.... and, while I may have misplaced the place where this happened (I could
have heard this when I was at U of Manchester), it seems that an extensive
set of early measurements of c were deliberately "sorted" and produced an
expected value and std that was outside of the actual value of c. When the
logbooks containing all of the measurements were consulted many decades
later, it was found that if one used all of the measurements the actual
expected value of c was within the expected error.

It is late and I have not quite said everything right. The (old)
published expected c and its std were well outside of the actual c. When
the old data was used in its entirety, the newly calculated expected c and
its std encompassed the actual value of c. (Note "expected" has a
technical meaning.)


The moral is to keep a complete log and be honest. It is much more easy
to do both when one has numbers. Before some of my work at Ohio State, one
had to extract numbers from strip chart recordings using slave labor.

Mac (who should be in bed) N8TT
--
J. Mc Laughlin; Michigan U.S.A.
Home:
"Roy Lewallen" wrote in message
...
Richard Clark wrote:
. . .
Ptolemy also reduced much of his theory of Astronomy and Optics to
geometric construction techniques in many Handbooks and offered scads
of tables of observations - some of which were condemned by Newton:
"[Ptolemy] developed certain astronomical theories and discovered
that they were not consistent with observation. Instead of
abandoning the theories, he deliberately fabricated observations
from the theories so that he could claim that the observations
prove the validity of his theories. In every scientific or
scholarly setting known, this practice is called fraud, and it is
a crime against science and scholarship."
. . .

How ironic! I recall an article in _Scientific American_ many years ago
which presented credible evidence that Newton himself fudged his data.
The author argued, and gave examples to show, that some of Newton's data
were much too accurate and consistent for the techniques and equipment
he used.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL