Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold - Softcover

Broderick, Damien

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9781560259862: Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560259868 ISBN 13: 9781560259862

Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007

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The paranormal — phenomena "beyond the normal,” manifested by apparent experiences of telepathy, remote viewing, psychokinesis, and precognition, or the prediction of future events — has been comfortably dismissed as fiction by many reasonable folk. But as 21st-century science explores the world of quantum mechanics — where one particle can be in many places at the same time — what has seemed impossible becomes just another part of our strange universe.
Award-winning author Damien Broderick, investigates possible relationships between parapsychology, evolutionary biology, and quantum (and other) physics. Here is a serious but popular treatment of paranormal claims and current attempts to explain them. Broderick has been in direct contact with many of the major players in this curious realm, including the scientific director of the long-classified U.S. government-supported study known under various codenames and, as Star Gate, closed in 1995 by the CIA. But the research continues, now privately funded.
Can we predict the future? Read other minds? Outside the Gates of Science suggests we just might be able to do so.

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About the Author:

Damien Broderick is an internationally respected writer, critic and theorist, and holds a multidisciplinary Ph.D. in the comparative semiotics of science and literature. Currently living in Texas, he is a Senior Fellow in the Department of English, Melbourne University, Australia.

From Publishers Weekly:

Broderick, best known as a science-fiction writer, returns to nonfiction (after 2001's The Spike) to evaluate various research programs investigating "psi phenomena." Divided into two branches, psi phenomena cover anomalous cognition, which includes telepathy, remote viewing and other forms of "non-material" communication; and anomalous perturbation, psi-mediated action or psycho-kinetics. Broderick remains analytical and objective throughout, reviewing the work of such laboratory programs as the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research group, the Science Applications Incorporated Corporation and the CIA-backed Stargate; recounting their experiments' designs, methods and procedures, Broderick then goes on to examine rigorously the resulting data. He concludes that while the evidence for various kinds of psi phenomena is strong, there are unknown (and possibly unknowable) factors that make classical, reductionist methods of testing it unpredictable and irreproducible (the reason, he suspects, that the CIA gave up on such research in 1995). Gratifyingly, Broderick connects the search for psi phenomena to larger philosophical questions while remaining skeptical and delightfully rational throughout.
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