[grey_whiskers]

Interesting take, and I haven't gone through the appendices in the original paper well enough to be confident in my conclusions...but it seems like they observed "a bit", in order that their disturbing of the system observed, for *each trial*, was limited to within some error bars -- like the difference between dirty eyeglasses and taking them off entirely :-)

Then they acquired statistics of (and hence information of the quantum states) by averaging over many trials.

I liked your comment at the end, btw -- the modern scientists jumped the gun on deciding what entity really was an ἄτομος.

Cheers!

[editor-surveyor]

"Then they acquired statistics of (and hence information of the quantum states) by averaging over many trials"

Yet there is still no way that they can be assured that there isn't some significant, yet undeterminable systematic influence affecting their observations.

It would be illogical to expect to observe anything without affecting it. Its just that in our everyday measurements the uncertainty gets buried in the everpresent noise.

[ChessExpert]

You provided a nice description of their technique. You are following the science.

I was merely following some of the philosophy and logic. I was a little surprised that their logical reasoning appeared wrong (on one point). I would have thought that logic would be easy and experimental science hard. Perhaps for some people it’s the other way around.