Читая интервью (http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sai/herbert_int.htm) с одним американским физиком (вполне себе ученый, Ник Герберт http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Herbert_(physicist), ссылка интервью внизу статьи, судя по нему это та еще свободномыслящая няша) наткнулся на забавный эксперимент о связи с духами умерших, который может кого-нибудь тут в /x/заинтересовать (в интервью кстати есть и другие интересные идеи). По крайней мере я раньше ничего подобного не слышал. Вот кусок оттуда.
RMN: The penultimate question. I hear you've been working with technology with which to contact the dead. Can you tell us about your ideas and experiences concerning this?
NICK: This is a notion that quantum processes are somehow connected with consciousness, that some quantum processes are unspoken for, and can be taken over by discarnate spirits. So what we do is, we get these quantum processes, and link them to communicating devices. Then we encourage spirits to inhabit the processes and speak to us through quantum mechanical mediums. If the dead can occupy brains, why can't they occupy these machines? So in the seventies we tried to make machines that discarnate spirits could inhabit. These involved radioactive sources connected with computers, and they were connected with typewriters or with speech synthesizers. So, when we turned the machine on, it would rapidly type pseudo-English, or make sounds which one observer said sounded like a Hungarian reading Finnigan 's Wake. I don't think our devices were complicated enough to be occupied by spirits.
RMN: Complicated enough?
NICK: Complicated. Like they were maybe the brain of an ant, something like that, or maybe even smaller.
RMN: It was just too basic.
NICK: Yes, it was just too basic a system. What we would want is a more complicated quantum system.
RMN: But you were getting something.
NICK: Oh, we got some funny prankish things that occurred. The most exciting thing happened at a Houdini seance, when we spent all day trying to get Houdini to come back from the dead through our typewriter. This was on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and it was in San Francisco. We had Houdini posters up on the walls. We held seances in the dark, joined hands, and lit candles, the typewriter chatting away all the time--a metaphase typewriter this was called. A couple of people dropped acid for the event. We went through the text and couldn't find any real printing, any real message, but the one thing that we did find that happened for sure, was right at the beginning--the typewriter jammed. it didn't print straight, so there were these lines of type going all over the place, and they made a little frame, a little oval, that wasn't typed in. There was one line in the oval, and it said, "In an infinite time." All with no spaces-"inaninfinitetime"-something like that. Now that message could be taken many ways. A million monkeys typing on a typewriter could type anything in an infinite time. An infinite time could be meaning to talk to us, a busy signal, that kind of thing. The ultimate busy signal.
In any case, it convinced me that the universe has a sense of humor. It's really about the funniest thing that could have been said in a few words. But nothing else seemed to occur that particular day. We had pounds of stuff to go through. Actually, this page was lost. Afterwards, we'd all saw it, but people had taken some of the pages for souvenirs, and I guess somebody got that one, and we never found out where that page ended up. So it's another one of those experiments that doesn't have any data. We don't have that sheet anymore. So it depends on the memory of all of us. Thomas Edison apparently worked on experiments to contact the dead, and there is a videotape about some of his exploits. I guess someone had a movie camera around, and had caught this for posterity. There's a videotape, it's something about collected weirdness, and it's just full of like Mondo Cane, or something like that. One of the scenes in this videotape, which I read about, was Edison, and his early model of something to talk to the dead with. But it never worked, he never got it to the point where it actually worked.
DJB: Edison would be a good person to try to contact probably, because he had an interest in it.
NICK: Well, there actually were some people who tried that. Yeah, Gilbert Wright, the inventor of Silly Putty, and some friends of his tried to build a machine to contact Edison. They claimed to get Edison through mediums, and Edison actually, through these trance mediums, gave them instructions for building a machine, through which he would try and talk. It involved batteries and radio-like devices, but Edison wasn't able to use that machine. It didn't work.
