Comment Re:Hmmmmm (Score 1) 453
I've read the Feynman essay, and it's a useful point as far as it goes, but it doesn't address the issues that I brought up at all: people (and animals) are a lot harder to experiment on than inert objects (marbles don't punch back). It has a lot more to do with the fundamental difference in complexity than it has to do with sloppiness.
But you do bring up a much more general point about experimental protocol that you overlooked in your description: a measurement is meaningless unless you also provide the resolution at which it was assessed. The famous example of this problem is trying to measure the length of the coast of England with various size rulers, which led to the development of fractal geometry etc (see also: scale space).
With regards to your replication of F=ma, to bring that experiment up to the level of Mr. Young's work, you would have found that F=ma broke down at some scales, and discovered quantum theory and relativity. Of course, that rigor took physics over 300 years of further effort!
Just a note on Freud: I happen to research neuroscience, and while I wouldn't call my educational path the most typical, my only encounter with Freud in a class was that some of his later work pioneered the study of neural networks.