I have conducted by own experiment in attempting to prove or disprove...
In what professional, refereed, or peer-reviewed journal may I read about this experiment? What qualified peers reviewed your work? In other words, what assurance can you give us that your experiment was conducted according to valid methods and principles, and not just the clumsy work of yet another disaffected amateur?
Jack White has conducted numerous experiments on the backyard photo anomalies...
Jack White is not even remotely qualified to work in this field, and is roundly rejected by it as a buffoon, along with his "experiments" which are merely a layman's fumbling with no attention to proper controls or methods. He has no stature in the field. Please don't try to cite him as an expert.
...as has John Costella and others.
John Costella has no relevant experience or training either, and no stature in the field. He has tried to tell people that since he has a PhD in physics, he is qualified to act as soem sort of a forensic investigator. This is a common tactic among crackpots. They say that because they have some training and experience in one of the foundation sciences such as physics or chemistry, they are qualified to work in all the sciences that utilize them.
Specifically, Costella has tried to posture himself as a photographic analyst. I was contacted by a few people asking me to review Costella's claims regarding the Zapruder film. I found his claims to be so naive as to be laughable. Specifically his almost complete ignorance of the quantitative properties of parallax was enough to dismiss him as yet another crackpot. He told people that he couldn't possibly be wrong because he was an expert in physics and the Zapruder film "contradicted the laws of physics." Unfortunately no, physicists don't learn about projective geometry etc. in their coursework, especially those who work in theoretical or particle physics, as opposed to mechanics.
Costella tried this same bunkum on Apollo photography (my particular area of specialty) and naturally I handed him his head when he tried to declare certain Apollo 11 photographs fraudulent on the same "laws of physics" basis. Of course he puffed out his chest and declared he couldn't possibly be wrong because he had a PhD in physics and we had to respect his deep knowledge of that and all subjects. But of course I was able to present him not only with empirical evidence that his claims were wrong, but also a properly founded mathematical proof. His knowledge of "the laws of physics" were shown to be comically naive on these points. And to this day Costella has never acknowledge or addressed the refutation.
Clearly he has no desire to practice real science when it comes to the various conspiracy theories he dabbles in. He adopts the
prima donna attitude of the theoretical physicist and does not respect those who, in addition to expertise in the theory, also have considerable training and experience in the specialized field. He shares certain properties in common in that respect with Jim Fetzer, who also makes Apollo hoax claims that he will not debate with the experts.
And that is what Science is all about -- Replication.
This is pure nonsense.
First, you are not scientist. You have no business trying to tell people who
are scientists how to go about it. Please don't assume you know what you're talking about; it's annoying.
Second, you don't know the difference between empiricism and reproducibility. The scientific goal of reproducibility means to devise a method of investigation that is as deterministic as possible and accounts as deterministically as possible for all relevant variables. This is so that the results can be said unequivocally to derive only from factors that appear in the study, not from factors that cannot be controlled for such as personal judgment, pre-existing bias, or opinion.
Empiricism, on the other hand, is simply the method and practice of letting the universe display its properties rather that deducing or inferring them from more basic principles. Good science must have reproducibility, but good science does not
require empirical methods.
Third, you miss entirely what science is "about" -- at least in the useful practice of it.
Science first requires knowledge and expertise among its practitioners. One cannot move ahead in a field without knowing what has gone behind. Most conspiracy-theorist pseudosciences do not have the relevant body of knowledge. They rely largely on intuition or hastily-Googled smatterings of fact. One cannot formulate proper models, experiments, or conclusions without a pre-existing knowledge of what to expect. Nearly all pseudoscientists lack this foundation. Hence their offerings tumble predictably into the elementary pitfalls that real scientists avoid by knowing the field. Jack White and John Costella know nothing about projective geometry. They do not have a proper foundation in the field, therefore their claims suffer from errors that a study of the appropriate foundation sciences would have led them to anticipate and correct.
Science also requires properly validated methods. Methodology is crucial in proper science. In the field of photographic analysis, there is more than a century and a half of scholarship, and from that has emerged a clear understanding of what will work -- and more importantly, what will
not work. There simply is no excuse for not understanding and employing proper methods, for they are how science progresses rather than just standing still. Conspiracy-theorist pseudo-scientists just make things up as they go. Since they lack experience in the field, they clumsily try to derive methods from the ground up. And they never submit these ad hoc methods to any sort of validation or test. So while they purport to be able to use these methods to discern real photographs from fakes, they decline to show you whether they've been able to do so verifiably on any photographs other than the ones they're "analyzing" for their conspiracy theory. Such
ad hoc methods are
specifically eschewed by the ideal of reproducibility.
Finally, review is essential. While scientists are individually responsible for making progress ("publish or perish"), the field as a whole is responsible for ensuring that the work of individuals passes muster. Hence not only are there formal methods for review prior to publication, there is also informal review among peers where criticism and suggestion has a more profound effect. Conspiracy-theorist pseudo-scientists never submit their work for review in the field as a whole. If they let it out of the corral at all, it is only within the circle of fellow conspiracy theorists who are just as clueless as they. Pseudoscientists flee from any meaningful review of their claims by qualified people.
Please don't try to hold up Costella and White as examples of real science. They practice the antithesis of real science. And just because you say they have conducted "experiments" is not proof that they know what they are doing.
If you cannot replicate an observation then that observation is not worthy of belief.
Nonsense. This discounts science based on analytical and synthetic methods.
Very often in forensic science (which I practice professionally as part of my training and practice as an engineer) we cannot replicate exactly the effects of happenstance occurrences. There is an entire body of science in error analysis that lets us proceed with confidence nevertheless. White and Costella are entirely ignorant of it.
Further, your "expert" Costella was trained in a field that specifically eschews empiricism in favor of synthesis and analysis methods. His supposed emphasis on empirical methods over other methods, as a scientist, betrays the only science he can legitimately profess. This is likely because he is completely untrained and completely unskilled in the analytical methods that apply to photographic analysis and interpretation, and simply waves his diploma whenever he is asked about them. And it's also amusing that he completely ignores the empirical refutations of his own claims, on the grounds that "crude" empiricism is no match for his superior analytical skill. In other words, whether he's going to be an analytical scientist or an empirical scientist varies on what he thinks he can get away with. The fact is that he has neither the theoretical nor the empirical understanding of the field.
On the other hand the so-called panel of photo "experts" on the HSCA conducted no experiments at all, and thus replicated nothing.
White's experiments had no basis in valid science. Silly layman's attempts at empiricism do not constitute real science, nor do they dispute the real science demonstrated by others.
