Beklager Honkey, men jeg finner din iver etter å tro på sirkuskabler fremfor fornuft litt underholdende. Hasteds karriere var dypt tragisk.
Her er Randi når det gjelder Hasted. Som Randi skriver mot slutten føler han det var trist at Hasted lot seg grunnlure av fusentaster:
Last week I wrote about the demise of UK physicist John Hasted, who was transformed into a parapsychologist by witnessing some spoon-bending that he chose to believe was somehow transcendent. I wrote about him in my book, "Flim-Flam!" and I will insert here part of the chapter "Off the Deep End," a section dealing with how people like Hasted perceived the world around them, and reported on it. John had written a letter to the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (JSPR), objecting to my account of a test session in June of 1977 of a young spoon-bender who had applied to win my prize, then only US$10,000. Here is that excerpt from my book:
Julie Knowles was a young English girl who worked with John Hasted as a spoon-bender. According to Hasted she was a good worker, very strong and dependable. His description made her seem like just the one to walk away with my $10,000. Upon my arrival in England on other business, I received urgent phone calls and letters from Mrs. Hasted, begging me to come to Bath to watch tests of Julie in the lab there. I set aside time to do this and showed up in Bath in the company of colleagues to witness this wonder. We sat Julie in the lab area and retreated behind a one-way mirror so as not to disturb her. Her mother, looking very fierce, stayed in a remote office, announcing that she would not come anywhere near me except to collect the check.
The girl sat there for two hours holding a spoon, the upper bowl area of which was blackened with a film of carbon from a candle to prevent her from touching it without leaving evidence both on her hands and on the spoon, that she had done so. Hasted sat nearby [see the photo] saying constantly that he was seeing the spoon bend and nodding and smiling encouragingly. He had signed an agreement saying that our protocol was satisfactory, and that he expected success. I knew damn well that as soon as Julie was discovered not to have any psychic powers working, he would rationalize like mad. I was right.
A note: Hasted's verbal encouragement and belief was felt to be necessary to success in the metal-bending art. Even today, Uri Geller likes to have his audience bellow out "BEND!" to coax the cutlery to deform, and since Geller had pretty well established the "rules" for this art though for very much different reasons than believed by the scientists, in my opinion Hasted was playing the game by saying that something was happening, that was not. That spoon remained unbent all through the episode.
Hasted later complained that the protocol had been complicated (it was not), that I had said Julie was "highly touted"(she was, by both Hasted and his wife) and that I had failed to test the unbent spoon for such changes as "nominal strain, residual stress, dislocation loop density, microhardness, grain structure, electrical resistance, specimen dimensions, etc." He ignored the fact that, unlike certain incompetent experimenters, we who designed the protocol for testing Julie Knowles specified in advance that we were testing for gross downward bending of a simple teaspoon, a feat this girl was said to be able to do. We did not intend to search for obscure peripheral effects and decide after the fact that any discovery was significant. When Hasted goes to the races he is not allowed to collect at the betting window if a horse he bet on to win comes in sixth and sideways. He simply does not recognize an adequate and proper experiment when he sees one!
Another note: it is, as my reader perhaps knows, a failing of scientists that they over-instrument, over-measure, and over-interpret experiments that often need such embellishment to have any apparent value. Hasted was fond of attaching sensors and labels to everything in sight, reading and recording everything from body temperature and skin moisture to heart rate and respiration, when a subject was simply trying to bend a spoon or fork. This, to him, made it "scientific." If we had agreed to test Miss Knowles for peripheral physical changes she might induce in a teaspoon, we would have specified those elements. It was simply a question of whether she could bend a spoon without using the usual trickery; she could not, and our experiment ended with that result.
Remember, too, from last week's mention of this subject, that John Hasted had thrown away the spoon that I myself bent and broke for him at Birkbeck! Why did he, as a reputable scientist, not retain it and examine it for "nominal strain, residual stress, dislocation loop density (?), micro-hardness, grain structure, electrical resistance, and dimensions"? To continue:
Hasted, in his letter to the JSPR, had called my conditions for the experiment "crude." No, John, they were simple and direct. Hasted said that the spoons used were unlabeled. Not true. They were labeled, quite adequately and permanently. He complained that only one side of the bowl was blackened. That's quite true; since we had agreed in advance that a downward bend was to be attempted (there's that damned insistence on announcing in advance what we intended to do, in very clear terms!) it was necessary only to blacken one side, where pressure would have to be applied if trickery were used. Blackening both sides would have allowed the possibility that Julie could disturb any blacking on the underside of the spoon when setting it down, which could have invalidated the experiment. We knew what we were doing. In his rebuttal to my own letter in the JSPR, Hasted said that he pointed out these things "in order to deflate Mr. Randi's claims that he is a better witness than scientists." This is a statement I have never made. But I will say that I am a better witness than some scientists.
Hasted ended his denunciations with the comment that "experimental design had better be left to professional experimenters and not to professional deceivers." No, Professor Hasted, let us say that experimental design had better be left to competent professional experimenters. Then we professional deceivers can get back to the entertainment business.
I hope that my reader has recognized in Hasted's retort to my JSPR letter the techniques of misquoting, inventing claims, overlooking the facts, exaggerating, and implying the inferiority of the opponent. They are cheap shots, and ineffective at best. I will admit that I cannot manage calculus as well as I'm sure Professor Hasted can, and I cannot claim his education, but I sure as hell can catch a kid bending a spoon! In fact, any moderately intelligent person can do just that, unless he has a compulsion to play dim-witted.
When Steven North, another wonder-child metal-bender whom Hasted also declared to be genuine, underwent tests at Birkbeck College that were attended by Granada TV, a young woman who was with the crew peeked in at Steven during one of the tests in which he was as usual left unattended and unobserved except by recorders hooked up to the metal samples; this is a favorite Hasted method of testing children. She distinctly saw him bending a sample with his bare hands and hastened to tell Hasted. But the scientist shrugged it off as an error on her part. Smiling, he said, "Steven may cheat in the next world, but not in this!" I have no interpretation at all of that comment. It is typically Hastedian.
Looking back on these comments, written so many years ago, I find that I don't regret them one bit. John Hasted is gone, and I hope that he will be remembered for what he added to our knowledge, our enjoyment, and to our world in general, but I find it unfortunate that he never had an epiphany in which he was able to recognize just how thoughtless, cruel, and predatory were the acts perpetrated on him by fakers who took advantage of his naivety and trust. I think he could have been one who served to clear the air on just how easily well-educated, well-meaning academics can be deceived largely self-deceived and yet can sometimes turn about in midstream and quite drastically improve their aim and direction. John Taylor, at one time also quite taken with the Geller phenomena, successfully did this, much to his credit.
