E-Meter
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This topic is a pseudoscience, and is not accepted by the scientific community as a valid discipline.
Although it may use scientific terminology, it does not use scientific methodology.
Remember: just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's actually right.
The E-Meter is a quack electronic gizmo used in Scientology. There are several versions in use, manufactured and sold by the Church of Scientology to its members, such as the Mark Super VII (which sells for $4650) and the older and cheaper Mark V which has been in use since 1962. The Church of Scientology sells them only to members who have undergone their training to be an "auditor", and has intervened to stop auctions of used E-Meters on eBay claiming sale to the public is an infringement on their intellectual property rights. Basically it is a simple ohmmeter that measures galvanic skin response (electronic resistance of the skin), somewhat similar to a polygraph; the user (the "preclear") provides one of the elements in a Wheatstone bridge.
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[edit] Intended use
In Scientology, the E-Meter is used in "auditing" sessions which are supposed to uncover "engrams" (traumatic incidents) stored in the subconscious mind, from both the subject's current and past lives. The subject holds two metal cylinders whilst the auditor interrogates them (often for hours on end), noting any response by the meter. It is also used as a de facto lie detector in Scientology's "security checks", during which members are asked a series of deeply personal questions regarding matters which could later be used to discredit them should they leave the "church" and become public critics of the cult.
The meter responses are not value readings per se, but examples of needle behavior (every model of e-meter ever made by the CoS has had an analog meter); for example, a "floating needle" (one which waves across the face of the meter) is considered a sign of a completed auditing session, while a "rockslam" (an abrupt sweep-bounce motion) is said to be an indicator of deceit or malice on the subject's part (and can often result in immediate remanding to an Ethics officer, or even the CoS's Rehabilitation Project Force). The meter mechanism used in standard e-meter designs is undamped, allowing significant amounts of needle artifacts to give the auditor "feedback"; no e-meter designs use a digital display, save a few Free Zone designs that are intended to plug into a computer for readout and recording.
[edit] History
The original e-meter was designed by a chiropractor named Volney Matheson around 1950, and was seized upon quickly by Hubbard as a reasonably plausible method to give Dianetic auditing the appearance of science. The original Matheson model was covered by a patent, and Matheson sued Hubbard for unauthorized use of the patent; however, Hubbard ultimately one-upped Matheson by converting from a wall-current design to a rechargeable battery-driven design. The e-meter thus went from a highly recommended tool to an "obsolete" tool after the Matheson lawsuit to an utterly essential one as Dianetics gave way to Scientology.
After several incidents where the U.S. Food and Drug Administration seized E-Meters as unapproved medical devices during the 1960s, in 1971 a U.S. District Court ruled that the device has no medical value. The Church of Scientology has since labeled each one with a disclaimer that it is not a medical device, and claims it is an artifact for religious use only. The current generation is known as the Mark VII, and is designed to be able to plug into computers or other e-meters for external monitoring of auditing sessions.
The E-Meter is useless when it comes to any of the claims made for it by Scientology, but if you absolutely must have one you can save $4650 and build one using schematics easily found on teh Internets, and parts from Radio Shack. It is possible, with a bit of imagination, to imitate the function of an e-meter with a manual-ranging multimeter, but the e-meter uses an analog sliding range (the "tone arm") rather than discrete ranges such as on a multimeter. Besides, those multimeter probes are pointy and you'd look kind of silly anyway, so why bother?
[edit] Schematics! We got schematics!
See here, or here, for the latest model! Just don't let the pixie dust escape! See all attached warnings!
[edit] Things the E-Meter is genuinely useful for
- A doorstop
- Target practice
- Bookends
- A kitschy artifact to show off to your friends at parties while watching The Wizard of Oz and listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon
- Playing guess-the-resistor-value using approximations of the tone arm's current ohm range
