Actually this piece at Reality Sandwich from parapsychologist Dean Radin is about psi phenomena, and gorillas, though the psi phenomena are real (according to Radin) and the gorilla isn’t.
Radin outlines recent scenarios in which the mainstream media and establishment science appear to have conveniently overlooked intriguing results from psi experiments.
An increasingly exasperated Radin raises some important points about the relationship between hard science and frustratingly mercurial psi phenomena, eventually asking:
“…will mainstream science ever be prepared to admit that psychic phenomena warrants serious investigation? I believe the answer is yes. Acceptance someday is inevitable. We are dealing with human experiences reported since the dawn of human history, experiences that do not go away in tightly controlled laboratory tests using the most sophisticated experimental tools and designs. So some of these phenomena will eventually become integrated into the mainstream. Exactly when I cannot say. Perhaps one to five decades.
Will this happen because the accumulated data will overwhelm skepticism? Probably not. As Max Planck, the physicist who dreamt up the idea of the “quantum” in quantum mechanics, once wrote, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Part of the problem, and perhaps the solution, involves managing expectations. The fantasies of psi phenomena are so far removed from their almost imperceptibly subtle reality that non-believers are never going to be satisfied, because parapsychologists are never going to get the telepathic gorilla to jump through flaming hoops*.
While I don’t deny that ‘these things happen’ I think it may prove impossible to extract the phenomena that we perceive as ‘psi’ – which are, by their very nature, almost always fleeting and acausal – from the weft and weave of everyday sensory experience. They are epiphenomena of our participation in the world around us. Are they glitches in our perceptual processing, or perhaps glitches in the way the world perceives and processes us? The answer, most likely, lies caught inexorably, inseparably, between the two.
Anyway, read the full article at Reality Sandwich
via Daily Grail
*Except for the instance pictured above during a pyrokinetic experiment conducted in Czechoslovakia in 1963.