At 06:31 PM 9/29/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
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.
They made a big deal about Miles! Right there in section 3. They
didn't ignore other people's work, especially not his. They
emphasized their own work, but they commented on many others.
Yeah. My memory is probably defective on that, I haven't looked
recently. They don't make as big a deal out of heat/helium as Storns
does, it didn't seem as clear to me, and the Appendix torpedoed it,
by also talking about helium in a way that diverted attention from
the much more solid information in the main body. It's just a theory,
Jed, that might explain why the helium evidence was ignored by one of
the reviewers, who misrepresented it, and then the reviewer took that
misrepresenation and distorted it even more, until what was a clear
correlation was presented as an anti-correlation that, on the fact,
made it look like helium and heat were not strongly correlated.
I wasn't there. I don't know what the presentations were like. But
McKubre is an accomplished lecturer.
He's impressive in what I've seen.
I have transcribed his talks and published them pretty much
verbatim, as papers. Hagelstein is pretty good too. The paper they
presented makes things quite clear. It as edited, improved and
commented upon by many people before the presentation, including me.
It was not dashed off in a rush. Some of the panel members
understood the issues perfectly well. If the others did not, I
suppose they were not paying attention or thinking things through. I
doubt it was the fault of the people making presentations.
"Fault" is a tricky word. Could it have been done better? Probably.
You know my opinion about the 2004 Review. It was the turning point,
it established credibility for the field *if it is read carefully.*
It was presented, though, as a confirmation of the 1989 review, which
is actually preposterous, they were like night and day. Or maybe like
the dead of night vs. the dawn.
