At 06:46 PM 2/10/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Shall we notice that the level of abstraction involved in judging
what is possible with condensed matter nuclear reactions is a bit
different than that involved in judging flying to the moon by arm-flapping?
Not according to Huizenga and other skeptics. They have never cited
that particular example as far as I know, but I expect if you ask
one he will tell you that is roughly the level of impossibility. He
will say something like: "No, the level of abstraction isn't a bit
different. We know how the laws of physics work, and there is no
chance whatever that aneutronic deuterium fusion can exist. That is
as certain as the law of gravity."
But, of course, he can't explain why. I've seen his attempts. And, if
course, he's making assumptions about the mechanism. Is it
"aneutronic deuterium fusion"? Probably not!
Suppose by some trick we can confine two deuterium molecules in a
small space, the size of a cubic lattice position in palladium metal.
Is he saying that this is impossible? Why? Difficult, yes. But
impossible? What physical law is violated? The lattice can't sustain
the pressure, if I understand the situation, but the condition only
has to last for a femtosecond....
And, then, if this confined state is somehow created, what will
happen? Is he saying that fusion can't take places there. The
efficient packing arrangement will be tetrahedral, and a
Bose-Einstein condensate may form. What happens then. Did Huizenga do
the math? Why do I doubt that he did?
Basically, you can still say, "unlikely." But "impossible"? Why?
This is the reason: ego. It's impossible because I say so, and I'm
me, and I know better than you. I'm better educated, I'm smarter, so
shut up and go away.
That's what's going on. It's pure, raw arrogance. Someone who really
does know better can explain, and clearly, how they know what they
know, and those people won't extrapolate from what they know to what
they don't know.
I must emphasize that is what these people sincerely believe. They
are not being cynical or faking it.
I agree. They really do believe that they are the center of the
universe. After all, can you prove that they are not?
It isn't as if they harbor secret doubts and they think there is a
slight possibility that cold fusion might be real after all. That is
my impression, anyway, but go ahead and ask a skeptic.
Real skeptics allow the possibility. I really urge you to reconsider
Hoffman, Jed. He was not actually the stupidest person to live. He
was right on about many things about cold fusion and, sure, he made
some mistakes. But he clearly maintained that it could be possible.
He just wasn't convinced. From what I've read, if he'd lived and kept
his marbles, he'd have accepted it by now. Too many of the questions
he asked, and his questions appear to have been sincere, have been answered.
Much of the data was known by the time he published his book, but
there is a delay in book publishing and he didn't necessarily have
the time or opportunity to see it with sufficient context to go
through the conversion. I'll tell you this, though, I first heard
about CR-39 and radiation findings from Hoffman. He wasn't debunking them.
You cannot understand Huizenga's book unless you realize this is
what he believes. Do not assume that he thinks levels of
abstraction may be different for high energy physics versus
Newton's law of gravity. They are equally well established in his
mind, and both are final and indisputable.
What mind, Jed?
The "I know, so shut up" argument will lose in a public debate.
Therefore these people will avoid public debate, unless they can
control the terms. . . .
If they get caught in a debate, say an on-line one, when it starts
to go badly, they will announce that they don't have time for this
crap, they aren't going to waste any more effort arguing with idiots.
Actually, Huizenga never evaded debate or said "shut up." He is
polite. On the radio and elsewhere he was willing to reiterate the
points made in his book as often as anyone asks. You might say: "but
he never came up with any fresh arguments!" However, from his point
of view, McKubre or Storms (with whom he debated) never came up with
any fresh rebuttals either. They kept repeating that experiments
overrule theory. Since he never bought that argument, from his point
of view, he won the debate.
I haven't seen any attempt at exploring the roots of belief with
Huizenga. In a way, his opponents were naive, imagining that if they
could just present the clear argument, he'd fall over. You're
probably right. He wouldn'
Yet, miracles do happen. It might have happened. He would have had to
see something that would revise his view.
That's true of Park and the other well-known skeptics. Ask them!
They are not shy about expressing their views. They remain firmly
convinced that all the experiments are wrong, and -- they tell me --
it makes no difference if there are a dozen replications, 100, or
1,000. If there are 1,000 that only proves that there are at least
1,000 incompetent or fraudulent scientists in the world. Park seems
perfectly willing to believe that, and unsurprised by it.
It's possible, surely. However, if Park is cornered into admitting
that this is his position, he's toast. At least he's toast among
those that have seen the debate....
My rebuttal argument is that the experimental method is
fundamentally sound. I spell out the reasons based on biology and
sociology. People are evolved to be sane, honest and healthy most of
the time. Society would not have survived otherwise. (Of course,
some societies don't survive.) The likelihood of 1,000 randomly
selected scientists being mistaken or fraudulent over 5 years is
roughly similar to the likelihood that 1,000 randomly selected
professional airline pilots will crash in a 5 year period, or 1,000
bankers will abscond with the money. The actual rate of error or
malevolence is far lower. If that were not so, we would not have
research labs, airlines or banks.
Gee, Jed, sounds like you are arguing for rationality? Aren't you
supposed to be that fringe nut case who runs the wild-eyed cold
fusion free energy government conspiracy to keep it down web site?
Not you? Never mind.
I doubt that Park has ever considered this argument. I imagine he
would say the 1,000 scientists who replicated cold fusion are not
randomly selected, but instead they are a self-selecting group of
people prone to incompetence and fraud. That is highly unlikely from
a statistical or sociological point of view. As it happens I know
many of these people's CVs, I know that is factually wrong.
Of course, there is another form of self-selection. Park is selecting
his arguments consistently to produce the same conclusion. He's
reasoning from conclusions. I call that paranoia.
In short, and to use even more technical language, he's crazy.
By the way, the actual number of cold fusion scientists is closer
2,000 or 3,000 than 1,000. I cannot easily count them, but there are
4,800 authors in my EndNote database. Huizenga, Park and other
skeptics are listed, but there are surprisingly few published skeptics.
That's correct. I noticed. Jed, why do you think I went from being
skeptical a year ago, and simply interested in this strange Wikipedia
blacklisting of this fringe (I thought) but harmless web site, I came
across, to actually staking out a possible career, such as it is
(i.e., a simple business idea), in the field?
There is a resident skeptical scientist on Wikipedia, Shanahan. I've
read his stuff back into the early 1990s. He's a maniac, absolutely
convinced that he's right with his idiosyncratic theory that other
skeptics don't buy, contemptuous, insulting, and has other nice
qualities as well. I wanted to keep him around because real skeptics,
who actually did understand the field enough to point to possible
problems or flaws in the arguments, were rarer than hen's teeth,
mostly there were just idiots who didn't understand the issues at
all. You know that, you, unfortunately, would tell them about
themselves and they definitely didn't like that. My view is that
Wikipedia needs representation from all sides....
The skeptics have left the field. It's claimed that this is because
cold fusion was definitively refuted twenty years ago, but that's
getting awfully thin as an argument, because of all the publications
appearing with no skeptical answer beyond, say, a physics instructor
who challenges some of the SPAWAR interpretations but actually does
replicate much of it. People like Park aren't publishing under peer
review, and probably couldn't cut the mustard. I'm telling you, the
opposition died, sometime over the last five years or so. But nobody
noticed, and the corpse is still standing. At some point someone will
give it a push and it will fall into a pile of dust.
People think that it's still there, people not involved with the
field go on thinking that cold fusion was refuted, but the refutation
actually stopped, and it never was definitive, it was merely vehement
and vindictive and politically nasty. The judgment of history is
already clear, and it won't go back.
Hey, how about asking Britz to write a critical review of the field?
Think he could pull it off? Taking apart Krivit is boring, and far
too easy. I'd like to *actually learn something*. Where is the
skeptic who could actually address the issues in the field, showing
what remains open and what is not open any more.
For example, *nobody* expects significant neutrons any more.
Back to aneutronic fusion of deuterium to form helium. Maybe Huizenga
was right on that. Where he was wrong in assuming that therefore you
could not take deuterium and make helium without neutrons. His
concept of "fusion" was a process that smashed deuterons together at
high energies. He's right. That will produce neutrons. Period. But
what else can be done with deuterium? Anything?
Science will never answer a question like that with "nothing."
Science will not say what it does not know, and there is no way to
know the full limits of the possible. Huizenga had some knowledge
about fusion and some intuition about it. Fine. I'm not denying that.
The problem was that he extrapolated from this to something
completely different, something that obviously was not what he knew.
And then his position becomes visible as "I know everything." Cool.
Remind me not to depend on you for anything, because people who
imagine that they know everything clearly don't know at least one
thing, themselves. And that may indeed be the most important thing
for us to know.
