NY Times on PEAR Closing

On Feb 10, the New York Times had a front page article on the closing after 28 years of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Laboratory, PEAR. It was, said the article, a relief to some. But as Bob Jahn observed, "If we haven't convinced people yet, we never will." It's time to move on. The GCP received enough inquiries about the effect on the project to justify a short statement:

The Global Consciousness Project is independent of PEAR, and won't be directly affected by the lab's closing. Of course the lab has been a kindred spirit, so to say, and it is a loss. But it is time for other, younger people to take up the work at the edges of what we know scientifically of consciousness and human capacity. And there are many people on that path, some of whom have time at the lab as part of their experience. The GCP itself derives from my years at PEAR, and the project integrates the philosophy and approach developed over our quarter century at Princeton.

There was also interest in how the EGG network might have reacted, so I did an exploratory analysis, simply plotting the 24 UTC hours of the 10th (which would be from early morning to past midnight in New York). Here is the graphical result, a sharp early downward trend, persisting through the day 'til early afternoon at a gentler slope. Such explorations are not interpretable statistically, but have an aesthetic presence.

NY Times on PEAR
Closing


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