A term derived from combining psi, the shorthand for Parapsychology, and electronics, to describe the application of electronics to Psychical research. The early such instruments were the original Hieronymous machine and the improved version of it developed by John Campbell, Jr., in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Since then, more-sophisticated devices have been devised. Professor John B. Hasted, head of the physics department at Birkbeck College, London, experimented in the late 1970s on psychic metal bending by school children, using strain gauges to detect any effect: “The signals were of a character such that they could not have been produced by any known physical force under the given experimental conditions.” Hasted was convinced that the integrity of his instrumentation ruled out any possibility of error or trickery. His results could only be explained by some effect on the metal caused by the child subjects willing it.
Attention recently has focused on the work of Professor Robert Jahn (1930- ). Until 1986, he was Dean of Engineering at Princeton. When he began to publish his parapsychology research, he lost his deanship and was reduced to an associate professorship. He has continued his research in a small laboratory, the Princeton engineering anomalies research laboratory (PEAR), financed by the Fetzer Institute and the McDonnell Foundation. Expecting to find very small effects of the order of 0.1 percent, one part in a thousand he built a very sensitive and stable apparatus, one that is protected against interference and fraud, to detect at that level. The equipment is a random noise generator, the amplitude of the signal from which is sampled a thousand times a second. If enough samples are taken, half should give a positive reading and half negative. Left alone the generator does just that. A person is then asked to think the genera¬ tor into altering the balance, in some trials to push the average to the positive, some to push to the negative. Jahn claims to obtain very small but statistically significant effects, around his expected one in a thousand. The number of samples taken is huge, many millions. The trials have been monitored by representatives of the Commitee for the scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal (CSICOP), an organization essentially skeptical. The equipment has been checked and crosschecked and tightened up wherever there seemed possible room for error. The results held, even when the person doing the influencing was as far away as New Zealand or Russia. Jahn believes that it is not the physical equipment, the random generator, that is being affected but the laws of statistics and advances a possible quantum explanation. Skeptics raise a whole raft of questions about the experiment and remain unconvinced. Jahn is not discouraged but says that the test will be for others to carry out similar experiments and check his data. Toward that end, he has designed, produced, and distributed a cheap version of his random generator and awaits results.