Peter Wadhams is Professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Marine Sciences Group in the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Ignoring Positive Evidence for "Psi"

Dear Scott,

I agree with you, and it puzzles me too. The cumulative evidence for the existence of psi, for instance, is absolutely overwhelming, both from carefully framed statistical experiments designed to detect tiny effect sizes and from case studies of more spectacular spontaneous cases. It was already overwhelming by about 1900; the Society for Psychical Research had been founded in 1882 and during its first twenty years carried out, and published, studies which firmly established the existence of the basic forms of psi that we recognise today. Yet, as you say, the impact on general scientific thinking has been underwhelming. In any other branch of science, such evidence would have provoked drastic rethinking of theoretical frameworks and a major global research effort. Yet psi today scarcely seems to enter the consciousness of most scientists. Stephen Hawking doesn't even consider it when he thinks of what needs to be included in a "theory of everything".

And there is positive persecution of scientists who try to investigate such phenomena while holding down a post in the conventional scientific world. When taxed with this, the best that conventional scientists can come up with is to say "Well, there have been no repeatable experiments". yet a vast number of repeatable experiments showing positive effects can be pointed to - a recent example is the work of Robert Jahn at Princeton on PK. Not only is this ignored, but it could not get published in a major mainstream journal (Nature has a ban on papers on psi) and Jahn himself was persecuted and demoted at Princeton. There is something deeply wrong with the group psychology of scientists today - not with science itself, but with the way it is practised. I don't know what can be done about it. As you say, when even overwhelming proof is ignored, what do you do?

Peter Wadhams

This memo from a Cambridge University professor of physics will give people some idea just how powerful the thought police are in the Theocracy of Great Britain. Only "experts" who can be relied upon to put the case for the mind and brain being the same - that so-called psi does not exist - are allowed anywhere near the British press, radio, television and educational outlets in our "free" country.

It's no mystery why the scientific proof of survival - a separate mind and brain - is censored. It means nothing less than the total collapse of the religious and scientific establishments throughout the world. Far too many powerful fat cats with too much to lose from the wrath of public opinion. No balance is allowed:

"...and this is how things will remain all the time good people continue to do nothing."

Voltaire