thomas malloy wrote:
Wikipedia, the DoE and many other institutions have failed to deal
with cold fusion, and probably many other subjects too. We don't
know how many others, because they have been suppressed.
Brilliant Jed. The question is how can we stop it. More to the
point, can we stop it?
Francis Bacon himself agonized over this question, and so have many
other philosophers of science. (Bacon was the granddaddy of the
scientific method. And by the way, my comments were not "brilliant"
so much as "plagiarized" from Bacon et al.)
I discussed the problem of disappearing discoveries here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcomparison.pdf
Quoting myself:
". . . Many other important discoveries were overlooked, denigrated
or ignored. Have any been lost altogether? There is no telling. It is
like the old joke: "raise your hand if you are absent." Some people
argue that science automatically preserves everything of value. If
that is true scientists are unique. People in other professions
constantly misplace important contributions. . . ."
The solutions are imperfect. There are some ground rules well known
to readers here:
* Do not jump to conclusions.
* Remember that experiment always overrules theory.
* Keep an open mind.
* Carefully separate the person from the discovery, because sometimes
strange or unreliable people make valid discoveries (as I just said
in the previous message).
. . . and so on.
Fleischmann recommends going through late 19th century back issues of
Nature looking for ideas that have been lost. Fleischmann likes to go
over the same data again and again looking for new clues, and he
revisits problems that he worked on decades ago.
One big problem we are all familiar with here is that resources are
limited, life is short, and you cannot investigate or attempt to
replicate every claim. It is very tempting to simply dismiss claims.
You should avoid that temptation. There are many claims that I do not
believe in, such as magnetic motors, but I try hard not to totally
disbelieve them either. This is the original meaning of "skeptic" but
the common meaning nowadays, as applied to science, is exactly the opposite.
It is difficult to maintain that mindset. It goes against human
nature. We crave certainty. We like to think we know the answer even
when we do not. Go back and read textbooks and encyclopedias from
decades ago, or hundreds of years ago, and you will find vast
edifices of "knowledge" in biology, disease, human psychology and so
on that had no basis whatever in fact. There was an extensive
literature on "humors" as the cause of disease. Before 1952 there
were mind-boggling complicated theories showing how proteins preserve
and pass along the genetic content of cells. People made these things
up out of whole cloth, began to believe them, and then worked for
generations to make them more and more complicated, filling textbooks
with them. Speculation and castles in the air should not be confused
with science.
For a cold fusion researcher, one reassuring aspect of these grand
edifices such as the protein theory of genetics is that they were
based upon theory, with no experimental evidence. Obviously, there
could not be any such evidence, because the claim wasn't true, but
there were not large numbers of mistaken experiments (so-called
"pathological science").
Along the same lines, we also like to think that our leaders, such as
Obama, know what they are doing when it is likely they are as
clueless as anyone else. An outstanding leader, such as FDR, admits
that he knows nothing more than anyone else. Instead of claiming
certainty, he says he will try something and if it does not work he
will "admit if frankly and try something else."
- Jed
