Indeed, Jahn’s own interest in testing for evidence of such “anomalous” interactions between mind and machine stemmed from his efforts to replicate experimental work done in the late 1960s by a fellow plasma physicist, the German Helmut Schmidt, then employed as a research scientist at Boeing.2 Schmidt appeared to have demonstrated that a particular experimental subject had the capacity to guess numbers generated by a randomizing algorithm at a rate considerably outside the calculated margins of probability. Working with an interested undergraduate student in the mid-1970s, Jahn had successfully reproduced some similarly anomalous statistical results using a random number generator of his own devising, and by the time he found himself chatting with McDonnell in the summer of 1977, Jahn was already contemplating turning his research attentions fully to the sustained investigation of what he would call “the role of consciousness in the physical world.” He would give the next thirty years of his life to this work, building the controversial PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) laboratories in the basement of the engineering building at Princeton University (in the teeth of lively opposition), and generating, with his co-author and collaborator Brenda Dunne (whom he encountered for the first time at that same 1977 conference), a massive database of tens of millions of experimental trials in which human subjects sought to influence the workings of various devices merely by thinking, wishing, visualizing, or praying. Together, Jahn and Dunne (who closed the original PEAR lab in 2007, but continue to write and speak about their work) claim to have demonstrated that human cognition has a real and measurable, if small, influence on the perceivable dynamics of the material world. If they are correct, the implications for physics, religion, etc., are enormous. If they are not correct, their labor-intensive and largely sober efforts over three decades limn a zone of techno-scientific quixotism perhaps best thought of as a suburb of performance art. Let us go forward as if we have not decided.