PEAR Deserves a New Obituary

After about 28 years, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR) is closing. It was founded by Emeritus Prof. Robert Jahn after he retired as Dean of Engineering at Princeton. The PEAR laboratory did scientific research in telekinesis, the paranormal, and other aspects of consciousness using ordinary people, predominantly students, as subjects. In a typical experiment, a subject would try to influence a randomly generated event by his consciousness alone, by just thinking about it. For example, in a sequence of ones and zeroes randomly generated by radioactive decay, the operator would try to have more zeros appear. To provide controls on the experiments, in a second experiment, the operator would try to have fewer zeroes appear, and in a third experiment, do nothing to influence the outcome. Jahn and his laboratory manager, Brenda Dunne, conducted numerous carefully controlled experiments for decades, with statistically significant results. They have found that out of 10,000 random events, consciousness can change about 2 or 3 events from the random result.

More about PEAR and their research can be found on their web site http://www.princeton.edu:80/~pear/publications.html.

How does the mainstream scientific community feel about PEAR closing? Relief !! Articles on its closing appeared in the New York Times National (Page A1, Sat. Feb. 10, 2007), “After 28 Years, Princeton Loses ESP Lab, to the Relief of Some,” and in Nature Magazine (March 1, 2007), “The Lab that Asked the Wrong Questions.”

I wrote a letter of dissenting opinion to Nature, one of the most "prestigeous" magazines representing mainstream science. Predictably, the staff at Nature decided not to publish the letter, so I am doing it for them:

The obituary of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory “The lab that asked the wrong questions,” highlights some unsettling issues about the culture of science. The article states that Jahn has shown that “on average, people can shift 2-3 events out of 10,000 from chance expectation,” but that such “tiny deviations from chance have not convinced mainstream scientists.” It is notable that no scientists have criticized the experimental methods of Jahn, yet the work is called “unscientific” by Robert Park because “no effort is made to offer a physical explanation.”

There is enormous resistance to both the perception of and acceptance of anomalies outside the dominant, accepted paradigm. Great scientists have denied the possibility of atoms, x-rays, nuclear fission, incandescent light bulbs, air planes, rockets to the moon, and many other achievements. Studies in consciousness, like Jahn’s, are not rejected by the scientific community for poor experimental procedure or poor data analysis, but because they are outside the paradigm. For scientific work within the accepted paradigm, small statistical effects are readily accepted. For example, in large drug trials, the occurrence of serious side effects in 1 of 1000 or 1 of 10000 patients is not dismissed as “unscientific.” In elementary particle experiments, the desired reaction may occur only once in a million events, yet the conclusions from one or two selected events are accepted.

The argument that the effect of the human interaction is so small as to not be of significance is without merit, and used to selectively reject the implications of the work of Jahn and others in consciousness research. Compare the small effect of psychokinesis (2-3 in 10,000) with the small effect measured in the experiments of Lamb and Retherford in 1954. They measured a difference in energy of 1 part in a million between two states of the hydrogen atom which were thought to be degenerate. Bethe provided a theoretical explanation almost immediately of this small deviation, ten times smaller than that found in hundreds of consciousness studies, but nevertheless it led to a fundamental revision in quantum electrodynamics. In 1920, Eddington and others measured a very slight deflection of star light as it passed by the sun, just 2 arc seconds out of 180 degrees, or about 1 part in 5400, comparable in size to the effect Jahn has measured. If scientists had rejected the small corrections measured by Lamb and Eddington, we would not have General Relativity or Quantum Electrodynamics today.

The critical issue was framed in the article: “How permissive should science be of research that does not fit a standard theoretical framework, if the methods used are scientific?” We are at a peculiar time in science. Most scientists readily accept that many physicists have been working for three decades on a theory that has yet to make an experimental prediction, and they categorically dismiss the results of scientists who have been making measurements on the effect of consciousness on physical systems because they don’t have a good theory. It appears that, today, many scientists are more interested in models than measurements. The history of science teaches that it is important to pay attention to good data, even if you cannot explain it. Theories come and go, but good data lasts forever.

GJM