I wrote: If it is about opinions then we can conclude that opinions have no bearing > on cold fusion. Plus we can conclude that sociologists are unqualified to > write about calorimetry, and they make fools of themselves when they try. >
To put it more charitably, I guess what I am saying is that an analysis based on sociology alone can only go so far. At some point you have to have subject-specific knowledge. Let me illustrate this with an example from anthropology, which I know a lot more about than sociology. In college I took several semesters of anthropology, as you might expect relating to Asia: India, China and Japan. This was a narrow specialty so there usually a dozen grad students and undergrads. The grad students had years of anthropology in various other societies and periods which gave them some advantages. They already knew that there a range of different ways of classifying relatives or paying for a new barn. In China or Japan they have a rotating loan to village members and they also used to turn out the whole village to help major construction (roof raising), the way American farmers used to do. If you want to understand the dynamics of traditional agriculture in Japan, general knowledge of anthropology is helpful. But knowing conditions on the ground in rural Japan, and knowing how to speak Japanese is a whole lot more helpful! I found it even helped in understanding China, although the two countries are as different as England and Italy, and I speak no Chinese. My point is, you cannot divorce the study of anthropology from a specific culture, place and time. It is never about things in general, but always about how people act in some decade in some country. The sociology of science may indeed have broad themes that can be discovered by examining specific incidents, but you cannot sort out these themes without some minimum understanding the technical aspects of whatever branch of science you are using as a test case. Someone who thinks that tritium at 50 times background is a disputable result has no basis to judge what is claimed, and no way of knowing who is blowing smoke up your ass, as it were. It would be like trying to figure out pre-1965 Japanese agriculture if you had no idea how rice is grown. If you did not know rice requires water paddies (which are communal by nature), or the fact that until the 1970s it could not be mechanized, and if you did not have other specific, mundane, on-the-ground factual knowledge, you would be confused. You would not grasp why people did things the way they did. You would come up with outlandish theories to explain behavior that is no mystery to someone who knows how people grow rice. This goes for history and many other subjects, and also experimental science, much more than theoretical science. Knowing how calorimeters work -- and how they fail -- gives you insight into what is taking so long in cold fusion. In Italy, someone asked Mike McKubre "why don't you look for helium more often?" He said: "Because you have to seal the cell perfectly and leave it sealed for weeks, and the day after you seal it, a wire breaks." I can relate to that! It is much more demanding than regular closed cell electrochemistry -- which is demanding enough. That's one of the reasons Miles used the method of capturing effluent gas for a relatively short period of time. (Incidentally, if you want to learn a lot about how rice was grown traditionally in Japan, see the movie "Seven Samurai." It is gift of future undergrad anthropologists. It is probably the most authentic portrayal of pre-modern Japanese agriculture ever made, or that ever will be made, because those people in 1954 still had one foot in the pre-modern era.) - Jed
