Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [89]
So Katz has not yet learned from his bad burn that fire is a dangerous plaything, attractive but deadly. To this day, Geller still owes him money and has accused Katz of stealing from him as a countermeasure. I am not surprised. Just a little sad.
Presently, the press officer at the Stanford Research Institute tells the curious that SRI's work with Uri Geller constituted "only 3 percent" of its output in parapsychological research. The majority of the rest is fathered by Drs. Targ and Puthoff, without whose naivete SRI would never have become involved in the useless subject. And to the dismay of the majority of scientists—who have seen through the flummery—parapsychology continues to be paraded as a legitimate science.
* * *
* (1) Charles Tart eventually answered for them as seen two paragraphs back.
* (2) It has now been discovered that the randomizer was defeatable. The sender could literally choose any digit desired so that the subject mentioned on the next page had ample means to cheat! There is no mystery at all about the phenomenal results obtained by this subject (known as PSI) now that we have this evidence.
The Great Fliess Fleece
There is a time in the tides of men,
Which, taken at its flood, leads on to success.
On the other hand, don't count on it.
—T. K. Lawson
In earlier, simpler times, theories were drummed into existence on almost any premise, and in Austria during the last century the Teutonic fascination (if not preoccupation) with numbers and measurements prompted many strange concepts, some of which persist today. One such is known as biorhythm.
Dr. Hermann Swoboda, a professor of psychology at the University of Vienna, aided by Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, an ardent numerologist and physician specializing in ailments of the nose, came up with a number of observations which indicated to them that two cycles occur in the human life-span, both beginning at the moment of birth and continuing on a remarkably accurate schedule throughout life. The first was a 23-day cycle, associated with masculine aspects, and the other was the 28-day "feminine" cycle. Later, in the 1920s, an engineer named Teltscher added an "intellectual" cycle of 33 days to the theory, and the credulous were off on another pursuit of order and meaning in the life of Man.
The new "science" was ideal for the Viennese temperament. It supported the idea that life was predictable, cyclic, ordered, and numerical. Most important of all, failures of the theory were easily explained away by suitable rationalizations dressed in scientific language. The Freudians, suddenly so popular and fashionable, were benefiting from this advantage as well. Formulating and measuring were at last to be had by simple and easily understood means, and pseudointellectuals of the day were ecstatic.
Along with Freudian psychiatry, this madness has persisted to the present day. Indeed, the rage for biorhythm and allied claptrap has hit a new high in recent years. But examination of the claims brings us down to earth once more.
The literature about biorhythm is extensive, and most of it tends to repeat the errors of earlier publications on the subject. Research done decades ago is highly regarded, being out of reach for close examination at the present time. Magazines are spiced up with biorhythm pieces quite frequently, and some newspapers run columns that purport to reveal to readers their situation for the day at a glance. Airports around the world feature biorhythm computers that trace out a series of graphs for twenty-five cents, and ads tout biorhythm services for two dollars and up.
To understand biorhythm claims,