Welcome to the Nightwalks…

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It so happens that “demons” are a nickname gifted to certain thought experiments in physics, philosophy, computer science, and other areas. Here are some of them.

Maxwell’s Demon

The Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell first mentioned this demon in a letter to Peter Guthrie Tait (another physicist and a pioneer in thermodynamics) in December 1867.

The demon was mentioned again in a letter to John William Strutt (a physicist and third Baron Rayleigh) in 1871, before Maxwell included it in his book on thermodynamics Theory of Heat in 1872.

Being a very religious person, he didn’t use the term “demon” but called it a “finite being.”

In Maxwell’s head, this “finite being” would control a portal between two chambers filled with gas. As each gas molecule came near the portal, this “being” would open and close the doorway quickly to allow fast-travelling molecules to pass through one way, and only slow-moving molecules to pass through the other way. This would make one chamber heat up whilst the other cooled down, because the kinetic temperature of gas relies on the speeds of its molecules.

This would decrease the total entropy of the two chambers, which would break the second law of thermodynamics (this law states that a system left to itself evolves into a state of equilibrium, or high entropy / more dispersed and disorganised, not lower / more ordered.

Maxwell’s “demon” or thought experiment was only monikered a demon in the journal Nature in 1874 by William Thompson (Lord Kelvin, a Scottish physicist, mathematician and engineer). He meant the term demon in the same way Greek mythology used the term daemon, i.e. a supernatural entity working in the background and not something evil!

Other scientists used forms of Maxwell’s demon in experiments (though they all differed to his original thought experiment in some way) and none have been found to break the second thermodynamics law. The reasoning behind the demon not being able to break this law are as follows:

• a demon would create more entropy / disorder trying to segregate the molecules than it could ever eliminate
• the demon would need some method of measuring the speed of the particles, and acquiring that information would cause the demon to expend more energy, increasing the entropy within the demon itself even as the entropy of the gas was lowered, so the system’s disorder would still increase.
• even if the demon used a method of measuring the particles’ speed that was thermodynamically reversible, it would need to either discard or store the data it was gathering. Discarding it would still increase entropy / disorder, and eventually it would run out of space to store all that data so would have to start discarding it anyway. Messy creatures, demons.
• the uncertainty principle would prevent the demon from sorting the molecules, because it wouldn’t be able to find their exact locations in the chambers when it measured their momentums.

(Interesting fact: Daemons (or daimons) in computing [certain processes that run on servers to respond to users] were named after Maxwell’s demon. They hide in software and computer systems, waiting for the right moment to emerge and do something either good or bad, before burrowing away out of sight once more. They are created by hackers, software designers, spies, and scientists, and they have come about from the growth of AI. These daimons can learn and even give themselves tasks. Examples of daimons can include chatbots.)

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Laplace’s Demon

In 1814, the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace looked at how Isaac Newton predicted how an apple would fall according to the law of gravity and wondered if the same way of thinking could be used to predict everything?

Laplace imagined the idea of a demon – or “intellect,” in his words – that was able to know the position and momentum of every single particle in existence and all the laws of nature. Such an intellect would be able to calculate the entire future of the universe and that nothing would be uncertain.

Physicists believe that no such intellect can have all of this knowledge. For example, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, no information can travel faster than light, so although some events can affect the future, we can’t know about them in the present moment. Information about those events just doesn’t have time to reach us.

Even if the intellect could get information from all of the universe, due to the uncertainty principle, that intellect couldn’t possibly know exactly where each particle was and what it was doing. All it would be able to do was guess the probabilities of each particle’s properties, which would involve keeping track of a mind-boggling array of outcomes, and it wouldn’t know which one of those outcomes was going to be the real one. Cue one demon with a migraine.

This demon inspired the British mathematician Charles Babbage’s invention of the early computer, goaded Charles Darwin into thinking about the development of life, and caused Schrödinger to wonder whether something with similar powers could be in charge of cellular order.

Laplace’s demon existed for around 100 years and was “exorcised” at the beginning of the 20th century when quantum mechanics was discovered along with the uncertainty principle.

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Loschmidt’s Demon

After steam engines had been invented and we were in the throes of the Industrial Age, Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann wondered how to explain entropy (the process by which everything becomes more disorded and messy over time). He reckoned he could explain it by looking at the tiny parts of big systems, e.g. particles of gas filling a room.

His older colleague Josef Loschmidt, however, doubted his methods and posed a challenge in 1876. He said to imagine the universe frozen in time, then reverse the direction that each particle was travelling in. (This original challenge didn’t involve a demon, but later on one was added that could see and freeze particles.)

At the particle level, reversing their movements – and therefore reversing time – would show nothing awry, but if you zoomed out and looked at larger structures, you would see events and objects reversing in time and undoing themselves! This gives rise to the question of why time only seems to run in one direction for us, if time can easily be reversed on a microscale level?

Later experiments would attempt to reverse time, inspired by Loschmidt’s demon. In the 1950s, Erwin Hahn used radio waves to temporarily push electric dipoles (like the hydrogen atoms in water molecules) into rotating in sync, thereby lowering entropy. This made it look like time was going backwards for the molecules. Once he switched off the radio waves, the molecules fell back into disarray.

Nowadays, we understand entropy doesn’t mean that systems always have to descend into chaos. Some systems even change into things that have more order to them, but only temporarily. (Entropy is the ultimate endpoint for everything, though.)

The universe began in a very ordered state, which gave it only one direction to go in… towards a messier state. There are many more ways to wreck an ordered system than to make it even more organised, making disorder much more likely.

So Loschmidt’s demon could reverse the movement of particles, but it would find it a real bugger.

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Nietzsche’s Demon

This was a being imagined by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his book The Gay Science in 1882. In it, he proposed a being that whispers in your ear one lonely night to tell you that you have to live your life over and over again, “every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you… all in the same succession and sequence.”

This demon would supposedly force you to take full responsibility for your own life.

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Descartes Demon

In Meditations in First Philosophy, the 17th century French scientist and philosopher Rene Descartes imagined a demon that could put you into a convincing fabrication of reality and make you think that it was real life. Could this demon completely fool you, and could it fool you forever?

According to Descartes, we could defeat the demon, because it wouldn’t be able to force a conscientious thinker to state “I do not exist” and truly believe that statement.

This demon inspired the idea behind the film The Matrix.

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Bacon’s Demon

Mentioned by the philosopher Francis Bacon, this was the sphinx which haunted the wilderness around the city of Thebes. It had birds’ wings and the claws of a gryphon, and it would ambush travellers before asking them perplexing riddles. Oedipus managed to answer the riddle and kill the sphinx.

Francis Bacon said that Oedipus represented science and the sphinx represented nature, and that though nature could be dangerous, the rational thinking of science could understand it and render it harmless.

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Miscellaneous

• Einstein “exorcised” the Filon-Pearson demon that could travel faster than light, teleport, act at a distance, and used a force named “gravitation” (not space-time) to push and pull things.
• There are quantum Maxwell’s Demons, nanoscale demons, and nuclear magnetic resonance demons
• Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, “bred” Laplace’s and Maxwell’s demons to imagine a cybernetic demon that can learn from feedback.
• John Wheeler, a cosmologist, proposed demons that live in black holes, feasting on energy and information and appearing to make entropy vanish.
• The philosopher John Searle came up with a demon that lives inside the brain and eats neural synapses.

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Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

https://youtu.be/ONCMMuREO4Y?si=oF2DPeYy-3r9DdB7

https://benjaminfranklininstitute.org/how-3-imaginary-physics-demons-tore-up-the-laws-of-nature/

https://physicsworld.com/a/demons-to-think-with-the-rebels-you-mustnt-ignore/

https://aeon.co/essays/why-physics-today-stands-on-the-wings-of-angels-and-demons

Issue 19 of Once Upon A Crocodile e-zine, (the weird, humourous thing I edit and illustrate online) was released yesterday. There are a couple of extremely dark humour / funny-horror tales lurking within it this time. Here is a peek at the contents:

The Gathering part IV by M. N. Wiggins – Things on the golf course take on an even more macabre yet bizarre turn as Cookie Jim continues to enact his revenge on his old high (very high?) school bullies.

Dating Death by Lindsay K. Ammons – A rather unusual social media influencer records a video for her followers refuting the rumour that she’s a murderer. Meanwhile, one of her boyfriends tries to leave with an unwanted piercing and her mother attempts to micromanage her from beyond the grave… wearing her best Sunday dress.

Mike and Margaret by Nancy S. Koven – There’s something peculiar about the post office clerk of East Wintergreen, and Margaret is determined to figure it out.

Rat Pack by Thomas J. Young – A man masquerading as Lord Elgin pretends to be the fiancé of the King’s daughter to obtain a magical object. However, it’s a difficult job when an interfering elderly magician has turned your colleague into vermin.

Good Coop, Bad Coop by Lyra – A stoat and a fox offer their protection services for the safety of a chicken coop. However, Henrietta can see a flaw in their business plan.

You Bet Your Life by Robert Walton – the 94 year old resident of a nursing home is determined to break out and go to Vegas with the aid of Groucho Marx’s ghost.

A Minor Complaint by Devan Erno – a story told via emails between an alchemist company and Cedric the Summoner, who was unfortunate enough to charm himself into falling in love with a bunny rabbit.

The Bad Gig by Robert Garnham – a stand-up comedic poet recounts his experience of one of the most shambolic spoken-word poetry nights in humanity.

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To read the current issue of OUAC and visit past issues, go here: https://onceuponacrocodile.wordpress.com/

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ESP consists of precognition (or retrocausality, where future events affect the present), clairvoyance, and telepathy, though some psychical researchers claim that psychokinesis (the ability to move objects using only the thoughts) is also a form of ESP. Others believe that ESP and PK are just related to one another, with PK being separate from ESP.

Inspired by a 1922 lecture on Spiritualism by the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the late 1920s – early 1930s Joseph Banks Rhine and Louisa Rhine came up with a research programme which became the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Before 1935, it was called the Institute for Experimental Religion. Whilst at Duke University, the Rhines popularised the term ESP or extrasensory perception and conducted studies of the phenomenon.

(J.B and Louisa initially trained as botanists and statisticians, and their mutual interest in metaphysical matters contributed to their forming a bond in their teenage years.)

The Rhines set out to rigorously test and document evidence for anomalous communication or conveyance of information that didn’t involve usage of the physical senses. J.B. created a series of card-guessing tests involving a deck of cards which were designed by the psychologist Karl E. Zener. Zener cards are a five-suit deck of 25 cards with simple symbols on them, e.g. a circle, a square, wavy lines, etc.

A typical test consisted of someone guessing the order of the cards after they had been shuffled and concealed from their eyes or placed in sealed envelopes. The experimenter took note of the subject’s guesses as they made them and then checked by the experimenter against the cards after the test, with the subject still there. There was a 1/5 or 20% chance of guessing the right answers.

Later involved a “telepathy procedure” where a “sender” looked at the cards one by one behind a screen or in another room. Results showed the clairvoyance procedure had as much success as the telepathy one, which led Rhine to test clairvoyance with the Zener / ESP cards more.

Early group testing of Duke University students in a classroom gave little more than chance results.

Then something odd happened. One of the class members, A.J. Linzmayer, scored strangely highly in an individual test. In further testing, Linzmayer carried on guessing the cards at a rate significantly above the 20% chance rate. By the end of the last two weeks of the school year, he estimated 404 of 1,500 cards correctly (if he was guessing only by chance, he would have guessed 300 of them).

Rhine and his team of two graduate students continued testing people one by one, and discovered other high-scoring test subjects, the most notable of which was divinity student Hubert Pearce, who got even higher scores than Linzmayer and kept them without decline for a longer amount of time.

By 1932, Rhine thought they had obtained good evidence of the existence of psychic phenomena or ESP. They also found ESP seemed to have natural relationships similar to ordinary psychological phenomena.

For example, both Linzmayer and Pearce temporarily lost their abilities when given the drug sodium amytal. Their performances also appeared to follow predictable patterns found in conventional psychology, e.g. the temporary decrease of scores under intense testing.

In three years, Rhine’s team found eight high scorers, about 1 in every 5 students tested. These college students scored, on average, more than 50% greater than the chance amount. As the experiments carried on, lab conditions were increasingly tightened to exclude the chances of the subjects being able to cheat.

An important finding of the early tests was that distance didn’t seem to have an effect on the results. This was shown in the Pearce-Pratt Series of 1933–1934, which was a clairvoyance test involving Hubert Pearce as the subject and Rhine’s research assistant J Gaither Pratt as the experimenter. The subject and the cards were put in two different buildings on the university’s West Campus. For three series, Pratt was placed with the cards in the Physics Building, a hundred yards from Pearce, who stayed in a Duke Library cubicle. In a fourth series, Pratt was 250 yards distant from Pearce, in the Duke Medical School.

The method was as follows: Pratt would pick up a card once a minute from a pre-cut and pre-shuffled pack, and put the card face-down onto a book without peeking at it. At that minute Pearce, who had a synchronized watch in the Library, would guess the face of the far-off card. After the test, both men would take the sealed records of their cards and guesses and bring them to Rhine so he could check them at the lab (while keeping copies of their own records).

Pearce’s total score for the four tests was 558 correct answers out of 1,850 (370 would be expected by chance). His accuracy in guessing the order of the unseen cards was 30%, compared to the 20% chance rate.

All data was reported and nothing was withheld. (In those days, social scientists would sometimes hide results that didn’t match logical expectations under the assumption that their methods were flawed – J. B. Rhine didn’t do this.)

In the years following the publication of their findings, other researchers attempted to replicate the experiments. About 60 articles on it were written by 40 different authors, mostly in American psychological journals. Fifty other experiments into ESP were done, and 61% of these were statistically significant. If the results were down to only chance, then that figure would be 5%.

In J. B. Rhine’s Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, in 1940, he made one of the first “meta-analyses” of several different experiments.

Later on, there was a general consensus that Rhine’s experiments were somehow flawed or fraudulent, and that the results couldn’t be replicated. However, even today skeptics are still trying to explain just how the fraud could have been done. One skeptic went so far as to suggest that one of the test subjects kept crawling through a ceiling-space to sneak a glimpse at the cards through a trapdoor over the lab!

From 1934 until 1941 (after which many lab members were called to fight in the war), Rhine’s lab at Duke University performed experiments into psychokinesis, in which people were encouraged to try to influence the outcome of random dice throws. Devices were soon used to throw the dice to make sure it was genuinely random and the experiment was done tens of thousands of times. A similar statistical result to that of the Zener card experiments was found, with some individuals showing a deviation of several percentage points in their success rate.

For a more detailed history of J. B. Rhine, read this: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/jb-rhine/

Ganzfeld

Aged 13, the self-taught psychical researcher Charles (or Chuck) Honorton began exchanging letters with J. B. Rhine after he read all the parapsychology books in his local library. Aged 15, he did an internship with the Parapsychology Laboratory in Durham, and eventually started working with Rhine. Honorton was interested in studying psychic phenomena under hypnosis. In the 1960s and 70s, he conducted research into dreams and ESP and designed the ganzfeld experiment.

You’ll probably be familiar with the concept of ganzfeld if you’ve watched Stranger Things. Ganzfeld means “whole / open field” and it involves entering into a state of relaxed sensory deprivation with a view to telepathic communication or remote viewing. Honorton believed that every human being might be capable of ESP if placed in the right conditions.

People were seated in a recliner in a soundproofed, dimly-lit room and wore eyeshades and headphones that emitted white noise. This set-up induces the state of hypnagogia, the phase we all get shortly before falling asleep at night which often involves snatches of hallucinatory images and sounds. This state can be used for waking hypnosis or auto-suggestion.

While one person was in this sensory-deprivation room, a second person would sit outside it and attempt to “transmit” a pre-selected image into their mind. Once the person in sensory deprivation emerged, they had to try to choose which image the other person had tried to send them, out of a total four images.

There was a one in four or 25% chance of guessing the right image. However, the test subjects surpassed the 25% guessing rate on average. In a 1994 meta-analysis of experiments, it was found that there was an overall hit rate of 32 – 35%. Since the mid-1970s, this data has been replicated by different labs in different nations. Honorton teamed up with a well-known sceptic named Hyman to look at these experiments and Hyman stated that Honorton’s methods were sound and that the data held significance.

Resonance and Psi

Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge biochemist and parapsychology researcher who was named one of the top 100 Global Thought Leaders by Switzerland’s Duttweiler Institute in 2013, has theories about biological resonance and psychic ability. He has been described as a New Age author.

Sheldrake’s theory on morphic / biological resonance is that memory is “inherent in nature” and that “natural systems… inherit a collective memory from previous things of their kind.” (This reminds me of Carl Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious). Sheldrake goes on to suggest that this inherited memory is responsible for telepathic connections between organisms.

He first had this idea while at Cambridge, then went on a trip to India where he later developed the theory, noticing a similarity between morphic resonance and the “akashic records” in Hinduism. He took the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of memories not being physically in the brain and ran with it, as the saying goes.

He wrote about this theory in a book, A New Science of Life. After it was published, New Scientist magazine sponsored a competition to invent scientific tests for morphic resonance. The winning concept involved learning Turkish nursery rhymes, and the psychologist Sue Blackmore came second with an idea involving the behaviour of babies. (Blackmore’s test results didn’t support the theory of morphic resonance, if you were wondering.)

Sheldrake believes that DNA doesn’t include a “recipe” for morphological development. He and the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert have a scientific bet going on. Wolpert bet Sheldrake a case of fine port that by May the 1st 2029, given the genome of a fertilised animal egg or a plant, humanity will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that grows from it, including any unusual features. The Royal Society will be asked to determine the winner if the winner isn’t obvious!

Sheldrake has also done experiments regarding the “telepathic” sense of knowing who is calling you shortly before picking up the phone, and the sense of being stared at by someone. For more information go here: https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/introduction

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Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-B-Rhine

https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/jb-rhine/

https://occult-world.com/extrasensory-perception/

https://open.substack.com/pub/mitchhorowitz/p/the-unseen-legacy-of-parapsychologist?r=91pib&utm_medium=ios

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/introduction