[Phys-L] Re: GCP (Princeton)

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 17:16 -0400 7/17/05, Chuck Britton wrote:
> At 8:50 AM -0500 7/17/05, Brian Whatcott wrote:
> > About the Global Consciousness Project (Princeton), from Red Nova Feb 2005
> >
> >      <http://www.rednova.com/news/display?id=126649>
>
> J.B.Rhine was big into this stuff at Duke back in the 50's & '60's.
> Then Duke 'threw' him off campus. I think that there is still small
> contingent of his devotees 'working' from a white house across the
> street.
>
> These folks say that they don't have anything yet to sell to the CIA.
> Don't worry, the CIA etc. are spending big bucks on such foolishness already.

Whether the CIA is presently involved, we don't know, since their
budget is a well-guarded secret, but we do know that they have
dabbled in these areas before, with very positive results--positive,
that is, for the bottom lines of the fraudulent contractors who sold
some pretty gullible CIA types a bill of goods.

The article at the URL that Brian sends us to is clearly written by
someone who believes this balderdash fervently.

It would appear that the author has done little if any fact-checking,
and is not ast all ashamed to falsely involve Einstein in the
project. Of course Einstein was never connected with Princeton
University to any more extent than that he lived in the town of
Princeton after he was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study,
which is in no way connected to the University, except that the
members of both institutions have been known to talk to each other.
Furthermore, Einstein was no friend of the paranormal. He made this
clear on more than one occasion, so linking him to the institution,
even falsely, doesn't do anything for their case.

He mentions the work of Prof. Jahn, which has been repeatedly
refuted, and its experimental flaws widely published. from what I
recall, Jahn's work was pretty much mostly wishful thinking on his
part, in the sense that he tended to ignore those tests that did not
fit his criteria and embraced those that did--not a terribly
scientific method.

It would appear that similar actions are going on in the new work.
Nowhere is the article could i find any reference to anyone who
disagreed with the findings reported, nor was there any discussion of
the research protocols involved. If they have some 60-odd generators
connected together, we are never told exactly what constitutes a
"significant event." Do all the sensors need to "go crazy" at once,
only some of them, only one of them? If less than all are needed to
signal an "event" is it the same ones every time, or even mostly the
same? Would these events be as obvious if all the sensors' output
were lumped together? How large a change in the "slope" of the graph
indicates an "event"? Were there any significant excursions detected
for which no event was ever correlated? Or did they even look for
this? We any significant events noted for which they could detect no
events in their generators? Could they tell what was happening, or
did they just have to look out there and see if anything was
happening whenever things "went crazy"? Was there any distance
relationship between the generators that went crazy and the events
inferred? What criteria did they use to determine if an event was
significant enough to record?

Not only are none of these questions addressed in the article, they
aren't even raised. Are there any papers being prepared for
publication in appropriate peer-reviewed journals?

Are any of these people significant scientists? Other then Jahn, I
have heard of none of them (which, by itself, says nothing, but if no
one on this list has heard of any of them, then I think it would tell
us something), and I have heard of John only in a negative sense--he
has apparently done nothing of much significance that I know of other
than his ESP experiments at Princeton.

Of course, there is no guarantee that having done significant work
before makes them immune to falling for some nutty scheme later. Pons
& Fleishman had pretty good reputations before they bet it all on
cold fusion and lost.

Clearly this article is not serious news but a serious puff-piece,
designed to convince the already convinced that something is going on.

Frankly, I doubt if anything is.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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