Jed, I will leave you to your certainties regarding the person I have been apparently unsuccessfully trying to describe. As you say, sometimes it is just not possible to change a person's mind.
I have not read Ed's book, but have Beaudette's and yours. I don't think books will do I what I believe needs to be done, no matter how well written -- because the book FORMAT will not get the job I envisage done. The problem is not with the content but with the format. The books do a good job at doing what they do. I am talking about a different task. Cheers, Lawry -----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:11 PM To: vortex-L@eskimo.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:Obama visiting MIT to discuss energy Lawrence de Bivort wrote: >Like it or not, he IS a scientist, and quite >prominently respected as one. And more than >that, he is an influential scientist. No. As I shall show below, when the subject of cold fusion comes up, this person suddenly stops being a scientist. >And, yes, he reached the point where he doesn't >want to hear anything new about CF. That is perfectly reasonable. Life is short and no one has time to investigate everything. However, if he does not read the literature he has no right to any opinion on the subject, positive or negative. >He did not reject the notion that there has been >progress in CF; he did assume that there >probably hadn't been enough to yet bring it the >amount of credibility that might lead him to >take another look at CF. I want to stress that >this person is rational, friendly, dedicated, >not uncurious, and quite accessible. He is, in a >nutshell, a good, smart and credible person. Not with regard to cold fusion. He has no credibility because he has read nothing and knows nothing about the subject. His assumption has no basis. Just being an expert on the general subject area does not give you a free pass. Experimental science is always about specifics. I am an expert programmer in many ways but I know little about Internet security, except what I read in the ZoneAlarm documentation. So I have no business pontificating about that, and no credibility. If someone gave me a month to learn about Internet security I would soon know much more than most computer users. If this scientist were to take a month to learn about cold fusion he would soon know more about it that I do. But until he does that, he knows nothing. >By 'framing materials' I mean a written item >that out-frames this basic antipathy toward CF. >That is, it presents CF in such a way that it >systematically overcomes each of the causes of >the antipathy. Much of doing this is linguistic >- it requires the use of precise and well-conceived language. The books by Beaudette and Storms fill the bill. >As I said, this is not by any reach an unreasonable person. And, I think, he >is typical of many physicists and chemists when it now comes to thinking >about CF. If you can't win this fellow over, there will be many others who >won't be won over. And this means, generally, that CF will continue to >struggle under and suffer from the weight of skepticism. He is typical. He is also probably a lost cause. All discoveries and inventions in history have opposed by people like him. With regard to cold fusion he has forgotten the fundamental rule, as Rob Duncan put it: "The Scientific Method is a wonderful thing, use it always, no exceptions!" I am sorry to be dogmatic but yes he is unreasonable. A trained scientist who makes assertions about experimental evidence he has not read is unreasonable by definition. It is hard to imagine a more clear-cut example of being unreasonable and unscientific. Here is the crux of the matter. Social science research has shown that people's minds and imaginations are not unified. The mind and personality are not one entity. Apparently, multiple thought processes occur within your brain and they are often at odds with one another. In other words, a person can be perfectly reasonable, logical, objective and scientific about one subject, but just the opposite about another subject. The person will not even realize he is being inconsistent. This happens to everyone, albeit to some more than others. This is not an illness or abnormality. It is simply the way the mind works. T. H. Huxley was a brilliant scientist, and one of the greatest educators in history. He was beloved by his students. He was kindly, gentle and as a scientist objective and fair down to his fingertips. And yet regrettably he was deeply prejudiced against black people. (Perhaps this was because some of his American relatives were on the wrong side of the Civil War.) He failed to realize how grotesquely unscientific and unfair this bigotry was. Most people in his era had equally bigoted views, but one would hope that such an enlightened person would transcend the limits of his time. After all, many smart people in the past such as Francis Bacon were free of race prejudice. I have no doubt your friend knows the scientific method in his sleep. He knows perfectly well that experimental evidence trumps theory; that all judgments must be made on the basis of a careful and complete examination of the relevant data; that physics is still empirical (as Schwinger put it); and so on, and so forth. You can read such platitudes in any junior high school textbook and I am sure your friend knows all of this as well as I do. If your friend had been drinking wine with Robert Duncan in Rome a few weeks ago, he would have heard exactly what I just said, and I have no doubt he would nod and murmur agreement without a second thought, and he would chuckle knowingly at Duncan's stories of scientists acting badly and not following these rules. However, the moment the subject turned to cold fusion he would suddenly abandon all of these fundamental rules and take an irrational, hysterical anti-science approach, more or less like a 4-year-old sticking his fingers in his ears and yelling "Nanny nanny boo-boo I won't listen! Shut up, shut up!" And all the while he does this he would remain totally oblivious to the fact that he was doing it! That's what people do. It is human nature. We cannot do anything about it. We have to work with people who are not inclined to go bonkers lose objectivity with regard to cold fusion. There are plenty of such people. Hundreds of thousands have downloaded papers at LENR-CANR.org. You are welcome to forward this message to your friend, but I expect it would be counterproductive. People who are acting irrationally seldom correct their behavior when someone else points it out. Therein the patient must minister to himself, as the doctor told Macbeth. - Jed
