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 Hyman, who 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’. "
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