Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [107]
Well, there it is. The matter of Edgar Cayce boils down to a vague mass of garbled data, interpreted by true believers who have a very heavy stake in the acceptance of the claims. Put to the test, Cayce is found to be bereft of real powers. His reputation today rests on poor and deceptive reporting of the claims made by him and his followers, and such claims do not stand up to examination. Read the literature, with these comments in mind, and the conclusion is inescapable. It just ain't so.
The Will to Believe
Man's capacity for self-delusion is infinite.
—Dr. Elie A. Shneour
Biosystems Research Institute
The desire to see favorable results where none exist is obviously the source of much of the "evidence" presented by parapsychologists. This failing is not limited to those who seek to prove paranormal phenomena; there are also examples of such wishful thinking in the annals of orthodox science. One such case occurred not so long ago as to have faded from memory and serves to show how far even an accomplished scientist can go in pursuit of the nonexistent.
Rene Blondlot was a renowned French physicist from the city of Nancy who was hailed as a careful and inspired observer after he determined the speed of electricity traveling through a conductor, a very difficult measurement. It proved to be somewhat less than the speed of light in a vacuum (186,000 miles per second). The method he used in the experiment was brilliant. But while trying to polarize X rays, which had been recently discovered by Roentgen, he claimed in 1903 to have found a new invisible radiation which he called (in honor of his home city) "N Rays." He used prisms and lenses made of aluminum to refract these rays (much as a glass prism or lens refracts light rays), thus, he said, producing an invisible spectrum. He claimed to be able to detect the bands of this unseen spectrum by passing a fine thread, coated with fluorescent material, through its supposed area. As the thread varied in brightness under the N Rays, he would read off the positions to an assistant. To him, and to at least fourteen of his close friends in science, these positions were definitely determined and could be seen at any time. Scientists in other parts of the world thought they saw these wonders, too, and reported on them.
But where did these rays come from? X rays were produced by high voltage in an evacuated tube. Light rays came from heated substances and other sources. But N Rays were, frankly, too strange to be true. It was claimed that every substance emitted the radiation, with the exception of dead wood; all experimenters agreed on this point.
Jean Becquerel, the son of a very famous scientist father (the discoverer of nuclear radiation), and himself an accomplished and gifted scientist, said that N Rays were not emitted from "anesthetized metals"—metals exposed to ether or chloroform—but that they could be conducted along wires, like electricity!
The French Academy, hearing of this discovery, prepared to award Blondlot its highest prize. But before they could do so, an American scientist aroused suspicions when he visited Blondlot's laboratory and reported his findings to Nature, the British science journal.
Dr. Robert Wood, the visitor, had tried to duplicate Blondlot's experiments and had failed. During his visit, he proved beyond doubt that N Rays had an entirely subjective existence. He did this by secretly lifting the aluminum prism from its place in the viewing apparatus, after which Blondlot continued to read off the expected positions of luminosity as the thread moved across the imaginary spectrum. The procedure could not possibly have worked without the prism, but Blondlot was still seeing the spectrum! An assistant, suspicious of Wood, offered to read off the positions. Believing that Wood still had the prism removed from the apparatus, though Wood had by then replaced it, the assistant announced that he could see nothing, and that the American had probably interfered