(December 2, 2018 at 10:29 am)polymath257 Wrote:(December 1, 2018 at 9:40 pm)T0 Th3 M4X Wrote: You're pretty much on point. The simple answer is they are not bound by natural law. Ghosts may not have been the best example, but I didn't want to pull anybody's strong personal beliefs into it so they didn't feel like I was picking on them. If you could establish natural laws, then you could study them based on those laws, assuming you could set parameters that they couldn't violate.
But, as always, you can start out with observed behavior and *hypothesize* the laws they operate under, test those laws, etc.
There is simply no reason the scientific method could not be applied to ghosts, goblins, or gods, in theory.
In practice, of course, it fails to study them because of the utter non-existence of them all.
I agree, you could, but you can guarantee "control." If something is not bound by natural laws, we can't measure it with assumptions of natural laws. When anything is measured scientifically, it is a measure of relationship. The starting point is always "null" or "no relationship", and then we try to determine the probability of relationship by controlling things that would skew those results, that way we are only testing the specific relationship in the research between two or more subjects. If we find nothing, we conclude the null was correct, but we also give a numerical value on the probability that "null" was the right result. If we see a relationship, we reject the null, and determine the extent of that relationship within those parameters. That's the beauty of the scientific method. Once we finish a study, we now the basis for more study by bringing what we know and resetting parameters to advance knowledge of those subjects. This is also why peer-review is important. You may (or may not) have done garbage research by not controlling the parameters and someone else can call you on it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because we all make mistakes and learn. Next time you can go back and do it with the necessary corrections.
Now if you say a vampire exists that can magically turn into a bat, and you believe you saw him in a cave in a mountain, how the heck are you going to set up parameters to test such a thing? You could try, but I can just imagine there would be at least a few dozen difficulties, and even more so if such a creature actually existed (safety issues, making sure it doesn't walk through a wall, etc...) Even finding in could potentially be a pain, and cooperation even more so.
