July 4, 2001
One of the real problems in my field is the fact that it is very easy to sort of lose track of reality. We deal in an area that requires a lot of things that seem coincidence to not be coincidence at all and sometimes it is very hard to sort them out, which is why we do the same thing over and over again looking for a pattern that may not even be there. Let’s be honest. There are a great many things that should work in theory but never seem to quite make it in practice and the important thing is to not be so wedded to the theory that one ignores the fact that it is not working.
And being the celebrity in this field that I am, I get a whole bunch of people with things they are absolutely sure will do something spectacular and I have to keep saying, “Well, that’s what it’s supposed to do. Now, let’s find out what really happens.” Naturally some people can become very discouraged but that’s life. And if something is not working it is time to discard it and go on to something else.
Unfortunately there are those who cannot quite handle that. They are so convinced in their own minds that X must be true that they will fit everything into that paradigm and conveniently ignore all the contrary evidence. They play games with logic, thinking like the poor deluded Scholastics of the Middle Ages that logic is reality. (I finally figured out why Aquinas is termed the “Angelic Doctor” in Catholic mythology. He was able to dance on the head of a pin, which in his case meant being able to spin on his head.) These are the paranoids, who think that the government is beaming messages into their heads while they sit on the toilet while looking for black helicopters in the sky. And they make our work very difficult because it is pretty hard to separate the truth from the lunacy when all you hear is lunacy.
So the research goes on, slowly and ploddingly and we put up sites like this to make it easier for others to start doing their own because the more people who get the same results, the more likely something is to be true, and not the figment of our frustrated imaginings.