They Spent Little Time on Epstein's Island, But Wasted Decades on Guth's "Cosmic Inflation" Dead End

There is a recent article in the news about how some leading scientists made a visit to Jeffrey Epstein's notorious pedophilia island where underage children were for years apparently raped and sexually trafficked. An NPR article tells us about a 2006 scientific conference funded by Jeffrey Epstein, who loved to mingle with scientists. It was a week-long conference called "Confronting Gravity." It was held in the Virgin Islands, and according to the article it was attended by "20 of the world's top physicists, including three Nobel laureates and three more who would later receive the prestigious prize." We read that the conference included a short trip to Epstein's notorious island:

"Along with the submarine, the scientists took a short boat ride for a barbecue picnic on Epstein's 70-acre island. Epstein had purchased Little St. James, or 'Little St. Jeff's' as he liked to call it, in 1998. It is a place that prosecutors say was used by Epstein to sexually abuse women and girls. But the physicists who visited the island say they saw none of that during their short stay.

The boat dropped off the scientists at the beach. Peebles said he remembers being met at the island by someone he described as 'a guide,' who cautioned the physicists, 'Don't go wandering off into the island.'

The group had its picnic near the Caribbean Sea. Guth said some scientists went inside Epstein's house just to use the bathroom."

The reference to Guth is a reference to  MIT physicist Alan Guth. In the article we see a big picture of him.  Some of my more suspicious readers may scoff at Guth's claim that the scientists only went to Jeffrey Epstein's house  to use his bathroom. 

I don't know what happened during the visit of these scientists to Jeffrey Epstein's house on Jeffrey Epstein's island that is now very widely regarded as being a site of sex trafficking and pedophile child abuse. But I do know that the NPR article is stating a half-truth when it describes Guth as "the physicist who first proposed the theory of cosmic inflation, a concept that has become a pillar of modern cosmology." Guth did first propose the theory of cosmic inflation. But that theory is not at all a pillar of modern cosmology. It is instead a dead-end never-well-supported theory that for 46 years has caused cosmologists to waste endless man-years of time. 

Around about 1978, cosmologists (the scientists who study the universe as a whole) were puzzled by a problem of fine-tuning. They had figured out that the expansion rate of the very early universe (at the time of the Big Bang) seems to have been incredibly fine-tuned, apparently to about one part in ten to the fiftieth power. This dilemma was known as the flatness problem. It seems that if the universe's initial expansion rate had differed by less than 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, there would not have arisen a habitable universe with galaxies and stars. 

Around 1980 Alan Guth (an MIT professor) proposed a way to solve the flatness problem. Guth proposed that for a tiny fraction of its first second (for less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second), the universe expanded at an exponential rate. The universe is not expanding at any such rate, but Guth proposed that after a very brief instant of exponential expansion, the universe switched back to the normal, linear expansion that it now has. This was the cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the more general Big Bang theory), a theory which has since taken on hundreds of different forms.  

The theory was devised to get rid of some fine-tuning, but it turned out that the theory required fine-tuning of its own in multiple places. So we had a kind of "rob Peter to pay Paul" situation in which it was unclear that the need for fine-tuning had been reduced. A scientific paper says this: "It actually requires much more fine-tuning for the Universe to have inflated than for it to have been placed in some low-entropy initial state (Carroll & Chen 2004)." The paper also refers to "the highly fine-tuned initial conditions required for inflation to work."

 For many decades cosmologists have been lost in a strange little world of fantasy whenever they dealt with this cosmic inflation theory. As different versions of the theory have kept failing, cosmologists have kept producing new versions of the theory; and by now there are hundreds of versions of it, making predictions all over the map.  All attempts to provide empirical support for cosmic inflation theory have failed.  

The main prediction of cosmic inflation theories have been that there would be observed something called primordial gravitational waves, gravitational waves coming from the very early history of the universe, possibly something that would have a feature called "b-modes." Although non-primordial gravitational waves have been detected (arising from times when the universe was already billions of years old), nothing has come from decades of searches for primordial gravitational waves, which have gone on for years with ever-more-fancy and ever-more-expensive equipment.  A 2019 article states, "Models such as natural and quadratic inflation that were popular several years ago no longer seem tenable, says theorist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University."  A late 2021 article (based on this paper) is entitled "Primordial Gravitational Waves Continue to Elude Astronomers." But rather than discarding a theoretical approach that isn't working, our  cosmologists keep tying themselves into knots by spinning out more and more speculative ornate versions of the cosmic inflation theory (which already has many hundreds of different versions).  This has all been a giant waste of time and money, without any real success. 

It is utterly false that Guth's cosmic inflation theory is a pillar of modern cosmology. Cosmology is the study of the origin of the universe and the large-scale structure of the universe. That study can get along just fine without Guth's utterly unnecessary theory about exponential expansion occurring during the first second of the universe's history. The Big Bang theory does not need the theory of cosmic inflation, which is an utterly superfluous addition to that theory. 

Within the study of cosmology, cosmic inflation theory has long been a money-draining "white elephant," a scheme allowing cosmologists to keep draining many millions of research dollars without ever producing any compelling observational results. The advocates of cosmic inflation theory have tried to justify their money-wasting and time-wasting activities by appealing to a bandwagon effect.  Such people keep telling us that pretty much all the cosmologists agree about the truth of cosmic inflation theory.  This is not true at all. In fact, according to a poll of cosmologists taken in 2024, not even half of cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory. 

In the scientific paper, on page 9 we have the result of a 2024 poll of cosmologists attending a scientific conference. Here is the result of a question that does the equivalent of asking cosmologists: what percent of you believe in the cosmic inflation theory? The result is that only 44% of cosmologists endorse the theory. 

Page 8 of the paper (discussing the result above) says that the cosmic inflation theory "does not command majority support." We have no claim in the paper that this was a secret ballot survey. A secret ballot poll might have shown even smaller support. 

For 40 years cosmic inflation theorists have been making groundless boasts that almost all cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory. An example is page 3 of the paper here, in which a zealous proponent of the theory assures us that a "vast majority" of cosmologists endorse such a theory, without offering any evidence to back up such a claim. The poll above indicates that not even a majority of cosmologists endorse such a theory. Never trust any proponent of a theory who claims that the theory is supported by the great majority of specialists in some scientific field, unless such a claim is backed up by a well-designed secret ballot poll of scientists, a poll substantiating such a claim.  Scientists routinely make groundless or unfounded assertions claiming or insinuating that some theory cherished by them is supported by an overwhelming majority of people in their field.  

The lesson of the cosmic inflation theory misadventure is exactly the same as the lesson of the supersymmetry misadventure.  A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "inflation" in the title produced 7457 results, almost all papers on the cosmic inflation theory.  A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "supersymmetry" in the title produced 4601 results.  Both the cosmic inflation theory and the supersymmetry theory involved elaborate speculative attempts to "sweep under the rug" dramatic cases of very precise fine-tuning that had been discovered in nature. All of these papers were wastes of time and exercises in futility. Neither of these theories was ever supported by observational evidence, although endless millions were spent trying to get evidence for both of them. 

The cosmic inflation theory misadventure and the supersymmetry misadventure both teach the same lesson: when nature presents some very dramatic case of fine-tuning, do not waste huge amounts of time trying to devise elaborate theories designed to explain away such fine-tuning, and trying to sweep such fine-tuning under the rug; but instead accept such examples of cosmic fine-tuning, look for other examples of fine-tuning both in the universe and in biology, and ponder the implications of such fine-tuning that can be found so very abundantly throughout nature. The point I discuss here is discussed more fully in my post here, which explains the type of fine-tuning that supersymmetry attempted to sweep under the rug and explain away. 

A futile maneuver

Gerard Croiset's Clairvoyance Was Well Documented in 1960's Newspaper Articles

 At the link here you can read a very long excerpt from a recent book by Tricia J. Robertson, an excerpt documenting the case of Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset. We read this:

"Croiset was sometimes called upon by the Dutch police to determine the whereabouts of a missing person whether they were presumed alive or dead, or to gain information about them. Croiset was also utilised by the Dutch police over many years to solve cases of theft and murder by using his amazing abilities."

We read that Croiset was a Dutch grocer who never charged money for his services. In the excerpt from Robertson's book, we read of what sounds like a case of the most astonishing clairvoyance from Croiset. It is a 1959 case involving a professor with a missing daughter. We are told that the professor arranged a telephone conversation with Croiset, who provided details that proved to be exactly correct. 

Robertson's account sounds very convincing, but there are a couple of problems with the account as she has written it. First, Robertson fails to give us the name of the professor with the missing daughter (the professor's name was Walter Sandelius). Second, she fails to give links to any source from around 1959 reporting the account she has given. It is just such things that help to build high confidence in accounts of the paranormal. 

I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it is to always track down the earliest versions of any report of the paranormal, and to look for things such as exact dates, the exact names of the witnesses, the exact source that made the earliest report, and so forth.  For example, a dated newspaper account giving exact names, dates and quotes from witnesses has a much higher value as evidence than some book written 60 years later saying that such and such happened 60 years ago to some person, without naming who the person was.  

Luckily there is a way to overcome the problems in Robertson's narrative. Using the Chronicling America web site that allows you to search old newspaper accounts, we can search for the name of Gerard Croiset. Using that technique, I found contemporary newspaper articles referring to the exact case Robertson discusses. 

The first such article I found was a February 26, 1961 article in the Evening Star. My first job ever was delivering this newspaper when I was a boy, and I know that around 1961 the Evening Star was one of the two most respected newspapers in Washington, D.C., the other being the Washington Post. Below is the 1961 newspaper article that appeared on this case involving Gerard Croiset, an article you can read using the link here:

The account is found in the bottom corner of the page, and it carries over to the next page, shown below, which you can read using this link:

Here is the part of the article that matches Robertson's account. The reporter Jack Harrison Pollack says he double-checked the account. 

"Croiset is also consulted in many missing-person

cases some of them thousands of miles from

Utrecht. One I was able to double-check in the U.S.

On October 18, 1959, Carol, the 24-year-old

daughter of Dr. Walter Sandelius, a political-science

professor at the University of Kansas, disappeared

from a hospital in Topeka where she had been a

patient. Police were unable to find her.

'After a month and a half I was ready to try

anything,' recalls Sandelius, a former Rhodes

scholar. 'In the course of my reading I had learned

about Tenhaeff. On December 11, I phoned him in

Utrecht, and he set up a three-way conversation

with Croiset.'

Croiset first asked, 'Is there a river near the

hospital where your daughter had been?'

'Yes,' answered her father, 'the Kansas River

runs close by.'

'I see her running over a large lawn and then

crossing a viaduct,' said Croiset. 'She’s now at a 

place where there are shops and a large body of

water with many small boats. She was driven there

in a truck and a big, red car.'

'Is she still alive?' asked her father anxiously.

'I’m not sure,' Croiset answered, 'but you’ll

hear something definite in six days.'

Six days later, as he was coming downstairs in

the morning to place another call to Dr. Tenhaeff

and Croiset, Sandelins was astonished to find his

daughter sitting on the sofa!

He told me recently that his daughter’s story

corroborated Croiset’s amazing vision: She had left

the hospital, running across the front lawn, and had

crossed the river at a viaduct. Making her way to

a highway, she hitched a ride with two soldiers from

the Topeka Air Base. Later she was picked up by an

elderly couple in a truck. At the time her father was

speaking to Croiset, she was at a carnival in Corpus

Christi, Texas, bordering on the Gulf of Mexico

where there are many speedboats.

“I had long suspected there was something to

extrasensory perception,'  says Dr. Sandelins.

'But now I'm sure of it.' "

So now the two problems with Robertson's account are resolved. We have the name of the professor with the missing daughter (Walter Sandelius). And we have an account written about a year after the described events, one in which the Evening Star reporter says that he double-checked (presumably by interviewing Sandelius, who he quotes). As evidence, this is not as good as a report giving all of the relevant details, which was written very soon after the events described (such as only a few days later). But it is something much better as evidence than Robertson's account the way she wrote that account. 

In the same newspaper account above we have this astonishing account regarding Croiset's clarivoyance:

"Dr. Tenhaeff in 1947 devised what he calls the

'chair experiment' for Croiset. The test has been
successfully conducted over 350 times by Dr. Tenhaeff 

and scientists in other European countries
under rigid controls. Tenhaeff, or his assistant Nicky Louwerens, select at random a chair number from a seating plan for
a meeting a week to ten days away. Croiset is told
the number. Then he describes the person who
will sit in the chair, in some cases before the person
himself even decides to attend the meeting!

Once Tenhaeff picked Chair 18 for a meeting in
Rotterdam. Croiset said, 'I see nothing.' Tenhaeff
was perplexed. Until then, Croiset had achieved
near-perfect results. Tenhaeff tried another, Chair
3. Croiset smiled: 'This is the wife of a neurologist.
Recently her face was scarred in an auto accident
in Italy.' 

On the night of the meeting it snowed in Rotterdam. Of 30 who were to be there, one person couldn’t attend. The empty chair? Number 18.

In Chair 3 sat the lady who had a scar on her face.
'Why, yes,' she said. 'I was in an accident in
Italy two months ago. But how did you know?' "

The Evening Star reporter (Jack Harrison Pollack) says he did his due diligence in checking out the reality of Croiset's clairvoyance. He mentions spending six weeks in Croiset's home city of Utrecht in the Netherlands. The reporter states this:

"I was able to check the documents in case after case transcripts, dated and signed by witnesses, letters and statements from police. All attest to Croiset’s accurate vision."

Gerard Croiset

At the beginning of the same February 26, 1961 Evening Star news story, we have another account of Croiset's clairvoyance, which you can see using the link here (or the first image above).  We read this account (in which the "paragnost" is used to mean a clairvoyant):

"An early success is this case I checked in the Parapsychology Institute and Dutch police files.On December 5, 1946, a pretty, blond, 21-year-old girl was returning home at 5:45 p.m. along a quiet country road near Wierden, Holland. Suddenly, a man leaped out from behind a stone storehouse, and assaulted her, hitting her on the neck and arms with a hammer. Before he disappeared into the dark, she was able to wrench the hammer away from him.

Police contacted Dr. Tenhaeff, who came to the
station, bringing Gerard Croiset, one of his team of
paragnosts. Because the girl was in the hospital,
Croiset didn’t see her. Instead he picked up the
hammer, his large hand squeezing the handle as
police watched skeptically. Croiset concentrated.

'He is tall and dark, about 30 years old, and has
a somewhat deformed left ear,' said the paragnost.
'But this hammer doesn’t belong to him. Its owner
was a man of about 55 whom the criminal visits
often at a small white cottage near here. It is
one of a group of three cottages, alt the same.' 

The deformed left ear was a key clue. Several
months later the police picked up a tall, dark 29-
year-old man on another morals charge. His badly

scarred and swollen left ear led to questioning about
the first attack. Finally, he admitted assaulting the
girl with the hammer. He said he had borrowed it
from a friend, who, the police discovered, lived in a
white cottage on the edge of town, with two others
just like it on either side."

Notice the exact match of the details. Croiset had not merely correctly identified the assailant as a man of about 30 with a deformed left ear. Croiset had also correctly stated that the man had got the hammer from a man living in a white cottage that was the second of a group of three white cottages close to each other. 

We read this in the article: 

"Dr. Tenhaeff's files bulge with such cases. Each
is documented with a recording or stenographic
transcript of the prediction, and with statements
confirming its accuracy from witnesses and police.

The Evening Star newspaper article quoted above was Part 2 of a two-part series by the same author. You can read Part 1 of the series using the link here, which takes you the story the Evening Star published on February 19, 1961. 

On the first of these two pages, the page here, the reporter (Jack Harrison Pollack) tells an astonishing story. He says he was in the living room of Gerard Croiset,  with Dr. W. H. C. Tenhaeff, when a call came from 50 miles away, with someone in Eindhoven reporting that a 4-year-old child had been missing for 24 hours. Croiset said "in about three days the child's body will be found in the canal close to the bridge." The reporter left feeling skeptical. But he says this:

"Three days later, I checked up.  The police of Eindhoven had just found the child’s body next to one of the piers of the bridge over the canal -- exactly as Croiset had predicted." 

The reporter says that at the Parapsychology Institute, "thousands of cases of ESP have been uncovered and documented." At the page here we read these claims:

The Confessions of Scientists Burst Their Boasts

Scientists are always claiming to understand big important things that they do not actually understand, things such as the origin of the human race and how there arises human minds. Over and over again we read statements claiming "scientists know" some grand thing, and the statements are very often profoundly misleading. 

One way to get a good understanding of how relatively little scientists know is to study confession statements by scientists in which they state things inconsistent with their grand boasts of knowledge. Often the same scientist who makes in one place some grand boast of scientists understanding things will in some other place make a confession inconsistent with such a claim.  In other cases, knowledge boasts made by one scientist will be contradicted by statements of other scientists in the same field. 

My very long post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" (which you can read here) is probably the most extensive collection anywhere of such scientist confessions.  I have been updating the post after its publication date. I try to add to the post whenever I read a good confession of knowledge limits by a scientist. 

Below are some recent additions to the post. I'll start with some quotes using the phrase "in its infancy." Whenever scientists confess that something is "in its infancy," they are effectively admitting they do not have good knowledge about such a topic.

• "Despite recent advancements in identifying engram cells, our understanding of their regulatory and functional mechanisms remains in its infancy." -- Scientists claiming erroneously in 2024 that there have been recent advancements in identifying engram cells, but confessing there is no understanding of how they work (link).
• "Study of the genetics of human memory is in its infancy though many genes have been investigated for their association to memory in humans and non-human animals."  -- Scientists in 2022 (link).
• "The neurobiology of memory is still in its infancy." -- Scientist in 2020 (link). 
• "The investigation of the neuroanatomical bases of semantic memory is in its infancy." -- 3 scientists, 2007 (link). 
• "Currently, our knowledge pertaining to the neural construct of intelligence and memory is in its infancy." -- Scientists, 2011 (link). 
• "Our understanding of how organelles physically interact and use cellular signaling systems to coordinate functional networks between each other is still in its infancy."  -- Two biologists (link).
• "As Mark Twain is reported to have said: 'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't true.'  In contemporary neuroscience, the list of assumptions that just ain't true is long indeed, so patience is required as I expose each in turn." -- Henry Vin, neuroscientist and psychologist, "The Crisis in Neuroscience" (link)

By making such confessions, scientists are admitting that they do not actually understand how a brain could store or retrieve memories. The reason for such ignorance (despite billions of dollars on funding to try to answer such questions) is almost certainly that the brain does not actually store memories and is not the source of the human mind.  Very much brain tissue has been microscopically examined at the highest resolution, and such microscopic examination has never found any trace of learned information. As discussed here, there is no plausible explanation of how a brain could store a memory for decades; and I discuss here how the brain is lacking in anything that could explain the wonder of instant human relevant recall when someone is asked a question (as brains lack indexes, addresses and sorting, the three things that allow quick recall using devices humans make). 

In the paper here, a neuroscientist interviewed by the paper author makes this anonymous confession: "We still don't understand how molecules contribute to consciousness or the mind.”

Below is a juicy addition to the "Candid Confessions" post, in which a biologist specializing in the origin of multicellularity confesses that scientists do not understand how multicellular organisms arose:

"Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion.....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms."

-- Biologist Will Ratcliff (link). 

The addition below to the "Candid Confessions" post gives us some scientists confessing their utter inability to solve the cosmological constant problem. This is the problem that according to the predictions of quantum mechanics, empty space should be more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times denser than steel, something that would make the universe utterly uninhabitable. The problem is discussed in my widely read post "' Vacuum Catastrophe'   Should Be Called the Vacuum Miracle," which you can read here. The confession of the scientists is below, and is stated in dense jargon:

"There are no robust predictions for the CC [cosmological constant] value within the standard QFT [Quantum Field Theory] paradigm that account for all existing vacuum contributions from quantum field dynamics (i.e. condensates) at various scales – ranging from the quantum qravity scale, MPl ' 1.2 · 1019 GeV, to the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) confinement scale, MQCD ' 0.1 GeV. The well-studied quark-gluon and Higgs condensates alone (responsible for chiral and gauge symmetry-breaking in the SM respectively) have contributions to the ground state energy of the Universe that far exceed the observed absolute CC value today [5]. Regardless of how the observed CC is explained, these huge quantum vacuum contributions must be eliminated [to explain a habitable universe such as ours]. Any consistent solution of this problem, known as the 'vacuum catastrophe', must rely on a compensation of short-distance vacuum fluctuations by the ground state density of the Universe to many tens of decimal digits. A dynamical mechanism for such gross cancellations (without a major finetuning) is not known, and should be regarded as a new physical phenomenon anyway.....There is still no real consensus in the community on what the resolution to the CC [cosmological constant]  problem is or should be. This is quite an unusual situation in physics, where traditionally there has tended to be a consensus on at least a general direction to look in. " --  A 2016 confession by scientists (link, p. 21).  The reference to "many tens of decimal places" refers to a fine-tuning such as a coincidental perfect balance to 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Below are some other recent additions to the "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post:

• "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark. 
• "Dr Gregory Jefferis, of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge told BBC News that currently we have no idea how the network of brain cells in each of our heads enables us to interact with each other and the world around us."  -- BBC news article (link). 
• "It is now evident that genes play only a minor role in evolution....We now know that the gene-centered Modern Synthesis was quite wrong (see especially Shapiro 2011, 2022; Noble 2012, 2013; Noble and Noble 2023; Corning 2018, 2020). Over the past few decades there has been a growing body of contradictory evidence."  -- Scientist Peter A. Corning, "Cooperative genes in smart systems: Toward an inclusive new synthesis in evolution" (link). 
• "We have addressed a large body of evidence related to transitions (micro- and macro-) in proteins that have a pre-existing globular 3D-structure (and function), but how does structure and function evolve in de novo [new] proteins? ...Overall, the evolution of MIPSs, the recruitment of first enzymes, and de novo emergence of proteins are aspects where our knowledge is still at infancy." -- Scientists confessing in 2022 that we don't know how new proteins originate (link). 
• "How did science become so unscientific? To make a long story short, we have been sold a triple pseudo-intellectual flimflam for decades: if you want to be a respectable homo academicus, then you must embrace the unholy trinity of mechanistic reductive materialism, plus skepticism in its most dogmatic declination, and finally secularism in the mode of viciously naive atheism. In a word, scientism has been institutionalized in the name of science. But, in the end, scientism is more dangerous than pseudoscience because it is an inside job. Error, bias, and hype are minor sins compared to scientific hubris....Future scientists are the most indoctrinated of all, since most check-points in the stairway to academic heaven –from undergraduate students to postdoctoral researchers to tenured professors– select for such failings and implant us with an operating system stuck in our 19th century understanding of the world. The problem is deep, as it is entrenched in the triangular industrial complexes of academia, journalism, and education. In sum, scientistic televangelism is alienating genuine truth-seekers, eroding public trust in science, and indoctrinating young minds. Let us reject such terms of disservice and reverse the dead-ending of science from within and without. The truth is that true experts don’t know 'the truth.'  Nobody really knows what is going on. We live in a wild, weird, wonderful world....Preaching dogma in the name of science is a dagger at the heart of society."  -- Àlex Gómez-Marín, physicist and neuroscientist (link). 
• "It’s maddening when you see people cheat. And even if it involves grant money from the NIH, there’s very little punishment. Even with people who have been caught cheating, the punishment is super light. You are not eligible to apply for new grants for the next year or sometimes three years. It’s very rare that people lose jobs over it.” -- Scientist Elizabeth Bik (link).
• "Little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and inventing new cell types." -- Two scientists, 2021 (link). 
• "While a lot of studies have focused on memory processes such as memory consolidation and retrieval, very little is known about memory storage" -- scientific paper (link).
• "Little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and inventing new cell types." -- Two scientists, 2021 (link). 
• "The most fascinating thing about eukaryotes is that we still don’t understand how they came about." -- Evolutionary biologist Toni Gabaldon, referring to the type of cells found in human bodies (link). 
• "Cell biology is a mystery for many reasons one
  of which is the lack of basic knowledge. This may
  be the fault of scientists or simply a failure in basic
  information at the level of common contemporary
  knowledge. The well known sentence of Socrates:
  'I know that I know nothing' is as true in cell
  biology as in other scientific fields. This sentence
  was modified by Lloyd in 1986 who claimed: 'The
  closer we look, the less we see'. I would like to
  modify this sentence yet again as a cell biologist and
  microscopist: 'The closer we look, the less we know
  about.' ... Everyone involved in cell
  biology, is surprised how limited is our knowledge
  about the various cell compartments....It should now be mentioned that our knowledge even of basic cell organelles, including their various functions, is very limited....We know something about cell organelles, including various nuclear compartments, but most of their functions are waiting for further and better clarification....Depending on conditions, selected genes may be repressed or derepressed and activated giving to rise to the particular cell lineage with characteristic cell structures and functions. On the other hand, such transformations, including the homing of the transformed cells are also very mysterious although both these processes are empirically used in clinical medicine."  Karel Smetana, cell biologist, "To the Mystery of Cell Biology," (link). 
• "As for the explicit types of memory, the biological underpinning of this very long-lasting memory storage is not yet understood." -- Neuroscientist Cristina M. Alberini in a year 2025 paper (link). 
• "The distinguished Parisian Professor of Medicine, Rostan, gave at the time his corroborative testimony to the existence of this power in the article ' Magnetisme,' in the ' Dictionnaire de Medecine,'  wherein he remarked : 'There are few facts better demonstrated than clairvoyance' ....Innumerable instances are recorded of the possession of the faculty of clairvoyance by persons in the normal state, in sleep [hypnotism], and in some abnormal conditions of the system, " -- Edwin Lee, MD, "Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism" page 103 and page 133.
• "It remains unclear where and how prior knowledge is represented in the brain." -- A large team of scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "How memory is stored in the brain is unknown." -- Research proposal abstract written by scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "The trends we expose forecast serious risks ahead for the scientific enterprise. Large groups of editors and authors appear to have cooperated to facilitate publishing fraud (Fig. 1). Networks of linked fraudulent articles suggest industrial scale of production (Fig. 2). Organizations selling contract cheating services anticipate and counter deindexing and other interventions by literature aggregators (Fig. 3). The literature in some fields may have already been irreparably damaged by fraud (Fig. 4). Finally, the scale of activity in the enterprise of scientific fraud already exceeds the scope of current punitive measures designed to prevent fraud (Fig. 5)." -- "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly," a 2025 scientific paper by four scientists (link).

The "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post has a new section dealing with galaxy formation and star formation. The newly added quotes are these:

• "Probably, a lot of people are impressed by these beautiful images that we get from Hubble Space Telescope, and they think that we must, by now, understand how galaxies work.  But the fact is that we don’t.  We don’t even understand how stars form.  There’s many different classes and theories of how stars form, and we don’t even know which class is right.  And if we don’t understand star formation and evolution, we can hardly understand how galaxies form."  -- Joel R. Primack, professor of physics and astrophysics (link).
• "It means we don’t understand, kind of fundamentally, how galaxy formation works.” -- Pieter von Dokkum, Yale astronomer (link). 
• "We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -- Cosmologist Carlos Frenk (link). 
• "We don't understand how stars form!" -- Matt Lehnert (link). 
• "We don't understand how supermassive black holes could have grown so huge in the relatively short time available since the universe existed." -- Günther Hasinger, science director at the European Space Agency, 2021 (link). 
• "There is much about the evolution of a typical galaxy we don’t understand, and the transition from their vibrant star-forming lives into quiescence is one of the least understood periods.” -- astronomer J. D. Smith (link). 
• "I got hooked on trying to figure things out; the fact that we don't understand how stars form is pretty mind-boggling considering we want to study things like galaxies."  -- Shari Breen, described as "an expert on star formation"  (link, page 24). 

I added these quotes discussing the low sensitivity of the brain to tissue removal, tissue loss or brain tumors (contrary to the dogma that the brain makes the mind):

• "Taken as a whole, the mean I.Q. of 95.55 for the 31 patients with lateralized frontal tumors suggests that neoplasms [tumors]  in either the right or left frontal lobe result in only slight impairment of intellectual functions as measured by the Wechsler Bellevue test." -- Aaron Smith (link). 
• "One more bizarre thing the researchers noticed was the bigger the lesions on the cortex, the better the mice performed. 'It was a strange result…' says Hong, who hesitates before adding: 'I wouldn't say that we're confident that if we [tested] a lot more animals we would see it. It was sort of a trend that we noticed. I guess the answer is, we don't know. Basically, it implied that the less the cortex is active, the better the animal is doing and the cortex was somehow interfering with the animal's ability to learn.' " -- Science article in Forbes magazine, quoting a scientist named Hong (link). 
• “O'Connor and colleagues reported that after diffuse brain injury, female rats performed better than males on the rotarod test of motor coordination and also incurred a slight advantage on the Barnes maze test of learning and memory.”  -- A paper by several scientists (link). 

Three of four quotes below are additions relating to the very low evidence of adaptive evolution in humans. Scientists claim that the human race arose through a process of so-called "natural selection." If that happened, you should be able to find a huge fingerprint of such "natural selection" by studying the human genome. No such thing can be found. Humans have about 20,000 genes. When scientists look for genes that show evidence of so-called "positive selection" in the human genome, they are only able to find a tiny number such as fewer than 10 or fewer than 20.  

• "There is little evidence of widespread adaptive evolution in our own species...Hominids appear to have undergone very little adaptive evolution." -- Biologist Adam Eyrie Walker, 2006, "The Genomic Rate of Adaptive Evolution.
• "Our overall estimate of the fraction of fixed adaptive substitutions (α) in the human lineage is very low, approximately 0.2%, which is consistent with previous studies." -- A paper by scientists finding that only 1 gene in 500 showed signs of being promoted by so-called "natural selection" (link). 
• "The sad truth is that it is possible to count on the fingers of two hands the examples like FOXP2 of mutations that increased in frequency in human ancestors under the pressure of natural selection and whose functions we partly understand.” -- Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, page 9.
• "The proportion of PSGs [positively selected genes]  in the genome is 233/13,888 = 1.7% for the chimp lineage, significantly greater than that (154/13,888 = 1.1%) for the human lineage (P < 10−4, χ2 test). Because 13,888 statistical tests were conducted for each lineage, it is necessary to control for multiple testing. Under Bonferroni correction, two human genes and 21 chimp genes remain statistically significant (see SI Table 8). ....In sharp contrast to common belief, there were more adaptive genetic changes during chimp evolution than during human evolution."  -- Paper by scientists finding good evidence for "positive selection" in only two out of roughly 20,000 genes (link). 

The Earliest Accounts of Out-of-Body Experiences (Part 2)

 In Part 1 of this two-part series I described the earliest accounts of out-of-body experiences, discussing account appearing between 1864 and 1911. Let us look at some more of the earliest accounts of out-of-body experiences, resuming the narrative from the early twentieth century. 

The image below shows the beginning of a much longer 1905 newspaper account you can read here. We have a very rare type of account of distinguished witnesses reporting they saw in the Parliament of London an apparition of a man (Sir Carne Rasch) who was sick and far away.  The witnesses include Sir Gilbert Parker and Sir Arthur Hayter. You could consider this an out-of-body experience involving Sir Carne Basch, alive at the time of the report. 

 

On the page here of the 1918 book Man Is a Spirit by J. A. Hill, we have an account of an out-of-body experience.  It is a second-hand account, but since many similar accounts have been collected since then, and since reports like this were all but unheard of in 1918, we have a strong reason for thinking the account is accurate. We read this:

"Some years ago I became acquainted with a stalwart ex-soldier of our Civil War. He was an artilleryman, and was sitting on the ammunition chest of his gun when it was hit by a shell from the enemy's guns and exploded. The man was thrown into the air and his body fell to the ground. He said that he was up in the air, looking down at his own body which lay upon the ground at some distance from him. He seemed to be yet connected with the body by a slender cord of a clear silvery appearance, and, while he looked on, two surgeons came by, and after looking at the body remarked that he was dead. One of the medicos took hold of an arm and turned the body on its side, and remarked that he was dead; and they both passed on and left him. Soon after the stretcher-bearers came along and found there was life in the corpse, and carried him to the rear.

After the turning of the body, he said, 'I came down that silver cord and returned to the old body and reanimated it, although my body was blind as a bat and my right arm was torn from my shoulder'; and he showed me on his face and chest forty-eight scars caused by the bursting shell. This man was living at St. Petersburg, Flo., and I think is yet living."  -- G. B. Crabbe.

On page 69 of the same 1918 book, we read this first-hand account by Beryl Hinton:

"I want also to tell you of my one and only psychical experience. Years ago, when only seventeen, I was, in Calcutta, put under chloroform to have a number of teeth out. I presently felt I, myself, was in space above my body, round which were the doctors, dentists, and my mother, and I remember wondering why I was not being judged, since I was obviously dead. I had been brought up as a strict Roman Catholic and taught that individual judgment followed death. I had never read any psychical books or experiences. I was afterwards told that my condition caused alarm, as I would not come back to consciousness. I've never forgotten that dream (?) and, when put under chloroform in September for my very serious operation, was anxious to see if anything of the same sort happened again. But it did not. I had no dream, and this time took the chloroform well. So it does look as if the soul had lifted from the body that long-ago time."

Later she says this, recalling the same experience:

"There was I, above my body, around which were gathered the people present. I could not talk to them, and I remember so distinctly wondering, 'If I am dead, how is it I am not being judged?' That I was out of the body I do not doubt. I am told they had some difficulty in restoring me to consciousness. In the long years that have passed since that experience, when doubts as to the future have assailed me, it has gone farther in my own mind to prove survival than all the books on faith I had read."

On pages 71-72 of the same 1918 book, we have an account by John Huntley:

"About five years ago I woke from sleep to find 'myself' clean out of the body, as the kernel of a nut comes out of its shell. I was conscious in two places — in a feeble degree, in the body which was lying in bed on its left side; and to a far greater degree, away from the body (far away, it seemed), surrounded by white opaque light, and in a state of absolute happiness and security (a curious expression, but one which best conveys the feeling).

The whole of my personality lay 'out there,' even to the replica of the body — which, like the body, lay also on its left side. I was not conscious of leaving the body, but woke up out of it. It was not a dream, for the consciousness was an enhanced one, as superior to the ordinary waking state as that is to the dream state. Indeed, I thought to myself, 'This cannot be a dream,' so I willed 'out there' (there was no volition in the body), and as my spirit self moved so the body moved in bed."

Doing an experiment involving what he described as "illusions of levitation,"  an experimenter in 1918 may have produced evidence for out-of-body experiences. His research is described in a later book:

"I cannot do better than summarize the interesting articles of Mr. Lydiard H. Horton, which appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (April, 1918 ; June, 1918 ; August, 1919), in which he attempted to prove this fact — that such illusions of levitation may be so produced — even without sleep ! He induced a number of experimental subjects to lie upon a bed or couch, and relax completely. Upon the degree of relaxation thus attained depends the success of the experiment. If the patient can induce this complete relaxation of the muscular system without falling asleep, he will often experience an 'illusion of levitation.' ' Out of the thirty subjects who relaxed completely, and of the twenty or so who retained consciousness after they had completely relaxed, eight of them reported illusions of levitation.'  The following are typical experiences of this nature :

“ One of them jumped out of the chair and was afraid to continue the experiment, so realistic was his apperception of a soaring motion.

" Another, this time a woman, gripped the chair in the momentary belief that she was floating away ; two others reported that they felt ‘ caught up ’ by a wave, but that their reason reassured them at the time.

" One other...reported himself ‘ just floating away,’ the sensation being overwhelmingly real. ...”

On page 46 of the February 8, 1919 edition of the periodical Light, which can be read here,  we hear an account by Captain Gilbert Nobbs of getting a severe head injury during World War I. He says, "I seemed for a moment somewhere in the emptiness looking down at my body lying in the shell-hole."

The 1919 book "Modern Psychical Phenomena" by Hereward Carrington had a Chapter IX entitled "Projection of the 'Astral Body' " that you can read here.  The chapter begins like this:

"One of the latest achievements of 'psychical science' — which is constantly making new and important discoveries — is the voluntary projection of the 'astral body' of man — the expulsion of the human 'double' or etheric counterpart of the physical body — by methods under control of the human will. Occult science has long since proved that — besides this physical body, which we know — there is also a more subtle and refined envelope — the 'spiritual body' of St. Paul — and that this body is capable of being detached, at times, and of being ' projected' — leaving the physical body entranced, while the subtle body journeys and makes itself manifest to others at considerable distance."

On the page here of the Carrington book we have a sketch showing the idea of astral projection, one that shows the "silver cord" reputed to connect the astral body and the regular physical body. 

The chapter has some interesting instructions on how a person can attempt to perform a voluntary out-of-body experience. But we have no testimonies by people who claim to have performed such experiences. A 1920 work by Carrington ("Higher Psychical Development") has a chapter entitled "Projection of the Astral Body." On page 282 Carrington makes this remarkable claim: "It is estimated that about 15,000 persons now living 'see' more or less on the astral plane; and that about fifty persons can consciously go out into that plane at will." The reference to going out into the astral plane is a claim of willful out-of-body experiences. 

The 1923 newspaper article here attempts to summarize a long book by M. Pierre-Emile Cornillier, one entitled "The Survival of the Soul and Its Evolution After Death." I have been unable to find the book on sites such as www.archive.org. The article makes it sound as if the author had out-of-body experiences. 

In 1925 a very long French work appeared on out-of-body experiences, one by Charles Lancelin entitled "Méthode de dédoublement personnel : extérioration de la neuricité, sorties en astral," which translates as "Method of personal doubling: exteriorization of neuritis, astral projections."  (The book is listed on www.archive.org with a publication date of 1925, although it may have been published earlier.)  At its end on page 504 we have the photo below, which has a French caption, which translates as follows: "Miss B's splitting following a serious cholera-anaemia condition lasting three years." The author apparently is claiming to have a photo capturing an "astral body" projected during an out-of-body experience. As I don't read French, I cannot say much about the credibility of this author or whether the photo should be taken seriously. 

The next major account of out-of-body experiences occurred in the 1929 book "The Projection of the Astral Body" by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington, which you can read online here. Muldoon begins his account like this:

"When my first out-of-the-body experiences occurred I was but twelve — so young and immature in mind that I did not realize their magnitude. The occurrences came about involuntarily and repeated themselves frequently, until I became so accustomed to them that, as a matter of fact, I soon regarded them as nothing extraordinary and seldom mentioned them even to members of my own family, to say nothing of keeping a record of them, although I had been urged to do so by many interested persons.

I had been told, by persons professing to know, that conscious projection of the astral body was nothing unusual, and that many psychics could produce it at will. I, too, wanted to be able to produce it at will, and I admit that I was envious of those who (I had heard) could do so. So I began a search for some one who could produce the phenomenon voluntarily. But my search proved fruitless, and eventually I concluded that I could not find that 'some one.'  Thus I began to experiment with the phenomenon myself, and in this book you will find the results of my experiments."

The term "projection of the astral body" that Muldoon uses is a term equivalent to "out-of-body experience," although the term "projection of the astral body" has more of a connotation of something that happen from willful effort.  The term "projection of the astral body" also is a more dogmatic term, as it involves the doctrine that there is such a thing as an "astral body," a term that is pretty much equivalent to "spirit body." 

On this page the co-author Carrrington explains the term:

" The Astral Body may be defined as the Double, or the ethereal counterpart of the physical body, which it resembles and with which it normally coincides. It is thought to be composed of some semi-fluidic or subtle form of matter, invisible to the physical eye. It has, in the past, been spoken of as the etheric body, the mental body, the spiritual body, the desire body, the radiant body, the resurrection body, the double, the luminous body, the subtle body, the fluidic body, the shining body, the phantom, and by various other names. In recent Theosophical literature, distinctions have been made between these various bodies ; but for our present purposes we may ignore these distinctions, and speak of the 'Astral Body' as some more subtle form, distinct from the organic structure known to Western science, and studied by our physiologists.

The broad, general teaching is that every human being 'has' an astral body just as he has a heart, a brain and a liver. In fact, the astral body is more truly the Real Man than the physical body is, for the latter is merely a machine adapted to functioning upon the physical plane. But it must not be thought that the astral body is held to be the Soul of man either. That is a mistake often made. It is said to be the vehicle of the Soul — just as truly as the physical body is a vehicle — and constitutes one of the essential connecting links between mind and matter."

The idea may seem less fantastic when you consider that the modern astrophysicist claims that a spiral galaxy has essentially two bodies or forms: a visible body or form of regular matter, and an invisible body or form consisting of dark matter. 

On the page here Carrington argues for the plausibility of Muldoon's accounts of out-of-body experiences:

"I should like to draw the reader’s attention particularly to the fact that no wild or preposterous claims are anywhere made in this book as to what has been accomplished during these 'astral trips.'  Mr. Muldoon does not claim to have visited any distant planets — and return to tell us in detail their modes of life ; he does not claim to have explored any vast and beautiful 'spirit worlds' ; he does not pretend to have penetrated the past or the future ; to have re-lived any of his past 'incarnations' ; to have read any ' Akashic Records' ; to have travelled back along the stream of time, and reviewed the history of mankind, or the geologic eras of our earth. He asserts, merely, that he has been enabled to leave his physical body at will, and travel about in the present, in his immediate vicinity, in some vehicle or other, while fully conscious. This is perfectly rational, and is precisely what we should expect, on the theory that these 'trips' are actual experiences. "

On pages 116-117 of a 1936 book Sylvan Muldoon describes his first out-of-body experience:

"Slowly ...I was moving toward the ceiling, all the while lying horizontal and powerless. Naturally I believed that this was my physical body as I had always known it, but that it had mysteriously begun to defy gravity...Involuntarily, at about six feet above the bed, as if the movement had been conducted by an invisible intelligent force, present in the very air, I was uprighted from the horizontal position, to the perpendicular, and placed standing upon the floor of the room... where I remained for two or three minutes, still unable to move of my own accord... I managed to turn around. There were two of me! In the name of common sense — there were two of me! There was another 'me' lying quietly upon the bed. It was difficult to conceive of this being real — but there I was, fully conscious, fully able to reason and know what I saw was actual. The next thing which caught my eye, explained the curious sensation in the back of my head — for my two identical bodies were joined by means of an elastic-like cord, one end of which was fastened to the medulla oblongata region of my phantom counterpart, while the other end centered between the eyes of my physical counterpart. This cord extended across the space of probably six feet which separated us."

Muldoon's 1929 book includes this illustration depicting the idea of an astral body floating outside of a physical body, with the two connected by an elastic-like cord. 

Quite a few examples of people reporting the existence of such an elastic-like cord can be read in my post here. The author of a 2023 PhD dissertation ("Investigating the Nature and Psychological Impact of Out-of-Body Experiences") performed an online survey of 213 people who claimed to have had an out-of-body experience (page 156).  He states that 11% reported "seeing a ray of light, cord, ribbon, or rope connecting the nonphysical self to the physical self" (page 450).