Have Scientists Discovered a Way of Peering Into the Future?

Deep in the basement of a dusty old library in Edinburgh lies a small black box that churns out random numbers. At first glance the box looks profoundly dull, but it is, in fact, the ‘eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center four hours before they happened, and appeared to forewarn of the Asian Tsunami.

"It's Earth shattering stuff," says Dr Roger Nelson, Emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the USA. "But unfortunately we don't have a box for predicting the future that we can sell to the CIA. We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark."

Dr Nelson's Global Consciousness Project - originally hosted by Princeton University - is one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. It aims to ‘sense' whether all of humanity shares a single unconscious mind that we all tap into without realizing it. Some might refer to it as the mind of God. But the machine has also thrown up another tantalizing possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.

Interesting but not wholly convincing, at least not as laid out in the article. To me, examples after the fact mean little. Show me instances where they have come out and said "whoa, we have some unusual spikes here which indicate something big is about to happen" and then something big does happen.

Nor are we informed how many false positives there may have been. Or do they normally only check the readings after a huge event?

Also, the tsunami example doesn't seem to hold together well. It states that the readings began to shift 24 hours in advance of the tsunami, then alludes to how this correlates to unusual activities of animals around this time ("fleeing for their lives"). It goes on to say that very few animals died.

That piqued my curiosity, so i did an internet search which turned up this article and it calls such statements into question. Furthermore, if animals have this ability to peer into the future, then why do so many get killed in forest fires or caught in traps or else are hunted to extinction?

Yes, it could be that some animals feel vibrations in the earth (or whatever the case may be) and this is what tells them to run for their lives...but that's not what the article is getting at. It is suggesting that somehow we (humans and animals) are able to foretell the future because time moves both forward and backward.

That brings up another difficulty. The animals supposedly can see the disaster, so they escape. Then why couldn't Princess Diana (who was mentioned in the article) have seen her disaster? Or why couldn't the 9-11 victims (also mentioned) have sensed that something awful was about to happen and decided en masse to call in sick that day? Is it that animals are better than humans in this respect, even though we have survived and thrived while so many of them have become extinct?

They’ve talked about this quite a bit on Coast to Coast AM over the years. It’s interesting stuff. I’d really have to see the raw numbers that they are looking at though. If I recall correctly, they look backwards at events, and are able to show a ‘correlation’ to big, global events. I’d like to see the same scrutiny applied to random date/times to see if it really is a genuine correlation.

I’ve studied physics for a long time, and what I see here is a sort of indication that time might not be an absolute, linear thing that you can measure with a tape (we call the tape a “clock”), but that time might instead be a little fuzzy... sort of.

So that events cannot be said to happen at an absolute, fixed “time”, but actually occur kinda sorta “around” a particular time.

The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big bowl of wibbly wobbly timey wimey... stuff.

I’ve always thought that was true. That time does not flow, but rather we flow through time. The past and the future are real and have always existed, but our consciousness limits us to experiencing only the present. It’s one of the conditions of being alive that we are limited in that way.

This is interesting. I hadn't thought of time in this way, but I can understand the concept. Almost like time is a tunnel through which we pass. Thanks.

"I can absolutely feel the difference between when I am guessing and when I sense something."

Then I suggest you contact the group of scientists who claim to be able to harness this power. It may be marketable.

With regard to the tree episode, you would get my attention if there had been no tree in your parents yard to begin with.

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