However, my yard is not large enough for another LHC. And I might be a little short of cash at the moment.
Still, perhaps the best present I have ever gotten as an adult was a small telescope, just powerful enough to see the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. And what a sight that was. In the moment I first saw that with my own eye, gained a sense of how Galileo and his contemporaries could have been so changed that they would risk freedom and life itself to tell others what they saw.
In the city where I live, you can go to the beach and get an unobstructed view out of Boston Harbor and into the Atlantic. It should not be hard for me to see the curvature of the earth from here. And still, I have not done it.
Someday soon, I will have a party and invite my rationalist friends to join me at Wollaston Beach for an act of first-hand scientific verification. Maybe my bucket list is a little different than most.
3 comments:
Methinks you should instead invite your empiricist friends. The rationalists think they already know what they'll see.
I imagine that on a clear day the biggest challenge would be finding an object (presumably a boat) that stays in view long enough (without ducking behind an island) and that makes it easy to tell which bits are the top.
Reproducibility: scientists claim to prize it, but there is often very little professional reward in reproducing experiments. This means there is often a lot less reproduction than people imagine.
But I think of looking for the rings of Saturn or the curvature of the Earth less as an exercise of reproduction, and more as a way to get in touch with the universe, and with our history. But maybe that's just the rationalist in me.
Actually, I've been wondering if there are objects on those islands themselves that help with the experiment. For instance, haven't I done an equivalent experiment if there as a dock that I can see at Boston Light from the top of the hill in Squantum, and it is obscured by the ocean when I look from Wollaston beach?
I guess you're right that the seeing the moons of Jupiter or rings of Saturn no longer counts as reproduction (though it once did). You are certainly right in noting that fewer experiments are reproduced that most of us expect (there may be some confirmation bias at play there, as well as the general lack of reward). Still, I think it contains the same germ of the idea that we should verify things offered as truth, and it is often a good idea to do that verification ourselves, or at least a portion of it.
Hmm. It's over seven miles to Boston Light, so yeah, maybe. I should see what I can and can't see on Peddocks Island and Hull from the second floor and from the ground.
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