till@didsgn.UUCP (didsgn) (07/29/88)
For those who hail the twisted approach by The Amazing Randi and his cohorts to a scientific experiment, it should be pointed out that a 'skeptic' is defined, by Webster's, as "one who instinctively or cosnsistently doubts, questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions...". From somebody else (whose name has slipped my mind, as did the context of the utterance) comes the definition of a skeptic as "someone who thinks that everything is possible, though not all things are probable". By those standards (which are not incompatible) I am a skeptic, who, by the way, refuses to be lumped into the same group as those self-styled skeptics that refuse to deal with the results of a scientific experiment on a scientific level. Wether this experiment reveals unsuspected vistas in fundamental physical theory, or whether it merely sheds some surprising (mainly because of the complete unexpectedness of the results) new light on the unsuspected presence of chaotic behaviour in connection with THIS particular experimental procedure, is quite irrelevant. What matters is that we approach the scientists involved with the respect they ought to be accorded- and not as potential frauds, whose very name is dragged into the shit by the mere presence of guys like Randi. We, as scientists, owe it to ourselves, not to allow this kind of innuendo to destroy our sense of personal motivational and professional integrity. Skeptics? Pahh... The way the French investigators are being dealt with sounds more like inquisition...