A last reply to Sheldrake - response to article in this issue, p. 40 - Brief Article

Apparent regularities in data are called laws, especially when they seem to have universal validity. Hence human laws imposed by tradition or authority are only used as metaphors in the context of science. Asking who or what set the laws of nature is confusing the metaphor with the real thing, like asking for the wavelength of the light of reason.

About the Gibbs function, it is Sheldrake, not us who tries to turn the tables. Already for about a century the Gibbs function has served quite well to explain chemical phenomena in general and melting in particular. Sheldrake proposes an entirely different theory in which entropy (an essential term in the Gibbs function) plays no role whatsoever, and in which no distinction is made between catalysis (making reactions go more quickly) and stabilization and which predicts neither magnitude nor speed of these changes in melting points.

He is the one trying to break new ground. Science can progress with the acquisition of new data or with new theory that better explains old data. Sheldrake produces data, but they are not useful, and not only because most of his melting points are "with decomposition." Impurities lower melting points. That's a fact. Chemists are improving their methods all the time. That's a fact too. So it isn't surprising that purities and hence melting points go up. We have explained why they might go up a lot, namely in cases of low melting heat. Sheldrake's data--also these cocaine data--lack essential purity information. We actually told him that such information might be found in specialized literature, but we didn't feel that we should do his work of searching for it.

We repeat that we offered to act as intermediary between him and industrial chemists interested in performing the experiments he proposed. Pot that he should present convincing data. He didn't.

Sheldrake explained why asparagine should have a constant melting point and threonine not, whereas we found that these substances (as sold by Aldrich) exhibit the same anomalies. Suppose these anomalies would turn out to be inexplicable and not merely the result of unequal admixtures of mirror molecules, then Sheldrake's theory would predict that the D-forms have a low melting point, exactly opposite of reality. How can he maintain that his data warrant a systematic search for support of his ideas?

Science has arrived at understanding evolution and the Big Bang by assuming constancy of laws of nature across the depths of time and space. Observations have never forced science to give up that assumption. Stringing words like "evolution" and "Big Bang" together doesn't make a case for the variability of natural laws in general, let alone for looking for such variation in esoteric subjects like the thermodynamics of melting of organic compounds.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group