During the course of a discussion elsewhere, I uploaded a famous letter
from Lindley to Noninski:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/Collections/Lindley.jpg
The first paragraph is remarkable. Noninski wrote a critique of
Lewis, and Lindley sent the critique to Lewis himself for
"advice." In other words, he asked Lewis whether a critique of
his own paper should be accepted or rejected, and Lewis decided that his
own work was valid and should not be critiqued. However, this is not
quite as bad as it looks. Note that the paper was rejected by an
"independent reviewer" in the first round. As I recall, this
letter was sent after the second or third round. Noninski tried to
rewrite the paper to satisfy the independent reviewer. In the later
round, Lindley decided to skip the independent review and have this paper
checked by Lewis directly.
The first paragraph is, shall we say, unconventional and surprising.
Let's leave it at that. When you look carefully, you will see that it is
the second paragraph which is truly mind blowing. This copy was sent to
me by Melvin Miles, and I believe it was he who marked the second
paragraph. Read it carefully. For lack of a better word, let me suggest
you savor it, and analyze it step by step, the way a translator
might carefully takes prise apart a cryptic sentence in an ancient
document in a forgotten language. You may have to read through it several
times before you realize what Lindley is saying, and what he demands of
Noninski. Let us list some of the weird assertions Lindley has packed
into these few short but telling sentences:
1. Lindley demands that Noninski find a single reason -- an equation --
that would simultaneously prove that all negative experiments, including
Harwell and others, are actually positive.
2. In other words, but Lindley asserts that all cold fusion experimental
results are uniform. The experiments all produced the same result. One
explanation must account for all of them. Lindley rejects the idea that
some null experiments failed for one reason and some for another.
Actually, it appears this idea never crossed his mind. He thinks that all
experiments produce a single yes or no result that can only be explained
by a single set of equations. The effect either exists or does not, and
all experiments automatically prove the issue one way or
another.
In reality, Lewis got positive heat but he made a mistake in his
equation, so he did not recognize it. In many other experiments the
result was actually negative because the cathodes cracked, or people did
not wait long enough, or the surface was contaminated, or the experiment
failed for any of a hundred other reasons. Lewis made a mistake in his
equations, but many other researchers used in the proper equations and
actually did get a negative result. Noninski did not prove that other
negative results were actually positive, and he never set out to do that
or claimed he had done that. He did not even address these other
experiments. But Lindley assumed this is what Noninski was trying to
do.
We assume that the wide variety of puzzling and varying results, both
positive and negative, indicate that the experiment is complicated and
that it is difficult to understand what is happening. Again, this thought
apparently never crossed Lindley's mind.
3. Getting back to wild assertions, Lindley apparently believes that
Noninski's methods are "unorthodox" and that he is trying to
make a special case, or invent new physics, when in fact Noninski is only
asserting that ordinary, conventional equations should be applied.
Noninski is saying that Lewis made a mistake. (To summarize very briefly
Lewis assumed the calibration constant changed, when in fact it remained
the same and the apparent change was caused by excess heat.)
It is astounding that an editor of Nature could be so appallingly
ignorant of how experiments are conducted, how varied & complex they
are, and how people go about interpreting the results. Lindley seems to
have comic book level understanding of experimental science.
- Jed
