April 1 this year brought the usual bunch of ‘big news’ gags (although, sadly, most people don’t make their stories humourous or obvious at all, preferring simply to hoax). New Scientist took an odder tack though, by publishing real news on topics so bizarre, that readers would think they were April Fool’s jokes.
The one story that stood out (and was in our news briefs this week), was this one: “‘They’re here’: The mechanism of poltergeist activity“:
The sight of small blonde girls watching television is guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of anyone who has watched the movie Poltergeist. We’re right to be terrified, say physicists. Children generate poltergeist activity by channelling energy into the quantum mechanical vacuum.
Pierro Brovetto, whose last known address was the Instituto Fisica Superiore, in Cagliari, Italy and his colleague Vera Maxia wanted to explain the origin of poltergeist phenomena, characterised by objects flying around the room “of their own accord”…
…Brovetto and Maxia hypothesise that the changes in the brain that occur at puberty involve fluctuations in electron activity that, in rare cases, can create disturbances up to a few metres around the outside of the brain. These disturbances would be similar in character to the quantum mechanical fluctuations that physicists believe occur in the vacuum, in which “virtual” particle and antiparticle pairs pop up for a fleeting moment, before they annihilate each other and disappear again.
The research is from the journal Neuroquantology, “a journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of quantum physics and its relation to the nervous system.”
New Scientist also throw a final joke into the mix by quoting Nobel Prize winning physicist Brian Josephson – who is on the editorial board for the journal – as saying the paper “looks distinctly flaky”. It will be interesting to see if Josephson – an emphatic supporter of psi research – responds in some manner.
