Posted by:
outsider
(
)
Date: September 27, 2014 12:24PM
Human Wrote:
>
> Out of curiosity, what institutions have tried to
> duplicate PEAR? Could you link to them?
From the wiki entry:
PEAR’s results have been criticized for deficient reproducibility. In one instance two German organizations failed to reproduce PEAR’s results, while PEAR similarly failed to reproduce their own results.[10] An attempt by York University’s Stan Jeffers also failed to replicate PEAR’s results.[9] PEAR’s activities have also been criticized for their lack of scientific rigor, poor methodology, and misuse of statistics.[9][11][12]
It's pretty much self-evident that their methodology is sh!t. Were they able to find anything, it would have been able to be duplicated.
Here's a damning article:
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/pear_proposition_fact_or_fallacy/"In their book Margins of Reality Jahn and Dunne raise this question: “Is modern science, in the name of rigor and objectivity, arbitrarily excluding essential factors from its purview?” Although the question is couched in general terms, the intent is to raise the issue as to whether the claims of the parapsychological community are dismissed out of hand by mainstream science unjustifiably. This paper argues that in the light of the difficulties in replication (even by the PEAR group itself), the lack of anything approaching a theoretical basis for the claims made, and, perhaps most damaging, the published behavior of the baseline data of the PEAR group which by their own criteria indicate nonrandom behavior of the device that they claim is random, then the answer to the question raised has to be no. There are reasonable and rational grounds for questioning these claims. Despite the best efforts of the PEAR group over a twenty-five-year period, their impact on mainstream science has been negligible. The PEAR group might argue that this is due to the biased and blinkered mentality of mainstream scientists. I would argue that it is due to the lack of compelling evidence."
Scientists get things wrong all the time.
Many of the younger people here will not know about the cold fusion fiasco in which Utah invested something like $4.5 million for research which was based on seemingly fantastic results in the lab. Actual results! From a world-famous scientist.
It was bad methodology and other issues, and ultimately died because it couldn't be reproduced.
From wiki:
"Cold fusion is a hypothetical type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature, compared with temperatures in the millions of degrees that are required for "hot" fusion, which takes place naturally within stars. There is currently no accepted theoretical model which would allow cold fusion to occur.
In 1989 Martin Fleischmann (then one of the world's leading electrochemists) and Stanley Pons reported that their apparatus had produced anomalous heat ("excess heat"), of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes.[1] They further reported measuring small amounts of nuclear reaction byproducts, including neutrons and tritium.[2] The small tabletop experiment involved electrolysis of heavy water on the surface of a palladium (Pd) electrode.[3] The reported results received wide media attention,[3] and raised hopes of a cheap and abundant source of energy.[4]
Many scientists tried to replicate the experiment with the few details available. Hopes fell with the large number of negative replications, the withdrawal of many positive replications, the discovery of flaws and sources of experimental error in the original experiment, and finally the discovery that Fleischmann and Pons had not actually detected nuclear reaction byproducts.[5] By late 1989, most scientists considered cold fusion claims dead,[6][7] and cold fusion subsequently gained a reputation as pathological science.[8][9] In 1989, a review panel organized by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) found that the evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process was not persuasive enough to start a special program, but was "sympathetic toward modest support" for experiments "within the present funding system." A second DOE review, convened in 2004 to look at new research, reached conclusions similar to the first.[10] Support within the then-present funding system did not occur."
Many lay people do not understand the process of the scientific method. Henry Bemis seems to fall into this. His argument is that there were numbers which could not be accounted for by normal methods, so it must be the paranormal.
This is simply utter foolishness, although admittedly much less embarrassing for him than for the State of Utah in it's over enthusiasm for cold fusion.
PEAR's research is trash because they couldn't even replicate it, which makes it worthless.