On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Mark Gibbs <mgi...@gibbs.com> wrote: > > >> I am sorry to be abrasive, but this is ignorant nonsense. >>> >> >> Alas, you really aren't sorry. That's just a technique to try to avoid >> being called out for incivility. >> > > No, it is pro-forma, Japanese style. It is what you say before you are > forced to be uncivil. > One is never "forced" to be uncivil. (I was going to continue using "one" but that sounds "stuffy" ... in the following "you" should be read as "people generally" and not as "you, Jed Rothwell") You choose to resort to incivility in an attempt to add emotional force to your arguments or because you are so attached to your viewpoint and so enraged by the unwillingness of others to agree with you that you attempt to bully them into agreeing or leaving the argument. What the Japanese do is neither here nor there and doesn't justify incivility. > > >> "Far closer"? How close? Next week? Next month? >> > > That would depend on academic politics and funding. It is not a scientific > question. If a reasonable level of funding had been made available in 1990 > we would probably have cold fusion automobiles by now. > "Far closer" was you assertion, not mine. So, your assertion really is "it could be closer." > > To address the technical issues: let us compare cold fusion to plasma > fusion. A tokamak reactor costs $1 billion to $15 billion. The longest, > most powerful plasma fusion reaction in history at the PPPL was 10 MW > lasting 0.6 s; 6 MJ. It took far more input energy to sustain the reaction > than it produced. Cold fusion reactions have produced 150 MJ at 100 W or > more, lasting up to 3 months. In some cases it takes not input energy to > sustain the reaction. That is, by any measure, more practical than plasma > fusion. > Great. When can I heat my house with one? That's what I'm getting at: Practical application. > The only thing lacking in cold fusion is control over the reaction. If we > had that, we could easily make prototype devices. > But we don't have that so we don't have prototypes. > > Plasma fusion research has continued for 60 years. It costs more every > month than the entire amount of money spent on cold fusion since 1989. So, > cold fusion has made far more progress per dollar and per man-hour of work. > OK, but where's the beef? > > >> And throwing in other scientific experiments - no matter what their >> payoff might or might not be - is simply setting up a straw man argument >> ... >> > > A scientific experiment cannot be evaluated by "payoff" but only by the > s/n ratio and the knowledge it contributes to science as a whole. Science > is not a practical or useful endeavor. It sometimes contributes practical > results to daily life, but this is never assured, it is cannot be used as a > metric to evaluate the results. Some of the most important scientific > breakthroughs of all time, such as Newton's, had no practical use for > decades. > But you have consistently argued that cold fusion *will* have a world-changing payoff ... you're not in it just for the science, you're in it for the payoff. > > >> There is no practical device yet, merely a lot of unverified claims and >> overdue promises. >> > > (snip, snip, snip) > > >> Sure, there's lots of interesting experiments but is there a testable >> theory? >> > > Theory has no bearing on the validity of a scientific claim. There was not > theory for nuclear reactions in the sun before 1939, and no theory at all > describing cellular reproduction (DNA) before 1952, but there was not a > scientist on earth who denied that the sun shines and that cells reproduce. > In the case of cold fusion, phenomena have been observed that are believed to be the result of a novel physical process. No one has been able to explain what causes the phenomena and no one has been able to produce a device that is useful that uses whatever the phenomena is. > > >> I'm not asking for a handwaving kind of explanation, I'm asking for a >> theory that can be tested. >> > > You are asking for something that has never, in the history of science, > been considered a valid criterion to reject an experimental claim. NEVER. > You turn the scientific method upside-down. First we discover things by > experiment. Then we explain them. Not being able to explain them is never a > reason to reject experiments. > > What did Peter originally ask? "when will enter LENR such lists as [Greatest Inventions: 2012 and 1913 Editions]?" My answer was "When there is a testable theory or a demonstrably practical device." I wasn't asserting that LENR doesn't exist, I was answering Peter's question. [m]
