Paranormal versus Artifacts
October 14, 2002
First Part.
Should scientists venture into this extremely slippery terrain? I answer yes, otherwise it would mean that taboos exist in science. Yet, in principle, there should be none. But in practice, science functions like a religion. Many scientists, for example, have never wanted to touch the subject of UFOs, adopting an irrational attitude as a result. This is why the subject has been abandoned to the "bandar-logs." I can recall an anecdote. I have a friend, an exceptionally courageous and honest researcher. He is one of the men I respect most, in every way. Moreover, he is a scientist of great stature, author of major discoveries. For a quarter of a century, every time the subject of UFOs came up in front of him, he would raise his hand in denial, saying to me:
— You know my views...
Each time, I refrained from pressing further. But a few months ago, I suddenly dared to question him.
— Have you read my books on the subject?
— No...
— Then, have you read any books written by others on this topic?
— Uh... no!
I didn't press further. It was clear that he considered it unnecessary to learn more about a subject he deemed, a priori, empty and meaningless. He had answered me in perfect good faith. Yet he has known me for twenty-five years, and he is fully aware of my scientific work. It would never occur to him to think that I am an unserious researcher, and he has even defended me vigorously on occasion. But astonishingly, he never asked himself: "How is it that Jean-Pierre Petit, whom I consider a very solid scientist, has devoted so much time to studying the UFO dossier?"
What caused this man to show no interest in the subject? It wasn't, as is the case with many of our colleagues, out of fear of negative repercussions on his career. It was simply because he knows nothing about it. In fact, the UFO subject is generally poorly understood by scientists. We have a false impression of scientists' openness of mind in general. They are specialists, and many of them, even if they excel in their field, are not particularly curious about what might lie beyond their "cognitive horizon." They are just as susceptible as the average person to mass brainwashing.
The world of the "paranormal" is also a scientific taboo. Yet we are all confronted with questions of a transcendent nature, with death being the most immediate. I once questioned theoretical physicists about how they imagined the afterlife. To them, it seemed simply... nonexistent, a question devoid of meaning. Many live with a rather naive materialist view of the entire universe. Some even believe that one day we will discover the famed "Theory of Everything" (TOE or Theory of Everything), and that the entire universe—its past, present, and future—could be deduced from some kind of mathematical formalism, perhaps even a "definitive equation." This is, for example, the position of a man like
Hawking,
who wrote in A Brief History of Time:
— The universe contains itself, and if it has neither beginning nor end, then what purpose does God serve?
When one reads such statements, one is tempted to exclaim:
— At a time when metaphysics is in crisis, it is reassuring to see that the philosophy of the pub remains strong.
The Nobel laureate in neuroscience, Edelman, expressed his conviction that "one day humans will be able to manufacture thinking, conscious robots." With such individuals, one gets the impression of finding no philosophical distance at all. The scientist, in fact, is primarily a man who believes he has the right to pronounce on anything. Most are completely unaware that any system of thought is merely an organized system of diverse beliefs. Some physicists firmly believe that the universe has four dimensions—three of space and one of time. I now quote a phrase from an astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky, with whom I had the extraordinary fortune to sail on a boat, who once said:
— If only theorists knew what lies behind an experimental measurement, and if observers knew what lies behind a theoretical calculation, they would take each other much less seriously.
An organized system of beliefs operates through a hypothetico-deductive mechanism:
— If... this and if... this, then... that.
This produces a linguistic machinery called a
paradigm,
which functions like a kind of "hamster wheel" within which the thinking person pedals unknowingly. Advances in knowledge come through
paradigmatic leaps,
and are essentially discontinuous. One might even use the word
catastrophe,
in the mathematical sense. Etymologically, it comes from the Greek
kata
: "beside" and
strophedein,
"to turn." If discourse could be compared to music produced by a phonograph, sometimes the sapphire jumps a groove, and a completely new melodic phrase abruptly takes over, utterly different from the previous one. A quick example: for who knows how long, schools taught that orogeny—the emergence of mountains—was due to what were called "geosynclines." This is how one could find seashells on high elevations. It was a theory very difficult to grasp, which we had to memorize almost by heart. I would be delighted if someone could produce a text from the 1950s evoking that fabulous intellectual fairy tale, which then held the force of law. You know the rest of the story. As soon as the first artificial satellite was launched into orbit, used to collect echoes and measure Doppler shifts, the continental drift—long considered the last absurdity by meteorologist Wegener—was immediately demonstrated. Geophysicists then rushed to reconstruct their vision of the planet. But instead of permanently honoring this visionary who had died (who hadn't merely noted the similarity in the coastlines of West Africa and South America, but had also established continuity in both the nature of the terrain and even in animal species), they preferred to name the new discipline
plate tectonics.
Thus, those who lived through the past sixty years experienced a fairly significant paradigm shift during their lifetime, since the continents they lived upon suddenly began to move. This is rather comparable to the abandonment of geocentrism, when the Earth suddenly began to move through space.
What is extraordinary is the way people, starting with scientists themselves, forget these shifts. After a very short time, they live as if their knowledge "had always been there." They have no awareness of the constant flux in their perception of the world. Between two leaps, an era-specific conformity is established based on...