Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [126]
Our photon example, a phenomenon known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox, seems to show that information can be instantaneously transmitted from one photon to the other photon light-years distant. This has delighted the paraphysicists. One such, Dr. Evan Harris Walker, has made the jump into madness by postulating that the secret of it all is the consciousness of the human being doing the observing. But part of his problem, to the dismay of John Wheeler, is that he has misinterpreted the language in which the matter is stated. In physics, "observing" is synonymous with "measuring"; Walker has assumed that a human observer must perform the measuring operation and thus interfere with the thing measured. What is really meant is that a device or other foreign influence—it need not be a human being, and the "consciousness" inherent in that term—interferes with the observed event in the process of measuring it. On the basis of this misunderstanding, the paraphysicists have been sprinting down yet another stretch of the Yellow Brick Road.
In referring to Walker's opinions on this subject, Professor R. A. McConnell, another toiler in the psi vineyard, has employed a term I may not use in this book. Dr. David Bohm, of Birkbeck College, London, has similar feelings about Walker's knowledge of quantum mechanics and its application to psi theory. But Walker became the golden boy of paraphysics with his quantum mechanics theory of psi—until Dr. Wheeler decided to set the record straight.
In January 1979, at a session on "Science and Consciousness" during a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Houston, Dr. Wheeler discovered to his chagrin that he was a scheduled speaker on a panel that included some parapsychologists, Harold Puthoff and Charles Honorton among them. He made it clear that if he had known this would be the case he'd have withdrawn from the panel. He described the notions of the parapsychologists as "absolutely crazy ideas put forward with the aim of establishing a link between quantum mechanics and parapsychology—as if there were any such thing as 'parapsychology.'" In no uncertain terms he complained that the AAAS had made an error in admitting the parapsychologists as affiliates, and that they had used that affiliation to lend an air of legitimacy to their claims. He was quite correct in this, for one Albert Moseley, a philosopher at the Mount Vernon Square Campus of the University of the District of Columbia, in a letter to The Humanist, called that magazine's expose of parapsychology "appalling" and said that "the acceptance of the Parapsychological Association as an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science grants a credibility to research in the area that your articles seem purposely to ignore."
Dr. Wheeler, referring to the decade that had passed since the AAAS admitted the parapsychologists, asked a simple question: "[Has] this field of investigation... produced any 'battle-tested' result?" His overall conclusion, in view of the skimpy findings obtained and exaggerated into great significance by the para-scientists, was simply "Where there's smoke, there's smoke." Dr. Wheeler called on the AAAS to oust the Parapsychological Association from its ranks. It is interesting to note that even the AAAS had found it difficult to categorize this ugly child in admitting it as an affiliate. It was the only group listed under the heading "General Category."
On the basis of their spurious quantum mechanics theory of psi, the parapsychologists have clamored loudly for the skeptics to recognize that quantum physics—with the Heisenberg Principle, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox, and other recently popular points of discussion—has given credence to their claims that skeptical attitudes