DIY
SCIENCE
ESP/PSI TESTING LAMP
Watch the universe play dice, by detecting
random radiation. By John Iovine
3 main sources: cosmic radiation from the sun and
stars; terrestrial radiation from radioactive elements
in the soil, air, and water; and radioactive isotopes
in living organisms’ bodies, such as potassium- 40,
carbon- 14, and lead-210.
Albert Einstein once wrote that God does not play
dice with the universe. To which Niels Bohr (or
Enrico Fermi) reportedly replied, “Stop telling God
what to do with his dice.”
To produce the random numbers, a microcontroller
constantly runs through a loop counting from 1 to
Photography by John Iovine
Here’s a mood lamp that expresses these dice
as 4 multicolored cubes that blink randomly, with
true randomness — not the deterministic, pseudo-random chaos that computers and other closed,
logic-based systems produce, but real, nonreplicable
randomness, triggered by background radiation
from across the universe.
4. Whenever the Geiger counter detects a particle,
the loop is interrupted and the last number counted
indexes to one of the 4 LED cubes. This new cube
is lighted, and the counting resumes until the next
detection. The algorithm resembles a fast-spinning
carnival wheel that’s stopped occasionally to read
the pointer position, then spun again.
I designed this lamp for testing ESP (extrasensory
perception), although it has other fun and interesting applications. At the heart of the device is a mini
Geiger counter that detects ionizing radiation from
As a result, a new cube on the lamp switches
on about once or twice a minute, under normal
circumstances. If the same cube lights again, it
momentarily blinks off in between. For logging and
other uses, the random numbers are also sent to
a serial port as TTL data (0V low, 5V high) that can
be read by a PC.
115 Make:
