Yes, I'll admit that falling for those fairy pictures was pretty embarrassing, but Doyle had lots of company in his belief in the paranormal, including some remarkably distinguished late 19th and early 20th century names.
Brigit Katz writing for Mental Floss:
Marie and Pierre Curie readily admitted that nature was rife with mysteries that scientists had yet to identify and study. “[W]e know little about the medium that surrounds us, since our knowledge is limited to phenomena which can affect our senses, directly or indirectly,” they wrote in 1902, acknowledging that they did not fully understand the origin of radioactive energy.
Pierre was particularly fascinated by the paranormal. Introduced to spiritualism by his brother, the scientist Jacques Curie, he confessed in an 1894 letter to Marie that “those spiritual phenomena intensely interest me.” He believed that the paranormal realm was relevant to “questions that deal with physics,” and according to biographer Anna Hurwic, thought that spiritualism might uncover “the source of an unknown energy that would reveal the secret of radioactivity.”
...
Just a few days before his death in 1906, Pierre wrote again to Gouy describing the last Palladino séances he would ever witness. “[T]hese phenomena really exist and it is no longer possible for me to doubt it,” he proclaimed. “There is here in my opinion, a whole domain of entirely new facts and physical states in space of which we have no conception.”
Marie does not appear to have been as intrigued by Palladino as her husband, according to Susan Quinn, author of Marie Curie: A Life. She had other demands on her time and energy, including her two young children and the intense public attention that followed her Nobel Prize win. But at the very least, Marie doesn't seem to have come away from Palladino’s séances as a firm disbeliever in the possibility of a spirit world—because after Pierre died, she continued to communicate with him.
Curie had company. William Crookes and fellow Nobel laureate Charles Richet were two of the many scientists who devoted a large part of the time to paranormal research. Albert Einstein wrote the preface to Mental Radio. Respected publications published serious discussions about psychic and supernatural phenomena. Not everyone was a believer, but it was rare to find people in the "absolutely, positively no-way" camp either.
Nor were the Curies the only ones to make a connection between the fantastic scientific discoveries of the day and the possibility of the paranormal. When Edison stumbled on the first radio transmitter back in the 1870s (that’s another story we need to get into), he wondered if it might explain telepathy. When the later debunked N-rays were announced, scientists speculated that they too might explain psychic phenomena.
When you are constantly bombarded with news of the seemingly magical—be it cylinders that capture voices, strange rays that let doctors see through flesh, or communications that somehow travel instantly through the air—it would probably seem foolhardy to prematurely dismiss the possibility of something outside of our range of knowledge.
We, on the other hand, have two large bodies of knowledge to draw on when evaluating claims of the supernatural. First, we have well over a century of paranormal research where, when you take out the frauds and the fatally flawed test designs, you find no support whatsoever for these claims. Second, we have a century of research into physics that has effectively ruled out any possibility of these forces causing ghosts to walk or psychics to tell you anything that couldn't be learned from a cold reading.
You and I aren't smarter than Einstein or the Curies, but we do know a bit more.
Mark:
ReplyDeleteI agree with your general point--you can also add Alan Turing to the list. That said, those fairy photos were particularly ridiculous. Doyle must have been turning off his brain on that one.
Andrew