"I am not hitting on you, I promise," I say to Stacy. I just want to see her illustration of Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy—an idea at the heart of something called "matrix mechanics"—which in Stacy's case takes the form of a tattoo inscribed just above the crack of her ass. She turns around, pulls up her shirt a bit, and there it is: a complicated equation surrounded by stars and a circle.
Her friend Melissa is more a wave mechanics kind of girl: the well-breasted blonde wears a tight T-shirt bearing a joke about Schrödinger's cat, a thought experiment that explains issues dealt with in quantum theory. Even though we are at a conference, The Amazing Meeting 3, that's packed with professors, scientists, mathematicians and incredibly well-informed magicians, for some reason Melissa has to keep explaining Schrödinger's cat to guys at the conference.
"You wouldn't believe how many people here don't know," she says.
"Yeah," I say, as we filled our plates during Saturday's lunch buffet, "I was an English major, and even I know it's some physics thing that proves a cat under a box isn't dead or alive until someone checks." Actually, I don't understand what I'm saying at all. That was literally everything I know about the complex mathematical and scientific concepts behind Schrödinger's cat. But I have considered one thing that Melissa hasn't: Perhaps these guys do get it, but just enjoy looking at her chest, then kicking back to hear this gorgeous young lady talk in wonk-speak.
Here's Melissa telling a favorite joke: "Heisenberg is driving down the street and he gets pulled over by a cop. The cop asks, ‘Do you know how fast you were going?' And he says, ‘No, but I know exactly where I am.'" All six of us laugh—including me, mostly to cover the fact that I don't get it. It's the kind of joke that goes over well at The Amazing Meeting 3, referred to by attendees as TAM3.
Melissa and Stacy are self-described Skepchicks, adapted from the title of Skeptic magazine, a must-read publication among the over 500 professional and amateur doubters gathered at the Stardust last week to undermine everything people are asked to take on faith: from religion and astrology to magnet therapy and mediums who claim to speak with the dead. Featured guests included maverick journalist Christopher Hitchens, gene researcher Richard Dawkins and Penn & Teller; and such scholarly papers as "Teaching Critical Thinking in the Physical Sciences" and "Legalized Child Abuse: Faith Healers and Child Deaths" were presented. It was the sort of gathering where you could observe Penn Jillette in animated conversation with Christopher Hitchens and wonder if they were talking about Susan Sontag.
The Amazing Meeting conference draws its name from The Amazing Randi, the retired magician who made a life's work of debunking claims of extraordinary or supernatural phenomenon. The event is a benefit for his foundation.
"The reason for us holding it [TAM3] is twofold," says Randi, a small, wiry man. "First of all, it gets together people from all parts of the world who are of like mind when it comes to the paranormal, the occult and the supernatural. We want to know the truth about these things. The mythology and such that's connected to it we think is very emotionally and economically damaging to people. And, besides from financially, the faith-healers, the gurus, the people who are leading people to the so-called alternative forms of medicine, like magnets in the shoes and charms that simply don't work and are totally farcical, and things like homeopathic medicine, which in my opinion can damage people physically. It is very, very dangerous. So we try to put the truth out there.
"The second reason for the conference is to raise money for the James Randi Educational Foundation [JREF]. We are a nonprofit organization that depends on donations, my lecture fees and this annual conference to raise funding so that we can survive from year to year."
JREF's best-known ploy to expose as fake anyone who claims spiritual and supernatural powers is the Million Dollar Challenge. For almost a decade, JREF has offered to pay a million to anyone who can prove they have the power to perform such science-defying claims as those offered by mediums, astrologers, dowsers, psychics and healers. Famously, the money remains unclaimed. In fact, despite thousands of inquiries annually, no one has even come close to collecting.
"People send in letters saying they can fly," says alternative-music legend Kramer, who now works at the JREF office and handles correspondence. "We get people saying they can survive in a bunker with poison gas—the Holocaust- deniers. We get the Christians who insist that they have exercised 100 demons in their lifetime, and they think that is enough to win them the prize. The rules state clearly that only a demonstration will suffice. There have been thousands of applicants, but I think less than 100 tests have taken place. No one has ever passed preliminary testing.
"Once they realize their little trick isn't going to get past the master conjuror [Randi], they either vanish, or use foul language and vanish, or threaten all sorts of lawsuits and then vanish. The connecting factor is that they all vanish."
One well-known psychic, Sylvia Browne, has spent years promising to take the Million Dollar challenge. On www.randi.org, a daily ticker keeps track of her failure to do so (yet).
Kramer, once a member of the seminal band Bongwater, as well as a respected producer and label owner, has been screwed out of most everything by predators in the music business, but his troubles have given him the opportunity to work for JREF.
"I was attracted to the notion of doing something more meaningful than producing records," he says. "I am convinced that the only hope for critical thinking and humanism and a world without dogma and ancient superstition lies in educating people and in particular our children. I am convinced I am doing something more meaningful now. I still have the hope I can convince the self-deluded that their belief system is so severely flawed as to be impractical and useless and a waste of one's existence."
Kramer is typical of JREF supporters. They are not distant do-gooders; they are hard-core in their interest in this subject. At 9 a.m. Saturday morning, after a Friday night in Vegas (Melissa, for example, tells me she was still in a hot tub just a few hours earlier, partying late into the night with other members of the JREF website bulletin board), every seat in the conference room was taken to hear a talk by Dr. Joe Nickell, the chief investigator for the Committee for the Scientific Study of Claims of the Paranormal. He was followed by Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins, author of the classic The Selfish Gene, as well as books like Climbing Mount Improbable and River Out of Eden.
If, with only passing awareness of his existence, you are nonetheless totally secure in the knowledge that Uri Geller is full of shit, and you don't care about the ifs, hows and whys of it, then TAM3 would at times have resembled an event you'd see on C-SPAN. In short, TAM3 isn't a fund-raiser in the sense of famous performers entertaining the idle rich. In fact, leaving aside success, education and sanity, there is an interesting parallel—i.e., a lot of middle-aged white guys—between TAM3 attendees and, say, a gathering of UFO believers. And there is a tendency among attendees to notice this and to worry about it, and to see themselves as a lonely voice in the universe of believers. But according to magician Penn Jillette, a major supporter and active member of JREF:
"Every year, someone goes, ‘Where are all the black people and where are all the young people? We must be failing to get through to them.' Well, the fact is that many people don't want to hang out with us, that's all. And that's terrific. South Park has a huge number of fans who have never heard of Amazing Randi and yet are by every definition skeptics. They just don't use those words. And the hip-hop community has a huge kind of skeptical, this-is-bullshit point of view that comes across on all the records. But they aren't going to go to the Stardust for a buffet lunch with those particular people [JREF]. But there is a beauty that has to be remembered, that if you want to have multiculturalism you can't have it all in the same room at the same time."
As proof of skepticism's wide influence, Penn & Teller's Showtime program Bullshit! enters its third season in March, and in a far more entertaining way exposes many of the same charlatans and hoaxes targeted by JREF. The show has hardly been shunned; in fact, it has been nominated for four Emmy Awards, two for each season on the air so far. "I am against crusading," Penn explains. "Anytime you try to do propaganda, you are wrong. Just tell the truth as you see it."
After three days, by the end of the conference I wound up seeing the JREF crowd as an elite force doing for the supernatural the equivalent of Ralph Nader's groundbreaking work in informing the public of consumer fraud and business scams. JREF provides access to this valuable information to a large number of sympathetic people who will seek that knowledge when the circumstances of life require it. And when that moment comes, the information will be crucial.
I fall into this category. I don't spend my days reading about why crystals don't heal anything. I already know it. And, if someone tells me otherwise, I will direct them to www.randi.org.
Not that this will always make a difference. Most of the people I know are on the secular side, too, except for my friend Caroline, who is a pagan. So on Saturday night in a meeting room at the Stardust, I take Caroline to a theatrical séance performed by Rick Maue. It is just like a real séance, except Maue admits up front that it's fake. I had heard Maue lecture the day before on the history of various conjurors and charlatans and how they fooled people into thinking the dead were doing some version of phoning home. In his guide, The Book of Haunted Magick, Maue explains many of the tricks of the trade.
But even after I tell all this to Caroline, she says she still believes people can communicate with the dead—or, as she would phrase it, she has an open mind on the subject. Which sounds sensible until you consider that, based on the overwhelming evidence (like the Million Dollar Challenge), believing anyone is having face time with those passed on is about as reasonable as being a member of the Flat-Earth Society. But I thought of taking advantage of things by offering Rick $20 to have the spirits tell Caroline to clean my apartment in a sexy outfit. That, of course, would be the very sort of fraud the JREF is designed to protect people from.
In front of an audience of about 30 skeptics, Maue created a series of impossible coincidences. In one, a "spirit" was asked to help a volunteer select among four cups, one of which had a medallion under it. It took three tries to find the medallion. Dumb spirits, I thought—except that the medallion had an inscription saying it would take three tries to find.
Even though Caroline and I knew going in that it was a fake, had we not been told, I am the only one of us guaranteed to know coming out that it was a fraud, too. Caroline surely would have been tricked into believing, it was that realistic. Of course, it may be that I am insecure about trusting my senses and myself. But I don't think so. I'm as Mulder as the next guy: I want to believe. But if this talking-to-the-dead shit can be done, it would have passed the same tests that aspirin and penicillin did, and Randi's wallet would be a million bucks lighter.
So, for those of you who want to put your faith in a miracle worker, or anyone who promises to perform the impossible, ask yourself before you write them that first check whether they would be willing to take the Million Dollar Challenge. It may open your eyes. And when they say no, you may want to think about donating to JREF, an organization that, to paraphrase noted skeptic Frank Zappa, protected you from discovering the big difference between kneeling down and bending over.