27 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
27 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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aliases:
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- Gerald Feinberg
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category: "Scientists & Researchers"
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tags:
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- Person
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summary: "Gerald Feinberg was a physics professor at Columbia University."
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born: 1933-05-27
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died: 1992-04-21
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location: "New York City, New York"
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---
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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-light[^1].
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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|ESP]] and other anomalous mental phenomena[^1].
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### Columbia tachyon work and the SRI contracts
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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]
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### 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.
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[^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.
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[^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.
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[^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).
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[^5]: Puthoff and Targ, research approaches document, CIA-RDP96-00788R002000010006-4 (undated); Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee report, December 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5.
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