The UNEXPLAINED Mysteries of Mind Space and Time

Psychical discoveries of the 19th century conflicted with the scientific picture of the Universe.But,as ARCHIE ROY explains,the scientists' complacency was shaken as they were forced to adapt their ideas to their own 'irrational' findings THE GREATEST OBSTACLE to acceptance of paranormal events is not the lack of evidence but the firmly entrenched belief that such events are impossible. Many eminent psychical researchers have drawn attention to this phenomenon - and,much to their dismay,have discovered it in themselves. Professor Charles Richet,a renowned physiologist and Nobel Laureate, a keen, sceptical and long-term researcher into alleged psychic phenomena, wrote the following after his carefully conducted series of tests of Eusapia Palladino,the famous - some would say notorious -physical medium: Charles Richet, a French physiologist, was convinced of Eusapia Palladino's genuineness But at this point a remarkable psychological  phenomenon made itself felt; a phenomenon deserving of all your attention. Observe that we are now dealing with observed facts which are nevertheless absurd, which are in contradiction with facts of daily observation; which are denied not by science only, but by the whole of humanity -facts which are rapid and fugitive, which take place in semi-darkness, and almost by surprise; with no proof except the testimony of our senses, which we know to be often fallible. After we have witnessed such facts, everything concurs to make us doubt them Now,at the moment when these facts take place they seem to us certain, and we are willing to proclaim them openly; but when we return to ourself, when we feel the irresistible influence of our environment, when our friends all laugh at our credulity - then we are almost disarmed, and we begin to doubt. May it not all have been an illusion? May I not have been grossly deceived?... And then, as the moment of the experiment becomes more remote. that experiment which once seemed so conclusive gets to seem more and more uncertain, and we end by letting ourselves be persuaded that we have been the victims of a trick. Right: Katie King, allegedly a spirit materialised by the medium Florence Cook (visible at the left of the picture), photographed at a sitting in the home of Sir William Crookes. In the foreground is Dr Gully, another investigator. Katie was sufficiently substantial to be able to accept gifts of jewellery from an admirer. Crookes was one of the most eminent of those scientists who were open-minded enough to investigate mediumship and courageous enough to vouch for its authenticity Everard Feilding, one of the most cautious investigators of the paranormal also testified to the disorientating effect of prolonged contact with the incredible: The effect of all this on my mind was singular. I appeared to lose touch with actualities. Once admit the possibility of such things - and the mere fact of investigating them implied such an admission - where could one stop? I wrote at the time that I gradually began to feel that if a man seriously told me that the statue of the Albert Memorial had called in to tea I should have to admit that the question to be solved  would not be the sanity of the narrator but the evidence for the fact. Walter Franklin Prince in his book The enchanted boundary wrote of the strange spell psychic phenomena seemed to cast over many respectable men of science: they became so immediately antagonistic to the claims of psychical researchers that without bothering to examine the evidence,they rushed into condemnatory print in terms so strongly emotive that, in any other field of scientific research, they would have lost any reputation they enjoyed. Left: dark ectoplasm is extruded from the navel of 'Margery' (Mrs Mina Crandon), an American medium active during the 1920s. Margery sat for a committee that was appointed by the magazine Scientific American. Her failure to convince them helped to strengthen the widespread conviction that science was in conflict with psychical claims. She was proved guilty of fraud on another occasion One must not tumble,however,into the  common pitfall of believing that because a pioneer is at odds with the establishment regarding alleged new discoveries, he or she must be progressive, an unacknowledged genius unjustly persecuted by a hidebound and reactionary authority. As Marx put it -Groucho, not Karl -They said Galileo was mad, and he was proved right. They laughed at the Wright brothers, but they did fly. They thought my uncle Waldorf was cuckoo - and he was as mad as a hatter! There is, of course, another strong motive for immediate antagonism towards psychical research and its findings from the intellectual establishments a motive best expressed as a sort of equation of irrational identification: psychical research spiritualism = the occult = black magic = witchcraft the superstitious dark ages from which science has rescued mankind In the second half of the 19th century especially, scientists and other learned men looked back in horror at the follies, the cruelties and the miseries imposed on the population of Europe by the superstitious persecution of 'witches'. It is estimated that during the witchcraft mania a quarter of a million people suffered torture and a hideous death at the hands of their tormentors. Nineteenth-century thinkers, having seen the light of science dispel the darkness of those earlier ages were determined to withstand any movement that threatened to extinguish that light. The belief in the impossibility of psychic phenomena was largely created because of the success of 19th-century science. It explained a host of celestial phenomena by applying Newton's law of gravitation and his laws of motion. One of the outstanding scientific successes of the century was the prediction of the existence of the planet Neptune, on the basis of its gravitational effects, before it was discovered with telescopes. Science came to understand a wide variety of natural phenomena, integrating in a seemingly universal theory of the physical world a large number of formerly separate fields, such as heat, light, electricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell's beautiful equations of electromagnetism gave an almost complete understanding of the electromagnetic field, leading ultimately to radio. In technology, too, Man's increasing use of his scientific knowledge in building bridges, ships, factories and trains, demonstrated how firmly based his mastery of nature was. It was not surprising that the only fear of scientists towards the end of the 19th century was that there seemed few, if any, jungles of ignorance left to be explored. One scientist expressed the belief that most scientific effort would henceforth be devoted to measuring physical constants to more decimal places. The billiard-ball Universe In this climate of opinion, most informed people believed that space, time, mass, the atom, energy, and so on were clearly understood. A body was made up ultimately of hard, billiard-ball-like atoms. Each atom always had a well-defined position and velocity. One could describe its space coordinates - its position - to any desired degree of accuracy, and by bringing in Newtonian time, which flowed uniformly, the rate of change of its space co-ordinates - its speed - could bee expressed uniquely. Matter was indestructible: it could change its form from solid to liquid to gas, but it could never disappear - or appear. Energy likewise was indestructible, thought, too, could change its form. The potential for useful work stored in a coiled spring, in an electric storage battery or in a hot gas was energy in its different manifestations. In search of the ether Left: a massive table floating on mercury provided a stable support for the optical instruments used by Michelson and Morley Below: a light ray is split into two components. One travels parallel to the supposed ether wind, one at right angles to it be rotated. In the orientation shown, one beam (A) would first be slowed down as it travelled against the ether wind, and then speeded up as it travelled with it. The net result would be that it took longer to make the round trip than beam B, which travelled across the ether wind. Michelson and Morley compared beams A and B and could find no difference in their travel times. Yet it was unthinkable that the Earth did not move. The only tenable solution was Einstein's theory of relativity, which abandoned the concept of the ether and drastically revised our ideas of space and time. Light is now regarded as sometimes behaving like a wave motion - though not requiring any physical medium for its transmission -and sometimes behaving like a stream of particles. The crisis of Victorian science was marked by many baffling experimental results. One of the most important was obtained by the American physicists A. A. Michelson and B. W. Morley in1'887. Light was a form of wave motion and so, it seemed, must be carried in some extraordinarily tenuous and all pervasive fluid, as sound waves are carried in air. Since the  Earth moves in its orbit around the Sun at 18 miles (30 kilometres) per second, a strong ether 'wind' must be blowing over the planet. Michelson and Morley devised a sensitive experiment to detect it. A light ray was sent to a 'beam splitter', a mirror that partly reflected and partly transmitted the light. The whole apparatus could It looked, too, as if the functions of plants and animals could ultimately be resolved into physical and chemical processes. Man, too, was beginning to be understood. The great physiologists and neurologists such as Hughlings Jackson seemed to be demonstrating by their their pioneer studies of neural processes that a sound mind presupposed a sound brain.The impairment of personality and mental functions caused by brain lesions of various kinds led many to the belief that the concept of mind was superfluous. More and more researchers were adhering to 'epiphenomenalism',which asserted that mental events were purely a 'side effect of brain activity - reflecting it, but not influencing it, so that an understanding of brain activity would be sufficient for an understanding of all mental processes. The brilliant physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who conjectured that light waves were undulations in a subtle medium, the ether. The overthrow of the concept of the ether marked the fall of Victorian physics There were two other major theories, though they were losing their adherents.Parallelism regarded mental and neural events as running in parallel. without either being the cause of the other. This also made understanding of the brain sufficient for scientific purposes. Interactionism maintained that mind was as real as brain, existed separately from it, yet interacted with it. This would make an understanding of mental processes dependent on, but not entirely reducible to, processes in the brain. Very few thinkers at the end of the 19th century still believed this. As far as the soul was concerned, it is fair to say that a good proportion of intelligent people refused to entertain such an outmoded and elusive concept. Lip service was still paid to the Church but, more and more, death was looked upon as the final annihilator of all human hopes. Most people, in fact, refused to think seriously about it at all until faced by the grim reality. Frederic Myers, the great pioneer of psychical research, was once in the company of a Victorian businessman whom he attempted to engage in conversation about Man's possible survival after death. The businessman was obviously uneasy and embarrassed. He refused to discuss the matter. Finally Myers asked point blank: 'What do you think will happen to you when you die?' His companions answer was; 'Why, I suppose I will enter into the joy of my Lord, but why talk about such an unpleasant subject?' It is no wonder then that the alleged phenomena studied by psychical researchers found no lodging in the house of late-19th-century science. Telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition and retro-cognition - all these branches of the paranormal were inexplicable according to the 19th-century world model. 'I'hey were, in fact, downright impossible. Only a deluded and gullible fool would believe them. And as if these weren't enough, what about the bizarre phenomena of the seance room, where mediums went into trances, were controlled by spirit guides and claimed to bring together the spirits of the dead and those still incarnate in this world? There were also many fully investigated eases of hauntings, both of places and of people. Above: matter proved to be transparent to x-rays - a 'paranormal' discovery of science, made by W. K. Röntgen in 1895 The Great Exhibition of 1851, held in London, showed off the machinery and manufactures of the Age of Progress. Superstition was in headlong retreat before science, which, it seemed, would make mankind the master of the planet Again, these things were impossible according to science and most scientists still ignored them or dismissed them with generalities about faulty reporting, fraud and human gullibility. Yet among psychical researchers over the next century there were to be numbered some of the keenest and best-trained minds in Europe and the United States. For example, of the 52 presidents of the British Society for Psychical Research, 26 have held chairs in science or philosophy in universities, 10 have been Fellows of the Royal Society, four have held the Order of Merit and three have been Nobel Laureates. They have included the physicists Lord Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson, and Sir Oliver Lodge, the philosophers Henri Bergson and Henry Sidgwick, the classical scholar Gilbert Murray, the psychologist and philosopher William James, and many others equally renowned for their intellect and research achievements. Left: the evolving concept of the atom. Democritus, a Greek thinker of 400 BC, regarded atoms as indivisible and made of one basic kind of 'stuff' (A). Differences in their shapes determined how they joined together and accounted for the properties of compounds. In 1803 John Dalton proposed that there were scores of qualitatively different types of atom (B). He was able to work out the relative weights of some of them. Only with the discovery of the electron was it realised that the atom was made up of smaller parts. J. J. Thomson suggested that atoms consist of electrons (negatively charged), surrounded by a cloud of positive charge (c). But Rutherford showed that electrons orbit around a central nucleus (D). Thus matter, apparently so solid, is largely empty space A change of climate The critical and condemnatory atmosphere of former times has to some extent changed since the 1950s. Controlled experiment in psychical research has confirmed the occurrence of many types of psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychometry, precognition and psychokinesis. For almost half a century, ever since the pioneering researches of J. B. Rhine in the newly created Parapsychological Laboratory at Duke University in North Carolina, workers in various parts of the world have conducted carefully controlled laboratory experiments on the paranormal. They have amassed results that could not be due to mere chance. If these had been produced in some other, 'respectable', research field they would have been universally accepted as valid. An increasingly large number of departments engaged in parapsychological research in the United States, Europe and Russia have enlisted the aid of modern science and technology. Among the more interesting have been the psychic dream experiments carried out at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, where dreams were analysed to see if they had been influenced by the pictures studied by experimenters in other rooms as the subjects slept (see page 586). At Cambridge University's Department of psychology, Dr Carl Sargent and his collaborators found that scenes watched by others influenced the images in the minds of conscious volunteers who had been relaxed and subjected to sensory deprivation. The new climate of opinion among professional scientists is mainly due to a growing realisation that the 19th-century model of the Universe is no longer valid. The physicists of the 20th century have demolished the old structure and in its place have installed a model possessing such wild properties that it makes the world of paranormal phenomena appear staid. With the construction of a new scientific world view, it no longer seems impossible that paranormal phenomena could be reconciled with science. Warfare in the modern age -Vietnamese children flee a napalm strike on their village. In the 20th century human beings have inflicted suffering on each other on a larger scale than ever before. The human race - sadder and, perhaps, wiser than the crowds who thronged the Great Exhibition in 1851 -looks towards the future not with confidence but with a grim foreboding This new model could not have been foreseen by the Victorian physicist. It resulted from totally unexpected discoveries made towards the end of the 19th century. In 1881 two American physicists, Michelson and Morley, tried to measure the Earth's velocity through the luminiferous ether, a medium supposed to carry light waves and to pervade the whole of space. They found themselves totally unable to detect its presence. It required the advent of relativity theory to explain this baffling state of affairs (see page 854). In 1895 W. K. Röntgen discovered xrays: a year later A. H. Becquerel noticed the blackening of an unexposed photographic plate in the presence of uranium and potassium compounds, thereby stumbling on radioactivity. By 1897 J. J. Thomson had reached a stage in his epoch-making researches where he was able to show that electrons - electrically charged particles -were over 1000 times lighter than the lightest atoms. The first steps into the strange world of the atom had been taken. Soon Einstein published his first papers. At the same time late-Victorian certainty was being further shaken by a parallel revolution, stemming from the discovery of the subconscious mind. Freud and Jung were embarking on their researches, which were to demonstrate that Man was not even master of his inner sanctum, the mind. In the world of the psyche, laws operated that were as alien to common sense as the new laws of quantum mechanics. The bestiality and irrationality still present in that psyche became all too plain during the 20th century. Science was the handmaiden of many of the centurys worst excesses, and forfeited its claim to be the guardian of progress. Science was no longer regarded as possessing a veto over claims formerly considered superstitious - at the very time that its own internal development was permitting it to become more open to paranormal phenomena. On page 854: how the physics of the 20th century has  'dematerialised' the Universe

Reproduced from THE UNEXPLAINED p801