Scientist Flubs and Flops #11

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• "However widespread is the acceptance among cognitive neuroscientists of this second part of the ontological postulate -- the mind is an emergent factor from the interactions among the vast number of neurons that make up the brain -- it must be reiterated that there is no proof of it, and it has to be considered as an unprovable assumption rather than a provable fact."-- psychology professor emeritus William R. Uttal, 2011 (link).
• "Neuroscience, as it is practiced today, is a pseudoscience, largely because it relies on post hoc correlation-fishing....As previously detailed, practitioners simply record some neural activity within a particular time frame; describe some events going on in the lab during the same time frame; then fish around for correlations between the events and the 'data' collected. Correlations, of course, will always be found. Even if, instead of neural recordings and 'stimuli' or 'tasks' we simply used two sets of random numbers, we would find correlations, simply due to chance. What’s more, the bigger the dataset, the more chance correlations we’ll turn out (Calude & Longo (2016)). So this type of exercise will always yield 'results;' and since all we’re called on to do is count and correlate, there’s no way we can fail. Maybe some of our correlations are 'true,' i.e. represent reliable associations; but we have no way of knowing; and in the case of complex systems, it’s extremely unlikely. It’s akin to flipping a coin a number of times, recording the results, and making fancy algorithms linking e.g. the third throw with the sixth, and hundredth, or describing some involved pattern between odd and even throws, etc. The possible constructs, or 'models' we could concoct are endless. But if you repeat the flips, your results will certainly be different, and your algorithms invalid...As Konrad Kording has admitted, practitioners get around the non-replication problem simply by avoiding doing replications.” -- A vision scientist (link). 
• "Scientists need citations for their papers....If the content of your paper is a dull, solid investigation and your title announces this heavy reading, it is clear you will not reach your citation target, as your department head will tell you in your evaluation interview. So to survive – and to impress editors and reviewers of high-impact journals,  you will have to hype up your title. And embellish your abstract. And perhaps deliberately confuse the reader about the content." -- Physicist Ad Lagendijk, "Survival Blog for Scientists."  
• "Thirty-four percent of academic studies and 48% of media articles used language that reviewers considered too strong for their strength of causal inference....Fifty-eight percent of media articles were found to have inaccurately reported the question, results, intervention, or population of the academic study....Among the 128 assessed articles assessed, 107 (84 %) had at least one example of spin in their abstract. The most prevalent strategy of spin was the use of causal language, identified in 68 (53 %) abstracts."" -- Statement by scientists in a scientific paper. 
• "This system comes with big problems. Chief among them is the issue of publication bias: reviewers and editors are more likely to give a scientific paper a good write-up and publish it in their journal if it reports positive or exciting results. So scientists go to great lengths to hype up their studies, lean on their analyses so they produce 'better' results, and sometimes even commit fraud in order to impress those all-important gatekeepers."  -- Brain scientist Stuart Ritchie (link).
• "Throughout all the journals, 75% of the citations were Fully Substantiated. The remaining 25% of the citations contained errors...In a sampling of 21 similar studies across many fields, total quotation error rates varied from 7.8% to 38.2% (with a mean of 22.4%)." -- Neal Smith and Aaron Cumberledge, "Quotation errors in general science journals."
• "Ioannidis (2005) and Pfeiffer and Hoffmann (2009) argue that reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field, in part because competition leads to corner-cutting and even cheating, and in part because if many people do the same type of experiment, this increases the chances (from a statistical perspective) of getting an experiment with misleading results. Carlisle (2021) identified flaws in 44% of medical trials submitted to the Journal Anaesthesia between February 2017 to March 2020, where individual patient data was made available; this is compared to 2% when it was not."  -- Three scientists (link). 
• "It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life....It’s time to stop pretending that, give or take a few bits and pieces, we know how life works." -- Biologist Denis Noble (link).
• "If Alexandrian fires were to consume all of thousands of metres of library space devoted to the archives of behaviourist and pavlovian journals from the 1920s to the 1960s, I doubt much of more than historical interest would be lost." -- Neuroscientist Steven Rose (link).
• "We, as a community of scientists, are so obsessed with publishing papers — there is this mantra 'publish or perish,' and it is the number one thing that is taught to you, as a young scientist, that you must publish a lot in very high profile journals. And that is your number one goal in life. And what this is causing is an environment where scientific fraud can flourish unchecked. Because we are not doing our job, as scientists. We don’t have time to cross-check each other, we don’t have time to take our time, we don’t have time to be very slow and patient with our own research, because we are so focused with publishing as many papers as possible. So we have seen, over the past few years, an explosion in the rise of fraud. And different kinds of fraud. There is the outright fabrication — the creating of data out of whole cloth. And then there’s also what I call 'soft fraud' — lazy science, poorly done science. Massaging your results a little bit just so you can achieve a publishable result. That leads to a flooding of just junk, poorly done science." -- Scientist Paul Sutter (link). 

For a 62-page free E-book filled with confessions like the ones above, use the link here 

Periodically Repeating "Big Bang Was Not the Beginning" Story Never Has Substance

The fact that our universe seems to have suddenly originated is one of the most important facts that a human can learn, and also a fact with the utmost philosophical significance.  To understand the importance of this fact, we can consider what positions were taken before it was discovered that the universe suddenly originated. The principle philosophy of ancient materialism was a philosophy called atomism or Epicureanism.  There survives from antiquity one great literary work stating this philosophy, the famous work De Rerum Natura by Lucretius. In that book Lucretius denied all claims of purposeful teleology in nature, and states the doctrine that the universe has always existed. Early in the work he states this about changeless simple particles that were called "atoms" before the modern atom was discovered:

"The various bodies of which things are made

Must have continued from eternal time"

Such a doctrine was very convenient for a materialist such as Lucretius. For one thing, it allowed him to deny that there was ever any purposeful creation event in which the universe began, something he did not want to believe in.  Secondly, the doctrine allowed him to suggest a possible explanation for how humans exist on a planet with such enormous biological order.  The explanation was simply that order had arisen from incredibly lucky combinations of atoms,  combinations that we would never expect to occur in, say, a trillion years of time, but which we might expect to occur if the universe had existed for an infinite length of time.  Lucretius stated the doctrine on this page of his De Rerum Natura:

"So much can letters by mere change of order

Accomplish; but these elements which are atoms

Can effect more combinations, out of which 

All different kinds of things may be created."

This idea of an eternal universe was a bedrock principle of materialists for centuries after Lucretius. In the eighteenth century the principle atheist writer was Holbach, who asked in his main book, "Is  is  not  evident  that  the  whole  universe  has  not been,  in  its  anterior  eternal  duration,  rigorously  the same  that  it  now  is?"  Holbach wrote this: "Motion,  then,  is  co-eternal  with  matter :  from  all eternity  the  particles  of  the  universe  have  acted  and reacted  upon  each  other,  by  virtue  of  their  respective energies  ;  of  their  peculiar  essences  ;  of  their  primitive elements ;  of  their  various  combinations." Later he wrote this: "Matter  has  existed  from  all  eternity, seeing  that  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  have  been  capable of  beginning."  Holbach and  atheists of the nineteenth century believed that the universe had existed forever, an idea that conveniently allowed them to dispose of any idea of a divine creation.

Believers in an eternal universe got a rude surprise in the twentieth century. Scientists discovered that our universe had a sudden beginning, seemingly about 13 billion years ago, in an event they called the Big Bang.  There were two types of observations that established this idea. The first were a great number of observations of galactic redshifts establishing that the entire universe was expanding.  The second type of observations were observations of what is called the cosmic background radiation. The scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the cosmic background radiation, made around 1965.  Since then fancy space satellites have observed this radiation in great detail. The cosmic background radiation is a type of radiation that was predicted before 1965 as a consequence of a universe that had a hot, dense beginning.  

The discovery of the Big Bang was a very great blow against all those who believe that human existence is accidental or that the universe is accidental. The rather unfortunate term "Big Bang" is somewhat misleading, because it causes some to imagine something like a giant bomb that exploded. The theory actually depicts no such thing, but something far more radical: the idea of all of the matter and energy in the universe arising from an infinitely small mathematical point. It is rather hard to imagine anything that could be more suggestive of a universe being purposefully created out of nothing.   

The Big Bang is a thorn in the side of the modern materialist scientist. Such a scientist wants to believe that the universe has existed forever, because if the universe had existed forever, it takes off the table all talk of the universe being specially created by some divine power.  But, contrary to the wishes of materialist scientists, nature is telling us that the universe has not existed forever. 

It is therefore no surprise that we occasionally get some science news articles giving us what we might call "cosmic beginnings backlash."  There is a type of article that shows up every several months on the science news sites. It is an article that attempts to tell a "the cosmic origins story has been revised" narrative.  The article may claim that now scientists are not so sure that the Big Bang was the beginning. Or, more deceptively, the article may attempt to insinuate that the idea of a sudden cosmic beginning is no longer maintained by most cosmologists. There is never any substance in the articles of this type that periodically appear.  No actual news is being reported. All that is going on is a little "clouding the waters" analgesic activity trying to make atheists feel a little better. 

The latest example of this type of story is an article in the frequently misspeaking and frequently misinforming BBC Science Focus site, an article entitled "Scientists now think we CAN know what came before the Big Bang." The title is bogus, and there is nothing of any substance in the article. We have this deceptive subtitle:

"New theories from leading physicists offer compelling possibilities about what existed before the early Universe. One thing they’re agreed on is that the Big Bang wasn’t the start."

The subtitle is deceptive because no new theories are discussed, and none of the theories mentioned are theories describing a state before the Big Bang with any credibility. No one advancing such wildly speculative theories seems to actually claim that anything can be known about some state before the Big Bang. The theories mentioned are the cosmic inflation theory, something called loop quantum gravity, something called causal set theory, something called horava gravity, something called the epkyrotic universe, cosmic natural selection or cosmological natural selection, a cyclic theory of Paul Steinhardt and a cyclic theory of Roger Penrose.  All of these theories have been around for many years. 

• Cosmic inflation theory has been around since about the year 1980, wasting endless millions in research money without producing any results. Cosmic inflation theory is not a theory of something happening before the Big Bang. It is a theory that something special (exponential expansion) happened during a tiny fraction of the first second of the Big Bang. Cosmologist Ethan Siegel likes to pull a very misleading hairsplitting trick in which he redefines the term "Big Bang" so that it is defined as everything that happened at the beginning of the universe after the first tiny fraction of a second. That is misleading trickery, designed to sneak in some illegitimate claim of "before the Big Bang." The BBC article tries a little of the same empty semantic trickery, saying, "Therefore, if we use the Hot Big Bang definition (which most physicists believe we should), then inflation must be considered a pre-Big Bang scenario." No, the cosmic inflation theory is a theory of what happened during the first second of the Big Bang, and is not a theory of something before the Big Bang. 
• Loop quantum gravity is a theory that has been around since at least 2002, and is some version of quantum gravity, which is well-known to be a groundless never-well-established swampland of speculation. Page 7 of the 2024 paper here asks some cosmologists what is the "best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity." Loop quantum gravity was chosen by only 5%. 
• Causal set theory is another version of quantum gravity, and since quantum gravity is a very much a "castle floating in the clouds" type of thing, it is premature to grant any weight to causal set theory. The theory dates from 2008, as shown here. Page 7 of the 2024 paper here asks some cosmologists what is the "best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity." Causal set theory was one of the choices, but 0% chose that choice. 
• Cosmological natural selection is a very silly theory that I have discussed in four posts dating back to 2014.  The theory was some nonsense about black holes spitting out universes, which failed to ever explain how that could happen. The author of the theory (Lee Smolin) stated in a 2004 paper (page 38) that the theory made a firm prediction. He stated, "There is at least one example of a falsifiable theory satisfying these conditions, which is cosmological natural selection. Among the properties W that make the theory falsifiable is that the upper mass limit of neutron stars is less than 1.6 solar masses. This and other predictions of CNS [cosmological natural selection] have yet to be falsified, but they could easily be by observations in progress.” By now this prediction has been falsified. A 2019 news story told us that a neutron star has been discovered with a mass of 2.17 solar masses. A Google search for "most massive neutron star" will tell you that one neutron star (the "black widow pulsar") has a mass of 2.35 solar masses. Smolin now seems to have lost interest in his cosmological natural selection theory, which never actually explained how a universe could be born from a black hole. 
• Horava gravity is another version of quantum gravity, and at present no theories of quantum gravity have any credibility. The theory dates from 2009, so it is not a new theory. The wikipedia.org article on the theory states, "Observations of gravitational waves emitted by the neutron-star merger GW170817 contravene predictions made by this model of gravity." The article makes no mention of the theory predicting a state before the Big Bang. 
• The article mentions a cyclic theory of cosmologist Paul Steinhardt. It's something called the ekpyrotic universe theory, and has existed since 2001.  The theory has not attracted any support outside of Steinhardt and his handful of collaborators. 
• The article mentions a cyclic theory of cosmologist Roger Penrose. It is something called conformal cyclic cosmology, and has since existed since the year 2012. The theory has not attracted any substantial number of supporters. 

None of the speculations mentioned above have any substance, because none are supported by observations. It is intrinsically impossible that there could ever be any observations supporting some theory of what happened before the Big Bang. The reason is that the Big Bang was a state of such extreme heat and incredibly high density that any traces of a state before the Big Bang would have been wiped out. 

An important fact of nature that will never change is that it forever will be physically impossible for any technology to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe," or to look back prior to such a moment. In its  first 100,000 years the universe was so dense that every type of radiation coming from such a time must have hopelessly scattered, with all of its information as mangled as a top secret document passed through 1000 different paper shredders, and all of the resulting paper scraps being passed through 1000 paper scrap shredders.  It will therefore be forever impossible to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe," or to ever get signals from a time before the Big Bang. Such an impossibility is one reason why all theories of a state before the Big Bang are pseudo-science. Because no such theory can ever be verified or falsified, no such theory should be called scientific.  

Free Will Denialism Is the Worst Type of Denialism

Free will denialism is when someone denies that humans have free will. A typical free will denialist claims that you do not have free will, because all of your choices are determined by events in the brain.  Were that true, you might not be responsible for your decisions. 

Free will denialism is morally poisonous, because it tends to weaken or destroy any sense of shame or guilt a person might have. Free will denialism offers an excuse (a kind of “get out of jail free” card) for any evil thing that you might do. If you believe that you have no free will, and that everything you do is completely mandated by the particles and electricity in your brain and the laws of physics, you may kill, maim or rape without feeling any sense of guilt at all. Why feel guilty about your conduct, if your neurons and brain chemicals and brain electricity made you do it? A person should only feel guilty about anything if there is free will.

Thankfully, there is a way to completely undermine the insanity of free will denialism, to make it melt into the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her. We can make the specter of free will denialism melt away in our minds by simply discarding the unwarranted doctrine that the human brain generates the human mind.  Free will denialism is entirely predicated on the dogma that the mind is generated by the brain. But if our minds are not generated by our brains, there is not the slightest reason to doubt our free will. If your mind is some spiritual reality or soul reality or some mental reality that is not generated by my brain, then if you do something evil you can't blame your neurons or some chemical reactions or electricity in your head; you can only blame your self.

The fact that we can defeat the mind poison of free will denialism and preserve a belief in free will is a practical reason for believing that the brain does not make the mind. But such a practical reason is only one of many reasons for believing that minds do not come from brains. They include the following:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could produce any such things as choices or decisions;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here);
• the fact that humans have very many types of well-documented experiences that are inexplicable under any claim that the brain is the source of the human mind.  

So while there is a practical moral reason for believing that minds do not come from brains, what we may call a reason of convenience, there are many more evidence reasons and logic reasons for thinking such a thing, reasons that hold with equal strength even if we pay no attention to practical consequences.

Do not fall victim to the madness that is free will denialism. You are a person with free will and moral responsibility. Nothing could be more obvious, and the fact that some deny this fact so obvious merely shows that humans can believe the silliest things. If you do some evil thing, you should feel guilt, because it is your self who made the bad decision, not your neurons. 

Avoid arguing with a free will denialist on some tiny little evidence matters he prefers to discuss, such as what exactly went on in some murky little experiment. Instead, turn the argument into a larger discussion of whether it makes sense to believe that brains produce minds. Learn well the facts and reasons for rejecting "brains make minds" dogma, and you will have the best defense against the cancer of free will denialism. 

Holocaust denialism is stupid, but not a tenth as stupid as free will denialism. The Holocaust denier claims that the Nazis were not so guilty, while the free will denialist would have us believe that the Nazis were not guilty at all, on the grounds that they were controlled by their brain chemistry.  

Sowing the seeds of immorality and wickedness, free will denialists lie like crazy. A careful study of their claims will help reveal the lies they so often tell. Free will denialists tell lies like those I list in my post here. I recently read a well-known scientist who revealed himself to be a free will denialist. I have followed the person's writings for years, and I know him to be a frequent liar. You should never be the least bit surprised to learn that a free will denialist is lying, and you should not be surprised if you learn such a  person committed some very bad crime.  We should expect that a person who believes that someone is not to blame for his actions will tend to act in ways that are shameful, whenever he thinks he can get away with such actions. 

Free will denialism is the nadir we might expect from materialism, which has always been a program aiming to dehumanize and depersonalize humans, to try to make humans sound like something more easily explicable as some accident of nature. 

Bad teachers

Reports of Dramatic Paranormal Activity in the House of the Physicist Dolbear

 The book Forty Years of Psychic Research by Hamlin Garland is an astonishing account of observation of the paranormal. At its beginning Garland says that he was living in Boston in 1891, a young novelist who was an agnostic evolutionist who enjoyed the Darwinist writings of Herbert Spencer. He was asked to join a new research society that would research paranormal phenomena, one called the American Psychical Society. Although inclined to disbelieve in the type of things that might be investigated, Garland was attracted to the idea that a physicist (Professor Amos E. Dolbear) would be one of the investigators, so he agreed to serve on the board of directors of the new society. Journals published by this society (which included some articles by Garland) can be read here. 

On page 10 Garland reports observing the phenomenon of slate writing, the mysterious appearance of writing on slates either untouched by human hands or tied together. Usually when this would occur a piece of chalk would be put between two bound slates observed to be blank before the tying; and the bound slates looked rather like this:

Here is Garland's account:

On pages 13-14 Garland reports a favorable experience with another slate-writing medium:

On page 16 Garland gets an amazing account from the physics professor Dolbear:

On pages 19 to 20 we have a narrative from Garland that is one of countless narratives by respectable reliable witnesses testifying to the paranormal movement of a table. Garland is introduced to a young medium, and he and the medium merely touch the top of a table with their fingertips. He says, "With both of us standing and only the tips of our fingers touching its top, the table rose completely from the floor and hung about twenty inches from the carpet." In full light he asked the young medium to stand away from the table, and the table continued to levitate, even though he could see there was no contact between the medium and the table. Garland says, "The table was being lifted by an unknown force, and was held suspended in the air for a minute, possibly longer." See my six posts with a tag of "table turning" to read many similar accounts. 

On page 25 Garland reports a variation of the phenomenon of slate writing, one in which writing mysteriously appears under the base of goblet filled with water. He says this:

Garland requests that a specific name be written underneath the base of the goblet, the name William Dean Howells. He reports the name was mysteriously written under the round base of the water-filled goblet. On page 27 Garland says he was extremely satisfied with the result of this test, and convinced it was evidence of something supernormal:

On page 28 Garland is involved in another test of slate writing, one involving a medium identified as Mrs. Flower. Garland requests that the word "Constantinople" be written on the slate, but is told that "they" don't know the spelling. Garland then requests that there be written something like a lightning bold, in yellow, within a circle. On the next page he reports that this request succeeded:

No one who has read my two previous posts with the tag of "slate writing" should be surprised by this account. Successes in very strict tests of paranormal slate writing were very widely reported in the years before Garland's tests. 

Garland states this:

About page 34 Garland begins to discuss some tests he made with what is called a trumpet medium, a type of medium who may be involved in seances in which there seems to occur mysterious voices, sometimes identified with spirits of the dead. On page 36 Garland asks the medium a good question, and gets a response that will "ring a bell" with any serious scholar of out-of-body experiences. We read this:

When Garland first got this report, he probably thought to himself something like:  well, that's a weird claim --no one else has reported something like that. At the time almost no one had reported out-of-body experiences. But anyone today who has studied this topic will recognize these claims. They are two of the most common features in reports of out-of-body experiences.  You can read many other cases of people reporting both of these things in my post here. 

Pages 38 to 45 discuss various tests with the same medium, which Garland says were highly successful. Garland tied up the medium with silk threads (which he says are impossible to untie once they are knotted). Then in a state of darkness various objects seemed to be levitated mysteriously, and also mysterious voices were heard.  Garland says this all occurred in front of several seated witnesses. The account is less convincing as evidence than some other accounts of similar phenomena, because (1) no exact observation date is given; (2) the real name of the medium is not given, only a pseudonym of "Mrs. Smiley"; (3) we lack an observation report that was published soon after the phenomena were observed; (4) the only person writing an account of these events is Garland. 

Garland said he arranged for the same medium to travel to Boston, so that tests could be done to some members of the American Psychical Society. The first of these were failures. But still remembering the previous successful test, Garland arranged for a test at the home of the physicist Dolbear. The test was very successful. The date of the test is given: November 10, 1893.  The only people present besides the  medium were Garland, Dolbear and his wife. 

On pages 56 to 57 we read of how the medium was elaborately tied up to a chair with silk threads that are supposedly impossible to untie. Also a newspaper was placed on her knees, to cause a sound alert if she tried to move. On page 60 we read that something like two dozen books started flying mysteriously from bookshelves in the room. We also read that when Mrs. Dolbear (the physicist's wife) requested that a candy box be brought, the candy box was retrieved from part of the room and "shoved down upon Mrs. Dolbear's hand," as if by some invisible hands. We read this:

We read on pages 61-63 of disembodied voices speaking and performing various wonders. A personality of "Mitchel" identifies himself as a deceased soldier who fought in the American Civil War. This is the strange phenomenon called "direct voice phenomenon," discussed in my post here. On page 64 we read this: 

"The table was grasped and shaken violently from side to side as if by a powerful impatient man; and yet the newspaper on the psychic's knees uttered no sound and the threads tied to the chair legs remained unbroken! Such violent side-to-side motion requires two hands."

On page 66 Garland reports that when the lights were turned on, the medium was found just as she had been set up, tied up in the chair, her legs still tightly tied to the table legs. She was found with a weak pulse and cold skin. She had apparently been in a deep trance as all the strange phenomena were occurring.

On page 68 we have Garland confronting the skeptical physicist Dolbear with the results they have just observed, such as something like two dozen books inexplicably flying out of Dolbear's own bookcase:

Page 69 of the book is rich in the psychology of stubbornness. We have a portrait of a physicist who simply won't give up his belief dogmas, no matter what he has observed. 

Showing excellent psychological insight, Garland predicts on the next page that if the physicist Dolbear meets one of his colleagues, he will not mention a word of what he saw during this seance in which so many inexplicable things happened such as dozens of books flying out of a bookcase. Sure enough, Dolbear wrote in 1897 a long book First Principles of Natural Philosophy which talked for hundreds of pages about scientific investigation, but which failed to make any mention of Garland, mediums or the paranormal phenomena Dolbear had seen. It was just as if Dolbear's rule was "I will banish from my memory everything I see or read about that contradicts my belief dogmas." And that seems to be the rule of the great majority of scientists today. 

There follows in Garland's book a description of quite a few experiments in which many equally strange things happened in seances of the same medium, although results on any one day seemed to be unpredictable, with quite a few days producing unimpressive results. Conversely, on other days, under the strictest test conditions in which the medium was all tied up to a chair, there reportedly occurred results such as writing on sheets of paper that were blank at the beginning of the test, with all witnesses present denying they did anything to produce such writing. 

Around page 112 and the following pages, Garland gives more reports of dramatic successes doing experiments with slate-writing.  On page 118 he reports a dramatic success when testing an unnamed medium in Chicago. While he held the medium's hands and also controlled the medium's feet, a metal cone was seen rising up from the floor and flying around the room mysteriously:

On page 187 Garland quotes a later letter from Dolbear, in which Dolbear states this:

"I didn't make out how some of the things were done. For instance, how the books, 24 of them, got off of the shelves, without Mrs. Smiley's hands being free, she was tied good." 

I will in a later post discuss many other equally striking claims made in Garland's book. If the topic of this post interested you, check out my free 292-page book "Eeriest Events," now available on www.archive.org using the link here. The book discusses phenomena such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparition sightings, deathbed visions and precognitive visions.  Using the native www.archive.org file viewer in single-page mode,  you can conveniently read the whole book by finger swiping. Scholars who are interested in following the links may prefer to download the book as a PDF file, which will allow opening links by right-clicking on a link.