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Comment by cupofjoakim | Hacker News Reader

Dude, I'm finding this hilarious. 69 years to prove that something is a fluid? I picture two really old scientists watching the tape, only to have one of the old geezers turning to the other to spill the sacred words: "Told you so".

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Science isn't about "told you so". It's about rigor, about completion. It may seem hilarious because of the length of time involved for the experiment to complete, but what if the results hadn't been what we assumed? Science is the only enlightenment we have, and to dismiss the outcome as obvious is to climb back into the dark ages.

Then the other one would have said it. Everyone enjoys being proven right.

Really? Scientists are people. Proving each other wrong is one of the biggest motivators to do years of painstaking, labour-intensive research. Of course, you can't prove someone wrong without being rigorous.

It gets finnier if you imagine Stephen Hawking saying "I told you so." to Leonard Susskind.

  D'OOOH... WERNSTROM!!!

You might find this to be "finny": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93Hawking%E2%80%93...

Finny is a perfectly cromulent word, sir...

How long are you willing to run a scientific experiment? People dream of projects that run decades or centuries or even millennia (see the Clock Of The Long Now); few manage to.

Well really they could have figured it out as soon as it started moving, which would have been a few months. The first drop fell after a few years and they could have called it quits then, but they wanted a human to observe the pitch drop. That's the only reason it took so long.

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