When research goes PEAR-shaped
There should be room for a bit of fringe science - but it's liable to suck you in.
It can't do much for your self-esteem when the media get interested in your research because it is shutting down. But Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory probably aren't too bothered by that. For the attention generated by this week's closure of the PEAR lab — or rather, by the suggestion in the New York Times that this removes a source of embarrassment to the university — can surely only enhance the profile of Jahn and Dunne's vision of exploring "consciousness-related anomalies".
Read the column here.
Comments
I disagree with the suggestion that cold fusion is not real science. It is real. My work on the subject of cold fusion may be read at:
http://www.angelfire.com/scifi2/zpt/index.html
Posted by: Frank Znidarsic | February 14, 2007 11:27 AM
I am one of a few scientists that have attempted to verify the claims of the PEAR Group without success. See "The PEAR Proposition-Fact or Fallacy?" available at
http://www.csicop.org/si/2006-03/pear.html
Stanley Jeffers
Posted by: Stanley Jeffers | February 14, 2007 03:32 PM
Science has two purposes. One is to explore new or little-known phenomena, thereby characterizing them. Another is to elaborate and refine things that are already known.
Most science tends to do the latter, but it would be a mistake to assume that this is all that science should be about.
However, when one is exploring the 'fringes', it is natural to expect such places to be populated by the credulous and the fraudulent as well as those who genuinely aim to be doing an honest job. We should expect to have to put up with this, because of the chance that some of these ideas turn out to be right.
Jacques Benveniste was wrong not because homeopathy is nonsense, even though that might very well be the case, but because his experimental design was flawed. On the other hand, everyone laughed at Wegener and continental drift. Benveniste was wrong because his experiments didn't properly address the phenomena he claimed to be observing: Wegener wasn't wrong, just ahead of his time. Just because cases such as Wegener's are extremely rare (more rare than cases such as Benveniste's) is no reason to dismiss them out of hand -- today's crackpot notion could be tomorrow's orthodoxy.
However, the onus lies on people working in such areas to be even more rigorous than they might be when pursuing less controversial subjects, and to demand very high standards of reproducibility: hence the old adage of Extraordinary Claims requiring Extraordinary Evidence. That's what eventually did for Benveniste, and -- despite the best efforts of those involved, presumably -- why the PEAR experiments have not achieved wide currency.
Of course, the chances that fringe ideas are right is so small that one is entitled to ask whether they should have much call on the public purse (SETI, anyone?). It is a credit to Princeton that they gave space to PEAR for as long as they did, even if their position was to keep it at arm's length.
Posted by: Henry Gee | February 16, 2007 11:03 AM
The notion that inherently weak brain waves can have sufficient controlled, focused gravitational force to affect playing cards, or enough electromagnetic force to affect laboratory instruments, is, prima facie, bullshit. Unless a researcher can design a consistently repeatable experiment that would refute this intuitively obvious notion, it is simply ludicrous to provide him with funding.
Posted by: C. C. Millah | February 19, 2007 09:21 PM
I find it disappointing that Nature in
"The lab that asked the wrong questions"
can publish such a poor analysis. Do they think that engineers don't know that
"If a coin is flipped enough times, for example, even a slight imperfection can produce more than 50% heads."?
Do they really think that was their mistake after 25 years of research? Is that the critic of a trained scientist or of a high school student?
That is exactly why test-runs are conducted?...so to say with the same coin? (but nothing is mentioned in the article about it, nor of the statistical significance).
Readers would be more informed if you use the language and the tools of science not only to build but to criticize science too. The article contains nothing but very vague and obscure arguments.
I find the critics quite simplistic. A science publication like Nature should present something more than
"they say that, on average, people can shift 2–3 events out of 10,000 from chance expectations"...
Many Cosmology measurements can be phrased in the same derogatory way: "Yeah, they say they saw 5 supernovas in 1000 years but it is surely not a consistent phenomenon, just a random thing that happens by chance...there's nothing physical to it"....
nobody really believes the supernova business.
Is that enough to dismiss the theory? Why not? What are the flaws? Is it consistent? If you repeat it a million times, does it stay? does it shrink? does the effect disappear at the speed it should? can you change a parameter? Who told you they saw it? Can you believe the Chinese records of it?
On the other hand, I see many comments assuming that an easier explanation is available. There isn't. It is indeed a very hard topic and theories are hard to build. I recommend the people who believe they know the answer to read the literature. Just like I could dismiss all the obviously inaccurate assumptions in condensed matter physics before knowing a bit more about their significance. Do read the literature before going any further. To answer C. C. Millah's comment It is most obviously not EM waves from the brain affecting any charge/mass or any other from the usual interactions. Such claims have been dismissed by researchers in the field a long time ago. I'm afraid that would be to easy. The claim is: There is something we can't explain with our conventional rules. And generally the theories invoked to explain it turn out to be quite weak, flawed, or just plain wrong.
I would also like to remind those who are suspicious about keeping certain runs (with certain subjects) and not others that if some phenomena only happen in a certain (not well defined yet) environment with a person with certain characteristics, all other environments and persons would wash out the significance. Keeping all the data would be as silly as asking people to produce electromagnetic waves out in the street. Since only one produced them, they are impossible to produce by humans. Oh, wait... it happened to be a physicist.... but, no statistics are never wrong, let's keep all the data and keep the sceptics happy. (by the way the experiment was repeated and none did that day, therefore it is impossible). If critics are to be adressed to unusual results they should be a bit informed about the method/results/analysis, etc.
Remember that all this doesn't make me automatically a believer. I am a critical scientist myself. However I find too many "believers" in the so called "sceptic" field, who are just blind believers of the kind
_ "if I haven't seen it it doesn't exist"
_"have you seen a determination of the hyperfine constant experiment?"
_"No"
_"then?"
_"I believe them because they are published"
These are generally the people who have never read a parapsychology paper in their live but feel free to talk about the whole thing being a waste of time and money.
Posted by: A.F. Boirac | March 2, 2007 07:25 PM