Little Black Box Doesn't Just Represent the Future...It Predicts It

Your time has passed, my friend. (image source: wikipedia.org)

So we all stopped believing in ghosts and witches around the time that we didn’t receive our Hogwarts letters of admission (and don’t pretend you didn’t check the mailbox every day for a year). And we’re all pretty sure that it’s impossible to predict the future, that paranormal investigation is a load of hooey, and that even the Princeton psychic can’t save our love lives.

But it seems that there are professors right here at Princeton who are challenging some of those very assumptions through their work on the Global Consciousness Project, an endeavor spearheaded by engineering anomalies researcher Dr. Roger Nelson.The project is centered around a small black box located in a library in Edinburgh that, through the process of churning out random numbers, appears to reflect global human sentiments and to predict tragedies such as the September 11 attacks and the tsunami that ravaged Asia last December.The idea for the little black box was conceived in the 1970s at Princeton with the work of Professor Robert Jahn. His ultimate goal was to study paranormal phenomena using modern technology, specifically a “Random Event Generator” that generates random sequences in binary. Just like when you flip a coin, a graph of the ones and zeros should reflect a 50/50 distribution of numbers, but Jahn and his colleagues started to note deviations. They took random person after random person into their labs and asked them to try to control the graph's deviations with their thoughts. And time and time again, these people did.Dr. Nelson heard of the machine and began bringing it to group meditation sessions. Soon, he had set up 40 of the machines all over the world, and from his Princeton lab he noticed something astonishing: these machines registered deviations up to hours before catastrophic events.Could it be possible that these little boxes are indicating a shared consciousness and predicting the future?Of course, there are skeptics. To their criticisms, Dr. Nelson replies,

We're perfectly willing to discover that we've made mistakes, but we haven't been able to find any, and neither has anyone else. Our data shows clearly that the chances of getting these results by fluke are one million to one against. That's hugely significant.

Bottom line? Think twice before you throw out the Jungian lit. Oh, and skip the psychic; just get yourself a little black box.