The Challenge of Chance: A Mass Experiment in Telepathy and Its Unexpected Outcome Hardcover – January 1, 1974

Great condition~

The telepathy experiments are not convincing. In fact, the authors appear to show that they get the same results randomly. Arthur Koestler's discussion of the new physics is interesting.

The first section of the book deals with an experiment which seems initially to demonstrate telepathy in a surprising and spooky way, but on further analysis reveals how easy it is to be misled if you don't understand how chance occurrences work. The second section has the delightful flaw that the authors themselves go on to be misled a bit by their own failure to understand that random distributions can themselves be randomly distributed. And the third section is a compilation of wild coincidences of the type that might cause you to change your own view of the universe if they happened to you, assuming you had not learned the lessons of the earlier sections. The whole thing is a charming and easy read. I recommend this book with the warning that you should not accept the suggestion in the second section that evidence for both telepathy and a kind of anti-telepathy may have been found without first consulting a statistician. This book would make a nice supplementary text for a course on how to exist in the real world.