The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Gerald Feinberg.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location
Gerald Feinberg	Scientists & Researchers	Person	Gerald Feinberg was a physics professor at Columbia University.	1933-05-27	1992-04-21	New York City, New York

Gerald Feinberg was a physics professor at Columbia University. He was working on hypotheses involving a subatomic particle called a Tachyon, which is proposed to be superluminal, or faster-than-light¹.

His work, along with that of Yakov Terletsky, attracted the attention of Hal Puthoff, who was interested in whether the tachyon flow could account for an "extra field" or force that physics couldn't yet see, potentially explaining Extrasensory Perception and other anomalous mental phenomena¹.

Columbia tachyon work and the SRI contracts

Feinberg was a physicist in Columbia's Department of Physics. In February 1970 Scientific American published his article "Particles That Go Faster Than Light," which describes a search for tachyons by a group at Columbia that examined bubble-chamber photographs for indirect evidence of neutral tachyons.² A technical proposal dated October 1, 1973 for a "Perceptual Augmentation Techniques" program, prepared by Puthoff and Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute, named Feinberg and Charles Tart as professors who "may be called upon to act as consultants."³ In 1974 Feinberg presented "Precognition: A Memory of Things Future?" at the twenty-third annual conference of the Parapsychology Foundation in Geneva. The paper suggested that precognition might be knowledge of a future state of the percipient's mind rather than of an objective state of the physical world.⁴ Later SRI remote-viewing documents attribute an "extradimensional hypothesis" to "Targ, Puthoff, and May (SRI), G. Feinberg (Columbia University), and E. Rauscher (University of California Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory)," and a December 1979 Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee report reproduces the passage.⁵

Footnotes

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1. Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎

2. Gerald Feinberg, "Particles That Go Faster Than Light," Scientific American, vol. 222, no. 2 (February 1970), CIA reading room copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000100030001-9. ↩︎

3. Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ, Perceptual Augmentation Techniques, Part One, Technical Proposal, SRI No. ISH 73-146, October 1, 1973, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200210001-8. ↩︎

4. Gerald Feinberg, "Precognition: A Memory of Things Future?", 23rd Annual International Conference of the Parapsychology Foundation, Geneva, August 26-27, 1974, CIA summary CIA-RDP96-00787R000200090021-0 (October 28, 1974). ↩︎

5. Puthoff and Targ, research approaches document, CIA-RDP96-00788R002000010006-4 (undated); Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee report, December 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5. ↩︎