Both Sean Carroll and Lubos Motl have written great posts thoroughly debunking that popular paranormal phenomenon known properly as “telekinesis”, and more popularly as “spoon bending”. James Randi and Martin Gardner, of course, are old hands at this, but as physicists, Carroll and Motl bring their own expertise and perspective into explaining why it is impossible. It all boils down to the two basic objects that physics studies and tries to explain: matter and the forces acting upon them. Ordinary matter, such as that which makes up you and me or a spoon or a fork, is very simply made up of three basic particles: up quarks, down quarks, and leptons, with gluons holding the first two together. That’s it. There’s nothing special about a spoon, a brain, a rock, a Toyota or a Norah Jones CD beyond the way the fundamental particles are arranged. If there are other particles which are constitutive of matter, they must be fiendishly difficult to detect and ultimately, inconsequential to its observable properties, and so cannot be invoked to support the spoon-bender’s arguments.

Even more problematic for the spoon-bending faithful is the nature of the forces acting upon matter. There are four basic forces: the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational. The two nuclear forces only become apparent at very short distances; they have no observable effects beyond the range of the nucleus, and so they’re obviously out of the question when it comes to explaining telekinesis. Gravity is the most far-reaching of the four basic forces and affects nearly all particles, but it’s also by far the weakest of the four forces, and even the gravitational field generated by Michael Moore is not sufficient to bend a spoon (unless he sits on it). And so, that leaves us with only the electromagnetic force, the only one of the four we can sense directly (without instrumentation, at least) and the most wide ranging in its possible manifestations, as a possible candidate for the agent responsible for spoon-bending.

Science fiction writers have frequently rationalized the use of psi powers by appealing to electromagnetism, but ultimately, that’s a lost cause as well. An enormous amount of energy would be needed to exert the amount of force necessary to bend even a sliver of metal, and there is not enough energy in the human body, much less the brain alone, to be able to do so. Furthermore, since whatever electromagnetic force the brain would hypothetically exert to accomplish feats of telekinesis must also exert a force on everything else within its vicinity, and would necessarily be extremely powerful, we should have been able to detect it ages ago. But we haven’t, and ergo, telekinetic force does not and can not exist.

Carroll and Motl both take note that there are implications here beyond the simple debunking of quakery that have to do with the nature of science and theories, implications which are also highly relevant to the ID controversy. As Motl notes, theories in physics are bound by certain limits; these are not imposed arbitrarily by the physicists themselves, but arise out of the body of available knowledge. To the untrained layman, many of the as yet unproven theories in physics-from strings to axions to branes to hidden dimensions-seem mysterious and speculative, but they are considered acceptable because they follow the rules that have been laid down by existing knowledge, and have the potential of being tested in the future. Spoon-bending has not just failed experimental tests but the theoretical one as well, and does not merit serious attention beyond exhibiting public gullibility.

Something similar is going on in biology right now, with the intelligent design crowd’s attempt at crashing biology. Biologists are as certain of the material make-up of a living thing as a physicist is of a spoon, and this certainty is likewise due to years of hard work, knowledge accumulation, and careful fact-checking. This same scientific method has also led to a good understanding of the forces responsible for evolution and abiogenesis; there is no need for vitalism or a phantom designer or any other magic wands to explain the emergence and diversity of life when existing conditions are sufficient, and while there are still unanswered questions, the effectiveness of evolution so far as an explanatory framework indicates it will most likely be the best source of answers in the future as well. The ID advocates are like the spoon-benders in their insistence that there must be properties of matter or forces acting upon it which have not yet been observed, and indeed, can never be observed. In their own way, they are even more dishonest than most other pseudoscientists; while the spoon benders are “merely” cranks, the IDers assume that they have wisdom that goes beyond the established knowledge, and this gives them privilege of breaking the rules of the scientific method. And to my knowledge, at least no one is insisting that we try to teach in our public schools how to deform cultery from a distance through an act of will…at least not yet.