A metaphorical “Great Disturbance in the Force?”
This ongoing experiment suggests that as mass mind moves, so does matter. The effect is modest in terms of its absolute magnitude, but it appears to be a real, persistent effect. The arrow of causation seems to go from mind to matter, but at this early stage we need to remain open to other possible explanations. Perhaps there is a third, as yet unidentified common cause, or even no cause at all, as in acausal synchronicities.
For most of the twentieth century, physicists were reluctantly forced to seriously reconsider common sense assumptions about the apparent gulf between observer and observed, in the latter half of the twentieth century, investigators developed increasingly rigorous methods for explicitly testing mind-matter interactions. As the twenty-first century dawns, when we ask, "For whom does the bell toll?," the response appears to resonate with John Donne's poetic reply in the seventeenth century "No man is an island.The bell tolls for thee."