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Re: The air track experiment:Cooked Data!



James Mackey wrote

Just picked up this thread (slow to get to my mail with schools
starting). I recall reading that most of Arthur Eddington's data taken at
the 1919 total eclipse that was used to "prove" Einstein's gravitational
bending prediction, did NOT fit Einstein's prdiction. Eddington had to be
very selective (just drop off that anomalous data point!) in the data he
presented to prove his point. How often has this happened - and then
turned out to be correct all along?
James Mackey

I don't have any data, but there are lots of stories about it having
been done by one or another illustrious scientist in the past (that
Millikan did it is clear from a study of his notebooks--in his case
he was wrong, and his authority kept the accepted value of the
electron charge too small for years.). I suspect that it happens a
lot more than we are willing to admit. Most of us, I'm sure, have, on
looking at a data point that just looks awful (i.e., doesn't fit with
the rest of the data) have at least been tempted to say, "That can't
be right. I'll just ignore that point and use at the rest."

An interesting related incident is the effort of Dayton C. Miller to
reproduce the Michelson-Morely experiment. Of all the published
results, I believe only Miller obtained a non-null result, and so
convinced was he of the accuracy of his data that he was fond of
pointing in a particular direction at public lectures and stating,
"That is the direction that the earth is moving relative to the
ether!" It was only years later that it was shown that his anomalous
results were due to an unrecorded temperature gradient in his
laboratory. (BTW, Miller was a renowned collector of flutes and his
collection, perhaps the most extensive in the world, is now the
property of the Smithsonian Institution.)

I also recall that at about the time I was first taking e-m theory as
an undergraduate, that some experiments with aircraft navigation
using LORAN along the East Coast, were giving results that implied
that the value of the speed of radio waves differed measurably from
the speed of light most recently (about 1932) found by Michelson, and
it was being seriously bruited about that perhaps the speed of light
was a function of frequency, contrary to the predictions of Maxwell's
theory. Later it was discovered that Michelson had neglected to
include the index of refraction of the residual air in his tube, and
when that correction was applied to his results the discrepancy with
the navigation results disappeared.

There is also the story that Einstein, on reading (or hearing) about
experiments that did not confirm some aspect (I forget which) of the
Special Theory of Relativity, refused to make any modifications to
the theory, preferring to believe that the experiments were in
error--which they were later shown to be.

When an exciting new phenomenon is reported (cold fusion, the fifth
gravitational force, high temperature superconductivity, and others,
both recent and in earlier years), the earliest reports of
replications tend to be positive, but sometimes (as in the case of
the first two examples above) the reports of disconfirmation start to
crop up as time goes on, and eventually the effect is recognized to
have been false, sometimes at the expense of the original
discoverers' reputations (cold fusion), and other times leaving the
discoverers' reputations intact (fifth force). It's not only theories
that can be wrong. Sometimes the experiments are wrong.

The history and process of science is not clean and neat and well
organized. Sometimes people make mistakes and get away with it,
sometimes people see what they want to see, and even though they
didn't see it, they were correct, but the self-correcting mechanism
of science almost always eventually ferrets out the errors and leads
us closer to the truth. It may take a long while and sometimes the
correction only occurs when all the proponents of the opposing view
have died, but eventually we get there.

to paraphrase Jefferson, "Eternal vigilance is the price of good science."

Hugh


Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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