Word: psy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Tentatively called a "J" particle by Ting's team, which used the 33 billion-electron-volt accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and a "Psi" particle by Richter's group at the two-mile-long Stanford Linear Accelerator, it was the heaviest atomic fragment ever found-almost 3% times more massive than the proton. It was also, by nuclear standards, extremely long-lived. It survived a full one-hundred billionths of one-billionth of a second, or 1,000 times longer than other massive particles...
Until science adopts the same rigorous testing procedures that are applied to any other investigation, the pursuit of any possible "psi" effect will meet with serious and legitimate objections. Miracle workers will continue to produce "paranormal" ghost pictures, bend nails and float objects in midair. Scientists will be confused until they realize that they are incapable of detecting chicanery without expert assistance...
Immense Claims. As parapsychology gains new respectability, so do its terms gain wide currency: "psi" for any psychic phenomenon; "clairvoyance" for the awareness of events and objects that lie outside the perimeters of the five senses; "out-of-body" experience for seeming to journey to a place that may be miles from the body; "psychokinesis" for the mental ability to influence physical objects; "precognition" for the foreknowledge of events, from the fall of dice to the prediction of political assassinations; and the wide-ranging term ESP for extrasensory perception...
...articulate spokesmen and scientific terminology, however, the new world of psi still has a serious credibility problem. One reason is that like any growth industry or pop phenomenon, it has attracted a fair share of hustlers. Indeed, the psychic-phenomena boom may contain more charlatans and conjurers, more naïfs and gullibles than can be found on the stage and in the audience of ten Ringling Brothers circuses. The situation is not helped at all by the "proofs" that fail to satisfy traditional canons of scientific investigations. Despite the published discoveries, despite the indefatigable explorations of the psychic researchers...
...inspiring Doyle lecture on spiritualism, Rhine and his wife Louisa immersed themselves in literature published by the Society for Psychical Research. When Rhine later joined the faculty of Duke University, he began a lifelong devotion to psychic research. It was he who coined the terms extrasensory perception and psi (for psychic phenomena); it was he who gave his specialty an academic imprimatur by compiling mountains of statistics about psychic subjects who could "read" cards that they could...