Discovery Lab Answers

The sources retrieved for this question touch on Olivier Costa de Beauregard only incidentally — as a named collaborator, editorial board member, or member of an informal research network — and do not contain descriptions of experiments he personally designed or ran, nor any experimental data attributed to him. What the sources do establish is outlined below.

Who Olivier Costa de Beauregard Was

Costa de Beauregard (1911–2007) was a French theoretical physicist, identified in one source as a professor at the University of Paris ^[5] and described elsewhere as a “French physics professor” (“französischen Physikprofessor”) ^[3]. He is placed within an informal network of French researchers with interests at the boundary of physics and anomalous phenomena, alongside figures such as Rémy Chauvin and Jacques Vallée ^[4].

What the Sources Show About His Research Involvement

Theoretical support for biological transmutation work. The sources retrieved indicate that Costa de Beauregard provided theoretical support — described as “support” (“Unterstützt hat ihn”) — for the low-energy biological transmutation research of Louis Kervran. He co-authored a 1975 book with Kervran: Preuves en biologie de transmutations à faible énergie (Paris: Librairie Maloine) ^[3]. The same source notes that a text by Costa de Beauregard dated 1975 appears as an appendix in the German edition of Kervran’s work ^[3]. These sources describe his role as contributor and co-author, not as the primary experimenter.

Editorial board membership. He served on the editorial board of the Journal of Scientific Exploration ^[5], positioning him institutionally within the organized study of anomalous phenomena.

Informal research network. An obituary of Rémy Chauvin places Costa de Beauregard within a group of researchers who engaged with what the source calls “fantastic realism” — a loosely organized intellectual circle that also addressed parapsychological topics ^[4].

What the Sources Do Not Contain

The retrieved sources do not describe:

• any experiment Costa de Beauregard personally conducted or led;
• any experimental data, effect sizes, or statistical results from his work;
• his theoretical writings on psi or quantum physics in detail (he is known in the broader literature for arguments linking time-symmetry in quantum mechanics to precognition, but that theoretical work is not represented in the retrieved excerpts).

The retrieved excerpts do not show these things; that does not mean the papers themselves lack them — the sources are excerpts, and the absence is a retrieval limit, not a verdict on the record.

What to Do Next

Costa de Beauregard’s theoretical physics arguments — particularly around time-reversal symmetry and their potential implications for precognition — are the part of his legacy most directly relevant to parapsychology, but the sources here do not reach that material. The ESP-Nexus page on him is noted as a placeholder pending a full content pass: Olivier Costa de Beauregard. Once that page is generated, it should carry citation-grounded coverage of both his theoretical contributions and whatever experimental collaborations the primary literature documents.

If you are looking for his experimental or data contributions specifically, the co-authored Kervran volume ^[3] is the closest thing the retrieved sources document, and consulting that work directly would give the fullest picture of what data, if any, he contributed to the biological transmutation claims.