I wasn’t sure where to put this, but as it’s psuedoscience, I thought it should come here.
Firstly though, I’d like to point out that I make no claims of certitude or definitive conclusions. I come only as curious investigator wishing to raise awareness about using plants to test spurious psuedoscientific claims.
I tested a couple of alternative medicines and symbols on plant growth.As I say I make no concrete claims - because I don’t have a lab and didn’t have strictly controlled conditions: double blind, confirmation bias etc. Sorry, if I sometimes seem a bit zealous in videos - confirmation bias is infectious and insidious.
As I say, my results aren’t important, I just want to raise awareness of using plants in this way to settle once for and for all the debate over things such as homeopathy. Or even religious stuff. For example just did nazi swastika vs hindu swastika.
Best wishes to all of you secularists reading. I really do sympathize with you sometimes when you get annoyed about the latest new age/glastonbury stuff to come out of the woodwork. While I have significant interest in more “esoteric” things, I do agree with all of you on many points. Which is why I think plants can settle once, for some things at least, the war between science and religion.
Your test is biased and incomplete. Front row plants tend to grow better than plants behind them. Natural reasons. Light, air, moisture.
Intermix the planters, make sure all the material that make up the symbols are identical, etc etc.
So far you proved front row plants germinate and grow quicker, something that most know.
You have to randomly assign pots to the symbols (after you plant the seeds) and then randomly assign positions of the pots in the tray.
Randomly = using a truly random process like picking marbles out of a hat, or throwing a die. Placing them because it looks random to you is not sufficient.
At the end of the experiment., you need to measure the results … size of plant, number of plants per pot, etc.
I think that it is great that you went to the trouble to experiment for yourself, but as they are saying, you have a lot to learn about ensuring that your experiment shows anything significant.
Frankly, I’d be more than a little surprised if in a good experiment, there was any significant difference at all associated with the symbols.
I think the first test showed promise, if you just repeated it and got mostly the same results, that would be fascinating.
That would mean that symbols have meaning and effect, something i had thought they were devoid of. I mean, if you look at symbols of a language you don’t know, they have no meaning, until someone tells you their meaning and correlates the symbols with meanings you already have conceptually in your mind.
Is your mind affecting things? E.g. If you placed symbols in a field and just let nature take its course, would you get patterns generated in nature. If so why don’t we see such things being generated by nature ~ given that the meaning is inherent in nature?