Question to Professor Avi Loeb by podcaster Curt Jaimungal: Would he use CE5 as part of his Galileo Project?
Professor Loeb replied: "What is being contemplated here is a deviation from the standard model of physics. In science and physics we usually use instruments - we dont use humans as detectors. Why don't we use humans as detectors? Because very often humans are hallucinating, they have wishful thinking and you cannot always reproduce phenomena with humans. Psychologists study humans but physicists build instruments that are completely separate from the human experience, so the instruments will collect quantitative data that is reproducible, that we fully understand because we built those instruments. These are measurement devices, you can think of them as clocks, rods or some electronic equipment that records physical phenomena in a way that is reproducible. And all of modern physics advances that were made by experiments were based on instrumentation not on humans' testimony.
So once again we get to the issue of how do we proceed in gathering evidence? And the Galileo project follows the same method basically using instruments. not using people.
Now it may well be the case that people have some insight into the UAP phenomena from something that goes beyond the standard model of physics - it cannot be within the standard model of physics cos it's not part of it right now. OK the standard model of physics is a set of laws and rules and equations that were derived by collecting a body of evidence by using instruments in laboratories in experiments. and they were never based on eye witness testimonies. So what we call the standard model of physics is divorced from reports by humans. And if we end up finding through the Galileo Project, that humans do play a role in terms of the physical evidence that we collect, as I said before, that would be very revolutionary, a change in the way that physics is done, it will change the standard model of physics because suddenly the human consciousness has some bearing on what you find. I don't dismiss it ahead of time. I just say we need to be convinced by the evidence that this is the case.
Now some people would say, in quantum mechanics, what humans know affects the wave function because if we collect some data about the system, it changes the state of the system. that's true, but it's all done, mediated through instrumentation, it's not mediated through humans. Human knowledge affects the way we formulate quantum mechanics- that's true but this knowledge, the definition of knowledge is, based on instruments, not based on the human body as the detector the human brain as the detector. That's a fundamental difference that you can't use humans as detectors. All of physics was designed based on quantitative data from instruments.
So if it turns out that we are missing something about reality in the context of the standard model of physics because it was only based on instruments, then that would be revolutionary but before we get evidence for that we can't really claim that. So you know I don't dismiss it ahead of time but I would like to see the evidence from our instruments first. We can potentially find something like that if we bring in some humans and see that the phenomena keeps repeating, in a way that it doesn't without the humans, then that would tell us.
Yes that would be a viable experiment, I'd be glad to do it, just to check, you know, as I said before we are just students of nature. we shouldn't assume things, if we have that experimental set up already built in and someone wants to come over and do the test, we'll do it- no problem" Link timestamped to this topic