History Atlas

How The Past Is Known

History Atlas

Open Questions

Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which expertise the answer needs.

These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither one settles it alone.

Grouped by the part of the atlas the question sits in. Start here if you know the territory better than the technique.

Filter By Specialty 99 fields, 1 selected
Fields With More Than One Question
Show All Specialties 66 more, one question each
One Question Each
Clear All

Showing 1 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.

1 open question shown.

People & Practitioners 1
Hubert Pearce What were Hubert Pearce's birth and death dates, and what became of him after the Duke experiments?

Open Hubert Pearce

Why It Is Open The parapsychological literature records his trial results to several decimal places and almost nothing about the man. This atlas could not verify a birth date, a death date, or any account of his later life from an accessible source, and records no dates at all rather than estimating them.

What Would Settle It Duke Divinity School enrolment and graduation records for the early 1930s, or the Rhine Research Center's own archive of laboratory correspondence, which would identify him well enough for ordinary genealogical work.

Expertise Needed Archival research; genealogy

Question posed in A Review of the Pearce-Pratt Distance Series of ESP Tests, J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt.