Precognition of a Quantum Process

Helmut Schmidt's Precognition of a Quantum Process, published in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1969, is a peer reviewed parapsychology study reporting that subjects could influence or anticipate the output of a device generating truly random events from radioactive decay, at a rate Schmidt reported as exceeding chance. Schmidt was a physicist by training who built his own randomizing apparatus specifically to remove the kind of nonrandom source that had undermined earlier psychokinesis and precognition experiments using dice or cards. Its strength is that physical rigor in the apparatus itself, a genuine engineering advance over the era's typical parapsychology methodology. Its limit is that Schmidt's results have never been independently replicated to the field's own satisfaction outside parapsychology friendly laboratories, and mainstream physicists and statisticians have raised standing methodological objections about selective reporting and experimenter effects, so this study should be read as one contested data point within an active and unresolved argument, not as settled evidence of precognition.