Don't put magicians on pedestals revisited

By Brian Clegg

REVISIT SERIES - An edited post from December 2014

Over the years, magicians like Harry Houdini and James Randi have shown time and again that they have ideal skills for spotting and debunking fraudulent claims of magical abilities and mental powers. In the Telegraph newspaper, though, Will Storr had a go at ‘debunking the king of the debunkers’, demonstrating that Randi himself, now 87 (according to his article, or 86 according to Wikipedia), was not all he seemed. [Randi died in 2020.] For me, this was a wonderful example of entirely missing the point.

Storr made three main accusations. That Randi has at some point been doubtful about the science behind climate change, that he was intolerant to drug users and that he had lied about replicating Rupert Sheldrake’s dog experiments, in which Sheldrake claims to have shown that at dog was able to predict when its owner would return home.

The first two, frankly, are hardly worth considering as they are classic type errors. Being good at debunking fraudulent psychics does not make you a climate change expert. Why should it? And some perfectly respectable scientists have doubts about some aspects of climate change science. It’s the nature of science – it’s not a belief system where you have to sign up to everything it says in the big book. As for Randi’s attitude to drug users, again, so what? So that leaves us with the strange incident of the dog.

It seems likely, if we take Storr’s article at face value, that Randi did indeed claim to have replicated an experiment when he hadn’t done so. This isn’t good. But in a sense it is the inevitable reverse face of the reason that Randi has done his job so well in the first place. Randi has always argued that scientists are not very good at devising tests that prevent those with a stage magician’s skills from cheating, or at detecting such cheating in action. What you need, he says, is a magician. And he has proved time and again that he is right. Scientists don’t have the expertise of a magician. Well, guess what? Magicians don’t have the expertise of a scientist either. Randi isn’t a scientist. So why are we surprised when Randi fails to operate in a proper scientific fashion over the Sheldrake business?

In fact, in his own writing, Randi has made scientific errors. In his book Film Flam he comments ‘Jack van Impe, a TV evangelist who perspires and preaches his version of science regularly to millions of believers, recently gave us an Easter message that reflected his ignorance of science. He referred to the preposterous “Jupiter Effect” so beloved of some nuts, which is supposed to cause wonderful catastrophes in 1982. The Earth should be a mess at the end of this claimed alignment of the planets, and I can hardly wait to see the show. Said Jack, “The Earth will be seven times hotter.” Codswallop. The term has no meaning. “Seven” is a number, Jack. If you take the normal temperature to be 70 degrees Fahrenheit, that makes the new reading 490 degrees Fahrenheit. If you’re in Europe or Canada, that same temperature is 21 degrees Celsius, giving the other folks a break with 148 degrees C, which is equal to only 298 degrees F.’ 

Yes, of course seven is a number – but that doesn’t mean that something can’t be seven times hotter than something else. Temperature is a measure of the mean kinetic energy of the atoms or molecules in a substance, and one thing can have seven times as much energy as another. So something can be seven times hotter than something else. (Or the world can be seven times hotter at one point in time than it is at another.) What Randi is really identifying is the arbitrary nature of the temperature scales he uses in his illustration. (And the stupidity of the prediction, which not surprisingly never came true.) If Randi had used the Kelvin scale, the numbers would be fine. But the way he phrased his attack shows that he too can get it wrong when working outside his field of expertise.

I’m not defending Randi in any way for what he is accused of doing. If his claim of replicating the Sheldrake experiment wasn’t true, it was bad science, the kind of thing that gets a scientist kicked out of his job. But it doesn’t in any way detract from the useful service Randi has provided over many years in devising tests and pointing out the flaws in scientific studies of ESP and the like. Has Storr shown that Randi is sometimes a liar? Quite possibly – and that’s why he’s good at his job. All magicians are liars by trade, even if they don’t always use words to do it. More precisely, they indulge in Brainjacking – you’ll find a lot on the work of magicians in my new book of that name. Deception is their business. Perhaps the problem is the fuzzy nature of Randi’s skeptical foundation JREF, which gave the veneer of science to what never really deserved that label. Since Randi’s death the foundation seems to have largely faded away – the last post on their website is from 2022.

When I read Storr’s article, I got the impression of reading the words of a fan who discovers his idol has feet of clay. The same as those who discover their favourite singer has an unpleasant private life. Or that a Nobel Prize winning scientist had unacceptable views on other topics. Welcome to the real world, Mr Storr.

Image by Eduardo Aparicio from Wikipedia

See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.