We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated
Define repetition.<p>It&#x27;s not as simple as that, for all sciences - once again an article on repeatability seems to have focused on medicinal drug research (it&#x27;s usually that or psychology), and labelled the entire &quot;Scientific community&quot; as &#x27;rampant&#x27; with &quot; statistical, technical, and psychological biases&quot;.<p>How about, Physics?<p>The LHC has only been built once - it is the only accelerator we have that has seen the Higgs boson. The confirmation between ATLAS and CMS could be interpreted as merely internal cross-referencing - it is still using the same acceleration source. But everyone believes the results, and believes that they represent the Higgs. This isn&#x27;t observed once in the experiment, it is observed many, many times, and very large amounts of scientists time are spent imagining, looking for, and measuring, any possible effect that could cause a distortion or bias to the data. When it costs billions to construct your experiment, sometimes reproducing the exact same thing can be hard.<p>The same lengths are gone to in order to find alternate explanations or interpretations of the result data. If they don&#x27;t, they know that some very hard questions are going to be asked - and there will be hard questions asked anyway, especially for extraordinary claims - look at e.g. DAMA&#x2F;LIBRA which for years has observed what looks like indirect evidence for dark matter, but very few people actually believe it - the results remain unexplained whilst other experiments probe the same regions in different ways.<p>Repetition is good, of course, but isn&#x27;t a replacement for good science in the first place.