Grimer wrote:
I have to respectfully disagree with that statement. Suppose you observe
some scientific phenomena which only occurs once and you are the only
observer.
If it only occurs once then it isn't scientific -- yet. You have to
reproduce it. If you cannot reproduce it, then eventually you must conclude
that you did not see it.
Of course that only applies to subtle events that are difficult to detect.
If you see a UFO land, and an extraterrestrial comes into your house and
drinks tea with you, that's real. But such unique yet high-sigma events
hardly ever happen to anyone.
Before 1989, Mizuno and others saw events such as neutrons produced by
palladium deuteride. In retrospect we now know that these events were real,
and they were what you might call precursor indications, or hints, of cold
fusion. However, at the time Mizuno did a lot of rooting around, checking,
but he never imagined it might be cold fusion, so he dismissed the events
as random electronic noise. You might say, he concluded he was mistaken,
and he had not observed anything after all.
Now you might call that head-in-the-sand, blind stupidity. If CF is ever
accepted by the establishment, Fleischmann and Pons will eventually be
regarded as two of the greatest experimental scientists who ever lived,
right up there with Faraday. Mizuno might have beat them to it, but he blew
it. He will be one of second-stringer, minor players in the field instead.
But I would not call that stupidity. I would say, instead, that a real
scientist must do what Mizuno did. Several times a day, in fact. He must
conclude that his senses deceived him, and he *did not see* what he thought
he saw. Or what he did not mean what he thought it meant. And 99.9999% of
the time, he will be right. We cannot go chasing after every stray factor,
every instrument noise or possible anomaly. Experimental science would
become hopelessly bogged down.
There are many famous incidents in science in which people ignored
anomalies which turned out to be important, the way Mizuno did. Other
might-have-been-famous researchers ignored precursor indications of the
x-ray and the photovoltaic effect for example. It is very difficult to find
the right balance.
If one only believed true what could be proved experimentally then normal
life would become impossible.
As a practical matter, yes, of course we believe lots of things that have
not been proven experimentally, including dubious notions such as
economics, true love, and the innate perversity of inanimate objects. But
when we restrict the discussion to phenomena that *can* be tested in a
laboratory, such as remote viewing, then experiment is ultimately the
*only* valid test. Of course theory and common sense are very good guides,
and most of the time you can rely on them without bothering to do an
experiment.
It is highly unlikely that remote viewing exists, after all. The public and
Congress had every right to be outraged that such things were being
researched with the taxpayer's money. That is even more true of absurdities
like the Star Wars program. BUT, however unlikely remote viewing or Star
Wars may seem, the only way to be sure they are impossible is to test them.
Because there is only a limited amount of money and a small number of
researchers, we must carefully pick and choose what to research, and what
to ignore. If we had an infinite supply of money and a billion researchers
standing by, life would be wonderful. We could exhaustively test
every claim that surfaces. (The magic magnet motor claims alone would fill
a hundred labs.) Someday, perhaps, with artificial intelligence and robots
we will be able to do that. Perhaps this will increase the pace of progress
in science and technology to an unimaginable extent, and we will learn more
every year than we learned in the whole of the 20th century. Who knows?
- Jed
