At 02:45 PM 12/2/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Simon is interested in the process of "closure." And what he comes
to with Undead Science is that there can be an apparent closure
where an apparent scientific consensus arises, but there is "life
after death," hence, undead science.
This is like saying there is no apparent scientific consensus about
evolution because the creationists disagree.
Jed, I think you have some axe to grind here, because you aren't
reading carefully. Your analogy is actually opposite to what I wrote.
The parallel with evolution is that an apparent scientific consensus
formed that evolution is real. To some extent, work on alternate
theories, if they can be justified by that name, continued. So we
could call "creationism" "undead science." But the analogy breaks
down, because there is very, very little "creationist" science, it is
mostly criticism or polemic about the mainstream theory.
Whereas with cold fusion, the zombies are actually walking the
streets. Scientists are performing real scientific experiments, doing
standard analysis, reporting their work, verifying and validating
each other. Supposedly cold fusion was "dead," but it wasn't.
There *was* an apparent scientific consensus. That isn't to be
denied. But was there a *real* scientific consensus. It's obvious
that there was not. That would be a consensus rigorously based on
scientific principles, and such a consensus would be far more widely
accepted. Cold fusion was always a factional dispute, and that one
faction had serious political power and the other didn't has no bearing.
Had it been a real consensus, it would have continued to spread
rather than merely influencing general opinion. Cold fusion
researchers would have increasingly abandoned their efforts, not
merely because of the obvious difficulties, but because they had
become convinced that the effect was an illusion, probably by some
conclusive demonstrations that the reported experiments had other
explanations than LENR.
The argument is valid but a red herring that it's impossible to prove
a negative. Rather, we suspect LENR because of certain positive
signs. If those signs are shown to have other causes (not merely
"possible explanations"), as happened with N-rays, for example, LENR
would not have been disproven, as such, but it would most definitely
had the rug pulled out from under it. There would be no reason to
believe that it was real. That would take new evidence.
In the cold fusion "dispute," by late 1990 we had one side is
playing by the rules, publishing papers and data, and making a solid
case. The other side had run off the rails, abandoned the scientific
method, and they were engaged in academic politics or in some cases
a weird new form of religion. They have no legitimacy, and no right
to be call themselves scientists any more than the flat-earth
society or creationists do. The two sides are well represented in
the debate between Morrison and Fleischmann:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf
Yes. Except I wouldn't put it in quite such stark terms. It's obvious
that the quality of Fleischman's reply greatly exceeded the quality
of Morrison's critique. In particular, I was struck by Morrison's
facile introduction of the palladium cigarette lighter, which
released significant energy through, first, relaxation of pressure,
the lighter being a rod of palladium pressurized with hydrogen gas,
then through ignition of the hydrogen. But there was no
pressurization in the experiment being criticized. So no initial
temperature rise. And there would be little or no oxygen available to
burn the evolved deuterium gas, at the cathode. At the same time,
much deuterium gas would be being evolved by electrolysis as the cell
approached boil-off.
Certainly consideration of recombination is in order. But the
cigarette-lighter effect falls into the category of a highly
speculative "explanation," one which raised far more questions than
it answers. It's a bit like Shanahan's calibration constant shift.
Sure, a possible source of error. However, large enough to explain
the results across a wide range of experiments using different techniques?
Critics like Shanahan become sources of persistent invention of
critiques. It's just as offensive as naive belief on the other side.
Indeed, though, both belief and skepticism are essential to
scientific progress.
For public policy decisions, though, the search should, at each
point, be for the "most likely explanation." To determine that, it is
not necessary to rule out and disprove completely every possible
objection, and, indeed, there is no end to such possibilities,
depending on how outrageous we are willing to be in proposing them.
"Proving" LENR is the wrong approach, in fact. Rather, there are
these effects, reported by so many researchers. What's the *most
likely* explanation for them? Given the body of evidence, the streams
of evidence that converge, it's obvious.
Nuclear reactions taking place under conditions previously thought impossible.
The brewing of cups of tea is totally irrelevant. As I've written
before, I'm quite sure I could brew some tea with one of my cells.
Just crank up the juice. The tea would prove *nothing*, because the
question would be the source of the heat, not that tea was brewed.
"Tea" is a great example of a neat polemic argument, a sound bite,
that has the effect of convincing many that a position is reasonable.
Great politics. Bad science. Cold fusion may never, from true excess
heat in a practical application, brew a single cup of tea. And that
has nothing to do with whether it exists or not. In order to get a
true cold-fusion brewed cup of tea, I'd need to establish "ignition"
in the hot-fusion sense, and have set up conditions where this
ignition wasn't literally igniting deuterium with oxygen, perhaps
shown by the duration of the effect.
McKubre, in the CBS special, claimed that "we could have brewed many
cups of tea," and he's probably right. With some cells. Garwin
modified his challenge to make it more difficult. "And then another."
Again, polemic sound-bite. If one truly brews a cup of tea from
excess heat, such that the single cup was clearly from that, if the
effect only lasted that long, it would still be very significant.
Cold fusion is not perpetual motion, is it?
Or look at the DoE 2004 Reviewer #15.
If that sounds elitist, I make no apologies. I am an elitist when it
comes to technical expertise. Legitimate experts often disagree
about complex subjects, but this is not a particularly complex
subject. When it comes to calorimetry, for example, it makes no
sense to give equal weight and equal respect to Duncan and Garwin
(as they did on "60 Minutes"). Garwin is talking nonsense and lying
though his teeth about his own Pentagon report. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#CBS60minutes
Yes. So? Garwin is doing a very human thing, attempting to hold on to
his dignity in the face of a huge mistake he made long ago. He could
change his position in history by taking a fresh look, but he may be
incapable of that. How old is he?
It's not the job of a sociologist to determine what ratio to
background is or is not disputable.
Imagine Simon were writing about biology, and he casually mixed
together claims by biologists with those of creationists, giving
them equal weight as if both were legitimate science. His book would be panned.
Sure. But that's not what he did. Let's imagine his book was about
creationism and biology. What's the topic? Biology? No. Simon's book
may appear to be about cold fusion, and it certainly includes a lot
of information about cold fusion *research*, but it's not a science
book. The purpose isn't to explore and explain the science of low
energy nuclear reactions. The purpose is to examine the nature of the
controversy, of the disconnect between a claim of scientific closure
and the reality of continuing research. It's a valuable purpose, all
on its own, Jed. And Simon documents it very well.
He did not "casually mix together" claims, "giving them equal weight
as if both were legitimate." He reports what he has of the facts,
i.e., for his field, what people have said and written and what can
be observed of their behavior. His topic is people, not cold fusion, per se.
And I found his book to be invaluable as a source for positive
information about cold fusion. Don't even think of putting him in the
same category as Labinger, whose examination is very shallow and
superficial and who does obviously swallow the anti-CF propaganda.
Simon doesn't, at all. And, of course, he had a little hands-on
experience with CF experiments. Look, Jed, Simon's actually on our
side, even though he seriously attempted to maintain neutrality.
But his story is valid whether CF is real or not. Suppose, Jed, for a
moment, that we have all somehow been fooled by some deceptive
evidence. Suppose that LENR, other than the known exceptions, does
not exist. The rejection of cold fusion would still be very, very
wrong, because it would have been premature, rejection was accepted
for reasonst that had little to do with science and that, in fact,
were another form of wishful thinking, the wish that this
inconvenient upset of everything we thought we knew would just go
away -- to the extent that this upset was accurate, it wasn't
actually an upset of known science, merely of some assumptions --
this hazard to our pet projects, very expensive big science projects,
in hot fusion.
He should at least make it clear that his book is not about an
actual, legitimate scientific dispute: it is about a dispute
between scientists and a group of irrational nitwits.
He couldn't do that, Jed, and you should know why. It is not about
either of those. For his purpose, the sociology of science, it
matters not at all whether the dispute was "legitimate" or not. How
does the scientific community address disputes?
Cold fusion is a very good example of how it did so very
dysfunctionally, resulting in an apparent closure that wasn't a
scientific closure at all, but simply a social phenomenon. Simon
makes this very, very clear.
Simon often presents enough of the evidence on the CF side that the
reality of CF would be apparent to someone for whom that's the
concern. In his 2002 book, he presents the heat-helium ratio, for
example, noting that this was confirmed by more than one group,
whereas that evidence was completely glossed over by the 2004 DoE
review, and has certainly been neglected by the body of criticism,
with only occasional phony objection regarding ambient helium and
leakage -- which wouldn't explain the results at all.
Anyone who takes seriously the notion that tritium at 50 times
background is marginal is more or less as ignorant as a creationist
who thinks that Darwin claimed monkeys sometimes have human
children. (That is an actual claim, albeit from the fringe of
creationism. In my opinion, the misunderstandings and ignorance of
people like David Lindley of Nature are as bad as this.)
It's a human failing, to allow weak evidence on one's own side while
objecting to strong evidence on the other side. Happens all the time, Jed.
To move beyond that, we need to suspend conclusions and attachment to
prior conclusions entirely, and examine all the evidence. It's
easiest to do this in groups, and cooperatively, with a common goal
of finding consensus. But if people don't even talk to each other
because of highly negative views of who "they" are and what "they"
think, it doesn't happen.
It would be interesting to see a seminar where some people like
Morrison and Fleischman explored the issues around that calorimetry
paper, with a group of highly knowledgeable people participating, to
determine what issues are real and what are polemic and superficial.
It has to be done one small step at a time, because if one tries to
find agreement on large issues without finding agreement on small
ones, one narrow issue at a time, it's impossible. It takes a lot of
time, in fact, which is the main reason it doesn't happen more often.
But there are ways around that problem.
