 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Physicists Metaphysics and Fraud. My name is Grace Stenman and this is my husband Chip Denman. We are founding members of the National Capital Area Skeptics and have been on the board of directors since its inception. We're also involved with the J-Rest. Chip is on the board of directors and I am an advisor and friend of the organization. So welcome. We're very happy to have you with us. Today's discussion begins with a history of NCAS in a sense. In the spring of 1987, James Chip, Jamie Ian Swiss and I, along with two gentlemen who are no longer on the earthly plane, formed the National Capital Area Skeptics. And one of our first events was in that fall to put on a theatrical seance which was great fun. We were inspired by a magician from Chicago and had a great theater experience. But our next seance experience was very, very different. It was indeed a seance in suburban Virginia. There was an advertisement the next fall. Come to the seance for a small fee. You could join the circle. And Chip and I and another friend, Randy Lockwood, also an NCAS member, decided we were curious and we wanted to go. And so we called, we reserved our space, and we were told that we could each invoke one person that we were trying to meet. Someone on the other side. And so we did a little strategizing and picked kind of different perspectives. I chose to try to talk to my grandmother Kennedy who had just passed, a real person that I knew extremely well. Chip chose to talk to John Mulholland who was a famous magician, a friend of Houdini, a real person whom he'd never met. And our friend, Randy, chose to make up an uncle that never existed that he was trying to visit. And at the same time, in that context of those roles, we decided to be honest. Like, within that, we weren't going to break the rules during the evening. And so we went to suburban Virginia, you know, to the rec room in these ladies' basement in their circle. And each of us, in turn, had a visit from the person we were going to visit. You know, they missed us, all was well. They hoped they were with us. Now, in the context of our three roles, that could only be a hit for one of us. And that was me. It couldn't be a hit for either Chip or for Randy. But what we found interesting at this seance is at the break. Many of the sitters, as well as our hostesses, took out pendulums. Very much like this one, since crystals were big at that time. And so, within the context of the break, they were asking each other questions. And the spirits were speaking through the pendulums to those questions. There were also other sitters who had brought sentimental items from people that they lost, that the hostesses were holding the pendulums over to answer specific questions about those lost people. So it was very interesting to us that it was part of the event, in a sense. And we were looking through the odd men out, and the odd women out, clearly. So pendulums have been used through history. In the early, you know, Roman days, they were used with a wheel or with letters to help spell out answers to questions. These are not new objects. But I would like to try an experiment, a demonstration with six of you. I brought six pendulums. So if six of you are feeling particularly positive because the movement of pendulums, especially with people who don't believe in magic and mysticism, is really reliant on a positive attitude. And so I would like to invite six people to please join me. Anyone feeling positive? Hello, Laura. AJ, do you want to join us? The first six people win. Actually, I'm going to adjust your mic every time you turn away. Okay, I actually have eight, so if we have seven. Now, I didn't prepare you pendulums quite as pretty as the one I brought for myself. I haven't faced the audience. I haven't faced the audience. Oh, yes, I will. Good point. Chip has reminded me that you should be facing the audience and not me. And any of you that are jealous can create these pendulums with a short trip to Home Depot. It's a wash. So what I want to suggest is that you hold your pendulum out at arm's length. And I don't want you to try to move it. I don't want you to try to stop moving it. What I want you to do is in your mind's eye, see the pendulum moving clockwise. In your mind's eye, think about how it would feel if the pendulum started to move. Holly has the motion there and mouse, great name is also moving. Think about how it would feel to see it move. We have some movement from Josh. Laura's not as positive as she thought she was. Direction isn't really important. It's motion. At least for three of our skeptics, there is some transmission. The one in the middle in particular, that one's really starting to move a little bit there. And you know, no, this is great. It's hard to not have it happen. We are all skeptics here, so we kind of have an expectation that it shouldn't happen. But it really is a natural thing. It's something that we hardly can control. It's part of our idiomotor system where if we think it, if we see it, it's hard to stop it from happening. Imagine it moving in your head. Concentrate in your mind's eye. I know you're tired. You've traveled a long distance. You shouldn't be annoyed. This is a very rational, normal thing. And it's really, there's no mysticism. There's no magic. It's the way our minds work. And that's great. That's exactly. Excuse me. Okay. So anyway, you're certainly welcome to keep your pendulums and later as you are trying to meet and grow closer to your fellow skeptics, you can use it to ask yes, no questions. And if the answer is yes, it will move back and forth. And if it's no, it'll go sideways. In some exactly, that's better than chances. I'm a statistician. I'll vouch for that. Thank you. Thank you. So I am passing the mantle to ask him to think about how he tested. Okay, that's a good point. So later, we're going to come back to this question. So it's not really a Q and a right now. But think about how you might actually test the pendulum effect. How would you know if it was magic or not? How would you know what was causing the movement? So just think about that. And we'll get back to it later when we get to the workshop portion of this day. Great. I'm not used to using a max. So let's see what do we need to do to get things there? There we go. All right. So Grace talked a little bit about our seance experiences. And I have been fascinated with seances since I was a kid. We see this stuff on TV. Maybe you remember the TV show from a couple of years ago, medium, or maybe you saw something on some late night movie with people sitting around in a darkened room holding hands around a table trying to evoke the spirits of the ones they had lost just like Grace described at the seance we went to in Virginia. Well, where does that idea come from? Where in the world did we get the idea that we could do something like that? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but seances as I'm describing them began the history of that began on the evening of March 31st, 1848. Yeah. So I'm going to talk very briefly about the history of seances and mediums and spiritualism. And that's going to lead us into a further discussion of pendulums and some other phenomena that scientists of the day became interested in testing and testing from from the physical sciences side. So we'll talk a little bit about how how those tests work. And before our time here is over, we'll be asking you folks to design some tests for some more modern phenomena. So that's where we're going. So in a sense, talking to the spirits has been around for as long as there have been humans talking to each other. There is some evidence that early early man may have had some kind of a sense of this of the afterlife in the supernatural. But I'm really talking about this very modern, almost modern idea of evoking the spirits under your control as a medium or as a sitter at a seance. And that's the history that I want to describe here. But first, a little bit of context. What was going on in the mid 1800s? Well, that was a time when science and technology were advancing by leaps and bounds. Electricity and magnetism were the vogue and and any sort of mysterious phenomenon might have been they tried to explain it in terms of electricity and magnetism. This was the time that Samuel Morris was demonstrating his telegraph that at the top there was his first test message sent to Congress from Baltimore of what have God wrought and the spiritualist of that day picked up on the fact that communication through some mysterious means invisible force like electricity was a lot like what they were trying to do and they even named some of their publications the spiritual telegraph. So it was an age when all sorts of things were changing. There were revolutions in Europe. It was a gold rush in California. It was a time when in upstate New York people were investigating all sorts of things from from mesmerism to spiritualism to Mormonism on upstate New York at the time was kind of the the California of its day. It was the hotbed of esoteric and philosophical exploration mesmer here. I'll just say a couple words. This was his idea. We has sort of evolved into what we think of as mesmerism or hypnotism today. But his concept was that we all have a certain amount of he called it animal magnetism a force that some people he thought could control and he thought he could really control it. So you see in this drawing here of him projecting these magnetic force fields to the patient he's working on. So as far as I've been able to determine the word seance itself began not with spiritualism but with mesmerism with people sitting around at home sitting the French word for sitting seance folks would sit and experiment with animal magnetism and mesmerism that set the stage for folks to experiment with other sorts of things and this fellow emerged who was a mesmerist. He claimed to be a clairvoyant and he was an author of what proved to be a very influential work to set the stage for spiritualism. I want to quote very briefly from the seminal work of his called the principles of nature her divine revelations and a voice to mankind published in 1847 in which he said it is a truth that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other is in the higher spheres and this truth will air long present itself in the form of a living demonstration and the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened and the spiritual communion will be established such as is now being enjoyed by the inhabitants of mars jupiter and saturn okay well never mind what he was trying to say was get ready world we are about to see the next great step in spiritual evolution we are about to find the ones who will let us break through the veil and communicate with the other side so the the world was indeed ready for three sisters from upstate new york hidesville new york doesn't really exist anymore although grace and i found the place where this house used to stand we we took a little field trip near rochester and even went to the county library where the local historian drew us maps and we found the crossroads where this house had stood sir author conan doil the the fellow who invented the ultra scientific detective uh sherlock holmes said of this particular moment this was one of the great points in psychic evolution little kate fox age six or seven we think her sister maggie a year or two older had been hearing weird sounds in the farmhouse at night but on this particular evening things took a dramatic turn they were sent to bed dark night in march upstate new york you know not a lot of things to do they were sent to bed early but after a few minutes they called to their mother and said come here there's something going on so the mother went in mrs fox went in her name was also margaret went in uh and here's what happened little kate pointed to the dark corner of their bedroom and said mr splitfoot do as i do and she clapped her hands three times and from that dark corner those three women those two girls and their mother heard an answering mr splitfoot little maggie picked up on the idea and pointed to the corner and said do as i do but this time maggie didn't actually clap her hands she just made the motion but guess what splitfoot still answered i can just imagine how good mrs fox must have shivered in that cold dark room it turns out that through a series of rapping sounds these two young girls developed a code and found out that they could communicate with the spirit who ultimately through their their messaging uh said that he was the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered in that house at some point they didn't say exactly when word spread like wildfire or people came from all over the the county to witness this phenomena and the girls really kind of were the focal point for this they really seemed to enjoy the the attention they would do this demonstration and it got so bad that a fellow who had been a previous tenant of the house even issued an official public statement that no he was not a murderer he had not done this evil deed but at some point it must have gotten a little bit out of hand and they sent that is mr and mrs fox sent the two young girls away to sort of maybe break the cycle and and calm things down for the neighborhood so they sent them to stay with their much older sister lia who lived in rochester at the time and guess what that pesky spirit that pesky spirit followed them to rochester and older sister lia had the brilliant marketing idea that we can actually sell tickets and so they started charging admission people would come to the home and thus the first commercial seances were held this whole idea really caught on and it didn't take long for other people to discover that they too had this ability so within a few years there were over 2000 practicing mediums in the united states alone and then it traveled across the pond to england where it caught on there just as well so there's a rich rich history of this uh this whole phenomena and i i would love to give a whole talk on that sometime i'm going to give you the very compressed version but it's it's worth saying that these two young girls made a living and they grew to adulthood and uh became uh celebrities they traveled to england and gave seances there uh and things were pretty good oh but i have to say there were skeptics there there were those who said no i don't think so uh there was a committee of doctors in buffalo new york who uh got permission and examined the girls and saw them do their their demonstration and uh they came back with a rather skeptical conclusion that it wasn't spirits that it was the girls uh cracking their their knee joints so not too many people paid attention to that they went on they actually rented a large theater in rochester the carinthian hall of where they charged a dollar a person which was not a cheap ticket at the time and demonstrated their their abilities on stage the ability to seemingly get these mysterious rapping or cracking sounds to to appear at their command and use them to answer messages from the spirits so as i said they grew to adulthood they traveled to england and at one point it seems that life was not always easy um on the return trip in 1888 maggie fox now an adult and somewhat discouraged with the way things had been going for her in england met up with a reporter for a new york newspaper the new york herald and promised him an exclusive interview after they arrived back in new york and here's what she said she confessed that she and her sister from the start had faked it all she said her big toe did it all those doctors in buffalo weren't so far off but it wasn't their knee joints they learned to crack their toes in such a way that they could even use the floorboards as resonators to to make it seem even louder and more mysterious than it than it might have been she said that that very first night in the bedroom when they fooled her mother they had tied an apple to a string and undercover of the darkness tugged on the string string to bounce the apple on the floorboards and create mr mr splitfoot so she confessed she even went on stage in new york and did a public demonstration with her sister attending and supporting they tried to come clean it didn't really work out too well for them no one wanted to pay admission to see how they'd been tricked the expose tour that they had planned flopped guess what they recanted the confession they said was a fake they'd been forced into it and so they went on to the rest of the rest of their lives not the celebrities that they had been but they managed to eke out a survival kate died as from alcoholism maggie died a year or two later also destitute in a pretty bad way and to their deathbed they blamed their older sister leah for having set them up and put them on that path that led them to this sham of a life so but what i'd like to do is fast forward through some of the other folks who discovered their mediumistic gifts as they said by 1852 there were over 2 000 mediums practicing in the united states this is an example of a different kind of mediumistic phenomena of a spirit photographer some of the folks discovered that they didn't just communicate through rapping sounds but they could even photograph the ghost if you look closely a behind mary todd lincoln there is the shadow shadowy figure of the president after his assassination there was a a photographer by the name of william mummler in boston who produced photos like this but he was not alone he was perhaps the best known but this whole industry sprang up of ghostly photographs capturing the images of those that you had lost as for the president himself mary todd lincoln had actually been an avid spiritualist even before her husband had been killed she brought mediums to the white house she had seances conducted there and it seems that that the president attended some of those there is a story it's perhaps apocryphal but it's such a wonderful expression that i i i will pass it on anyway it is said that someone asked the president what he thought of the seance that he had just attended and he said well for those that like that sort of thing i suppose it's exactly the sort of thing they would like so but by this time mediums had gone on to many many other ways of communicating with the spirits not just through through rapping sounds here i'm going to give credit to one doctor well we use the term loosely doctor henry slade who gets credit for being the first i believe to communicate with the spirits through writing he discovered that he could in a seance room with the lights turned down having what had been a blank school slate like you see in the picture appear a little while later with a message written on it in chalk from the spirits uh the photo here actually contains a message and it took me a while before i was able to decipher the handwriting but what it says there is your slate is too small for our use we will do more someday soon signed w w so this was one of the spirit messages captured from one of his seances but the main reason i want to talk about him today is that he was willing to be tested by the scientist and in 1877 he brought himself to professor yohan carl fredrich zollner uh who was a mathematician and astrophysicist uh his area of study led him to be very very interested in higher dimensional mathematics and he came to believe that if there were indeed spirits they were operating through a fourth dimension a fourth physical dimension that we did not have access to and so he believed that many of the spiritualist phenomena like slate writing were being accomplished not by trickery but by spirits who could manipulate our three dimensions by reaching out from their fourth and so he was tested by uh that is he tested slate and was very very favorably impressed now mind you he had his own critics and there are those that said that zollner was relatively late in his career that he may not have been completely in the right mind or the clearest thinker in fact he did die i believe three or four years later from a brain aneurysm so you know he perhaps he wasn't thinking the most clearly but he nonetheless was an early scientist who was willing to sit down with a medium and do a physical test to see if it would work the way he wanted one of the things that they did was that slade took a rope that had been braided together into a continuous loop and he put it around his neck and then you know during the seance they turned out the lights you know that was one of the interesting things to me was that in these seances the darker the room got the cooler the phenomena became so in this particular case when the lights came back up the rope mysteriously had several knots inside it which would have been impossible uh in just our three dimensions and so this among a few other things were kind of the clinchers for zollner who really became convinced that there was a fourth dimensional agent working here slade found his way to england where things went less well once he was in england there were several other scientists who took an interest in him i'm i'm mentioning wallace for for a reason wallace as you probably know was the co-discoverer of this the theory of natural selection the idea that that evolution species evolved through a mechanism of natural selection discovered this independently of darwin and we don't hear much of him today in the same way we hear about darwin i think there's a reason for that relating to the spiritualist movement he was an avid spiritualist when slade was hauled before the magistrate in the courts of london and accused of fraud by two other scientists who said that they believe that that slade was just doing magic tricks wallace came to slade's defense and testified as a character witness on his behalf he didn't actually do test as far as i know he had already been convinced in principle and felt that slade was the sort of upstanding fellow who wouldn't be cheating but wallace defended while two other scientists challenged ultimately slade was convicted but then the conviction was overturned on a technicality it seems that the the law that had been invoked to to charge him was a law prohibiting fortune telling not spirit communication per se and so he actually never received any true penalty for what he had done but here we see two sides of the scientific community one side two scientists who challenged the spiritualist and another imminent scientist who embraced them and this was not that uncommon at that day spiritualism was a phenomena of interest whether you were a skeptic or a believer and that was true in the scientific community as well it was at least considered something worth investigation by many which brings us to Florence Cook a medium in in Britain who became known as perhaps the most adept medium for producing physical phenomena actual materializations having a ghost walk around the seance room she was associated with a spirit many spirits but the one most associated with her was what she called her spirit guide a ghost by the name of Katie King Katie King was supposedly the spirit of the daughter of the pirate Henry Morgan got all that so Katie King would appear at Florence's seances and sometimes walk around sometimes be photographed sometimes cut off locks of her hair as souvenirs of and it was an amazing thing but she had she actually approached one of the most prominent young physicist of the day Sir William Crooks and asked him if he would please conduct a series of rigorous tests of her ability now why in the world would a seance medium whom we skeptics might naturally think uh trying to pull tricks why would a medium like that put herself in the situation of being tested by a scientist a physicist like William Crooks well she had had shortly before this a somewhat unfortunate event there had been a seance that had not gone well when the lights had gone out and this and the spirit walked about the room one of the rude sitters in the in the in the parlor had the audacity to reach out and grab the ghost a bit of wrestling ensued and eventually the spirit broke free and retreated to the back area that what they call the the spirit cabinet behind a curtain and a few minutes later a somewhat dazed and disheveled Florence emerged and end of story this was fairly damaging to her career it has been suggested that she went to Crooks because Crooks was known to be sympathetic she went to this sympathetic scientist and asked to be tested in the hopes that she could sort of get back in the good graces of the world if she could convince this prominent physicist well maybe that one event wouldn't be such the the disaster that it had looked like so Crooks agreed and he actually took her into his home and and conducted a series of experiments that lasted almost a year and he never actually issued an official statement one way or the other but from his correspondence it looks to his friends it looks as if he was more or less impressed perhaps until the very end the fact that things ended so suddenly suggests that this is speculation on my part that perhaps he started to get suspicious and decided to terminate things before there was an out-and-out exposure I don't know but it just seems odd that things suddenly came to the halt that they did without him ever saying anything more I want to put a picture up here this was a photo taken during one of his seance tests in his own home of the spirit katie king walking with him their arm in arm I want to I will leave it to your own call how much of a resemblance there might be between katie king and Florence herself there is I think crooks is an interesting example of someone who let's see here we go sorry about that crooks was an interesting example of a highly trained scientist who I think had a little too much hubris he maintained to many of his colleagues that a trained scientist a trained physicist was completely up to the challenge of detecting any trickery from a professional conjurer now I kind of live in both worlds I'm not a performing magician but I have studied a little bit I've worked with some of the folks here that you've probably seen perform and so I know a little bit about magic and how easy it is for a smart person to get fooled I think crooks was a little too smart he was someone that believed that his scientific training was the same thing as being trained in deception and I will tell you I don't think that's the case at all there was an interesting correspondence between him and one of his friends where he was describing a session with one of these spirit photographers who had taken photos of a ghost and he wrote a letter in which he said it does my heart much good to see this evidence the photos had been taken and at no time did the medium handle the camera or the photographic plate it does my heart much good to see this strong evidence and that's a pretty clear strong statement however 10 days prior to that he'd written another letter to the same individual describing the same event and in that earlier letter it came across a little differently he said the photographer the medium had not handled the camera or the plate except for the moment when he took it out and reinserted it into the camera it seems that crooks did not appreciate how that subtle little point there was indeed a moment when the photographer handled the plate but he that was so insignificant to him he didn't see it as meaningful to the investigation and by 10 days later he'd completely forgotten about it entirely so by this particular time one of the phenomena that scientists got interested in testing was the phenomena known as table tipping or table turning where people would sit around in the parlor often in their own homes put their hands on top of a lightweight table and ask the spirits to come forward and many times after a little while the table would start to shake rock a little bit move back and forth sometimes they could even use it like a pendulum to ask questions of the spirits and get an answer in code however it's worth noting that there are many ways to make a table tip and what i want to call your attention to here is the gentleman sitting facing us all who's lifted up his boot underneath the table to give it a shove now this phenomena of tipping caught the imagination of many people both in the sciences and not harry houdini the most famous magician of all time was an avid ghost buster he was truly interested in contacting the spirit of his mother who had died he had been very much wanting to contact her he went to seances and was appalled at what the tricks that he saw and so he made a large part of his later career devoted like our hero randy here devoted to exposing the the fakes and these are diagrams from a pamphlet he published illustrating how another medium under cover of absolute dark room this only would have worked in the dark even though her feet and her hands were supposedly under control by the other sitters at the table she could under cover of darkness lean forward put her head under the edge of the table and lift up and create the spirit effect i think there's a really important difference in viewpoint between some of the scientists that that investigated these psychic phenomena and the magicians that investigated crooks and zoner and others who investigated the psychic phenomena for the most part we're not trained in deception not trained in magic not trained to look for that sort of thing and often they put their focus on sort of weaker controls and letting the medium do pretty much whatever they wanted to do whereas the magicians like houdini and some others put more stringent controls on and really went and looked for tricks there were many many magicians who were on the skeptical side of things i won't talk about them in any length here but grace had mentioned john mulholland the spirit that i contacted at that seance mulholland had been a bit of a ghostbuster himself beware familiar spirits was it was a nice book of his and magicians even when they were not active ghostbusters were certainly willing to make use of these themes in their shows but here is an engraving from 1853 that sort of illustrates what might have gone on and and a sophisticated party of the day and you see right in the center of the image we've got people men and women alike putting their hands around a small table engaged in an exercise in table tipping and this was something that few scientists really wanted to understand michael faraday perhaps the most prominent physicist of his day was absolutely fascinated by this and he put not one moments of credence in the idea that it was spooks he was convinced that there was something else going on here even when people weren't doing trickery he thought there might be an interesting phenomena to investigate uh he let me just read a brief quote i think i've got and i'm entirely sure how to how to get my notes down here um there we go this gives you an idea of of his skeptical attitude he was finding fault with the great body of the of the population who quote reject all consideration of the quality of cause and effect who refer the causes to electricity and magnetism who yet know nothing of these laws or of these forces who even refer them to diabolical or supernatural agency rather than suspend their judgment or acknowledge to themselves that they are not learned enough in these matters to decide on the nature of the phenomena so he was surely a skeptic but he was a skeptic that wanted to investigate with some rigor so what did he do what would you do if you wanted to investigate this phenomenon of table tipping and test the idea is it spirits or is it something else what would you do pardon me turn on the lights okay uh the lights were on in many of these cases in the table tipping it could be a room like you saw at the party remove the tablecloth he did things like that uh and indeed a tablecloth wasn't necessary in fact it was often just a bare wooden table cleared glass table to look for trickery okay good idea move the people away well okay but the people but the claim was it only happened when they put their hands on the table sure so so yes ah good idea in fact you're you're very much if you will in the spirit of what what he was coming up with good idea so what he suggested was that what if you put pieces of paper on the table between the hands and the wood and therefore you could better understand when the hands were pushing on on on something and that's very much the thinking that Faraday used here's what he actually did he wrote this up and published it in 1853 in a british magazine called the anthoneum he devised a whole series of tests and my favorite is the first one he did it's the simplest in which he took he says four or five pieces of cardboard slippery cardboard this isn't so slippery this is a non-working model of what he did but he took four or five pieces of cardboard and stuck them together with wax cement and lined them all up put a piece of sandpaper on the on the bottom and took made sure the biggest one the top one was a little bigger than all the rest so that it hid the edges what he did was he put this on the tabletop and had the sitters put their hands on the cardboard ah right you understand here was his reasoning and this is what proved to be he broke this down to here's my research question are the spirits moving this he translated that to a hypothesis first hypothesis uh no it's not the spirits it's the people pushing it alternative hypothesis okay it's the spirits he set up this mechanism this device with a slippery cardboard so that he reasoned this way he said if it's the spirits then the force starts at the table and the people are following however it moves on the other hand if the force is coming from the people they're pushing the cardboard and the cardboard and the sandpaper are pulling the table along with it by doing this experiment with sincere people he was very clear in his write-up that he had ruled out trickery for most of what he was investigating he was investigating those cases where this happened with sincere honest believers who had no idea that they were actually doing anything themselves he was able to demonstrate with a cardboard that when the table moved the cardboard slid and when they turned it over they could see that the cards at the top had slid the most and as you went down the stack less and less movement so that the uh you could tell the direction the force had initiated at the top the hands had pushed it moved the top layer a lot the next layer a little bit the bottom layer at least of all and demonstrated that the source of the motion started with the hands and he built more and more elaborate mechanisms like this and one of the interesting things was that he gave visual feedback when he let the people see that they were pushing it when he made a sensor that let them know when they were pushing it wouldn't move at all the people weren't trying just like with a pendulum they were not deliberately trying to deceive they were simply deceiving themselves so he was an innovator in this kind of investigation here's that picture again look what's going on on that side of the room the same the same party where the uh table tipping was going on in the middle right here she has a pendulum these two phenomena were going on at the very same time often in the very same room and grace is going to talk a little bit about another scientist who investigated this side of the picture chevrolet was a chemist a frenchman a very very famous chemist in france um he's renowned i don't know why we don't know about him here um but i can tell you some of his major accomplishments so you get a sense that he was an important person in his time he is he spent a decade of his life working in the lab to understand animal fats to break it down to understand what fatty acids were to understand soapworks and an important thing he did was create margarine which i believe the french chefs of the world have yet to forgive him but in his day um in 1812 in fact he was invited to observe in a lab someone holding a pendulum over water and the relationship of the pendulum to the water caused it to move but when a barrier a pane of glass was put between them the movement stopped interfering with the relationship between the pendulum and the material in the bowl and yes there was water there was mercury many many different um materials were used but the relationship of the pendulum to what was in the bowl was consistent and he was invited to come up and to repeat what he had just seen and much to his surprise it worked for him too when he held the pendulum it moved and when the pane of glass was put in place it stopped but what made him special different a scientist was that he thought there had to be maybe another reason maybe it's more than the pendulum in a relationship with a substance so he asked himself what could be happening what could make this happen so consistently and one of the questions he asked himself is could could i be moving it without realizing i'm moving it and so he developed two really interesting tests to test that first he built a wooden rest and he held it here and slowly moved it down his arm and as it moved down the movement got smaller and smaller and smaller and when the rest was under his fingers the movement stopped but as he moved the rest back the movement became greater again and it it made him think it must you know there's something he's doing that the rest prevented and so he returned to the experiment that had been done over and over again that he'd been very successful for with you know when i hold the pendulum over the substance it moves but when a pane of glass is put between it stops only this time he was blindfolded and his assistant moved the pane of glass without him knowing when it was there and when it wasn't and without the feedback of knowing expecting the movement because he could see the liquid it didn't work and so he actually wrote this finding up he initially had an open letter where he discussed this but later in his life he wrote it up in a formal paper in the 1860s with other skeptical things that he did one of the things i want to point out to you is he lived to be 102 and he worked for most of those years he retired i think when he was 92 from leading the museum of natural history so mr randy you're just a whipper snapper and you have a long time yet to go it's time for you to work we have three modern devices that make extraordinary claims like table tipping in the spirits moving pendulums and we would like you to um think about how you might test them you could thank you so the first is the truth speaker we have brought this to you sparing no expense since we actually did spend the 149 dollars to buy it from sharper image 1998 catalog uh it pat patent pending circuitry it it claims to be able to read stress in the voice and stress indicates a lack of truthfulness and so you can have it on your desk and what you know as people come and go with your conversations during the day you can judge whether they're being forthright or not um you're you're able to adjust it for background noise and things like that so that's our device number one device number two is the ugly wheel this helps you measure your life energy and through feedback from your experiments with it you increase your life's energy the idea is you cup your hand around it like in the photo there and your vital force will eventually start the wheel to turning and the the little meter down here will measure the rate of turn and the faster it spins the stronger your your life energy and then our our third device is vermin x so you plug this in and it exhibits a high pitched tone humans can't hear but those spiders those spiders and mice and probably your dogs might be unhappy um this is the cheapest of our our devices um i do want to point out there's one really important thing that all these devices have in common they have leds and so we want to break you up into teams um you can come up and look at these but please leave them here because all the teams are going to want to look at it we're going to assign you a device so that each of the devices has um so what your jobs will be is to define the claim that's being made to translate it into a testable hypothesis to define what your outcomes would be what is success what is failure to identify the limits of your test and what the protocols the important protocol points would be so chip do you want to break them up yeah let's see this is a large group here so let's see how we can best do this and and i know their handouts going around the room i don't know if we had about a hundred handouts printed i don't know how many uh but at least we should break into groups so that every group has at least a couple of copies of this the handout basically describes the basic instructions that come with each of these three devices so what suggests is that folks maybe like two rows at at a time sort of pull yourself apart from the group maybe move your chairs around and sort of take this in terms of like two rows two rows two rows two rows and so all right so just to recap for the video folks here we've talked about three devices the truth seeker lie detector that measure allegedly measures level of stress in the voice the ugly wheel which allegedly measures vital energy whatever that means and finally the vermin x which is supposed to to emit its own energy its own ultrasonic energy and repel those pesky mice and other critters that we don't want around here so i'd like to ask for let's start with the the truth seeker is there a group that would like to talk a little bit about your process and and what you'd like to do to do the testing yes okay so do we have a spokesperson for the truth for truth seeker group please come up to the mic all right so what are the hypotheses that your group was focused on we were focused on a lot of different things of what the machine could potentially measure whether it's actual stress or just voice tone voice tone volume anything pitch yes and it's we decided to just level the or simplify the experiment as to simply are you telling the truth or not is it living up to its its claim it's as a truth seeker good okay so number two so number two measurable outcomes between success and failure obviously would be can it tell the truth can it tell the truth and unfortunately it's not entirely a binary thing there's a as a range but for simplicity's sake we figured just you know yes or no is it telling the truth is are you telling the truth are you are you lying so the protocol we decided on was that first blinding is very important we have to make sure that the subject does not know if they're actually but what they're what they're being tested on and so we decided to have on at least for one sample group and possibly multiple samples perhaps but at least for one sample group have a simple statement such as I have a daughter or I my I am 30 years old or I am I am a woman and have all the samples read the same statement and have it be a 5050 split between you know say if you have 50 men and 50 women and they all say I am a man obviously half of them are lying and see what the results of that test would be so that would be a simplistic protocol and then you could also vary if you have more subjects and resources for things like pitch volume if they're under stress maybe haven't do some jumping jacks something like that okay great now limitations there's anyone see a limit a limitation with the protocol that they talked about here oh I'm sorry I okay I didn't mention all the details basically the the testes would not know what the test is they would just be handed a simple paper read this and then exit the room and then another group of the testers would just mark you know this this subject got red this subject got green etc so yeah okay okay Randy here speak to my microphone hi I see I see a problem in the the people who are undergoing the test are not necessarily under a stress of some kind and that that's critical to a thing like this I am I a man or a woman well with me it's a different matter but uh I first of all it's obvious I don't want to get into the details the point is if you're not under test conditions of stress of some kind I don't think this test would be adequate yeah we we also thought of that and another and yes we actually we we decided that that is in fact the limitation of that test but also to perhaps randomize and I don't know how how robust this would be but basically you could also say please answer this question state your gender but decide on your own lie or not say I'm a man or a woman and just and then exit the room and then after exiting check saying I lied I told the truth and having a separate sample that way and compare it against the the first baseline sample of someone just reading a piece of paper okay good we did this similar exercise with this device at a workshop a few years ago and one of the groups came up with a way to put this subject under stress and they actually demonstrated it in the room someone stood there the person speaking was seated the person who was lying or telling the truth was seated and there was someone else over them with a pitcher of ice water ready to pour someone got dumped before the day was that okay the next device the ugly wheel who'd like to start out okay come come to the microphone please you're not alone there were other people working on the wheel there was too much to talk about yeah I guess the big issues that we came up with were trying to isolate it from potential input other than life force like whether or not there was wind affecting it whether or not temperature was a factor whether not magnetism or capacitance were factors I think we spent a lot of time doing that I don't have anything else sorry anyone else on the ugly wheel so our hypothesis was a subject vitality should be the same in any given moment and so the the measurable observable outcomes distinguished between success and failure would be to take two devices have the person cut both devices and make sure that they have the same reading so the protocol of course would be place two devices on two separate tables we had some concerns about the the pulse of the person might be causing micro vibrations to affect the thing so we wanted to put it on two different two different surfaces we talked about the idea of temperature if we get somehow control for temperature you know place a hot cup of coffee near one of the devices and a cold cold ice cup near a different one and some of the limitations of the test that we found is there might be manufacturing defects in the equipment so we're not actually using the same device to measure the thing uh the other we said talked about that you could measure with two hands you'll have different readings but they also said to test separately so that's why we think the uh the two hand might be the best approach okay cool we have another contributor because the dimensions about a zillion in one variables and it basically covers all the bases so that you could never test any individual thing one thing that one person in our group picked up on is that the uh there's a claim on on the page that says that a hundred percent life reading is the average so a very easy very testable thing is to just gather enough gather up enough people and if it's an average some of them will be stressed some of them will be happy some of them will be sad and it won't matter if it measures that a hundred percent then you go on to test other things but it at least sort of like you could start to uh criticize the device and his claims from that yeah this one's a tough one because the claims are so vague it's hard to actually pin it down and that's often the case when randy is dealing with folks from the million dollar million dollar challenge that the claims that people come to us with are often so ill-defined non-specific that it's hard to come up with a a reasonable test yes the young lady i'm sorry go ahead great you wanted to say something hey i was pretty much going to say exactly what you were saying we stumbled on the first block because defining the claim is pretty much impossible like vital energy we don't know what it is they're not going to tell us what it is i read well i flipped through the booklet it never really defines what it is so i think the idea of the average of hundred percent is the closest we can get because that's the closest thing to an actual claim that they make i tested myself this morning i was only a 20 but all their literature goes to people who already believe in the device and what it does it's all about your advice for you if you do have a low reading like you maybe you could change your diet the booklet suggests or spend less time in the del mar lounge so i mean to actually pin them down to get to them to define a claim is more or less impossible and also i want to take the box apart that was another thing our group said so without actually looking inside it i don't know yeah great thank you there had been someone else yes real quick please besides uh defining the claim of vitality which none of us could agree upon we thought there would be an overly elaborate way we can sort of isolate groups of people like the athletic people average and people that are ill of a specific way and just sort of see how the device reacts to each and every one of them that it still wouldn't really define what i of course vitality actually is and why is that sitting there it wouldn't really it wouldn't really define what vitality is but it would at least give us an idea of a control especially separating of course men and women in each different subset groups we also thought of isolating the device in a vacuum like a glass vacuum and seeing how it would react to specific scenarios if it would just be in a vacuum and you would move your hand close to it it would be within a few inches but yet still be in a vacuum would it still react to you and what happens if we sort of create a a device that is very similar at 98.6 degrees runs water and has the same sort of gelatinous substance of a hand and keep it nearby to see if it react in the same way it's a cool idea yeah one last quick comment on this one then we'll get to vermin x i'll just say that all three of these devices are things that i've used in a class that i've taught at the university of maryland and i would make this an assignment yeah i would make this an assignment every time i taught one of the assignments was to design a protocol for something and several years i used these three things here that you folks have had 20 minutes to think about i would give it to the students to work on for for a few days and see what they came up with some interesting things came out of that go ahead i would actually like to say that i believe that they make a very good claim they make a claim it's just that it's not they say that it's the vital force that moves it they make that claim they just don't define vital force for us and they even if we could make the test with all of us here and we should come to an average of 100 that wouldn't show anything more than that maybe the calibration of of the the tool wasn't right it it wouldn't really say anything about the the claim they are making the claim they are making basically saying that there is a vital force that goes beyond what we normally can measure and that they have found a way of measuring it with this meter so it's i mean it's much more complicated than that and and i mean they claim a change direction with with which hand you use and stuff like that and to come up with something that is even close to what we can do in 20 minutes is hard but they're making a claim they're making the claim that is that vital force that will turn it okay great thank you whoops we just lost the the plug in the mic all right so very quickly we're almost out of time but is there a group that worked on the verminx that would like to come up and tell us how you would approach that there's a mic on the table you can come up to the table oh here comes our verminx man just speak into it okay so we worked on verminx and they make several claims but uh you know most of them have to do with what verminx actually does how it's acting on the vermin that it works at a high frequency that affects a nervous system but none of those are important unless it does what you want it to do in your home which is to get rid of the vermin so unless it does that it doesn't matter how it's doing it and it also is brought up in our group that you could probably solve all those other things by a quick google search you can find out you know what frequency these insects or mice can hear at and all those things so what we want to do is come up with a protocol for testing whether or not vermin actually do respond or or have an adverse reaction to this high pitch frequency and we came up with a simple experiment where you just you know you create a controlled environment you put your vermin in there the insects or the mice or whatever you can have maybe you have two verminx one on either side and one's operational one is not and just watch to see if they have you know a preference for one side or the other unlike some of these other devices it's actually a pretty simple and straightforward claim either they either it gets rid of them or it doesn't and i guess some limitations of that test if i can just keep moving through it yeah please right you could test it on right different kinds of vermin as well i think we have another and what i like about you suggested something that i think has a great potential you said have one device active one device not that would lend itself to actually setting up a randomized double blind situation right you have one experimenter set it up and then you have different people observe it and you would also keep the led active on both of them right right because we can't hear it is the idea but you would still see the light sorry there was a comment right it didn't work they make the price low enough that it's worth a try exactly it's painless so there's no guilt associated with it and then also unlike in the controlled experiment you're not very likely to see you know very dramatic results in your home at least not very quickly great thank you thank you all all right good job yeah nicely done if i could just sort of wind this down i know it's time for lunch but i'm going to bring it back to to faraday for a moment faraday in his report on his testing of table tipping said i think the system of education that could leave the mental condition of the public body in the state in which this subject has found it must have been greatly deficient in some important principle he really emphasized the the criticality of events like this and getting materials into the schools and working with folks to educate them about how the world works and how to think critically there's an old welsh prayer that goes from ghoulies and ghosties and long leggy beasties and things that go bump in the night good lord deliver me okay but rather than a prayer i suggest that education and scientific skepticism are the best nightlights that we have to get rid of the spooks thank you