ATDTdA : 12 - broadening the notion of scientific method?

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

Keith
> He may be critiquing science as monotheism and offering
> up a polytheistic view. I doubt he'd throw out the scientific
> method as part of the whole.
>

In M&D there's a sense of the scientific method as gradually
supplanting various other myths, embodied in Mason and Dixon
themselves and their various jobs.  But during their leisure 
they spin tales, steal a bathtub, protest slavery, 
discuss religious experience, and Mason talks with his deceased wife:
as rich as the scientific experience is, even its exemplars
are motivated by more humanistic concerns.
There's also a sense that the Line is cutting across 
something living, damage to which is lamentable.
Could this indicate something of P's attitude?

Also, in GR, Franz Poekler shows the consequences of the
same kind of bargain.  

What is the essence of the scientific method anyway?  
Isn't it to propose hypotheses, test them and refine them?

Could it be that the political circumstances which allow 
people to exercise scientific method in performing tasks for
their masters - but not in choosing the actual tasks to perform -
are what is lamentable here?  

The narrowing of choices (hmm, like back in Chicago) - and
of course then when you have a closed system, that's when
entropy comes into play

> Robin:
> Tesla's description of his vision of the transmitting tower
> has many parallels with Rilke's experience of 'receiving'
> the Duino Elegies

The individual mind functioning with something like "eidetic
imagery" which I think has been labelled as a dumb-person function
by the insistently verbal psychology profession...

Tesla's autobiography stated that all his inventions came to him
that way.  He would see them as they would be, and then make them.
Einstein, too, depended a lot on thought experiments.

This doesn't really conflict with the scientific method.  The
actual hypotheses one proposes are tantamount to visions.  Efficient
minds like Tesla's or Einstein's have well-developed 
built-in simulators so they don't have to physically 
run the experiments till later in the testing process...

Keith
> "Still there are parts of it I can't believe I wrote. Sometime, in
> the last couple of decades, some company of elves must have snuck in
> and had a crack at it." [_Slow Learner_, 'Introduction,' 22:21-24]
>

never noticed that sentence before.  Thanks!