Holy crap I’m JUST LIKE THOSE SNEERERS! I need a cracker to properly absorb the meaning of th— CURSE YOU POLLY!

morphic dissonance [...] making it harder to perform certain activities once someone else has performed them first
It occurs to me now that according to this same effect, by covering similar ground, publications like the Annals of Improbable Results* have made it more difficult for me to write the promised book about the effect. My inability to get around to writing a coherent paragraph in fact demonstrates the reality of morphic dissonance. It has nothing to do with my normal state of indolence.

• Or for older readers, the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

This actually strikes me as backwards. Of the nonscientists I know, who aren’t trained in contemporary theoretical physics but are perfectly functional in the commonsense everyday world, a lot of them believe in telepathy, precognition, etc. on the basis of their subjective observations. They believe they’ve got it to some extent; they’ve had various experiences which strike them as inexplicable unless some kind of unusual psychic influence is happening. It’s the people who are scientifically trained who are more likely to discount those experiences as coincidence or self-delusion and generally disbelieve in this stuff, whether or not they come by that disbelief fairly.

(Granted, it’s not an airtight association; in the Seventies it seems like there was a wave of physicists believing in the powers of famous psychics, and Randi became famous in part for saying, probably correctly, that he was better at seeing through simple stage-magic ruses than they were. But this isn’t so common today.)

Now one thing that’s happened is that, starting around the Seventies, there’s been this little industry devoted to writing books that say modern physics makes this or that paranormal claim more plausible, on grounds that are usually sort of metaphorical and aesthetic: space-time is dynamic, we don’t know how it works on a fundamental level, quantum correlations are nonlocal and spooky, etc.

But you could do this general type of thing at any stage in the development of physics. Newtonian mechanics includes a cosmic influence of every particle of matter on every other particle, which propagates at infinite speed across universal distances without benefit of any palpable medium and can penetrate any solid substance; how much simpler to carry a thought at infinite speed from one brain to another! Maxwellian electrodynamics, with its invisible Hertzian waves pervading space? I don’t even need to make that one up: late 19th- and early 20th-century spiritualists were very big on magnetism and aetheric vibrations. I’d be suspicious of claims that recent physics is radically different in this regard.

My book about morphic assonance is ging ti kick iss in yir bik.

One of these days I plan to write a book about morphic dissonance, which is the opposite phenomenon, making it harder to perform certain activities once someone else has performed them first. Look at all the scientific observations that no-one was able to replicate. N-rays, polywater, the planet Vulcan…

Let me read his mind and I will respond, as Dave, when I am successful.