From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 01:52:40 MDT
Pretty good summary, with a few glitches. The conjecture that Hawking is a
theist, for example, is simply mistaken, as Hawking has made clear a number
of times since his book was published.
However, this summary fits well with my own extensive reading in the field:
>As he discovered one flawed description after another, Child finally
>concluded that the books he reviewed contained "nearly incredible
>falsification of the facts about the experiments."
The misleading summaries of parapsychological results that are found in
almost all accredited psych books are simply astonishing and depressing to
anyone who has taken the trouble to go to the original experiments and work
through them. It's like reading creation science accounts of the `supposed'
evidence for `so-called' evolution--except, of course, that there is as yet
no powerful theory of psi accepted by parapsychologists, and the results
are always more ambiguous than those of most well-established sciences. I
have friends and acquaintances who are working toward a more satisfactory
account of those strange anomalies that Ray Hyman (cited in this essay)
agrees are real, even though he doesn't accept that they are paranormal.
Stay tuned.
I can feel another book coming on...
Damien Broderick
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