So, now I think we have enough data to begin to analyse all this stuff. The question being - Do we want to do that? I suspect not...
Anyway, I asked a friendly scientist what we should do to prove existence using the same methods they use and strangely enough he also quoted the electric cosmos site. At the risk of repeating what I put at the top, this is some of the reply I received. I have added numbers and letters so that we can refer to them later.
This is from http://www.electric-cosmos.org/introduction.htm :
The Empirical Scientific Method Scientists are distinguishable from artists, poets, musicians, and others in that they use what is known as the 'scientific method'. It is not that 'inspiration' or 'the muse' is not valuable in science, it is - but it is not the starting point of what we call science.
In the process called the scientific method a true scientist will:
1) Observe nature - carefully record what is seen.
2a) Seek patterns in the observed data - b) put numbers on the data - c) fit equations to those numbers.
3) Generalize those equations into a word description of the process - this is a hypothesis.
4) Carry out experiments and/or gather independent data to see how well the hypothesis predicts future observations and results. This is -called "closing the loop" on your hypothesis.
5) Reject, or modify the hypothesis if the experiments show it falls short of success in these predictions.
6) Only after the results of several experiments have been successfully predicted by the hypothesis, can it be called a theory.
You needn't be a professional or a scientist to use and apply the scientific method.
---------------------- My comments:
Point 1 & point 2a - this is what we have done extensively and now we are ready to move on with the process at point 2b.
Putting numbers to data I assume means counting how many instances of X there are and how many show Y and how many show Z. I am not quite sure how we can fit equations to our numbers unless we have to say W% of the time is spent doing Y activity and V% of the time is spent doing Z activity? There are many hypotheses floating about in among our posts, so maybe we extract them and relate them to the analysis?
It seems that we can carry out the 'scientific method' up to and including point 3 but we are unable to do experiments since we do not have access to space. However, we can use different instrument data and we can gather images and data from other space agencies which supports our hypotheses.
Please add to this if you have any thoughts on how we can improve this.
However, whether the data is good or bad, we can still apply scientific methods to it.
Yes, we may be wasting our time if the data is concocted, but we will, at least in theory, be using the methods that science wants to use and the language that science wants to talk. This will allow our theories to supposedly have more weight in the minds of scientists. Supposedly.
Anyone who feels they know what Scientific Methods are, please contribute.
I found this on the electric-cosmos.org site and I guess it sums up pretty well what we should be aiming for if we want our theories to be accepted by science.
Observe nature - carefully record what is seen.
Seek patterns in the observed data - put numbers on the data - fit equations to those numbers.
Generalize those equations into a word description of the process - this is a hypothesis.
Carry out experiments and/or gather independent data to see how well the hypothesis predicts future observations and results. This is called "closing the loop" on your hypothesis.
Reject, or modify the hypothesis if the experiments show it falls short of success in these predictions.
Only after the results of several experiments have been successfully predicted by the hypothesis, can it be called a theory.
