Seven Experiments That Could Change the World - A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science

Rupert Sheldrake's Seven Experiments That Could Change the World is less a report of finished research than a manual for producing it. The book's premise is that a small set of stubborn anomalies — animal direction-finding, the sense of being stared at, the apparent constancy of the fundamental constants, and related puzzles — sit at the bottom of the scientific agenda not because they have been solved but because institutional science has grown conservative. Sheldrake, a former research fellow of the Royal Society and former director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Clare College, Cambridge, argues that these problems can be attacked cheaply by people who are not professional scientists, and that the people best placed to do some of the work are the enthusiasts who already keep and race the animals in question.

The book is framed as a do-it-yourself guide. Its experiments are deliberately low-cost and low-tech, designed so that a reader with patience and a notebook can contribute data rather than merely read about someone else's. This framing carries an argument about who is allowed to do science: Sheldrake traces the professionalization of research from the late nineteenth century and its vast institutional expansion after the 1950s, and contrasts that with an earlier era in which independent investigators dominated. Charles Darwin is his model — a man with no institutional post who studied barnacles, kept pigeons, and ran garden experiments with his son Francis. Sheldrake notes that only a handful of independent scientists remain, naming James Lovelock, the Gaia hypothesis proponent, as the best known, and observes that amateur naturalists and freelance inventors, while still present, have been pushed to the margins.

Pigeon homing and the failure of orthodox mechanisms

The strongest material in the book concerns how homing pigeons find their way home. Sheldrake reviews the candidate explanations and reports that several have been tested and failed.

The first is magnetic navigation. In German experiments, pigeons were transported while being rotated at up to ninety revolutions per minute inside a variable magnetic field, unable to see out and isolated from the smells of the country they passed through. If the birds depended on a magnetic compass or on integrating the direction of travel, this treatment should have wrecked their orientation. According to Sheldrake, the rotated birds performed about as well as control birds carried in open crates on the roof of the car.

The second is inertial navigation — the idea that a bird senses and integrates every turn of the journey using the semicircular canals of the middle ear, the organs that detect acceleration and rotation. Destroying these organs entirely prevents birds from flying properly, but surgical cutting of the horizontal canals left pigeons homing normally after being taken more than two hundred miles away, and performing as well as controls. Other work with a variety of surgical lesions to the canals found the birds orienting accurately under both sunny and overcast conditions. Sheldrake treats this as a firm negative: the inertial hypothesis, he writes, can be ruled out and is no longer seriously entertained by researchers in the field. This is an unusually decisive conclusion for a book that generally insists anomalies remain open.

The third candidate is landmark navigation. Sheldrake concedes that landmarks matter when birds are released a few miles from the loft, and when they fly repeatedly over the same terrain. In one series of trials, by the fourth release at a site the birds seemed to be using local features, and by the seventh they were effectively following a chain of landmarks home, much as a person learns a familiar route. But this cannot explain first-time homing from unfamiliar country, where no landmarks have yet been learned.

Mobile lofts and the cancelled test

A separate chapter examines pigeons homing to lofts that move. During the First World War the Italian Navy used shipboard lofts to carry messages between vessels while both were under way; Sheldrake quotes the report that from distances over a hundred kilometres the birds found their own loft on their own boat, which was continuously moving and never stayed in one place, and could pick it out even among very similar vessels. He calls this remarkable and regrets that more detail is unavailable. The British Army Pigeon Service ran a comparable two-way system in Algeria and Tunisia, and mobile-loft systems were being developed in Switzerland with birds from the Swiss Army Pigeon Service, one of the last military carrier-pigeon services along with China's.

Sheldrake is candid that the historical record is thin. He could not establish exactly how the wartime mobile lofts were operated, and supposes that in most cases the loft simply travelled with the birds inside it and the birds were given time to adjust — in which case homing to a mobile loft would not be especially surprising. The more striking case is the sea-going loft, where the ship moved more than six thousand miles over several months and the birds continued to enter it after training flights from widely separated positions. Van Oortmerssen's birds, released from the ship in a new position, tended to fly off in a direction roughly matching the compass direction of the place they had flown from before, which Sheldrake reads as evidence that they recognized the earlier release site and tried to return to it. Some birds climbed high and vanished at speed, especially near land, suggesting they were searching for land and heading for it when they saw it.

All of this training was meant to set up the decisive experiment: transferring pigeons to a second ship, sailing the Tydeman away in a randomly chosen direction for at least forty miles — beyond the horizon — and releasing the birds to see whether they could find their moving home. The test never ran. The time allotted to the pigeon work was cut from a week to two days because the voyage's main purpose, testing military sonar equipment, took priority. Only 14 and 20 September 1996 remained available, and on the first of those the Tydeman was about a hundred miles south of Madeira. Sheldrake's own account leaves the central question unanswered.

The sense of being stared at

The staring experiments rest on a distinctive pattern. In "looking" trials, where a looker behind the subject is instructed to stare, most subjects score somewhat above chance. In "not-looking" trials, where the looker is instructed not to stare, subjects score at chance. Sheldrake argues that this asymmetry is itself a safeguard: someone cheating, or picking up subtle cues such as the sound of a head turning or a change in breathing, ought to score above chance in both conditions. The not-looking trials have no parallel in ordinary life, he notes, because we have no everyday sense of not being stared at, so subjects in those trials are simply guessing.

The pattern reportedly survives attempts to remove sensory channels. Blindfolded subjects were stared at through closed windows and through one-way mirrors with similar results, and subjects also detected staring in ordinary mirrors where the looker could see only their reflected image. Sheldrake acknowledges that few tests have used unusually sensitive subjects, though a German school reported selected participants scoring up to ninety percent correct, and that very few studies have tested subjects repeatedly with feedback to see whether the ability improves with practice. The largest ongoing effort, running in Amsterdam since 1995, was developed by Diana Issidorides and colleagues at the New Metropolis Center science museum, who turned Sheldrake's simple looker–subject pairing into a computerized game with moving graphics, immediate feedback, and a statistical method designed to be both rigorous and easy for visitors to use.

The variability of the fundamental constants

One chapter turns from biology to physics and argues that the constancy of the fundamental constants is an act of faith rather than an established result. Sheldrake's case is methodological. The official values of the constants have changed within recent decades, he notes, and attempts to test constancy over astronomical distances and times rely on astronomical methods that already assume the universal constancy of nature — the very thing they set out to demonstrate. Such arguments are, in his phrase, circular to varying degrees. When measurements do show variation, he observes, the variation is normally dismissed as experimental error and the newest figure is treated as the best approximation to a true value. He concedes that many variations are indeed errors and that accuracy improves with better instruments, but insists that not every variation need be error, and that in an evolving universe the constants might themselves evolve, perhaps cyclically.

He also sketches, and explicitly labels as very speculative, a theory of cosmic fecundity: universes whose constants permit star formation also permit black holes, and if black holes spawn new universes, then only universes like ours would reproduce, leaving many broadly similar habitable universes. Sheldrake immediately notes that this does not explain why any universe exists at all, what determines the laws, or what maintains and remembers the constants. His point is that even these extravagant speculations remain conventional in assuming eternal laws and constant constants, and that this shared assumption is what makes constancy feel assured.

What the book establishes and what it does not

The negative results on pigeon navigation are the most substantial evidence in the book: they come from published experiments with controls, and Sheldrake reports them as closing off magnetic and inertial explanations. The mobile-loft material is historical and admitted to be incomplete, and the key sea trial was cancelled. The staring results are presented as a consistent pattern rather than a demonstrated mechanism, and Sheldrake himself flags the shortage of repeated-feedback tests and of work with sensitive subjects; the asymmetry argument is an interpretation of the data, not a control condition in its own right. The constants chapter is a critique of method and an argument about faith, not a new measurement. The cosmic fecundity idea is offered as speculation and attributed as such.

The book's larger claim — that anomalies are neglected because professional science is conservative, and that amateurs can fill the gap — is supported mainly by historical and rhetorical argument rather than by the experiments themselves. Its lasting contribution is the experimental program it proposes and the data it collects from others, together with a clear statement of where the evidence is strong and where it thins out.

References

- Sheldrake, Rupert. Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science. Park Street Press, Rochester, Vermont.

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