Battling Against Science

Often deemed the arch-enemy of science, Charles Fort is believed to have gained valuable cosmic understanding as a result of collecting anomalous phenomena.

The publication of The Book of the Damned by Charles Hoy Fort in 1919 undoubtedly changed the standard of reporting of anomalous phenomena in the American press for the better. Nonetheless, there was a sting in the tail. For whenever journalists reported a sighting of a sea serpent, or a home disrupted by a poltergeist, or a shower of frogs, they would tend to dismiss such matters as fodder for the arch-enemy of science, Charles Fort.

The unfortunate reputation of Fort as an enemy of science still lingers. Anyone who has actually read his books, however, must disagree, for Fort was extremely well-versed and up-to-date in nearly all branches of science for his day and understood the scientific method, the rules of evidence and proper scholarship. Indeed, he had looked closely at the great and impressive edifice of science and proclaimed it full of cracks. He had found, he said, scientists who made pontifical pronouncements without bothering with the facts of the case, who substituted dogma for true scientific enquiry, and who suppressed, ignored or explained away any embarrassing data. For his part, he was convinced that anomalies could well hold significance for science and should be studied.

The history of science is not one of orderly progression; it resembles more a battle, full of seemingly chaotic advances, retreats and skirmishes. This view of disorder and accident in scientific progress has been endorsed in one of the essential works on the history Of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. At any time in its history, says Kuhn, science is the prisoner of the 'basic preconceptions' of the day. These preconceptions are limiting factors, which he calls 'paradigms'. But paradigms are essential to the formal expression of a science because they serve as models or structures within which to organise whole areas of knowledge and to provide the context for explanations.

Kuhn shows that the rise of a new paradigm in science, and the demise of the outdated one, is not always the 'graceful surrender' by fair-minded individuals that science propagandists would have us believe. On the contrary, it is often as painful and protracted as any religious or political revolution, and for much the same reason. Scientists are human beings with innate weaknesses and worries. They have a great deal invested in their jobs, status and credibility - factors of more value to their security than the ideal of an open mind. Above all, they tend to be loyal to the familiar paradigm.

The classic example of reluctance to accept something new is that of the group of Italian scientists who refused to look through Galileo's telescope lest they, like the Jesuit Clavius, be tempted to abandon their comfortable view of a geocentric Universe on seeing Jupiter's satellites through the instrument. Indeed, the revolutions of moons about Jupiter, the model for the new idea of the solar system, remained in contention for many years after Galileo first proposed the idea.

New paradigms

A new paradigm, or the data that leads to it, can seem threatening, even sinister. So the body of orthodox science behaves like an invaded organism and closes ranks against 'infectious' data. Eventually, anomalies mount up, and there comes a time when they can no longer be ignored. There ensues a crisis period during which whole fields of science are broken apart, the pieces reassembled to incorporate the new data. What was once anomalous is now accepted or explained as a self-evident fact. But recurrent crisis is not only typical of scientific progress, Kuhn says, it is essential to it. In his book Lot, Fort called science 'the conventionalization of alleged knowledge,' explaining: 'It acts to maintain itself against further enlightenment, but when giving in, there is not surrender but partnership, and something that had been bitterly fought then becomes another factor in its prestige.'

The study of strange phenomena is clearly not at the same stage of development as mainstream science. In the field of 'anomalistics', as some American scholars call it, collections of oddities have long abounded. Indeed, many of the works of Greek philosophers such as Pliny, Pausanias and Athenaeus are rich in so-called Forteana. So are the writings of travellers such as Ibn Batutah and Marco Polo, and of the compilers of early bestiaries and natural histories such as Olaus Magnus and Edward Topsell, their work forming a vast data base on subjects currently lumped under the heading of unexplained phenomena.

An unbridgeable gap

Fort also was convinced that orthodox science is, by its own definition, 'exclusionist'. A scientific experiment, for example, is an attempt to isolate something from the rest of the Universe. The flaw of orthodoxy lies in its attempts to put things into units or categories. Yet anyone who has seriously investigated strange data knows that they usually defy categorisation. Exclusionist science functions well enough, but bases its criteria on arbitrary decisions.

As science progresses, such distinctions become obsolete and collapse. Thus, in the early 19th century, many biologists still regarded living things as essentially different from non-living things: for these 'vitalists' there was an unbridgeable gap between the animate and inanimate worlds.

But from around 1828 onwards, as chemists learned to synthetise organic compounds (compounds such as urea or acetic acid, which are produced by living organisms), the distinction between the animate and the inanimate lost its fundamental importance. Today, there is a tendency to forget that many of the dividing lines drawn by contemporary science - such as that between mind and matter, for example - may be redrawn or abandoned; and scientists frequently slavishly accept or reject data by criteria that are, at best, transient. It is clear that this arbitrary structure predetermines how we interrogate the Universe and how we interpret its answers. The German physicist Werner K. Heisenberg wrote: 'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.' In other words, light will behave like a wave or a particle according to the context in which it is investigated.

The barriers between the acceptable and unacceptable in science are changing all the time: moreover, what is dismissed as magic or superstition by one era may even become the science of the next.

The great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier told the Academy of Sciences in 1769 that only peasants could believe stones could fall from the sky, because 'there are no stones in the sky.' Indeed, it was his influence that prevented scientific study of meteorites -'stones from the sky' - until 1803.

Radical progress

But some barriers are gradually breaking down. Indeed, today's life sciences contain much by way of rehabilitated folklore: old herbals have been used for new pharmaceuticals and the practices of shamans have been adapted for new treatments. Apparitional phenomena, once the preserve of theologians and demonologists, are now the subject of both psychical research and psychology. What is more, a number of Fort's special correlations - strange lights on the Moon, curious aerial lights, sounds that accompany earthquakes, lunar periodicities in biological processes and behaviour, lake monsters and UFOs - all are matters of serious academic study today.

In answer to how strange phenomena could relate to the main body of science, Fort suggested that it was science that would eventually make the move to assimilate anomalous phenomena by adopting a more 'inclusive' approach. Inclusionists would 'substitute acceptance for belief', he said, but only temporarily until better data or theories arose. This is exactly what true scientists do, of course - because, for them, enquiring after the truth is more important than being right or first. Inclusionism would recognise a state of existence in which all things, creatures, ideas and phenomena were interrelated and so of an underlying oneness. From his thousands of notes, Fort saw that the Universe functioned more like an organism than a machine and that, while general principles applied universally, deviations and anomalies were the inevitable result of local expression of those principles.

This almost mystical view anticipated C.G. Jung's notion of the collective unconscious and echoed similar beliefs that appear in the cosmologies of primitive and animistic religions. Yet another theory, in which the world is seen as functioning more like an organism than a machine, emerged in 1981. This was Dr Rupert Sheldrake's principle of formative causation. This appears to offer philosophical tools for exploring continuity and synchronicity by postulating a resonance between forms of similar structure, whether living or not, that operates outside time and space.

In earlier ages, most cultures had an appreciation of anomalies that we have lost. They also had some framework in which to study them, usually as omens or portents of social change. Priests in rural Scandinavia in the late medieval period were obliged to report to their bishops anything contrary to the natural order, for example, and the chronicles that survive are treasure troves of sea serpent sightings, falls of mice and fish, animal battles and other strange phenomena.

Today, such stories are absent from most scientific journals, and are instead used as small filler paragraphs in newspapers, often written up inaccurately and just for laughs. But one day, when orthodox science widens its circle of attention and comes to realise that possibly there is much to be learned from thorough investigation of reports of bizarre occurrences, the task of assimilating such Fortean phenomena will have been made easier by dedicated collectors of obscure and weird data.