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Physicists have found, in 400 years of searching nature ever more closely and at an increasingly fundamental level, evidence for the existence of only four fundamental forces in nature. These are gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Because these four forces are very well understood, and the theories, which describe them, have been so thoroughly tested, it is known that NONE of these forces could be responsible for the hypothetical ESP stimulus. What then about a new force, previously unknown to science? An undiscovered force which can act in the everyday environment strongly enough to account for alleged ESP phenomena is essentially certain not to exist, for precisely the same reason you can be certain there is not an elephant in the room with you as you sit reading this! There is no place for it to be, no place for it to hide. If such a force existed, everything would be different than we see it to be, because the force would affect everything in some way. Forces are universal, exerted from subatomic particle to subatomic particle, felt equally by planets, rocks, molecules and tomcats, because all matter is made of the same basic triad of particles: electrons, protons, and neurons, at one level; electrons, up quarks and down quarks at the next level down. To argue that such a force exists but has no observable effects is contradictory; we know of the existence of forces only through their effects. Furthermore, all known interactions in physics diminish at least as fast as the inverse square of the distance, and often far faster than that. All interactions propagate from point to pint in space-time at a speed at or below the speed of light. ESP is said to violate these universal rules for all forces in nature.

This brings us to the most important point of all, and one essentially never considered by proponents of ESP. We know that electromagnetic radiation, for instance, exists over a vast range of frequencies or wavelengths that we are totally blind to, because we have no sensory organs that will respond to such radiation. Our knowledge of the existence of such radiation does not depend on the accidental birth of mutants or supermen or "sensitives" who can somehow detect radio or ultraviolet rays directly. Nobody can detect such waves directly; the question is irrelevant, because we are dealing with a real phenomenon of nature, which is universal in character. There are a vast number of sources in nature for electromagnetic radiation in any part of the spectrum it is desired to study; and it is simple to construct artificial sources of electromagnetic radiation, as intense and monochromatic as we wish. It is equally easy to construct detectors for such radiation, again as sensitive and broadly responsive as we wish them to be. Even when using the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans can sense directly, the visible spectrum, one would prefer to use instruments such as movie and TV and still cameras so as to have a permanent, objective record, unaffected by fatigue, bias, defects of vision, and poor memory that would afflict a human detector-describer-recorder. In other words, when one is dealing with a real process, one studies the process directly. If ESP existed, the question of whether or not humans had ESP would be totally irrelevant; the "radiation" or whatever other physical interaction is involved could be best studied directly.

It has been pointed out over and over, most forcefully by Joseph Jastrow and John Mulholland in 1938, and by George R. Price in 1955, that the ESP experiments that are done are actually irrelevant to whether ESP exists or not! What is usually done is a "guessing" experiment, for example a game of guessing playing cards or symbol cards. Any amateur magician who is knowledgeable, or any gambler, who is effective, can score high in such games using nothing but subtly disguised sensory perception. Over and over, one hears of high scores in such games being "evidence" of ESP. But a machine, which randomly chose cards by some automatic process, could also obtain a high score on occasion. We would hardly say the machine had ESP, and it isn't using trickery, either! Where experiments have tight procedural, controls to rule out cheating and trickery, and where the runs are long enough to average out the chance fluctuations toward very high and very low scores, the "guesses," either human or mechanical, are precisely in accord with chance expectations.

Two characteristics exhibited by all pseudosciences are that no physical process is ever actually discovered or studies, and that "research" does not progress but rather remains perpetually inconclusive. The ESP experiments conducted by pseudoscientists fit this pattern perfectly.

In summary, the existence of ESP has not been demonstrated in either everyday life or the laboratory. Furthermore, the faulty claims for ESP run counter to well established, well tested laws of nature. To be consistent with the rules by which reality is regulated, ESP would require elaborate, highly specialized organs for sending and receiving ESPO radiation -- organs that are not evident. The ESP radiation should be detectable directly and capable of study by sensitive instruments. Such instruments do not exist because such radiation does not exist in any recognizable form.

Pseudoscience Fact Sheets: Resources to Promote Critical Thinking are produced by the Austin Society to Oppose Pseudoscience (with the assistance of AFF).

The complete collection of Pseudoscience Fact Sheets is available from AFF Electronic Bookstore. 43 pp.

FOR FURTHER READING:

• Anomalistic Psychology, L. Zusne and W. Jones, Erlbaum, New Jersey, 1982
• ESP and Parapsychology: A Critical Re-Evaluation, C. E. M. Hansel, Prometheus, New York, 1980
• Parapsychology: Science or Magic? By James Alcock, Pergamon, New York, 1981
• The Psychology of the Psychic, David Marks and Richard Kamman, Prometheus, New York, 1980
• "Science and the Supernatural," George R. Price, Science, Vol. 122, 1955, pp. 359-367
• "Psi-ing in the Carolines," in The Spoor of Spooks and Other Nonsense, Bergen Evans, Knopf, New York, 1954
• ESP, Seers, and Psychics, Milbourne Christopher, Crowell, New York, 1970