truncheons. You'd just offer them 20 pounds, lure them into a test room, hit them with a truncheon, color randomly assigned of course, and snap the photo. In fact the truncheon-hitting and photo-snapping would be done by an assistant who hadn't been told about the hypothesis, so he couldn't look expectant, hit harder, or snap the photo at just the right time.
Blondlot had destroyed his reputation with the sort of mistake that would get a failing grade and probably derisive laughter from the T.A. in a first-year undergraduate course on experimental design... in 1991.
But this had been a bit longer ago, in 1904, and so it had taken months before Robert Wood had formulated the obvious alternative hypothesis and figured out how to test it, and dozens of other scientists had been sucked in.
More than two centuries after science had gotten started. That late in scientific history, it still hadn't been obvious.
Which made it
The books were full of complicated instructions for all the things you had to do
...if you did the simple but wrong thing, and tried to test alternative forms
But what if you
What if you gave Hermione a list of spells she hadn't studied yet, taken from a book of silly prank spells in the Hogwarts library, and some of those spells had the correct and original instructions, while others had one changed gesture, one changed word? What if you kept the instructions constant, but told her that a spell supposed to create a red worm was supposed to create a blue worm instead?
Well, in that case, it had turned out...
...Harry was having trouble believing his results here...
...if you told Hermione to say "Oogely boogely" with the vowel durations in the ratio of 3 to 1 to 1, instead of the correct ratio of 3 to 1 to 2, you still got the bat but it wouldn't glow any more.
Not that belief was
If you gave Hermione completely incorrect information about what a spell was supposed to do, it would stop working.
If you didn't tell her at all what the spell was supposed to do, it would stop working.
If she knew in very vague terms what the spell was supposed to do, or she was only partially wrong, then the spell would work as originally described in the book, not the way she'd been told it should.
Harry was, at this moment, literally banging his head against the brick wall. Not hard. He didn't want to damage his precious brains. But if he didn't have some outlet for his frustration, he would spontaneously catch on fire.
It seemed the universe actually
The worst part of it was the smug, amused look on Hermione's face.
Hermione had
So Harry had explained to her what they were testing.
Harry had explained why they were testing it.
Harry had explained why probably no wizard had tried it before them.
Harry had explained that he was actually fairly confident of his prediction.
Because, Harry had said, there was
Hermione had pointed out that this was not what her books said. Hermione had asked if Harry really thought he was smarter, at eleven years old and just over a month into his Hogwarts education, than all the other wizards in the world who disagreed with him.
Harry had said the following exact words:
"Of course."
Now Harry was staring at the red brick directly in front of him and contemplating how hard he would have to hit his head in order to give himself a concussion that would interfere with long-term memory formation and prevent him from remembering this later. Hermione wasn't laughing, but he could feel her
"Say it," Harry said.