Science is about empiricism, so i would expect scientists to try out the occult from time to time.
Pascal's wager with respect to machinery, maybe the toys don't help, but what if they do?
See also, the Pauli effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect
The Pauli effect or Pauli's device corollary is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present.
An incident occurred in the physics laboratory at the University of Göttingen. An expensive measuring device, for no apparent reason, suddenly stopped working, although Pauli was in fact absent. James Franck, the director of the institute, reported the incident to his colleague Pauli in Zürich with the humorous remark that at least this time Pauli was innocent. However, it turned out that Pauli had been on a railway journey to Zürich and had switched trains in the Göttingen rail station at about the time of the failure.
R. Peierls describes a case when at one reception this effect was to be parodied by deliberately crashing a chandelier upon Pauli's entrance. The chandelier was suspended on a rope to be released, but it stuck instead, thus becoming a real example of the Pauli effect
Interesting, I seem to have the opposite condition - something breaks, then they ask me to look at it and by the time I get there it's working perfectly again.
The article I linked says they're unrelated.
The Pauli effect is not related to the Pauli exclusion principle, which is a bona fide physical phenomenon named after Pauli. However the Pauli effect was humorously tagged as a second Pauli exclusion principle, according to which a functioning device and Wolfgang Pauli may not occupy the same room.
Can verify: I work at a research laboratory and I can't tell you how many Trump stickers I have seen on bumpers. These are people who mostly have either an engineering masters or a science PhD, and they still believe in fairy tales like voting works.
Engineering is the most chud of all academic fields. Beyond the engineering stemlord aspect, there’s a lot of military money floating around.
There’s some similar things with bio fields and pharmaceutical/bioengineering money.
