Jun 27, 2016, 4:23 PM

@Arkandel I've seen as many if not more people who are as emotionally invested in 'not real' as I have people who insist 'yes real!', but somehow, it never seems to come up from that angle -- or, I've never seen it happen. You're exactly right that we shouldn't have sacred cows, but repeatedly, the investment in 'not real' is overlooked, which fosters an atmosphere of 'dismiss with a maybe' rather than 'find out'. There are examples in this thread of it, so I'm sure you can see what I'm talking about here -- lots of verdicts rendered without the legwork, essentially.

What you're describing about the poltergeist phenomena is pretty much spot-on in regard to the problem of testing. It's why I brought up the methane gas experiment video; it's a good parallel with a physical representation. They were eventually able to figure out how to perform the experiment -- which is frickin' neat -- but the factors involved there are things people already understand how to reproduce, work with, etc. enough that they're able to construct and conduct the experiment.

We don't always have that advantage. Knowing how methane gas disperses in water is key to making that experiment work.

We're talking about situations in which, following the parallel, we don't even know if it's gas, let alone whether it's methane or hydrogen.

Which is a problem. It makes the actual testing process considerably more complicated.