Why is it acceptable to believe in quantum mechanics, or Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance', and yet it is considered folly to believe in extrasensory perception? I use belief in its truest form, for it takes faith to persist in the multi-billion-dollar search for fragments such as the God particle. Why is entanglement of subatomic particles admissible to physical scientists and yet precognition is described as pseudoscience?
If you look up subatomic particles on Wikipedia, you’ll find dozens of them, each with bizarre names like muon and neutrino. Some of them have been named despite the fact that there is no categorical evidence to support their existence. This is said to be because quantum mechanics is still an in its infancy. Much of the suppositions are based on advanced mathematical probability, and the missing linkages between particle behaviour and waveforms. There is still much to be learned. That is a fair assessment.
Why it is okay to fabricate the existence of particles in an imaginary sub-atomic realm, and spend billions in the search for proof, but it is not scientific to examine the possibility of telepathy? Millennia of anecdotal evidence are dismissed as superstition and folklore. Stories from every religion, race, country and hemisphere, acknowledge human extrasensory perception in one form or another. Many of the incidences may form myth and legend, but surely not all can be attributed to exaggerated storytelling, or a fundamental chemical response triggered in the brain.
There are simply too many occurrences for these phenomena to be shoved into a weird science category and ignored. Admittedly, popular fiction has done little to enhance the credibility of such occurrences, but the same can be said for science fiction. There are just as many alien and viral plague stories as there are ghost stories. Why is science fiction so often labelled as visionary, but tales of precognition and contact with the afterlife, ludicrous?
Might it be possible that further to our five known senses, which monitor our physical environment, we may have as just many unknown senses to collect information from our non-physical environment? Could it be that we have sense receptors that are as undetectable to the naked eye as a quark or neutrino?
Just forty years ago, surgeons would happily remove a grumbling appendix from a four-year-old child, content in the knowledge that they would have no need of this vestigial and redundant organ. Today, we know better. The complexities and function of this digestive and limbic organ is still not fully understood, but enough is known not to whip it out at the first sign of inflammation. At least medical researchers are willing to put the time and effort into discovering more about the finger shaped protrusion hanging from our intestines. It can be seen; therefore, it can be tested. Our mind cannot be seen, yet we accept that it is present, same with our memories and sub-consciousness.
It was Thomas Kuhn, who stated that anomalous results within experimental protocols are routinely dismissed as error, until such a time when the anomalies outnumber that which was expected. It is at this point, when old paradigms of belief are abandoned in favour of the new. How long will it take for traditional scientists to accept, that their paradigm must shift, to include the irrefutable fact, that we are more than the sum of our sub-atomic particles.
Are we not more sensitive as a collection of human beings than the best supercomputer available, or the devices used to smash atoms into those Godly fragments? Was Einstein really referring to our mental abilities to collapse a waveform at a distance, when he spouted those fateful words? When will pseudo-science become simply, science?
Sam Nash is the author of the thriller series, The Aurora Conspiracies, available now at most ebook distributors. You can find her at https://www.samnash.org or on Twitter @samnashauthor or Facebook.com/samnash.author.