E-mail from Michael Roll to Professor B D Josephson (February 24, 2003): "Psi Supporters"

2003-February-24 Filed in: Campaign
Brian,

I hope you are right and the "psi supporters" at Edinburgh University now pluck up the courage to come out in the open and back Parnia and Fenwick. A separate mind and brain, just about the greatest scientific heresy in the history of scientific endeavour.

Look at the stick you received on BBC Radio 4 in October 2001 from Professor Nicholas Humphrey. Another person who has received money from the Perrott-Warrick Scholarship, along with Dr. Susan Blackmore - £60,000.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Let's see if any of this money now ends up with scientists who start from the base that the mind and brain are separate. Look out for flying pigs!

Dr. John Beloff chose Prof. Robert Morris, a fellow psychologist, to run the chair at Edinburgh University in 1985. I have a cutting in front of me from the Telegraph listing those who were trying for the Arthur Koestler Chair. Among them is Prof. John Hasted, a physicist from Birkbeck College, London University. What a different students' reading list John Hasted would have produced to the one Morris came up with. For a start the great scientists Crookes and Lodge would not have been persona non grata.

Between them, Beloff and Morris, have set research into life after death back nearly 20 years. I shudder to think what Arthur Koestler must think of what has happened.

Michael

B D Josephson
Brian David Josephson, FRS is a Welsh physicist. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1973 for the prediction of the eponymous Josephson effect. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge, where he is director of the Mind–Matter Unification Project in the Theory of Condensed Matter (TCM) research group. He is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
From a set of commemorative Royal Mail stamps, issued in 2001:
"Physicists attempt to reduce the complexity of nature to a single unifying theory, of which the most successful and universal, the quantum theory, has been associated with several Nobel Prizes, for example those to Dirac and Heisenberg. Max Planck's original attempts a hundred years ago to explain the precise amount of energy radiated by hot bodies began a process of capturing in mathematical form a mysterious , elusive world containing 'spooky interactions at a distance ', real enough however to lead to inventions such as the laser and the transistor. Quantum theory is now being fruitfully combined with theories of information and computation. These developments may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science, such as telepathy - an area in which Britain is at the forefront of research."
Professor Brian Josephson
Awarded the prize in 1973 for 'Discoveries regarding "Tunnelling Phenomena" of particles in solids'.



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