Jed, you are right in everything you say. Though by the same token there are many things that are proven and yet utterly ignored because people think that the limits they place on the universe actually mean something, why they think their model of the universe trumps irrefutable proof of how the universe really works I don't honestly know.
To quote a TV pilot that you'll never see on TV 'It doesn't have to make sense to you, it just has to make sense'. My point is that while you are right, cold fusion is the least of what is provably real yet denied and I'd wonder if you may flat out deny some of the other stuff too. (No, I don't want to get into an argument about different types of evidence) On 2/10/07, Jed Rothwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Michel Jullian wrote: Now try another impersonation. Imagine yourself in the place of a hypothetical CF experimenter who realizes years later that his past overunity claims were erroneous for some unobvious reason, but still believes (rightly so maybe) that there must be a way to make CF work. Would you endanger the whole field -and therefore the world- by admitting your error, or would you keep quiet? I would say the likelihood of this is roughly equal to the likelihood that scientists will discover that copper and gold are the same element, or that the world is only 6000 years old. The over unity claims are not based on a researchers' opinions. They are based on replicated, peer-reviewed experimental evidence, fundamental laws of physics, and instruments and techniques that have been used in millions of experiments and industrial processes since the mid-19th century, such as calorimetry, autoradiographs and other x-ray detection, spectroscopy, tritium detection techniques and so on. These techniques have been used to confirm the results by hundreds of scientists in thousands of runs. If they could all be wrong for some reason, the experimental method itself does not work, and science would not exist. If a cold fusion researcher were for some reason to question his own high-Sigma result, he would be wrong. To take a concrete example, researchers at Caltech were convinced that they did not observe excess heat. They thought the calibration constant in their isoperibolic calorimeter was changing instead. However, I am sure they were wrong about that, and they did actually observe excess heat. Their opinions to the contrary count for nothing. Just because the people at Caltech cannot bring themselves to believe indisputable experimental proof of cold fusion, that does not give them leave to rewrite the laws of thermodynamics or to claim that an instrument developed by J. P. Joule in the 1840s does not work! Science is not based on opinions. It is based on what nature reveals, in replicated observations and instrument readings. The bedrock basis of the scientific method is that in the final analysis, all questions must be settled by experiment, and *experiment alone*. Experiment always trumps theory. When instruments show that a phenomenon occurs many times, in many different labs, with different instrument types, at a high signal-to-noise ratio, the issue is settled forever. It is beyond any rational doubt or argument. No better proof can exist in the physical universe. A scientist cannot "choose" not to believe the instrument readings, any more than a pilot can choose to pretend he is on the ground when the airplane is actually flying at 1,000 meters altitude. Let's push it further. Imagine you lack, unknowingly, the particular technical skill (some exotic subbranch of EE or plasma physics or statistics, whatever) which you would need to realize your error. Cold fusion results are not based on exotic skills or subbranches. They are based on 19th century science that only a lunatic or creationist would dispute. The excess heat and tritium results are sometimes subtle, but in other cases they are tremendous and far beyond any possible instrument error. Sigma 100 excess heat and tritium at a million times background are not debatable, and there is no chance they are caused by error or contamination. I said that "people who do not believe what the instruments reveal are not scientists." Everyone knows that some working scientists do not believe cold fusion results, but they have temporarily stopped acting as scientists, just as a policeman who goes on a rampage and beats innocent people is not acting as a policeman. Skeptical scientists who reject cold fusion fall in two categories: 1. Those who have not seen the evidence, or who refuse to look at it. 2. Those who look at the evidence, agree that it is indisputable and then dismiss it anyway, such as the DoE reviewer who looked at Iwamura and wrote: "The paper by Iwamura et al. presented at ICCF10 (Ref. 47 in DOE31) does an exhaustive job of using a variety of modern analytical chemistry methods to identify elements produced on the surface of coated Pd cold-fusion foils. . . . The analytical results, from a variety of techniques, such as mass spectroscopy and electron spectroscopy, are very nice. It seems difficult at first glance to dispute the results. . . . From a nuclear physics perspective, such conclusions are not to be believed . . ." http://lenr-canr.org/Collections/DoeReview.htm#StormsRothwellCritique This person is not acting as a scientist, and the last sentence has no meaning. It is not a "nuclear physics perspective"; it is an imaginary prospective, or one based on a kind of faith, a cult, or superstition. If you cannot "dispute" replicated results -- meaning you cannot find a technical error -- then you *must* believe them. Without this rule, no technical argument can be settled, and no scientific progress can occur. - Jed
