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© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
Supposedly, Albert Einstein was willing to remain open-minded about psychic claims (clairvoyance, extra-sensory perception, mind-reading...), until he heard that such "powers" are not affected by distance. People who claim to have these talents, claim that their powers operate undiminished at any distance, even across interstellar space.
Light, electrical fields, magnetism, gravity, and other forms of energy obey the "inverse square law:"
energy=constant / distance²
This is merely the result of the energy being spread out as it travels.
While this effect is fairly universal, there are cases where energy does not spread out. An electrical current in a metal wire is diminished somewhat, but not with the square of the length of the wire. But, it should be fairly obvious why the electric current does not spread out, as it is confined to the surface of the metal wire. Similarly, a beam of light, focused by a convex lens, increases in intensity up to the focal point of the lens, before it disperses at greater distances.
People claiming to have psychic powers have no obvious means of focusing their energy. They may claim to focus (channel) it, but they don't know how they do it (and they seem proud to not understand it). Maybe they are accidentally holding up some huge psychic lens in just the right place to focus on some distant civilization. But I think that they are just the victims of wishful thinking.