A Fortean Porn Result?

Previously, we noted that the infamous "Rule 34" breaks down when applied to Gnostic Forteanism.  Now, we still haven't found pictures of naked Gnostic girls, but we have found a porn-related experiment with decidedly Fortean overtones:

In another experiment, devised to test precognition, Bem provided his volunteers with the following instructions: “This is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions. Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all. Several of the pictures contain explicit erotic images (e.g., couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts). If you object to seeing such images, you should not participate in this experiment.” Which curtain covered an image was selected randomly by computer, which should have given subjects a 50 per cent chance of correctly locating the image.

The results were interesting, to say the least, with subjects achieving an overall hit-rate of 53.1 per cent for the pornographic pictures; while this may not sound all that impressive, statistically speaking it is significantly above chance. Their hit-rate on the neutral, non-erotic pictures was 49.8 per cent. Similar above-chance results were found in eight of the nine experiments, and across all nine an average ‘affect size’ of 0.22 was obtained.

Originally, this column was going to be about the Copenhagen Interpretation.  It's much safer for non-specialists to avoid modern physics - but where's the fun in that?  So, pressing forward, from Nature Magazine:

At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November1 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real.

In other words, while the map is still not the territory, it's possible that there is, in fact, real territory for the map to represent.

Or is there?  It turns out there might be another explanation:

[T]he new paper, by a trio of physicists led by Matthew Pusey at Imperial College London, presents a theorem showing that if a quantum wavefunction were purely a statistical tool, then even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other.

Nature concludes this is unlikely, so we'll have to go with neo-realism, rather than having a "scientific" basis for things like ESP, alchemy, astrology, homeopathy, and other "action at a distance" phenomena.