| Paranormal Piffle |
15 September 2003
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Lund University Lowers the Bar
British wit Clive James may have had it right when he said that everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology. But it seems the Swedes will be taking education to new depths as Lund University appoints Scandinavia's first professor of parapsychology, hypnology and clairvoyance. One wonders if they can guess what the Kensington Review thinks of the idea.
To be fair to the Swedes, "Verifying the existence of paranormal phenomena does not seem to be a promising field of science," said Sven Ove Hansson, professor of philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. And the Universities of Edinburgh and of Utrecht have chairs in parapsychology, making them equal laughing stocks.
But the troubling thing about this is the apparently willingness, nay eagerness, of some to take rather common parlor tricks and treat them as physical (or metaphysical) phenomena. Uri Geller, the great Kreskin and John Edwards have never satisfied the scientific world through double-blind experiments with controls that anything paranormal exists. Many insist that the lack of proof does not undermine the paranormal -- Karl Popper would agree, but he might also say that the lack of proof doesn't do much to support the idea either. It is hard to believe in what one can't see when one has a hard enough time believing what one does see.
Meanwhile, Dr. Richard Lord, an acoustic scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in England, and his colleagues have determined that infrasound -- tones too low for the human ear to detect -- can cause people to feel sorrowful, uneasy, and generally bothered, much as one might in a "haunted" house. Perhaps, it would have been better if the Swedes had appointed a scientist to help explain the normal rather than someone interested in the paranormal.
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