Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [8]
Emily’s experiment was brilliantly simple. She set up a card table with an opaque cardboard shield dividing it into two halves, with Emily sitting on one side and the TT practitioner on the other side. Emily cut two small holes on the bottom of the board, and through each the TT subject put both arms, palms up. Emily then flipped a coin to determine which of the subjects hands she would hold her hand above. Figure I.12 shows a diagraph of Emily’s experimental protocol.
With this simple design we can see that, just by guessing, anyone being tested should be able to detect Emily’s hand 50 percent of the time. Assuming that the TT practitioners can really detect a human energy field, they should do better than chance. (In fact, most said they could detect it 100 percent of the time, and in preexperimental trials without the card-board, they had no problem sensing Emily’s energy field.) Emily was able to test twenty-one Therapeutic Touch therapists, whose experience in practicing TT ranged from one to twenty-one years. Out of a total of 280 trials, the TT test subjects got 123 correct hits and 157 misses, a hit rate of 44 percent, below chance!
Figure I.12. Emily Rosa puts Therapeutic Touch to the test.
We published preliminary results of Emily’s experiment in a 1996 issue of Skeptic magazine, but our readers were already skeptical of Therapeutic Touch so this generated no great controversy. But in the April 1, 1998, issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association Emily’s complete results were published in a peer-reviewed scientific article, and suddenly Emily found herself on the Today Show, Good Morning America, all the nightly news shows, NPR, UPI, CNN, Reuters, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many more (over a hundred distinct media stories about Emily and her experiment appeared within weeks). We brought Emily to Caltech to present her with our Skeptic of the Year award, where she was also recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person ever to be published in a major scientific journal.
Did Emily prove that Therapeutic Touch is a sham therapy? Well, it depends on how her results are placed in a larger context. Emily did not directly test whether people are healed or not using TT, so we can only indirectly make this inference. But it is obvious that if TT practitioners cannot even detect the so-called human energy field, how can they possibly be “massaging” it for healing purposes? In any case, the “Emily Event,” as it has now become known among skeptics, serves as a case study in how science can be conducted simply and cheaply (Emily spent under $10 for her entire project), and can get to the answer of an important question.
We have seen that science is a great Baloney Detection Kit. But can it identify nonbaloney? Can it find real patterns? Of course. Smoking causes lung cancer—no question about it. HIV causes AIDS—almost no one doubts it. Earth goes around the sun. Earthquakes are caused by plate tectonics and continental drift. Plants get their energy from the sun through photosynthesis, and we get our energy by eating plants and animals that eat plants. This much is true, and much more. Yet there are true patterns that are counterintuitive. Quantum physics is one of these. It’s weird, really weird. Electrons go around the nucleus of an atom like a planet goes around the sun—we’ve all seen the schematic diagram; only it isn’t true. Electrons are quite