The Secret Life of Uri Geller Read Online Free PDF Page A

– light particles –18 kilometres apart apparently sending information to one another at 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. ‘I want to be able to tell a story,’ Professor Gisin has said, ‘and I cannot tell you a story of how nature manages the trick.’)
    So in quantum theory we have sub-atomic particles entangled, in the sense of being ‘tied together’, affecting one another and seemingly communicating at absurd speeds. We have the prospect, any year now, of quantum computers using quantum effects, even though these can’t be explained, to work millions of times faster than today’s electronic computers.
    Entanglement is also the basis of teleportation, which is no longer ‘Beam-me-up-Scotty’ science fiction, since it has been demonstrable in the laboratory since 1997, four years after it was first seriously proposed. In teleportation, two quantum-entangled objects seem to act in concert as a link that moves information from one physical location to another. Chinese researchers currently hold the official record for teleportation distance, having teleported a piece of information via entangled photons across 16 kilometres of urban landscape and a lake.
    But what does all this have to do with Uri Geller, mind reading, ESP, remote viewing and metal bending, not to forget ghosts, poltergeists, and even while we’re at it, the placebo effect, mind-over-matter, Jungian synchronicity, chanting, prayer, miracles and religion?
    Obviously, broadly speaking, everything ‘paranormal’ from spoon bending to prayer power is in the same ballpark as thought transference. But there has been no experimental work on the mechanics of how any of this might be working. So far, photons are the main things to have been provably entangled, although the size of demonstrably entangled objects is slowly increasing; in various experiments, a blob of thousands of photons and even a centimetre-long crystal have reportedly been entangled with a photon. And nothing experimental has (yet) demonstrated anything remotely involving brain cells swapping information via quantum entanglement. Yet we have globally respected scientists like Dr Green in Detroit and other researchers who are not even notably ‘heretical’, explicitly stating that the explanation for the abilities of Uri Geller and his like is most likely quantum entanglement.
    And there are tantalizing glimpses of what you might call Geller-like aspects within what is known about entanglement. One such hint is the puzzling fickleness and unreliability of entanglement. It is famously finicky, declining and even disappearing abruptly – something known as ‘entanglement sudden death’ – with even slight external disturbance. ‘Gellerism’, to coin a phrase, is similarly unpredictable and often weak and indeterminate. Sceptics love to hoot with laughter at Uri’s not-uncommon inability to ‘perform’, especially when he is surrounded by people who want him to fail. These sceptics, though, don’t appear to find it odd that people in the public eye, from comedians to athletes to politicians, seem to do better with an audience willing them on, and often flop with a crowd that’s against them, but we’ll let that pass.
    In conventional science, however, effects are meant to be consistent on all occasions, in all conditions, regardless of the experimenter’s feelings. Yet amongst its oddities, a particularly peculiar part of quantum entanglement is that an observer can affect an entangled system; yes, merely measuring one object that is entangled with another can cause the state of the distant object to change to that of the one being measured. Indeed, even emotions can, in this field, affect outcomes. No wonder, perhaps, that sceptical scientists by and large shun this kind of research on the somewhat unscientific grounds that it just can’t be true!
    There are other fragments of the work in progress that is the understanding of quantum entanglement, which hint