Volume 6, Number 9 · May 26, 1966
Funny Coincidence
By Martin Gardner
ESP, A Scientific Evaluation
by C.E.M. Hansel
Scribner's, 263 pp., $6.95
Ever since Joseph Banks Rhine, a botanist-turned-parapsychologist, began his systematic study of psi (his term for 'psychic') phenomena, he has enjoyed an unusually favorable popular press and an unusually unfavorable academic one. Long, laudatory articles about him have been appearing for decades in mass circulation magazines (e.g., 'A Case for ESP' by Aldous Huxley, Life, January 11, 1954). Arthur Koestler has compared Rhine's discoveries to the Copernican Revolution. Today's skeptical scientists. Koestler says in The Sleepwalkers, resemble those Italian philosophers who refused to look through Galileo's telescope at Jupiter's moons because they knew in advance that such moons did not exist. Many otherwise sophisticated people, I would guess, take it for granted that ESP and other psi powers have been conclusively demonstrated by workers in the field, and that only a few pigheaded professors refuse to look through Rhine's telescope at the towering mountain of scientific evidence.
Review, 2297 words
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