What do you envisage to be AGA's role re expermentats? sh
Hardly anything. No research committee; no funding. If AGA goes ahead with the forum, AGA would just support a forum on experimentation and, if we can get anybody to do some simple experiments, we can get some TAG articles out of them.
(There is a language problem: A forum like APC has forums on various subjects and even sub-forums within a forum.)
The emphasis should be on simple experiments. I think that many would-be experimenters feel that the experiment has to be mind-numbingly complex with double blind experimentors and advanced statistics. Everybody should know about one of the great experiments of all time on plants by Von Helmont. For 800 years everybody believed that Aristotle was correct in saying that plants got all their substance from the soil. Von Helmont decided to test that claim. He got a tub of soil, weighed the soil, rooted a small willow branch, planted it in the tub, grew it for five years, then weighed the willow tree and all its shed leaves and weighed the soil again. The tree gained something like 100 lbs (I don't remember exactly how much), whereas the soil only lost about a pound. So much for Aristotle's claim! Nice and simple, and you can't argue with the results.
--Paul Krombholz in humid central Mississippi, where I heard some thunder rumbling to the North, but nothing here.
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