Edmund Storms wrote:
Thanks Jed for trying to keep such people honest.
Thanks. I forwarded your message to the prof.
Nick Palmer wrote:
That story about the difficulties the maser inventors faced is a
really great argument.
I copied that text from a review of Townes' book that I wrote for
Infinite Energy. Nowadays, this kind of problem would never arise in
the first place. The research would be strangled before it began. If
two Nobel laureates were to tell a grad student or newly tenured
professor: "don't do that experiment" he would never bother to apply
for a grant.
I have found that people like Partridge, who write naive
blandishments about how wonderfully fair scientists are, are often
themselves unfair and unscientific. They exaggerate the intellectual
purity and the effectiveness of science because they are blind to its
problems, and to their own. They are not introspective. They claim
that scientists are especially objective, and that scientists must be
honest or their ventures will fail. That's true, but it is like
saying that bankers must be prudent with money. Of course, but that
does not stop some bankers from foolishly invest in stock market
bubbles and the like, and going bankrupt. Why does anyone suppose
that scientists are especially good at their jobs compared to people
in other professions? Or that they are above politics and jealousy?
Scientists must honor the truth and make a clear distinction between
what is real and what is imaginary, but so must airplane pilots,
structural engineers, farmers, and computer programmers. An academic
scientist who wanders away from reality and fudges the experimental
data will probably pay a smaller price than a pilot who ignores
instrument readings. People say that science is self-correcting.
Indeed it is, but so are most other institutions, and many of them do
a better job. When the structural engineer fails to put enough steel
into a building, people find out and they take away his license. When
Partridge or his professor friend publish nonsense about cold fusion,
no one takes away their license to practice academics or publish essays.
People who most loudly praise the value of objective thinking are
sometimes the least likely to practice that skill. One of cardinal
rules of science, that you will find in any elementary school
textbook, is that you must read original sources, think for yourself,
and muster quantitative facts to back up your arguments. Your
argument should be falsifiable. So what do Partridge and his
professor friend do? They give us a stream of fact-free opinions and
impressions! They do not cite a single fact, paper, instrument,
technique or equation.
The professor ridicules the electrochemistry jargon "incubation,"
saying: "we're talking nuclear processes here for heaven's sake; not
chicken farming." This is not a critique of cold fusion; it is an
admission that he knows nothing about the subject. He supposes it
might be difficult to understand the papers (which he has not read),
or to perform the experiments, as if only simple, easy, quick
experiments have merit: ". . .if obtaining positive results is so
exquisitely difficult ('months or years of preparation',) . . . there
seems to be little point in reading the papers . . ." The top quark
experiment, a tokamak plasma fusion experiment, or a global warming
simulation are "exquisitely difficult" and they take years. I doubt
the professor thinks there is no point to reading about these things.
He invents this weird new standard -- the experiment must be easy! --
and he applies it to cold fusion alone.
Partridge says that comparing cold fusion to ESP or Creationism may
be unfair, but unfair or not, since he does not read about ESP or
Creationism he is magically justified in attacking cold fusion
without reading about it. In other words: "cold fusion may not
resemble ESP but is okay for me to act as if it does, and I need not
glance at a paper to find out one way or the other." He speculates
about what Bill Gates would say or do about cold fusion, and he
assumes that we can trust that Gates or some other billionaire will
make an accurate technical evaluation. (As it happens, I have a
letter from Gates to A. C. Clarke about cold fusion, so I know the
extent of his knowledge, and I know that Partridge is wrong. Trusting
the wisdom & insight of Bill Gates in this instance is like trusting
President Bush on global warming.) He assumes that a journal editor
at Science or Physical Review will be fair and objective toward cold
fusion, so he will believe the results only after these particular
editors accept them. The corollary is that the editors at the
Japanese Journal of Applied Physics and the Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry are unfair and subjective, since they
already published cold fusion papers. In any case Partridge has no
idea what the editor at Science thinks. For all he knows this editor
is a political animal like the editors at Scientific American and Nature.
These are not valid objections to cold fusion. They are not invalid
objections. They are illogical, emotional expressions of gut feelings.
In my opinion, people like Partridge and his friend, who think that
science is particularly good at self-correction and above politics,
and who lavishly praise science while they steadfastly refuse to
practice it, suffer from two problems:
1. They are blind to the glaring deficiencies of science. They think
the institution is already close to perfection, so there is no urgent
need to improve it. They have not read history, so they do not
realize that hundreds of vital discoveries were held back for years.
2. They suffer from a failure of imagination eloquently described by
Giorgio de Santillana, in the book "The Origins of Scientific
Thought," (U. Chicago, Mentor; 1961). People act this when an
institution is stultified, and improvement is no longer thought
possible or desirable. They think we have reached "the end of
history." Everything is derivative. Instead of reading original
sources, people should quote experts. Partridge goes to the ultimate
extreme when he quotes Park's anonymous "experts" at third hand. He
does not even know who he is relying on! Not a single person in this
chain of the blind leading the blind even mentions a thermocouple, or
has any clue what is done in the laboratory! (Unlike Partridge, I
know who some of Park's "experts" are, and I know that you might as
well consult a Magic 8 Ball as depend upon these people.) Facts not
only cease to matter; they cease to exist. They are replaced by
slavish faith in self-proclaimed gurus like Park -- or Bill Gates, of
all people. de Santillana wrote:
"It is a common experience of our time that enough change takes place
in one generation to more than fill a century for our grandfathers.
Things seem to go the other way in antiquity after about 200 b.c. --
a divide which is marked not only by the death of Archimedes but by
the consolidation of Roman dominion over the Hellenistic empires.
Intellectually, what had been decades become centuries. . . .
. . .
The reasons for this change of pace may concern us, too. We can
discern several:
A. The Hellenistic states which came after the conquests of Alexander
(and Rome is only the last of them) had not only become a very mixed
civilization, they had become uniformly 'big-time,' with huge and
fearsome structures of power. State cults of divine rulers,
state-encouraged superstitions, the worship of blind Fortune, had
replaced the old city gods. In their wake had come new mystery cults
from the East, exotic gospels of salvation, magic doctrines and
practices and novelties for big-city dwellers -- very much as these
things have come in our time to southern California. Science was
represented no longer by free men and respected elders of the
community, but by subsidized intellectuals who were told to go and
perform and quote one another in ample institutions like the library
of Alexandria, and also (this was an order) to provide moral uplift
and entertainment for the arts-loving ruling class. The insistence,
which to us seems excessive, on virtue and character-building is not
all escape literature, witness Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius. But there
is a ring of frustration in it.
B. Economic decline has set in. There seems to be a failure of
imagination at the root of it all. A great and stable and ever more
complicated administration needs economic growth to keep pace with
it, and the Roman Empire seems to have been strangely incapable of
economic and political growth; even more so than the Chinese. . .
. Dullness, conformity, and gloom spread like a pall of smog over
the last centuries. Science became manuals and encyclopedias,
literature became stale rhetoric on 'classic' models, or tales of the wondrous.
C. The failure of imagination explains, among other things, why men
became so reactionary-minded, even when they thought they were
entertaining the most lofty and liberal ideals. Something like that
was to occur again in the American South. When Aristotle, the great
master of ethics, said that slavery is a fact of nature, and that we
shall need slaves so long as the shuttle will not run in the loom by
itself, he had registered one of those great mental blocks which
foretell the end of a cycle. And this leads us to what is obviously
crucial, the lack of an applied science. . . ."
- Jed
