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“Let’s say the police get a report that a child has been abducted. Police detectives are trained to recognize patterns so they would know that the perpetrator is probably male and probably someone known by the child. And they could predict that the child is dead if missing more than forty– eight hours, with the body probably left outdoors within fifty miles of the crime. Let’s say the police call in an FBI profiler who is even more proficient than the police at spotting criminal patterns. Based on experience and statistics with similar crimes, the profiler might predict that the perpetrator has a certain type of background, upbringing, and personality. The police detectives and the FBI profiler can produce information that would seem psychic if you didn’t know it was based on simple patterns. Now let’s say the police contact a so-called psychic who is a genius at pattern recognition. At the genius level, far more subtle patterns come into play.”

He continued. “For example, the entertainment and news media create patterns in the public’s minds. Let’s say that several movies and TV shows about kidnappings in the past year have created a pattern about the best place to dispose of dead bodies. That pattern could influence a perpetrator to pick a drainage ditch instead of an old shack. The psychic unknowingly picks up on the pattern and ‘feels’ that the child will be found in a drainage ditch. A search of drainage ditches proves the psychic right.

“In such a case, the so-called psychic’s powers would be useful and in some sense genuine, but they could never be reproduced under controlled experiments. In a lab setting, all patterns are removed.”

“What about a guy who talks to your dead relatives?” I asked. “He always has information about the survivors and about the dead person that couldn’t be a coincidence. How’s that done?”

“That, too, is pattern recognition, along with showmanship, and sometimes trickery. Some of what passes as extraordinary psychic ability is nothing but playing the odds. The psychic might say, for example, that the deceased husband saw the widow kissing his picture. That would be a safe guess. Most widows kiss pictures of their dead husbands. Or the psychic might say that the departed husband liked to work with his hands at home. That applies to almost all men.

“The psychic can pick up many patterns suggested from a person’s voice, accent, clothes, age, name, health, and ethnicity. Let’s say a client has smoke-stained teeth. Smokers are likely to live with other smokers. The psychic might guess that a loved one recently died from heart or lung problems. That would be a good guess.”

“Okay, what about those televangelists who heal people on TV? Those people look healed to me. Is that fake?”

The old man just laughed. I laughed too.

Light

“Consider light,” the old man said. “Our world appears infused with light’s energy. But what is light?”

“It’s made of photons,” I said, thinking that was a start. By then I should have known better. I think he ignored my answer.

“If you were in a spaceship racing a beam of light, and you were moving at ninety-nine percent the speed of light, how much faster would the light be?”

“About one percent of the speed of light, obviously. I don’t know the miles per hour.”

“Not according to Einstein. He proved that the light beam would be faster than your rocket ship by the speed of light, no matter how fast you are traveling.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. But it sounds vaguely familiar. Did he really say that?”

“Yes, and it is accepted as fact in the physics world.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “If I’m traveling ninety-nine percent as fast as the light beam, in the same direction as the light, the light beam can’t be faster than me by the same speed as if I weren’t moving at all.”