I <3 James Randi.
I'm a cosmology student and it drives me nuts when people talk about certain terrible metaphysical ideas supported or briefly supported by Wigner, Bohm, von Neumann and Wheeler.
People seem to think that physicists are immune to quackery and nonsense and it utterly isn't so. There is a lot of ************ that goes on in physics because physicists, like most human beings, don't know jack **** about proper metaphysics. Wigner and Bohm are great examples, especially Bohm (who often fell victim to pseudoscientific garbage... Bohm was even convinced by that dude that claimed to bend spoons and keys with his mind).
Just because someone does great physics (when they're actually doing physics) doesn't mean that their
metaphysical interpretations are informed. With all due respect to Wigner and Bohm, they were complete fools when it came to metaphysics. Von Neumann and Wheeler at least saw the errors of their ways; Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Einstein and Bohr saw the BS for what it was from the beginning. Einstein is in fact to this day still one of the most metaphysically competent physicists there was in that time (Bohr is arguably his equivalent). Even Einstein threw some mysticism into his metaphysics irrationally.
Randi knows what's up. He's said on several occasions that it takes a liar to spot a liar. Some scientists are naive to the world of lying so they're easily suckered by pseudoscience and nonsense like David Bohm was [in]famous for.
When there are studies for extraordinary things like OBE's, NDE's, ESP, UFO's, ghosts, souls, and other such things there most definitely should be someone like Randi around. Hell, even Martin Gardner -- a theist, rather a fideist -- agrees that scientists are often metaphysically incompetent enough to require the presence of a magician/illusionist to catch the tricks of hoaxers red-handed or even to identify when someone legitimately believes a process (say, ESP) but they're really just doing the age-old trick of cold reading regardless of whether they're cognizant of that fact or not.
May James Randi live long, and especially may he convince scientists that they
need people like him if they aren't going to bother catching up on their metaphysics.