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There has been, of course, some considerable prejudice against mental telepathy and things of this kind, because of its arising in the mystic business of spiritualism and all kinds of hocus-pocus in the nineteenth century. Prejudices have a tendency to make it harder to prove something, but when something exists, it can nevertheless often lift itself out.
One of the interesting examples is the phenomenon of hypnotism. It took an awful lot to convince people that hypnotism really existed. It started with Mr. Mesmer who was curing people of hysteria by letting them sit around bathtubs with pipes that they would hold onto and all kinds of things. But part of the phenomenon was a hypnotic phenomenon, which had not been recognized as existing before. And you can imagine from this begi
Another principle of the same general idea is that the effect we are describing has to have a certain permanence or constancy of some kind, that if a phenomenon is difficult to experiment with, if seen from many sides, it has to have some aspects which are more or less the same.
If we come to the case of flying saucers, for example, we have the difficulty that almost everybody who observes flying saucers sees something different, unless they were previously informed of what they were supposed to see. So the history of flying saucers consists of orange balls of light, blue spheres which bounce on the floor, gray fogs which disappear, gossamer-like streams which evaporate into the air, tin, round flat things out of which objects come with fu
If you have any appreciation for the complexities of nature and for the evolution of life on earth, you can understand the tremendous variety of possible forms that life would have. People say life can’t exist without air, but it does under water; in fact it started in the sea. You have to be able to move around and have nerves. Plants have no nerves. Just think a few minutes of the variety of life that there is. And then you see that the thing that comes out of the saucer isn’t going to be anything like what anybody describes. Very unlikely. It’s very unlikely that flying saucers would arrive here, in this particular era, without having caused something of a stir earlier. Why didn’t they come earlier? Just when we’re getting scientific enough to appreciate the possibility of traveling from one place to another, here come the flying saucers.
There are various arguments of a not complete nature that indicate some doubt that the flying saucers are coming from Venus—in fact, considerable doubt. So much doubt that it is going to take a lot of very accurate experiments, and the lack of consistency and permanency of the characteristics of the observed phenomenon means that it isn’t there. Most likely. It’s not worth paying much more attention to, unless it begins to sharpen up.
I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. (Incidentally, I must explain that because I am a scientist does not mean that I have not had contact with human beings. Ordinary human beings. I know what they are like. I like to go to Las Vegas and talk to the show girls and the gamblers and so on. I have banged around a lot in my life, so I know about ordinary people.) Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that’s true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it’s possible or not but whether it’s going on or not. Whether it’s probably occurring or not, not whether it could occur.
That brings me to the fourth kind of attitude toward ideas, and that is that the problem is not what is possible. That’s not the problem. The problem is what is probable, what is happening. It does no good to demonstrate again and again that you can’t disprove that this could be a flying saucer. We have to guess ahead of time whether we have to worry about the Martian invasion. We have to make a judgment about whether it is a flying saucer, whether it’s reasonable, whether it’s likely. And we do that on the basis of a lot more experience than whether it’s just possible, because the number of things that are possible is not fully appreciated by the average individual. And it is also not clear, then, to them how many things that are possible must not be happening. That it’s impossible that everything that is possible is happening. And there is too much variety, so most likely anything that you think of that is possible isn’t true. In fact that’s a general principle in physics theories: no matter what a guy thinks of, it’s almost always false. So there have been five or ten theories that have been right in the history of physics, and those are the ones we want. But that doesn’t mean that everything’s false.We’ll find out.
To give an example of a case in which trying to find out what is possible is mistaken for what is probable, I could consider the beatification of Mother Seaton. There was a saintly woman who did very many good works for many people. There is no doubt about that—excuse me, there’s very little doubt about that. And it has already been a
There was a girl who had acute leukemia, and the doctors don’t know how to cure her. In the duress and troubles of the family in the last minutes, many things are tried—different medicines, all kinds of things. Among other things is the possibility of pi
A special tribunal is arranged to investigate this. Very formal, very careful, very scientific. Everything has to be just so. Every question has to be asked very carefully Everything that is asked is written down in a book very carefully. There are a thousand pages of writing, translated into Italian when it got to the Vatican. Wrapped in special strings, and so on. And the tribunal asks the doctors in the case what this was like. And they all agreed that there was no other case, that this was completely unusual, that at no time before had somebody with this kind of leukemia had the disease stopped for such a long period of time. Done. True, we don’t know what happened. Nobody knows what happened. It was possible it was a miracle. The question is not whether it was possible it was a miracle. It is only a question of whether it is probable it was a miracle. And the problem for the tribunal is to determine whether it is probable that it is a miracle. It’s a question to determine whether Mother Seaton had anything to do with it. Oh, that they did. In Rome. I didn’t find out how they did it, but that’s the crux of the matter.
The question is whether the cure had anything to do with the process associated with the praying of Mother Seaton. In order to answer a question like that, one would have to gather all cases in which prayers had been given in the favor of Mother Seaton for the cures of various people, in various states of disease. They would then have to compare the success of the cure of these people with the average cure of people for whom such prayers were not made, and so forth. It’s an honest, straightforward way to do it, and there is nothing dishonest and nothing sacriligious about it, because if it’s a miracle, it will hold up. And if it’s not a miracle, the scientific method will destroy it.