EdgeScienceNumber 23 September 2015 Current Research and Insights SPECIAL ISSUE ON PSI Trauma Displaced in Time Autistics, Savants, and Psi A Multi-Sensory Clairvoyant A publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration EdgeScience #23 September 2015 EdgeScience is a quarterly magazine. Print copies are available from edgescience.magcloud.com. CONTENTS For further information, see edgescience.org Email: [email protected] THE OBSERVATORY Why EdgeScience? Because, contrary to public Beyond the Safe Zones of Science perception, scientific knowledge is still full of By Michael Brooks unknowns. What remains to be discovered — what 3 we don’t know — very likely dwarfs what we do know. And what we think we know may not be entirely correct or fully understood. Anomalies, which researchers tend to sweep under the rug, should be actively pursued as clues to potential breakthroughs and new directions in science. FEATURES PUBLISHER: The Society for Scientific Exploration EDITOR: Patrick Huyghe Trauma Displaced in Time: ASSOCIATE EDITOR: P.D. Moncrief 9/11 and the Terrible Enjoyment of Psi CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Brooks, Diane Hennacy By Eric Wargo 5 Powell, Peter Sturrock, Eric Wargo DESIGN: Smythtype Design The Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) is a professional organization of scientists and scholars who study unusual and unexplained phenomena. The primary goal of the Society is to provide a professional forum for presentations, criticism, and debate concerning topics which are for various reasons ignored or studied inadequately within mainstream science. A secondary goal is to promote improved understanding of those factors that unnecessarily limit the scope of scientific inquiry, such as sociological constraints, restrictive world views, hidden theoretical assumptions, and the temptation to convert prevailing theory into prevailing dogma. Topics under investigation Autistics, Savants, cover a wide spectrum. At one end are apparent and Psi: A Radical anomalies in well established disciplines. At the 12 Theory of Mind other, we find paradoxical phenomena that belong By Diane Hennacy to no established discipline and therefore may Powell offer the greatest potential for scientific advance and the expansion of human knowledge. The SSE was founded in 1982 and has approximately 800 members in 45 countries worldwide. The Society also publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration, and holds annual meetings in the U.S. and biennial meetings in Europe. Associate and student memberships are available to the public. To join the Society, or for more information, visit the website at scientificexploration.org. BACKSCATTER PRESIDENT: William Bengston, St. Joseph’s College A Multi-Sensory Clairvoyant VICE PRESIDENT: Garret Moddel, University of By Peter Sturrock 20 Colorado, Boulder SECRETARY: Mark Urban-Lurain, Michigan State University TREASURER: York Dobyns EDUCATION OFFICER: Chantal Toporow EUROPEAN COORDINATOR: Anders Rydberg Copyright © 2015 Society for Scientific Exploration The authors, artists, and photographers retain copyright to their work. ISSN 2330-4545 (Print) Cover image: Stocksnapper/iStock ISSN 2330-4553 (Online) EDGESCIENCE #23 • SEPTEMBER 2015 / 3 ❛THE OBSERVATORY❜ Michael Brooks Beyond the Safe Zones of Science Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ou might think it’s hard to take science by surprise. After wrote about his life’s work shortly before his death. He said, Yall, aren’t scientists the clever ones, the know-it-alls? Aren’t “I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself they revered as the people with answers to every question? now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than It’s certainly true that science has made extraordinary ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered inroads into discovering how the universe and everything before me.” It’s not true: much of what he did was reaching within it ticks along. Science has been successful for the most into the murky water and pulling out surprising new truths. part in explaining why things are as they are. But in the process Many have followed in his footsteps, moving out of the they have also discovered the broad horizon of their ignorance. safe zone, venturing beyond the very limits of our knowledge That is not a problem; on the contrary, it is an enormous and peering into the gloom until they could make out the gain. In science, ignorance is not something to be ashamed of, vague shape of something intriguing. Then, grabbing all the something to hide, but something to acknowledge and explore. tools at their disposal, they plunged into the water, intent on Just as the tide’s ebb and flow created the perfect conditions bringing that shadowy form back on to dry land. for life to arise at the edge of Earth’s oceans, the place where It is a dangerous thing to do. Here at the edge of uncer- certainty gives way to uncertainty—the shoreline of our igno- tainty we have discovered shocking things—things that have rance—is fertile ground indeed. made some scientists beat a hasty retreat. It was here, for In much of science, the parts we know well, there is rela- instance, that Henri Poincaré discovered that a resolution to tively little to be gained. Here, further up the beach, we might certain anomalies in electromagnetic theory would require determine a constant to another decimal place; there, we seek rethinking the nature of time. Poincaré was too perturbed to make a slightly more accurate measurement of the time it by the discovery to press on; it was left to Albert Einstein to takes for a signal to travel between neurons in the brain. We venture into dark waters and hunt out the special theory of find a catalyst that will make a chemical reaction happen a little relativity. The astronomer Arthur Eddington had once done more quickly or efficiently. We discover another distant star to some work that suggested the existence of black holes, but enter into our catalogues, and so on. Such incremental gains he hated the implications: that there were rips in the fabric are always there for the taking, pebbles to be turned over and of the universe. So when Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar con- inspected. These advances are added to the canon of science, firmed the suggestion with a mathematical proof, Eddington but they don’t change anything—not really. That is why they railed against it, and made Chandrasekhar’s life a misery. don’t make front-page news. Newton was too humble when he Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet was another fugitive from Henri Poincaré Albert Einstein Arthur Eddington Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar 4 / EDGESCIENCE #23 • SEPTEMBER 2015 unwelcome truth; when he performed an experiment showing again. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “All great truths begin that humans lacked free will, he dedicated the rest of his life to as blasphemies.” proving himself wrong. Good science—important science—can Where science does have a problem is in the fact that our be as unnerving as it is enlightening. collective memories are so short. Once that resigned accep- Sometimes work at the edge of uncertainty is without tance of a discovery comes, we forget that there was once such tangible fruit: it simply uncovers our ignorance. From time a kerfuffle. We act as if this truth were always with us, that it to time, for example, we will discover that our previous scien- is self-evident. We forget the decades of persecution someone tific understanding was built on a flimsy foundation and must endured in order to shepherd us to the view we would now die be urgently shored up—or even abandoned. This is not the to defend. And so we become comfortable—so comfortable disaster it might seem, because science is fickle: it reserves the that we will wantonly persecute the man or woman who comes right to change its mind. Some scientists might make definitive to disturb our newfound peaceful state. statements, but others must then take on the task of trying to undermine them. Very often they succeed: new experiments, Excerpted from At the Edge of Uncertainty: 11 Discoveries new thoughts, and new discoveries turn our thinking on its Taking Science by Surprise by Michael Brooks. Copyright © 2014 head, reverse a trend, expose the flaws in previous experi- by Michael Brooks. Published in 2015 by The Overlook Press, Peter ments, or poke holes in a celebrated scientist’s thinking. The Mayer Publishers, Inc. www.overlookpress.com. All rights reserved initial result is usually panic or denial, anger or derision—often all of the above. Eventually, though, after months, a year, a MICHAEL BROOKS holds a PhD in quantum decade or a century, there is resigned acceptance of the new. physics and is the author of Free Radicals Until, that is, someone dares to take in the view from the new and 13 Things that Don’t Make Sense. He edge of uncertainty. That novel perspective inevitably leads is a consultant at New Scientist and has to further revisions and revolution. “Everything we know is a weekly column for New Statesman. His only some kind of approximation,” Richard Feynman once website is michaelbrooks.org. said. “Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.” This is where Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein did their work. All the revo- lutionaries have been challenged, accepted, then challenged Visit the new SSE website at scientificexploration.org EDGESCIENCE #23 • SEPTEMBER 2015 / 5 Eric Wargo Trauma Displaced in Time: 9/11 and the Terrible Enjoyment of Psi “I felt a great disturbance in the force . as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.” —Obi-Wan Kenobi danhowl/iStock n the morning of September 11, 2001, my alarm awoke Ome around 6:30 A.M.