211. Parapsikoloji ve Psiye Şüpheci yaklaşım

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212. Parapsikolojide Bilimsel Sorun Var Mı?

Parapsikolojik araştırmalar klasik bilim insanlarınca acımasızca eleştirilmektedir. Diğer yandan kendilerini parapsikolojiye inanan ve araştırmalara da katılan birçok bilim insanından (Brian Josephson, Lord Rayleight, Joseph Thomson, Charles Richet, Henri Bergson, Santiago Cajal, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud…) daha akıllı da kabul ederler. Parapsikolojik olayları ciddiye alanlara kızar ve aşağılarlar. Araştırma yapanları da sahtekâr, yalancı, şansa dayalı sonuç bulma, gizli ipuçlarından yararlanma, yanılsama ve istatistiksel taraf tutma şeklinde suçlarlar.  Dürüst olarak “bu konuda fikir beyan edecek bilgi sahibi değilim” de demezler. Parapsikolojik iddialar için sıra dışı kanıtlar ararlar ama sıra dışı kanıtın ne kadar sıra dışı olması gerektiğini ise söylemezler. Bu sansür sadece bireysel seviyede kalmaz, çoksatan (125 bin abonesi olan) Science gibi bilimsel dergiler bu tür yazıları yayınlamaya cesaret edemez veya bilerek yayınlamazlar. Dolayısı ile okuyanları da gizli sansürü bilmeden yaşarlar.

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213. Parapsikolojide neden akademik eğitim gereklidir?

Bilim dediğimiz kavram, doğadan elde edilen bilginin sistematik hale getirilmesidir. Doğanın başlangıçtan beri var olan kendi kuralları vardır. Bu kuralların bazıları çok net ortaya konulabilirken, bazıları bizim anlayışımızı zorlamakta ve mantığımızla bile çelişmektedir. Doğayı ve işleyişini anlama çabamızın, yani bilimsel bilgi üretmemizin sonu gelmeyecektir. Muhtemelen doğanın gerçek işleyişini hiçbir zaman anlayamayacağız ve gerçeğin tahtının yamacına ancak yaklaşabileceğiz. Doğadaki işleyişin tamamının bilindiği sanrısına kapılarak neyin bilimsel olduğunu neyin olmadığını kesin çizgilerle belirlemeye çalışmak en hafif tabir ile “komik”tir. Günümüzde gelinen noktada kuantum fiziğinin biyolojik yapılarda işleyişini görmek, bunun en açık örneğidir. Doğa işlerken bizim bilimimizin kurallarını bilmez ve hatta dikkate bile almaz. Doğa bize bazen “anomaliler” ile göz kırpar. Kuralları biz doğadan öğreniriz ama doğaya ondan öğrendiğimiz kuralları dayatamayız. İnancımız ne olursa olsun, teorik fikirlere destek olunmalı ve deneyle ortaya konan kanıtlar dikkate alınmalı, aynı deneysel yoldan gidilerek kanıtlar güçlendirilmelidir. Çıkan deneysel sonuçların (evrene veya deneye katılımcı olmak) mistik yaklaşımları çağrıştırması veya mistik yaklaşımları daha sağlam temellere oturtmasına bakıp, deneysel sonuçları yok saymak sorunu çözmeyecektir. Fizik kitaplarını tekrar yazmak gerekse bile bu cesareti göstermeliyiz.

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214. Paul Flechsig

Flechsig (1847-1929), “Beyin ve Ruh” adlı kitabında (1896) beyni ruhun organı olarak ele aldı. Daha önceki felsefecilerden etkilenerek üstün zihinsel yeteneklerin beynin artmış kıvrımlarından kaynaklandığını öne sürdü. Bu dönemlerde, Korsakoff hastalığına yakalanan hastalardan elde edilen izlenimlerle, zaman algısının bu hastalarda bozulduğunu, orta beyin yapıları, önbeyin bölgesi ve beyin kabuğunun bilincin fiziksel temeli olabileceğini öne sürdü. Flechsig’e göre bilinç doğrudan sinir hücresel çalışmayı yansıtıyordu. Çünkü, kısa da olsa, oksijen yokluğu bilinç kaybına neden oluyordu.

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215. Photon reaches from beyond the grave in quantum trick

EINSTEIN mockingly called it "spooky action at a distance": the finding that quantum particles can influence each other regardless of how far apart they are. We can only imagine his horror at a new experiment that extends the idea to time by entangling a pair of photons that never coexisted. As well as expanding the reach of quantum theory's baffling implications, the experiment could improve long-distance cryptography. At the heart of the phenomena is entanglement, in which the quantum states of two entities become linked. The implications of this for spatially distant particles stumped even Einstein, but things got still stranger last year. Joachim von Zanthier of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and his colleagues showed that, in principle, entanglement could also work for particles that have never existed at the same time (Optics Letters, doi.org/bdwpsj). Now Hagai Eisenberg of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and colleagues have done the experiment, via a process called an entanglement swap. If you have two pairs of entangled photons, taking one photon from each pair and entangling them disengages the two original pairs, and creates a second, fresh entanglement between the two, left out photons. Eisenberg's team used the swap to entangle a photon with one that no longer existed. They started with an entangled pair of photons, 1 and 2, and then measured the quantum state of photon 1, which destroys the particle. Photon 2, however, lived on and, about 100 nanoseconds later, the team created a new pair of entangled photons, 3 and 4. When the team entangled photon 2 with newborn photon 3, photon 4 also became entangled with photon 1 - even though 1 was by then "dead" (see diagram). The team knew 4 was entangled with 1 by measuring 4's state, which depended on the states measured for 1, 2 and 3 (arxiv.org/abs/1209.4191v1). "Without the idea of entanglement, you cannot explain it," says von Zanthier, who was not involved in the latest experiment. "The future photon, which is not born, is strongly influenced by a photon that is already dead." The result could boost quantum cryptography, in which entangled photons are used to transmit a secret key for ciphers. Entanglement makes the process secure because if a photon is intercepted, its partner registers this, allowing the key to be ditched. Entanglement swapping can enable the process over enormous distances. Take an entangled pair, 1 and 2, created in London. Photon 2 can be sent to Paris, where an entanglement swap with another pair, 3 and 4, takes place. Photon 4 is now entangled with 1 - still in London - and can then be sent to Berlin. Quantum communication between London and Berlin is now possible, even though no single photon has travelled that distance. The process can be extended by further swaps, all the way to Beijing, say. But currently, London would have to hold on to its photons until the chain is complete - which gets trickier as the total distance increases. The new experiment shows that London can measure its photons well before Beijing's even exist. "London can already start working," says Johannes Kofler of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. "That's cool."

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216. Physicists Create Quantum Link Between Photons That Don't Exist at the Same Time

Timeless. In standard entanglement swapping (top), entanglement (blue shading) is transferred to photons 1 and 4 by making a measurement on photons 2 and 3. The new experiment (bottom) shows that the scheme still works even if photon 1 is destroyed before photon 4 is created. Now they're just messing with us. Physicists have long known that quantum mechanics allows for a subtle connection between quantum particles called entanglement, in which measuring one particle can instantly set the otherwise uncertain condition, or "state," of another particle—even if it's light years away. Now, experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two photons that don't even exist at the same time. "It's really cool," says Jeremy O'Brien, an experimenter at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the work. Such time-separated entanglement is predicted by standard quantum theory, O'Brien says, "but it's certainly not widely appreciated, and I don't know if it's been clearly articulated before." Entanglement is a kind of order that lurks within the uncertainty of quantum theory. Suppose you have a quantum particle of light, or photon. It can be polarized so that it wriggles either vertically or horizontally. The quantum realm is also hazed over with unavoidable uncertainty, and thanks to such quantum uncertainty, a photon can also be polarized vertically and horizontally at the same time. If you then measure the photon, however, you will find it either horizontally polarized or vertically polarized, as the two-ways-at-once state randomly "collapses" one way or the other. Entanglement can come in if you have two photons. Each can be put into the uncertain vertical-and-horizontal state. However, the photons can be entangled so that their polarizations are correlated even while they remain undetermined. For example, if you measure the first photon and find it horizontally polarized, you'll know that the other photon has instantaneously collapsed into the vertical state and vice versa—no matter how far away it is. Because the collapse happens instantly, Albert Einstein dubbed the effect "spooky action at a distance." It doesn't violate relativity, though: It's impossible to control the outcome of the measurement of the first photon, so the quantum link can't be used to send a message faster than light. Now Eli Megidish, Hagai Eisenberg, and colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have entangled two photons that don't exist at the same time. They start with a scheme known as entanglement swapping. To begin, researchers zap a special crystal with laser light a couple of times to create two entangled pairs of photons, pair 1 and 2 and pair 3 and 4. At the start, photons 1 and 4 are not tangled. But they can be if physicists play the right trick with 2 and 3. The key is that a measurement "projects" a particle into a definite state -- just as the measurement of a photon collapses it into either vertical or horizontal polarization. So even though photons 2 and 3 start out unentangled, physicists can set up a "projective measurement" that asks, are the two in one of two distinct entangled states or the other? That measurement entangles the photons, even as it absorbs and destroys them. If the researchers select only the events in which photons 2 and 3 end up in, say, the first entangled state, then the measurement also entangles photons 1 and 4. (See diagram, top.) The effect is a bit like joining two pairs of gears to form a four-gear chain: Enmeshing to inner two gears establishes a link between the outer two. In recent years, physicists have played with the timing in the scheme. For example, last year a team showed that entanglement swapping still works even if they make the projective measurement after they've already measured the polarizations of photons 1 and 4. Now, Eisenberg and colleagues have shown that photons 1 and 4 don't even have to exist at the same time, as they report in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters. To do that, they first create entangled pair 1 and 2 and measure the polarization of 1 right away. Only after that do they create entangled pair 3 and 4 and perform the key projective measurement. Finally, they measure the polarization of photon 4. And even though photons 1 and 4 never coexist, the measurements show that their polarizations still end up entangled. Eisenberg emphasizes that even though in relativity, time measured differently by observers traveling at different speeds, no observer would ever see the two photons as coexisting. The experiment shows that it's not strictly logical to think of entanglement as a tangible physical property, Eisenberg says. "There is no moment in time in which the two photons coexist," he says, "so you cannot say that the system is entangled at this or that moment." Yet, the phenomenon definitely exists. Anton Zeilinger, a physicist at the University of Vienna, agrees that the experiment demonstrates just how slippery the concepts of quantum mechanics are. "It's really neat because it shows more or less that quantum events are outside our everyday notions of space and time." So what's the advance good for? Physicists hope to create quantum networks in which protocols like entanglement swapping are used to create quantum links among distant users and transmit uncrackable (but slower than light) secret communications. The new result suggests that when sharing entangled pairs of photons on such a network, a user wouldn't have to wait to see what happens to the photons sent down the line before manipulating the ones kept behind, Eisenberg says. Zeilinger says the result might have other unexpected uses: "This sort of thing opens up people's minds and suddenly somebody has an idea to use it in quantum computing or something." Correction, 23 May at 3:30 p.m.: Photon 4 at right in the upper image was incorrectly labeled as photon 2.

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217. Possession: a clinical enigma

BMJ Case Rep. 2011 Mar 10;2011. pii: bcr0120113725. doi: 10.1136/bcr.01.2011.3725. Possession: a clinical enigma. Gadit A. Department of Psychiatry, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. amin.muhammad@med.mun.ca Abstract This is a case of a 21-year-old lady who presented with history of episodes where she would display extraordinary strength while becoming aggressive towards her family members, speak in foreign language and display bizarre behaviour. The episode would last for 15-20 min and would resolve spontaneously. She would always claim amnesia for the event. This would remain irritable in the intervening period. The frequency of such episodes is at least three times a week. The family members took her to several faith healers with no improvement in her condition. On the suggestion of a family friend, the patient was brought in for consultation in the psychiatric clinic. The patient remained a diagnostic dilemma though there has been some reduction in intensity of such episodes on psychotropic medication. Unfortunately, there is no remission in episodes.

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218. Possibility of Cloning Quantum Information from the Past

Dec. 8, 2013 — Popular television shows such as "Doctor Who" have brought the idea of time travel into the vernacular of popular culture. But problem of time travel is even more complicated than one might think. LSU's Mark Wilde has shown that it would theoretically be possible for time travelers to copy quantum data from the past.   It all started when David Deutsch, a pioneer of quantum computing and a physicist at Oxford, came up with a simplified model of time travel to deal with the paradoxes that would occur if one could travel back in time. For example, would it be possible to travel back in time to kill one's grandfather? In the Grandfather paradox, a time traveler faces the problem that if he kills his grandfather back in time, then he himself is never born, and consequently is unable to travel through time to kill his grandfather, and so on. Some theorists have used this paradox to argue that it is actually impossible to change the past. "The question is, how would you have existed in the first place to go back in time and kill your grandfather?" said Mark Wilde, an LSU assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and with the Center for Computation and Technology, or CCT. Deutsch solved the Grandfather paradox originally using a slight change to quantum theory, proposing that you could change the past as long as you did so in a self-consistent manner. "Meaning that, if you kill your grandfather, you do it with only probability one-half," Wilde said. "Then, he's dead with probability one-half, and you are not born with probability one-half, but the opposite is a fair chance. You could have existed with probability one-half to go back and kill your grandfather." But the Grandfather paradox is not the only complication with time travel. Another problem is the no-cloning theorem, or the no "subatomic Xerox-machine" theorem, known since 1982. This theorem, which is related to the fact that one cannot copy quantum data at will, is a consequence of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle, by which one can measure either the position of a particle or its momentum, but not both with unlimited accuracy. According to the Uncertainty Principle, it is thus impossible to have a subatomic Xerox-machine that would take one particle and spit out two particles with the same position and momentum -- because then you would know too much about both particles at once. "We can always look at a paper, and then copy the words on it. That's what we call copying classical data," Wilde said. "But you can't arbitrarily copy quantum data, unless it takes the special form of classical data. This no-cloning theorem is a fundamental part of quantum mechanics -- it helps us reason how to process quantum data. If you can't copy data, then you have to think of everything in a very different way." But what if a Deutschian closed timelike curve did allow for copying of quantum data to many different points in space? According to Wilde, Deutsch suggested in his late 20th century paper that it should be possible to violate the fundamental no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics. Now, Wilde and collaborators at the University of Southern California and the Autonomous University of Barcelona have advanced Deutsch's 1991 work with a recent paper in Physical Review Letters. The new approach allows for a particle, or a time traveler, to make multiple loops back in time -- something like Bruce Willis' travels in the Hollywood film "Looper." "That is, at certain locations in spacetime, there are wormholes such that, if you jump in, you'll emerge at some point in the past," Wilde said. "To the best of our knowledge, these time loops are not ruled out by the laws of physics. But there are strange consequences for quantum information processing if their behavior is dictated by Deutsch's model." A single looping path back in time, a time spiral of sorts, behaving according to Deutsch's model, for example, would have to allow for a particle entering the loop to remain the same each time it passed through a particular point in time. In other words, the particle would need to maintain self-consistency as it looped back in time. "In some sense, this already allows for copying of the particle's data at many different points in space," Wilde said, "because you are sending the particle back many times. It's like you have multiple versions of the particle available at the same time. You can then attempt to read out more copies of the particle, but the thing is, if you try to do so as the particle loops back in time, then you change the past." To be consistent with Deutsch's model, which holds that you can only change the past as long as you can do it in a self-consistent manner, Wilde and colleagues had to come up with a solution that would allow for a looping curve back in time, and copying of quantum data based on a time traveling particle, without disturbing the past. "That was the major breakthrough, to figure out what could happen at the beginning of this time loop to enable us to effectively read out many copies of the data without disturbing the past," Wilde said. "It just worked." However, there is still some controversy over interpretations of the new approach, Wilde said. In one instance, the new approach may actually point to problems in Deutsch's original closed timelike curve model. "If quantum mechanics gets modified in such a way that we've never observed should happen, it may be evidence that we should question Deutsch's model," Wilde said. "We really believe that quantum mechanics is true, at this point. And most people believe in a principle called Unitarity in quantum mechanics. But with our new model, we've shown that you can essentially violate something that is a direct consequence of Unitarity. To me, this is an indication that something weird is going on with Deutsch's model. However, there might be some way of modifying the model in such a way that we don't violate the no-cloning theorem." Other researchers argue that Wilde's approach wouldn't actually allow for copying quantum data from an unknown particle state entering the time loop because nature would already "know" what the particle looked like, as it had traveled back in time many times before. But whether or not the no-cloning theorem can truly be violated as Wilde's new approach suggests, the consequences of being able to copy quantum data from the past are significant. Systems for secure Internet communications, for example, will likely soon rely on quantum security protocols that could be broken or "hacked" if Wilde's looping time travel methods were correct. "If an adversary, if a malicious person, were to have access to these time loops, then they could break the security of quantum key distribution," Wilde said. "That's one way of interpreting it. But it's a very strong practical implication because the big push of quantum communication is this secure way of communicating. We believe that this is the strongest form of encryption that is out there because it's based on physical principles." Today, when you log into your Gmail or Facebook, your password and information encryption is not based on physical principles of quantum mechanical security, but rather on the computational assumption that it is very difficult for "hackers" to factor mathematical products of prime numbers, for example. But physicists and computer scientists are working on securing critical and sensitive communications using the principles of quantum mechanics. Such encryption is believed to be unbreakable -- that is, as long as hackers don't have access to Wilde's looping closed timelike curves. "This ability to copy quantum information freely would turn quantum theory into an effectively classical theory in which, for example, classical data thought to be secured by quantum cryptography would no longer be safe," Wilde said. "It seems like there should be a revision to Deutsch's model which would simultaneously resolve the various time travel paradoxes but not lead to such striking consequences for quantum information processing. However, no one yet has offered a model that meets these two requirements. This is the subject of open research."

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219. Pratik Günlük Egzersizler

1. Bir sokakta yürüken bir dükkan vitrini köşesinde bulunan bir nesneyi “görmeye” çalışın (tabi daha önce hiç gitmediğiniz, görmediğiniz yer olmalı) 2. Arkadaşınızın dinlediği, sizin duymadığınız, müziği bilmeye çalışın 3. Kendinize gelecekte bir gün ve saat seçin, o saate nerede bulunacağınız yeri çizin ve tarifleyin ama kendinizi kandırmayın! 4. Hiç tanımadığınız insanların yüzlerini çizmeyi deneyiniz. Ya da tanışmaya gideceğiniz insanların neler giydiğini ya da yüzünü çizmeyi deneyin. 5. Doğmamış bir çocuğun cinsiyetini önceden çizmeye çalışın. 6. Kaybolan nesnelerin yerlerini çizmeye çalışın (Kaybolan nesneyi hesef nesne yaparak). 7. İnternetten tanıdğınız bir MSN arkadaşınızla, nesne ya da resim tutup çizmeye çalışabilirsiniz. 8. Durugörü yeteneği olan biriyle çalışmanız başarı oranınızı yükseltir. Oldukça güçlü durugörüye sahip olan birinin bulunduğu yerde diğer kişilerde durugörü yaşayabilirler. Bu tür bir çalışma arkadaşı edinmek en iyisidir. 9. Durugörüyü ya da uzaktangörüyü hayatınıza, diğer hobileriniz gibi bir renk olarak ekleyip, onunla eğlenin. Her zaman başarılı olmaz iseniz de yine de onunla oynayın! 

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220. Predictive physiological anticipation preceding seemingly unpredictable stimuli: a meta-analysis

Julia Mossbridge1*, Patrizio Tressoldi2 and Jessica Utts3  1Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA 2Dipartimento di Psicologia Generale, Università di Padova, Padova, Italy 3Department of Statistics, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA Front. Psychology, 17 October 2012 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00390 This meta-analysis of 26 reports published between 1978 and 2010 tests an unusual hypothesis: for stimuli of two or more types that are presented in an order designed to be unpredictable and that produce different post-stimulus physiological activity, the direction of pre-stimulus physiological activity reflects the direction of post-stimulus physiological activity, resulting in an unexplained anticipatory effect. The reports we examined used one of two paradigms: (1) randomly ordered presentations of arousing vs. neutral stimuli, or (2) guessing tasks with feedback (correct vs. incorrect). Dependent variables included: electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume, pupil dilation, electroencephalographic activity, and blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) activity. To avoid including data hand-picked from multiple different analyses, no post hoc experiments were considered. The results reveal a significant overall effect with a small effect size [fixed effect: overall ES = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.15–0.27, z = 6.9, p < 2.7 × 10−12; random effects: overall (weighted) ES = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.13–0.29, z = 5.3, p < 5.7 × 10−8]. Higher quality experiments produced a quantitatively larger effect size and a greater level of significance than lower quality studies. The number of contrary unpublished reports that would be necessary to reduce the level of significance to chance (p > 0.05) was conservatively calculated to be 87 reports. We explore alternative explanations and examine the potential linkage between this unexplained anticipatory activity and other results demonstrating meaningful pre-stimulus activity preceding behaviorally relevant events. We conclude that to further examine this currently unexplained anticipatory activity, multiple replications arising from different laboratories using the same methods are necessary. The cause of this anticipatory activity, which undoubtedly lies within the realm of natural physical processes (as opposed to supernatural or paranormal ones), remains to be determined.

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