(December 22, 2017 at 3:53 am)CapnAwesome Wrote: I'm not doubting this story, but how do we know they didn't fudge the data if we can't recreate it ourselves. That's how we confirm science, by recreating experiments.The beginning of science isn't a controlled experiment. It's observation. "What happens if we stick these guys in freezing water? What happens if we saw off their arms?" By the time you make a controlled experiment, you're already about halfway through the process.
Also a lot of that just sounds like torturing people, not a valid controlled (repeatable) experiment.
Also what is the undeniable positive influence on medicine? Can you be more specific? I mean, antibiotics had been invented so the plague wasn't really a problem.
Also, recreating experiments isn't always necessary. Some experiments lay the groundwork for prediction-- someone else has done the experimentation, and the proof is in the predictive power of a resultant theory, equation, or relationship that couldn't have been determined without the experimentation.
For example, I don't need to recreate Newton's experiments to know what gravity is. That science has been done already, and the subsequent experiments can safely rely on it until for some reason (or in some new context) it is no longer reliable.
