Category: F

Austrian physician and inventor of a technique of Hypnosis known as mesmerism. Mesmer has often been dismissed as a fraud who manipulated credulous people for his own personal gain. He was intrigued by the physical phenomenon of magnetism, and he formulated a theory that animals and plants as well as inanimate objects give off magnetic…

Amateur scientist, traveler, author, and mathematician who was the intellectual spark for the modern eugenics movement. Galton was the seventh and youngest child of a wealthy banking family from Birmingham, England. He was related on his mother’s side to the famous naturalist Charles darwin. A prodigy in various subjects, admirers have estimated his childhood IQ…

Viennese medical doctor whose studies of the brain and cranium helped launch modern biological psychology and provided the basis for the pseudoscience of phrenology. Born in Germany and trained in medicine in Vienna, Gall later claimed to have initiated his lifelong study of the structure and function of the brain as a young man when…

A term coined in 1949 by the German historian Ossip K. Flechtheim to designate the then new science of prognosis. It has often been described as an organized activity, explicitly devoted to systematic and normative interpretation of potential future histories. The new science has since been applied to a wide spread of long- range forecasting…

The concept that there is another dimension beyond the three that we use to describe or visualize solid objects or describe mathematically in solid geometry. The idea entered the popular realm when explanations of Einsteins special theory of relativity appeared in the media. Einsteins theory made time the fourth dimension, inextricably connected with the three…

Parapsychology research organization continuing the work of the former Parapsychology Laboratory founded in 1935 by Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University. Rhine was the pioneer advocate of laboratory research on psychic phenomena. In 1927 he joined the Psychology Department faculty at Duke, then under the chairmanship of William McDougall, a former president of the society…

A modern upmarket monthly journal, founded in 1973 to continue the ideas and preconceptions of the U.S. author Charles Hoy FORT. It is published in Britain by Mike Dash for Viz and edited by Bob Rickard and Paul Sieveking, who call themselves “cosmic clerks.” The magazine prints a wide selection of strange phenomena, unusual beliefs,…

Founded in 1931 to promote the science-debunking ideas of Charles Hoy FORT by two of Fort’s longtime friends, well-known novelist Theodore Dreiser and Tiffany Thayer. Other members included renowned literary men of the time, such as Alexander Woollcott, Booth Tarkington, Ben Hecht, Burton Rascoe, and John Cowper Powys. Fort himself opposed the idea of founding…

A theory concerning the origin and growth of forms and characteristics in nature that was originally proposed by biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. Generally, biologists speak of what is termed “morphogenetic fields” to indicate the as-yet poorly understood factors that influence the development of growth in plants and animals. These factors are assumed to operate through the…

An organization that promotes the belief that the Earth is flat and pancake-shaped and not an oblate sphere the orthodox view for many hundreds of years. The society describes itself on its Internet site as a nonpartisan, nonprofit, and nondenominational membership organization that is dedicated to improving understanding of the nature of reality through paraphysical…