Bad Timing of His "Time to Go Back to the Moon" Editorial

Clearly the coronavirus crisis is now a grave international problem. The number of people infected has now increased beyond 125,000, and is rapidly growing. You can use this page to track the current status of the virus. Thankfully in China the growth of the virus seems to have leveled off. But in countries other than China, the virus seems to be spreading at an alarming rate.  When I click on the "Daily Cases" subtab at the bottom right of this page, I see a recent growth of new cases that looks very alarming.  If I look out my window, I see a significant fraction of people wearing face masks.  The National Guard has been called out to help check the spread of the coronavirus from nearby New Rochelle, New York.  The stock market has now plunged to become a bear market, largely because of the coronavirus.  Today the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus to be a global pandemic. 

But today the web site of CNN published an editorial by Roger Launius, one that fails to even mention the coronavirus.  The title of Roger's badly-timed editorial is this: "It's time for us to go back to the moon -- and stay there." Roger fails to make a compelling case for any such thing, and this could hardly be a  worse time for proposing that we spend 30 billion dollars on a lunar base, money that is needed for things such as fighting the spread of deadly viruses here on Earth. 

The first paragraph of Roger's editorial is pure nostalgia. He reminisces about listening to Neil Armstrong's moonwalk on a car radio. Such nostalgia will appeal only to those of his readers who are old-timers.  In the next paragraph Roger claims that we should create a permanant lunar base "to learn more about the cosmos and to further our goal of becoming a multi-planetary species." But we won't actually learn much of anything more about the cosmos by building a permanent base on the moon. We already know practically all there is to know about the moon, which is a dull, boring, lifeless rock.  Since the moon is not actually a planet, and since a permanent lunar base would have only a small number of inhabitants, we would not really be furthering a goal of becoming a "multi-planetary species" by creating a permanent lunar base for a small number of people. 

Roger claims that a lunar base could lead to "a host of discoveries in astronomy, Earth observation, materials science, pharmaceuticals and biomedical research," but gives us no details to back up these far-fetched claims. It's true that the moon is a good place for astronomical observations. But for much less than the cost of building and shipping a telescope to the moon and keeping it manned by astronomers living on the moon, you can build an unmanned telescope such as the Hubble Space Telescope that floats in orbit above our planet. An approach such as the Hubble Space Telescope is a tried-and-true approach, so why not stick with that, rather than trying some far-more-expensive lunar telescope that would probably give you much less "bang for the buck"?  As for "materials science, pharmaceuticals and biomedical research," research in such areas can be done far more effectively on Earth than on some base on the moon. 

Roger tells us, "Should a medical emergency take place, researchers could be rescued relatively easily, unlike on Mars where it would take months to complete a rescue mission."  But it would be vastly less expensive and safer to provide emergency medical care to researchers if they were doing their research here on Earth rather than on the moon.  Roger tells us, "By establishing a base on the moon, we could also further the development of low-cost energy and other technologies by using space as a proving ground for new concepts and hardware that could be used not only on the moon but also on Earth." Yes, new technology can be tested on the moon, but it is a hundred times less expensive to test such technology here on Earth.  Roger also tells us that a lunar base "could also begin the process of building a base for nuclear weapons that could be used to destroy near-Earth asteroids and other threats to our planet." He provides no details supporting any claim that we would be safer from the very remote danger of near-Earth asteroids by putting nuclear weapons on the moon as opposed to our own planet.  I doubt whether any of us would feel safer once launchable nuclear weapons were installed on the moon, as we would wonder about whether such weapons would ever be used against our planet. 

Roger thinks that building a base on the moon is "how we'll take our next great step and learn more about both the universe and humanity." But we won't learn anything more about humanity by building a base on the lifeless rock that is the moon. As for learning about the cosmos, our astronomers are already scheduled to get next year a gigantic gift: the 10-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope. That should keep them busy for many years, so why build them a moon base to house some other telescope?

Our limited science dollars should be spent mainly on things related to public health and safety, including new science that helps reduce the grave peril of global warming, and new science to reduce threats such as the threat of global pandemics.  Science dollars that do not directly improve or affect the health or safety of humans should be spent mainly on answering questions related to life and mind, the type of questions that the average person has some interest in.  We should not be spending tens of billions of dollars to answer esoteric "lifeless matter" questions unrelated to life and mind, questions that only a tiny clique of specialists care about (questions such as the precise details of lunar geology).   

A lifeless rock unworthy of much further attention

Complex Innovations by Random Mutations Are a Googol Times More Improbable Than a Point Improvement

The Darwinist explanation for complex functional biology is that it arose from random mutations and natural selection. We have no evidence that any complex biological innovations ever appeared because of random mutations, natural selection or any combination of the two. Darwinists try to back up their explanation of biological innovations by presenting examples of something that improved through a random mutation. But we must distinguish between two different probabilities:

1. The likelihood of getting an improvement in existing functionality from one or more random mutations (call it Probability 1).
2. The likelihood of getting a new complex innovation from one or more random mutations (call it Probability 2).

The second of these probabilities is almost infinitely more improbable than the first. I can give an example that illustrates the vast difference between these two probabilities.

Let us consider: what is the likelihood that a random change in some functional and almost-perfected written text may improve that text? We can roughly calculate this probability in a fairly straightforward manner, using this formula:

Probability of a random character improving almost-finished text (P) = percentage of characters that are typing errors (X) multiplied by likelihood of a random character being the character that fixes the typing error (Y).

Here is a simple example. Let's imagine you just typed some code for a computer program. There is a certain percentage of these characters that will be typing errors. We can use 1% as a rough estimate for this probability. The probability that a random character will fix the typing error is about equal to 1 divided by the number of possible characters that you can type using a single keystroke. Given that there are about 50 characters you can type using a keyboard, we can roughly estimate this probability as being 2 percent. So under these assumptions, the likelihood that a random keystroke anywhere in your text will improve your recently typed programming code is roughly 1% (.01) multiplied by 2% (.02). That is a likelihood of about .0002. If you were a very careful typist who made only one mistake per 1000 characters, the probability of a random character improving your text would be only .00002. But if you were a rather careless typist who made a mistake in every ten characters typed, the probability of a random character improving your text would be higher, about .002.

It is clear from this discussion, that it is not vastly improbable that a random mutation will improve some close-to-completed piece of functionality, given a small error rate in the block of semantic information that codes that functionality. So when we hear about a rare random mutation that might slightly improve an existing biological function, we should not be terribly surprised.

But what about the likelihood of random mutations producing whole new functionality? Then the math is entirely different. To calculate the chance of that, we must estimate the likelihood of you producing a working body of instructions (such as a functional computer program) by just typing random characters on your keyboard, or having some computer program generate completely random characters. It is very hard to do anything like an exact calculation of such a probability. I can calculate the exact number of combinations that could be produced from typing a thousand random characters, but there is no way to precisely calculate what percentage of these would be useful or meaningful instructions.

But there is a way to do a very rough calculation. Consider a block of six characters. Each of those characters can be any of about 50 different things, given 26 possible letters, 10 possible numbers, and about 14 different punctuation marks. That means that there are about fifty to the sixth power possibilities ( or 15,625,000,000 possibilities) when you randomly type 6 characters. But the English language has only about 200,000 words, and there may be as many as 100,000 recognizable names such as recognizable last names, first names, and brand names, meaning there are very roughly about 300,000 six-character combinations that might be meaningful. 15,625,000,000 divided by 300,000 is 52,083. That means your chance of typing an English word or recognizable name when you type six random characters is very roughly about 1 in 52,083, which we can round down to be about 1 in 50,000.  In this rough simplistic calculation I ignore the fact that most English words are smaller or larger than six characters. 

We can do a little reality test on this estimate by using the random string generator at this site. When I use “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789~!@#$%^&*()_+={}|[]\” as the allowed characters, and type 100 under “Number of strings,” and type “6” as the length, I get 100 random strings, none of which are intelligible words or names. When I keep pressing the Generate button 5 or 10 times, I fail to see any intelligible word or name. Although this doesn't prove the previous estimate, it is a result consistent with such an estimate.

Random text generated at this site

Now, in a block of 1000 characters there are 166 six-character blocks. So to make a very rough calculation of the chance of you getting meaningful instructions from 1000 randomly typed characters, one that is greatly oversimplified, it would seem that we should multiply the 1 in 50,000 likelihood discussed above by itself 166 times. This gives you a likelihood which ends up being roughly 1 in 10⁷⁸⁰ or 1 in ten to the seven-hundred-eightieth power. How often should we expect something that unlikely to happen? We should expect that it should never happen in the history of the observable universe.

I may note that the actual chance of getting a useful, meaningful instruction set of 1000 random characters is actually much less than the probability roughly calculated previously. I have merely calculated the chance of getting 1000 random characters that have a very superficial appearance of intelligibility, with all the words being intelligible words. The chance of such words actually making a useful instruction set would be vastly smaller than the microscopic probability just calculated.

So we can see that there is an ocean of difference between the likelihood of a single random mutation producing an improvement in some nearly-complete functional instructions and the likelihood of a complex new functional instruction set arising from random mutations. It is more than a googol times (ten  to the hundredth power times) more improbable that a complex new functional instruction set might arise from random mutations than it is that a single random mutation might improve some existing functional instruction set. A googol is ten to the hundredth power. 

So when our Darwinist biologists attempt to back up the idea that complex biological innovations arose from random mutations, and they refer us to cases where some tiny gain in function resulted from a single point mutation, they are trying to make us believe in something almost infinitely more improbable than the cases they are providing as evidence. Although proteins are not specified by strings of English characters, the mathematics of getting a functional protein from a gene that is a random string of thousands of nucleotide base pairs is very much in the same ballpark as the math I have discussed relating to the probability of getting a functional instruction set from 1000 random characters.  Each of the more than 20,000 types of protein molecules used by humans is its own complex biological innovation, and a protein is typically specified by its own gene that is a unique sequence of thousands of nucleotide base pairs. 

I can give an analogy to illustrate the difference between the likelihood of some random mutation producing a point improvement, and the likelihood of some set of random mutations producing a complex biological innovation. The first likelihood is like the probability of throwing two cards towards a house of cards, and the two cards producing an improvement at one point in the house of cards. The second likelihood is like the chance of you tossing an entire deck of 52 cards into the air, and those cards forming into a house of cards, with most of the cards becoming part of the house of cards. There is obviously no comparison between these two. The first event is something we would expect to see happening maybe once in 50,000 tries. The second event is something we would not expect to occur even once in a million billion trillion quadrillion tries, something we would not expect to see once in the observable universe even if the observable universe was filled with people spending their lives throwing decks of cards into the air.

Realistic math is so very hostile to the explanatory pretensions of our biologists that one scientist last month took the extremely desperate measure of appealing to multiverse speculations to try to back up theories of random biological origins.  I'll have a reply to that one day. 

When "Dead End" Scientific Efforts Are Spun as Glorious Progress

One of the biggest unsolved mysteries of nature is the mystery of matter/antimatter asymmetry. Scientists believe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such beliefs are based on what scientists have observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such conclusions about matter, antimatter and photons leads to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the first minute of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of a tightly packed density of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So the amount of antimatter should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But instead we have a universe with lots of matter and only trace amounts of antimatter.

It would be incredibly inconvenient if matter and antimatter were equally distributed. So much energy is released when matter makes contact with antimatter that if there were large amounts of antimatter lying about, you'd have “oops, someone blew up Europe because he stepped on a tiny piece of antimatter” situations all over the place.

Scientists have made no progress in resolving this mystery of why we live in a universe in which matter is 1,000,000,000,000,000 times more common than antimatter.  But you'd never know this from reading recent press accounts. Such accounts have discussed  futile dead-ends pursued by scientists looking for answers about why we don't live in a universe that is all photons or half antimatter. But such dead-ends have been hailed as explanatory progress. 

An example is the recent misleading headline in Scientific American, a headline of "Physicists Come Closer to Answering Question of Antimatter’s Scarcity." No real progress was made in resolving the issue. The physicists merely found that an antihydrogen atom (a hydrogen atom consisting of antimatter) behaves the same way as a hydrogen atom, which is what was expected. We read this:

"Doing so allowed them to observe that in antihydrogen—which is composed of an antiproton and a positron, the electron’s antiparticle—jumps in energy levels known as the Lamb shift were identical to those seen in hydrogen. This symmetry rules out one of the possible answers to the matter-antimatter discrepancy."

There is nothing else of substance reported in the article. No real progress was made in resolving the question of why we live in a universe that isn't all photons or half antimatter, neither of which would be habitable.  You do not make progress in resolving some problem with limitless potential answers when you merely rule out one answer. If I spend a weekend pondering whether the meaning of life is crucially related to potato chips, and finally decide after 48 hours of deliberation that the meaning of life is not related to potato chips,  I have ruled out one possible answer; but this does not mean I have actually made progress in figuring out the meaning of life.  And, similarly, if you spend six months trying to create a high-voltage time machine, and finally conclude after six months that high voltage is not useful in making time machines, you are not entitled to claim that you have made any progress in making a time machine. 

A similar example of misleading spin is an article on the Science Daily web site. The title of the article is "Why is there any matter in the universe at all? New study sheds light."  Below this headline we have a subtitle of "Scientists one step closer to understanding the mystery of matter in the universe."   Below is a quote:

"After more than two decades of work by researchers at the University of Sussex and elsewhere, a final result has emerged from an experiment designed to address one of the most profound problems in cosmology for the last fifty years: namely, the question of why the Universe contains so much more matter than antimatter, and, indeed, why it now contains any matter at all. Why didn’t the antimatter cancel out all the matter? Why is there any matter left? ...The answer relates to a structural asymmetry that should appear in fundamental particles like neutrons. This is what we’ve been looking for. We’ve found that the 'electric dipole moment' is smaller than previously believed. This helps us to rule out theories about why there is matter left over – because the theories governing the two things are linked."

Of course, you have not made any actual progress in resolving some question with a near-infinite number of possible solutions when you merely exclude one or a few of those possible solutions. So scientists have not actually "shed light" on the mystery of matter's existence, or moved "a step closer" to solving such a mystery. Science Daily's unwarranted spin on this topic was repeated by other science web sites such as this one.  What's going on is that the science news web sites are all just uncritically parroting the spin from a university press release.  So the groundless claim of that press release ("Scientists one step closer to understanding the mystery of matter in the Universe" ) was mindlessly parroted all over the science news media.  This kind of thing goes on almost every day. University press releases very often make claims about research that are not warranted.  A scientific study found that 33% of university press releases contain "exaggerated causal claims." 

Nineteenth Century Evidence for Extrasensory Perception

In the twentieth century scientists such as Joseph Rhine accumulated overwhelming laboratory evidence for extrasensory perception (ESP), commonly called telepathy. Twenty-first century descriptions of such experimental investigations in mainstream books are typically very inaccurate, and their inaccuracy will be discovered by examining the source documents of investigators such as Rhine. One of the misstatements frequently made is that Rhine was the first scientist to seriously study the topic of ESP. The truth is that decades before Rhine, serious investigators began gathering weighty evidence for the existence of ESP.

Examples of such evidence may be found in Volume 1 of the classic parapsychology work Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore and Frederic Myers. On page 21 we read the account of a Reverend Creery, who claimed astonishing successes with ESP tests done among his family. He stated, “I have seen seventeen cards, chosen by myself, named right in succession, without any mistake.” These were presumably playing cards, with a chance probablility of 1/52 of choosing the right card; for Zener cards with only five symbols had not been invented yet. 

We read on page 21 that a group of serious investigators was formed to investigate such claims: "In the course of the years 1881 and 1882, a large number of experiments were made with the Creery family, first by Professor Barrett, then by Mr., and Mrs. Sidgwick, by Professor Balfour Stewart, T.R.S.,and Professor Alfred Hopkinson, of Owens College, Manchester, and, after the formation of the Society for Psychical Research, by the Thought-transference Committee of that body, of which Mr. Myers and myself were members." After some successful object guessing experiments with members of the Creery family, the following occurred (as we read on page 24): 

“The Committee, consisting of Professor Barrett, Mr. Myers, and the present writer, made a number of experiments under similar conditions, which excluded contact and movement, and which confined the knowledge of the selected object — and, therefore, the chance of collusion with the percipient- to their own group. In some of these trials, conducted at Cambridge, Mrs. F. W. H. Myers and Miss Mason also took part. In a long series conducted at Dublin, Professor Barrett was alone with the percipient. Altogether these scrupulously guarded trials amounted to 497 ; and of this number 95 were completely successful at the first guess, and 45 at the second.”

Skeptics have tried to dismiss these results, insinuating that a secret signal code may have been been used between the Creery daughters. But the statement above makes such an objection irrelevant. In the guessing trials the object selected (such as a number or a card) was known only to one of the investigators outside of the Creery family. So there is no code signal system or signal system that can account for the results. As Professor Joseph Rhine said when discussing this case, "No one has been able to find grounds for discarding the better part of the work, since the girls did not know what object they were supposed to perceive telepathically." 

The results achieved were the very impressive results shown below (from page 25 of the book).

A mathematician was consulted to calculate the chance of getting such a result by chance. The mathematician computed (based on the first guesses) that the likelihood was less than 1 chance in 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999. Using both the first guesses and the second guesses as data, the mathematician computed a probability of less than 1 in 10 to the thirtieth power.

On page 33 we read of 17,653 card guessing trials in which the number of successes was 4760, which exceeded by 347 the number expected by chance. This is a result with a chance likelihood far less than 1 in a million.

Far more impressive are the results described on page 34:

“In another case, the choice lay between 4 things, but these were not suits, but simple colour — red, blue, green, and yellow. The percipient throughout was Mr. A. J. Shilton, of 40, Paradise Street, Birmingham ; the agent (except in one small group, when Professor Poynting, of Mason College, acted) was Mr. G. T. Cashmore, of Albert Road, Handsworth. Out of 505 trials, 261 were successes. The probability here afforded of a cause other than chance is considerably more than a trillion trillions to 1. And still more

remarkable is the result obtained by the Misses Wingfield, of The Redings, Totteridge, in some trials where the object to be guessed was a number of two digits — i.e., .one of the 90 numbers included in the series from 10 to 99 — chosen at random by the agent. Out of 2,624  trials, where the most probable number of successes was 29, the actual number obtained was no less than 275 — to say nothing of 78 other cases in which the right digits were guessed in the reverse order. In the last 506 trials, the agent (who sat some 6 feet behind the percipient) drew the numbers at random out of a bowl; the odds against the accidental occurrence of the degree of success — 21 right guesses — obtained in this batch are over 2,000,000 to 1. The argument for thought-transference afforded by the total cannot be expressed here in figures, as it requires 167 nines — that is, the probability is far more than the ninth power of a trillion to 1.”

There follows in the chapter a discussion of drawing tests (in which one person sketched something, and another person who had not seen the sketch was asked to draw the same thing), and taste and smelling tests (in which one person smelled and tasted something, and some person elsewhere was asked to guess what the other person had smelled and tasted). These were highly successful, giving results very far above chance. But it is quite hard to quantify the improbability of the results.

In the next chapter of the book, on page 103, we have the following astonishing account:

“One evening early last year, I resolved to try to appear to Z, at some -miles distance. I did not inform him beforehand of the intended experiment ; but retired to rest shortly before midnight with thoughts intently fixed on Z, with whose room and surroundings, however, I was quite unacquainted. I soon fell asleep, and awoke next morning unconscious of anything having taken place. On seeing Z a few days afterwards, I inquired, ‘ Did anything happen at your rooms on Saturday night ? ’ 'Yes,’ replied he, ‘a great deal happened. I had been sitting over the fire with M, smoking and chatting. About 12:30 he rose to leave, and I let him out myself. I returned to the fire to finish my pipe, when I saw you sitting in the chair just vacated by him. I looked  intently at you, and then took up a newspaper to assure myself I was not dreaming, but on laying it down I saw you still there. While I gazed without speaking, you faded away. Though I imagined you must be fast asleep in bed at that hour, yet you appeared dressed in your ordinary garments, such as you usually wear every day.' ‘Then my experiment seems to have succeeded,' said I...A few weeks later the experiment was repeated with equal success.”

Here is another similar account quoted in the book, on page 104, one just as astonishing as the previous account:

"On a certain Sunday evening in November, 1881, having been

reading of the great power which the human will is capable of

exercising, I determined with the whole force of my being, that I would be present in spirit in the front bedroom on the second floor of a house situated at 22, Hogarth Road, Kensington, in which room slept two ladies of my acquaintance, viz., Miss L. S. Y. and Miss E. C. V., aged respectively 25 and 11 years. I was living at this time at 23, Kildare Gardens, a distance of about 3 miles from Hogarth Road, and I had not mentioned in any way my intention of trying this experiment to either of the above ladies, for the simple reason that it was only on retiring to rest upon this Sunday night that I made up my mind to do so. The time at, which I determined I would be there was 1 o’clock in the morning, and I also had a strong intention of making my presence perceptible. On the following Thursday I went to see the ladies in question, and, in the course of conversation (without any allusion to the subject on my part), the elder one told me, that, on the previous Sunday night, she had been much terrified by perceiving me standing by her bedside, and that she screamed when the apparition advanced towards her, and awoke her little sister, who saw me also. I asked her if she was awake at the time, and she replied most decidedly in the affirmative, and upon my inquiring the time of the occurrence, she replied, about 1 o’clock in the morning. This lady, at my request, wrote down a statement of the event and signed it. This was the first occasion upon which I tried an experiment of this kind, and its complete success startled me very much."

On page 105 an L.S. Verity gave this account of the same incident:

"On a certain Sunday evening, about twelve months since, at our house in Hogarth Road, Kensington, I distinctly saw Mr. B. in my room, about 1 o’clock. I was perfectly awake and was much terrified. I awoke my sister by screaming, and she saw the apparition herself. Three days after, when I saw Mr. B., I told him what had happened ; but it was some time before I could recover from the shock I had received, and the remembrance is too vivid to be ever erased from my memory."

Her sister E.C. Verity stated:

“I remember the occurrence of the event described by my sister in the annexed paragraph, and her description is quite correct. I saw the apparition which she saw, at the same time and under the same circumstances.”

Later on page 191 we have the following account of spontaneous telepathy:

“When the Rev. John Drake was minister of the Wesleyan Church at  Aberdeen, Miss Jessie Wilson, the daughter of one of the principal lay office bearers in that church, sailed for India, to join the Rev. John Hutcheon, M. A., then stationed as a missionary at Bangalore, to whom she was under engagement to be married. Mr. Drake, one morning, came  down to Mr. Wilson’s place of business and said, ‘Mr. Wilson, I am happy to be able to inform you that Jessie has had a pleasant voyage, and is now safely arrived in India.’ Mr. Wilson said, ‘How do you know that, Mr. Drake?’ to which Mr. Drake replied. ‘I saw it.’ ‘But,’ said Mr. Wilson, ‘it cannot be, for it is a fortnight too soon. The vessel has never made the voyage within a fortnight of the time it is now since Jessie sailed.’ To this Mr. Drake replied : ‘Now you jot it down in your book that John Drake called this morning and told you that Jessie has arrived in India this morning after a pleasant voyage.’ Mr. Wilson accordingly made the entry, which Mrs. Hutcheson assures me she saw, when she returned home, and that it ran thus: ‘Mr. Drake. Jessie arrived India, morning of June 5th, 1860.’ This turned out to have been literally the case. The ship had fair winds all the way, and made a quicker passage by a fortnight than ever she had made before.”

Later in the book (on page 194) we have this account from a Mrs. Bethany who gave her address:

“I was reading geometry as I walked along, a subject little likely to produce fancies or morbid phenomena of any kind, when in a moment, I saw a bedroom known as the White Room in my home, and upon the floor lay my mother, to all appearance dead. The vision must have remained some minutes, during which time my real surroundings appeared to pale and die out ; but as the vision faded, actual surroundings came back, at first dimly, and then clearly. I could not doubt that what I had seen was real, so, instead of going home, I went at once to the house of our medical man and found him at home. He at once set out with me for my home, on the way putting questions I could not answer, as my mother was to all appearance well when I left home. I led the doctor straight to the White Room, where we found my mother actually lying as in my vision. This was true even to minute details. She had been seized suddenly by an attack at the heart, and would soon have breathed her last but for the doctor’s timely advent.”

On page 45 of Volume I of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, we have the following pair of accounts.  In the first a Miss C. has a vivid dream about Miss E.  In the second, dating from the same day and time, Miss E. has a dream about Miss C. matching the dream that Miss C. had.  The account by Miss C. is below:

"On June 10th, I had the following dream. Some one told me that Miss E. was dead. I instantly, in my dream, rushed to her room, entered it, went to her bedside and pulled the clothes from off her face. She was quite cold ; her eyes were wide open and staring at the ceiling. This so frightened me that I dropped at the foot of her bed, and knew no more until I was half out of bed in my own room and wide awake. The time was 5 o'clock a.m. Before leaving my room I told this dream to my sister, as it had been such an unpleasant one."

The account by Miss E., describing the same hour of five o'clock on the same day, is below:

"I awoke on the morning of June 10th, and was lying on my back with my eyes fixed on the ceiling, when I heard the door open and felt some one come in and bend over me, but not far enough to come between my eyes and the ceiling ; knowing it was only C. I did not move, but, instead of kissing me, she suddenly drew back and going towards the foot of the bed, crouched down there. Thinking this very strange, I closed and opened my eyes several times, to convince myself that I was really awake, and then turned my head to see if she had left the door open, but found it still shut. Upon this a sort of horror came over me and I dared not look towards the figure which was crouching in the same position, gently moving the bedclothes from my feet. I tried to call to the occupant of the next room, but my voice failed. At this moment she touched my bare foot, a cold chill ran all over me  and I knew nothing more till I found myself out of bed looking for C, who must, I felt, be still in the room. I never doubted that she had really been there until I saw both doors fastened on the inside. On looking at my watch it was a few minutes past 5." 

On pages 35-38 of Volume 7 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, we have an account of extrasensory perception. A woman had a striking "mind's eye" vision of a friend of hers falling while walking up the stairs of her house,  dropping some papers at the time. She wrote a letter to the friend describing what she saw in this "mind's eye" vision, dating the letter the same day as the fall. The friend receiving the letter reported that the description of the fall (which the letter writer did not visually observe) was exactly accurate. 

The evidence for the reality of extrasensory perception is overwhelming, and has been gathered for more than 140 years.  One way to examine such evidence is to go to www.archive.org and search for online volumes of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and volumes of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.  Open up the online volumes, and search for "telepathy" or "thought transference" to find evidence for extrasensory perception gathered over decades.  Additional stunning examples of evidence for ESP from the nineteenth century can be read here.  For some very convincing results from the twentieth century, see here and here.  For equally compelling results from the current century, see here.  Very compelling results from the past 100 years can be read in the Journal of Parapsychology articles here. Those who deny such evidence for extrasensory perception do so because they have an incorrect theory of mind, the idea that the mind is merely the product of neural activity.  Such psi skeptics are typically people who have never seriously studied the evidence for extrasensory perception.  Their opinions on a topic they haven't studied are no more relevant than the opinions of a cab driver regarding some topic he hasn't studied, such as quantum chromodynamics. 

Postscript:  On page 57-58 of Volume 12 of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, we have the account below suggesting ESP or telepathy. 

"We had spent the winter 1896-7 in Egypt for C.'s [her husband's] health, and we went to Hyeres about a fortnight before Easter. There I left him, being obliged to come to London, and I intended to stay over Easter in town, if he continued as well as when I had left him. He wrote cheerfully, describing his daily walks, and telling me that he felt very well. I was therefore not feeling anxious about him.About 1 a.m. on Easter Monday I awoke thinking I heard him call me. I sprang up in great anxiety, feeling sure that he was ill. After a time I persuaded myself that I had only been dreaming, and fell asleep again, only to wake a second time in
the early morning with the impression again that he was calling me. This time I got up, dressed and packed my things, and when my maid came in with a telegram she found me almost ready to start. The telegram was 'Come at once.' Hemorrhage had come on about midnight, and all that night C. had been thinking of me and wondering how quickly I could get to him."