(9 of 10)
What is wrong with Physicist Sir James Jeans' attempt to give coherence to an unruly cosmos: "The universe begins to look more and more like a great thought than a great machine"?
The psychic adherent's reply is simple: anything is possible. But simply saying that it is so and then supporting the contention with shoddy or downright fraudulent evidence, is not enough. Psychic phenomena cannot be accepted on faith; they must be convincingly demonstrated to objective people by objective researchers. To date, those demonstrations have not been made.
Any close examiner of psychic investigators and reporters will find a new meaning for Koestler's roots of coincidence. A loose confederacy of parapsychologists parodies the notion of the scientific method. Harold Puthoff, one of the two S.R.I, investigators of Uri Geller, is singled out in The Secret Life of Plants as a reputable scientist who has been experimenting with the response of one chicken egg to the breaking of another. He is also a promoter of the bizarre and controversial cult of Scientology, which Ingo Swann, another psychic tested by S.R.I., also practices. William Targ, a Putnam executive, recently contracted to publish Astronaut Ed Mitchell's forthcoming book, Psychic Exploration, A Challenge for Science. At the signing, Targ stated that "the real race now between the Russians and us is in the area of sciences like ESP." Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Sciences helped to fund S.R.I.'s Geller research, which was conducted largely by Puthoff and Russell Targ, who happens to be Editor Targ's son.
The questionable connections of many psychic researchers, in addition to the paucity of objectively verifiable results in their work, has made it difficult to raise funds for research; parapsychologists barely squeak by with money from a few foundations and gifts and encouragement from occasional philanthropists like Stewart Mott and Manhattan Realtor John Tishman. There is only one academic chair on parapsychology in the U.S., at the University of Virginia. Should the findings prove depressingly negative, it is unlikely that academies or foundations would encourage more chairs, or promote further psychic investigations.
In a way, it is rather a pity that the sheep cannot get together with the goats. At the very least, the paranormal establishment has questioned the dogma, emphasized the ignorance and underlined the arrogance of modern medicine and science. Indeed, modern doctors have scarcely breached the frontiers of the mind. Science has all too frequently destroyed the layman's sense of wonder by seeking materialistic explanations for all phenomena.
As C.P. Snow says: "Scientists regard it as a major intellectual virtue to know what not to think about." Complains one S.R.I, spokesman: "The society we live in doesn't give you permission to have psychic abilities. That is one reason that so much talent is suppressed." As Martin Gardner believes, "Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses."
As for the parapsychologists who make many of those hypotheses, they could learn the most valuable weapon in the arsenal of