Monday, April 10, 2023

Ray Hyman and Modern Apathy: To Explain Away and Dismiss

In 1986 an article appeared in the Proceedings of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) with the title “Parapsychological Research: A Tutorial Review and Critical Approach”. I have no idea why CIA classified this (public) document? Perhaps for this reason: 


So here it can be read:




The author of this (now "FOIA declassified") document is Ray Hymanwho is described in the Wikipedia as follows: 

Ray Hyman (born June 23, 1928, Chelsea, Massachusetts) is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon,[1] and a noted critic of parapsychology.” 

Concerning Crookes’ experiments with D. D. Home, here is what this “noted critic of parapsychology” had to say:

"By today's standards, the investigations that come closest to being "scientific" were those that Crookes carried out with the celebrated medium Daniel Dunglas Home. (…) This series of experiments is by far the most impressive, from a scientific viewpoint, of any that Crookes conducted. Indeed, so far as I can tell, although these were among the very first serious attempts by a scientist to test a psychic, they have not been exceeded in degree of documentation and experimental sophistication during the subsequent 114 years. This is despite the fact that following Crookes' example, eminent scientists during almost every decade since Crookes' experiments have conducted tests of famous psychics."

But right after all these exclamations our “noted critic” does not hesitate to add:

"The comments in the preceding paragraph should not be taken as an endorsement of Crookes' results."

Sure! If one starts with a certain goal in mind – namely to negate the phenomena; Hyman revealed his agenda in the Introduction to his book “The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research.” He acknowledges there “the high quality of the research”, and then he admits that these things “are not so easy to explain away or dismiss”. 

Right in this sentence, he revealed his goal: not to understand, but, instead, to explain away or dismiss”. 

That is, I think, the main difference between the creative scientists, those who are curious and want to understand, and the bored – and boring - debunkers, whose only aim is to explain away or dismiss. Certainly, being burdened with a non-curious mind, or one that has had the curiosity drilled out of it, must be the most incomparably dull, boring and surfeiting thing in the world. 

But these are the sorts of people that are eminently pragmatic and rise to the top in administrative capacities and that can have a crushing effect on human thought and society at large.

P.S.1 10-04-23 16:14 And how it works within physics? 

Quoting from Wikipedia:

"Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science""

Quoting from Manjit Kumar, "Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality", Icon Books (2008):

"... Five  years  passed before  Bell  received  a  letter  in  1969  from  a  young  physicist  at  Berkeley  in California.  John  Clauser,  then  26,  explained  that  he  and  others  had  devised  an experiment to test the inequality. Two years earlier, Clauser had been a doctoral student at New York’s Columbia University  when  he  first  came  across  Bell’s  inequality.  Convinced  that  it  was worth  testing,  Clauser  went  to  see  his  professor  and  was  bluntly  told  that  ‘no decent experimentalist would ever go to the effort of actually trying to measure it’. It was a reaction in keeping with the near ‘universal acceptance of quantum theory and its Copenhagen interpretation as gospel’, Clauser wrote later, ‘along with  a  total  unwillingness  to  even  mildly  question  the  theory’s  foundations’. "


Next post: Dangerous to be Curious? Quantum Future - Gossip and Censorship

Previous post: William Crookes and the Paranormal: True Science

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