Preliminary condensation of statements for publication assessment. Text marks indicate omission of irrelevant, impertinent or classified material. Not for outside circulation.
John C. Cormill
Naturally I object to being asked, but I'm ready to avow--not admit--that I'm an atheist. I was only invited in as a sort of control, a token sceptic. As such, of course, I should have been consulted from the start and allowed to work with Elder on the experimental design. Any halfway competent [...] A hospital just isn't a controlled lab environment, even if it's university-linked.
Of course I doubt the claims. In spite of the alleged evidence I'm still highly dubious of the Messiter algorithm itself. Something which only one man has quote mastered unquote: what kind of reproducible process is that?
All right, I agree that the final incident is sort of inherently a one-off. Poor guy, we can't treat him to a big horse-laugh about repeatability now, but I reckon we still ought to be committed to aiming at some kind of objective truth. Dead fakes can do more harm than live ones. For example, look at [...]
I do admit that at the time it was impressive.
A million ways it could have been done. How did Messiter pull his communication tricks? I wasn't asked early enough; never had long enough to watch him in action. Professional magicians should have spied on him through concealed video cameras ... they did all that? Well, no one denies he was clever.
If you insist. For the sake of argument I'll go along with the big names who endorsed Messiter. Remember, though, the spiritualists made fools of Crookes and Conan Doyle. I just want to mention it.
Even taking the Algorithm at face value, we're still left with the big unrepeatable of the last message. What can I say? It was impressive, incredibly impressive, at the time. I have to state that at the time it actually seemed to meet my criterion about information which must have an extraordinary source. Though, remember, Messiter was a brilliant thinker, and he could just conceivably have had that last bit about Fermat's theorem up his sleeve ... I'd always been sure that was one of the great undecidables. I can't say anything until I see the unedited transcript I've kept asking for.
That apart, we're talking about a [...] computer output here. You've heard of viruses and logic bombs. All of us had the opportunity when we were keeping that endless creepy death-watch. Four days, three nights, meals and sleep. Even I had to sleep. Two minutes alone with the equipment would be enough to load something that did it all; erased itself; left no trace.
Frankly, you ought to be stopped from going public with [...] like this.
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