The hidden variables in nature

What do philosophers William James and Henri Bergson, astronomer Camille Flammarion, zoologist Sir Alister Hardy, quantum physicist David Bohm, psychologist William McDougall, mathematician Sir Oliver Lodge, anthropologist Margaret Mead, discoverer of cathode rays Sir William Crookes, inventor of Xerox Chester Carlson, Freud, Jung, J J Thomson who discovered the electron and the Nobel laureate neurologist Sir john Eccles have in common?

They have all been presidents, members or affiliates of the Society for Psychical Research which was founded more than a century ago to study events and processes overlooked or not understood by mainstream science. The Society still exists.

Its raison d�������tre was illuminated by William James, the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. ���Tunnel vision��� he called it, saying it was a kind of perception of external reality where we tend to look at the ���out there��� through a formal funnel of self-imposed ignorance that only undermines whatever the thrust of consciousness tries to develop in us.

And that it then becomes increasingly easy to criticise investigations into anything other than the known ��� thanks to an overriding materialist scientific approach ��� so that a lot of us automatically assume that a sense of healthy derision is an axiomatic function of what normal thought processes should be.

Moreover, it is so casually assumed these days that science is merely nano-seconds away from unravelling the mysteries of the cosmos that most of us begin to spend our whiles ��� leisure time or academically ��� in trying very hard to believe that we believe this.

True, the Society still exists today but, ironically, and in fact from about the same period as its inception, it
didn���t need to. For that was when two of the greatest upheavals in science ��� relativity and quantum mechanics ��� revolutionised our cosy classical concepts of normalcy. Today, we know that we know only about 4% of what exists in our universe because the rest, comprising some 96% of whatever it is that remains ���out there��� is made up of something called dark matter and dark energy of which we have no idea yet.

As the Cambridge philosopher, professor C D Broad was often fond of saying: the problem with any theory is not with what it covers but with what it doesn���t. This penumbral residuum is what ultimately catches up with our complacence.