Not for quotation or citation without author's permission
I seem to have been born a skeptic, or at least I grew into one. While
still in grade school I was much influenced by Martin Gardner's Fads
and Fallacies in the Name of Science, in which Gardner gleefully exposed
various theories and, by implication or directly, mocked their adherents.
I particularly remember his describing a test of "orgone", where one master
of the discipline imbued a tree in a garden with it (or identified which
tree in a garden has an excessive amount of it) and another master was
subsequently unable to identify the tree. It was natural, then, that I
concentrated in part on research methods during my graduate training, so
that I am now officially one of the department's methodologists.
Thus it was as a skeptic, and a trained one, that I approached chi
- some mystical substance that the uninitiated could neither feel nor
touch nor hear nor see nor smell nor taste. Like orgone, chi was
obviously a self-delusion, which - having fooled the Chinese population
in prescientific times - was now making inroads into the West, led by unscrupulous
gurus who made big bucks off desperate, gullible students in an increasingly
irrational New Age culture. It was my job to unmask this fraud, to point
out the Emperor's lack of clothes, to recall the West to the path of scientific
righteousness.
However, I've come to believe that something like chi
exists. I currently have two grounds for this belief. First,
the twinges I get from time to time in my body are along the acupuncture
meridians. Let me clarify. xx. Both twinges are along
the same acupuncture meridian. Second, I feel something when I touch
my head. [I know this sounds pathetic so far. I'll have to
fill it out later, though.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Martin Gardner (1957). Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. NY: Dover.
xx (19xx). xx article. xx xx:xx-xx.
xx (19xx). xx paper. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the xx, xx.
xx (19xx). xx book chapter. Pp. xx - xx of xx, ed. xx. xx: xx.