At 07:43 PM 1/13/2013, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Martin Fleischmann expressed a view that you might say is the
opposite of this. He said "when you find an anomaly, it is the
easiest thing in the world to convince yourself it isn't real." Your
first instinct is to dismiss it. I think he meant that was the first
instinct of a trained scientist such as himself. Other people may go
too far the other direction.
This isn't "opposite." It's the *same*, i.e. filtering out
information that contradicts held belief about how reality works.
That's what an "anomaly" is.
Martin was right. There is *another problem* which is when we come up
with an *explanation* for the anomaly. At that point, our psyche can
flip. We now become a defender of the new paradigm. *This* is when we
need to try as hard as possible to falsify it.
Bill wrote about the first stage, noticing anomalies:
Fifth: Keep a journal. If you notice something strange, WRITE IT DOWN.
If you don't, you'll invariably forget it.
Anomalies are anomalies. They only appear normal if we don't look at
them closely. Anomalies demonstrate that we don't know something. It
might be something trivial or something important.
We can't possible notice every single anomaly, but they are where the
juice is, the progress of science. Otherwise it's all machinery.
The insane tragedy of cold fusion in 1989-1990 was the failure of
imagination, of curiosity. Okay, so maybe this is all artifact, but,
damn! what artifact could be fooling so many people? Naw, not
interested. Someone else will figure it out. They aren't physicists
anyway, what do they know about fusion?
Not much, in fact. That's why it was such a tragedy. The field
needed, and probably still needs, the best minds in physics to figure
out what is going on. Chemists, those who persisted, were stuck with
experimental results that their knowledge of chemistry told them
wasn't chemistry.
So what was it?
Miles showed, in fact, and it's been confirmed, beyond a reasonable
doubt, that it was *some kind* of deuterium fusion, but that doesn't
establish the mechanism, it only narrows the mystery.
It would be truly funny, if it weren't tragic, physicist reviewers
demanding that chemists supply an "explanatory theory" before
allowing their experimental results to be published. (That's why much
or most of the experimental work was published in chemistry journals,
since these were mostly chemistry experiments.) The pseudoskeptic
physicists demand publications be in physics journals. Great! Write
the damn papers!
