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so you beat sticks together all day and the elephants don't turn up. thats
your experiment. the theory that you draw from that experiment is that
beating sticks keeps elephants away.
but to support this theory of elephant behavior, you would have to do more
experiments. say you do an experiment where you don't beat any sticks and
the elephants still didn't come. for this to be science rather than a
superstition- you would revise your theory to say that perhaps stick beating
has little relevance to security against elephants.

observations are part of science. but if observations and experimentation
don't help you redefine your theory then what you have is a superstition or
a mythic understanding not a scientific understanding.


dana
science nerd

On 1/4/07, Lisa Jo Rudy <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related
> institutions.
>
> *****************************************************************************
>
>
> I can beat sticks together all day, and zero elephants will turn up (at
> least, not so long as I live in North America...!  Similarly, I can light
> a  fire
> every January and howl to the moon, and inevitably the sun
> will  return...  A
> replicable experiment if there ever was one!
>
> Well,  you can't but were they repeatable? Did anyone after hearing
> about beating  sticks to keep the elephants away survive to tell
> anyone else about it so  that others could also beat sticks to keep
> the elephants away? Did they  survive to tell others? Certainly
> publication was a problem but so was  perishing.
>
>
>
>
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