Which search is over?

If thoughts could have a direct effect on appliances, I think my friends and family would cage my head in three-ply metal shields so that none of my brainwaves would ever reach any circuitry and break appliance warranties. But then, it would have been interesting to have an alternative career as a repeating customer of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR) that closed yesterday, Feb. 28, after 28 years.

PEAR began in 1979 in the basement of Princeton’s engineering department and had stayed there since. From the reports I have read, particularly that of Benedict Carey of the New York Times, I got the impression that PEAR had existed in the Princeton household as some sort of a "crazy aunt" — often dismissed by scientists there because it is a cause for embarrassment. PEAR particularly conducts research on "psycho-kinesis" — the ability to move objects as intended, by the power of thought alone. Obviously, "objects" here did not include "funds for research" being moved to make their organization last longer since it reportedly had no more funds left. Its founder, Robert Jahn, 76, stated in Carey’s report, that they had "no reason to stay and generate more of the same data," and now, probably the only ESP unit in any university belonging to the category of Princeton, has announced on its website (http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/press_release_closing.html) that it will finally close. Some may construe this as evidence of PEAR’s own failure to demonstrate ESP with compelling evidence, since if their ESP claims were true, they could have just announced it to the world through some sort of telepathic conference. This would be in keeping with the reply of one journal editor to them who said that he would only accept their paper if they (PEAR) would telepathically communicate their paper to him.

What has gotten lost in the story is the investigation of scientists of PEAR research. PEAR has claimed that they resorted to having their own journal because no journal would accept their research for publication. I did some research and found that this was NOT true. I found that they did get published at least once, in the Journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The study was "The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective" by R. Jahn (1982). To cut a long story short, a review of the article by York University Physics Professor Stanley Jeffers revealed that this PEAR research failed to be duplicated by independent groups and even by another experiment by PEAR itself. And if you cannot duplicate an experiment and yield the results you claim, then that is not science. Let me illustrate further: If like me, you are one of those who are desperately trying to escape the forced voyeurism being inflicted on us by media when they play up the emotional mishaps of celebrities, you would want quicker control of the TV. If PEAR research claims were scientifically valid, I could just think of changing the channel by reasonably trusting the TV to cooperate with my wish. But if I would have to sit through 10,000 gossip shows and I am able to change the channel only two or three times, I might just have a much better chance of escaping celebrity drama if I cut myself off from TV viewing and newspaper subscriptions rather than rely on the strength of my brainwaves reaching the channel selector.

I do not think the closure of PEAR is an abandonment of the search for ESP. It just abandons the science claimed by PEAR research. If by some wave of overwhelming and sparkling rationality, research on ESP would one day show it does have the power to move physical objects as intended, over and over, then science, with its rational way of knowing, would have to take it like it accepts gravity. But until that day, we have no reason to despair since research on the power of the human mind is thriving and breaking ground in the branches of neuroscience and psychology.

There is another search that many people would want to put a stop to and that is the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. There is an institute that does this and it is called SETI, founded in 1984, and supported by major scientists, including the famous Carl Sagan, who was responsible for plowing back heaps of "wonder" in the public understanding of science. As a private, non-profit organization dedicated to scientific research, education and public outreach, SETI’s mission is "to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe."

In a Jan. 18, 2007 article by astronomer Seth Shostak, entitled "When Does SETI Throw in the Towel?" that appeared in Space.com, Shostak tried to make a case to readers (many of whom are, I suspect, non-scientists) by saying it is too early to give up on the search because we have not covered even our own neighborhood in the Milky Way Galaxy. The pace at which we now discover planets outside the solar system and the knowledge that there are at least 100 billion stars like our Sun in our galaxy alone in a universe with probably a 100 billion galaxies give us a clue as to the probability of life out there.

Shostak did not convince me with his early arguments to keep SETI going. The vastness of the universe (and hello, it is expanding and accelerating, too!) is not something you want to emphasize if you want to convince people that we could find something that seems to be pretty elusive. It was his last statement which won me: "We might yearn, or even need to believe that we are special, but to conclude that Homo sapiens is the best the cosmos has to offer is egregious self-adulation." Simply put, like Shostak, I also want a search to prove that the universe that is obviously not frugal in its size was also not so stingy with life that the best it can offer is this most fragile humanity, fixated on its own importance and primacy, yet still with enough time left to be voyeurs to celebrity dramas. I want to know that because I am curious to see what kind of morality and "space-beingness" arise from such advanced minds (they would have to be advanced since they figured out a way to reach us through space). If we do find out, will we stay/change our course? And while we are at it, will we still endure gossip shows?

PEAR research wants to prove that the directed thought of a human can move the physical world. It wants to show that in thought alone, we are far more than what we thought we were. SETI, on the other hand, searches out for a mind-blowing reason for a deep kind of humility, a largely optional feature in the character of our species. Perhaps a mind powerful enough to move mountains is what the SETI will come upon one day. When that happens, I think I will petition that alien life to take these noisy, whiny self-absorbed celebrities away. But since these aliens are far more intelligent than we are, I think there is a pretty good chance they may just hold my hand so poignantly ET-style and tell me, with all the sympathy they could muster: "You breed them, you keep them."

Sigh.

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