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My mother died on the 30th of July 2002, late in the evening. She was
92 years old and had a long life of good health, which began to decline
only in the last few months. She was a wonderful person, much loved by
a wide circle of friends and relatives. She gave gifts of open,
generous and loving appreciation to us, and into her last year she
was out there as a volunteer in the community,
reading to children, monitoring art galleries and museum displays,
ringing the Salvation Army bells, and
playing the piano for people in the retirement and nursing home where
she finally came herself to rest. She belonged to two bowling leagues
and maintained a remarkable average into her 92nd year.
She was tested many times by difficult events.
She passed those tests with grace and dignity, and I am
happy that she was gifted in return with a peaceful passing.
She was a wonderful person, and I will miss her.
Although I told her about the Global Consciousness Project,
it was pretty esoteric from her perspective. She knew the
direct connections between people from personal experience, but
a noosphere was for her, I think, a nice but very distant idea.
She would not mind that I decided to "do science" by examining
the GCP data on the day of her passing, as a contribution to
the deep assessments we must make to understand better the
so-called experimenter effect. Put simply, one of the possible
sources of the anomalous effects is Roger Nelson, and others who
are deeply involved in maintaining the project and generating its
scientific results. Here are the results of this assessment.
The first of the two following graphs shows a general and fairly steady
positive accumulation over the two day period that approximately
surrounds the moment of her death. (The axis labels are in UTC, some 5
hours offset from Nebraska time.) There is no indication of a
significant surge at or about that time, and overall the positive slope
is not significantly deviant.
The second graph looks at the details of personal connection by
examining separately the two eggs that are in my direct care. Egg
number 1 is on my home workstation, and number 28 is on the noosphere
server that is housed at the University a mile or so from home.
Again, although egg 1 looks like it might have "noticed" something
and changed its
behavior around the time of my mother's passing, neither it nor egg 28
show the extreme deviations we require as evidence of a correlation with
the specified event.
The quick and simple summary is that there is no clear evidence
that this deeply important personal event produced an
"experimenter effect". It is, on the other hand, worth noting
the similarities to the analyses of data from an ad hoc global
network for Mother Teresa's funeral ceremonies. They showed no
departure from expectation, while the same kind of data for Princess
Diana manifested large deviations. In my mother's case, as for Mother
Teresa, the death was not tragic, but simply the passing, after a long
and fruitful life, to the next stage. In most of the other cases we
have examined in these explorations, there has been an element of
tragedy, and they have tended to show patterns that suggest a response
from the egg network.
The difference of the two eggs' response is even more pronounced when we
look at the 24 hours beginning four hours before her death. One of the
two eggs, which is at my home, has a strong trend; the other, attached
to the noosphere server at the University, shows a level trace.
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