The latest book by Cosmos fiction editor, Damien Broderick, is a scrupulous study of parapsychology and the alleged phenomena commonly grouped as 'psi': paranormal links between individuals and the external world, including other people.
Commonly posited psi phenomena include clairvoyance (perception at a great distance), precognition (non-inferential knowledge of future events), and psychokinesis (paranormal action of the mind on the external world).
Inexplicable forms of perception and knowledge, such as clairvoyance and precognition, are sometimes grouped as ESP or, more formally, as 'anomalous cognition', while psychokinesis is classified formally as 'anomalous perturbation'. What makes all of these paranormal, if they actually do exist, is their failure to conform to any existing, well-corroborated body of scientific theory, and the inability of science to produce any routine replication of them.
The difficulty for any author of a book like Outside the Gates of Science is that it's impossible to please two groups of readers simultaneously – and relatively easy to displease both. One set consists of enthusiasts about paranormal phenomena, who are likely to subscribe to various supernatural or wildly speculative explanations. The other consists of diehard sceptics who are dismissive of the claimed phenomena or hope for a forthright debunking.
Broderick is resistant to all supernatural explanations and unwilling to adopt the wilder flights of fancy from science's shadowy fringe. At the same time, he concludes that any fair and thorough review of the accumulating evidence will identify a residue of genuinely anomalous outcomes: statistically-significant, and sometimes qualitatively dramatic, data that defies easy explanation in terms of fraud, wishful thinking, biased interpretation, or poor experimental design. Although a sceptic myself, I can't deny that Broderick builds an
impressive case for his position.
It remains a mystery just how the full range of documented observations can be accounted for within our scientific image of the world, or how that image might need to be modified. Alas, it's one thing to have a body of seemingly anomalous data, but another to have even the beginning of a reputable theory to explain it.
