Physics Today and the US government’s quest for psychic powers

For physicists, quantum mechanics provides a beautiful set of tools for understanding the fundamental workings of the universe. For nonphysicists, quantum theory seems to promise so much more: miracle cures, a basis for describing consciousness, even an understanding of God. In a recently published xkcd comic (right), Randall Munroe brilliantly captures why the combination of wild philosophical implications and absurdly complex mathematics leads so many people to think quantum mechanics contains the answers to life’s strangest mysteries.

The tendency for nonexperts to bestow magical powers upon quantum mechanics isn’t new. I found an amusing example after I searched, just out of curiosity, for “Physics Today” in an online database of CIA documents .

The second search result was an April 1973 memo written by an unnamed US intelligence officer with some encouraging news about the military’s secret attempts to harness the power of parapsychology. As part of what would come to be called Project Star Gate, intelligence agencies were working with the Stanford Research Institute to determine whether some people could acquire information about obscured objects solely with their minds. Government-recruited researchers had tested a man named Ingo Swann for his ability to “determine the colors of a light switch[ed] on in a remote room,” and they planned to do the same with Uri Geller.

In the memo, the unnamed agent reports learning about a new paper on parapsychological phenomena written by Evan Harris Walker, a PhD physicist at the US Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland—the officer calls him a “theoretically physicist.” Walker, who later gained fame for asserting (wrongly, historians say) that Albert Einstein stole the idea of special relativity from his wife Mileva Marić , claimed to have found “a physical basis for paranormal phenomena” by linking them to quantum mechanics.

The new study apparently reminded the agent of a series of letters about quantum mechanics, including one by Walker, published in the April 1971 issue of Physics Today. Several months earlier the magazine had printed an article by theoretical physicist Bryce DeWitt that addressed why we observe only one value of a measurement when quantum mechanics predicts a superposition of many. The best explanation, DeWitt asserted, was the many-worlds interpretation. Apparently the article garnered so many reader responses that editors decided to publish six of them as a package, along with a reply from DeWitt.

Walker’s letter in Physics Today referred to his Mathematical Biosciences paper on “The nature of consciousness.” He explained that he had developed a solution to the measurement dilemma posed by DeWitt that is “essentially a combination of [Eugene] Wigner’s conscious observer and [David] Bohm’s hidden variables .” Walker wrote that his research indicated that “conscious events are associated with, and serve as, hidden variables that cause the collapse of the state vector of every quantum-mechanical event.”

The agent seemed most excited about Walker’s theory because it included testable predictions that presumably went beyond asking self-proclaimed psychics to guess the color of a light in another room. However, the officer was sketchy on the details of the proposal, bemoaning that the supposedly popular research summaries in Physics Today “are difficult reading for those not familiar with quantum mechanics terminology.” The officer suggested that intelligence agencies focus on Walker’s general idea rather than try to make sense of the quantum physics and the mathematics behind it. The memo ends with what was surely an objective, scientific-minded assertion: “It is possible that we are now observing and contributing to the development of one of the most significant scientific developments of our time.”

Despite the anonymous agent’s optimism, the secret efforts to harness psychic powers, with or without the help of quantum mechanics, bore little fruit. The CIA canceled and declassified Project Star Gate in 1995. A book about the regrettable scheme, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was published nine years later.

Hat tip to Sarah Zielinski for the idea to search the CIA archives.