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by carapace 2560 days ago
One of my favorite photos in the world is of the large (wall-sized) Galton board at the old Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab. There are two guys, visitors, sitting in front of it and they have just used "psychic powers" to affect a run and the balls are ridiculously skewed to one side, just ridiculously, obviously skewed.

I like the photo because it's a bifurcation point for the viewer: there are two options to resolve what you're seeing:

1. It's fake.

2. It's not fake and "there's something there".

The whole PEAR Lab itself suffers from the same ambiguity: they got consistent positive results, but never so positive that skeptics could be decisively satisfied. (Not including one-off things like the photo of the visiting guys who did produce a dramatic undeniable effect.)
1 comments
misterprime 2560 days ago
A picture is worth a thousand words. No chance you'd be able to share that photo here, is there?
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carapace 2560 days ago
I managed to remember the book in which the photo is published: "The Second Coming of Science: An Intimate Report on the New Science" by Brian O'Leary 1992

My copy is in storage so I can't post a scan. IIRC the visitors are O'Leary and his son.

It turns out he has a wikipedia entry:

> Brian Todd O'Leary (January 27, 1940 – July 28, 2011)[1] was an American scientist, author, and former NASA astronaut. He was part of NASA Astronaut Group 6, a group of scientist-astronauts chosen with the intention of training for the Apollo Applications Program.

> A remote viewing experience in 1979 and a near-death experience in 1982 initiated O'Leary's departure from orthodox science. After Princeton, O'Leary worked Science Applications International Corporation. He refused to work on military space applications, for which reason he lost his position there in 1987. Beginning in 1987, O'Leary increasingly explored unorthodox ideas, particularly the relationship between consciousness and science, and became widely known for his writings on "the frontiers of science, space, energy and culture".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_O'Leary

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