On 11-11-15 10:31 AM, James Bowery wrote:
The pseudoskeptics continually assert that their criticism of those who are investigating Rossi's claims has nothing to do with whether Pons and Fleischmann had any validity to their claims. This rhetorical maneuver denies the obvious Bayesian law of prior probability distribution: If P&F's cold fusion claim was not valid then any subsequent claims of advances on P&F's cold fusion claim are likewise invalidated.
This is total nonsense. Experimental results must be judged on their own merit, whether or not the reason for doing the experiments in the first place was actually well founded.
It would be *surprising* if P&F had really found nothing at all, and yet later workers, inspired by a mistaken belief that P&F really had something, discovered a real effect. However, that's the most you can say -- if later experiments are done carefully (as many have been) and show a clear if somewhat elusive effect (as many have) then they must be accepted on their own merits, *regardless* of whether careful post-analysis of P&F's data shows a real anomaly or nothing but noise.
Laws of the sort to which you refer have, at best, the status of "rules of thumb". It's like Occam's razor, which is also not a law -- someone on this list recently accused someone of "violating Occam's [law]", as though that invalidated what they were saying. You can't violate it, because it's not a law: It's merely a statistical assertion, which is that making larger numbers of assumptions which appear unlikely renders the conclusion less likely.
In fact, the reason for doing *any* Pd/D cold fusion experiments was not the positive results of P&F -- after all, what reason did P&F have for thinking they'd get anything but a blank result? It was, rather, the observation that it was unreasonably difficult to calibrate a calorimeter using an electrolysis cell loaded with deuterium, whereas a cell loaded with plain hydrogen was typically better behaved.
