Theos-Talk Archives (February 2007 Message tt00206)

Excepts from ch. V of
"OCCULT CHEMISTRY RE-EVALUATED" by E. Lester Smith, D.Sc., F.R.S.
where he considers possibilities of couscious or unconscouus fraud.

(Not proof-read, sorry).

1. Neon (atomic weight 20) and a variant meta-neon (atomic weight 22) 
were described in The Theosophist in 1908, some six years before 
Soddy introduced the concept of isotopes to science. So in 1908 there 
was no scientific reason to suspect a second variety of neon and no 
purpose in fabricating it.

2. The second argument is even more telling and has been mentioned 
already. Besant and Leadbeater were defending a false hypothesis; 
namely that the number of ultimate physical atoms seen in an element, 
divided by 18, should give its atomic weight. In fact, it should give 
the mass number of whichever isotope of that element was observed. 
But they persisted with their original hypothesis long after isotopes 
were accepted by science. If either conscious or unconscious fraud 
were involved, they could have made a much better job of securing 
closer agreement between their "number weights" [(no. of U.P.A. in 
M.P.A.)/18] and published atomic weights.

3. If their description of molecular structures were indeed 
fabricated, why should they ascribe scientifically unacceptable 
structures to many molecules, for example the octahedral structure 
shown in  Occult Chemistry for benzene and its derivates instead of 
the generally accepted hexagonal structure?

4. Certain spinning and precessing motions of ultimate physical atoms 
and their groupings such as hydrogen triangles in magnetic or 
electrical fields were described vividly and unmistakably long before 
any such motions were even suspected by scientists, let alone being 
postulated or experimentally observed. Some of the occult 
descriptions published as early as 1908 imply that ultimate physical 
atoms behave like magnetic monopoles. But they do not even mention 
the possibility of their particles having magnetic charges, and the 
concept of monopoles was not formulated until 1933 by Dirac.

5. These are only some of the more dramatic examples. Many others 
present "exact correspondence between facts and ideas of contemporary 
particle physics and micro-psi observations published as long ago as 
1895. If the latter are merely fabricated, all these remarkable 
similarities can only be coincidental—a conclusion which lacks 
credibility. "(7)

So the possibility of fraud cannot be seriously entertained. It has 
to be accepted that micro-psi vision is a real faculty that does 
provide observers with images of some kind. The question then has to 
be asked, are they subjective or objective? Subjective images, 
arising in the brain of the observer without relation to the external 
object being examined, are a possibility that must be entertained. 
This would be in the realm of fantasy and hallucinations, of interest 
to psychologists or even psychiatrists, but not to physicists. But 
similar images were seen by both observers and they were seen over a 
period of 38 years. Hallucinations are not likely to alter when 
another person switches on or off an electric or magnetic field, yet 
this happens repeatedly to certain of the subatomic conglomerations 
seen by micro-psi vision. It could hardly happen if they were just 
archetypal (in Jung's sense of emanating from a collective 
unconscious; we shall suggest later that they may indeed be 
Archetypes in the theosophical sense of thoughts in the Logoic Mind). 
Moreover, ultimate physical atoms, for example, behave in response to 
electric and magnetic fields in a manner that can be understood by 
modern science in terms of properties like electric charge, spin and 
electric dipole moments. Yet some of these concepts were unknown even 
to scientists at the relevant dates, much less to lay persons like 
Besant and Leadbeater. Thus there seems no escape from the "realist" 
explanation that micro-psi is a valid means of examining actual small 
objects. In the words of Dr. Phillips "micro-psi vision is ESP of 
physical microscopic objects that are present in space-time during 
the period of their active observation." This statement is carefully 
framed; it does not claim that the object is seen exactly as it was 
before the examination and as it may be after this is over. This 
claim was made categorically by the original investigators in all 
sincerity and innocence. But it cannot be supported today in the 
light of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. With objects so minute, 
interaction between observer and observed is unavoidable; the very 
act of observation perturbs the object presumably even with such a 
gentle mode of observation as micro-psi vision. This might be 
arguable, but in practice much greater violence is done to the atoms 
by an additional action by the observer; this is the use of a special 
kind of will power to slow down the various motions of the atom. It 
implies psychokinetic application of physical force to the atom and 
it is precisely this which totally destabilizes it and leads to the 
doubling-up phenomenon, outlined in chapter 4. (The Two Hypotheses 
Concerning Micro-psi). Its mechanism will be explained in more detail 
in chapter 9.