Thursday, April 21st, 2016
Author: William A. Wilson
Source: First Things
Publication Date: May 2016
Link: Scientific Regress
Stephan: As a scientist, and one who works in the controversial area of consciousness research, I have a very strong interest in rigorous science. And the truth is the discipline in which I do much of my work is amongst the most rigorous in science, although you would never believe it to hear the Deniers talk. So I don't worry very much about consciousness research being compromised. In 40 some years of research I have only seen one scandal and it was not that the researcher who was dishonest, but that a deliberate attempt to corrupt the experiment was carried out by a vile little man named James Randi.
But much of the rest of science, particularly where big money is involved -- which it certainly isn't in consciousness studies -- is becoming complacent and corrupt. Here is the latest in a growing number of reports about the rot in science.
In 2013, researchers from Cambridgeshire ‘downloaded’ all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets on to strands of synthetic DNA (illustrated)
The problem with science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an […]
I totally agree that this situation exists and have two shelves of books that prove the truth of this discussion about science’s corruption. One can start with the book “Seeing Red” by Halton Arp, who’s work disproved the redshift theory, yet his work was dismissed because it did not fit the “Standard Theory” being taught in cosmology classes. I could go through the whole list but will just leave with my latest book by Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones titled “Bankrupting Physics” subtitled “How Today’s Top Scientists are Gambling Away Their Credibility” which has the same objective as the article just read.
Based on what someone who once worked with Randi on other issues told me, plus seeing some of his stuff on TV where he supposedly disproved things I had seen first hand, I consider Randi a fraud. That said- is there a link or source to his misbehavior that you mention?