Scientific Method reproducibility veridical Sherlock

Scientific Method

Scientific method is just the common sense of the West, used by shadetree mechanics, mothers with crying babies, gardeners, and even the master detective himself, Sherlock Holmes. If the baby is crying, we first see if it is wet. No. Hungry? No. Is a pin or other object sticking the baby? No. Needs to burp? No. Maybe the baby is bored. Get out the stroller, take the baby for a walk in the park. The crying stops and the baby takes a nap. Problem solved. The key thing is to see scientific method as problem solving. The problems may be varied and abstract. Newton solved all sorts of problems, having to do with the tides, and the trade winds, and the flight of cannon balls, and the working of pendulum clocks, and indeed, the motion of everything in the heavens and on Earth.

The genius and humanity of science lives in a certain kind of curiosity. Thousands of people over thousands of generations must have walked past cliffs showing geological unconformities, without thinking about it, without wondering about it, without caring about it. But in the 18th Century, a Scotchman named James Hutton wandered past just such cliff, and stopped to wonder, to question, and to imagine what might have happened. The top formation showed layers of marine limestone and shale. These layers were horizontal. Hutton and others before him thought these horizontal layers must have been laid down in some ancient ocean or shallow sea by the processes of sedimentation going on at the present. Below this was a formation where the layers were nearly vertical. This is what geologists now call an uncomformity. Hutton realized a huge gap in time must be missing. The second formation must also have been laid down in horizontal layers by sedimentation, then uplifted in a mountain range, which was then worn away by erosion and eventually found itself on the bottom of the ocean again, to receive the top formation, which was once again raised up as mountains, which must have in turn worn down by erosion into the gentle hills of Scotland.

Below the second formation was a third, in which the layers were sharply folded, and the minerals changed. Hutton thought that both the folding and the transformation of sedimentary rocks into other kinds of rock could only have happened in great heat, deep within the Earth. These are the pictures conjured up in Hutton's imagination by looking at a cliff. Sometimes being a scientist is just being curious about things which other people take for granted.

Scientific method in general does not require math, laboratories, or even explanation. We have a problem. We try to solve it, whether it is a car that won't start, a crying baby, a wilting plant, or an unsolved string of crimes. Scientific method requires reproducibility, veridical details, and rigorous tests to rule out all the known alternatives. A theory that survives alone amidst continued rigorous testing and expansion of its range of application is called "well-established." It is theory which allows us to apply past experience to the present problem.

Scientific method for particular sciences may very well require math, laboratories, or explanation. Mathematical physics should not only use math, but it should abide by the logical rules of math. If it had done so, physics might not have wandered off the path in 1927 into paradox, singularity, and infinity. Many sciences are best done in the field. That is true of psychical research, for instance. J.B. Rhine did not make the field more scientific by bringing it into the laboratory. Quite the contrary, since parapsychology does not seem to be reproducible. So, it appears that undergraduates who wander in off the street may not possess any ESP or PK. It did not help that J.B. Rhine simply ignored all the studies of apparitions and poltergeists that had already been done in the Society for Psychical Research.

Part of scientific method is what some call Occam's razor, but really should be called Newton's razor. Every explanation is in terms which are not explained. In Newtonian theory, this was gravity. When asked to explain gravity, he loftily replied, in my translation of 17th Century English, "I make no untestable speculations." So add that to your list of rules of scientific method. Don't make assertions that are unsupported by evidence, and don't put forward "theories" which cannot be tested, even if at some future date, testable hypotheses about it may be possible. It is this last rule which is mostly ignored in academic physics and entirely ignored in alternative or exotic physics. See Physics Without Paradox.

Sherlock

When Sherlock is examining a crime scene, he is not making deductions. He is making up hypotheses to account for this smudge of boot black on the mantel, the sailor's knots holding the damsel in distress, the bit of candle wax on the carpet, and the three glasses of port, one of which has no dregs. These things mean nothing to the police, but Sherlock is dreaming up fantastic theories involving a sailor in collusion with the said damsel. And he knows of ways to check this hypothesis. That's where the deduction comes in. Sometimes more than one theory will fit the facts, and he has to rule out alternatives. Sometimes he fails to come up with the correct hypothesis until more crimes are committed or more facts emerge.

"When you have ruled out the alternatives, my dear Watson, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." This is often quoted by scientists, although the actual passage does not include the "my dear Watson" clause. Ian Stevenson ruled out the alternatives, leaving reincarnation as the only explanation for the young children who spontaneously recall former lifetimes. Improbable, perhaps, given our current worldview. But, if we call ourselves scientists, we must either redo the studies, or accept these improbable results, and reject reductionism.

Reproducible and Veridical

Scientific method requires reproducibility, to catch fraud, incompetence and "gremlins." Cold fusion was never able to produce results when visiting scholars were around. Similarly, Stephen Hawking discovered that the more rigorous the controls in Parapsychology, the less the Psi observed. Thus, for the time being, we conclude that both cold fusion and Parapsychology are non-reproducible.

Veridical Details

Remember that our facts must be both reproducible and veridical. "Veridical" means "details which cannot be explained away, which are found to be true." For instance, Moody (1975) describes the Near Death Experience (NDE) of an elderly woman who had been blind since childhood. In her NDE, she not only could see, but she accurately described the instruments and techniques used in the resuscitation efforts on her body. All of this she told to her doctor after resuscitation, who referred her to Raymond Moody, an MD who was known to be interested in such things. She also told her doctor who came in and out, what they said, what they wore, what they did, all true.

Carl Sagan's birth hallucination theory of NDEs simply cannot account for such veridical details. By definition, hallucinations do not provide testable truth. It's all in the details. That's the trouble with debunkers. They don't bother with the details.

Debunkers

The "psi-cops" use Hume's rule that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs," such as proof that fraud could not possibly have occurred, a proof that can be given neither for traditional scientific studies nor for those of the new sciences. Hume's rule is not part of scientific method. Suppose Hume's rule had been applied in the time of Galileo and Kepler? They made discoveries as extraordinary and upsetting in their day as UFOs and Psi are today. If Hume's rule had been invoked, we would still be burning witches and heretics and still living in Ptolemy's crystalline spheres.

The "psi-cops" do use Hume's rule. I will give you an example. When Martin Gardner heard about the demonstrations of dermo-optical vision through a blind, before the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Gardner immediately "debunked" it on the grounds that this could be duplicated by a stage illusionist (Gardner, 1966). Of course that is true, if the stage illusionist gets to "set the stage," and use her own blind. I'm sure the Soviet Scientists thought of that. According to the psi-cops, all famous psychics, like Uri Geller, are master illusionists, despite the total lack of evidence that they have any training in that art, or any of the equipment necessary. Stage "psychics" or "mentalists" are illusionists, but they would never submit to the controlled experiments inflicted on the Russian psychics or on Uri Geller. Remember, the appearance of anything can be duplicated by the illusionist's apparatus and skill. Every scientific discovery reported in Nature could also have been faked. But we don't make such charges without grounds.

Mystical experiences are reproducible. They are the same in all cultures, under all religions. Symbolic interpretation is reproducible, at least in the hands of experts like Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell. They find the same lessons in folk-tales, mythology, dreams and religious ritual. The seven pillars of wisdom in Psychical Research are reproducible. Anyone with the time and money can easily reproduce any of these studies.

Galileo

If all this is true, why isn't Psychical Research and UFOlogy widely accepted? Blame it on our institutional stupidity. This is exactly what Galileo ran into in his time. Everyone remembers the opposition to Galileo by the Catholic Church (in his old age), but everyone forgets the even greater opposition from his fellow academics. There is a famous letter from Galileo to his fellow Natural Philosopher, Kepler, where he coins this phrase, "extraordinary stupidity."

"I think, my Kepler, we will laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of the multitude. What do you say of the leading philosophers here to whom I have offered a thousand times of my own accord to show my studies but who have never consented to look at the planets, moon, or telescope." Letter from Galileo to Kepler. (Koestler, p. 213)

The "multitude" Galileo refers to are his own academic colleagues at the University of Padua. I think, my Kepler, that we shall also laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of our own leading philosophers and scientists. Intelligence is the ability to benefit from experience; stupidity is its opposite. Extraordinary stupidity is the refusal even to look. More than anyone, academics have a vested interest in their store of knowledge. Well, what if that store of "medieval scholasticism" should suddenly be shown to be worthless? It is especially difficult to get their attention when it is their worldview which is called into question.

Universality

Science is universal and non-sectarian. Even at the height of the Cold War, Soviet and Western physicists were friends and went to the same conferences, even those scientists who had built the H-bombs for each side. Every truly scientific theory has testable consequences, and thus we can decide between competing ideas by rigorous experimentation. It is not just that. Only a theory with empirical consequences is of any use to the scientists. That is why Creationism is ignored. It is not out of any prejudice against Christianity. It is just that Creationism provides no help to the scientist in trying to figure out where to look for what.

Scientists can get just as opinionated and hot-headed about their favorite theories as anyone else. Every new idea is challenged, which is good, because it forces its originator to go back and examine new possibilities. Sometimes the new result turns out to be just an artifact, something not reproducible. But when the dust settles, and an idea is tested in lots of different ways, the issue is settled peaceably. This is what I love about science, that and the adventure of ideas.

The Narrow Scope of Existing Sciences

On the other hand, the existing sciences are very narrow in their scope, and leave out most of the really interesting questions. The existing sciences restrict themselves to a narrow band on the spectrum of reproducible experience, namely, the visible and tangible.

The trouble is, mystical experience is not visible and tangible. It does not register on photographic equipment. And neither do most of the things investigated by Psi researchers. Poltergeist phenomena can be photographed, and even haunts show up on infrared cameras, but apparitions (which are far more common) do not register on photographic equipment. Nor is the mind itself visible or tangible. Yet it can be seen by powers inherent to the mind, and these observations can be tested, and they are reproducible. To restrict science to the visible and tangible is to build assumptions about the nature of reality into Science. And if we do that, how is Science any different from Religion?

The existing sciences also restrict themselves to a particular kind of problem, that of explanation and prediction. But we do not always want explanations, particularly not those of a reductionist kind. In the Science of Civilization, one of many Utopian problems is to find ways to prevent thermonuclear war. What good would it do to be able to predict it, even assuming that this is possible?

My goal is the Aristotelian task of separating the essence from the accidents. I say the essence is problem solving, and for every kind of problem, there is a relevant realm of reproducible experience. All we need to do is find the equivalent of a fact, an experiment, and a theory. The concept of "well-established" is the same for all sciences, those accepted, those forbidden, those newly created, and any future ones. A "fact-equivalent" or a "theory-equivalent" is well-established if we can empirically rule out the alternatives.

Forbidden Sciences

There are a lot of things known by personal experience, which are not part of science. But there are also entire sciences which have not made it into the textbooks, or into Scientific American, discoveries which are not yet part of common knowledge. Indeed, rejection is a litmus test applied to everyone who wants to become a professional scientist. If you believe in UFOs or Psi, you had better look for another line of work. Yet these forbidden sciences follow the same methods as every other science.

Why, then, isn't UFOlogy part of the existing academic sciences? Because of theory. Scientists are both helped and hindered by theory. Knowing that there is no possible physical basis for space travel in any reasonable length of time, they simply dismiss UFO sightings. "Impossible," they laugh, and don't even bother to investigate. In this way they are exactly like the "extraordinarily stupid" colleagues of Galileo that he and Kepler were laughing about.

Are there any special rules when applying scientific method to UFOs? I don't think so. As usual, we look for "best evidence," that which has veridical details which rule out alternative interpretations of the experience. That is why I ignore night-time sightings of UFOs, although there are some very good ones, especially the experience of the talk radio guru Art Bell. In general, however, there are almost always other possible explanations for mysterious lights in the night time sky, such as aerial formations of ultra-light aircraft, carrying bright lights, flying high and slow. Or flares dropped by distant military aircraft, which turned out to be the ultimate explanation of the large triangular craft seen over Phoenix, although it does not explain the observation of Art Bell and his wife of a large triangular craft passing slowly overhead, visible in the moonlight, blotting out stars.

I draw all major conclusions about UFOs from observations of UFOs on the ground, with aliens standing around, seen in broad daylight, at close range, by multiple witnesses. I have restricted myself to cases before 1969, because there had been no serious treatment of real UFOs in movies or TV at that time, so there can be no "rational" explanation for the common features of all the observations collected by Bowen in The Humanoids, other than the fact that these people were seeing real interstellar spacecraft and aliens from distant stars. How could people independently dream up the same things, very different from the aliens of fiction? Even today, what Hollywood mostly gives us are "Alien" slime monsters, hideous, evil and aggressive, while the real aliens are none of those things.

The Greatest Unknown Scientific Discovery

What is it? Reincarnation! The best example of rigorous scientific reasoning that I know of is the final chapter of Prof. Ian Stevenson's Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, originally published in 1967, available from the University of Virginia Press. Here he carefully considers every possible alternative explanation for these cases of young children who spontaneously remember a former lifetime as soon as they learn to talk. He shows that one feature or another of these twenty cases rules out each alternative. Later work by Stevenson and others has only buttressed the case for reincarnation. His studies are completely reproducible. If you doubt the validity of his discovery, you are welcome to repeat the studies. Indeed, it is the scientific duty of all skeptics to do so. I have no doubt that this result will eventually become known and accepted.

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