Experiments can be wrong. Maybe even most attempts at experiments are wrong.
This wouldn’t surprise me much, at least in physics. There are probably more physics students than professional physicists, and those students do lots of tabletop experiments, badly. (My own old lab books document a refractive index measurement of −19.6, a disproof of the equivalence principle, and a laser beam that travelled at (1.05±0.01)c.) Nonetheless...
What makes a scientist a scientist instead of a crackpot is the debugging and validation. Trying to exclude every way the results might not mean what it seems like they mean—not just doing control-experiment comparison and saying you’ve done your duty.
...this is a bit too strong a distinction between crackpots & non-crackpots, though your basic point is right. The way I’d put it: a non-crackpot confronted with a bizarre result immediately wonders, “what did I do wrong?”, but a crackpot confronted with the same result immediately gasps, “I knew it!”.
I guess I’m just paraphrasing Dear Leader, really: one’s strength as a non-crackpot is one’s ability to be more confused by bizarre, inexplicable results than predictable results.
This wouldn’t surprise me much, at least in physics. There are probably more physics students than professional physicists, and those students do lots of tabletop experiments, badly. (My own old lab books document a refractive index measurement of −19.6, a disproof of the equivalence principle, and a laser beam that travelled at (1.05±0.01)c.) Nonetheless...
...this is a bit too strong a distinction between crackpots & non-crackpots, though your basic point is right. The way I’d put it: a non-crackpot confronted with a bizarre result immediately wonders, “what did I do wrong?”, but a crackpot confronted with the same result immediately gasps, “I knew it!”.
I guess I’m just paraphrasing Dear Leader, really: one’s strength as a non-crackpot is one’s ability to be more confused by bizarre, inexplicable results than predictable results.