Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Project Alpha was an effort by magician James Randi to test the quality of scientific rigor of a well-known test of paranormal phenomena.. In the late 1970s, Randi contacted the newly established McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research ("MacLab") with suggestions on how to conduct tests for paranormal phenomena.
James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician, author, and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. [1]
Randi had a varied career, performing stage magic, mentalism, escape acts, [3] and other illusions. [4] After seriously injuring himself in an escape act, Randi quit escapism and stage magic. [4] He subsequently devoted more of his time towards investigation of the paranormal, publishing several books on the topic including Flim-Flam!
How it works in a magic trick: “It’s rare that a magician straight-up lies to you,” Barnhart says. “Instead, they encourage you to lie to yourself through your assumptions.”
Projecting an image onto smoke with a mirror, from Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques (1770). Smoke and mirrors is a classic technique in magical illusions that makes an entity appear to hover in empty space.
Geller's performances were revealed to be tricks due to the work of magician and investigator James Randi and others. [ 1 ] Despite hundreds of experiments by parapsychologists to determine whether spoon bending is a genuine psychic phenomenon, spoon bending by psychic powers has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the scientific ...
Advertisement for a reproduction of the trick by stage magician Howard Thurston. The Indian rope trick is a magic trick said to have been performed in and around India during the 19th century. Sometimes described as "the world’s greatest illusion", it reputedly involved a magician, a length of rope, and one or more boy assistants.
This article contains a list of magic tricks. In magic literature, tricks are often called effects. Based on published literature and marketed effects, there are millions of effects; a short performance routine by a single magician may contain dozens of such effects. Some students of magic strive to refer to effects using a proper name, and ...