On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Giovanni Santostasi <gsantost...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Until LENR is something that every amateur enthusiast can reproduce and >> post on youtube, it will remain in the realm of pseudoscience. >> > > That will never happen. But tell me something. As you know, amateur > enthusiasts are not capable of reproducing the top quark, or cloning a > mammal, or performing open-heart surgery. Amateur enthusiasts cannot launch > robotic probes to Mars. They cannot build tokamak plasma fusion reactors. > There are thousands of other experiments and procedures they cannot do. Do > you say these are all in the realm of pseudoscience? > > > That statement didn't look like a general statement to me. Phenomena are not all alike. If someone claims that wearing a certain glove allows anyone to golf like Tiger Woods, then anyone should be able to test it. On the other hand, walking on the moon requires expensive rockets. Not everyone is Julia Child, but just about anyone can cook her beef bourguignon by following her recipe. And absolutely anyone can get a high Tc superconductor, some liquid nitrogen, and a magnet, and demonstrate the Meissner effect with levitation. Cold fusion is a simple experiment, and anyone should be able to follow the recipe, even if not from scratch. If the material is tricky, get it from someone who claims to be able to make it reproducibly. In the case of cold fusion, with the scale and simplicity of the experiment, the fact that it can't be done by just about anybody really does put it in the realm of pseudoscience. That criterion doesn't apply to large-scale science, like the top quark or plasma fusion.
