SPEED SCALE SCOPE STANDARD

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The study was published in 1999 in the well-regarded journal Social Indicators Research.263 This was a prospective study, meaning it was planned and approved in advance. Two dozen university sociologists and criminologists, representatives from the police department and government of the District of Columbia, and local civic leaders participated in the planning and approval process. Violent crime was measured by a standard report obtained from the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department. As a control comparison, they used data from those same reports for the same two months from the preceding ɹve years (1988– 1992). They also tracked variables known to inɻuence violent crime, including changes in weather, changes in police and community anticrime activities, prior crime trends in DC, and crime trends in neighboring cities. When the researchers analyzed the data after controlling for all known moderating variables, they found a highly signiɹcant decrease in violent crimes, and as they had also predicted, the decrease was correlated with an increase in the size of the group of meditators. The maximum decrease was a 23.3 percent reduction in crime as compared to the same period in previous years. The reported odds against chance for this outcome were 500 million to 1.

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In 1961, this idea was actually tested with electrons, and it worked as expected. Elementary particles, chunks of stuʃ like little billiard balls, behave like waves, provided that you aren’t looking. This can be demonstrated easily even if you shoot a single photon one at a time through a double-slit apparatus.312 However—and this is the frosting on the quantum measurement problem—those very same chunks of stuʃ behave like particles when you do look at them. Technically, the process of looking is called gaining “which-path” information, in which you learn which path a photon took as it traveled through the double-slit apparatus. To repeat: If you know that it goes through the left slit or the right slit, typically determined using a detector placed behind each slit, then the photon will behave like a particle. But if you don’t know, then it will behave like a wave

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