# The impossibility of werewolves? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 9, 2013, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378 "2013-09-09T02:04:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Chimera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Chimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chimera)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378/41 "2013-09-17T13:46:49Z")
Except CERN is a bad example because you could empty the place, use entirely different scientists, and still replicate and verify the same results. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378/42 "2013-09-17T16:36:21Z")
> [@esbie](#): > > You, I, we believe CERN because we want to believe them. And why not…They have a good track record (as far as we know) and they have little reason to lie to us. If I recall correctly, the catholic church carried much stronger assumed infallibility for a much longer time, and we’re taught that humans believed the earth was flat for an even longer period than that. Except CERN has something the Catholic Church never had: Reproducible results and actual evidence backing up its claims. > [@](#): > > CERN’s experiments are claimed to be reproducible, but who among us has a hadron collider to test it? Could you even legally build one? There are other colliders in the world, you know. > [@](#): > > It takes faith to believe in CERN, Bohr, LaVoisier, god, or the easter bunny. Now you’re equivocating on the definition of ‘faith’: What it takes to ‘believe in’ CERN and what it takes to ‘believe in’ god or the Easter Bunny are two entirely different things, and it’s dishonest to shift the definition of a word partway through a sentence without acknowledging that you’ve done so. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378/43 "2013-09-17T18:50:26Z")
I don’t think **esbie** is consciously shifting the meaning of the word partway through the sentence: instead, I think **esbie** is simply not seeing that the chain of evidence that allows us to trust CERN is (vastly!) more substantial than the chain of evidence (none!) that would allow anyone to believe in the Easter Bunny. The definition of “faith” isn’t the problem, so much as the definition of “evidence.” We have tons (quite literally!) of evidence supporting CERN and its results. re the Easter Bunny, none. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378/44 "2013-09-17T19:26:16Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > I don’t think **esbie** is consciously shifting the meaning of the word partway through the sentence: instead, I think **esbie** is simply not seeing that the chain of evidence that allows us to trust CERN is (vastly!) more substantial than the chain of evidence (none!) that would allow anyone to believe in the Easter Bunny. If this is true, I apologize for the false accusation of equivocation. However, a lack of equivocation wouldn’t make **esbie** ’s argument any stronger, and the portion I quoted directly above explains why: CERN’s work is a capstone of a huge, multi-generational research project which established the underlying theory CERN is testing through multiple paths of evidence and multiple chains of logic. Even if CERN’s results aren’t immediately verifiable in other labs in some fashion (something I’m not really convinced of), the work which lead up to CERN _is_ verifiable, and to say that we must take CERN on blind faith means that we must ignore the ongoing verification of the theory CERN is built on. This ties back to something I’ve mentioned before: Science isn’t a thing apart from the everyday. It _is_ the everyday, only with different tools and better record keeping. The laws don’t change, and they don’t go away when someone leaves the lab. Even something as apparently abstruse as the applicability of Special Relativity to subatomic particles can be validated by [observing gold and doing some not-very-complicated mathematics.](http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/golden_glow/) ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378/45 "2013-09-17T20:51:52Z")
Or the Rutherford gold foil experiment. It isn’t that tough. Any of us could do it in the kitchen. Jearl Walker’s famous “The Amateur Scientist” column in Scientific American was a wonderful long-running exploration of the remarkable things pretty much anyone could do, if not at the cutting edge of research, at least in independent duplication and verification. It is not an arcane ivory-tower mystery! ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378/46 "2013-09-17T21:06:10Z")
Can’t you also do the double slit experiment on a table using some cardboard? ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378/47 "2013-09-17T23:29:34Z")
> [@DocCathode](#): > > Can’t you also do the double slit experiment on a table using some cardboard? I always thought the most interesting part of that one was the fact a stream of single photons would exhibit the interference behavior, but I don’t know offhand how you’d reliably generate single photons with stuff you’d reasonably have around the house, or how you’d use household materials to record the ‘impact’ of individual photons so as to gradually build up the interference pattern they collectively adhere to. Anyway, yes, you can. [Here’s a YouTube video which shows a process for doing it and the results](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EnABJ31Ax4) and has some really annoying drum music. Lose the sound; everything’s in the video here. [This non-video website attempts to recreate Young’s original experiment using modern-day materials](http://www.zuriky.com/Doubleslit.htm); note that both of these setups assume you have a cheap pocket laser on hand. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378/48 "2013-09-17T23:45:46Z")
The very phrase “cheap pocket laser” makes me feel so very old! But, wow, it also speaks volumes of the progress science and technology have made in so very short a time. (That, and my home 2 Terabyte data disk!) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-impossibility-of-werewolves/668378.md?page=2)