Cross-Examining the Case for Precognition: Comment on Mossbridge and Radin (2018)

Can people really sense the future? Mossbridge and Radin said yes, and this team -- including a real-deal astrophysicist from Fermi Lab -- fired back with a pointed "not so fast." Their argument hits from two angles. First, the statistical side: the tiny effects found in precognition studies are so small they don't rise above what the authors call the "crap factor" -- basically, the background noise of measurement errors that plague psychology experiments. Plus, the more people you test, the easier it is for standard statistics to declare something "significant" even when nothing real is going on. Second, and this is the heavy hitter, physicist Dan Hooper looked at what we actually know about how the universe works -- relativity, quantum mechanics, the whole toolkit -- and concluded that none of it allows information to travel backward in time. Doing so would break the second law of thermodynamics, one of the most ironclad rules in physics. Instead, the authors suggest that people who report presentiment experiences might just be unusually sensitive to subtle cues and prone to intuitive thinking -- real psychological traits, no time travel required. They lay out three things you'd need to actually prove precognition: experiments that reliably repeat, effects big enough to matter, and a model that doesn't break known physics. A high bar, and they argue precognition hasn't cleared it.