What's going on at Temple University? - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

In recent years Temple University, a distinguished coeducational institution in Philadelphia, has become a center for the promulgation of some of the wildest aspects of pseudoscience. It all began in 1986 when Richard J. Fox, chairman of Temple's board of trustees, met with some fringe scientists in London. He became impressed by their difficulties in getting work published that went beyond "mainstream paradigms." "Paradigm" is still a favorite buzzword of maverick scientists and those who write about them.

There was a crying need, Fox decided, for an organization that would permit fringe scientists to interact with mainstream scientists and provide a forum for discussing their results. If Temple University would sponsor such a center it could make certain that high academic standards were maintained. Here is how Fox described the purpose of such an organization:

The Center's overall objective is to create a legitimate place and environment where scientists, researchers, and thinkers from all areas of scientific and intellectual endeavor can come together and discuss their thoughts, projects, and ideas no matter how revolutionary, with complete confidence and comfort.

Temple's president, Peter Liacouras, agreed. The center's mission, he declared, was "to examine critically frontier research projects that hold promise of future breakthroughs."

Temple's Center for Frontier Science, as it is now called, was founded in 1987. Since then it has sponsored a raft of conferences, and more that fifty lectures on Temple's main campus. Its periodical Frontier Perspectives, issued twice a year, has grown to more than eighty pages. I had not seen a copy until physicist C. Alan Bruns, at Franklin and Mitchell College, in Lancaster, sent a copy of Vol. 7, No. 1, 1998, to CSICOP's office, which in turn forwarded it to me.

Reading through its pages I could hardly believe my eyes. I had expected the magazine to be concerned with such outstanding frontiers as superstring theory, the nature of dark matter, the genetic origins of altruism, how organic molecules fold so rapidly, speculations about a "multiverse" in which endless universes, each with a unique set of laws, explode into reality, or supercomputers operating with quantum mechanics.

The "frontiers" covered in this peculiar journal are nothing of the sort. They are reports on research so far removed from reputable science that it is no wonder academic journals refuse such papers. Let me quickly review a few topics that dominate the Fall/Winter 1998 issue of this magazine.

Homeopathy is one of the center's favorite "frontiers." I don't need to remind SI readers that this is the nineteenth-century crank contention that certain substances, diluted to a degree that no molecules of the substance remain, have great potency in curing an enormous variety of ailments. Because homeopathic remedies consist of nothing but distilled water, it becomes necessary for its defenders to assume that, in some mysterious manner totally unknown to chemists, the water retains a "memory" of its vanished substances.

Cyril Smith, a British electrical engineer, writing on "Is a Living System a Macroscopic Quantum System?", relates "homeopathic potencies" to the Earth's electromagnetic fields that cause dowsing rods to turn. The Center obviously regards the ancient art of water witching as another of today's science "frontiers." In 1989 it sponsored a conference on dowsing, chaired by Terry Ross, identified as a "well-known dowser."

Nancy Kolenda, executive editor of Frontier Perspectives, writes "The participants found the meeting to be a learning experience that gave them the opportunity to develop their skill as dowsers . . ." A second conference on dowsing, titled "Bioinformation Sensing and Sensitivity to Geophysical Fields," was held later in 1989 in Germany.

Writing on "Three Frontier Areas of Science that Challenge the Paradigm" (Frontier Perspectives, Vol. 3, No. I, 1992), Beverly Rubik, for seven years director of the Center, conjectures that dowsing is related to ELF (Extremely Low Frequency electromagnetic waves). ELF waves are another major concern of the Center, especially the alleged terrible effects on human health of ELF waves bombarding us from overhead electrical wires. The other two major concerns of the Center, Rubik asserts, are alternative medicines and the nature of consciousness.

Glen Rein, in a paper on how quantum fields heal, finds that such fields, rather than electromagnetic fields, are what alter the properties of water and give it healing powers. Like other authors in this journal, Smith and Rein write in a mind-numbing technical jargon almost impossible to understand.

F. Fuller Royal and Gregory Olson discuss "Illness as a Delusion." They actually believe that illness has no reality! Illness, according to these authors, is caused by "mental delusions" in a mind that is not confined to the brain but is active in every atom of our body. Homeopathic remedies, they maintain, "are patterns of nonlinear waves that resonate with similar thought programs located in the memory field of the subconscious mind and with perturbations in the conscious mind field. These medicines are capable of eliminating delusional programs located in the memory field that serve as the foundation for illness."