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The Towler Institute, an Italian “science research centre, art studio, conference venue, and cinema” owned by an accomplished British Scientist, Mike Towler, is hosting a conference in August. The institute invited Europe’s leading physicists. And then it uninvited several of them. According to an article by Matthew Reisz in Times Higher Education:
Conference organiser Antony Valentini, research associate in the Theoretical Physics Group at Imperial College London, wrote to three participants to say their invitations had been withdrawn.
The physicist and science writer David Peat, biographer of David Bohm (co-founder of de Broglie-Bohm theory), was considered tainted because of his books on “Jungian synchronicity” and “connections between Native American thought and modern physics”.
Brian Josephson, head of the Mind-Matter Unification Project at Cambridge, was rejected on the grounds that “one of his principal research interests is the paranormal”.
Josephson is admittedly a little odd. In 2001 he somewhat controversially wrote that research in quantum theory “may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science such as telepathy, an area where Britain is at the forefront of research.” But then, Josephson also won a 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics.
According to the article, Josephson was sort of annoyed by the revocation of his invitation:
Speaking this week, Professor Josephson said: “I was keen to attend the conference and would have concentrated on the theoretical ideas and touched on the paranormal as only one aspect. I thought it would be an interesting opportunity for cross-fertilisation.”
Ok, fine, said Valentini, who reinstated Josephson and Peat’s invitations. The third person uninvited from the conference, American theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti, will not be let back in. According to the article, Sarfatti sent Towler several hundred emails about the conference, many apparently suggesting that Towler Institute was funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
UPDATE: Sarfatti denies this, explaining in an email that,
Mike Towler lied about me. I did not send him a hundred emails in a week and I did not say he worked for the CIA! Higher Educational Supplement in fact apologized in print on that. In fact I am an advisor to a high-level CIA official on fringe physics topics.
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Antony Valentini on May 02, 2010 11:20 AM:
I would like to make a public statement about this.
The fuss stemmed from a private email that I wrote to Prof. Brian Josephson on the 19th April 2010, regarding a conference (about the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics) which I am co-organising with Dr. Mike Towler. The matter has recently erupted into the public domain with the publication of a rather misleading article in Times Higher Education.
Conference organisers are sometimes required to make difficult judgements, and of course mistakes can and do occur. The email I wrote was an attempt to deal with a difficult and complex organisational problem internal to the conference. It was not intended as a literal statement of my views about the scientific status of research into the 'paranormal'. Nor did the wording accurately convey the nature of Prof. Josephson's early association with the conference.
For the record, and contrary to what many are claiming: I am not in principle opposed to the careful and scientific investigation of alleged anomalies, whatever they may be. This view seems to me entirely obvious and uncontroversial.
Some will ask why I wrote an email apparently 'dis-inviting' a participant. Normally, such a step would of course be a regrettable breach of basic etiquette, and the recipient could reasonably complain strongly (and in private) to the organisers. However, as many will have learned from Dr. Towler (who started planning the conference before I got involved), certain alleged 'invitees' were in fact never formally invited.
Even so, some may ask why certain people became associated with a conference that is outside their domain of expertise, and which was never intended to be about the paranormal. Others feel driven to suggest that I was forced to write the email by a sinister power, and attempt to portray this episode as a bigoted attempt to suppress radical ideas. Some have simply concluded that there were probably good (if obscure) reasons for my writing the email, while others have seen fit to make comments without knowing the full (and private) facts behind the case.
In my view, if I may say, these matters are the business of the conference organisers and not of anybody else.
Prof. Josephson took the regrettable step of posting my email, in full and with author signature, on his website. (The author information and some of the text has now been removed.) This act encouraged a storm of protest from some of Prof. Josephson's associates, partly in the form of a large volume of misleading emails sent to all the conference participants as well as to dozens of others (including journalists) and partly in the form of postings on various websites, including one that by any reasonable standard can only be described as deliberately defamatory.
Private correspondence (whether by conventional or electronic mail) should be treated as private, and should not be placed in the public domain without the author's consent. The internet is an evolving medium, and one can query the suitability of standard constraints in this context. However, I suggest that we all take a deep breath, and ask ourselves if it is wise to blur the distinction between private and public correspondence in this way.
It is my view that a private matter between Prof. Josephson and myself has been brought into the public domain in a manner that is inappropriate and improper, as well as unhelpful and deeply misleading.
Some will regard my attitude as old-fashioned. For the other side of the argument, I can recommend a book by Lee Siegel, whose title speaks for itself: 'Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob'.