> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Koestler-Les-racines-du-hasard/381165

> LES RACINES DU HASARD, par Arthur Koestler, trad. Georges Fradier. Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1972, 1S3 pages. — LA SCIENCE n'a pas cette belle certitude hautaine qu'on lui attribue généralement, et les phrases telles que "la science nous apprend que… ” ne peuvent le plus souvent que recouvrir une somme d'incertitudes et d’approximations, car si, pour le profane, la science équivaut au réel, le savant est, quant à lui, de plus en plus conscient qu'il "fait” le réel.
[…]
AU-DELÀ DE LA SCIENCE ET DES SENS
Arthur Koestler, lui, insiste et c'est même là le but premier de son livre "Les racines du hasard" : démontrer que la "fluidité" et l'indétermination que la science physique contemporaine reconnaît au monde permet de reposer en termes nouveaux, et avec beaucoup plus de vraisemblance, la question de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler les phénomènes extra-sensoriels (télépathie, prémonition, clairvoyance, etc.). Il faut dire, toutefois, que si la partie du livre de Koestler concernant l'exposé des tendances de la physique moderne est des plus claires et des plus passionnantes à lire, les arguments qu'il en tire, dans le reste du livre, pour étayer sa présentation des phénomènes extra-sensoriels, ne sont guère convaincants.
Pourquoi d'ailleurs faudrait-il se donner tant de peine pour justifier scientifiquement des phénomènes somme toute assez mineurs par rapport aux merveilles que la science elle-même a produites depuis deux siècles. Quant à la recherche psychique dans son ensemble, elle est, il me semble, de plus en plus poussée aujourd'hui et on ne peut qu'espérer que les découvertes qu'on y fera ne viennent pas renforcer les œuvres d’oppressions que les découvertes de la physique moderne ont malheureusement permises. La grande erreur serait de penser que le "psychique", ou le "spirituel”, est plus pur et plus dégagé des intérêts mesquins que le monde "matériel". (Jean-Claude DUSSAULT)
—La presse, 25 novembre 1972, D. Arts et lettres, (p. 3)

I can't help it, I love coincidences. So did Koestler. Just to prove how incredibly clever he is despite this, I offer from Theodore Dalrymple:

Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word vince down on the board.

“Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?”

Koestler, who never lost his strong Hungarian accent but whose mastery of English was such that he was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language, replied (one can just imagine with what light in his eyes): “To vince is to flinch slightly viz pain.”

How many people could define a word in their first language with such elegant precision, let alone in their fourth, and moreover combine it with such irresistibly wicked humor?

( )

I can't help it, I love coincidences. So did Koestler. Just to prove how incredibly clever he is despite this, I offer from Theodore Dalrymple:

Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word vince down on the board.

“Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?”

Koestler, who never lost his strong Hungarian accent but whose mastery of English was such that he was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language, replied (one can just imagine with what light in his eyes): “To vince is to flinch slightly viz pain.”

How many people could define a word in their first language with such elegant precision, let alone in their fourth, and moreover combine it with such irresistibly wicked humor?

( )

Librería 4. Estante 5.

Koestler's Roots of Coincidence is a review of relatively modern parapsychological research. It deals with the published evidence of phenomena such as Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) and Psycho-Kinesis (PK). One thing that surprised me is that this research has been done, and is being done, at some of our best universities, and that a large number of Nobel Laureates and other famous and brilliant scientists (such as C.G. Jung, Henri Bergson, Wolfgang Pauli, John Eccles, Lord Rayleigh, J.J. Thompson, William James, Henry Sidgwick) have been involved in it. What surprised me even more, was that some of the evidence is quite good.
I don't think Koestler overstates the case for the existence of these phenomena, but the case does appear quite strong. The sort of thing that seems to be reproducible, under controlled conditions, might not actually be as exciting as the imagination could conceive. Some people have been shown to be able to guess the identity of random cards at over 10% above the rate of chance, over tens or hundreds of thousands of attempts. This is statistically significant, with the chance of it happening randomly in the orders of millions or billions to one. The evidence for this sort of thing seems quite good, and does demand some kind of explanation, other than chance.
Koestler thinks that most people who refuse to believe in these phenomena do so due to mechanistic (Newtonian) world views. He presents the strangeness of modern quantum mechanics and relativity, and it makes the objections to parapsychological phenomena seem a lot more tenuous. Of course, we don't know the mechanisms of action for these parapsychological phenomena, but if they exist then they probably rely on quantum events. The physics and neuroscience coverage seems quite well done, and it is interesting that Koestler knew personally several scientists, such as Pauli.
In truth it does all seem quite far-fetched, but it should be possible for the reader to rationally suspend disbelief in these things after reading this book.
Koestler seems to have a knack for making his readers realise that they are interested in things that they previously weren't interested in. Perhaps this is because he only writes about interesting things, or maybe it is becaus he writes well about them. Before reading this book I was a lot more skeptical about these phenomena than I am now, and I suspect that advances in science will allow us to get nearer to the bottom of these things, and to find out if there is a sensible explanation for them. ( )