Late Night Thoughts about Science by Peter A. Sturrock

Abstract

Few high-achieving scientists have also given as much thoughtful attention as Peter Sturrock has to things that science doesn’t know. In this book, Sturrock describes fifteen “questions to which I do not have answers, to which I would like to have answers.”

Those are: ball lightning; the Allais effect (pendulums and eclipses); low-energy nuclear reactions (“cold fusion”); intriguing properties of beta decays (one of the mechanism of radioactivity); precognition; clairvoyance; remote viewing; psychokinesis; anomalous healing; out-of-body experiences, reincarnation; permanently unidentified flying objects; crop circles; Tunguska; Shakespeare authorship.

The rigorous empiricism and intellectual clear-headedness Sturrock brings to bear is illustrated by some of these, for instance permanently unidentified flying objects which immediately forestalls the typical “Skeptic’s” enumeration of all the UFO reports that turned out to be planets, satellites, etc. The problem for the pseudo-skeptics is that the weirdest sighting reports seem to be also the best-documented from the most reliable sources.