James Randi is apparently expiring his Million-Dollar Challenge on March 6, 2010. It will have run for 12 years, with the million dollars safely earning interest and awaiting a challenger who can demonstrate psychic or any other supernatural ability under carefully controlled scientific testing rules.
Move a pencil with your brain? Win a million bucks!
Bend a spoon with your mind? Win a million bucks!
Accurately predict a series of future events? Win a million bucks!
Demonstrate that you can tell the difference between two high-end speaker cables using only your ears? Win a million bucks!
It’s been a very straightforward challenge, and so far no “psychic” or mystic has been able to prove anything other than random-chance probabilities in the lab. Many have tried. Many who try and fail complain that the testing is unfair, and a large number poo-poo the application process as filtering out legitimate paranormals because it’s not easy to design a test that satisfies both the paranormal investigator and the paranormalist.
Also the Foundation has made it a practice to disallow certain dangerous or untestable claims. For instance, people who claim to be able to survive indefinitely without food… well, some people can take months to starve to death, and the only conclusive proof you couldn’t do it would be your death. So that’s out. Also, claims of miraculous healings are extraordinarily difficult to test objectively because of placebo affect, among others. There are a number of other issues, so there’s a fairly narrow range of things which can be scientifically tested.
It will be sad that the “Million Dollar Challenge” can’t just be automatically extended to anybody who claims a supernatural ability, but after twelve years, well, it’s been a good run I guess.