93143 wrote:someone who fails to educate himself on the pitfalls can easily run afoul of one and end up with a failed attempt at replication.
Last edited by 93143 on Tue Dec 25, 2012 9:55 pm; edited 1 time in total
Surely, someone who remains independent and does not perform the same methods of measurements but does it in a different, valid, way is an asset to the science, not a detriment?
For example, one might note in Woodward's setup how the accelerometer wires are exposed and not in screened sleeves. Those accelerometers give out very small signals and a charge-amp is needed to discriminate accelerometer signals. It would seem wise to take a different approach to ensure there are not inductive interference effects.
Surely you must agree that there is no
reason to
have to contact Woodward to achieve optimum (any?) results. The comment above, under chrismb's name, was directed at the GIT suggestion that the failure of an independent researcher was
because they had failed to make prior contact with Woodward. This has to be false.
An independent researcher's chances may be improved by making such prior contact, but surely you have to agree that this also increases the risk of repeating the same systematic errors as before, than if the principles claimed are subjected to alternative, truly independently experimentation?
It is worth seeing the Horizon programme where they attempted to reproduce Taleyarkhan's 'sonoluminescence bubble fusion' and, of course, Taleyarkhan said after they failed that they didn't do this-or-that in quite the correct way. This is a classic warning sign to be on the lookout for 'pathological science' at play.
The same can be said of many 'cold fusion' experiments, that the claim is always that it 'wasn't done in quite the right way'. That's not science. It is up to the claimant of the new science to publish clear, precise, direct and specific conditions under which the same measurements they have obtained can be repeated, and they have not performed the science diligently if they have provided insufficient information to repeat an experiment to obtain the same findings.
Either Woodward's publications are 'scientific' in that they are a complete account of the work and describe an experiment that can be repeated independently. Or they are not 'scientific' in the conventionally accepted meaning of the word.
93143 wrote:You know perfectly well that there were numerous attempts at building a flying machine before the Wright brothers came up with the key to actually making one work. All of them failed for reasons that had not been obvious to the experimenters.
That is a wholly different point to claiming a need to have contacted prior researchers to gain success. Quite a different point. What's the name of this logical fallacy? The 'complex question', or some such thing...