> "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
... authored by a man who believed in seances and faeries, and not an actual scientist.
... authored by a man who believed in seances and faeries, and not an actual scientist.
But at least quantum mechanics exists within the framework of what we know to be provable reality. The supernatural doesn't - making it even less probably than me spontaneously teleporting to Mars like John Carter.
The spiritualism that Arthur Conan Doyle believed in and the seances he attended were fraudulent, as were the Cottingley Faerie photos (which he believed were real because the photographs looked convincingly real to him.) I'm certain that he eliminated all other mundane possibilities from his mind to arrive at the supernatural conclusions he did, but he was still wrong.
Mere process of elimination is not sufficient to prove something "however improbable." Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, still needs to be proven. Otherwise you wind up in the trap of confirmation bias.
Otherwise every locked-room mystery could be solved by "the killer traveled through a folded pocket universe", or "the killer had telekinetic powers and managed to stab the victim in the back from outside the room". And similarly, seances and faeries are improbable enough to be grouped with the impossible for now.
It doesn't work in the real world because it first requires perfect foreknowledge of all of the possible explanations for a phenomenon, as well as perfect confidence that the attempts to disprove all but one of those explanations were correct.
But, as demonstrated with Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley faeries, there may be assumptions one is not willing to challenge (the literal existence of faeries themselves) and possibilities one may not have considered.