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Moonlight

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ju4o:
The idea of this thread is to suggest an analogy between (1) exploration of radioactivity, in terms of:


* 1A: the weak and not very useful fizzing of natural (terrestrial) radioactivity
* 1B: the barely imaginable intensity of the energy released by the nuclear chain reaction
and exploration of psi, in terms of:


* 2A: the weak and not very useful anomalous correlations of natural psi
* 2B: the life-changing potential of trained clairvoyance


On 12th September 1933 The Times newspaper quoted from an address given the previous day by Ernest Rutherford in Leicester, at the annual meeting of the British Association ("A review of a quarter of a century's work on atomic transmutation"):


--- Quote ---The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
--- End quote ---

'Talking moonshine' is English idiom for talk that is foolishly unrealistic.

The literal sense of the word may not have been in Rutherford's mind, but there is a way in which moonshine is exactly the right description.

Reading Rutherford's quote now, a luminous correspondence between 'moonshine' and the faintly gleaming glow of the wristwatch hands of those heroic decades of the early twentieth century is unmissable.  But moonshine is the reflected glow of sunlight, which comes from the 'transformation of atoms'.

Anyway, see what happened next ... on the very same day, according to some accounts:



~Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 1987

Very atmospheric!  It is surely worth looking at in more detail.  From the same book:



This story is now famous and as such it's interesting to note that it could be quite inaccurate.  One minor detail is that, according to the British Newspaper Archive, Rutherford's address to the British Association was reported not only in The Times but in the Nottingham Evening Post.  Also in the Gloucestershire Echo, the Aberdeen Journal, the Hartlepool Mail, the Derby Daily Telegraph, the Portsmouth Evening News and the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette.  I think the author's confident assertion that it was necessarily in The Times that Szilard found the spark may be taken with a pinch of salt.

And I would be more than slightly doubtful about the traffic light which Szilard waited for to turn green.  It seems very unlikely that it would have been a pedestrian traffic light.  The first pedestrian traffic light was installed in San Fransisco in 1929.  It is scarcely believable that such a thing would have existed in London in 1933.  But if it was an ordinary traffic light, Szilard should have been waiting for red, not for green.

Anyway, here is a much more plausible version:



~The Collected Works of Leo Szilard: Scientific Papers, Bernard T. Feld and Gertrud Weiss (eds)

Now, psi.  Like with radioactivity, the key fact, and historically difficult to establish, is that it exists at all.  It doesn't matter that in its natural state it may be weak, unreliable and pretty much useless (except for glowing watch hands in the case of radioactivity, or forum games in the case of psi).  What is important is if it exists at all.  If it exists then, as a second step, it would make sense to discuss how it might possibly, sometimes, in the right and perhaps rare conditions, be intense and become awesome.

ju4o:
 
"I never knew Szilard to stop for a red light."

~Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 1973
 

Mr G:
Thanks J4 looks like you've done the hard work for us. Would you like us to try and contribute here or would you like to keep this thread relatively neat? I'll try not to make a mess.

I tried to think of definitions but it occurred to me that we're probably not the first to think of it. So if you don't mind a cheap google search effort, the question "what is psi?" (besides 6.895 kPa) points us to the site of the Parapsychological Association:


--- Quote ---It is the term parapsychologists use to generically refer to all kinds of psychic phenomena, experiences, or events that seem to be related to the psyche, or mind, and which cannot be explained by established physical principles.
--- End quote ---

In their FAQ sections, they kindly explain what parapsychology is, and what it is not:

http://www.parapsych.org/articles/36/76/what_is_parapsychology.aspx

http://www.parapsych.org/articles/36/75/what_is_not_parapsychology.aspx

(It's not long reading)

Without going into questions or affirmations of the credentials of this association, do you think these are fair outlines for discussions in your thread?

Perhaps The Rt Hon. Lord Rutherford meant to say "Moonshine", which I'm sure you'll agree is a different kettle of fission... Ahem :-X

Master X, if it so behoves our learn'd host I suggest that we wander hither...

Edit: erratum - he did say "moonshine", I had it confused with the thread title.

Mr X:
hello,

i too found myself looking up psi, and also ended up on an page from that website :
http://archived.parapsych.org/what_is_psi_varvoglis.htm

first things first, mr j, when you say psi what is your definition. what is the working definition of psi here in moonlight that we can all refer to ?

x.

ju4o:
"What is psi?"  Here is an example.


--- Quote ---There is a wonderful story (circa 1990, which was written up in an Australian newspaper and later made into a movie) concerning an Australian medical student who was lost in the Himalayas on a trek for about six weeks.

Thrangu Rinpoche had been consulted by the sister of the Australian medical student, because she had met someone in Boudhanath, who recommended she ask a lama. She had nothing to lose, for she had exhausted every other possibility without success, in her attempt to locate her brother. She visited Rinpoche and told him her woeful story.

Rinpoche asked for her map of the Himalayas and did some kind of contemplation and went over the map with his mala (using it as a kind of divining rod), and he told her that she would find him in a certain area on the map. Because she feared the worst --her brother had been lost for over four weeks in the snowy Himalayas without food or shelter-- the woman asked Rinpoche if her brother was dead. And Rinpoche replied that she would find him alive.

Unfortunately the woman did not have faith in Rinpoche's visionary talent and she did not begin the search immediately in the area he recommended. All the people leading the search were of the opinion that it was impossible for him to have made his way into the area outlined by Rinpoche, the so-called hidden valley, for there was no path leading into it.

Another two weeks of precious time went by before the sister decided --as the final flight-- to have the helicopter pilot fly over the so-called "hidden valley"; not because she expected to find him alive, but only because she wanted to return to Australia knowing with certainty that she had exhausted every possibility in her search for her brother. Well lo and behold, when the helicopter flew over the hidden valley, who should come out from his shelter under a rock: none other than the medical student himself, still alive after six weeks without food. If only the sister had listened to the recommendation of the Great Visionary, Thrangu Rinpoche, they would have found him within four weeks instead of six, and chances are he would have been in much better shape than he was.
--- End quote ---

~http://www.rinpoche.com/stories.htm (http://www.rinpoche.com/stories.htm)

If that story is true, it would be an example of the intensified form of psi and of how psi can be actually useful, in contrast to the weakly fizzing forms of it that we may have been glimpsing in the exploration thread.

But, according to the analogy which I am suggesting, the weakly fizzing forms are a crucial first step.

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