Retirement, Death and Experiment
Stevenson stepped down as director of the Division of Perceptual Studies in 2002, though he continued to work as Research Professor of Psychiatry. He died of pneumonia at his retirement home in Charlottesville, Virginia in February 2007. Bruce Greyson, editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, became director of the division, while Jim Tucker, the department's associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences, has continued Stevenson's research with children, examined in his book, Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives (2005).
In the 1960s Stevenson set a combination lock using a secret word or phrase, and placed it in a filing cabinet in the department, telling his colleagues he would try to pass the code to them after his death. Emily Williams Kelly told The New York Times: "Presumably, if someone had a vivid dream about him, in which there seemed to be a word or a phrase that kept being repeated—I don't quite know how it would work—if it seemed promising enough, we would try to open it using the combination suggested." The Times reported that, as of February 2007, the lock remains unopened.
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Famous quotes containing the words death and/or experiment:
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“Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don’t happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data ... and yet we don’t understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.”
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