Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses [Kindle Edition]

There is a disturbing new trend in "popular science" to justify New Age and mystical beliefs using misinterpreted scientific ideas. Most experimental physicists are content to ignore this trend and continue in their research, regardless of how people choose to interpret it. Others are careless enough to make ambiguous statements about physics and the nature of reality that add fuel to the fire of pseudoscience. Victor Stenger is a refreshing voice of reason, with a solid background as a respected experimental physicist.

First of all, Dr. Stenger is not attacking parapsychology. Rather, he is defending science from those who try to corrupt it by putting parapsychology on the same level, or use scientific ideas to support unscientific theories. Science, specifically physics, has a rigorous standard of evidence and experimental verifiability under controlled conditions. Any theory that claims to be scientific must meet these standards to justify that claim. Psychic powers, and the other supernatural phenomena addressed in this book, have never met these standards.

To summarize, this book is not anti-supernatural, it is just pro-science. Dr. Stenger does an excellent job of showing that supernatural phenomena are not scientifically established, and probably never will be, or they would have been experimentally verified a long time ago. If you choose to believe in the supernatural, feel free, but don't try to justify your beliefs scientifically.

Victor Stenger seems to think that his play on words in the title of his book will excuse him from his total ignorance of Demonstrative Science. His Scientific Method deals only with things that cab be reached by the senses things you see, touch,feel, smell, or handle, but if we were limited to that, Sherlock Holmes would never track down his criminal, since he can neither see, feel or touch him.

The question is so elementary that I am surprised that Dr. Stenger did not come across it in his first year of Philosophy, as I did. His sciemtific method is what I call "Hound Dog Science" and can be used by police when they try to track dowm a criminal: even a Hound Dog can use it. But Forensic Sciemce would never find criminals if it was limited to what Dr. Stenger would call the Scientic Method. They use Demonstrative Sciemce as well.

A Hound Dog can follow a scent over hill and dale and track down a criminal from the smell of his trousers, but Sherlock Holmes can determine everything about the man from reasoning: his height, his weight, and even what he had for breakfast that morning - from a few clues.

Victor Stenger would make a good Hound Dog, but he would make a lousy detective, since he does not know how to reason on his physical evidence. His Scientific Method is Hound Dog Science, and all he can get is the snell of the man's trousers. Demonstrative Science, using reason alome, can identify the man, who he is and where he came from and those characteristics that make him unique and different from any other person on the face of the earth.

Hound Dog Science cannot demonstrate that God exists, but Demonstrative science can, because a cause can be known by the multiplicity of its effectsm and the effects in this case are the universe revealed by Cosmological Science and the variety, multiplicity and nature of the effects revealed by Physics, the earth and life sciences, since these are the effects of the Big Bang, which marked thje beginning of the universe. "Elementary, My Dear Watson!"

And here is the prize in the package: Below is what you come up with when you peek behind the Big BAng, and Dr. Stenger may deny it, but I'll trust Sherlock Holmes any day to a scientist who has a hiddem agenda behind his Science and tries to prove his Atheism by a method that went out with Edgar Allen Poe and the Maltese Falcon.

`Yes, this is what you come up with when you put all the facts into the hopper and shake it well with a little reasoning:

"There is one First Being, possessing the full perfection of all being, Who of the abundance of His perfection bestows being on all that exists, so that He is not only the first of beings, but also the beginning of all."

And what else does Demonsrative Science tell us?

"God is not confined in time, He is eternal and without beginning or end. His n be taken way from Him, nothing added. And His name is HE WHO IS. His grandeur exceeds incomparably anything that we can know, for He is boundless."

And what is the instrument that discovers this and can tear its secrets out of thje Cosmos?

"This is the earthly goal of Man: to evolve his intellectual powers to their fullest, to arrive at the maximum of consciousness; to open the eyes of his undestanding upon all things, so that upon the tablet of his soul, the order of the whole universe and all its parts may be enrolled."

And I will add thus further, which Dr. STenger could never have discovered with his Hound Dog Science:

"Our intellect in knowing is extended to infinity. This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain, if there were no infinite object of knowledge....The end and ultimate perfection of human beings is to transcend the whole order of created things through knowlefge and love and to advance to the First Cause, which is God."

Now, children does that make a lot more sense than a book that carefully makes the point that Physics and Psychics do not belong together, which no one questioned im the first place.

Father Clifford Stevens
Boys Town, Nebraska

This book is good in that it identifies problems in understanding the paranormal in terms related to physics, especially relativity and quantum physics. The author indicates that the new world of quantum mechanics and relativity makes it improbable that the paranormal is real, even more so than the world of Newtonian physics. I personally do not agree with that conclusion. Quantum mechanics and relativity have demonstrated that the real world may be different than commonly assumed, however the author has suddenly concluded that all paranormal phenomena is fraud, delusion, you name it, anything but a possibility that it is true, and thus is making the same mistake as those who were so convinced that Newtonian mechanics was the final world that they refused to consider anything else. In my opinion I am very skeptical that all paranormal phenomena is fraudulent, resulting from wishful thinking, delusion, etc. There is just a bigger world out there than we have imagined and which remains to be explained.