Paranormalia: Didier and Robert-Houdin

The clairvoyant, the magician and the proto-psi-cop

Science 'solves' mysteries

Mary Rose Barrington has posted below on the encounter between the clairvoyant Alexis Didier and the magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin. On its own, the story is worth retelling, but Mary Rose has added an entertaining twist: a sceptic's recent and quite desperate attempts to explain it away (March 23, 'The clairvoyant, the magician and the proto-psi-cop). This is Randi's Million Dollar Challenge in reverse, without the cash, obviously, and without the histrionics. Many thanks, Mary Rose.

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Occasional thoughts about consciousness, spirituality and psi research, by Robert McLuhan, a journalist and author living in London.

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‘These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in.’ Alan Turing

‘I have noticed that if a small group of intelligent people, not supposed to be impressed by psychic research, get together and such matters are mentioned, and all feel that they are in safe and sane company, usually from a third to a half of them begin to relate exceptions. That is to say, each opens a little residual closet and takes out some incident which happened to them or to some member of their family, or to some friend whom they trust and which they think odd and extremely puzzling.’ Walter Prince

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative. Arthur C. Clarke

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Arthur C. Clarke

‘Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.’ Thomas Henry Huxley

We can always immunize a theory against refutation. There are many such immunizing tactics; and if nothing better occurs to us, we can always deny the objectivity – or even the existence – of the refuting observation. Those intellectuals who are more interested in being right than in learning something interesting but unexpected are by no means rare exceptions. Karl Popper

Didier and Robert-Houdin

March 23, 2010

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