Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal by Derek Lee
The European Enlightenment imagined “progress” as a rising highway with science laying the paving stones. At the same time, millions of people, including some scientists, have opted for other roads, including byways rejected by scientific convention. Derek Lee’s Parascientific Revolutions is an often-brilliant examination of rejected ideas that continue to circulate, sometimes seizing the high ground of popular imagination. The persistence of those ideas often comes from the stubborn resistance of heretics within the science academies but also through pop culture, especially science fiction. Lee deploys “parascience” to describe forbidden ideas that have coalesced within a scientific context.
Consider the psitron, the source of Dr. Manhattan’s precognition in Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen. Working with quantum ideas of psychology and neurology, physicist Adrian Dobbs published a paper in 1965 proposing the existence of the psitron, a faster-than-light thought particle “that emanated from future events and could impart prescient information on striking the brain.” No psitron has ever been observed, but as Lee insists, quantum physics, by “demonstrating that the subatomic particles constituting all things were fundamentally marvelous,” opened the door to anti-matter, string theory and a host of counterintuitive possibilities. In a cosmos of tachyons and other hypothetical particles, why not a psitron?
Other concepts that emerged from a science setting have been amplified by New Age pundits. Take Gaia, the understanding of the Earth as a living, sentient organism. The idea originated in the ‘60s out of systems theory as conceptualized by NASA engineer James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Disputing the notion that Earth was a dead stone in space populated by living things, they described our world as a living system capable of self-regulation. Some environmentalists, feminists (Mother Earth) and spiritual wanderers elaborated on their idea, endowing the Earth with consciousness and intent.
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Mainstream science may snicker at clairvoyance, or “remote viewing” as the more science-oriented proponents call the wild gift. However, the world’s superpowers were willing to give it a chance. Rumors were rife during the Cold War that both the U.S. and the USSR were funding paranormal operations in an effort to spy on each other. Lee uncovers the less known project by China under Deng Xiapoing to develop ESP research grounded in the ancient Chinese concept of qi. America’s psychic scheme, the CIA’s Project Stargate, persisted past the demise of the Soviet Union and was finally defunded in 1995. “Clearly, science is not the only way scientific ideas spread,” Lee writes. In Parascientific Revolutions, he pulls Philip K. Dick and Amy Tan together with Rupert Sheldrake and SETI for a deep dive into the “occulture.”
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