[ExI] Psi. (no need to read this post you already know what itsays )

John Clark jonkc at bellsouth.net
Sat Jan 9 18:21:56 UTC 2010


On Jan 8, 2010 Damien Broderick wrote:

>> At the start of every year for the last 10 years I've made a paranormal
>> prediction for the coming year; I've predicted that a positive Psi (or
>> ESP or spiritualism) article will NOT appear in Nature or Science or
>> Physical Review Letters for the next year
> 
> No, you've made a sociologically astute prediction based on your implicit knowledge of the reigning paradigm prejudices of those journals.

So you think the reason these 3 journals (and I could easily extend my prediction to several dozen respectable journals) don't publish Psi stuff has all to do with sociology and nothing to do with Science. I think they don't publish Psi papers because what they contain conflicts with reality. On my side I have journals that have published every major scientific discovery of the 20'th century, on your side you have some bozo nobody ever heard of who typed some stuff onto a website or onto a dead tree that also nobody has ever heard of.

> This happens routinely in science

Not like this it doesn't! Sure on a few rare occasions somebody comes up with a correct idea that wasn't fully accepted for a long time, the most extreme example of that I can think of is continental drift, but even when it was in the minority the support for it never dropped to zero in the scientific community as it has for Psi. And the truth is that the evidence Wegener gave to support his theory was pretty weak and would remain weak until the 1960's. When the evidence did become good the Journals I mention didn't refuse to print it, far from it, they competed madly with each other to be the first to publish more about this wonderful new discovery. If the confirmation of Psi became as strong as it was for continental drift was in the 60's the same thing would happen, but that didn't happen last year, it won't happen next year, it won't happen next decade and it won't happen next century. And for every Wegener who was incorrectly labeled a crackpot there were tens of thousands who really were crackpots. 

Damien, we last went into this Psi stuff a couple of years ago, in that time objects 13 billion light years away have been observed, microprocessors have become 5 or 6 times as powerful, Poincaré conjecture was proven and the genome of hundreds of organisms have been sequenced; and what advances has the science of Psi achieved in that time? Zero, zilch, goose egg. Well over a century ago, long before the discovery of Quantum Mechanics or Relativity and even before Evolution and the Electromagnetic Theory of Light were generally accepted, people were saying Science was too hidebound to accept the existence of Psi and they are saying the exact same thing today as I'm certain they will be saying next century.  

> An example discussed recently in the NYT, IIRC, was a woman whose work on epigenetic effects was dropped scornfully into the trash bin in front of her by a senior scientist she showed it to, hindering her work for many years.

Did it hinder her work for centuries? And if it was me I would have made a copy.

  John K Clark


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