I’ve been following his work for some years, and the line of research he is doing now is what I find the most intriguing. Part of the reason is that I encountered the problem of observation (the measurement problem) in quantum mechanics quite early on when studying physics myself. I felt it said something profound. To my surprise almost all the students and professors didn’t see anything profound at all. We were thought the “shut up and calculate” version of QM, so I guess that stops any deep thinking in most people.

I remember going to an invitational seminar on quantum mechanics that was supposed to be held by a a well known British physicist. One of his colleagues in the same research group came instead, but the presentation he held was the same as the original guy intended. At the end of the presentation he basically said that QM show us that it is our consciousness that collapse the wave function and thus we participate directly in creating the world we see. I thought that this would give rise to a heated debate as I by this time had started to see that there was a serious taboo related to consciousness in the physics community. I was wrong. No questions was raised about this at all. Even students I talked to afterward hadn’t gotten hold of what had been said. It was like people had just filtered out the good stuff from the presentation!

Anyway, it’s ironic that one of the biggest issues facing the foundation of modern physics (the measurement problem), is being experimentally probed closest to it’s core by someone outside the physics community! But it’s not surprising.
Other physicists are doing good work on this too (one group being led by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna), but where they are more showing that the world is non-local and in some esoteric way dependent on observation to exist at all, Dean Radin’s work is more direct and “in your face”, relating it all to mind and consciousness. Of course, probing the results and conclusions of the Vienna group it’s hard to come to any different conclusions than what Radin have, but it’s camouflaged nicely enough to be published in Nature. Sometimes I wonder if they really see what their own results are saying. (I can’t stop associating this whole thing with the tale of the emperors new clothes

Radin and Nelson published in the journal Foundation of Physics about the global consciousness project a few years back. So it’s not impossible to get in touch with the mainstream. If it happens through Science or Nature I will be quite surprised (in a positive way).

-Tor