James Randi

Randi's central claim was methodological and it is the most durable thing he left behind. Scientific training, he argued, equips a researcher to interrogate nature, which does not lie, conceal or improvise; it equips nobody to interrogate a person who is actively working to mislead. A physicist who has ruled out every physical channel has ruled out nothing at all if the subject palmed the object while the physicist was writing. The conjuror, by contrast, spends a career learning precisely how attention is directed away from the moment that matters.

From this followed his standing recommendation, which several parapsychologists eventually accepted, that any laboratory testing a claimed psychic should have a competent magician in the room from the design stage onward, not brought in afterwards to comment on a videotape. He was blunt to the point of being counterproductive, and a number of researchers who agreed with the principle refused to work with him personally. The principle survived the personality. It is now unusual for a serious test of a claimed ability to be designed without conjuring input, and that is largely his doing. The weakness of the position, which his opponents pressed and he never fully answered, is that it can be extended indefinitely: any positive result can be attributed to a trick nobody has yet identified, and a claim that cannot fail is not a scientific claim either.

Two of Randi's projects are still argued about. The first was Project Alpha, begun in 1979, in which two young amateur magicians he had coached presented themselves as gifted subjects to a newly funded university psi laboratory and were accepted, studied and reported on for a considerable period before the deception was announced.

Randi presented it as a demonstration of exactly the vulnerability he had been describing; critics, including some sympathetic to him, objected that the researchers had been deceived without consent, that the ethics were poor whatever the point being made, and that humiliating a laboratory does not settle a scientific question. The second was the standing prize, eventually one million dollars, offered by the James Randi Educational Foundation to anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal ability under conditions agreed in advance by both parties. It was never won, and was closed in 2015. Its defenders treat that record as informative; its critics point out that a single prize with negotiated protocols and a single adjudicating body is a publicity mechanism rather than a scientific instrument, and that serious researchers had no reason to enter. Randi held a MacArthur Fellowship from 1986 and remained active almost to his death in 2020.