The Field (19 page)

Schmidt was 37 before he finally got the opportunity to test out his ideas, in 1965, during his tenure at Boeing. A tall, thin presence with a pronounced, angular intensity, his hair heavily receded on either side of an exaggerated widow’s peak, Schmidt was in the happy circumstance of being employed to pursue pure research in the Boeing laboratory, whether or not it was connected to aerospace development. Boeing was in a lull in its fortunes. The aerospace giant had come up with the supersonic but had shelved it, and hadn’t yet invented the 747, so Schmidt had time on his hands.

An idea slowly began taking shape. The simplest way to test all these ideas was to see if human consciousness could affect some sort of probabilistic system, as Rhine had done. Rhine had used his special cards for the ESP ‘forced choice’ guessing, or ‘precognition’, exercises and dice for ‘psychokinesis’ – tests of whether mind could influence matter. There were certain limitations with both media. You could never truly show that a toss of the dice had been a random process affected by human consciousness, or that a correct guess of the face of a card hadn’t been purely down to chance. Cards might not be shuffled perfectly, a die might be shaped or weighted to favor a certain number. The other problem was that Rhine had recorded the results by hand, a process that could be prone to human error. And finally, because they were done manually, the experiments took a long time.

Schmidt believed he could contribute to Rhine’s work by mechanizing the testing process. Because he was considering a quantum effect, it made sense to build a machine whose randomness would be determined by a quantum process. Schmidt had read about two Frenchmen, named Remy Chauvin and Jean-Pierre Genthon, who’d conducted studies to see if their test subjects could in some way change the decay rate of radioactive materials, which would be recorded by a Geiger counter.
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Nothing much is more random than radioactive atomic decay. One of the axioms of quantum physics is that no one can predict exactly when an atom will decay and an electron consequently be released. If Schmidt made use of radioactive decay in the machine’s design, he could produce what was almost a contradiction in terms: a precision instrument built upon quantum mechanical uncertainty.

With machines using a quantum decay process, you’re dealing in the realm of probability and fluidity – a machine governed by atomic particles, in turn governed by the probabilistic universe of quantum mechanics. This would be a machine whose output consisted of perfectly random activity, which in physics is viewed as a state of ‘disorder’. The Rhine studies in which participants had apparently affected the roll of the dice suggested that some information transfer or ordering mechanism was going on – what physicists like to term ‘negative entropy’, or ‘negentropy’ for short – the move away from randomness, or disarray, to order. If it could be shown that participants in a study had altered some element of the machine’s output, they’d have changed the probabilities of events – that is, shifted the odds of something happening or altered the tendency of a system to behave in a certain way.
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It was like persuading a person at a crossroads, momentarily undecided about taking a walk, to head down one road rather than another. They would, in other words, have created order.

As most of his work had consisted of theoretical physics, Schmidt needed to brush up on his electronics in order to construct his machine. With the help of a technician, he produced a small, rectangular box, slightly larger than a fat hardback book, with four colored lights and buttons and a thick cable attached to another machine punching coding holes in a stream of paper tape. Schmidt dubbed the machine a ‘random number generator’, which he came to refer to as RNG. The RNG had the four colored lights on top of it – red, yellow, green and blue – which would flash on randomly.

In the experiment, a participant would press a button under one of the lights, which registered a prediction that the light above it would light up.
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If you were correct, you’d score a hit. On top of the device were two counters. One would count the number of ‘hits’ – the times the participant could correctly guess which lamp would light – and the other would count the number of trials. Your success rate would be staring at you as you continued with the experiment.

Schmidt had employed a small amount of the isotope strontium-90, placed near an electron counter so that any electrons ejected from the unstable, decaying molecules would be registered inside a Geiger – Müller tube. At the point where an electron was flung into the tube – at a rate, on average, of 10 a second – it stopped a high-speed counter breathlessly racing through numbers between one and four at a million per second, and the number stopped at would light the correspondingly numbered lamp. If his participants were successful, it meant that they had somehow intuited the arrival time of the next electron, resulting in the lighting of their designated lamp.

If someone was just guessing, he’d have a 25 per cent chance of getting the right results. Most of Schmidt’s first test subjects scored no better than this, until he contacted a group of professional psychics in Seattle and collected subjects who went on to be successful. Thereafter, Schmidt was meticulous in his recruitment of participants with an apparent psychic gift for guessing correctly. The effects were likely to be so minuscule, he figured, that he had to maximize his chances of success. With his first set of studies, Schmidt got 27 per cent – a result that may appear insignificant, but which was enough of a deviation in statistical terms for him to conclude that something interesting was going on.
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Apparently, there’d been some connection between the mind of his subjects and his machine. But what was it? Did his participants foresee which lights would be lit? Or did they make a choice among the colored lamps and somehow mentally ‘force’ that particular lamp to light? Was the effect precognition or psychokinesis?

Schmidt decided to isolate these effects further by testing psychokinesis. What he had in mind was an electronic version of Rhine’s dice studies. He went on to build another type of machine – a twentieth-century version of the flip of a coin. This machine was based on a binary system (a system with two choices: yes or no; on or off; one or zero). It could electronically generate a random sequence of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ which were displayed by the movement of a light in a circle of nine lamps. One light was always lit. With the top lamp lit at the start, for each generated head or tail the light moved by one step in a clockwise or anticlockwise direction. If ‘heads’ were tossed, the next light in clockwise order would light. If ‘tails’, the next light in the anticlockwise direction would light instead. Left to its own devices, the machine would take a random walk around the circle of nine lights, with movements in each direction roughly half the time. After about two minutes and 128 moves, the run stopped and the numbers of generated heads and tails were displayed. The full sequence of moves was also recorded automatically on paper tape, with the number of heads or tails indicated by counters.

Schmidt’s idea was to have his participants will the lights to take more steps in a clockwise direction. What he was asking his participants to do, on the most elementary level, was to get the machine to produce more heads than tails.

In one study, Schmidt worked with two participants, an aggressive, extroverted North American woman and a reserved male researcher in parapsychology from South America. In preliminary tests, the North American woman had scored consistently more heads than tails, while the South American man had scored the reverse – more tails than heads – even though he’d been trying for a greater number of heads. During a larger test of more than 100 runs apiece, both kept to the same scoring tendencies – the woman got more heads, the man more tails. When the woman did her test, the light showed a preference for clockwise motion 52.5 per cent of the time. But when the man concentrated, the machine once again did the opposite of what he intended. In the end, only 47.75 per cent of the lit lights moved in a clockwise direction.

Schmidt knew he had come up with something important, even if he couldn’t yet put his finger on how any known law of physics could explain this. When he worked it out, the odds against such a large disparity in the two scores occurring by chance were more than 10 million to one. That meant he’d have to conduct 10 million similar studies before he’d get the results by chance alone.
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Schmidt gathered together eighteen people, the most easily available he could find. In their first studies, he found that, as with his South American fellow, they seemed to have a reverse effect on the machine. If they tried to make the machine move clockwise, it tended to move in the other direction.

Schmidt was mainly interested in whether there was any effect at all, no matter what the direction. He decided to see whether he could set up an experiment to make it more likely that his subjects got a negative score. If these participants ordinarily had a negative effect, then he’d do his best to amplify it. He selected only those participants who’d had a reverse effect on the machine. He then created an experimental atmosphere that might encourage failure. His participants were asked to conduct their test in a small dark closet where they’d be huddled with the display panel. Schmidt studiously avoided giving them the slightest bit of encouragement. He even told them to expect that they were going to fail.

Not surprisingly, the team had a significantly negative effect on the RNG. The machine moved more in the opposite way than what they’d intended. But the point was that the participants were having some effect on the machine, even if it was a contrary one. Somehow, they’d been able to shift the machines, ever so slightly, away from their random activity; their results were 49.1 per cent against an expected result of 50 per cent. In statistical terms, this was a result of major significance – a thousand to one that the result had occurred by chance. Since none of his subjects knew how the RNG worked, it was clear that whatever they were doing must have been generated by some sort of human will.
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Schmidt carried on with similar studies for a number of years, publishing in
New Scientist
and other journals, meeting with like-minded people and achieving highly significant scores in his studies – sometimes as high as 54 per cent against an expected result of 50 per cent.
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By 1970, the year before Mitchell’s moon walk, Boeing suffered a setback in profits and needed to cut back sharply on staff. Schmidt, along with hundreds of others, was one of its casualties. Boeing had been such a key source of R&D jobs in the area that without the aerospace giant, there was virtually no work to be had. A sign at the border of Seattle read, ‘Will the last one to leave Seattle please turn off the lights?’ Schmidt made his third and final career move. He would continue on with his consciousness research, a physicist among parapsychologists. He relocated to Durham, North Carolina, and sought work at Rhine’s laboratory, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, carrying on his RNG research with Rhine himself.

A few years later, word of Schmidt’s machines filtered through to Princeton University and came to the attention of a young university student in the school of engineering. She was an undergraduate, a sophomore, studying electrical engineering, and something about the idea of mind being able to influence a machine held a certain romantic appeal. In 1976, she decided to approach the dean of the engineering school about the possibility of replicating Helmut Schmidt’s RNG studies as a special project.
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Robert Jahn was a tolerant man. When campus unrest had erupted at Princeton, as it did at most universities across America in response to the escalation of the Vietnam War, Jahn, then a professor of engineering, had found himself an unwitting apologist for high technology, at a point when it was being blamed for America’s stark polarization. Jahn had argued persuasively to the Princeton student body that technology actually offered the solution to this divisiveness. His conciliatory line not only had settled down the campus unrest but also had helped to create an accepting atmosphere for students with technical interests at what was essentially a liberal arts university. Jahn’s skill at diplomacy may have been one reason he’d been asked to serve as dean in 1971.

Now his famous tolerance was being stretched nearly to its limit. Jahn was an applied physicist who had invested his entire life in the teaching and development of technology. All of his own degrees came from Princeton, and his work in advanced space propulsion systems and high temperature plasma dynamics had won him his current distinguished position.

He’d returned to Princeton in the early 1960s with the mission of introducing electric propulsion to the aeronautical engineering department. The project he was now being asked to supervise essentially belonged to the category of psychic phenomena. Jahn wasn’t convinced it was a viable topic, but the sophomore was such a brilliant student who was already on a fast track through her program that he eventually relented. He agreed to subsidize a summer project for her out of his discretionary funds. Her task was to research the existing scientific literature on RNG studies and other forms of psychokinesis and to carry out a few preliminary experiments. If she could convince Jahn that the field held some credibility and, more importantly, could be approached from a technical perspective, he told her, then he’d agree to supervise her independent work.

Jahn tried to approach the topic as an open-minded scholar might. Over the summer, his student would leave photocopies of technical papers on his desk and even managed to coax him into accompanying her to a meeting of the Parapsychological Association. He tried to get a feel for the people involved in studying what had always been dismissed as a fringe science. Jahn rather hoped that the entire subject would go away. Much as he was amused by the project, particularly by the notion that he somehow might have the power to influence all the complicated array of equipment around him, he knew that this was something, in the long run, that might mean trouble for him, particularly among his fellow faculty members. How would he ever explain it as a serious topic of study?