Examples of theorems misapplied to non-mathematical contexts For something I'm writing -- I'm interested in examples of bad arguments which involve the application of mathematical theorems in non-mathematical contexts.  E.G. folks who make theological arguments based on (what they take to be) Godel's theorem, or Bayesian arguments for creationism.  (If necessary I'm willing to extend the net to physics, to include bad applications of the second law of thermodynamics or the Uncertainty Principle, if you know any really amusing ones.)
 A: Here are some examples, ranging from the comical to the debatable.
Comical: Pretty much any mention of mathematics in Jacques Lacan. To give you an idea, here is a typical passage:

This diagram [the Möbius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject. This goes much further than you may think at first, because you can search for the sort of surface able to receive such inscriptions. You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease. [Lacan (1970), pp. 192-193] 

And here's another one:

Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely $$\frac{S(\text{Signifier})}{s(\text{signified})} = s(\text{the statement})$$ with $S=(-1)$ produces $s=\sqrt{-1}$[...]Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the  of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of the lack of signifier -1. [Lacan (1971); seminar held in 1960.] 

Interesting/Rigorous but still quite a stretch: The work of Alain Badiou on set theory, although more rigorous and advanced, also provides a very good resource for misapplications of formal mathematics in order to draw non-mathematical conclusions, cf. especially Being and Event which is his magnum opus, in which he uses set theory to support the tagline that 'Mathematics is Ontology'. Unlike Lacan, Badiou at least knows his stuff when it comes to the statement and development of formal results. That said, his interpretations and conclusions are often huge stretches.
Here's a related MO post on Badiou:
Badiou and Mathematics
Interesting/Philosophy: I don't know if you'd call these misapplications, but they are certainly attempts to use formal results to draw philosophical conclusions that are not in any formal way entailed by those results. Here are some examples:


*

*Michael Dummett on how Godel Incompleteness might/might not threaten the thesis that meaning is use (philosophical anti-realism):


The philosophical significance of Gödel's theorem, M Dummett - Ratio, 1963


*

*Hilary Putnam on how the Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem proves that reference is underdetermined by all possible theoretical or operation constraints (i.e. that the meaning of our mathematical vocabulary can never be accurately understood in order to fix an intended model):


http://www.jstor.org/stable/2273415
Pretty much anything philosophical that has been written about the so-called Skolem Paradox involves formal-to-informal entailments.


*

*Roger Penrose in The Emperor's New Mind again using Godel to draw conclusions about consciousness and mechanism

A: My favourite in this direction is an application of Noether's theorem to public relations: Sha, "Noether's Theorem: The Science of Symmetry and the Law of Conservation", J. Public Relations Research, 16 (2004) 391-416.
I quote from the abstract:

Noether's Theorem shows that
  symmetry-or change-can only exist
  simultaneously with conservation or
  invariance. For public relations, the
  implication is that an organization
  can behave "symmetrically" while
  maintaining certain beliefs,
  principles, or purposes that will
  never be relinquished. A case study of
  the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
  on Taiwan using participant
  observation (13 months), qualitative
  interviews (n = 22), and a
  quantitative survey (n = 166; response
  rate = 28.77%) showed that the
  organization exhibited symmetry by
  reaching out to external publics,
  engaging in dialogue with them, and
  expressing openness regarding Taiwan
  independence. Simultaneously, the
  party conserved its interests in
  gaining power and establishing an
  independent Taiwan. Recent electoral
  victories of the DPP suggest the
  effectiveness of symmetry-conservation
  for public relations practice.

A: It's physics rather than math, but surely this creative paper by Alan Sokal deserves mention.
A: A rare instance of Gödel-abuse in a published paper is "Bacterial wisdom, Gödel's theorem and creative genomic webs" by Eshel Ben-Jacob. Here, Gödel's theorem is used to prove that "a system cannot self-design another system which is more advanced than itself", with application to genomics.
A: This is my favourite example.
From the text:

The Mandelbrot set provides a fractal representation of how these
  unique individuals provide self-similarity within the larger intrinsic
  case. This theme, in particular, focuses on how these individuals’
  experiences with change contribute to the overall stress within the
  larger far-from-equilibrium system

Authors try to analyze how librarians work, by making an analogy with fractals.
Also, the obligatory reference to Heisenbergs uncertainty principle.
A: Here we read, 
Dr. Jason Lisle provides “a little window into the mind of God” by exploring the amazingly beautiful and complex secret code that God has built into numbers. Using fractals – types of structures that repeat infinitely on smaller and smaller scales – Dr. Lisle demonstrates that the laws of math couldn’t possibly have resulted from any kind of evolution and could only have originated from God. Fractals have no reasonable explanation in the secular/evolutionary worldview, but their intricacy, complexity, and wondrous beauty reflect the infinitely complex and inexpressibly powerful mind of the Creator.
A: Russian media provide a lot of amusing examples. Let me mention two:
1) (Perelman's proof of) the Poincaré conjecture leads to understanding the shape of the Universe;
2) (this is maybe what you mean in the post) it follows from the Godel's theorem that God does not exist.
A: In the same vein as the bayesian argument for creationism and misapplications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, there are misapplications of the second law of thermodynamics against evolution of life ("undesigned", e.g. darwinian or lamarckian).
The second law is a mathematical consequence of Hamilton and Schrödinger equations for reasonable hamiltonians, in particular of fundamental physical evolution equations, and also of simple statistical models (statistical ensembles).
See Wikipedia.
The argument is that life is complex and evolution implies a decrease in entropy/increase in complexity contradicting the second law. See for instance here.
The flaw is that the Earth, where evolution occurs, is not an isolated system. If we consider rather the solar (or just Sun-Earth) system there is loss of entropy on Earth but a compensating gain on the Sun.
For a recent anecdote (and a nice blog to add to your blogroll) see Retraction Watch.
A: I recently came across a paper of P. Cirillo and N. N. Taleb, ”On the statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflicts”, which purports to disprove a widely cited claim by Steven Pinker that violence has decreased over time, but, interestingly enough, is published in a physics journal.
A highlight on paper’s webpage states that the paper provides a new method for dealing with ”heavy-tailed but bounded random variables”.
The key point of the ”method” is to apply to the data the transform
$$
φ(Y)=L−H\cdot \log\left(\frac{H−Y}{H-L}\right),
$$
where $H$ is the current population of Earth, taken to be 7 billion , $Y$ the number of casualities in a conflict, historically never greater than 100 million, and $L$ is a lower cut-of for $Y$, taken to be 3000. I hope everyone here can check that in fact
$$
\varphi(Y)=Y\cdot (1\pm 0.001),
$$
in other words, given the accuracy of historic data on casualities, the transform $\varphi$ does not transform anything at all.
The whole paper, of course, just a bunch of buzz-words the authors have no idea about. But it also raises a question: if the authors have actually looked at the data and applied their transform, how could they not notice that it does nothing?
A: This is not an answer. Just a very long comment. Mostly I am stunned by the answers given.
(1) I'm surprised to see Lacan featured as the main example. What I see in these quotes is an attempt to formalise human condition. Is it laughable? Yes! But no more that 16th century physics and widely taken as such. I'm pretty sure  99,9% of the human population never heard of Lacan and was never affected by his thoughts on maths in any way.  
(2) If I was in the audience for a talk on "Theorems misapplied to non-mathematical contexts" I'd selfishly want to see examples that affected me or someone I know. Amazingly, none of the answers given until now mentionned the field of ECONOMICS. Some people in this field are passing opinions (often political) for mathematical facts every day and this translates into policies that have influence on the lives of millions (if not billions) of people. 
Just an example. When the subprime mortgage buble exploded, we heard most banks and insurance companies were shocked because "their experts(*) said the price of houses couldn't go down everywhere in the US at the same time". In fancier terms, it was widely believed that the use of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) and Credit Default Swaps (CDS) were minimizing the risk of default while it was actually just spreading and increasing it. I am very ignorant in mathematical finance but I'd like someone to try and explain to me which theorems that was based on. I'm pretty sure this should go straight to the top of the list. 
(*) I used the word "experts" as a generic word for "economists and mathematicians employed by financial institutions".
A: A couple of misapplications of physics come to mind:
Conservation of angular momentum does not mean what people think it means. If you have an object spinning on a flat surface, it can't turn around without outside forces, right? Wrong, the rattleback toy does this (video). 
The Coriolis effect is real, but the idea that this has something to do with the direction water spins down the drain is a false urban legend.
A: This reference is an excellent parody of the so-called application of mathematics to economics and other social sciences (it purports to apply mathematics to theology):
http://www.amazon.de/corruptionis-Entscheidungslogische-Ein%C3%BCbungen-H%C3%B6here-Amoralit%C3%A4t/dp/3922305016
A: There are very many examples of the misuse of probability arguments in legal cases.  See e.g.  the Prosecutor's fallacy.
A:   "Therefore, socialist economy is impossible, in every sense of the word."
Robert Murphy comes to this conclusion in Cantor’s Diagonal Argument: An Extension to the Socialist Calculation Debate.$^1$
The debate is over whether a Central Planning Board can, even in theory, correctly price goods and services, as it is assumed a market economy can. Socialists such as Dickinson argued that a market economy can, in principle, be simulated by the Board, even if it means solving a large system of simultaneous equations. Hayek, on behalf of the Austrians, agreed, yet maintained the number of equations—presumably one for each product and potential product—is clearly too large in practice. Both sides claimed victory.
In the cited article, the author takes the ball from Hayek and carries it across the goal line: after a decent three-page explanation of the diagonal argument, Murphy concludes the Planning Board’s task would not merely be impractical, but fully impossible because of the requirement to publish an uncountably infinite list of prices.
I suppose if one started with the assumption there are (at least) countably infinite number of products/services $p_1, p_2, \dots$ and also agreed that any possible subset of these products is again a product itself, the price of which is not necessarily the sum of the component prices (let’s ignore issues of convergence!), then one could conclude using Cantor’s Theorem ($2^S>S$) there are an uncountable number of products the Board must “list”. But I’m not sure why, if we take the listing process literally, it matters how large the infinity is.
$^1$THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS VOL. 9, NO. 2 (SUMMER 2006): 3–11
A: As you mentioned, an often misapplied mathematical statement is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which for me, as a reader of Chriss-Ginzburg, is the purely mathematical statement that any subvariety of classical phase space ($\mathrm{Specm}(\mathrm{gr}A)$) that arises from a noncommutative system of equations (an ideal in A) is coisotropic. The Encyclopedia of Science and Religion states:

There has also been an interest in using quantum uncertainty, and the breakdown of rigid determinism that it ensures, to defend the concept of free will and to provide a channel for divine action in the world in the face of unbreakable laws of nature.

I've come across this often in religious discourse- the claim that the uncertainty principle states that "everything is uncertain" and that therefore the laws of nature are subject to the decisions of G-d. I've heard it freely confused with the "law of relativity", which apparently states that "everything is relative".
Moreover, some anthropologists cite Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as follows:

In social situations, too, the simple presence of an observer - an anthropologist at a tribal ceremony, a news reporter at a schoolboard meeting, or a TV camera in a courtroom - generally influences the course of events to some uncertain degree as they are recorded. The distortion that results from measurement or observation is called the Heisenberg Effect as in “No one does or can do the same thing on stage that he does unobserved...”

A: I just came across the paper BAK-SNEPPEN MODELS FOR THE EVOLUTION OF STRUCTURED KNOWLEDGE in SOCIETY. INTEGRATION. EDUCATION
Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference.
The abstract states:

Models of biological evolution can help to understand many social and economical phenomena where the search for optimality is hindered by voluntary or random competition. Bak-Sneppen is one of the most significant models because it balances at best explication power and simplicity. Unlike cellular automata models, Bak-Sneppen models join locality and globality. The authors try to re-read these models in the framework of mathematics, where, despite its high developped structure, knowledge waves can hinder comprehension both of pupils and of scholars.

A: This recent article is a striking example of debunking 
a misuse of mathematics in social sciences. In short, some diversity scholars had claimed to prove a "theorem" that diverse groups of less able individuals outperform uniform groups of more able ones. Upon examination, it turns out that the theorem is


*

*wrong;

*trivial and contentless if corrected;

*has assumptions that make it irrelevant for applications, in particular, they are not met in the numerical experiment featured in the paper to illustrate the theorem.


Remarkably, the authors use an expression "for any probability measure on (a finite set) $\Phi$ with full support, (something holds) with probability one", instead of saying that it holds for every element of $\Phi$.
It seems to be a widely accepted result, published in PNAS with about 500 citations in Google Scholar.
A: The original question, and several of the answers, refer to misuse of Godel's work, but with very few specific citations. For these, I would suggest Torkel Franzen's book, Godel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to its Use and Abuse. 
A: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's book deserves some mention if we are talking about misuse of theorems.
A: The "No free lunch" (NFL) theorem from mathematical optimization was used by William Dembski to disprove Darwinian theory of evolution. (The relevance of NFL's theorem  to evolution was proposed  earlier by Stuart Kauffman.)
Olle Haggstrom wrote a paper debunking Dembski's argument.  (Here is an early version with stronger rhetorics.)
A: Arrow's theorem is often glossed as "there is no good voting system".
Press' paper Strong profiling is not mathematically optimal for discovering rare malfeasors has been misinterpreted by the popular press as a mathematical endorsement of certain politics, though that's perhaps due in part to the intentional framing of the problem by Press.
Goedel's theorem is misapplied arguably more than it is used properly.
A: This isn't exactly what you asked for, but I find it so amusing I could not resist.
The Indiana $\pi$ bill, when they almost passed a bill claiming that $\pi=3.2$, in order to be able to square the circle.
Unbelievable.
A: In his book Everybody for Everybody, Samual A. Nigro argues that Gödel's theorems not only cast doubt on the theory of evolution, but prove the doctrine of original sin, the need for sacrament and penance, and that there is a future eternity.

A: This is a wonderful and fascinating still life by Juan Sanchez Cotán: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/monarchy-enlightenment/baroque-art1/spain/a/juan-sanchez-de-cotn-quince-melon-and-cucumber
It is thought by many art historians that Cotán used a mathematical formula to determine the heights at which the various items would appear. For all I know this may be the case -- it would seem only appropriate given the name of the artist -- but I once read part of a book by a very respectable art historian (whose name I have maddeningly forgotten but I'm working on it) who said what the formula was. His evidence was just the picture itself and not any surviving record of how it was painted. But of course, given that the heights of the items are not precisely determined (anything like), it is clear that any number of curves could be declared to fit. This is not exactly misuse of a theorem but it was certainly misuse of mathematics, similar to finding the golden ratio everywhere but a bit more sophisticated.
Added: I've tracked it down now. The critic is Norman Bryson and he says this: "In relation to the quince, the cabbage appears to come forward slightly; the melon is further forward than the quince, the melon slice projects out beyond the ledge, and the cucumber overhangs it still further. The arc is therefore not on the same plane as its co-ordinates, it curves in three dimensions: it is a true hyperbola, of the type produced when a cone is viewed in oblique section." I haven't found more of the quotation, but I seem to remember that it was quite important to Bryson that it really was a hyperbola and not, say, an exponential decay. (As a matter of fact, looking at the picture again I am not convinced that the items form a nice curve of any kind: the cabbage is too far to the left and too near to being directly under the apple. And the relationship of the string of the cabbage with the leaves of the apple leads me to doubt whether the curve lies in an oblique plane, or indeed any plane, as he suggests.)
A: A tragic example of this is the case People v. Collins, in which a prosecutor asked a mathematician (as an expert witness) a question of the form, "assuming these events are independent, what is the probability that...". The events were obviously not independent, things like "drives a convertible", "has a caucasian girlfriend", "girlfriend has blond hair", and some others. The mathematician answered the misleading question correctly (assuming independence), and the defendant went to jail. The California Supreme Court later overturned the verdict, in a decision that shows a surprisingly solid understanding of probability.
This case could be required reading (the supreme court decision, anyway) in any introduction to probability course. It has counting, independence, and conditional probability all involved in a fundamental way.
A: In order to baffle the uninitiated, some authors interpret Banach-Tarski
paradox (stating that "it is possible to decompose a ball into five
pieces which can be reassembled by rigid motions to form two balls of
the same size as the original.", cf.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Banach-TarskiParadox.html) in an
obviously false way as if it could be applied to physical
objects. E.g. Reuben Hersh writes (Reuben Hersh: "What Is
Mathematics, Really?" p.255):
"Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski proved, using the axiom of choice,
that it's possible to divide a pea (or a grape or a marshmallow) into
5 pieces such that the pieces can be moved around (translated and
rotated) to have volume greater than the sun." 
Clearly, this formulation is very much misleading, since it suggests
that the paradox can be applied to a physical objects, which is
obviously false. Indeed, the construction is such that the ball is
divided into non-measurable parts and, clearly, there is no physical
objects corresponding to non-measurable sets.
A: Sokal once again, with Brown and Friedman, wrote this paper:
The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: The critical positivity ratio (arXiv version). The story behind this is that Nick Brown, "who began a part-time psychology course in his 50s – and ended up taking on America's academic establishment" according to Andrew Anthony in the guardian http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-of-happiness-debunked-nick-brown.
A: I submit, for your consideration, the paper The structure of the world from pure numbers by Frank Tipler, Professor at Tulane University (originally titled Theory of Everything based on Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model). The paper was published in the peer-reviewed Reports on Progress in Physics, volume 68 (2005), pages 897-964 (doi:10.1088/0034-4885/68/4/R04). Tipler's book "The Physics of Christianity" is based on this paper. 
Tipler invokes Gödel's theorem (see p. 905 onwards), Presburger arithmetic,  Löwenheim-Skolem, Hales' proof of the Kepler conjecture (the latter only as an example, I believe), and various other mathematical results. 
A: This could be an unfair example, since I don't know the text myself. All I can say is that my skepticism is aroused just by the title of 


*

*Guerino Mazzola, The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory, and Performance (Birkhäuser, 2002) 


(in other words, topos theory applied to music theory). At least one MO participant at MO (Mikael Vejdemo Johansson) has tried to read this book and came away feeling skeptical, according to his remarks here. I'd be interested in hearing other reactions from people who have taken a stab at it. 
A: The whole "transformation" and "network centric warfare" push in the US Department of Defense last decade under Cebrowski and Rumsfeld invoked a heap of dubious interpretations and purported applications of nonlinear phenomena (perhaps most notably when 9/11 was referred to as a "system perturbation"). See here for an introductory overview.
A: I call your attention to http://www.abarim-publications.com where you will find the book, Quantum Mechanics for Beginners; an Introduction with the blurb,  
Quantum Mechanics studies the peculiar world of the "ones"; those things in nature that can not be divided. Since God is a One, and the Body of Christ as well, it shouldn't be surprising that the Bible discusses the "ones" at length, and this a few millennia before the emergence of Quantum Mechanics in the scientific arena. To appreciate this unexpected dimension of the Bible, Abarim Publication's fun-filled crash course in Quantum Mechanics should be mandatory at every seminary.  
Also, Chaos Theory for Beginners; an Introduction:  
Chaos Theory looks at patterns and their reoccurrence in nature. Since Moses built the tabernacle - which would turn into the temple, and later still in the Body of Christ - after patterns he saw in heaven, Chaos Theory is a must for every serious student of the Bible.  
One of the chapters is entitled, Agape and Gravity Live Together in Perfect Harmony. Fans of Stevie Wonder may see a pun there. There is also Scripture Theory for Beginners; an Introduction:  
What Chaos Theory does with nature, Scripture Theory does with Scriptures: the identification of reoccurring patterns and their meanings. Especially interesting are those Biblical patterns that are identical to those found in high-energy physics.
A: Not really a theorem but amusing non-sense. Somebody (it was perhaps Sokal) told me about a psychanalytical book based on set theory. The author wrote it in English and translated
the french terminology "th\'eorie des ensembles" as "Theory of the (w)hole". The book was later translated into French with the title "Th\'eorie des t(r)ous". 
A: [Copying an answer I posted to another question over here. I think these are actually nice examples of scientists taking pains not to misapply science to theology, although Mendeleev still argues for the immortality of the soul by analogy from conservation laws in physics.]
Once, browsing in the local history section of the Central Library in Rochester, NY, I stumbled upon a curious book:

The book (a full scan of which is available here) is a collection of responses by various thoughtful people to the following request:

Dear Sir:
The Author of this letter, inspired by the untimely decease of a dear friend, and in contemplation of the numerous philosophical and logical theories leading to a belief in the continued existence of the soul, or personal identity after death, begs of you the great favor of a letter, setting out as briefly, or at such length as may be convenient, what you consider to be the strongest reason, or argument, advanced by science or philosophy, or by common sense, in favor of an affirmative answer to this mighty question; or preferably, a statement of your own deductions thereon.
It is our desire to obtain from thinkers and educators of the world, an expression—a twentieth century bulletin, on this subject.
Our request will impress you doubtless as an unusual one, but none the less will you see the force of it, and its possibilities. Who can measure the impetus such a compilation may have upon the inquiring human mind?
May I not have your co-operation in this matter?
Thanking you now in advance for the courtesy of a reply, I am
Fraternally yours,
ROBERT J. THOMPSON.
Wellington Ave., Chicago, U. S. A.
October, 1901.

I had fun skimming through the first collection of responses, from "The Scientists". The variety of responses is interesting. Although there's the usual bloviation on the cosmological and teleological arguments, as well as some self-citations to studies confirming the existence of telepathy and other paranormal phenomena, there's also some healthy scientific modesty. E.g., E. Ducleaux writes,

Excuse me for not being able to help you in your investigation. I have no scientific opinion regarding the questions you put. I mean, no opinion that rests on anything but personal beliefs. Besides, I think that everybody is in about the same position and that any reasons that may be brought forth in favor of one's opinion are only good for the person that brings them forth, and that they cannot impress the listener; they are therefore not scientific reasons.

D. I. Mendélieff's response begins similarly, although he ends by arguing for the immortality of the soul by analogy with the laws of conservation of mass and energy (an analogy I was surprised to see repeated very often in other responses!):

The question as to the continuance of the existence of the soul or personal identity after death, mentioned in your letter of August, 1901, I, as a natural philosopher, consider to be an hypothesis which cannot be proved by evidence of real facts. But as a man educated in a religious sense, I prefer to remain in the belief of the immortality of the soul. It is my opinion that the philosophical side of the question consists in the relation between the soul, the natural forces, and matter; and if it were possible to clear up to some extent this feature of the problem---the relation between force and matter---then also the relation between the soul and natural forces would be forwarded to a great extent.
The unquestionable existence of reason, will and consciousness compels us to acknowledge the existence of a special world of relations of this kind, and any rational conclusion in relation to this special world cannot be accepted as proved quite in the same manner. Knowledge of physics and mechanics does not give anything in relation to chemistry or in relation to the existence of celestial bodies.
We must simply confess that it is impossible to comprehend this question in a general way, but it would also be sheer nonsense to ignore the physical world; and as matter and natural forces must be acknowledged as eternal, it is also probable that the soul is eternal.

But my favorite response was by James R. Nichols, marveling at the modern-day wonders of technology and anticipating the next version of the iPhone:

Do we not every day converse with unseen friends long distances away; do we not recognize their familiar voices, in homes separated from us by rivers, woods, and mountains? These voices come out of the darkness, guided by a frail wire which science provides as a pathway.
[...]
If our friends in this life, dead to us (hidden as they are by the shroud of space), can be seen, and we can hear their voices, their shouts of laughter, the words of the hymns they sing, the cries of the little ones in the mother's arms, is it very absurd to anticipate a time when those dead to us by the dissolution of the body may, by some unknown telephony, send to us voices from a realm close at hand, but hidden from mortal vision?

