|
On Feb 10, the New York Times had a front page article on
the closing after 28 years of the Princeton Engineering
Anomalies Laboratory, PEAR. It was, said the article, a
relief to some. But as Bob Jahn observed, "If we haven't
convinced people yet, we never will." It's time to move on.
The GCP received enough inquiries about the effect on the
project to justify a short statement:
The Global Consciousness Project is independent of PEAR,
and won't be directly affected by the lab's closing. Of
course the lab has been a kindred spirit, so to say, and
it is a loss. But it is time for other, younger people to
take up the work at the edges of what we know
scientifically
of consciousness and human capacity. And there are many
people
on that path, some of whom have time at the lab as part of
their experience. The GCP itself derives from my years at
PEAR,
and the project integrates the philosophy and approach
developed
over our quarter century at Princeton.
There was also interest in how the EGG network might have
reacted, so I did an exploratory analysis, simply plotting
the 24 UTC hours of the 10th (which would be from early
morning to past midnight in New York). Here is the graphical
result, a sharp early downward trend, persisting through the
day 'til early afternoon at a gentler slope.
Such explorations are not interpretable statistically, but
have an aesthetic presence.
|