A cursory overview of his method was in his post. There is insufficient information to determine whether it was good science. Since you haven't presented any science yourself, his is the best we have to go on.
Lol. Really?
This is a lot of throwing around claims with little in actual counterclaims. You purport to be a dick for science but you are actually more of the artificial alternative, the dildo of science, if I may correct the labelling to something with more truthiness.
I related an observation. You called it crap science with no physics to back up why, just basically confirmation bias. Pot meet kettle.
If I didn't know any better, I would think I was on some other Internet forum where such antics are common place but shall not be named. Nice projection too, as far as to your interlocutors emotional states. You don't know any of us personally, so such stuff is at best invalid and at most schoolyard debate tactics.
I agree so let's drop the petty flaming and deal with the original issue....
As I said the physics is not important. What is is making sure you're answering the right question.
So what is the question?
Is it 'does contact between the players torso and an electric guitar's wood body affect the signal from the pickups?'
Or is it 'does playing the guitar in different positions affects the signal...'
The first might be slightly interesting, the latter is trivial.
So take the first question since it's the only one worth making the effort for (and then only barely) and try to design an experiment that seeks to answer that question (whether it does or not is another matter).
Off the bat strumming the strings yourself isn't going to cut it since that overwhelmingly has the biggest affect on the sound (not an empty claim, though valid to dispute it with some control testing, probably not worth the effort tho).
Repeatability and variation control means you'll need some consistent way of energising the strings. Opportunity for first improvement: string. Not strings. That's going to simplify things. So take the other 5 off.
Could use a mechanical plucking device, or my preference, an ebow fixed in position and connected to a controller that turns it on for a preset time.
Now we'll make some assumptions about cause. Here I can only guess what you were thinking but given the context of the thread lets assume that the body material significantly affects the pickup signal by way of some sort of resonance interfering with either the way the string or pickup moves or both (the physics is not needed to design a good test, this is obvious when you realise that science progresses by the process of guesswork and trial and not by empirical validation of theory). You could assume pixies, but I don't know how to design a test for that...
So that's my assumption and that is what is being tested - feel free to object/modify etc
Following from that it's reasonable to assume that body contact is proving a dampening influence to the guitar and this is what is presumed to be measured (and not say the gravitational influence of a players beer belly). We'll try anyway.
Add/remove damping to guitar body: Lots of ways to do this, lets go myth busters on it and buy a side of pork (repeatability and control of variation). Mount the guitar on its side in a playing position and the pork such that they can be moved in and out of contact (consistently).
Hit record, actuate string, move pork. Repeat.
That test *might* stand some chance of providing good data. Note that even then, unless the measured effect was very large, you still have the issue of determining the relationship between what is measured and the subjective experience of a guitarist in the field and that's a huge can of worms imo.
So, criticise, reject, modify. As long as your objective is to improve the experiment (that was my original intention believe it or not) I'm not going to get upset.
(Sorry, I had way too much fun than I should have writing this... and apols to the op for the gunpoint hijack of the thread
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