March 31, 2002, updated March 23, 2005
James DeMeo was known to me initially mainly through his research into the work of Dayton Miller, which has involved him in studies of all the various attempts at detecting "aether drift" and related matters. He has made major contributions in the group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GravitationalAnomalies/, frequently coming up with novel explanations, for example a new interpretation of the red-blue shift of the CMBR as simply what it looks like: evidence of a temperature difference. The latter idea is included in a sample posting.
DeMeo is, however, better known in the area of "orgone" research, and this has led him into some totally unreasonable problems. Whether or not orgone is a real substance, possibly another word for the aether, it seems that orgone therapy is simply another kind of natural healing method. An "orgone accumulator" has an effect on various things placed inside it, including crystals, gases in vacuum tubes and radioactive substances. Although my own interpretation of the effects are that they are all due to shielding of disruptive waves ("cosmic rays" etc), it is clear that the apparatus is not going to do anyone any harm!
Yet it seems that William Reich, who invented the accumulator, has been branded a criminal. Many falsehoods are available about him on the internet, few facts. It seems that his crimes consisted of promoting the accumulator and failing to realise who his real enemies were. If you have been told otherwise, do read what DeMeo has to say, inspired by some unpleasant exchanges in the sci.physics.relativity and sci.physics newsgroups, March 2002.
As I see it, matters of principle are involved here. A worker's other interests should not be taken into account when assessing the merits of any particular achievement, and a physicist does not have to be "cold" -- indeed, my own version of physics is more akin to the softer subject of biology. Many examples can be found in history of people who have had quite extraordinary hypotheses and yet done some groundbreaking work. Kepler, for instance, not only did some astrology but even in his "hard" physics -- the study of the planetary orbits -- was investigating the hypothesis that their relationships corresponded to a nested set of "perfect solids". Neither of these facts prevented him from discovering that their orbits were ellipses.
I should like draw attention to a little story I came across in New Scientist book review, 17:02:01 (p50: Stephanie Pain, “War and Peace”):
Hiram Maxim invented the machine gun (adopted by the army in 1889) and also, for his personal use, a patent inhaler (his “Pipe of Peace”) that cured bronchitis symptoms in the London smog. His friends were worried that this invention could damage his standing as a scientist. As he said,
“It is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine, and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering.”