李教授專訪

[edit (散播歡樂散播愛)]

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5730/1852b

Science, Vol 308, Issue 5730, 1852 , 24 June 2005
  Summary of this Article
  PDF Version of this Article
  E-Letters: Submit a response to this article


[DOI: 10.1126/science.308.5730.1852b]
News of the Week
TAIWAN:
New University President Has Links to Paranormal Research
Lei Du*
JINAN, CHINA--The Taiwan government has chosen a devotee of research into
paranormal phenomena to lead its premier university. Lee Si-chen, a
semiconductor physicist at National Taiwan University (NTU), says he plans to
end his current experiments of parapsychology once he takes office this week
as NTU's 16th president. But faculty members are worried that those
experiments, prominently displayed on Lee's CV and Web site, will undermine
his efforts to make NTU, founded in 1928, a world-class institution.

Lee, 52, previously dean of academic affairs at NTU, is well regarded for his
work in solid state physics. "Professor Lee has certainly made several
important contributions to semiconductor heterojunction device physics," says
James Harris, a semiconductor physicist at Stanford University in California.
Trained at Stanford and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the leading international society for
electrical and electronics engineers, Lee says he wants to make NTU one of
the world's top 100 universities by wooing top-ranked scientists from around
the globe and building new research and teaching facilities.

In conjunction with his administrative and scientific labors, however, Lee
has maintained an active interest in the paranormal. His research into Qigong
(a Chinese practice combining meditation and breathing exercises) has
favorably examined claims that so-called external Qi is capable of altering
the nature of materials without any physical contact. He has also explored
the phenomenon of "finger-reading," which purports that school-aged children
can be trained to visualize numbers, Chinese characters, and symbols written
on paper that is wadded up and placed in their hands.

That work bothers some of his colleagues. This spring, Yang Shin-nan, a
physicist and delegate to the university's faculty senate, wrote an open
letter expressing his fear that Lee's appointment could damage the
university's reputation. NTU physicist Kao Yeong-Chuan, a longtime critic of
Lee's paranormal research, says that he was "shocked that Professor Lee could
get enough votes to become one of the two finalists." Kao is willing to cut
Lee some slack, but he says that "extra-ordinary claims must be backed up by
extraordinary evidence."

Lee, who was appointed to a 4-year term, defends his line of investigation.
"Everybody is welcome to reasonably challenge other people's research, but
not to reject all unusual phenomena bluntly and arrogantly," he says, adding
that most of his studies on finger-reading were done to confirm the work of
others. "Scientists should not be forbidden from exploring the unknown
frontier."

Lee acknowledges, however, that findings have been inconsistent because human
beings are "unsteady." And although he would like to find more quantifiable
metrics for studying such phenomena, he says he plans to terminate his
experiments "for the sake of a peaceful campus."




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lei Du is a freelance writer in Shandong Province, China.


--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) 
◆ From: 140.112.101.151
推 darkstehiya:這只是簡介吧?! XD