New book...A DEEPER, DARKER TRUTH

[Charles Drago]

With Wilson, to use four examples, Groden, myself, John Costella and Mili Cranor, don't understand it. And Cranor has one of the best visual and technical minds I know. And Costella is a scientist. Groden is a photo expert. I have a degree in film. So we are not dunces.

Help me out, Jim, by being more specific about your "degree in film." Is it a B.A.? Were your studies centered on the history of motion pictures, including technical innovations? Writing for the screen? Or did you earn a B.S. related to, among other subjects, the properties of photographic film with an emphasis on chemistry? What I'm wondering, of course, is how your "degree in film" possibly could be the basis for a significant contribution to a rigid scientific examination of Wilson's method.

As for Mili Cranor, know that she is a dear friend of long standing. I harbor profound respect for her mind. And I guarantee you that she would be the first to acknowledge that A) science can advance in such a way as to challenge the longest, strongest held "givens," B) "if I don't understand it, it can't be real" is a statement driven not by the scientific method, but by ego, and C) fallacious arguments from authority occur when legitimate expertise and expert consensus are not established.

So far, you've established neither.

I used to have my own darkroom and I developed scores of photos. I made up the chemical solutions myself. And I then soaked the emulsions into the liquids. I then set the film on a plate with an enlarger and developed my own photos to whatever format I wanted to on photographic copy paper. So I know something about that process and how it works. I also know how optics and light transmittal are transferred through a lens onto a film plate with the strip of film going across it. And I know how that process works.

Which is the equivalent of stating that successfully completing Biology 101 and making a hobby of dissecting frogs qualifies you to pass informed judgment on claimed advances in biochemistry.

See, there really is no mystery about the ideas of Galileo and Newton. They are easy to understand once explained. And you can do it with high school students.

See, prior to the formulation and presentation and testing of those ideas, they would have been impossible to grasp, let alone explain.

See, because they wouldn't have existed.

Never in all my years of studying film or photography-and it was a long time--did I ever come across anything like Wilson's technology. And the history of film is well over a century old. Photography is even older.

Which is the equivalent of stating that never in all your great-great-grandfathers' years of riding horses did they ever come across anything like a Ferrari.

So before one accepts it, one should hear from people who have some exposure to it and have some well based doubts about it.

Not people who have "some exposure to it," but rather qualified scientists who have had the opportunity to conduct in-depth study of Wilson's methods -- without which "doubts" simply cannot be "well based [sic]."

From Day One I have publicly called for rigorous scientific testing of Wilson's methods. I continue to do so. What I want to believe is hardly the point.

What I want others to believe about me is hardly the point.

See?