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Home > Investigating Skeptics > Mediawatch > Observer at Large > Telepathy, Stamps and Fuzzy Logic
5. Telepathy, Stamps and Fuzzy Logic
by Guy Lyon Playfair
Britain in the Forefront
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Telepathy made the headlines at the end of September 2001. A
whole page of the Daily Mail, half a page of The Observer and a
sizeable chunk of BBC Radio 4's Today programme were all devoted
to it. What could have attracted so much of the media's attention
to a subject they normally avoid like the Black Death?
It all began when the Royal Mail issued a set of stamps to
mark the centenary of the Nobel prizes, together with a
presentation set containing a brochure for which six British
Nobel laureates were asked to write short pieces about their
subjects. One of these was Professor Brian Josephson, FRS, who
won a prize for physics in 1973 for his work in solid-state
electronics. His contribution ended:
"Quantum theory is now being fruitfully combined with
theories of information and computation. These developments may
lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within
conventional science, such as telepathy - an area in which
Britain is in the forefront of research."
Something immediately hit the fan, the first handful being
slung by Oxford physicist David Deutsch. "Utter rubbish," he
spluttered to The Observer (30 Sept.). "Telepathy simply does not
exist." This opinion came from somebody alleged to be an expert
on time travel, something for which there is no credible evidence
at all, in contrast to the whole shelves of evidence for
telepathy backed up by some pretty impressive statistics.
The paper's science editor Robin McKie suggested
patronisingly that Josephson had "gone off the rails" as other
laureates had in the past when holding forth on subjects other
than their own. The transistor pioneer William Shockley, for
instance, gained well-deserved notoriety for his extremely
offensive views on race. McKie seems not to have noticed that
Josephson, (both a Cambridge physics professor and a longtime
member of the Society for Psychical Research). was making a well-
informed comment about his own field.
True to its tradition of scrupulously fair balance, the BBC
confronted Josephson with psychologist Nicholas Humphrey and
conjuror James Randi, neither of whom are
Nobel laureates, Fellows of the Royal Society, or even
physicists. Let's hear it first from Mr Randi:
"There is no firm evidence for the existence of telepathy,
ESP or whatever we want to call it, and I think it is the refuge
of scoundrels in many respects for them to turn to something like
quantum physics, which uses a totally different language from the
regular English that we are accustomed to using from day to day,
to merely say oh, that's where the answer lies, because that's
all fuzzy anyway."
Humphrey was slightly more coherent:
"Well, I think the idea that quantum physics explains the
paranormal is an unnecessary idea, because there's nothing to
explain. If Brian Josephson could produce the goods by showing
that there is evidence for telepathy or psychokinesis, or metal
bending, or anything else, then we have a problem, but we haven't
got any evidence."
This came from a former holder of the Perrott-Warrick
research fellowship in psychical research, who pocketed an
estimated £75,000 without doing any noticeable research at all,
and even managed to get shortlisted for the Koestler chair of
parapsychology at Edinburgh.
Josephson, who must have felt he was trying to argue with
somebody who insisted that the Earth was flat, explained
patiently and in perfectly regular English that the concept of
mind being linked to matter was "absolutely standard physics". He
might have added the words attributed to his Trinity predecessor
Isaac Newton when somebody made a silly remark about alchemy:
"Sir, I have studied the subject and you haven't."
(You can find the whole stamp saga on http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/ bdj10/#stamps
Copyright © Guy Lyon Playfair
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