Unrepeatable Scientific Experiments / Results

[ricmat]

Here’s an excerpt from this link (my bold below):

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.

This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology…For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?

Do any of you have opinions on how widespread this is? Other comments?

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[Edmundus1581]

I read the first page, and it seemed to only be about the effectiveness of pharmaceutical drugs, and the results of some psychological experiments. In both these cases there is so much variability in the initial conditions that it is not surprising that experiments are not exactly reproducible.

It’s not as if they have found an exception to gravity, or the laws of thermodynamics.

 

[Theophorus]

I see this quite alot and I think it is related to the narrowing of scientific objectives and investigations and the changing nature of physiological studies rather than anything else. Any experiment that lacks specificity and repeatability should be questioned especially if other assumptions are based on it.

 

[ricmat]

Is anyone seeing this in fields other than medicine / physiology?

 

[rkrispies]

Is anyone seeing this in fields other than medicine / physiology?

I can remember several times in grad school (chemistry) where an initial experiment didn’t hold up after three or four more repetitions. I think the effect is much more common in the softer sciences like psychology or animal behavior, but is also prevalent whenever biology is involved. Like someone else said, the initial conditions are so varied that non-reproducibility is not at all unexpected.