At 11:03 AM 9/29/2009, you wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
For their part, the cold fusion "believers" did a lousy job of selling it.
I agree their public relations efforts have not been good. I think
it is a bad idea to make conference proceedings only available as
copyright books. Biberian recently told me that they have sold only
85 copies of the ICCF-10 and ICCF-11 proceedings.
Right. Now, what that means, probably, is that the publishers lost
money. Bad model. Better model: on-line copies free. On-demand
printed copies for a modest price that includes some funding to
support the activity. The system as it is provides nothing to the
people who actually do the hard work, the researchers. At least as
far as I understand it. Now, it seems that the ACS LENR Sourcebook
sold out and went into at least one additional printing. And it's
phenomenally expensive, for what it is. It could be a small fraction
of the price for an on-demand published and bound book, yet have the
same utility for readers.
However, I think many researchers have a good job presenting their
results in well-written, convincing papers. There is enough good
material out there to make a solid case. Goodness knows, there is
also enough bad material to make cold fusion look crazy. But all
endeavors involving large numbers of people are a mixture of
competent and incompetent, brilliant and stupid. You have to judge
by what is best.
You have to judge by all of it, though it depends on what you are judging!
The earliest effect that was actually conclusive was heat/helium
correlation, which cut through the replication problem and turned
it into classic proof through correlation (and this makes
"failures" into controls). Somehow the presentation at the 2004 DoE
review managed to sufficiently confuse the reviewers and the DoE so
that the correlation was missed, and totally misrepresented in the
summary report.
This is true, but I doubt it was the fault of the presenters. The
paper given to the panel explains the helium results clearly in section 3:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Hagelsteinnewphysica.pdf
There is an old logical fallacy. Because we tried, we must be
successful. Look at the results. Section 3 was largely ignored and
what was covered in the review was the Appendix. Why was that? Well,
perhaps, people remember most what they read last. To a CF
researcher, the Appendix was of considerable interest. To the
reviewers and the DoE, it was a colossal distraction, and they easily
misinterpreted it, for reasons I could probably explain.
Some people feel this paper should have said more about Miles or
Iwamura. I asked the authors, Hagelstein and McKubre, about that.
They said they emphasized their own work because they understood
their own work best, and they could discuss it in depth with the
panel without fear of making a mistake or misrepresenting the work.
That seems sensible to me.
Sensible and very wrong. There is another reason to discuss your own
work. It's your work, you are close to it, you think it's important.
And your judgment about that might well be clouded. The big lacuna is
Miles, of course, very old evidence, and heavily verified. Really, a
better effort might have been done by talking only about heat/helium,
because it's a reframe of the replicability problem. It cuts through
the most obvious objection to cold fusion, efficiently, as long as it
isn't buried in less relevant and more controversial evidence.
Appendix 1 was misunderstood because the point wasn't clear, and when
I figured out the point, it was a truly minor one, important only
with respect to *one* experimental example. Rather, because it
reported, on the face, a series of experiments, there was a tendency
to treat it as more than it was. People don't read "factually," they
(mostly!) read emotionally and with some sense of the purpose of a
writing, and if they get the purpose wrong, they will misinterpret
and misremember the facts.
By the way, all those papers listed in the references were given to
the panel members. I gather they were given big goodie boxes crammed
with papers as take-home prizes (homework). So if they didn't get
it, it was because they didn't do their homework. It isn't all that
hard to understand, after all!
If you don't believe that the effect could be real, you won't read
the papers, or you will skim them looking for some possible imaginary
reason to reject them, even if, on examination, that reason turns out
to be preposterous.
I do not know if, in fact, it could have been done more successfully.
A one-day session is probably inadequate unless there is a lot of
pre-session communication. Imagine that a mailing list had been set
up, with all the reviewers anonymously subscribed (through googlemail
or something like that), or a wiki had been set up for them, and for
the presenters, and a wider community had been included as
presenters. And each detail were hammered out and discussed....
Properly done, it would have been lower cost and possibly even more
efficient than the actual face-to-face meeting. And there might have
been some opinions shifted....
But it's speculation.
