The Plane of Existence
Repeatable procedures and measurements
An experiment is a series of repeatable procedures done with standard steps. It is a technique for producing a predicted outcome. Scientists can repeat an experiment and produce the predicted result. Skilled Scientists can replace standard steps with non-standard steps if they result in the same measured value produced with the standard measurement procedure. Measurement determines whether or not a step has been done correctly. A step is repeated if the measurement at the end is repeated.
For the measurement to have been done correctly others must be able to repeat it, both within this experiment and in copies, and get the same number. Measurements are steps that produce numbers or other criteria that other people can reproduce within the same experiment. A measurement is reproduced when two experimenters both announce the same number. Measurements can be checked, that is, repeated. Other procedures, for example the production of chemical reactions, can often not be redone within an experiment, but only in a copy. Measurements, unlike other procedures, do not make changes in what is measured, and are thus repeatable within the experiment.
Different procedures can be used to make the same measurement as long as the number at the end is the same. Mass can be measured with either a balance or a spring scale. One can be calibrated to agree with the other. Two different procedures that produce numbers that are in proportion can be used interchangeably. In different circumstances one or the other might be more convenient, and even possible. But just because two measurement procedures are possible it does not follow that there is some mysterious something independent of them that they are measuring. One may, if one chooses, imagine that there is, but it changes nothing, for we cannot manipulate it and so it can never be part of an experiment. What matters in measurement is only how, with what procedure, to measure. Explanations are irrelevant. How not why is a scientific question. What matters is what we can do.
Measurements need not require instruments, and need not be numbers. In medicine the observed condition of the patient can serve as the measurement. Observations that can be described and then pointed to by others can be experimental steps, including measurements, especially when we realize that observation is noticing some things and ignoring others. To observe is to do something, it is not merely passive. There is a Chinese story of a horse trader who marvels it the level one of his rivals has achieved when told that he selected a horse without noticing its sex. This, to him, was evidence of his rivol's high skill. As with other procedures, observation is of much that we all see, and some things seen only by a few. When a procedure requires a unique skill, and is therefore not teachable, it is not part of science, but of art. Science is democratic. Observation is an experimental procedure, and when unique, an art.
An experiment consists of standard procedures because it must be teachable. Others must be able to do it. Experienced people might substitute a procedure of their own for a standard procedure. The proof of the pudding is in the measurement. Experiments are routines tested by measurements, that can be repeated and taught to others. The correct measurement is done with the standard procedure by the trained scientist. That others can repeat and reproduce the measurement value is evidence that it was done correctly. We test the accuracy of a measurement by doing it twice.There is no further test. Repeatability is essential for all experimental steps. The end of an experiment is a final measurement upon which success or failure to realize the prediction is determined. All this is a question purely of what we can or cannot do.
Although repeatable and teachable, experiments need not be done with procedures everybody can do, but there must be a community whose members can do them. Only trained radiologists can read an x-ray, and those who can't leave the field. Procedures that can only be done by a few we still call scientific, those that can only be done by one are art.
Science is experiments. An experiment is a procedure that has a purpose, a measurement of a certain value. Something done without a purpose is not an experiment, unless it can be reproduced. But to know it has been successfully reproduced is to specify a criteria for success, a purpose. The Scientific World Picture is a description of a purposeless, albeit rules following, world. How did the Scientific World Picture find its justification in experiments?
Repeatable Procedures
An experiment, to be an experiment, must be reproducible. Some trick you don't know how you did is not an experiment. Given the written experiment other trained people can reproduce it and get the same result. The result can then be employed in a more complex experiment and made into an industrial procedure. Now what does it mean to reproduce an experiment? What does it mean to get the same result? No two actions by different people in different places at different times are ever exactly the same. You can't step into the same river twice. The equipment could be so different that someone ignorant of what the two scientists were doing might find it hard to see that they were doing anything similar. Even the appearance of the results might be quite different to the untrained eye but the same to the trained, or conversely, alike to the untrained, when to the trained eye very different.
Two results might be called different in one context and the same in another. (An experiment that has been claimed to improve the purity of some produced substance or claimed to produce at least the same purity.) The experiment's predicted conclusion determines whether or not the experiment is repeated successfully. Clearly, simply describing what happened is not enough. We have to describe what we did and announce we intended to do. Achieving what one is trying to achieve is an essential part of the experiment, and determines whether or not we have repeated it. For an experiment must be something we do to achieve something. It has a purpose, the experimenter's purpose.
But if our intentions are an essential part of an experiment, one wonders how experiments led to the theoretical Scientific World Picture. For in that picture purposes are illusions. Intentions are but epiphenomena, in reality just configurations of the invisible particles and fields somehow transformed into “consciousness”. Scientific law, which is by definition mechanical, has produced the configuration. All operates according to law and without purpose. It is an infernal machine. We are but particles, fields, and quantum states and all our activity but particles, fields and states moving without purpose. Our purposes are, therefore, an illusion. Indeed in the scientific picture we ourselves are, of course, merely an epiphenomenon of a concatenation of particles and fields. But who is there to see this epiphenomenon, and if no one is there, what makes it an epiphenomenon? If we ourselves are an illusion, who is deluded?
Let us turn away from this phantasmagoria. Look around. This is what we are interested in. We care for the world we share. Here is where we live and die. Here and now is not “the physical world” but the collection of all our activities, what we do together. We are born into the world that has others, we do things with them, and when we die we leave them. If we stick to what we do and see and say to one another, the scientific world picture becomes mere shadows. Does the world we live in need this invisible world as an explanation? I have heard a scientific theorist utter as a commonplace, “Everything solid is really mostly empty space.” Really?
