The PEAR lab (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) is closing doors.
Chris F. Masse November 16th, 2006
Very sad news.
The info comes from the always excellent Business Innovation Insider blog (who got it from the last issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly).
According to the most recent issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Princeton finally plans to shut down the Princeton Engineering Anomalies (PEAR) Laboratory, a “little-known but sometimes-controversial participant in the university’s research community.” After 27 years of exploring mind-matter interactions (i.e. psychic phenomena), the lab could no longer find the funding for current operations. Located in the university’s engineering department, the laboratory was first proposed by mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Robert G. Jahn back in 1979. At its peak, the lab employed 7 full-time researchers. During its nearly quarter century of work, PEAR produced over 200 academic papers, including some that appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (the same publication that routinely covers astrology, UFO sightings and Big Foot).
My Take On PEAR (In Short):
#1. Professor Robert Jahn (pictured above) is a bright engineer. (Professor Jahn is Dean Emeritus of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.)
#2. Robert Jahn is a dumb theorist and a failed physicist.
I read his book (Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World), some years ago, and it’s a very serious work on the engineering side. However, it’s complete crap on the theory side. Robert Jahn, who is not a physicist, generated an intellectual galimatia mixing philosophy and science. Complete crap.
To have lab skills is not required to be a discoverer of a new scientific theory; you can outsource that. A productive scientific approach starts with he RIGHT HYPOTHESIS (which you find after a series of trials and errors). And that’s what Robert Jahn has always been incapable of producing, for all these years at Princeton.
I am more interested by Doctor Olivier Costa De Beauregard’s interpretation of the E.P.R. paradox, because he is a theoretical physicist, and he backs his hypothesis with mathematics. As to apply his hypothesis to the so-called “psychic phenomena”, Costa De Beauregard says, in short, that they could be explained if you see that information can travel backward in time, with the cause being retarded and the consequence advanced, in the timeline. For example, the so-called “precognition” would be explained by the so-called “psychic” receiving information from the future of his own mind (when he/she would first get news of a particular event).
I don’t want to persuade you that precognition exists. I just want to convey that if you set up a Princeton lab in order to discover a new scientific principle, you’d better have the RIGHT HYPOTHESIS. Otherwise, you’re toasted; you’re digging in the desert.
The world is best explained by scientists who master complex mathematics (used in the field of quantum mechanics) rather than by engineers and experimenters.
External Links:
- Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research -
- Video: The PEAR Proposition - MPEG file -
Photo Credit: Professor Robert Jahn
- Precognition
- Comments(2)
Here’s a hypothesis: There could be a superimposition of ‘morphic resonance’ on top of ’cause and effect’. This is, that any arrangement of events can be simultaneously explained due to resonance/precedence (with/of similar arrangements elsewhere in the universe) as well as be explained due to local causality.
Which consequently means that in some cases what we consider random events may nevertheless be strongly determined by resonance.
This doesn’t represent a challenge to, or conflict with, any laws of nature, and isn’t supernatural, it may simply augment our understanding of natural phenomena.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Chris.
“The world is best explained by scientists who master complex mathematics (used in the field of quantum mechanics) rather than by engineers and experimenters.”
Be careful. I am no expert in theoretical physics but I get the impression that some of it at this point is “overfitting” with little predictive power.. a sort of mathematical game.
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