Claude Swanson

Claude Swanson (c.1947–2022) was an American physicist trained at MIT and Princeton, where he held National Science Foundation and Putnam fellowships and did doctoral work in Robert Dicke’s “Gravity Group” on experimental cosmology, with later fusion-related research at Princeton and Cornell.

Having begun his career pursuing unified field theory, he came to argue that mainstream physics was missing an essential piece — the phenomena of the paranormal — and devoted his later work to building a model that could include them.

His central work, The Synchronized Universe: New Science of the Paranormal (2003), and its successor volume (Life Force) propose a revised, “synchronized” picture of quantum mechanics in which ESP, remote viewing, distant healing, psychokinesis, and out-of-body phenomena are treated as data to be explained rather than dismissed.

Drawing heavily on torsion-field concepts, Swanson framed consciousness and psi as integral to a unified physical model. Within this lineage he represents the credentialed-physicist attempt to give the paranormal a rigorous-sounding theoretical home — a synthesis many regard as fringe, but argued in the language of working physics.