It was in my mind, but I think Edison got away with some things that exceed the current crop of billionaires, by at least one length, as they say in horse racing. Especially during his no-holds-barred attack on Westinghouse/Tesla and their alternating current, while Edison pushed direct current, which included his inventions to create and deliver it. He had the whole goddamned infrastructure planned out, world domination for decades and decades was at stake here.
But even as Edison pushed every vicious tactic to discredit DC as unsafe, Nikolai Tesla came out the winner, and he did it with dignity and style.
Remember the famous photos of Tesla by the arcing electric wires and stuff? Those were publicity shots to show the world (well... mostly NYC at the time, where the AC vs DC war was being fought) that DC was safe enough for even the inventor to sit there casually and read the newspaper.
The more you read about that shithead edison, the worse it gets. The asshole acted with an impunity that defies modern logic.
As it was, there was no social media and our current sensibilities back then, information took much more effort to spread, so way too many people have revered him as some sort of saintly hero. Word didn't spread about how narcissistic and petty, how cruel to the point of savagery, he was.
That goes ditto for Marconi, his "billion-dollar innovation" consisted of stealing every academic research idea and design within reach, and patenting every single one as his own.
Still better than that Quantum Field trip last year. Now THAT was a wild ride, it takes a while to get your bearings back after getting entangled and someone collapses the wave function.
Then someone blinked and suddenly we got teleported to a lower energy state, it feels like it took three trail bars and a jumbo Monster drink just to get a little bit of pep back.
I did that once, the cats were staring out the window with wide-open eyes, so I joined in to see what the hubbub was all about... and there was a silver fox on the porch, staring back at us.
There we all stood, all frozen in place for a while, like some sort of "Mexican standoff".
Ah, yes! Of course, there's that other half of the post - the "experiment" itself. What I said about words applies to the people involved, it's not the mold in the jar who "believes" in the placebo, I completely skipped over that part.
For a laboratory scientific experiment to prove something, anything at all, it has to pass a threshold known as sigma-5, which means that the margin or odds of error must be less than one part in around 3 million. There has to be a laboratory certainty of 99.99994%
There are a million-plus-one ways that an attempted "controlled experiment" can go askew and wrong. In the case of the jars, my guess is that they packed the "unloved jar" more aggressively. That kitchen experiment is messier and more chaotic, uncontrolled, than a school lab, and a school lab doesn't cut it even for a sigma-1 I would reckon, you'd get equally "useful" results by flipping a coin.
I'm not wrong... but I'm not even right!
I just enjoy quoting my favorite Wolfgang Pauli line.
Seriously now - "but it's not an electron at that time" - is quite a doozy of a way of... erm... looking at it.
Goddamn it, I looked at it! Again! Which goddamn collapsed the goddamned wave function! I can't seem to get anything done around here with my Newtonian/classical physics tools (level, pincers and a pendulum) and these here fancy, tiny subatomic particles.
If you printed a bunch of memes you've collected, hung them in a gallery exhibit and for sale as pop artwork, would you be courting a legal storm, flying in from all directions?
1 Plain Potato 3.29
EDIT: doesn't that sound just like a Bible verse?
1 Corinthians 3:29
1 Plain Potato 3:29