He blinded us with seance

摘要

IT WAS nothing short of astonishing. In 1877, word began to spread that a team of internationally renowned scientists had witnessed empirical proof of a fourth spatial dimension populated by the souls of the dead. The luminaries, at the University of Leipzig in Germany, included Wilhelm Weber, inventor of the electromagnetic telegraph, psychophysics pioneer Gustav Fechner, Johann Zollner, the university's chair of astrophysics, and Wilhelm Wundt, who would later be dubbed the "father of experimental psychology".