On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 10:14 AM, Harry Veeder <hveeder...@gmail.com> wrote:
Does he classify them as miracles because he considers them impossible > or extremely improbable? > My impression only, but he seems to use the term "miracle" to highlight what is in his view fanciful thinking on the part of the researchers offering tentative explanations for cold fusion phenomena as of 1992, when the book was published. The book is well-researched and refers to many of the experiments at the time, and he seeks to give the impression of an objective account. But one gets the sense that he's incredulous about the all of the junk science and is just trying to speak slowly to non-scientists so that they can be assisted to see how impossible all of it is. He has a great deal of confidence in his and other physicists' understanding of the relevant science and is willing to argue that all of the individual experiments were either misinterpreted, were done too sloppily to draw any conclusions or were otherwise in error. So I would wager that he thinks the miracles are impossible. Despite these shortcomings, the book is worth getting and reading. I learned a lot from it. It seems to me if he was certain they were impossible he would > have explicitly mentioned violation of conservation of momentum/energy > since > modern physics considers that impossible in no uncertain terms. > The three sections go into a bit of detail. The third section, on the missing nuclear products, is quite long, and I would not be surprised at all if he mentions conservation of momentum, which would be broken for the rare d+d→4He+ɣ branch if there was no gamma. Eric
