Steven V Johnson wrote:
Many years ago Dr. Zimmerman once lectured to me privately via email that the amount of heat allegedly generated from certain CF experiments should have been sufficiently lethal to have killed anyone stupid enough to be watching the proceedings close by. Since no obvious amounts of radiation had apparently been detected, Dr. Zimmerman concluded that all of these CF experiments must be bogus - bad science.
As you say, we have all heard this argument many times. It is called "the dead graduate student problem" as in, "why isn't he or she dead?"
It seems exceedingly odd to me . . . Zimmerman must realize that many of the people doing these experiments are distinguished professors and the like, with deep knowledge of physics. He might suppose that Johnson or I are ignoramuses and this argument never occurred to us. But does he seriously believe that of someone like Fleischmann, Bockris, Srinivasan or Iyengar? Does he imagine that the Chairman of the Indian AEC does not know how much radiation a plasma fusion reaction produces? That's crazy.
Obviously, the researchers know this, and they assume that some sort of aneutronic reaction is occurring. They could be wrong, but there is no chance they overlooked widely known laws of physics. Speaking for myself, when I read the Wall Street Journal article in March 1989, this conclusion flashed through my mind in an instant: "if this is true, they must have discovered some totally new from of fusion that does not produce deadly radiation." I was pretty familiar with plasma fusion, since one of my roommates in college worked in the plasma fusion lab. I knew instantly this could not be anything remotely like plasma fusion, or Fleischmann and Pons would be dead. It does not take a lot of scientific knowledge to know that.
If you are still in contact with Zimmerman you should tell him this. He is suffering from a strange delusion about people and their knowledge.
It reminds me of Creationists who bring up the problem of the eye and ask how could it have developed incrementally. They know so little of evolution they do not realize that Darwin himself in his initial publication tackled this problem and produced an elegant solution.
- Jed
