Friday, February 16, 2007
The closing of the PEAR laboratory at Princeton, after 28 years
of non-accomplishment, may be a sign of declining interest in the
paranormal, or it may just be an anomaly. Either way, Princeton
University endured the embarrassment without compromising on the
principle of tenure, which protects the right to hold minority
views. Science is conditional. If someone comes up with better
measurements or a better analysis, the textbooks are rewritten.
The problem is that in the paranormal world, nothing ever gets
better. In recent years, PEAR became the focus of the Global
Consciousness Project, involving a hundred or so researchers at
dozens of sites around the world, looking at the output of random
number generators (RNGs). Exciting huh? They report "deviations
from randomness" before major disasters, such as 9/11 and the
"Christmas tsunami" in the Indian Ocean. They believe this is
evidence of global consciousness. Or maybe RNGs are causing
disasters (WN 18 Feb 05) ?
"Scientist of faith" is an oxymoron. The University of Rhode
Island recently accepted the dissertation of a doctoral candidate
in paleontology, Marcus Ross, who just happens to also be a
young-Earth creationist. His thesis is on mosasaurs, that lived
65 million years before Ross believes Earth was created. How
does Ross deal with this? He says he uses different paradigms.
Most scientists who regard themselves as religious, and there are
many, interpret the scriptures metaphorically. Even so, they
often partition their lives, treating faith as a virtue on one
side of the partition, and a scientific sin on the other. Dr.
Ross, meanwhile, now teaches earth science at Jerry Falwell's
Liberty University. He can't do much harm there. Wonder what
paradigm he uses? As the song goes, "Brother can you paradigm?"
Tuesday, the Kansas board of education scrapped creationist-
inspired science education standards that represented Darwinian
evolution as scientifically controversial. Only adopted in
November 2005 (WN 11 Nov 05)
the anti-evolution standards had not yet had any effect.
Instead, the voters replaced the school board, and the new board
replaced the science education standards. We can only imagine
what new strategy creationists will come up.
A year ago Purdue announced a full review of the "bubble fusion"
claims of Rusi Taleyarkhan, but four months later a story in
Nature raised serious questions about the pace and secrecy of the
review. This week, the university seemed to clear him, but
supplied little detail. Taleyarkhan says he feels vindicated.
Others are not so sure. It doesn't seem quite over.
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