An Engineer's Framing of an Unwelcome Question

Jahn's career before 1979 was in electric propulsion, the physics of accelerating a spacecraft by ionising a propellant rather than burning it, and he wrote the textbook that trained a generation in the subject. That standing is what allowed the next part. When a graduate student asked to look at claims about mental influence on machines, Jahn opened a small laboratory to test it, and he justified it to a wary administration in engineering terms rather than psychical ones: modern systems depend on hardware random number generators, and if a human operator could bias such a device even slightly, that would be an engineering fact about the reliability of those systems whatever its ultimate explanation.

The framing determined the whole research programme. PEAR did not hunt for gifted psychics; it used ordinary volunteers, called them operators, and looked for a minute statistical shift accumulated over enormous numbers of binary trials, on the reasoning that a real but tiny effect would only become visible in bulk. It also determined how the work was received, since housing the laboratory inside a school of engineering meant its output was reviewed largely by people with no training in experimental psychology, which critics identified early as a structural weakness.