The Crumbling Paradigm – Part Two

Probably the most famous, or notorious person, depending on your point of view, to influence matter by some agency of mind, has been the Israeli psychic Uri Geller. Although best known for his ability to bend spoons and startle defunct watches and clocks into renewed activity, Geller has nevertheless conducted a variety of experiments that have confounded attending scientists.

In one experiment that took place at the White Oak laboratory of the Naval Weapons Center at Silver Spring, Maryland, Geller was invited by Eldon Byrd to see if he could deform three pieces of nitinol wire. The particular characteristic which prompted Byrd to choose nitinol wire was that although it could be twisted into any number of shapes, it always reverted to its original shape when heated.

Geller was challenged to see whether he could induce any permanent changes in the nitinol wire. As Geller proceeded to rub these wires with his fingers, each one of them began to curl into unusual shapes. Subsequent heating was unable to restore them to their original shape.

Byrd concluded that only intense heat or mechanical stress could have accounted for the permanent deformations which Geller had been able to induce in the nitinol wires.  1

On another occasion, while in the presence of Dr. Wilbur Franklin of Kent State University, Ohio, Geller fractured a platinum ring. Franklin presumed that he had caused a “fatigue fracture” in the ring, a rupture caused by excess wear and tear in the metal.

Yet when the ring was examined under an electron microscope, it was found that the fracture actually consisted of two separate and distinct cracks in the platinum. What was so remarkable about this discovery was that although the two cracks were extremely close to one another, each crack seemed to have been made by entirely different forces.

One fracture resembled that which typically occurred at a temperature of -195 degrees Celsius, while the other was characteristic of a crack caused by a temperature of 1773 degrees Celsius. Dr. Franklin later wrote: “It would be extremely difficult, even under the best laboratory conditions, to produce two so totally different fractures at sites so close to one another”.  1

While on a visit to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in California in 1974, Geller was asked by Ronald Hawke whether he could erase, or in any way alter, the programmes that had been magnetically stored on four computer cards.

These cards were coated with a layer of plastic to prevent any direct contact with the cards themselves. Again, Geller merely rubbed his fingers gently across the surfaces of the cards. When Hawke then fed these cards into the computer, they were immediately rejected.

Hawke found that the magnetic programmes had in some way been altered in a manner which now rendered them “ambiguous.”  He later commented that “subsequent inspection with a magnetic viewer after the meeting with Geller revealed that the magnetic patterns had been altered.”  1

Once more, “normal” science was perplexed.  Not only had Geller been able to do what the fundamental laws of physics indicated could not be done, but he had done so in a manner that defied all explanation.

The Will to Believe

These cases have become yet more embarrassing anomalies that do not fit into the current scientific paradigm. The existence of these anomalies is not just a recent problem. They have in fact been reported as far back as 1897. In his book The Will to Believe,  the American psychologist and philosopher William James wrote:

“The phenomena are there lying broadcast over the surface of history. No matter where you open its pages, you find things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar individuals over persons and things in their neighbourhood.

“Look behind the pages of official history, in personal memoirs, legal documents and popular narratives and books of anecdote, and you will find that there never was a time when these things were not reported just as abundantly as now.”  2

That tiny trickle of anomalous events has swelled today into a mighty flood, yet they seldom find their way into the published journals of science. Since they contradict the official rules of science, they are condemned to lie in “personal memoirs, legal documents, and popular narratives and books of anecdote”.

And because they are not reported in the official instruments of science, “normal” scientists who are wedded to the current materialistic paradigm continue happily to ignore them.

So great has been this profusion of unexplained phenomena over recent years that they have now come to be consolidated into a category of their own. This vast body of evidence is now referred to under the name of Psi, derived from the first letter of the Greek word psukhe (psyche), meaning soul or spirit.

Psi embraces a wide variety of unusual powers which appear to be manifestations of the human mind. Psi phenomena include:

The ability to see, hear, smell, taste or touch, without the use of corresponding sense organs (extra-sensory perception – Esp)
The ability to see things that are remote from the observer (clairvoyance)
The ability to hear things that are remote from the hearer (clairaudience)
The ability to acquire information directly from the mind of another person (telepathy)
The ability to know things that will take place in the future (precognition)
The ability to know things that have taken place in the past (retrocognition)
The ability to influence matter by non-sensory means (psychokinesis)
The ability to transport matter over distance, or to dematerialise it and rematerialise it elsewhere (telekinesis.)
The ability to heal (faith healing)

These abilities, which appear to lie beyond the range of normal human expression, are generally referred to as “paranormal” abilities, and the study of those people who possess these abilities, as “parapsychology”.

The use in each case of the prefix “para” – meaning beyond, above or outside – is a clear indication of the fact that they are considered to fall outside of the “normal” realm of experience. It is because science and psychology have thus far been unable to explain these phenomena within the current scientific paradigm that they have come to be regarded as paranormal, or something beyond the range of normal behaviour.

It is an inevitable and unfortunate corollary of this definition, that those people who demonstrate these abilities are themselves regarded as abnormal, and in some way strange, odd or queer. In earlier centuries such people were considered to be in league with Satan, and were condemned to a painful death for practising witchcraft and the occult arts.

The stigma that has clung to these phenomena in the past has by no means been overcome today, even though parapsychology has become an acknowledged branch of psychology, and today claims the attention of many leading scientific minds.

The Limits of the Paradigm

However, the process that Thomas Kuhn elucidated continues to be plainly evident today. As Kuhn revealed, scientific paradigms serve as frameworks which bind the investigators of “normal” science within certain prescribed boundaries of belief.

In the course of time, evidence accrues which cannot be explained within the framework of the existing paradigm. At first these exceptions, or anomalies, are simply ignored by official science. As time passes, however, these exceptions increase in number to the point where a state of considerable tension arises.

This internal stress ultimately leads to a scientific crisis, out of which a new scientific paradigm is born. Like every form of revolution, this shifting paradigm is a traumatic affair, and only succeeds in overcoming the old ideas after a protracted battle with the guardians of outdated beliefs.

The evidential data that collectively has come to be known as Psi, has not emerged overnight. It is not some swift malaise that has come to afflict a portion of humanity. It has steadily been accumulating over the centuries.

In the past it was the power of the Church that effectively suppressed this data.  It is now Science itself that has come to wield the rod of oppression. To official science, these anomalous events are unwanted, for they serve only to muddy the clear waters of accepted thinking.

Despite this religious and scientific crusade, the sheer abundance of Psi evidence has built up a groundswell of discontent, such that the redoubts of conventional science are now under siege.

According to the Cartesian dualism of classical science, the universe is divided into two opposing spheres – one of matter and the other of mind. The evidence of Psi threatens this divide. Yet ironically, this evidence offers a bridge across the gulf that would heal the centuries old chasm that has artificially divided the universe into two opposing parts.

Generations to come may wonder why it was that the opportunity presented by Psi was not seized upon enthusiastically by those who now man the bulwarks of traditional science. But that has not been the way of change in the past, and it is unlikely to reflect the transformation of the future.

The proponents of Psi will undoubtedly have to face a stern test of their resolve in the face of an unflinching foe, before the buttresses of the classical castle of science will be ready to crumble.

Those scientists who have established their careers and their reputations in the practice of conventional science, are naturally the ones who have the most to lose by a change in paradigm, and it is they, the leading scientists of their day, who have traditionally been in the vanguard of those who have resisted the onslaught of the new.

Parapsychology will have to fight a fierce battle before it takes its rightful place in the new scientific paradigm. It is assailed on many sides, particularly by those who now hold positions of authority, and who have come to be regarded as the foremost experts in their field.

The battle against all forms of Psi, the challenge of the encroaching powers of mind, has led to highly charged confrontations in the past, and continues to do so to this day. It inspires in many a profound dread of the unknown.

Sigmund Freud, who was one of the pioneers of the adventure of psychiatry, and who more than most should have been alert to the awesome potential of the human mind, was so appalled at the prospect of the occult, that he called it “the black tide of the unknown”. In reflecting this visceral response, he succumbed to mankind’s horror of all things hidden and unknown.

Freud spoke not only for the majority of his peers, but also for the major body of scientists today, who consider anything that cannot be explained in conventional scientific terms as inherently unhealthy. The Church in turn has rigorously opposed all forms of the paranormal, believing them to be evidence of collusion between man and Satan.

Their centuries long Jihad has been directed at anyone who practised divination, or who demonstrated any unusual talent. The paranormal practitioners of yesteryear did not become the millionaires of their times, as Uri Geller has become today. Instead, they faced lives of victimisation and terror, that all too often ended upon a fiery stake.

Society has always feared the unknown.

The Threat of Psi

Today, many leading scientists see in the phenomena of the paranormal threats to the orderly process of living, and a likely reversion to that state of barbarism, witchcraft and superstition, out of which science so laboriously dragged itself four centuries ago.

For them the threat of Psi is very clear. It is the choice between the pure light of logic and reason on the one hand, and the gloom of magic-mongery and blind faith on the other. To pander to the inclinations of the paranormal then, is to court the collapse of all civilised virtue.

They paint the threat of Psi in bold opposing colours. These scientists not only consider themselves to be defenders of scientific truth, but crusaders for the very tenets of civilisation. They stoutly profess that it is only their valiant defence of conventional science that prevents humanity from sliding inexorably into a new age of darkness.

Lawrence LeShan speaks eloquently for their fears:

“Psi phenomena seems to threaten the basic concepts of the universe – the weltenshauung, the lebensgefuhl of modern individuals. We live in a perceived world of law and order, of sequential cause and effect – a world in which space and time are limiting factors.

“It is on this view that we have built our own personality structure, our action and reaction patterns, and our sense of security. We may not find it an ideal world and may even resent its limitations, but it is the world of the 20th century and our own homeland.

“What then if these basic laws of the universe are threatened? What if we are faced with apparent evidence that they may be illusions – that space and time can sometimes be discounted or ignored; that sequences of events can occur which are irrelevant to the logic of cause and effect?”  3

In answer to his question, LeShan himself replies:

“It brings us to the ‘catastrophic anxiety’ the psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein has described as the most severe of all anxieties. Goldstein has demonstrated how we in our development, build our ego to support, and be supported by, that view of reality which our culture believes to be the only correct one.

“If this model is no longer supported by the culture around us, or if we are faced with data that contradict it, we feel as if we are in great danger, the danger that our unsupported ego will crumble and come apart. We feel that we can no longer remain whole.”  4

The resistance to Psi will continue to be fierce, not simply because it challenges the conventional view of science, but because it threatens the very integrity of the personalities of its opponents.

For such scientists, the onslaught of Psi will be resisted as if their very lives depended on it, which in a sense they do.  Conceding to the validity of Psi will call for a new description of the universe, and by extension, a new definition of ourselves.

The battle lines over Psi are now clearly drawn. The bastions of official science are guarded by its protectors who have entrenched themselves in their defensive positions.  In this conflict, we find ourselves caught today in the rip-tides of a changing paradigm of science.

The old paradigm of classical physics, based upon fixed laws of nature, the rigorous march of time and the strict equation of cause and effect, seems to be giving way inexorably to a revolutionary new era whose potential we can only dimly see.

For those who are threatened by this change, and they include all those who have been conditioned by, and have committed themselves to, the old paradigm, this new revolution is fearsome in the extreme.

Others, mostly the young, see in the outcome of this conflict the potential for new beginnings, and a new age of extraordinary freedom. The laws of nature, which have for so long bound us in their iron clasp, are now being seen to be illusory. The “cogs in the machine”, as Gary Zukav has remarked, appear ready at last to become “creators of the universe.” 
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The shift to the new paradigm appears remorseless, and those who stand today in the forefront of the resistance, seem destined to become historical footnotes as those who stood in the path of progress, just as the Church once resisted the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo. As Henry Margenau and Lawrence LeShan explain:

“We can see the problem clearly when we think about the colleagues of Galileo who refused to look through the telescope. They refused because it was unnecessary to look; they had confused their theory about reality with facts.

“As far as they were concerned, they knew the facts, and there was simply no point in observing a contradictory fact; the telescope’s view was necessarily false because it contradicted known facts. At this distance we can see their reasoning and confusion.

“It is, however, harder to see when many modern scientists, not looking at the facts of parapsychology, simply dismiss them as necessarily false and therefore unnecessary to examine since – for them – they contradict a known fact. They are as confused as were Galileo’s contemporaries, but this is a lot harder to see close up.”  5

The Problem of Explanation

Parapsychologists today are deeply engrossed in collating the observables of Psi and cataloguing these new “facts of nature”. Their basic problem, however, is that they are unable to explain these new facts. For it is one thing to record a fact, but quite another to explain the principle that accounts for it.

The main difficulty of parapsychology today is that parapsychologists are simply unable to say why the strange events that they record happen as they do. But if the underlying reasons have been difficult to grasp, the amount of evidence that has thus far been accumulated is truly immense.

Much of it remains necessarily in anecdotal form, simply because these illegitimate “facts” are not welcome in the official journals of science. As unwelcome as this may be to “normal” science, however, its sheer volume has now become so persuasive, that an increasing number of physicists have come to recognize that it can no longer be ignored.

Men like David Bohm, John Hasted, Brian Josephson, Henry Margenau, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ have all made signal contributions to the reality and significance of Psi.

The essential difficulty that these researchers face, as with any shift in paradigm, is simply that nature has not yet been “beaten into line”. The basic problem of the investigation of Psi from a scientific point of view, is that results obtained by one person under certain circumstances may not match the results achieved by another person under similar outward circumstances.

This conflicting evidence flies in the face of the scientific tradition, which requires that individual scientists must be able to replicate the results of other experiments conducted under identical conditions. In the field of Psi, this seldom seems to occur.

The reason it does not occur, is because scientists who are conditioned to the paradigm of classical physics have overlooked a vital ingredient in the determination of their results. They have become accustomed to denoting the significant factors that affect the outcome of any experiment in purely physical terms.

They do not realise that the success of classical physics was not achieved in this way. It took many years of conflicting results before nature was successfully beaten into the classical mould of expression.

It is only now becoming recognised, if only dimly, that it is the mental attitude involved in any experiment relative to Psi, that is the true determinant of the experimental result, and that this needs to be controlled just as carefully as temperature, pressure and the rest.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, when John Dalton developed his atomic theory of chemical reaction, he was faced with a disconcerting problem. Although his ideas were clothed in theoretical elegance, the “facts” of nature did not always support his point of view.

The French chemists Berthollet and Proust were initially unable to obtain verifying data, and it took “almost another generation” before chemists everywhere were able to achieve consistently uniform results that were in line with Daltonian theory.

The problem of making nature fit the paradigm was not so much a question of achieving consistent empirical methods, as it was a matter of co-coordinating people’s minds. It was only when chemists began to think alike and to expect consistent chemical results, that nature herself obliged by functioning in a manner consistent with these expectations.

Until this consensus of mental conformity was attained, we may well imagine the extent of the controversy that raged throughout the world of science at that time. Those chemists whose empirical results supported Dalton would have spoken out strongly in favour of the whole number hypothesis, while those chemists who had obtained conflicting data would have resisted fiercely the encroachment of the new ideas, and staunchly defended their methods and results.

This variability in results is an inevitable feature of any changing paradigm. Each period of transformation is marked by conflicting “facts”, simply because there is no uniformity in the underlying pattern of belief.

It is only when everyone has become conditioned to the new ideas, that the physical “facts” then achieve uniform consistency.  With the benefit of hindsight we are able to see how this uniformity has come about, although we still fall into the trap of interpreting this as evidence of a given law of nature.

If we examine the events that are occurring today, we can see that a similar process is at work. Results of Psi experiments continue to be inconclusive, with no real indication as to which point of view is “correct”.

Experimental results are inconsistent, not only between different experimenters, but even with the same people involved in identical experiments, but done at different times. This inconsistency is meat and drink to the skeptic, who triumphantly presents it as proof of the illusory nature of the phenomenon of Psi.

There remains also the problem of proof. What constitutes proof to one scientist does not necessarily convince another. Inevitably, this comes to depend upon the underlying cast of mind.

Those who are open to the possibility of new events are relatively easily persuaded. For those whose minds are utterly closed, even to the possibility of such new events, no amount of proof will suffice. One may recall the heroic efforts of Dr. J. B. Rhine, who strove for over forty years at Duke University, to assemble sufficient evidence that would convince his peers of the existence of telepathy and precognition.

To open-minded observers, Rhine’s results were sufficient to prove their existence and efficacy beyond all reasonable doubt. In fact, most of Rhine’s volunteers were soon bored to distraction by the endless repetition of experiments. Yet for the majority of scientists, it was as if Rhine had never conducted a single valid experiment.

The skeptics remained totally closed to the idea that there might actually be a faculty of telepathy, and no amount of evidence was able to persuade them otherwise. In the final analysis, no man or woman is able to be convinced unless he or she chooses to be convinced.

Even Christ could not convert the Pharisees.

Continued in Part Three

References

1  “The Geller Papers”, edited by Charles Panati, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1976, pp. 6-10.
2  William James, “The Will to Believe”, Lecture given in 1896.
3  Lawrence LeShan, “The Medium, The Mystic and the Physicist”, Ballantine, New York, 1975, p. 199.
4  Henry Margenau and Lawrence LeShan, “Einstein’s Space and Van Goch’s Sky”, Macmillan, New York, 1982, p. 20.
5  Ibid, p.212.

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