Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Tarot cards
A pack of 78 cards, first used in Northern Italy in the early 14th century, originally as a tricktaking game, but now used by fortune-tellers for divination. The deck of 78 cards comprises four suits of 14 cards in each, making 56; the other 22 cards are unsuited trumps, decorated with symbolic designs like The…
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The Tao of physics
A book by Fritjof Capra, a physicist of some standing and a professor at the University of California, first published in 1975, revised in 1983, and subtitled “An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism.” The book has three parts: The Way of Physics; The Way of Eastern Mysticism; and The Parallels.…
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Talking apes
Communication between apes and humans. During the last hundred years, there have been several attempts to engage in some form of intelligible speech with apes. Richard L. Garner spent many years analyzing the sounds made by apes and eventually claimed to be able to talk to monkeys in their language. He published several books, The…
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Table rapping
A phenomenon of spiritualism in which poltergeists or noisy spirits are heard to rap on tables to attract attention, or more frequently a method by which spirits of the dead answer questions posed to them. Table rapping or table tilting is a very laborious way of consulting the spirit world and works rather like the…
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Synchronicity
A Jungian term for a connecting principle that he thought would give meaning to a series of causal coincidences, as for example the frequent recurrence of a particular number over a short span of time. Carl Gustav Jung thought that these coincidences were meaningful and would not accept that they could happen in accordance with…
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John cleves symmes
Hollow Earth theorist. Symmes saw Earth as made up of five concentric spheres with openings at each of the poles, several thou¬ sand miles in diameter. Water from the oceans flowed through these openings and plants and animal life lived on both the convex and the concave sides of the spheres. He thought this construction,…
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Superorganisms
Huge entities that behave in a way similar to living organisms plants or animals and form self-regulating systems. In response to some disturbance of a superorganism’s normal state, it reacts in such a way that it readjusts to a new equilibrium state. An example of such a system, which has been much discussed in recent…
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Sunspot cycles
The cyclic occurrence of spots that travel across the surface of the sun as it rotates. The number and area of these spots waxes and wanes. They were first observed by Galileo and much later by Heinrich Samuel Schwabe in 1826. By 1843, Schwabe had detected an average 10-year cycle, which he later corrected to…
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The day the sun stood still
Refers to an event recounted in the Old Testament when Joshua commanded the sun to delay going down for a full day and the moon to halt in its movements. During the 1970s, a story began to circulate in conservative Evangelical Christian circles that some scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had…
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William Summerlin (1938- )
Fraudulent medical researcher. Dr. William Summerlin was a respected immunologist who specialized in research on the problem of rejection of transplanted tissue. Through the 1960s, he had worked at the University of Minnesota and at Stanford. By the early 1970s, he had accepted a position at the Sloan-Kettering Institute of Cancer Research. While there, he…
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