[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Jed in a nutshell, Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence".
Carl Sagan was right about many thing. Yesterday I learned that he said some nice things about cold fusion toward the end of his life. But that statement was wrong, wrong, wrong. He had it backward. As Chris Tinsley is to say, extraordinary claims demand *ordinary* evidence. The more extraordinary the claim is, the more conventional, reliable, ordinary and indisputable the evidence for it should be.
Fortunately, that is exactly what we have for cold fusion. It is based on 18th and 19th-century calorimetry, which is one of the most fundamental and unquestionably reliable techniques known to science. Recent experiments by J. Dufour et al. use the world's first calorimeter -- the ice calorimeter developed by Lavoisier in 1787. An elegant, first-principle instrument, well-suited to this experiment. Do the skeptics really want to assert that Lavoisier was wrong? Or that his claims were "extraordinary"? If you believe him, and J. P. Joule, where do you get off doubting people who use the very same instruments and methods 218 years later? (And it is the same instrument. Lavoisier would recognize it at a glance.)
People who reject cold fusion must also reject thermodynamics and most of modern chemistry. Frankly, I consider them lunatic fringe, flat-earth whackos. People who think the textbooks are wrong usually turn out to be flakes.
- Jed
