Out of curiosity I just checked if I could find it. I couldn’t, which isn’t surprising - a book isn’t a scientific publication, so sources are rarely of great interest.
But in general: It would take hours, maybe days of work to cross reference the sources of a whole book with what the author claims they prove. Obviously I won’t do that. How many papers from the bibliography have you read? If you own the book, at least you should have easy access to it’s sources.
I believe in helium balloons too. Does that mean I don’t believe in gravity?
Physics can explain helium balloons really well. There’s no mystery here. And they’re certainly not disproving gravity.
Einstein didn’t even get a nobel prize for special relativity because it was considered too radical at the time.
Einstein had no easily repeated experiments to show off. You’re claiming ghosts are measurable in a repeatable way - simple enough to be explained in a book for laypeople . At least after the third or fourth study with robust methodology the scientific community would be talking about nothing else. And I know that because I am surrounded by the kind of researchers you’re thinking of when you say “scientists”. They’re a bunch of nerds, they love that stuff. And they research ominous stuff all the time, a biology professor here spent 3 years studying healing crystals in drinking water. Disappointingly they found nothing.
And why do you assume this science has gone ‘unnoticed’? We’re talking about it, aren’t we?
Well to be fair we’re talking about a claim that such research exist, which is miles off from discussing actual research, which would be done by scientists in order to validate it’s operationalisation and discuss their findings.
The thing is: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A book simply isn’t that. It’s way too easily faked, isn’t subject to the scientific method, peer review, any form of control or critical oversight and at the end of the day profits not from the truth but from being sold. And you are here doing advertising for them, so it seems like they are succeeding at that.
I’m not trying to persuade you. I believe that would be hard to do at this point. What I’m trying to say here, referring to the thread and OP’s question: It’s not unreasonable to think that you, and everyone else being convinced by a very entertaining and captivating book outside of the actual scientific method, are unreasonable.
One book simply shouldn’t be this convincing.
Thanks for explaining. To be honest I’m still not sure why that convinced you. If you wrote a book with a few hundred, even a few thousand anecdotes about people levitating I would still believe in gravity.
The power of the book is that it just inundates you with credible stories (and credible science!) from credible people
That is the part I doubt the most. Because if that was true, if this so called credible science in your book wasn’t misinterpreted or simply faked, the scientists responsible would have gotten a nobel price and world wide recognition. But they didn’t. If ghosts (or near death experiences, for that matter) were measurable in a repeatable or otherwise credible way it would be done on a wide scale. Scientists basically live for the chance to be the one who challenges a paradigm - and this one would shake everything we know about the material world, every scientific discipline, religions even.
There’s simply no good reason for such “credible science” to go unnoticed. There is at least one very good reason for faking it: It makes money.
The details here might be a bit out of scope for a c/nostupidquestions thread but I’m basing my thoughts here on the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane.
What was it that convinced you?
I’m trying to show you that your case isn’t convincing.
If your book could logically prove something, or at least argue convincingly (logically!) in favor of it, maybe it would in fact be interesting. Then you could repeat the arguments here (and elsewhere, and scientists would be doing just that) and we’d actually have some kind of discussion with something to gain for both of us. Anecdotes are, scientifically speaking, basically worthless. At best they’re used to create hypotheses, never to test them or to prove something. And even a great sum of them simply aren’t science.
And I’m sorry to say but this very much reminds me of conspiracy theories, e.g. flat earth theory, were science is really clear about something while a few laypeople on youtube think to themselves “I bet all those researchers just didn’t think of this, which to me on the other hand is completely obvious”.
Your claim is absolutely extraordinary. You would have to present an absolutely powerful, convincing logical argument in order to even begin to support it. “Someone claimed it happened to them” simply isn’t that, no matter how well it’s written.