History of Telekinesis

Historical, religious, mythological, and fictional characters have been moving things with their mind for millennia. Take Shakuni, for example. This key character in the Sanskrit epic “Mahabharata” telekinetically manipulates the dice in a crucial game to alter the outcome in his favor, kicking off the main plot of one of two the major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, as well as the Hindu age of Kali Yuga. Perhaps the first telekinetic, Shakuni reshaped history with his mind back in 400 BC.

And then there’s the most famous telekinetic of them all—Jesus. What was Jesus doing in the Bible if not using telekinesis to turn water into wine, heal the sick, and change a little bit of food into a lot? It's probably a good time to mention that telekinesis, later known as psychokinesis (PK), is an umbrella term for a slew of special abilities that include biological healing and the transmutation of matter, two abilities Jesus displayed in the above examples. Also bundled under the umbrella term psychokinesis is supernatural healing, which sounds a lot like what Jesus was doing when he brought Lazarus back from the dead.

Long before there was Gandalf, there was the telekinetic wizard Merlin, from the legend of King Arthur. According to the Arthurian legend of the 12th century, Merlin’s telekinetic powers were so abundant he sailed through the ocean in a glass house and, to really lay his telekinetic powers on thick, transported Stonehenge across the Irish Sea from Ireland to England.

Although telekinesis had intrigued people for centuries, it really became a phenomenon in the late 19th century. The term itself was coined by Russian psychical researcher Alexander N. Aksakov. Aksakov got jazzed up by the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist who allegedly had psychic abilities. Aksakov was specifically interested in the physical manifestations of mediumship (people who can commune with spirits).

By the late 1860s, Askakov had become famous as one of the organizers of the first séances in Russia, and eventually became known for his study of the British medium Mme. D’Esperance (born Elizabeth Hope), who Askakov believed was a legitimate medium. D’Esperance traveled throughout Europe conducting séances, claiming she had a host of telekinetic powers, including automatic writing (producing writing from a spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content), ectoplasm (producing a gauze-like substance from orifices in her body that spirits could then drape over their nonphysical bodies in order to interact with the physical universe), and good old fashioned telekinetic table-turning.

Telekinesis went from the realm of the supernatural—objects being manipulated by spirits, angels, demons, ghosts and other such forces—into the purview of science. In the 1930s American parapsychologist J.B. Rhine began conducting experiments, stripping away all the theatrics and voodoo associated with telekinesis and reducing it to its most simple terms in order to test it in a laboratory setting. In 1934, a young gambler came to Rhine and told him he could effect dice with his mind. The results of Rhine’s tests on the young man’s ability were surprising, and encouraging.

Rhine went on to conduct further experiments to see whether a subject really could influence the outcome of tossed dice. By the end of 1941, he had tested more than 650,000 experimental die throws, with the results suggesting that psychokinesis was, indeed, possible. Although the results of Rhine’s experiments were mixed, and the effects witnessed were small, he was far from being alone in thinking people might be able to manipulate objects with their minds.

There are two basic metrics researchers use to describe measuring the effects of supposed psychokinetic effects during experiments, Micro-PK and Macro-PK. Micro-PK requires scientific equipment to observe the manipulation of atoms, molecules and subatomic particles. Macro-PK describes any large-scale effect that can be seen with the naked eye.

Haakon Forwald, a Swedish electrical engineer, promoted the idea that a person could manipulate gravitational fields by mentally agitating the atoms and neutrons inside an object. Gerald Feinberg, a Columbia University physicist, futurist and author invented the idea of the tachyon, a theoretical particle that moves faster than the speed of light and could, possibly, explain psychokinesis.

Motionpictures