Hi Nigel,

"This is an impossible basis for interpersonal communication and is not my fault!"

Absotively agree. I too tend to lose patience very quickly with flat statements, and the Gladstone reference hits the right note ;-)

Please also note I wasn't directly or obliquely referencing any particular personal response to Cropredy, just the general angst evident on both extreme sides of the debate.

"In fact, it's my Yuletide message to the world...."

Ha!

I think that it would be enormously interesting to take Cropredy up on his claims of detecting 'dead straight' lines over great distances. Easily 'proved' without the use of blindfolds.

What say you Cropredy?

Rods and laser-survey at dawn?

Thusly:

1. Cropredy finds one of these 'dead-straight' lines and tracks it for a distance of, say, 1km. Inserts own markers at 100 metre intervals or so.

2. TMA'rs over plot his line by laser and measure any variance from dead-straight.

If he claims these lines to be dead straight, it should be easily proved or disproved in this way.

Wow - a three-part epic. You must have too much time on your hands, Morfe.

I agree that there is more in heaven and earth than science can explain and I do still find the wonder in everything around me that you refer to. However, that doesn't extend to accepting whacky ideas that are not substantiated and I will defend the scientific approach when I feel it's being discounted. Science in it's purest form actually embraces enquiry into the whole of nature. Any meaningful discussion (apart from one madman to another) has to be based on logic and reason even if the topics being discussed are illogical or unreasonable. Even such non-scientific things as art, poetry, etc are normally discussed in terms that embody reason.

If I were to say that a particular line of poetry moved me to tears that's a reasonable statement with which many people could empathise. However, if I said that the poetry made me cry because the shape of the letters on the page was such that as they were read out an energy was release that became focussed onto my tear-ducts causing them to leak, and offered no explanation other than I believed it to be so, then I would have strayed outside of the bounds of reasonableness. Yet this is the same kind of argument that Kevin and the others would have us accept at face value.

Contrary to what many people seem to assume scientific enquiry is not just about measurement and absolute proof. It can be applied to all sorts of apparently non-scientific problems. The process consists of making observations, forming hypotheses consistent with those observations, and then designing experiments to test the hypotheses. It's often necessary to repeat this process many times as some hypotheses are rejected and others take their place. Everything should be under scrutiny including the method itself and what the process should NOT involve is conclusion-jumping.

That's why I have such a problem with Cropredy et al. They observe an effect and then immediately import a whole raft of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo to support their particular angle on it and are unwilling to entertain the fact that they might have got it wrong.

I would have enjoyed discussing the pros and cons of findings Kevin's if he had presented them as such. For instance, if he had posted diagrams of what he was experiencing or taken up the offeres of Nigel and others to conduct some (preferably double-blind) experiments, but he has done neither of these constructive things.

I know that philosophers have argued about reality for millenia so we aren't likely to solve the problem here, but at least let's base our discussions on reason and rationality, not on unsubstantiated mumbo-jumbo.