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I’m so excited about this new magazine EdgeScience! And it’s coming out from the Society for Scientific Exploration. You can download the first issue for free.
There’s an article about the Global Consciousness Project by Roger D. Nelson that I look forward to reading. Consciousness is one of the areas I’m most curious about.
The article has a great Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pull quote. “It is our duty—as men and women—to behave as though limits to our ability do not exist. We are collaborators in creation of the Universe.”
(Brief aside: I once did a piece for NPR about the Vatican’s search for a patron saint for the internet. A lot of people wanted Pierre Teilhard de Chardin because of his ideas about the Noosphere, and I did too, but he wasn’t eligible because he is not, and likely never will be canonized a saint.)
Here’s why I think this magazine is good news. I was asked to write a “PS” section for the paperback edition of my book. One of the things I go into briefly is the loss to science when anomalies are dismissed. I used the discoveries about audio hallucinations made by Dr. Louisa Rhine as an example. Had the scientists of Dr. Louisa Rhine day paid attention to her papers the recent “discoveries” being made in this area today—that people hear voices more than we knew, and that it isn’t necessarily a sign of mental illness—would have begun fifty years ago and we would be that much further along in understanding what is happening and why.
It reminds me of this professor at Hunter who once got up at one of J. B. Rhine’s lectures and denounced him. Rhine kept his cool and invited the professor, Dr. Bernard Reiss, to try the experiments himself. Reiss did and got statistically significant results. Later, at an APA conference, Dr. Reiss was criticized by a Dr. Britt for publishing his results so soon. Reiss stood and said:
“I undertook the experiment as a way of demonstrating to my classes that ESP did not occur. I did not succeed in that,” he told the crowd. “I do not know whether Dr. Britt believes in throwing away good data just because he doesn’t precisely understand the full implications of that data, but I felt they should be reported.”
A new publication to report findings that would otherwise be ignored or belittled is something to celebrate. So check out EdgeScience!
