Michel Jullian wrote: >Best is to concentrate on the experiments which are thought/known to work, and >validate them. Ideally they should pass the Earthtech test . . .
I disagree. The Earthtech test appears to be "Scott Little can replicate." Little is a gifted and smart person, but he is not qualified to do many of these experiments. The fact that he has not been able to replicate them only proves that he is not qualified. He should not be held as some kind of standard or metric to judge the work of professional electrochemists. Oriani, who is one of the world's top electrochemists, said that in his 50-year carreer in electrochemistry, this was the most difficult experiment he encountered. Yet he did replicate, and so did many other professionals. The fact that Little did not is not at all surprising, and should not be held against him in any sense. Still, if you are going to make Little the standard for cold fusion, why not also insist that you will not accept a new tecnique in brain surgery, cloning, or Tokamak design until he master it? > . . . after which they could go and claim the Randi prize without further ado. I discussed this with Randi. I can send you the exchange of letters. Basically, as I recall, he would not accept any cold fusion experiment, no matter how convincing it is. He wants to see something like a commercially useful device that produces palpable levels of heat before he will accept cold fusion. An experiment that requires any kind of analysis or expert knowlege is not a candidate for his prize. He readilly admitted to me that he himself is not qualified to judge calorimetric results; he has not interest in doing that; and he will not accept the judgement of any expert or set of experts in calorimetry, or for that matter tritium detection, transmutations or any other scientific subject. Perhaps originally he might have accepted the judgment of scientific experts, but I think when I began to discuss the subject, and when I told him that cold fusion has been replicated and it has produced multiple watts of heat and so on, he and his "advisors" made haste to move the goal posts. In other words, he changed to rules to make sure cold fusion is not allowed. To judge cold fusion, you should stick to traditional, conventional scientific criteria: replication, publication in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals, and so on. Cold fusion passed these tests by 1990. It is a bad idea to leave the mainstream academic world and ask people like Little or Randi to evalute it. - Jed
