What is an experiment?
What is the PLSS experiment?
Should we do an experiment?
How should we do an experiment?
The quote that Laura brought in from Bacon is worth keeping in mind, about "torturing Nature" (la Natura). On the other hand it indeed in the spirit of things to let a hundred flowers bloom, or at least let a hundred tendrils nudge through the earth, and see how they work it out adaptively. But the question arose of how to do an experiment, of what are we testing? There was talk of transposition, of controls in order to make comparison. Astronomy, and economics, and natural biology (eg Darwin's voyage) were sciences in which the practitioners could not systematically vary conditions around the objects of their study, in order to make comparative observations. Yet they were empirical: they relied on observation. They also relied on reproducibility not of an experimental event, so much as of a verification by other scientists of repute.
An excellent book about the rise of scientific method is the by now legendary book: Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life ( 1985) by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. It may give some insight into the questo, what is an experiment. In fact since we are at the beginning of a new science - human plant , plant plant, plant world, and human world relations, of deep ecology - it may actually be appropraite to look to the beginning of early chemistry of early modern science for methods than to the highly specialized methods of industrialized and normalized science of mid-20c science like medical research or modern chemistry.
A practical (and methodological) suggestion. How about if we think about what is closer to the heart of our concerns? What if we say, look, the experiment is whather the entire TML -- people, media systems, plants, water, electricity, natural and electrical lighting systems -- can co-exist in a sustainable and dynamical way from now through the summer into the beginning of the next school year?
What if that were the experiment?
The questions could be:
What habits do we have to adopt individually, and as a lab, in order to make that possible?
What "gardening" -- soil, water, mechanical -- systems are developed that work?
What media, sensor, electronic, lighting, etc. systems work?
This relieves the burdern of having to do detailed studies at the relatively micro-level of what happens to individual plants and core samples of soil, with all the attendent problems of what we are doing ethically (how can we justify chopping a "pound of dirt" from a park in order to bring it indoors?) and epistemologically (what is a sample ? How does one "excise" without resorting to such Kantian geometric abstractions like cylinder, or square prisim? ) Instead of doing botany, or biology, can we define experiments that are holistic, experiments about "deep ecology"? Not prayers or maxims, but observations that at least two of the PLSS team agree on, or even all of us will agree on, that we can write down (with some supporting images) in a way that someone who was not present can both comprehend, and believe?
So the emphasis instead will focus on a more appropriately macroscopic scale. The technical details of what plants are grown, what sensors to use, what to sense, what soil conditions are sustained, can all be varied freely without having to break any "experimental protocol" because they would all be at a finer scale, of "making the apparatus work."
- Xin Wei