jomk said:
Holy cow. I am conflicted. Why not scientific proof of this stuff (not yours in particular) vs people see stuff. Evidently, the conflict doesn’t seem to matter to my goosebumps and shivers.
I’ve always wondered about that. I’ve always been, on the whole, a fairly scientifically-minded person. I never believed in these things till I first saw them for myself. And even since I have, it’s always seemed strange to me that there’s no scientific evidence for something that so many people in the world have seen and experienced.
Then again, maybe there is. There are lots of weird photographs and ‘anomalies’ in scientific data, but it just gets tossed out or ignored or brushed aside because ‘those things aren’t real.’ So who knows? Maybe we’ve been getting evidence of this stuff for decades and we’ve continued to willfully ignore it. Wouldn’t be the first time. Everybody in the 1800s knew that women’s skulls were smaller, right, because they had smaller brains?
But there’s a study I read several years ago—and you can believe I’ve been trying to find the link again ever since—done by a computer scientist…down in Louisiana, I want to think I remember. In the late 1990s, he challenged himself to build a truly randomized number generator—which he achieved—and then to test it, he started running it using a coin-flip simulation, for a few years.
And while mostly it behaved liked a proper random number generator, with probability coming out 50/50 between even vs. odd, he found that there were times when, for the space of maybe a couple of minutes to, very occasionally, a few hours, probabilities skewed well beyond the bounds of likelihood.
And the really weird thing was, many of those moments could be mapped to real-world events. Natural disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis. Political events like significant elections. Manmade disasters. The most drastic was 9/11 when, for the space of about 8 hours surrounding the event, the odds of a coin flip coming up even vs. odd went off the charts. Almost every ‘coin flip’ made during that time period landed the same way. And then, the next day, it all went back to normal again.
So I don’t know. What I do know is that the world is a far stranger place than any of us can entirely fathom, and that it would be egotistical to assume that we’ve figured out the answer to everything.
