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Click to enlarge Credit: NASA DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a sm all black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, t hat churns out random numbers in an endless stream. At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in meta l, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones fo und in modern pocket calculators. But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite ex traordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appea rs capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events. The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of con spiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sc eptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsu nami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic trag edy. Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with ap parently inexplicable powers. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity s hares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realis ing. And machines like the Edinburgh black box have thrown up a tantalising po ssibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of pred icting the future. Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fo ols' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists fr om 41 different nations. Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spe nt much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in B ritain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. The project is also th e most rigorous and longest-running investigation ever into the potentia l powers of the paranormal. He was one of the first modern scientists to take paranormal phenomena seriously. Intrigued by such things as tele pathy, telekinesis - the supposed psychic power to move objects without the use of physical force - and extrasensory perception, he was determin ed to study the phenomena using the most up-to-date technology available . One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather li ke an electronic coin-flipper. The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' as it were - could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the gene rators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve. During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's u sual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to conc entrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking th em to try to make it flip more heads than tails. The results, however, were stunni ng and have never been satisfactorily explained. Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could i nfluence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'. According to all of the known laws of science, this should not have happe ned - but it did. Dr Nelson, also working at Princeton University, then extended Prof Jahn' s work by taking random number machines to group meditations, which were very popular in America at the time. The groups were collectively able to cause dramatic shifts in the patt erns of numbers. Using the internet, he connected up 40 random event generators from all o ver the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton. These ran constan tly, day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Mo st of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line. But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: th e graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviat ions from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reaso n, too. For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the w orld watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbe y Dr Nelson was convinced that the two events must be related in some way. Could the concentrated em otional outpouring of millions of people be able to influence the output of his REGs. So, in 1998, he gathered together scientists from all over the world to a nalyse his findings. They, too, were stumped and resolved to extend and deepen the work of Prof Jahn and Dr Nelson. A total of 65 Eggs (as th e generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the 'eyes' of the project. And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure. For during the course of the experiment, the Eggs have 'sensed' a whole s eries of major world events as they were happening, from the Nato bombin g of Yugoslavia to the Kursk submarine tragedy to America's hung electio n of 2000. The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations, such as New Year 's Eve. But the project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11, 2001. As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs. Not only had they registered the attacks as they actually happened, but t he characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers had begun four hours b efore the two planes even hit the Twin Towers. They had, it appeared, detected that an event of historic importance was about to take place before the terrorists had even boarded their fateful flights. The implications, not least for the West's security services w ho constantly monitor electronic 'chatter', are clearly enormous. For in the closing weeks of December last year, the machi nes went wild once more. Twenty-four hours later, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean trig gered the tsunami which devastated South-East Asia, and claimed the live s of an estimated quarter of a million people. So could the Global Consciousness Project really be forecasting the futur e? Cynics will quite rightly point out that there is always some global even t that could be used to 'explain' the times when the Egg machines behave d erratically. After all, our world is full of wars, disasters and terro rist outrages, as well as the occasional global celebration. Are the sci entists simply trying too hard to detect patterns in their raw data? They claim that by using rigorous scientific techniques and powerful mathematics it is possible to exclud e any such random connections. Professor Chris French, a psychologist and noted sceptic at Goldsmiths Co llege in London, says: 'The Global Consciousness Project has generated s ome very intriguing results that cannot be readily dismissed. I'm involv ed in similar work to see if we get the same results. We haven't managed to do so yet but it's only an early experiment. It is possible - in theory - that time may not just move forwards but bac kwards, too. And if time ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, it mi ght just be possible to foretell major world events. We would, in effect , be 'remembering' things that had taken place in our future. And there is a tantalising body of evidence to suppo rt this theory. Dr John Hartwell, working at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands , was the first to uncover evidence that people could sense the future. In the mid-1970s he hooked people up to hospital scanning machines so th at he could study their brainwave patterns. He began by showing them a sequence of provocative cartoon drawings. When the pictures were shown, the machines registered the subject's brain waves as they reacted strongly to the images before them. Far less easy to explain was the fact that in many cases, t...
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