I first came across his ideas in the 70s, through a book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), by two American authors, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder.

Reflecting somewhat the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, the authors were exploring psychic matters and occultism, and for that purpose they visited Soviet Russia, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. As described in the back cover, “they reveal astonishing breakthroughs and key personalities spearheading exploration of man’s unknown powers” in laboratories from Prague to Moscow.

One place they stopped was the Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), “the principal observatory of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the timekeeping Greenwich of Russia” (today The Central Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences) to meet Dr. Kozyrev. They were going there to discuss “an amazing theory of time” developed by Kozyrev, whom the authors described as “one of the Soviet Union’s most renowned astrophysicists” (p. 157).

Kozyrev does deserve this praise, as he was only 17 when he published his first scientific paper. When he graduated in physics and mathematics from the University of Leningrad, he was only twenty. And by the age of twenty-eight, he had already won distinction as an astronomer and had taught at several colleges (p. 158).

He was brimming with new ideas and life was as good as he could possibly have wished it to be. Then the ax fell. In 1936 he was arrested in the Stalinists repressions and in 1937 he began eleven crushing years in a prison camp. … When he was at last rehabilitated and could return to astronomy, Kozyrev made a series of brilliant predictions about the Moon, Venus, and Mars. Much later, Soviet space probes proved him right. (p. 158)

Like many other geniuses throughout world history, his announcements were received with skepticism in the beginning. In 1958, for instance, he announced volcanic activity on the moon, which meant that there were vast natural resources to exploit. Scientists “classified him as an eccentric hunting for gas on the moon. They knew this was not possible.” But he was proven right when Dr. Harold Urey, a U.S. Nobel Prize winner, talked with him and NASA started the enormous “Moon Blink” project. Eventually, gas emissions were found on the moon.

Kozyrev was proposing a new theory when he said, “Time is a form of energy. It is to time’s properties that we should look in order to find the source that maintains the phenomenon of life in the world.” With all credit to his other findings, this theory on time may sound completely irrelevant and without basis to scientists today; but as mentioned in the beginning, the purpose of this review is not to confirm his theory, but to open up a long forgotten gateway for researchers studying time and ether.

Although approached with suspicion today, parapsychology studies peaked in the eastern bloc in the 1960s, which was the main reason the two American authors felt the need to travel overseas and spend three years researching their 450-page book. “Parapsychology, nonexistent just a decade before, was suddenly flourishing all over the USSR,” they wrote. When the authors looked beyond Iron Curtain politics, “behind the lace curtains of everyday Russia,” they began to come across “some very unusual material about life.”

“Soviet scientists were asking publicly, ‘What is man?’ Do we have unused, undreamed of potentials? Can parapsychology melt the barriers and create the supernormal human being? These were heady questions to read in Soviet publications.”

In 1966, the authors noted, the influential journal Science and Religion put out a special issue, No. 3, on current Russian telepathy research. Outstanding Soviets, including such notables as Dr. Nikolai Semyonov, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and Vice President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, called for further scientific investigations of telepathy. It was in this time and context when Kozyrev’s research intensified and his speculative theory came into a form.

The authors noted that, according to some Soviet scientists (p. 159), ESP (extrasensory perception) “may involve an unknown form of energy,” which Kozyrev called “time,” in the telepathic transfer of “thought” instantly from one person to another.

“Time is the most important and most enigmatic property of nature. Time is not propagated like light waves; it appears immediately everywhere. The altered properties of a certain second of time will appear instantly everywhere at once, just as time is everywhere. Time links us all and all things in the universe,” Dr. Kozyrev told the authors in his high-ceilinged office at Pulkovo. The authors noted the following from their interview with Kozyrev:

Kozyrev’s “time” has a number of properties which he says can be studied in the scientist’s lab. He has found, for instance, that this “X” energy, or “time,” is denser near the receiver of an action and thinner near the sender. He showed us some of the instruments he has devised to chart this unusual effect. The basic equipment includes precision gyroscopes, asymmetrical pendulums, and torsion balances. The instruments, when set up in a complex arrangement, react showing a change in time density near a mechanical action (like stretching elastic) or a chemical action (like burning sugar).

This is the gist of what happens in one of the more simple experiments: a long elastic is stretched by a machine. You can think of this elastic as having two poles. The “pull” or cause end and the “stretch” or effect end. When the elastic is stretched, the registering equipment, consisting mainly of an asymmetrical pendulum made with a gyroscope, arcs toward the effect pole of the elastic. This deflection is imperceptible to the eye, but easily registered on the sensitive instruments. It is a highly important effect. It shows there has been an increase in the intensity of time, according to Dr. Kozyrev. “This has nothing to do with force fields. We shielded and calculated out any possible influence of electrostatic or any other force.” Considering Kozyrev’s rarified caliber as a scientist, he probably knows what he is talking about.

Kozyrev’s instruments also showed a thinning of time near the “cause” end of the elastic, and this was possible even when the “cause-effect” equipment was shielded by a wall one yard thick: “It reacts even through iron tubes.” Chemical cause-effect, like burning sugar, also showed the change in time density. “We postulate,” Dr. Kozyrev said, “that time is thin around the cause and dense around the effect.”

According to the authors, “what Dr. Kozyrev has found in these tests can be called PK (psychokinesis),” for the chemical events acted on the gyroscope pendulum at a distance and without the use of any known force. Dr. Kozyrev would say that “time density” brought on this startling action at a distance. PK is usually considered not as matter affecting matter from a distance, but as a mind affecting matter. The authors asked Kozyrev whether thought might have any effect on this time density. “Yes,” Dr. Kozyrev replied. “Thought definitely affects the reaction. When I purposefully think of poetry or something emotional during the test, the equipment registers more of a change than when I think of mathematical calculations. Our thoughts may change the density of time.”

“Would the density of time, then, have something to do with telepathy?” asked the authors.

“Telepathy always depends on the density of time. Time would be thin near the sender of the thought and denser around the receiver. We’ve already done tests in our lab to try to artificially change the density of time. When we can make time dense at will, we can make telepathy happen when we want it,” Dr. Kozyrev feels.

What else affects the density of time? Thunderstorms, the weather, the change of season, the activity of growing things, gravity, and density of matter have an effect on time density, which lingers longer in some substances than in others. “It remains twice as long in aluminum as in lead and five times longer in wood than in lead” (p. 162).

Another characteristic of the energy Kozyrev called “time” is that it has a flow pattern, according to his findings:

Dr. Kozyrev thought about all living organisms-animals, plants, people. Our right and left sides are not mirror images. More of the heart is on the left than the right side. Microbes produce colonies of a spiral structure. Protoplasm, the basic building block of life, is not symmetrical either. Asymmetry is a basic property of life. This can’t be a chance thing, Dr. Kozyrev thought. … Perhaps the energy of “time” flows in this pattern. If so, Dr. Kozyrev figured, he could see it and measure it in a rotating body like a gyroscope. Altering the time pattern in a rotating system should add or subtract energy.

After years of careful experiments, Dr. Kozyrev and his colleagues found that in a left-hand rotating system the time flow is positive-it adds energy. In a right-hand system the time flow is negative. … In Dr. Kozyrev’s view our world is a left-hand system and it has a positive time flow that adds energy to our universe.

Time not only has a pattern of flow, says Dr. Kozyrev, but also a rate of flow. He calls “the rate of flow” the difference between cause and effect. “As the rate of the time flow through a substance changes, weight is lost,” Dr. Kozyrev told us. “It means that ‘levitation’ is a perfectly practical possibility.” (p. 163)

Time or ether?

Time is not matter. According to Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, “time is like an aspect or a ‘ribbon’ of motion” (The Thirty-First Word, p. 591). That is, time is not possible without motion. I argue that what Kozyrev thought he discovered was not time, but perhaps had to with what is called ether, an element which is assumed by some cosmologists to be the essence of all existence, but which is also disregarded by many scientists today. Bediuzzaman is one of those scholars who referenced ether in his work. In his partial Qur’anic exegesis, The Sign of Miraculousness (Isharat al-I’jaz first published in 1914), Bediuzzaman explained the verse (Hud 11:7) as follows:

… the verse “the heavens and the earth were at first one piece, and then We parted them as separate entities”(21:30) indicates that the earth and the solar system were a sort of dough kneaded by the hand of power out of a simple substance; I mean ether, which compared with beings is a fluid substance that passes through and among them. The verse “His Supreme Throne was upon the water”(11:7) alludes to this matter, which resembles water. After its creation, the ether received the Maker’s first manifestation giving existence; that is, He created the ether, then He made it into the subatomic particles (jawâhir farda) … (Isharat al-I’jaz, pp. 254)

For Bediuzzaman, ether was something like an interface upon which all acts of God were displayed:

… being an extremely subtle, fine, obedient and subjugated page for the All-Majestic Maker’s acts, being a means for the transmission of His commands, being an extremely delicate veil for the execution of His decrees, being refined ink for His writing, being a finest raiment to clothe His acts of creation, being a fundamental component in His artifacts and a field in which to sow His seeds, ether acts as a mirror for the manifestations of the Lordship of God. (The Thirtieth Gleam, p. 477)

Bediuzzaman also referred to “ether” when he said “refined matter” in the following quote: “Such subtle and refined matters as light, electricity, and heat point to the existence of a more subtle and refined matter that fills space” (The ThirtyFirst Word, p. 589).

The observations and findings of Kozyrev, though in desperate need of endorsement by objective scientific criteria, sound, from how the American authors revealed in their interview, as if referring to this mysterious subtle matter called “ether” rather than “time.”

Conclusion

The authors of this once popular book wrote in the Prologue that they “would have to be megalomaniacs to think that scores of highly reputable scientists from centers across the Soviet Union and the satellite countries all conspired to publish data for a decade and to bluff through interviews” to impress them when they happened to meet them. The authors further noted that “whether communist observations and theories about psychic happenings are right or not, can only be determined by further investigations East and West.”

Let us conclude with the following quote from the Prologue: “As Vladimir Mutshall wrote of current Soviet telepathy research in the American Foreign Science bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 8, ‘If the Russian reports are even partly true, and if mind-to-mind thought transference can be used for such things as interplanetary communications or the guiding of interplanetary spacecraft, the reports will obviously have overwhelming significance.'”

The main reason I have extensively quoted from this book is not to confirm any of the findings, but to encourage scientists to conduct further research into the essence of matter without completely disregarding phenomena like ether.

Recent advances in science have led to longer lives, better health care, and healthier societies. Science develops through trial and error. However, irreproducibility still remains a problem, with issues related to bias, a high level of competition, a lack of appropriate statistical analysis, and preference to publish novel and positive findings instead of negative or additive results.

Irreproducibility issue

One of the pillars of scientific work is its reproducibility. Repeated proofs with a statistically significant number of experiments that show the finding is true under defined conditions further consolidate its acceptance by the scientific community. Positive findings often need reproducibility from different scientists and laboratories to be accepted as scientific fact. This does not mean, however, that they are completely discredited when they cannot be reproduced. Each bit of research is significant and worth praise by itself.

Scientists often do not find the means to repeat somebody else’s work given that large amounts of effort and money need to be spent. The practical way to test someone else’s findings usually happens through industries that could gain commercially from a certain finding. Unfortunately, this often comes with a price, even if research is found to be irreproducible. Bruce Booth, a venture capitalist, states that at least half of the findings in publications cannot be reproduced in industry settings. This might be an underestimation, given recent reports from different biotech companies.

According to various reports the reproducibility of published articles, in biomedical sciences for instance, is as low as 10-30 percent. Amgen, a biotech company with a team of around 100 scientists, tried to reproduce the results of 53 key cancer research articles in top journals, and found only 6 of them were reproducible (11% reproducibility). Bayer’s scientists found that only 14 of 67 projects related to oncology, cardiovascular medicine, and women’s health were reproducible (21% reproducibility).

Another example is the PsychFileDrawer project related to experimental physiology, which showed only 6 out of 21 articles were reproducible (28% reproducibility). In addition, one study to reproduce findings drawn from 18 articles regarding gene microarray analysis found in Nature Genetics largely failed. Similarly, when protein samples of identical proteins, as shown in article by Bell et al (2009), were sent to different laboratories, those labs failed to reproduce the initial findings. Dr. Asadullah, Vice President and Head of Target Discovery at Bayer, points to the increased trend of failures in Phase III trials, which also suggests a serious problem in the way research is vetted and published.

These numbers regarding the reproducibility raise an important question regarding the system of scientific research. If these alarming findings are true, it could mean that 70-90% of money spent on science does not bring about anything that is reproducible. It is intriguing that although the technologies used for scientific discoveries are now much improved, which would be expected to make date more precise and rigorous, the opposite is happening. This tends to suggest that the issue is not with the technology, but with the attitude and atmosphere of the larger scientific community.

Table 1: Major issues regarding today’s science

Publish or perish

A scientific publication is not only a tool for the transfer of knowledge between scientists, but also the basis for promotion and the awarding of grants. A rule in scientific communities regarding finding money to perform research is “Publish or Perish.” This refers to the cycle of publishing a high impact paper to get a grant, or losing one’s ability to compete with other labs.

The bar for success in the scientific community is set very, very high. This forces fledgling scientists to publish quickly and in high impact papers. Remarkably, in the major science journals, there has been a 10-fold increase in the retraction of articles in the last ten years, while there has only been a 1.4-fold increase in the number of journals published (Fang et al, 2012, Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications, PNAS).

Selective publication issue

Providing the best figures for publication, and selective interpretation of data, can also lead to incorrect results within scientific literature. A lack of blind experiments in basic science also plays a role in these mistakes. Some researchers may design their experiments, know what the control and experimental groups are, and may have biases in terms of wanting their hypothesis to be correct – thus they may interpret their data in favor of their idea.

Dr. Begley, head of global cancer research at Amgen, tells of a case where they tried to reproduce scientific findings in a paper but failed to reproduce the findings, even after 50 trials. Finally, they went to the author of the article and discussed how to solve this issue. Dr. Begley learned that the authors had tried the experiment only 6 times and it worked only once, but they put it in the paper since it made the best story. This might be seen as an extreme case, but similar selective publication of “good data” is not uncommon.

Scientists are under a great deal of pressure to publish the “best story” – both to advance their own careers and to fulfill their own competitive ambitions. This is increasingly becoming an important issue, and it stresses the need for verifying the results of others and publishing findings that negate previous publications.

Lack of incentive for verification

A majority of journals require authors to publish novel and positive findings and disregard negative findings and repetitive studies. There are a few journals that publish negative results, such as the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, the Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results, and the Journal of Interesting Negative Results, etcetera. But publishing negative findings is still a low priority for most publications, which seek new and exciting discoveries to attract more attention. But a renewed focus on verifying existing science, and publishing negative results, will create more reliable scientific literature.

Another issue is the lack of incentives for verification. Since the easiest way to get funding is novelty and publishing in high impact journals in the current hypercompetitive environment, there is almost no room for verification, if any. Under these conditions, many scientists tend to write up their own observations and seek to get published with little concern for reproducibility. Why do they need to find out whether it is wrong or not? If it is wrong, this would make it tougher for them to get funding.

But is this proper scientific conduct? Given these issues within the community, how can we be certain their research and its findings are sound?

Given the potential amount of misinformation in scientific literature, we need a scientific renaissance. We could have a reward system, such as funding or recognition that improves reproducibility, robustness of data, and an increased publicity of data and protocols, as Dr. Ioannidis suggested. Other approaches to increase reliability could be decreasing the requirements for getting grants, and providing a reproducibility parameter in the citation index.

Toprak is a freelance writer, living in Texas, studying Genetics.

References

1. In cancer science, many “discoveries” don’t hold up. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-idUSBRE82R12P20120328 on 4/28/13.
2. Reliability of ‘new drug target’ claims called into question. Retrieved from http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/09/reliability_of_new_drug_target.html on 4/28/13.
3. Retrieved from http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/view_article_list.php on 4/28/13.
4. John Arrowsmith. Trial watch: Phase III and submission failures: 2007–2010. Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 10, 87; 2011.
5. Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
6. Ioannidis et al. 2009. Repeatability of published microarray gene expression analyses. Nature Genet. 41, 149–155; 2009
7. Fang FC, Steen RG, Casadevall A (2012) Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 109: 17028–17033. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212247109
8. Bell et al. 2009. A HUPO test sample study reveals common problems in mass spectrometry–based proteomics. Nature Methods 6, 423–430; 2009
9. Bruce Booth. Academic bias & biotech failures. Retrieved from http://lifescivc.com/2011/03/academic-bias-biotech-failures/#0_undefined,0 on 4/28/13.

In the past few decades many studies and articles on the subject of religion, spirituality and health, from both Western and Muslim perspectives, have been published. In this book, Salih Yucel’s quantitative and qualitative studies support previous research findings which suggest that religion and health are not mutually exclusive and that there is clearly a positive correlation between prayer and wellbeing.

This book comprises a research study taken from the author’s doctoral thesis, The Effects of Prayer on Muslim Patients’ Well-being. Also included in this book is a qualitative study which contains examples of many case histories and anecdotal evidence from Muslims who have benefited from the healing power of prayer, which includes salat (Islamic ritual prayers), dua (formal and informal supplication to God), and dhikr (remembrance of God, based on the Sufi concept of connectedness to the universe. Also included are Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s “twenty-five remedies” for the sick which explains the concept of illness and how Muslims should view it in the light of belief.

The aim of this research has been to investigate the physical and spiritual effects of prayer on Muslim patients. Sixty adult Muslim in-patients, consisting of equal numbers of women and men from different educational backgrounds and nationalities, were recruited from the patient population at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School-affiliated institution in Boston, Massachusetts. The research included a pre-test questionnaire in order to assess the spiritual level of the patients and a post-test questionnaire after prayers were completed. The surveys were based on Islamic sources, with the second survey split into two sessions: the first contained readings from the Qur’an while the second consisted of texts from a non-religious source, serving as a control in order to determine the effect of prayers on the patients.

Unlike previous studies, this research has provided guidelines for prayer which is based on the Qur’an, the Prophetic Traditions and the works of a number of Muslim scholars. The guidelines are a reminder that prayers should if possible be carried out under certain conditions, which include both physical and spiritual preparation prior and after prayer. Examples include taking ablution and ensuring clothes are clean prior to prayer and so on. Also some of the spiritual advice is extremely helpful, such as the understanding that prayer will always be answered but not necessarily in the way that individuals may expect it, thus reducing the disappointment patients may feel if they do not get exactly what they have asked for after prayer. However, other conditions, such as offering prayer “sincerely,” may not be so easy to ensure.

The findings of the preliminary survey were used to determine the level of religiosity/spirituality of patients from an Islamic perspective. These findings were consistent with previous studies, showing a strong correlation between religiosity/spirituality and hopefulness/confidence. The post-test survey based on self-report measures of religiosity and wellbeing following the prayer session also showed higher scores in comparison to the control group. With regard to vital signs and the positive physical effects of prayer on health, however, the data was not considered to be clinically significant. The author admits to some of the limitations of the study such as the hospital environment itself which is not conducive to prayer conditions. One of the main limitations has been the omission of compulsory prayers (salat) from the survey, as many bed-ridden patients were unable to take part in this activity. A longitudinal study with a larger participant group and a more convenient environment might possibly have produced better results.

However, the qualitative study included in this book, which consists of many case studies of people who have benefitted from the healing power of prayer, provides further support for the importance of including prayer as part of treatment. The main strength of the book lies in its approach, which is based mainly on Said Nursi’s ideas of remedies for the sick. These remedies enable patients to move away from reliance on the realm of causality and are able potentially to empower them to try to understand their condition in a much broader context that includes the concept of the Hereafter.