Even before I knew that establishment sources lie to us about climate, covid, terrorism, race, gender, history, psychology, economics, events, foreign countries …. and especially about each other …. I was already on the lookout for evidence of the extraordinary, and like most, my personal bias is that I want there to be evidence of the extraordinary, but as much as I always recommend that one be super open-minded, I also recommend that one be super skeptical and not believe without due diligence.
In my previous article on evidence of the extraordinary, I performed due diligence for an independent experiment to detect Aether.
In this article, we will do our due diligence for the experiments in this video, which someone told me proved that each body in the solar system (sun, moon, planets) affects the behavior of a corresponding metal on Earth.
To anyone inclined to try to reproduce this experiment, let me say how much I love it when an individual tries to independently reproduce or falsify theories. We need a lot more of such efforts instead of just trusting authority.
This series of experiments was performed from 1923 to 1926 by Lili Kolisko, who was a protégé of Rudolph Steiner.
Unfortunately, there are many reasons to doubt the results.
- This was in the 1920’s.
- She did not control for temperature. It is consistently colder at night.
- She did not control for bacteria.
- She didn’t control for bugs.
- She didn’t control for hair, spit, or dust falling into the experiment.
- Sometimes the test was by the window, and sometimes it was in a darkroom. The tests during conjunctions sounded like they were the ones by the window.
- Maybe she left the window open on the conjunctions to allow the full effect to reach the test.
- Maybe she closed the windows only during conjunctions to be absolutely certain bugs and critters did not interfere.
- Maybe she kept it colder or warmer during the tests for the conjunction.
- Maybe she had more people in the room watching the tests during the conjunction.
- Maybe she was more excited about the tests during the conjunctions and was more likely to be talking while near the tests and bits of spit went into the test.
- She did not control for the fact the she expected interesting results at certain moments and thus would have almost certainly been closely watching the experiment at some (all?) of those moments, which would have changed both the ambient temperature and humidity of the experiment (e.g. light, body heat, and hot humid breath).
- Mars looks like rust, and the moon looks silvery, which I guess is why the narrator says that Rudolph Steiner believed that we owe the origin of iron to Mars, and we owe the origin of silver to the Moon.
- No indication that the interpretations of the data contained no cherry picking and no confirmation bias.
- In the 100 years since, there were no reproducible results this video felt were worth mentioning.
- A specific planet influencing a specific metal sounds like the kind idea (not even a hypothesis) that a child or primitive human tribe might think. It is the kind of magical thinking that a modern mature human recognizes in a blink. It is tantamount to claiming that each planet influences the freshness of a specific tree nut.
That is enough to convey the idea of just how sloppy these tests were, and just how unscientific these two experimenters were.
This video did not raise the critical subject of reproducible results. These experiments are easy enough to perform that almost any individual could perform a more rigorous version of them with a modest amount of money and maybe 300 hours of effort over the course of several years. A rigorous subset of these experiments (without conjunctions) could be done in as little as 40 hours of work in a single month, and that would be sufficient to determine if further investigation was worthwhile. However, in spite of millions of individuals who have found these experiments interesting and convincing, no one made an effort to reproduce them that this video felt was worth mentioning. Lack of reproducible results alone is enough to dismiss the quality of these experiments.
Based on this video, I give these experiments zero credibility.
Alas …. my hope for evidence of the extraordinary falls to due diligence again.
To be clear, if such a phenomenon could be reproduced with sufficient rigor and sufficient repetition, then it is probably real, no matter how magical it seems. I am always open to new evidence.
Rebuttals
I was not given any additional evidence as a rebuttal, but some rebuttals I have received from people (one of whom claimed to be smarter and more in touch with reality than me) are:
- I can’t criticize these experiments until I have tried to reproduce them myself.
- Just because the moon is not the origin of silver, is no reason to doubt the rest of this work.
- Cosmic bodies affect the Earth all the time, so there is no reason to doubt that a particular planet affects a particular metal.
- If I do not try to reproduce the experiments, then I am not curious.
- I wasted an enormous amount of time (10 minutes) writing about the experiments in this 21-minute video I was asked to watch, when I could have tried to reproduce them instead. (That was before this article, which took more like 30 minutes.)
Those who asked me to watch the video and who provided these rebuttals are indeed smart and get many things right, and yet …. here we are.
I did address some of these extraordinarily weak attempts at deflection, but they are so transparent that I will not bore anyone with such responses here. I invite others to pierce the logic of these rebuttals if they feel so inclined.