Magic is in the air – but it’s the wrong sort of magic

Thanks to modern-day magical thinking people are once again beginning to dream of teleportation, but that’s not going to work in our macro-world

I’ve been writing columns for a slightly scary 50 years now, and while 40 of those were for impeccably rational tech magazines such as this one, ten of them weren’t. I started off writing in 1970 for the “underground” newspaper Frendz, which like its contemporaries Oz and IT was devoted to the hippy counterculture: its content comprised sex, drugs, rock & roll and anarchism, liberally embellished with a welter of the newly fashionable paranormal, the wacky, the spiritual. Think Indian gurus, flying saucers and telepathy. Having recently left my Imperial College chemistry course (in those days equivalent to four years of hard labour) I was unsympathetic to such piffle, and still am. I vividly remember arguing with a colleague who claimed that the Russians had perfected teleportation; he had no answer…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 2023

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