The Music of Chance

How random is this? I’m sitting in an empty classroom at Princeton, a few feet away from Roger Nelson, the founder and director of the Global Consciousness Project. The setting seems plucked right out of A Beautiful Mind, with a thin band of blackboard framing the room, broken by windows overlooking an immaculate campus. There are chalkboard leavings from the previous occupants: elaborate differential equations from a math class, Arabic conjugations from some linguists. And in the nearby engineering quad sits a server, quietly humming away, polling dozens of computer randomizers around the world for Nelson’s grand experiment. Based on that data, he’s written several carefully worded scientific papers that claim that human minds are somehow influencing the random numbers in subtle ways.

The project surprised me when I first heard about it. Nelson uses well-documented statistical methods to look at 10 million datapoints per day from 65 computers around the world between San Francisco and French Guiana. Nelson examines trends that he claims correspond to global events. Many of his best examples tend to be large catastrophic occurrences — embassy bombings, earthquakes, 9/11 — anything that “rends the social fabric and holds human attention.” There’s more: in a November 2006 paper published by the American Institute of Physics, he explores the idea that trends in random numbers begin hours before an event.

I wasn’t sure I believed it, but Nelson impresses me as a straight-up guy in the first few minutes of our meeting. Herbal tea in hand, he walks around looking for a quiet place for us to talk, finally ducking into the empty classroom. He’s in his mid-60s, with a neatly trimmed beard and striped broadcloth shirt, eminently professorial in appearance.

The Global Consciousness Project, or GCP, is unconnected with Princeton University, except that Nelson’s friends in the engineering department allow him to keep a server, and Nelson himself worked as a researcher there for over 20 years, retiring in 2002. GCP is a bootstraps project with a tiny budget, mostly stemming from PayPal donations. Friends of the project designed one of the matchbox-sized gadgets that perform random-number generation. Nelson’s adult

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son wrote the software to poll the devices, and 65 volunteers around the globe host the generators in their spare bedrooms, university labs, and home offices.

“They’re like one-way modems, blasting out random bytes at 9600 baud,” Nelson says, holding out one of the randomizing devices used in the project. He passes me the tiny gadget, and I involuntarily wonder if there’s something fishy about the apparatus — the image comes to mind of a magician tapping the sides of a wooden cabinet before the lady climbs in. I know he wouldn’t appreciate the comparison.

Nelson is diligent in his research. Over the last few years, he’s been the focus of respectful, if cautious, articles in The New York Times and Time, the latter going so far as to point out that many of our greatest scientific breakthroughs were once ridiculed. The November paper came out of a symposium on “Retrocausation” — organized by the respected American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) — exploring the theory that time flows symmetrically.

“The theoretical questions about the direction of time go back 150 years,” says Daniel Sheehan, organizer of the AAAS symposium and a physics professor at the University of San Diego. “Nelson and other experimentalists are starting to put some experimental background to the idea that retro-cau-sation may be a real phenomenon. The experimental evidence is not all in, but his results are tantalizing.”

Photograph by Erika Larsen