[extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings

[John K Clark]

"Ben Goertzel" <ben at goertzel.org>

> The experiments are simple but hard to get right

One of the greatest understatements of all time! A simple well publicized
experiment that was true but imposable to confirm for 17 years would be
unprecedented in Science, at least for the last few centuries; I think you'd
have to go back to Hero of Alexandria's steam engine or the Baghdad battery,
and even then they weren't really well publicized.

Ben, let me ask you a purely theoretical question, suppose two fairly well
respected scientists had performed a simple experiment and claimed a
revolutionary result, and suppose, just for the sake of argument they were
wrong. What do you imagine the results would be 17 years later? I would
think crackpots would still be repeating it in science fair experiments and
they would still be claiming revolutionary results, and I would imagine real
scientists would have forgotten about the entire sorry fiasco and moved on
to more productive things. Does any of this sound familiar?

   John K Clark