On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 8:54 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Someone wrote: > > >> Don't be silly. The field is already dead. No one cares anymore. The >>> credit of which you speak has already been handed out to Koonin and Lewis >>> and Huizenga and others. >>> >> > Lewis' experiment was positive. He showed that cold fusion probably does > exist. This was some of the best early proof. It is ironic that any skeptic > still points to this.I expect that skeptics who point to this have never > read the paper, because it is quite clear from the paper that this is > evidence in favor of cold fusion. > The need to continually pick over negative claims from 1989 like this one and the alleged falsifications of the MIT work, reveals the complete vacuum in field -- that, as I said, there is simply no quality evidence for cold fusion since then. Wegener's theory did not prevail because advocates went back to the early skeptical papers and found flaws in them. It prevailed because better evidence made his conclusions inescapable, and that made the old skeptical arguments irrelevant, apart from possible historical interest. The best way to prove Lewis's interpretation was wrong is to point to better evidence that makes cold fusion inescapable. As for the paper, Lewis himself read it, and he was a skeptic, and he disagreed with your interpretation. As did the editors at Nature. I'm inclined to hold his judgement in higher regard than that of a computer programmer, or his true believer advisors. > The only reason he did not see it is because he did not want to see it. > > That's complete nonsense. If cold fusion were real, he would have been on the cusp of a major scientific revolution. It's a dream of any scientist to have their names attached to revolutions of that sort. Everyone knows that that is the quickest route to honor, fame, glory, and funding. The only plausible influence of cognitive bias works the other way. The reason for your positive interpretation is because you and your cohorts really really want cold fusion to be real, and you don't have the experience to keep your desires in check. It's interesting that you often argue that the lack of progress is because the experiment is so difficult and so expensive, and yet here is an experiment done rather quickly on what I guess was without an assigned budget, and yet you call it some of the best early proof. Not such a difficult experiment after all.
