On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Alan Fletcher <a...@well.com> wrote:
> Another reason to think they do not intend to submit for publication > > in a reputable scientific journal -- they cite Wikipedia (ref. 8, at > > the end). > > Lordy, lordy -- it's firgin diagram -- a compilation of generally > available information, and not really central to the paper. > It would have been easy to miss my point, since I expressed it a little intemperately. My point was about communication and not the substance of the paper. As far as I know, Levi and the others measured exactly what they said they measured, and Rossi demonstrated a device with COP 2.6+. I was talking about effective communication. Who are the authors trying to persuade? Their intended audience will shape the approach they will want to take. Four possibilities come to mind: 1. The general public. 2. Cold fusion people. 3. Open-minded scientists without much exposure to cold fusion. 4. Close-minded scientists (Lubos Motl, etc.). If you're going for (1), you probably also want to aim for (3). If you're going for (3), you should try to meet those folks half-way. That means dotting your i's and crossing your t's. I would not be surprised if there is a body of sociological literature on why the process for preparing a paper for submission is so complex and fraught with possible errors. For example, there is the typesetting that I gather the authors are intended to do themselves, at least in part. And any professional scientist is expected to have (at some point in the submission process) an impeccable command of grammar and punctuation and so on. I think these things provide a signal to others about whether the authors have been thorough. Did they miss something important, e.g., did they forget to look at the power supply? They missed some simple things, like fixing up the funky formula, and they didn't bother to ask for help, so perhaps they missed the power supply. This kind of thing is a distraction. Distractions are bad. People hold different productions to different standards. You ignore for the most part whether your younger niece is hitting a few wrong notes in a piano performance during a holiday and enjoy the show. You hold a concert pianist to a different standard, and those kinds of mistakes look very bad. People in category (3) are expecting something along the lines of the latter and will be distracted by something aiming for the standards of the former. Effective communication involves minimizing distraction. People in (3), above, are no doubt looking for journal articles. If we want to persuade them that there might be something to cold fusion, we should try to meet them half-way. Even if journals have a policy of avoiding cold fusion articles, people should still aim for the same level of quality. By the way, I suspect that some (certainly not many) of the close minded folks are actually secretly open-minded people and are just playing devils advocate to get some good counterarguments. We don't know who suggested the radiometric calorimetry method and the use > of the Ragone plot. Chicken? Egg? > And even if Levi et al DID follow he previous methodology, is that bad? > No, it's not that bad. It's just something that can be expected to trigger an alarm bell in a casual observer (need not be a debunker), since no mention is made of the earlier paper as far as I can tell. It gives the impression of a naive adoption of the earlier methods. Anything that looks like naivety can be expected to impair effective communication. I get that we here don't have those kinds of filters and are looking at other details, but we should not expect open minded scientists to discard them all at once. Eric
