Short answers, pulled from the story.
Parapsychology is the scientific study of alleged psychic phenomena including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, and apparitional experiences. The Parapsychological Association divides the core subject matter into psi-gamma (extrasensory perception) and psi-kappa (psychokinesis), and explicitly excludes topics such as astrology, UFOs, and cryptozoology from its scope.
The term parapsychology was coined in 1889 by German philosopher Max Dessoir, who formed it from the Greek prefix para, meaning alongside, and the word psychology. J. B. Rhine adopted it in the 1930s to replace the older phrase psychical research, signaling a shift toward experimental methodology.
Rhine and Karl Zener developed a test deck of five symbols and treated scores significantly above 20 percent correct as evidence of ESP. After 90,000 trials Rhine claimed in his 1934 book Extrasensory Perception that ESP was an actual and demonstrable occurrence. Multiple independent replications by Princeton University and four other psychology departments failed to reproduce his results, and the experiments were later discredited because sensory leakage and cheating could account for all positive outcomes.
The Stargate Project, which handled ESP and remote viewing research for the U.S. federal government, was terminated in 1995 after it was concluded that it had never produced information useful in any intelligence operation. The data generated was described as vague, irrelevant, and erroneous, and there was reason to suspect research managers had adjusted project reports to match known background information.
The Ganzfeld experiment uses mild sensory deprivation to test for telepathy: a receiver is isolated with eyes covered and ears filled with white noise while a sender attempts to mentally transmit an image. Ray Hyman examined 42 Ganzfeld studies and found flaws in every single one, organized across twelve categories including inadequate randomization and failures to prevent sensory leakage such as sounds passing through non-soundproof walls.
Physicists including Sean M. Carroll and John G. Taylor have argued that psychokinesis violates the inverse-square law, the second law of thermodynamics, and conservation of momentum. Any new physical force capable of producing psychokinesis would need to be at most a billionth the strength of gravity to have escaped detection in existing experiments, and no such force has been found. Taylor concluded that psychokinesis is in complete contradiction to established science.