Radiolab - 12: Proof

This week on the podcast, we continue our meditations on death. Our After Life episode had eleven meditations, and now we’re gonna throw a new one at you each day, all week long, culminating in a very special treat at the end of the week.

Duration: 8m
Broadcast on: 10 Aug 2009
Audio Format: other

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Oh, wait, you're listening to radio lab from WNYC and NPR, number 12 proof. Okay, so I read an article in the news scientist by author Mary Roach and it starts like this. What happens after you die? I can aim you 47 men who have tried to harness the rational horsepower of science to answer this most floaty question. Some were physicians, some physicists, some psychologists, two were Nobel Prize winners of them. Only one to date has landed irrefutable proof. Man's name was Thomas Lim Bradford. Yes. And that is Mary Roach. Hi. How are you? I'm fine. And Mary is the author of several books with wonderfully succinct titles. Spook, Stiff, Bonk. Those are three different books. The one we're talking about today is Spook. The subtitle is Science Tackles the Afterlife. Which brings us to Mr. Bradford. Thomas Lim Bradford was a spiritualist who lived in the early part of the 1900s. A spiritualist, is that the? Spiritualism was very, it was a religion very popular around the turn of the last century that was predicated on this notion that there is no death, that when you die you just go on to Summerland. Summerland. A beautiful place beyond. The thing is spiritualists like Thomas Lim Bradford, actually especially Thomas Lim Bradford, they didn't just have faith that Summerland was out there after death. They wanted proof, physical evidence that there is a beyond. So here's what happened. Today. One was this by the way. This was 1921. One day in 1921 Thomas Lim Bradford put out an ad. Yes, he put an ad in a Detroit newspaper. It's basically said, I would like to prove the existence of the afterlife. Anyone out there that can help? I'm looking for other like-minded people to think about this and this one woman contacted him. Really? A Ruth Moran. Who was apparently a psychic. It sat down and they devised what they thought was an ironclad plan. One person dies, crosses over to the afterlife, and then from the beyond that person would yell back. Hey, it worked, I'm here, there's an afterlife. Meanwhile the person who didn't die would be sitting in a room somewhere psychically listening. To see if they could hear something. Because if they could, then we'd have our proof.

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