Robert George Jahn (April 1, 1930 – November 15, 2017) was an American plasma physicist, Professor of Aerospace Science, and Dean of Engineering at Princeton University.
Jahn was a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics[5] and was chairman of its Electric Propulsion Technical Committee.
With Brenda Dunne, he established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) in 1979 following an undergraduate project to study purported low-level psychokinetic effects on electronic random event generators.
In 1982, at the invitation of the editors of Proceedings of the IEEE, Jahn published a comprehensive review of psychic phenomena from an engineering perspective.
[8] A subsequent critique of this review by psychologist Ray Hyman, which was also invited by the journal's editors, discussed Jahn's work in the context of a long history of flawed psychic research.
Many of Jahn's papers on parapsychology appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration and similar publications that focus primarily upon fringe science.
In 1984, the United States National Academy of Sciences, at the request of the US Army Research Institute, formed a scientific panel to assess the best evidence from 130 years of parapsychology.
Park has suggested that the reason statistical studies such as Jahn's are so popular in parapsychology is because they introduce opportunities for uncertainty and error which are used to support the biases of the experimenter.
In spite of all the tests devised by parapsychologists like Jahn and Radin, and huge amounts of data collected over a period of many years, the results are no more convincing today than when they began their experiments.
"[17] According to Massimo Pigliucci, the results from PEAR can be explained without invoking the paranormal because of two problems with the experiments: "the difficulty of designing machines capable of generating truly random events, and the fact that statistical "significance" is not at all a good measure of the importance or genuineness of a phenomenon.