The chief scientist, Sudhir Shah, was the same each time and you're right that he is "an ardent proponent of Jain philosophy" according to his wikipedia page.
However, both tests were done with other researchers (in 2010, with "a team of 35 researchers from the Indian Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS) as well as other organizations") in the largest hospital chain in one of the most industrialized states in India.
So, still very believable to my mind, despite the reaction of the scientific community at large. Many are quick to say "impossible", citing what they know based on their own observations. It saddens me that modern scientists are such cynics. History has proven that "impossible" is just a point of view and that many things widely believed to be impossible in the past are completely doable.
India on the whole has a lot of trouble with this sort of thing. One of the skeptics who criticised the Prahlad Jani experiments, Sanal Edamaraku (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanal_Edamaruku), had to leave the country to avoid arrest under outdated blasphemy laws for pointing out that the supposedly miraculous tears of a statue of Jesus were actually from a leaking sewage pipe. More recently, another noted skeptic, Narendra Dabholkar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Dabholkar), was shot dead shortly after making significant progress towards outlawing some very lucrative "mystical" practices.
And a large, well-funded project doesn't guarantee reliability. Science involves a certain amount of trust of your peers and scientists studying these claimed phenomena often miss tricks by the participants that someone trained in deception wouldn't (there's a reason so many skeptics and "debunkers" are magicians by training). Look at Project Alpha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha) - a couple of amateur street magicians were able to make a whole department of researchers believe they had psychic powers for years without even being challenged.
When it comes down to it, science is about evidence. That's why scientists were able to overturn ideas like geocentrism - they examined them and they didn't fit with the evidence, so they had to go. Theories that had seemed "impossible" to some (certainly not all) people before them, like the Earth going round the Sun, did fit the evidence when scientifically examined and they became the accepted scientific consensus (to cut a long story short).
Scientists dismissing these studies aren't doing so based just "on their own observations". There's a very solid base of scientific, verifiable evidence that says that people need to eat. I don't think it's overly cynical to say that a couple of flaky studies should do little to change anyone's mind.
> "...both tests were done with other researchers (in 2010, with "a team of 35 researchers from the Indian Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS) as well as other organizations") in the largest hospital chain in one of the most industrialized states in India."
But this is exactly the problem, scientists in general are not trained to investigate cases where the phenomena studied is adversarial and has an interest in a given outcome. I am not saying that the man is a fraud, I don't know, but the mindset that you need to spot it will be very different from what most scientists hold. This is why I personally think that these kinds of people should at least initially be analysed by magicians and others who are trained in misdirection and illusion.
> "It saddens me that modern scientists are such cynics."
The amount of evidence required is usually proportional to the strength of the claim. In this case the man is asking us to suspend close to everything we know about how the human body processes waste and its energy requirements. Claiming that this is possible due to a deity. These are very grandiose claims and I think a lot of people are rightfully sceptical rather than cynical.
>It saddens me that modern scientists are such cynics. History has proven that "impossible" is just a point of view and that many things widely believed to be impossible in the past are completely doable.
Science is based on skepticism, you can't believe something just because somebody tells you to or because you hope it is true, and you can't trust all sources of information. This is why there is a system (we can admit it is improvable) where experts on a certain area review the quality and reproducibility of a work to ensure it reaches a certain/minimum level.
Obviously, something that we consider true today can be accepted as false tomorrow (even though usually in science more than false, the change is to not complete). And that's precisely the power of science.
However, both tests were done with other researchers (in 2010, with "a team of 35 researchers from the Indian Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS) as well as other organizations") in the largest hospital chain in one of the most industrialized states in India.
So, still very believable to my mind, despite the reaction of the scientific community at large. Many are quick to say "impossible", citing what they know based on their own observations. It saddens me that modern scientists are such cynics. History has proven that "impossible" is just a point of view and that many things widely believed to be impossible in the past are completely doable.