It must be emphasized that although cold fusion results are surprising, the techniques are conventional and instruments are used within their design specifications. ***This means that Cold Fusion doesn't really qualify as an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof. It is basically an ordinary claim. It is skeptopaths who are generating extraordinary claims such as EVERY instance out of 14,720 replications are errors, which has been shown to be well past impossible by more than 4400 orders of magnitude.
On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 6:16 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Cude and other skeptics have recently brought up the undiscovered error > hypothesis. Here is a response to that by Melich and Rothwell: > > > Undiscovered error hypothesis > > Some skeptics claim that there might be a yet-undiscovered error in the > experiments. [As Beaudette wrote] “if the measurements are incorrect, then > an avid pursuit of the ‘science’ must in due course explicitly and > particularly reveal that incorrectness.” > > More to the point, the claim that there might be an undiscovered error is > not falsifiable, and it applies to every experiment ever performed. There > might be an undiscovered error in experiments confirming Newton’s or > Boyle’s laws, but these experiments have been done so many times that the > likelihood they are wrong is vanishingly small. Furthermore, skeptics have > had 20 years to expose an experimental artifact, but they have failed to do > so. A reasonable time limit to find errors must be set, or results from > decades or centuries ago will remain in limbo, forever disputed, and > progress will ground to a halt. The calorimeters used by cold fusion > researchers were developed in the late 18th and early 19th century. A > skeptic who asserts that scientists cannot measure multiple watts of heat > with confidence is, in effect, rejecting most textbook chemistry and > physics from the last 130 years. > > As a practical matter, there is no possibility that techniques such as > calorimetry, x-ray film autoradiography or mass spectroscopy are > fundamentally flawed. It must be emphasized that although cold fusion > results are surprising, the techniques are conventional and instruments are > used within their design specifications. Cold fusion does not require > heroic measurement techniques. Heat and tritium are not usually measured > close to the limits of detection, although they have been in some cases, > and helium and transmutations have been. > > It has been argued that even though the instruments work, the researchers > may be making mistakes and using the instrument incorrectly. No doubt some > of them are, but most are experienced scientists at major labs. The effect > has been confirmed at 180 major laboratories [Storms, Table 1]. If an > experiment could be as widely replicated as this could be mistaken, the > experimental method itself would not work. > >
