It would involve observing in real-time, without any sort of intermediary (including a video feed, which may be tampered with), and being able to do so at will, involving free and repeated access. I suppose its only value is perceiving reality as accurately as possible (if you care about that sort of thing).
But does it make you as accurate as possible? Doesn't it mean that you exclude 99.9% of all the information available to you based on the vague notion that
maybe, possibly they are tampered with? What if one of those pieces includes the critical information? Based on direct observation alone, you might for example conclude that "this snake here" isn't poisonous because you only ever saw it bite one person directly, and that person was fine. But in fact the snake is very poisonous and your mistake will kill you.
And that isn't even going into how your own senses may also be fooled easily. It seems to me given the mindset that "everything could be fake", we cannot know anything.
Many of these are inaccessible to the general public though - someone like you or I wouldn't have the means to conduct them. This is where deference to specific institutions comes into play.
Are you suggesting that only experiments that can be done with kitchen utensils found in every household (by the way, is this worldwide or limited to one country?) are admissible? How do you propose we find out about, say the constituents of matter, or how the human body works, using that standard?
And can you give examples of important experimental results that we are told about, but that are inaccessible to the public? Because I can't think of any off the top of my hat. Most of the physics used on this forum, for example, is available via simple google search.
Dr. Rowbotham did not formulate a hypothesis. He asked a question ("Is the surface of standing water level?") and then performed an experiment to determine the answer. Further conclusions were able to be drawn from there.
It's your word against the wiki. And you still cannot explain me
how he did that. Let's start with the easiest question: Why did he ask that specific question?
First of all, none of them refute a Flat Earth.
Of course not
Secondly, the presuppositions I was referring to are tautological; essentially, we know the Earth is a globe because it is. Take reason #7:
"If you walk ten thousand kilometers straight along the Earth's surface, turn ninety degrees to your right, walk ten thousand kilometers more, turn right again, and walk another ten thousand kilometers, you'll be back to where you started, having successfully created a triangle with three ninety degree angles. As any geometry student can tell you, this is impossible on a flat surface."
Being able to do that on a ball apparently means you can do the same with the Earth. Why? Because it's also a ball. Brilliant. That isn't even an argument, let alone a reason we know the Earth to be round. The only way you could possibly think that is if you'd already accepted the conclusion.
I don't understand what your problem is with the proof. You can do the stated experiment (directly and personally even) and discover that if you make three right-angle turns, you arrive back at your starting position. This means the earth's surface cannot be an euclidean plane. Obviously if you think the video simply makes up these facts, it doesn't prove anything, but then it wouldn't matter what the video says in the first place. But excluding that, the video gives you the experimental procedure, the expected result, and the theory that explains the result. What more do you want?
You may be right that the differences between the two methods are relatively small, but this does not mean they are negligible. Small differences can have great consequences. You need only look at the end product of both systems - one produced Round Earth Theory and the other produced Flat Earth Theory. If you want the practical result of cutting out the hypothesis stage, there it is.
But, as you say, this is a difference
in results. I asked for a difference
in method. One does not allow you to deduce the other.
I will try stating the question as precisely as possible: Given the same observations and the same capacity for logical thinking, how do Zeteticism and science arrive at different results given that in both methods, observation is the sole measure of truth?