What makes telekinesis possible

This sounds uncontroversial, but is worth explaining. Spoons are made of atoms, and we know what atoms are made of — electrons bound by photons to an atomic nucleus, which in turn consists of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made of quarks held together by gluons.

Five species of particles total: up and down quarks, gluons, photons, electrons. There is no room for extra kinds of mysterious particles clinging, aura-like, to the matter in a spoon. And if there were a kind of particle that interacted with the ordinary particles in the spoon strongly enough to stick to the spoon, we could easily make it in experiments.

The rules of quantum field theory directly relate the interaction rates of particles to the ease with which we can create them in the lab, given enough energy. And we know exactly how much energy is available in a spoon; we know the masses of the atoms, and the kinetic energy of thermal motions within the metal.

Taken together, we can say without any fear of making a mistake that any new particles that might exist within a spoon would have been detected in experiments long ago. Again: imagine you have invented a new kind of particle relevant to the dynamics of spoons. Tell me its mass, and its interactions with ordinary matter. If it is sufficiently light and strongly interacting, it will have been created and captured many times over in experiments we have already done.

There is no middle ground. We completely understand the regime of spoons, notwithstanding what you heard in The Matrix. In the context of quantum field theory, we know precisely how forces arise: through the exchange of quantum fields.

We know that only two kinds of fields exist: bosons and fermions. We know that macroscopic forces only arise from the exchange of bosons, not of fermions; the exclusion principle prohibits fermions from piling up in the same state to create a coherent long-range force field. And, perhaps most importantly, we know what forces can couple to: the properties of the matter fields that constitute an object. This is where the previous point comes in. Spoons are just a certain arrangement of five kinds of elementary particles — up and down quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons.

Once you tell me how many electrons etc. Of course, we have worked hard to discover different forces in nature, and so far we have identified four: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But the nuclear forces are very short-range, smaller than the diameter of an atom.

Gravitation and electromagnetism are the only detectable forces that propagate over longer distances. Could either gravitation or electromagnetism be responsible for bending spoons? In the case of electromagnetism, it would be laughably easy to detect the kind of fields necessary to exert enough force to influence a spoon. Not to mention that the human brain is not constructed to generate or focus such fields.

But the real point is that, if it were electromagnetic fields doing the spoon-bending, it would be very very noticeable. And the focus would be on influencing magnets and circuits, not on bending spoons. In the case of gravitation, the fields are just too weak. In the s, Uri Geller became the world's best-known psychic and made millions traveling the world demonstrating his claimed psychokinetic abilities, including starting broken watches and bending spoons.

Though he denied using magic tricks, many skeptical researchers observed that all of Geller's amazing feats could be — and have been — duplicated by magicians. Public interest in psychokinesis returned in the s. One person nationally known for claimed psychokinetic ability, James Hydrick, tried to demonstrate his powers on the television show "That's My Line" in , following several successful television appearances.

He claimed to move small objects, such as a pencil or the pages of a telephone book, with his mind. Host Bob Barker consulted with skeptic James Randi, who suspected that Hydrick was merely discreetly blowing on the pages to make them move.

To prevent this method of trickery Randi placed styrofoam bits around the open book, as the lightweight pieces would clearly be disturbed if the pages were moving because of Hydrick's breath instead of his mind. After many awkward minutes in front of Barker, Randi, a panel of judges, and the live studio audience, a flustered Hydrick finally said that his powers weren't cooperating.

Hydrick later admitted that his psychokinetic powers had been faked, and marveled at how easy it had been to fool the public. Even many researchers admit that the data fall far short of scientific standards of proof; researcher Russell Targ, in his book "The Reality of ESP" , Quest Books acknowledges that "the evidence for laboratory psychokinesis is quite weak.

Recent advances in virtual reality technology may, however, be the next best thing. In , a company called Neurable announced plans to develop psychokinesis — or at least a virtual reality form of it — for a game called Awakening.

Using a combination of eye movement tracking technology and electroencephalogram EEG sensors in a headset, the game allows a player to move and manipulate objects in a virtual world merely by looking and thinking. What this really shows is that when we talk about a brain-computer interface, we should be able to harness that interaction to exert our will over any piece of computer-controlled equipment.

Obvious choices given the nature of neural engineering are robotic arms, exoskeletons, and transport like cars and wheel chairs. This is all natural, as the field has been centered on duplicating existing human capabilities as a restorative. Very little attention has been paid to other possible things to control. BCI is not going to let us break the laws of physics, but it will enable us a more direct interface to technologies that could have an effect at distance.

At present our bottlenecks are the actual nature of the interface this is where Elon Musk is putting his money , and how to extract the electrical signals emitted by the brain and use them to create controls for various devices. Which devices we control I leave entirely to your imagination. Do you have a burning question for Giz Asks?

Email us at tipbox gizmodo. The simple answer is obviously no as all the experts here point out. The point of telekenisis as its known is that the brain acts on an object with no medium. The mere act of installing a chip provides a medium precluding telekenisis in the true sense.