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Feb. 27, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:00
Edition 107 - Mathematics and The Paranormal

Can mathematics and science explain paranormal phenomena... Yes, thinks US Maths ProfessorJames D Stein, the author of The Paranormal Equation

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Many thanks for coming back to the show and thank you for the great traffic of emails that I've had lately.
You know, one of the hallmarks of success in this peculiar business of broadcasting that I've made my own for these last couple of decades is the fact that you know that you're doing well when you get more feedback.
Occasionally, of course, you're not doing well and you get lots of feedback.
People will tell you that you're not.
But usually, it's a hallmark of you doing well.
And the email traffic for this show seems to be going up exponentially.
So it's like growth on growth on growth.
It's like building a brick wall very fast.
And that wall's getting pretty high now.
Amazing, really, when you consider that there's only you, me, and Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, involved in this thing.
You know, that's just three people.
Tiny, tiny little operation.
And in the broadcasting firmament, a little drop in the bucket.
And yet here we are talking to the United States, talking to Canada, talking to the United Kingdom, speaking to the entire world.
It is a tribute to the way that modern technology works.
And I could only have dreamt of this when I used to sit up late at night in Liverpool, trying to hear WABC across the Atlantic on 7.70 a.m., 77.
Look where we are now.
I can listen to WABC whenever I like, or I can listen to Radio Live from New Zealand whenever I want, or 2GB from Sydney whenever I like.
If I choose to do that, any station, anywhere.
That's how things have changed.
But it's also empowered this new technology, people like me, with broadcast backgrounds, to come and talk to you directly.
And that's the exciting thing about the unexplained.
If you're new to the show, you'll soon discover what we're all about here.
We are about pushing back the bounds, talking about the paranormal, conspiracy theories, and the unusual and the unexplained, but doing it in a professional and journalistic way.
And I hope that we're on the way to achieving that.
Of course, we don't always hit the mark and not everybody will agree that we're doing well.
But if the average is pretty good, then you're probably doing all right.
That's not to say that I would ever get complacent about this.
Now, I promised I would do some of your emails this time.
A lot of you went to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, and not only registered a hit, but sent me some feedback.
So I'm going to go through some of your emails.
Unfortunately, I can't get through them all, but thank you very, very much for them.
Mark wants a comment forum on the website.
Mark, good idea.
We've been thinking about this for a couple of years, and we want to do it right.
So we're not going to do it until we've got a plan for it.
But good thought.
Dino Forland, thank you for your suggestions.
Gene in Nova Scotia.
How's Nova Scotia, Gene?
Thank you for your suggestion of retired U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon and his thoughts.
Tony, liked Judy Wood.
Not everybody did, as you will hear.
Tommy in Northern Ireland, good to hear from you.
Chris in Michigan liked Judy Wood as well.
Alex, let's say that Alex is not Judy Wood's biggest fan.
Andy in Fazakali, thank you for your email.
Fazakali in Liverpool.
Pronounced in Liverpool, Fazakali.
I know Fazakali well.
I used to get the bust of Fazakhali.
Frederick in Sweden, thank you very much for listening to The Unexplained.
Same to Laurentino in Portugal.
Good points you made.
Andrew Kemp thinks, and Andrew, I understand entirely what you say here, and you do have a point.
You think that to an extent on the hurricanes you let Judy Wood with her theories about what really happened, she thinks on 9-11, I let her off the hook on that point.
That was partly, and I know that I let that point kind of slip away, but it was partly because of time pressure.
She had so much to say, and we only had an hour to do it in.
But, you know, that's kind of letting myself off the hook now.
So thanks for that, Andrew.
Will liked Judy Wood's theories immensely.
Nathan in North Carolina wants me to talk about stone circles in the US and UK.
Good thought.
Bon Grover, thank you for your great email.
All of the points noted, Bon.
Mark Conlon, thank you.
Ashley Matamo in Carmel, California, who says that Ashley is obsessed with the show.
Really?
Thank you very much.
Joe Marino in Dublin, Ohio.
Good to hear from you.
And Dane in Cape Town.
Dane, how's it?
Like they say, in South Africa.
I've only just learned how to pronounce Freniken.
I probably haven't even done that properly.
So many pronunciations in South Africa.
It's hard to get them all right.
But Dane, good to know that you're listening.
Now, this time round on the show, after the Judy Wood show, we're going to get back to a mainstream scientific show.
I know that my listeners are kind of divided, aren't you?
Into people who love the science and people who love the paranormal stuff.
So next time we're going to talk about Ouija boards.
That'll be a good show.
But this time, science and how science could possibly explain the paranormal.
We're going to get on right now to a man called Jim Stein in the United States, who is a man of learning, as you will hear.
And he has some theories about the paranormal being fully explainable by the likes of mathematics.
So Jim Stein in Long Beach, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
Howard, it's a pleasure.
Thank you for inviting me.
Well, lovely to be talking to you.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
One thing we've got to get clear from the beginning, it's not a big question of science at all.
It's the pronunciation of your name, because I think the Brits tend to say Stein, and I'm not sure if your name is Stein.
So can you set me right on that first?
Is it Jim Steen, Jim Stein?
My family has always pronounced it Stein, but when you stick Stein at the end of a name, such as Bernstein or Feinstein, things change.
And I'm not exactly sure what the pronunciation rules for it are if you stick it at the end.
But a lot of my ancestors were German, even though some of my ancestors were Irish and English.
And visiting your relatives who have an English accent is really a little disquieting.
I find it disquieting and I'm English.
You want to try being called Howard Hughes.
You know, I arrive in America and they say, you're putting me on Howard Hughes.
He died years ago.
Lots of money.
Yeah, we have lots of money that I certainly don't have.
We've sorted out the name thing then, Jim.
How is Long Beach at the moment?
We've got winter here in the UK.
I keep hearing radio reports from the US, from KFI Radio, other stations in your area telling me the weather's very nice.
Well, the weather is bright and sunny today, but we've gone through an abnormal cold snap.
Normally in the winter, you don't always have the experience of walking out and finding that your windshield actually has ice formed on it to some extent in California.
But that's happened to me twice.
So maybe that has something to do with the reports of global warming possibly being incorrect.
That could be.
Gee, I thought there was a law against ice in California, but they didn't allow it.
Only in drinks.
We angst like it in drinks.
Now, Jim, tell me a little bit about yourself.
Professor of mathematics, right?
That's correct.
I went to undergraduate school at Yale, studied math, minored in physics, went to the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, which was absolutely the greatest time to be in Berkeley.
Very interesting period.
And I've been interested in math and science ever since.
But some of your listeners might wonder why I wrote a book called The Paranormal Equation.
Well, we'll get to that, but I just want to take you back to your background here, because you very modestly skip over the fact that it was Yale and Berkeley, but two of the greatest seats of learning.
Well, that was due to the fact that it wasn't as tough to get into the greatest seats of learning back in the 1950s as it is now.
You're very modest, I think.
But Berkeley, from what I remember of reading history, studying politics, which I did, that was one of the crucibles of revolt against the Vietnam War, wasn't it?
Absolutely.
And as a matter of fact, I had sort of an interesting experience with that a little later on.
I signed a petition along with about 5,000 other college professors that appeared as a one-page advertisement in the New York Times.
There were just a list of college professors' names saying essentially we protest the war in Vietnam.
And all of a sudden, FBI men showed up and asked my neighbors about me.
So that kind of stuff really happens.
Yes, it really did.
I mean, I'm not saying that they tapped my phone lines.
For all I know, they did.
Nowadays, I just, but at least nothing untoward ever happened to it.
And I proceeded comfortably through the academic system.
Nowadays, they just fly drones over your house, I think.
Yeah, exactly.
Actually, your cell phone knows where you are.
So I assume the government knows where I am, too.
I guess so.
I don't know whether that's a good thing or whether that's a bad thing.
I'm tending towards the bad, but that's a whole other subject.
It's bad when they come for your income as an income tax.
Oh, yes.
We all know about that, Jim.
Okay, so why, for a man who's interested in mathematics, that's your life, and a man of hardcore scientific values, I would have thought, how come the interest in the paranormal and paranormality?
What's that all about?
Well, it comes from two sources.
First of all, when I was young, I was interested in practically everything is when you're young.
I read a lot of science fiction and I read the newspapers.
And one of the books that I read was a novel called Slan by the author A.E. Van Vogt.
And I read it when I was an impressionable young boy.
And it was about a teenage girl telepath.
And I sort of fell in love with a heroine.
And also there was an incident called the Bridie Murphy Incident.
I don't know whether or not you're familiar with that.
Let me tell you, I know the name, but I don't know what it's about.
Okay.
In the 1950s, a psychiatrist put a Colorado housewife under hypnosis and subjected her to something called past life regression.
Oh, she was the most famous.
Yes, I do remember the most famous regression case.
Exactly.
And it was front page on the New York Herald Tribune, and they serialized it, and I kept reading it, and I was fascinated in it.
But later, it wasn't proven to be fraudulent, but it was probably debunked in the sense that it was found that the housewife had a neighbor named Bridie Murphy Corkle, who had probably imparted a lot of her experiences to it, and the housewife had just simply forgotten those recollections.
And also, from a personal standpoint, several of my friends, who are mostly left-brain, you know, scientist types like myself, have very unusual ideas.
The best mathematician I know believes in reincarnation and tells me that he can prove it logically and scientifically.
I'm a little skeptical.
And one of my good friends, who's a Harvard-trained doctor, an eminently successful medical researcher, has told me that he has walked into rooms several times in his life and known exactly what's going to be in the room before he walked into them.
And this same doctor, when I was talking to him, said, you know, Jim, there are three types of facts in the universe.
There are the known facts, the unknown facts, and the unknowable facts.
And of course, we immediately knew what a known fact was, something like Mount Everest is the highest mountain on the planet.
We've measured them all.
That's it.
And it's also easy to see what an unknown fact might be.
For instance, whether or not there's life on Mars, which is certainly of interest to me.
And you may remember that in 1984, they found a meteorite in the Antarctic, which they could tell came from Mars.
And there was a suspicion that it might have shown traces of previous life there.
Well, I hope we get to Mars.
I even more fervently hope we get there in my lifetime so we find out the answer to that question.
But whether we do or we not, or whether we do or we don't, either there is life on Mars or there isn't.
It's an unknown fact.
But it occurred to me, what does he mean by unknowable fact?
And a few years ago, I was writing another book.
Can I stick in a shameless plug here, Howard?
You can.
Terrific.
The name of the book was called How Math Explains the World.
And in writing that book, I realized that mathematics had come to grips with the concept of an unknowable fact in the 1930s due to a brilliant development by an Austrian mathematician, Kurt Gödel.
And I had never seen that anyone had bothered to look at what Gerdel discovered and look at possible applications, if you would have it, to the real world.
Because what Gödel discovered was that there are truths in mathematics that are unprovable.
And this came as an absolutely staggering blow to the mathematical community.
Because when you do mathematics, and one of the things that I've discovered is that people are really happy when you talk about mathematics.
They enjoy it like shows like Numbers or A Beautiful Mind.
But when you actually sit down and do it, oops, all of a sudden they're not so comfortable.
So I'm not going to do it.
I'm just going to talk a little bit about it.
People tend, and I know I do, I was never fantastic at maths, although I used to get the task when I used to do news bulletins that had to be exactly 180 seconds for a network.
I used to get the task of adding, in the days before computers did that for you, I used to get the task of adding up the copy that I had to read to make the exact 180 seconds that we needed.
So I was good at that part of it, but the rest of it, equations and all the rest of it, always passed me by.
But the one thing I do think is a fact, and you see that more and more, that mathematics provides people with a sort of warm certainty in an uncertain world, I think.
As far as we know, here are some laws and they are reasonably universally applicable.
And that gives you a nice warm feeling that a lot of things in our life now that we see around us can't offer.
Howard, I think you're absolutely right.
And one of the things that has been discovered is that, at least in the United States, is if you ask elementary school children what their favorite subject is, almost always they'll say arithmetic or mathematics at the time.
And then later on, when they get to sixth or eighth grade or further on than that, all of a sudden it's slipped to the bottom of the list.
And one of the reasons that I suspect it's very much of a favorite of theirs early on is that children like a certain amount of structure.
I mean, you know, they always, psychiatrists tell us that children like to know what the boundaries are.
And if nothing else, mathematics has well-defined boundaries.
It's not vague and children can appreciate that.
And I think other people appreciate that too.
And I was starting to explain what it was that Gurdel discovered that was so astounding.
If you remember your high school geometry, even you don't have to even remember it.
I'll just recount it.
There's something called the Pythagorean theorem, which is a theorem about right triangles.
It was discovered 2,500 years ago.
And obviously, because there are an infinite number of right triangles, Pythagoras couldn't go around measuring every single possible right triangle to see whether or not it was true.
The entire human race, given all the time in the universe, can't do that.
Just not enough time.
So what he had to do was he had to prove it logically.
And so what mathematicians always felt is that mathematical truths dealing with infinite systems could be proven.
We may not be able to find the proof because we're just not bright enough, or we don't have enough time because it might be a proof that is so long that it takes billions of years to write out and then you're never going to get it done.
But at least the proof was there to be found.
And what Gerdell found is that in any infinite system, there are truths which simply cannot be proven.
And this absolutely blew everyone away in the mathematical community.
And one of the things that has always interested me, not just my friends have been interested in the paranormal, but a lot of great scientists, including the greatest of them all, Isaac Newton, was certainly interested in alchemy.
And he had a glimpse of some of the things that Gerdel was talking about, because in his later life, Newton, who was not the most modest guy on the planet, he had a very healthy appreciation of Isaac Newton, was asked how he saw himself and his discoveries.
And he said, I seemed to be as a child playing on the seashore with a prettier pebble or a lovelier shell than ordinary, while all around me, the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.
And I think most scientists have that sense that even when they discover something, whether it's a minor fact or whether or not it's an actually something that we would deem significant, they still realize there's so much that we don't know.
And what Gurdel did was he showed that it's not just stuff we don't know, it's stuff that we can never know because mathematics is simply not powerful enough to actually show this stuff.
And what I've always thought, or at least I started thinking when I was writing the other book, is that this possibly provides an explanation for some of the things that we don't understand and we may never understand.
And probably the greatest scientist of the 20th century was Albert Einstein.
And everybody knows the equation equals mc squared.
Even if they don't know what it means, they recognize it that it's some iconic truth about the universe.
And it isn't necessary to know what it means for the purpose of this discussion.
But nonetheless, it's an equation which relates basic physical parameters of the universe.
It actually relates energy, mass, and the speed of light.
And it occurred to me that if what Gurdel was saying was true for infinite systems, and if the universe were an infinite system, and that's something that many cosmologists believe at the moment, that the universe is indeed infinite.
We haven't proved it, but I've read a lot of cosmology and it conflicts with none of the existing theories of cosmology.
It's perfectly consistent with them that the universe is infinite.
And if the universe is infinite, my contention is that there are relations between the physical parameters that make up the universe, things like energy, mass, length, time, force, information, stuff like that about which the universe is constructed, that are unknowable and are related to each other in the form of an unknowable truth.
And it's possible, although quite frankly, I don't think it's likely, that this might affect things such as paranormal phenomena.
But I do think that there are phenomena in the universe that it affects.
Whether or not the phenomena that it affects actually affects us may not be known because, of course, there's a lot of stuff that's going on in the universe that simply doesn't affect us because our species is limited into what it receives and the information that it receives, the sensory data, the different types of forces and energy that are in the universe that can affect us.
But nonetheless, it's possible that this may go some way to at least, if not explaining, provide some sort of rational justification for believing in these phenomena.
So Jim, we've got through a lot of ground, fascinating ground there.
We've covered an awful lot in that couple of minutes.
Is what you've just said to me a paradigm?
In other words, an explanation for now until we discover something better?
Or is it an explanation for all time?
Is it the one size fits all?
Wow, that's a little bit difficult a question to answer.
I'm not even sure that it constitutes a paradigm because in my opinion, a paradigm really only occurs when all of a sudden a large segment of the community starts to believe it.
And when we change, and the scientific community does change, I'm fond of saying, I guess I don't think I have any really memorable sayings to my credit, but if I do have one, I'd like to be known by science isn't the last word, it's just the latest word.
And the latest word sometimes changes.
We have a great history of that in science.
And that's one of the beautiful things about science.
I mean, even though I'm to some extent a believer in paranormal phenomena, I need to see it justified or proved to a greater extent than it has been.
But nonetheless, I'm at least open to accepting it, which a large number of the scientific community may not be so open to it.
But as you said, there are more and more people, and certainly that's the impression that I get, more and more people of science who are willing to build this into their, not exactly belief system, but certainly thought process, which is quite exciting, really.
What you've discussed here is a way for people of science to actually, without shame, without embarrassment, investigate the paranormal.
I think so.
And it's not that I'm providing any sort of justification, because at the moment, you've got the heavy hitter in this area residing in the UK.
There's a man named Brian Josephson who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum mechanics.
Now, you cannot get any higher up the scientific tree of approval than winning a Nobel Prize.
Brian Josephson was an unquestionably brilliant student, an unquestionably brilliant physicist, and he believes strongly in paranormal phenomena.
He's written papers on connection between quantum mechanics and various paranormal phenomena such as telepathy.
And in doing so, he's incurred, if not the wrath of the scientific community, at least there are a lot of people who've basically said, Brian, you're full of it.
And my feeling is that in a universe in which we've just discovered in the past 40 years that we don't know what makes up 95% of the universe, and I'm referring to the discoveries of dark matter and dark energy.
Dark energy won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year.
So, and we only literally discovered its existence 10 or 11 years ago.
But the matter and energy that we know in the universe only comprises 5% of the universe.
So 95% of what is a total unknown to us.
And my feeling is that in the universe in which you don't know 95% of what even makes it up, to say nothing of how it relates to other stuff, I really don't think that science should close the books on the paranormal.
I think what science does have to do is it does have to say to itself, okay, there haven't been any really solid proofs of paranormal phenomena at the moment.
That's perfectly acceptable for science to say.
It's also acceptable for people to realize that science is a monetarily driven enterprise.
People who invest in science, and science requires money.
I mean, it requires scientists to investigate it.
It requires equipment for scientists to do the investigations with.
So you need money.
And most scientists are not extremely well paid.
Back in the 1700s, the scientists were mostly relatively well-to-do individuals.
True enough.
Well, that's certainly the British tradition, you know, Rutherford and people like that over here.
However, in this day and age, as you rightly say, money is the key to everything.
Money's the problem.
I would guess it would be very hard to get one of the big foundations and one of the big industrial conglomerates to invest money in research into paranormality, or maybe I'm wrong.
No, I think you're right.
In fact, I've had a discussion with an individual who was an orthodox science in the United States and a successful one.
And after a while, he realized that this wasn't what he was interested in doing.
He was interested in investigating what we would call a paranormal.
And so he went out and became a member of one of the few institutes that are devoted to investigating this.
And he described his budget to me.
And his budget is infinitesimal.
The U.S. blows that amount of money in a nanosecond.
And so does the UK.
No, we can do a better job of investing money badly.
I think you've had more practice.
We may not be able to do a better job.
We have more of it and more people, so we can do it.
So, if that is the case, even allowing for the fact that orthodox science now has a reason to do this and an explanation of why it's okay to do this sort of investigation, the problem is always going to be persuading ordinary run-of-the-mill people involved in the capitalist system to dig down into their pockets and say, okay, this stuff might potentially be important at some point in the future.
So let's give you $100,000 to go away and find out more.
Well, here's the difficulty.
First of all, I would expect that at some stage, Aunt Mildred is going to die.
And instead of leaving her money to her cats, what she's going to do is she's going to leave her money to some organization like this.
So, you know, I'm sure that some minuscule level, possibly even a larger level of funding will exist.
But the major funders of science at the moment are government and corporations.
And both of them want two things when they invest money.
They want a probability of success and they want a down-the-line payoff.
And this is perfectly understandable.
At least it's understandable to me, because when you look at it, when you're throwing money at something, you want to have something to show for it.
And for instance, if you were to ask me where I would like to see somebody invest money in a possible cure for cancer or medical research or paranormal research, I ask, what's it going to benefit me?
And of course, a government is going to ask the same thing.
And in the United States, we have essentially awards that are sort of mock awards that are given for the most ridiculous scientific investigations that are conducted because some of them certainly sound ridiculous to outsiders.
You know, investigating the sex life of fruit flies or something like that just sounds ridiculous to an outsider.
And believe me, if you start investing money in the paranormal in which there really haven't been any definitive positive results.
Now, when I say there haven't been any definitive positive results, the individual that I refer to, who's the head of the scientific arm of one of the few institutes devoted to it, feels that that's not the case.
He feels the results are in and they're definitive.
But the vast majority of the scientific community disagrees.
And I'm glad that science is conservative.
I'm glad it takes a large amount of time to budge what we think of as truth.
Or at least, if not necessarily a large amount of time, something drastic has to do it because I value science.
And one of the things that makes science so valuable is, first of all, it takes a long time for something to become accepted.
When it's accepted, we're pretty sure of it.
And in addition to which, if it was accepted because of something fraudulent that happened, and that has happened in science, science has a way of exposing it.
Because sooner or later, even if people don't do the original experiments, they'll do experiments that are based on fraudulent results.
They'll get weird answers and they'll say, hey, what's going on here?
And that's part of the problem with getting an organization to throw money at paranormal research because it's got a tainted history about it.
Well, it does.
And certainly here in the UK, there have been a lot of charlatans in previous decades, probably even now, practicing in these fields.
So there are a lot of blind alleys that you could find yourself going up or down.
If it was possible to get hold of Aunt Maud's millions and invest them into an area of paranormal research relating to science, where would you like to start?
Where do you think we should begin?
Okay, that's a question that I've thought about.
And I think what you have to do is you have to start with something simple.
I'm not exactly sure what the something simple would be because that would, you know, what I would do is if I had a bunch of money like that, what I would do is I would start by asking reputable scientists, look, I know you don't believe this stuff.
What would it take to convince you?
And how could we convince you from an economically feasible standpoint?
Because, you know, if you look at some of the things that science builds, science builds Hubble telescopes and it builds superconducting supercolliders and all sorts of multi-billion dollar investments.
And you're not going to get that in the paranormal, in paranormal research.
But if you were to get a reasonable chunk of money, what you don't want to do is you don't want to go around investing in your favorite project and essentially preaching to the choir, because there are a large number of people who believe in paranormal phenomena.
As a matter of fact, something that astounded me when I started looking into this, there was a survey of college professors taken in the United States in the 1990s, and over 50% of science professors believed that either ESP was a real phenomenon or very likely.
And science professors, you know, they're, you know, they're scientists.
They knew what the story was.
They knew that Joseph Ryan had done a lot of research, 40 years at Duke University, and had basically come up with not much to show for it.
But let's be frank about it.
During the Cold War, we do know anecdotally and physically, definitely, that the U.S. government and the Soviet Union too were investigating things like ESP and remote viewing and that sort of thing.
And they were doing it on a serious, money-spinning, scientific basis.
But of course, both sides of the divide were covering that investment in black ops budgets, weren't they?
In under-the-counter budgets.
Okay, I'm not familiar.
I am familiar With the fact that we were investigating it.
My feeling is that the United States started investigating it because the Russians and the Chinese were investigating it.
And we didn't want to lose the space race to the Russians, and we didn't want to lose the remote viewing race to the Russians, even if there was nothing to the phenomenon of remote viewing.
And essentially, to the best of my knowledge, the successes of these projects were fragmentary at best.
I've had people tell me that they did have some success, but here's the bottom line on it.
As far as I know, these projects are not ongoing at the moment.
And what about people who claim to have come out of some of that research?
I mean, there's a guy who's been a guest on radio.
He's even in a movie.
I know him quite well, Major Ed Dames.
I've heard the name.
Well, Major Dames is one of these people behind technical remote viewing.
He's a highly, highly controversial guest on.
Whenever I get him on, I get a lot of people saying, wow, that's amazing.
And a lot of people saying, nothing this guy ever says is the case, turns out to be the case.
But nevertheless, he is a leading practitioner of this, and I find he makes a fascinating guest.
But I'm still not sure whether remote viewing exists.
Did you get any further down that particular road when you were researching this book?
Well, yes and no.
First of all, there's a very, very famous paper that was published in Nature in the 1970s by Harold Potoff and Randall Targ, who were physicists.
And they did experiments on remote viewing, which were sufficiently credible at the time to be published in what is easily the most prestigious scientific journal in the world.
So it was felt that there was something to it.
The results that they obtained were later shown to be open to question.
Now, I'd like to get back to the question you asked me of what would be a reasonable way to go about this.
First of all, if you are going to make any sort of a splash with your million dollars, and let's face it, you can spend money really, really badly.
But there's a possible way to spend it intelligently here.
And I've sort of outlined the basic idea.
What you want is you want to convince the opposition of the validity of your views.
You don't want to preach to the choir because that never does any good.
And in such a controversial field, how are you going to do that?
I don't know for myself, but I do know this.
There are a lot of competent physicists out there.
And I would think that of all the possible experiments that there are, it would be possible to devise a physics experiment, which would, I'm not sure that remote viewing is the right one to use.
It might be something like ESP or something like that, but it really doesn't matter.
I would think that if you got five physicists in a room and said, hey, look, here's $100,000.
I want you to devise a physics experiment that, if it is successful, would convince the physics community of the validity of this particular phenomenon.
I am sure you could have the physicists devise a good experiment.
I'm not capable of doing that because I'm not a physicist myself.
But the idea is that no matter what Ed Dames knows from his personal experience, it obviously hasn't convinced the majority of the scientific establishment.
And we have to trust the scientific establishment in the sense that we have to trust science.
Now, I've had people say the scientific establishment has its own axe to grind.
And yes, that's certainly true because what they want, the scientific establishment is at the top of the heap.
And science is a human endeavor.
Money goes with it.
Prestige goes with it.
Ego goes with it too.
I mean, look at the, there have been so many, we don't have time to enumerate them, but through history, the number of times that people doing great research have been stymied by orthodox science.
Look at Nikolai Tesla for one example.
Absolutely.
There are innumerable examples of that.
And that happens, you know, that happens consistently.
And because science itself is conducted by human beings, it's always going to happen.
But the beauty of science is that if somebody can come up with something that is incontrovertible, it shows up.
And my feeling is that if you get a bunch of physicists together and you say, here is a project, I want you to devise an experiment, which if it proves the results that would establish paranormality, a paranormal phenomenon of some sort, it would be accepted by the scientific community.
You could certainly construct such an experiment and you might be able to perform the experiment relatively inexpensively.
And do you think that we're anywhere near being able to do that?
Bearing in mind that this first experiment, this toe in the water, it has to be a damn good experiment.
It has to be a damn good group of people and it's got to get some damn good results.
Otherwise, the rest of this research is not going anywhere, is it?
That's true.
But at least you've got a shot in the sense that the people who believe in paranormal phenomena, I guess you could say one of two things about it.
You could say that there are those people who believe in it, but it's sort of a very evanescent type of experience in that it takes the right person, the right circumstances to come up with something in the way of paranormal phenomenon.
Now, that's not going to convince anybody, or at least it might convince other people to whom you tell them of the reality of your experience.
It convinces those people who believe in alien abductions when somebody says, hey, I had an experience of an alien abduction, but it certainly doesn't convince scientists.
And I think Carl Sagan Once said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
But I think there's also, there's also a number of scientists who investigate this who believe that the difficulty at the moment is that the extraordinary proof exists, but the scientific community won't accept it.
Now, I discussed with this individual and he showed me some of the papers that have been written in this area claiming this extraordinary proof.
And I'm not a formal scientist myself.
I'm a mathematician.
But I looked at it and I could see things that would cause me to object to this as being valid research.
I'm not saying that my objections were legitimate, but my objections would have to be overcome.
And if I could have them, I'm sure that the members of the scientific community would have them.
So what we're looking for then is presumably some kind of, before we go anywhere, some kind of great committee of scientists and the great and the good to decide on the subjects to be researched and the way that they will be researched before you do anything.
Yes.
And I think that that's necessary because the truth is that's exactly what you do when you do any experiment.
Now, in the sense that back in, you know, back, you know, hundreds of years ago, they did experiments by mixing stuff and hooking things together and seeing what happened.
But nowadays, most things, if you're going to investigate a phenomenon, there's some sort of underlying theory.
At the moment, part of the problem is that there isn't any real underlying theory of the paranormal.
But nonetheless, there are sufficiently, because the paranormal has been investigated for centuries, not successfully in the sense that, hey, everybody believes in this stuff.
It might be because we're only beginning to get a handle on the equipment necessary to investigate it.
For instance, one of the things that I firmly believe is that at some stage, telepathy will be established.
Now, I don't necessarily believe that telepathy will be established by having me think something and somebody in another room is going to pick it up in the sense that Upton Sinclair believed that telepathy was mental radio.
He wrote a book entitled Mental Radio on the telepathic experiments that he had conducted with his wife.
But what I do believe is if you take a look at the equipment we've devised, we already know that there are such things as left-brained and right-brained individual because we know that particular types of thought cause different sections of the brain to light up.
When you're thinking about sex, one portion of the brain lights up.
When you're thinking about food, another portion lights up.
When you're thinking about soccer, football to you, another thing lights up.
And when we think about something, no matter what we're thinking about, different connections in our brain are made.
That means that different types of, you know, energy is being transferred from one place to another.
Some of it is done chemically, some of it is done electrically, but it produces an effect on the outside world.
It's not a totally closed system.
And I think that as our technology increases, what we'll be able to do is we'll be able to gradually pinpoint what sections of the brain think about what.
And the problem is then going to be devising some sort of Rosetta stone, which will translate the energy patterns that we can detect associated with thoughts to the actual thoughts themselves.
And I'm not, you know, the way that I put it is I think we'll be able to tell that you're thinking about lunch rather than breakfast, but I don't think we'll be able to tell exactly what you're going to be thinking about having for lunch.
And you have to filter out of those experiments, don't you, logic and assumption?
Because this is beyond logic as we know it.
And you have to also filter out assumptions.
So if it's midday, then you would assume that your subject is probably thinking about lunch, among other things.
So you have to be able to do that.
Well, if it were my wife, she's thinking about meals three days in the future.
Because she's very person.
No, not so much psychic.
She likes to think about the food that she plans to enjoy in the sense that she's going shopping in another portion of Los Angeles.
There's a particular restaurant there in a few days.
And so she'll think about what she's going to have to eat there.
And this is this crazy question.
What star sign is she?
Oh, here's it.
Okay, let me counter with another question.
What sign do you think?
I would say a planner, practical person, is sheatorian.
No, she's a Virgo.
Okay, well, that's, you know, that kind of fits.
You know, I hope I didn't put you on the spot here, but one of the questions that I talk about is that whereas I certainly feel that paranormal phenomena are worth investigating, I think astrology and numerology and things like that make for good entertainment.
And in papers in the United States, when you see an astrology column published, there's usually a disclaimer that this column is published for the purpose of entertainment only.
But a few years ago, I saw a video about the famous scientist Linus Pauling, who was, in my opinion, one of the great minds of the 20th century.
He had a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and also another Nobel Prize for Peace.
And he was an amazing individual because when you asked him a question, he did something nobody does anymore.
He was silent for a few seconds while collecting his thoughts and then he answered you articulately in complete sentences.
Who does that anymore?
We have a mayor of London called Boris Johnson who does some of that.
You know, we get a pause, but that's because he's got such a tremendous brain that I think that that brain is assimilating what you've said, and then he'll answer in a second or two, but you've got to give him his time.
But People like that are few and far between.
Most people just speak off the top of their heads now, don't they?
Absolutely.
And I certainly fall into that category.
But anyway, Linus Pauling was giving a lecture at a college.
And during the question and answer session afterwards, a student asked him what he thought of astrology.
And Pauling thought for five seconds, and he gave what I thought was the best answer I've ever heard on this.
He said that astrology was devised a couple of centuries after the birth of Christ by possibly the most brilliant scientist of the time, a man named Ptolemy.
And Ptolemy was a brilliant scientist.
He had several other very, very brilliant and insightful theories.
But what he did was he devised the ideas of astrology based on what was known about the universe at the time.
And Pauling said that he thought that Ptolemy was such a good scientist that if he were somehow resurrected today and took a look at astrology, he would completely disown it as irrelevant and based on assumptions about the universe that he made in his time that are no longer proved to be true.
And I think that's an extremely good answer.
And I have nothing against astrology if you want to have fun with it.
I mean, I look forward when I go to a Chinese restaurant, I always look forward to my fortune cookie at the end of the meal.
Same type of thing, but I'm not, you know, even if the fortune cookie said, buy biotechnology stocks, which it never says something like that, I'm not going to do it.
And I think that take astrology and stuff like that with a grain of salt.
The problem is that whenever somebody says that on this show, and I had a very good astronomer on here a year or so ago, a lady called Heather Cooper, and she poured disdain somewhat in a very nice way on astrology.
Boy, you should have seen the emails that I've got.
And I've got a fairly scientifically minded audience here.
You know, they don't buy the fluff.
You're going.
Here's what I know about astrology.
First of all, I know what my birth sign is.
I think everybody knows what my birth sign was.
And during the 1970s, you knew that it was the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
But here's a question.
During.
I don't know if you remember the song Aquarius from the Musical Hare.
I do.
It begins, when the moon is in the seventh house and then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.
Beautiful song, beautiful lyrics, might even help to go things, to actually have that happen, because a lot of people believed in it at the time.
But ask where that information comes from.
Where did they get that idea?
Are there guiding principles of astrology that enable them to deduce it?
Did they make a huge number of observations and deduce that there was a link between Jupiter being in the seventh house, when the moon being in the seventh house and Jupiter aligning with Mars?
No, we're talking about 200, you know, a couple of hundred years after the birth of Christ.
They didn't have any databases on anything whatsoever.
So it wasn't like they had a huge database to find the link between smoking and lung cancer, which we had and which I think I'm here now because I stopped smoking as a result of that survey.
But there just really isn't any basis for any of the ideas in astrology.
And so you get to the point that a stopped clock is right twice a day.
And the statistical studies have borne that out.
There have been a bunch of statistical studies done on predictions of astrology, and they've all come up with there's essentially nothing there.
And if somebody can show me what the basis of astrology is, rather than a collection of nostrums that come from thousands of years ago, I might believe it.
And do I disagree with the fact that there's wisdom of the ancients?
There's a tremendous amount of wisdom of the ancients.
Read the great works of philosophy that the Greeks and other philosophers wrote.
Read the great religious tracts that were written thousands of years ago.
You'll find that these people had tremendous insight onto how human beings relate to each other.
But you're living in an era where they thought that thunderbolts were the results of the anger of the gods throwing them at one another, rather than we know there's static electricity these days.
They thought disease was the result of the displeasure of the gods.
And if you think that these people were capable of coming up with an incredible theory that predicted personality and behavior as the result of random astronomical alignments, I think you got another thing.
All right.
Well, one area that science may be taking us towards, and you've certainly addressed this in the book, haven't you, parallel universes.
Now, we have a growing scientific interest in quantum physics, and quantum physics might, I'm not a scientist, but might be able to help us to explain the fact that maybe there are parallel universes and there may be a rational way to explain that.
What did you make of that when you did your research?
Absolutely.
100%.
In fact, one of the big problems that quantum mechanics had, and quantum mechanics was once considered such a bizarre combination of results that at first it wasn't accepted by the scientific community.
It took a number of years before the experiments were in that definitively proved it.
But the great physicist Niels Bohr once said that if you don't think that quantum mechanics is truly bizarre and astounding, then you haven't understood it yet.
And what quantum mechanics, people wondered about, what does it all mean?
And they're still wondering.
And Niels Bohr was one of the people who said, well, we can't really decide what it means at the moment, but it gives really great measurements.
And in a sense, a lot of scientists believe that quantum mechanics is sort of like a black box that gives answers to an incredible number of questions that have enabled us to devise, for instance, the technology by which you and I are talking today.
But possibly one of the most intriguing explanations of an underpinning for quantum mechanics is what's known as the many worlds interpretation, which was propounded by Hugh Everett Wheeler, who was a student, doctoral student of the brilliant physicist John Archibald Wheeler.
I'm sorry, Hugh Everett, not Hugh Everett Wheeler.
Wheeler was his thesis advisor.
And he basically constructed a theory of parallel universes, which validated the computations that quantum mechanics was coming up with.
And for those of your readers who are interested, I would advise you to go to a website by a man named Max Tegmark, T-E-G-M-A-R-K.
He's a physicist at MIT.
He has a wonderful website, and he wrote a fabulous article on parallel universes for Scientific American in, I think, 2003.
And there's a squib there from the article itself.
I think Scientific American wants you to pay for the full article.
But nonetheless, he has his own paper, which is a little more technical on the subject, but it's a brilliant exposition.
And it's well, certainly a large portion of it is readable.
As usual, you can skip the equations, but he has sort of a taxonomy of different theories of parallel universes.
And I believe it.
I believe in parallel universes.
So does Max Tegmark.
So do many leading physicists.
As I say, it conflicts with absolutely nothing that cosmology has discovered about the universe.
And if you're one of those people who think, no, I'm not inclined to think this is so, maybe you should ruminate on the fact that scientists have just announced, I was listening to a news item the other day here in the UK, that they're on the way to developing something akin to the Star Tractor Beam on a very, very small basis.
Now, that is the kind of stuff that was Gene Roddenberry's imagination back in the 1960s.
And now we seem to be getting there.
So our knowledge is forever expanding.
That is one immutable, isn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
In fact, that's one of the things that I'm planning on doing is I'm planning on leaving a sample of my DNA behind simply that in the hopes that somebody in the 27th century, maybe some kid, will decide that what he'd like to do as a school science project is clone the 20th and 21st century mathematics professor.
And I'd be willing to come back with my brain in a jar just to find out what has happened in the intervening 500 or 600 years.
Because there is one of the things about science is it is virtually endlessly fascinating.
Every day we discover new and intriguing things.
And one of the things that I think about the paranormal is the reason that science should keep an open mind towards this is if some of the ideas that have been discussed in the paranormal, in discussions about paranormal phenomena,
if these turn out to be true, the universe all of a sudden becomes an order of magnitude more fascinating than it already is, because we're not just sitting here as added pieces on the chessboard of the universe.
We're interacting with the universe and helping to determine the chessboard as well as moving around on it.
And so I think that would be absolutely fascinating.
I think, you know, I'm a skeptic because I'm an orthodox scientist and I'm skeptical, but I'm not so skeptical that I wouldn't love to see some, you know, somebody's Aunt Millie leave $10 million for investigating this stuff.
Because I think it wouldn't require that much in the way of a budget to come out with a really knockout experiment, as I discussed earlier, which might turn a few heads and might get people interested in it.
But even so, you still have what's the payoff?
Do you believe in ghosts and life after death yourself?
Do you believe?
No.
What I'm always willing to do is I'm always willing to turn on a dime when somebody actually shows me something.
But until proven otherwise, I think I said somebody once told me I was the least spiritual person that they'd ever met.
And I actually took that as a compliment, believe it or not.
But I think that you have to, I think that, for instance, there's a lot of anecdotal material about ghosts, but I think a lot of the things about, you think you've seen a ghost, something like that, I think it's a residual hangover to some extent of when we were lesser developed animals and required more highly developed sensory reaction to our surroundings.
Now we don't require much in the way of sensories.
We do most of it with our brain.
Our brain is what's developed at the expenses of our senses.
But you watch an animal, they jump when practically anything happens.
A sudden flash of light, a sudden sound, a change in the chemical environment that enables them to smell something different.
They react to it immediately.
And there's a portion of our brain that is there.
And I think that, again, this is just speculation on my part, that we're reacting to it.
No, I don't believe in ghosts.
No, I don't believe in life after death.
But the kind of thing it seems to me that you do allow for are things like precognition, ESP, and that sort of thing, because that would somewhere down the track have an X, potentially have an explanation in science.
Potentially have an explanation, potentially be able to prove it.
I can't think of a single experiment that could be done that could prove unquestionably that there is life, you know, that we have after-death experiences or whether or not there are such things as ghosts.
But one thing I do believe, and I say this in the book, if ghosts are ever shown to be a real phenomenon, all of a sudden you're going to find departments of ghostology or whatever the word is in the science department, because scientists love to investigate new phenomena.
That's what they live for.
But they have to be at least convinced that they're not just looking at something that just is anecdotal evidence.
So they want to be convinced.
I want to be convinced too before I'll believe in it.
And Jim, in your lifetime and in your life there in Long Beach now teaching, have you ever come into contact with yourself or people close to you with paranormality?
Things that you could not begin to explain?
Well, as I said, I've had a lot of friends who have described paranormal experiences to me.
And because I believe that they are honorable people and they're also bright people, I have more credence in it than I would in just random reports of same.
But nonetheless, I haven't had any experiences like this myself.
And if you could experience something paranormal, what would you like to experience first?
You must have thought about that.
Yes, I don't think I'd want.
Wow.
Very interesting question.
I think I guess I'd have to go back to telepathy.
If for no other reason that, boy, I could make a fortunate poker.
But I think the reason that I find telepathy intriguing is I like the idea of communicating with people and communicating honestly.
And I know I conceal things, you know, everybody conceals things, but it would be nice to know honestly what people thought.
And also, as I said, one of the first experiences that I ever had that interested me in this stuff was a novel by A.E. Van Vogt.
It was written in either the late 1930s or 1940s, something like that, called Slan, S-L-A-N.
And it was a wonderfully interesting story about a young girl, telepath, living in a society that hunted down telepaths as the enemy.
And for all I know, looking at it from the perspective of somebody who's actually taken some English courses in college, it might have been an allegory.
And I didn't realize it when I was reading it.
I don't know how good an author Van Vogt was.
But nonetheless, telepathy as an idea, it intrigues me more than the others.
It may have a basis in chemicals or electromagnetism or something.
All I know is that I had one really weird experience that I've never been able to explain that could be described as a kind of telepathy.
There's a guy called Nathan Morley, who was a reporter on Cypress Broadcaster there, nice guy.
And I once had him on the radio, and I said to him, I'm sorry, I've got to ask you this, but what is the green VW Beetle, VW bug car?
It's a really old green VW Beetle.
And he paused a good long time, and he said, how do you know about that?
Because that green VW Beetle coughs its way up the hill next to my office and I see it through my open window almost every day.
How could I have known that?
I don't have an I have a possible explanation for that, if you're interested in hearing it.
It's one that I, okay, one that I propound in the book.
I think that there are a lot of experiences such as you've described, and we're talking about it now because it's such an extraordinary experience.
And I also believe that for every experience like yours, there are any number of experiences where people say, what about that green VW beetle?
And there's a pause and the other person says, what are you talking about?
I've never heard of a green VW beetle.
And this is what's known as the file drawer phenomenon.
For every exciting incident such as yours, there are any number of unexciting ones that have no, you know, that basically came up dry that are unreported.
I know, for instance, you just asked me a moment ago if I've had any paranormal phenomena, experiences.
And I've certainly had the following experience, which I know has happened to lots of people.
You wake up in the middle of the night with a dread that something terrible has happened to someone that you love or care about.
And what happens is you make a phone call to that person.
And most of the time, there's no basis for it.
And what happens is that you never report it.
And it just, you know, you say, boy, I'm glad, you know, it's just false alarm.
And you never bother reporting the false alarms.
But on the instance that it turns up correctly, such as you yourself, that's the incident that you remember.
Now, I don't know whether this is a valid explanation or not, that I happen to be talking to the one person among thousands who, when they discussed green VW Beetles with other people, you're the person who actually had the one that didn't, that came up correctly.
But I do know that the file drawer phenomenon is a recognized one in psychology and in science.
There are a lot of any, you know, the only thing that appears in journals, basically, are the studies which show something.
When the studies show nothing, nobody bothers to report them.
Well, that's food for thought and food for research as well, I think, Jim.
Jim, we're out of time.
Fascinating to talk to you.
People who do work like you do, they don't stop at one book or a number of books.
They're always working on something new.
So what are you working on now?
Well, at the moment, I have a proposal.
Well, I don't really have a proposal in at the moment, but I'm working on a proposal in a different area.
And if anybody gets interested in publishing it, I will let you know.
But I think at this moment, my agent would be uncomfortable if I talked about the idea because my agent thinks that everybody in the literary and entertainment industry, if they hear a good idea, they're going to rip it off.
Exactly.
That's exactly what happens, I'm afraid.
And sometimes I worry, you know, whether if I have a good idea or come up with something good, if I think about it too much, maybe this is just paranoia, that if I think about it too much, somebody's going to rip it off.
But that's a whole other subject.
Jim, pleasure to talk to you.
If anybody wants to know about Jim Stein, where do they go?
Have you got a website, something they can reference?
You know, I don't have a website.
They could just Google paranormal equation and they'll find the book.
But one of the things Is that I believe I'm a paid employee of the state of California.
My business is to answer questions.
And if they go to the website for California State University, Long Beach, and look in the math department, they will find me listed.
I have an email address there, and if they send me an email and ask me a question, I'll do my best to answer it.
I'll give them an honest answer.
If I can answer it, I'll give them what I think is the best answer.
If I'm just giving an opinion, I'll tell them that.
And if I say, if I don't really have an opinion or I don't know any way to validate what they say, I'll tell them that too.
And you're sure you want to put yourself up for that?
Sure.
I mean, I believe I've been teaching for over 50 years.
In those 50 years, nobody has asked me a smart-ass question.
People ask me questions because they think I know something and they genuinely want to know it themselves.
And I treat all questions with respect.
And I feel that one of the reasons that science should keep an open mind is about the paranormal phenomena is this is something a lot of people want to know about.
Treat it with respect.
In this world, as far as I'm concerned, and there isn't time for me to go into why I believe this, but I believe there is nothing better than a good teacher, because I was lucky enough to have my life rescued by a couple of good teachers back in Liverpool a long time ago.
Sounds to me like you're a good teacher and you do that wonderful thing that you encourage people to quest.
And in my book, there's nothing better than that.
Jim Stein, pleasure to talk to you.
I hope we talk again.
Thank you.
I hope so too, Howard.
And you have my number and I'd be delighted to come on your show again at a later opportunity.
It's a pleasure talking to you.
Boy, that made me think.
Did it make you think to Dr. Jim Stein in Long Beach, California, man of science and mathematics, talking about how those things may be made to apply one of these fine days to the world of the paranormal.
I think there is a great thought there that he left us with, and that's the thought that one day a great pot of money might be left by somebody to do some real, meaningful, serious, hard-nose research that I think may well produce some amazing results.
And maybe we can start with something like telepathy.
Because I've had experiences of that, and I'm sure you have too, in your life.
Whether the other stuff needs to be researched as well, the ghosts and all the rest of it, I think yes, but maybe that can follow a little down the track.
Thank you very much for keeping the faith with the unexplained.
If you want to get in touch with the show, go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, and you can click on the link and send me a message.
I'd love to hear from you.
And if you can leave a donation there, please do to help this work continue.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for devising the website, www.theunexplained.tv and for getting the shows out to you.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
And above all else, thank you to you for keeping the faith, for supporting me, and for listening to The Unexplained.
Take care.
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