Re: Randi (Score: 1)
by bender772 on Monday, April 07, 2003 @ 21:07:33 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.suppressedscience.net | | First of all, I do not believe that Randi would be happy to pay the $1 million. On the contrary, there is evidence that Randi will reject challenges that threaten to actually succeed.
As far as ignorant tirades are concerned, I offer the following two pieces of evidence.
1. In a personal note published on James Randi's Website, Robert Park makes the following statement about the "Motionless Electromagnetic Generator", a claimed free energy device:
I've been following the MEG claim since Patent 6,362,718 was issued in the spring (What's New 4 Apr 02). The claim, of course, is preposterous. It is a clear violation of the conservation of energy.
But Park is only demolishing a straw man. The first law of thermodynamics states that the energy of a closed system is conserved. But the inventors of the MEG claim that their device takes energy from the zero-point field of the vacuum, thereby conserving the energy of the total system (which in this case would be the MEG and the surrounding vacuum). Whether it can actually do that is an open question. But the existence of the Casimir force proves that in principle such extraction of energy from the vacuum is possible (even though the energy gained from the Casimir force between two plates is negligible). Therefore, one cannot dismiss claims for free energy devices such as the MEG on a priori grounds of energy conservation. Since Park is a physicists, he could not possibly be unaware of this. By stating that the claimed invention contradicts the law of energy conservation, he intentionally misrepresents the claims of the MEG inventors. They do not claim to have found a way around the first law; they merely claim to have accessed a source of energy not previously accessible to human technology.
By endorsing Park's statement in his online newsletter, Randi is making it his own. The fact that he is apparently unaware of the Casimir force (otherwise he could not dismiss claimed vacuum energy devices on a priori grounds) qualifies him as ignorant.
2. Consider Randi's never-ending tirades against homeopathy. If you study his website, you will see that all he ever quotes is disconfirming medical studies, while the ones that confirm homeopathy are conveniently ignored.
Try it yourself. Use Google to search Randi's website for
Madeleine Ennis homeopathy
and see how many hits you get. One. And that one just mentions Ennis' name in the context of discussing a disconfirming study, and calls her a "pharmacist from Belfast." Relying soley on Randi's site, a reader would never know that the woman is a professor of Immunopharmacology at Queen's University, Belfast, and that she and others have produced a ground-breaking replication of Benveniste's seminal work on ultradilutions.
This kind of biased, selective reporting of evidence is more than just ignorance. It is mallice and science fraud.
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