Telekinesis

Telekinesis is a purported psychic ability allowing an individual to influence a physical system without physical interaction. Simply put, it is the moving or manipulating of objects with the mind, without directly touching them. Experiments to prove the existence of telekinesis have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no reliable evidence that telekinesis is a real phenomenon, and the topic is generally regarded as pseudoscience.

Reception

Evaluation

There is a broad scientific consensus that telekinetic research has not produced a reliable demonstration of the phenomenon.
A panel commissioned in 1988 by the United States National Research Council to study paranormal claims concluded that:

despite a 130-year record of scientific research on such matters, our committee could find no scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as extrasensory perception, mental telepathy or "mind over matter" exercises... Evaluation of a large body of the best available evidence simply does not support the contention that these phenomena exist.

In 1984, the National Academy of Sciences, at the request of the US Army Research Institute, formed a scientific panel to assess the best evidence for telekinesis. Part of its purpose was to investigate military applications of telekinesis, for example to remotely jam or disrupt enemy weaponry. The panel heard from a variety of military staff who believed in telekinesis and made visits to the PEAR laboratory and two other laboratories that had claimed positive results from micro-telekinesis experiments. The panel criticized macro-telekinesis experiments for being open to deception by conjurors, and said that virtually all micro-telekinesis experiments "depart from good scientific practice in a variety of ways". Their conclusion, published in a 1987 report, was that there was no scientific evidence for the existence of telekinesis.
Carl Sagan included telekinesis in a long list of "offerings of pseudoscience and superstition" which "it would be foolish to accept... without solid scientific data". Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman advocated a similar position.
Felix Planer, a professor of electrical engineering, has written that if telekinesis were real then it would be easy to demonstrate by getting subjects to depress a scale on a sensitive balance, raise the temperature of a waterbath which could be measured with an accuracy of a hundredth of a degree Celsius, or affect an element in an electrical circuit such as a resistor, which could be monitored to better than a millionth of an ampere. Planer writes that such experiments are extremely sensitive and easy to monitor but are not utilized by parapsychologists as they "do not hold out the remotest hope of demonstrating even a minute trace of " because the alleged phenomenon is non-existent. Planer has written that parapsychologists have to fall back on studies that involve only statistics that are unrepeatable, owing their results to poor experimental methods, recording mistakes and faulty statistical mathematics.
According to Planer, "All research in medicine and other sciences would become illusionary, if the existence of had to be taken seriously; for no experiment could be relied upon to furnish objective results, since all measurements would become falsified to a greater or lesser degree, according to his ability, by the experimenter's wishes." Planer concluded that the concept of telekinesis is absurd and has no scientific basis.
Telekinesis hypotheses have also been considered in a number of contexts outside parapsychological experiments. C. E. M. Hansel has written that a general objection against the claim for the existence of telekinesis is that, if it were a real process, its effects would be expected to manifest in situations in everyday life; but no such effects have been observed.
Science writers Martin Gardner and Terence Hines and the philosopher Theodore Schick have written that if telekinesis were possible, one would expect casino incomes to be affected, but the earnings are exactly as the laws of chance predict.
Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey argues that many experiments in psychology, biology or physics assume that the intentions of the subjects or experimenter do not physically distort the apparatus. Humphrey counts them as implicit replications of telekinesis experiments in which telekinesis fails to appear.

Physics

The ideas of telekinesis violates several well-established laws of physics, including the inverse-square law, the second law of thermodynamics, and the conservation of momentum. Because of this, scientists have demanded a high standard of evidence for telekinesis, in line with Marcello Truzzi's dictum "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". The Occam's razor law of parsimony in scientific explanations of phenomena suggests that the explanation of telekinesis in terms of ordinary ways—by trickery, special effects or by poor experimental design—is preferable to accepting that the laws of physics should be rewritten.
Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge has written that:

violates the principle that mind cannot act directly on matter. It also violates the principles of conservation of energy and momentum. The claim that quantum mechanics allows for the possibility of mental power influencing randomizers—an alleged case of micro-—is ludicrous since that theory respects the said conservation principles, and it deals exclusively with physical things.

Physicist John Taylor, who has investigated parapsychological claims, has written that an unknown fifth force causing telekinesis would have to transmit a great deal of energy. The energy would have to overcome the electromagnetic forces binding the atoms together, because the atoms would need to respond more strongly to the fifth force than to electric forces. Such an additional force between atoms should therefore exist all the time and not during only alleged paranormal occurrences. Taylor wrote there is no scientific trace of such a force in physics, down to many orders of magnitude; thus, if a scientific viewpoint is to be preserved, the idea of any fifth force must be discarded. Taylor concluded that there is no possible physical mechanism for telekinesis, and it is in complete contradiction to established science.
In 1979, Evan Harris Walker and Richard Mattuck published a parapsychology paper proposing a quantum explanation for telekinesis. Physicist Victor J. Stenger wrote that their explanation contained assumptions not supported by any scientific evidence. According to Stenger their paper is "filled with impressive looking equations and calculations that give the appearance of placing on a firm scientific footing... Yet look what they have done. They have found the value of one unknown number that gives one measured number. This is numerology, not science."
Physicist Sean M. Carroll has written that spoons, like all matter, are made up of atoms and that any movement of a spoon with the mind would involve the manipulation of those atoms through the four forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravitation. Telekinesis would have to be either some form of one of these four forces, or a new force that has a billionth the strength of gravity, for otherwise it would have been captured in experiments already done. This leaves no physical force that could possibly account for telekinesis.
Physicist Robert L. Park has found it suspicious that a phenomenon should only ever appear at the limits of detectability of questionable statistical techniques. He cites this feature as one of Irving Langmuir's indicators of pathological science. Park pointed out that if mind really could influence matter, it would be easy for parapsychologists to measure such a phenomenon by using the alleged telekinetic power to deflect a microbalance, which would not require any dubious statistics. "he reason, of course, is that the microbalance stubbornly refuses to budge." He has suggested that the reason statistical studies are so popular in parapsychology is that they introduce opportunities for uncertainty and error, which are used to support the experimenter's biases.

Explanations in terms of bias

research has suggested that people are susceptible to illusions of telekinesis. These include both the illusion that they themselves have the power, and that the events they witness are real demonstrations of telekinesis. For example, the illusion of control is an illusory correlation between intention and external events, and believers in the paranormal have been shown to be more susceptible to this illusion than others. Psychologist Thomas Gilovich explains this as a biased interpretation of personal experience. For example, someone in a dice game wishing for a high score can interpret high numbers as "success" and low numbers as "not enough concentration". Bias towards belief in telekinesis may be an example of the human tendency to see patterns where none exist, called the clustering illusion, which believers are also more susceptible to.
A 1952 study tested for experimenter's bias with respect to telekinesis. Richard Kaufman of Yale University gave subjects the task of trying to influence eight dice and allowed them to record their own scores. They were secretly filmed, so their records could be checked for errors. Believers in telekinesis made errors that favored its existence, while disbelievers made opposite errors. A similar pattern of errors was found in J. B. Rhine's dice experiments, which were considered the strongest evidence for telekinesis at that time.
In 1995, Wiseman and Morris showed subjects an unedited videotape of a magician's performance in which a fork bent and eventually broke. Believers in the paranormal were significantly more likely to misinterpret the tape as a demonstration of telekinesis, and were more likely to misremember crucial details of the presentation. This suggests that confirmation bias affects people's interpretation of telekinesis demonstrations. Psychologist Robert Sternberg cites confirmation bias as an explanation of why belief in psychic phenomena persists, despite the lack of evidence:

Some of the worst examples of confirmation bias are in research on parapsychology... Arguably, there is a whole field here with no powerful confirming data at all. But people want to believe, and so they find ways to believe.

Psychologist Daniel Wegner has argued that an introspection illusion contributes to belief in telekinesis. He observes that in everyday experience, intention is followed by action in a reliable way, but the underlying neural mechanisms are outside awareness. Hence, though subjects may feel that they directly introspect their own free will, the experience of control is actually inferred from relations between the thought and the action. This theory of apparent mental causation acknowledges the influence of David Hume's view of the mind. This process for detecting when one is responsible for an action is not totally reliable, and when it goes wrong there can be an illusion of control. This can happen when an external event follows, and is congruent with, a thought in someone's mind, without an actual causal link. As evidence, Wegner cites a series of experiments on magical thinking in which subjects were induced to think they had influenced external events. In one experiment, subjects watched a basketball player taking a series of free throws. When they were instructed to visualize him making his shots, they felt that they had contributed to his success. Other experiments designed to create an illusion of telekinesis have demonstrated that this depends, to some extent, on the subject's prior belief in telekinesis.
A 2006 meta-analysis of 380 studies found a small positive effect that can be explained by publication bias.