Metal benders and disputing boffins

Press, 25 March 1981, Page 17

Metal benders and disputing boffins

The metal-bending feats of Uri Geller have been dismissed by most scientists as nothing better than conjuring tricks. Now, however, one of Britain’s top physicists has put his professional reputation at risk by asserting that there may be something in them after all. DANAH ZOHAR of the London “Sunday Times,” reports on the controversial experiments of Professor John Hasted.

In 1974, the young Israeli, Uri Geller, paid a call on Professor John Hasted, chairman of the physics department at Birkbeck College, and proceeded to turn things, literally, upside down. Hasted watched in astonishment as ashtrays, statues, and clocks appeared to acquire a life of their own. Spoons bent, watches stopped,, objects leapt off mantelpieces, defying, apparently, every known law of physics. Hasted decided that “the only way to approach these phenomena was as a physicist, using the tools of my trade.” For the next six years he carried out his own laboratory experiments to seek an explanation. Now he has published his findings and, to the horror of the scientific establishment, concluded that there were some results “which can’t be explained by known physics.” Hasted is well aware of the risk that he, as a scientist, is running by venturing into the turbulent waters of parapsychology, but he is unrepentant about his conclusions. “I am absolutely certain that I have got paranormal results,” he says. These are strong words coming from a physicist of Hasted’s unquestioned ability and reputation, who is neither dotty nor senile. He has held the Chair of Experimen-

tai Physics at Birkbeck since 1968, has written the authoritative Physics of Atomic Collisions and more than-150 professional papers, and has just retired as chairman of the International Commission on Atomic Physics and Spectroscopy. He is, therefore, not the sort of man who might be expected to take up psychic metal-bending, but Hasted has always had a lively unorthodox streak. He found that his experiments on metal-bending posed, problems from the start. “The trouble,” he says, “with a messy fringe sciencelike parapsychology is knowing what experiments to design in the first place and then knowing how to record and interpret your results.” Hasted soon decided not to rely on the naive evidence of bent spoons and twisted paper clips which any good .conjurer can replicate (though lamentably he does not make this clear in his book). Instead, he devised apparently stringent laboratory tests for no-touch metalbending too subtle to be visible to the naked eye. His experimental set-up was to fix several sensitive metal detectors several

inches from his child subject’s fingertip. If the child generated a burst of alleged psychic metal-bending energy, it both disturbed the atoms in the detectors and fired off an electrical signal which Hasted could record on a print-out. He says he has recorded thousands of such signals. To the untrained eye Hasted’s results look impressive, but how are they viewed by his professional colleagues? Will the scientific world at last sit up and take note? “Not yet,” judges Hasted’s Birkbeck colleague, David Bohm, the professor of theoretical physics. “I would want to see more data from ' more people,” Bohm says. “Where there are

results like this that challenge both expectation and existing physical theory, and in a field so highly charged, with emotion, where mistakes and fraud have been common, the scientific community requires extra data, extra proof — much more than would normally be required.” Bohm was worried about the complexity of Hasted’s newly-invented electrical circuitry and sensitivity of his metal-detectors: “Before we can take the experiments really seriously, we need to know more about how his instruments are actually working — what can produce an electrical signal from them and what can’t”.

Hasted accepted Bohm’s point that an “extra burden” of proof is needed in this field. “I think it’s fair,” he adds. “My own motto in this work has been ‘Never believe what you hear and only believe half of what you see.* For a scientific community to function, there has to be consensus, and that requires more experiments by more people.” Indeed, Hasted admitted he has at times felt uncomfortable about his own experiments. “I can’t say for certain, in my heart of hearts,” he says, “that I’ve always been able to apply the same high standards here that I do in my mainstream physics work. There are so many variables in these experiments — even the colour of my tie can affect the results!” “Yes, and there’s the problem of cheating,” Bohm adds. “Can you be really certain the children aren’t touching the detector when you’re not looking?” “I’ve caught them cheating occasionally,” Hasted argues, “but in an experimental run I may get up to 50 positive results. Even allowing they cheat a few times, that still leaves many results where

I’m certain they weren’t cheating. “But in science,” Bohm says, “once you’ve caught someone cheating, you can no longer use his data.” When Hasted replied that it was impossible to exclude all cheating altogether, that indeed it was psychologically necessary to let his Subjects cheat sometimes to get them to perform well as metalbenders, Bohm concludes: “Then you will always have a problem getting these results accepted by scientists.” Is there anything then that Hasted, who remains certain of his own results, can do to gain the confidence of his scientific colleagues? Bohm suggests as a first step that he invite a delegation of top scientists from relevant fields to his laboratory to scrutinise every aspect of his equipment, his experimental conditions, and his results. How would Hasted feel about this? 1

“I would welcome it,” he says, “though you know it would be a field-day for the sceptics.” Until this hypothetical delegation of experts arrives, would Hasted still maintain “absolute certainty” about his paranormal results? “As a scientist, I suppose I can’t really say I’m ever absolutely certain of anything,” he adds, “but in my heart I know Im right"