At 04:25 PM 10/31/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>> Zimmerman must realize that many of the
people doing these experiments are
distinguished professors and the like, with deep knowledge of physics.
>
> Actually, he probably didn't realize it.
That is a chilling thought. It means he has made
many comments over the years and devoted a lot
of attention to the subject, but he has never bothered to read the papers.
Or if he did, he didn't recognize the names or
had some negative opinion about those specific
people, justified or not. But, big surprise. Lots
of people who should know better have made stupid
comments about cold fusion. It was a relatively
easy topic for people to attach to what appeared
to be the majority view, and then to believe
that, since it was the majority view, it wasn't
necessary to learn more about it until it became
clear that it wasn't the majority view any more.
Most of these people would cave if they became
aware that the balance has shifted, and I think
it has, among those who actually read some of the
work. 2004 DoE review showed that. Highly
defective, but enough to show a drastic shift
from 1989. But many seized on a possibly
unintended meaning of the summarizing bureaucrat.
"No big difference from 1989," which is blatantly
untrue if we take it to refer to the whole field.
In fact, it probably was in reference to the
actual funding recommendation, which, in 1989,
was a compromise to prevent the Nobel
Prize-winning cochair from noisily resigning,
making noises about the desirability of further
research, and modest funding under existing
programs, whereas, in fact, Huizenga wasn't about
to allow any of that. In 2004, the recommendation
actually reflected the unanimous opinion of the
reviewers, it wasn't a compromise. But that "same
as 1989" phrase was used, probably, to continue
to deny further funding, or whatever, and the hot
fusion lobby was powerful, I'm sure. Lots of
people with their careers at stake.
Have any of those physicists considered the
implications of Garwin's "cup of tea" question?
Where is the hot fusion cup of tea, after, what
is it, billions of dollars of research and
engineering? And no cup of tea in sight. I
suppose if they get payback, a little excess
energy, the excess from the megawatts they put in
might brew some tea. Expensive tea, eh?
It does not upset me when journalists and
ordinary folks make this sort of amateur
mistakes, and neglect to do their homework. You
don't expect them to know the ABCs. But it
bothers me when a full-time professional make a
terrible blunder. As I said before, this is like
seeing a doctor forgot to wash his hands before
an operation -- or a doctor in the mass media
say people should not get H1N1 vaccinations
because there is some risk associated with them.
When Semmelweiss realized that the cause of
childbirth fever among patients at hospitals was
the doctors, going from one patient to another
without washing their hands, he was met with
stubborn opposition. "This lunatic thinks that,
in spite of how much we care about our patients,
we are killing them? How could he dare say such a
monstrous thing!" See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweiss. From that article:
Specifically, Semmelweis' claims were thought to
lack scientific basis, since he could offer no
acceptable explanation for his findings. Such a
scientific explanation was made possible only
some decades later when the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory>germ
theory of disease was developed by
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur>Louis
Pasteur,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister,_1st_Baron_Lister>Joseph
Lister, and others.
That should sound familiar, eh? Many thousands of
women (maybe even millions) needlessly died
because of the resistance to considering
Semmelweiss's theory, which had substantial
experimental evidence behind it. There is a very
interesting discussion in the article of the
history and the "so-called
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex>Semmelweis
reflex or effect is a metaphor for a certain type
of human behaviour characterized by reflex-like
rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts
entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigmsÂnamed
after Semmelweis whose perfectly reasonable
hand-washing suggestions were ridiculed and rejected by his contemporaries."
Semmelweiss reflex. Get used to it, it might be mentioned a lot.
Of course professionals in all fields and all
eras in history have made terrible blunders such
as the Titanic disaster and the 2008 financial
collapse. But in a healthy society, such events
provoke public outrage, Congressional investigations, and reforms.
Eventually. It can take a long time. I don't want
to see a witch hunt against the skeptics, that
would merely be the flip side. If someone,
however, lied and cheated to obtain personal
benefit, or to promote a personal agenda with
reckless disregard for the facts, and caused
damage with this, it might be relevant to some
future action. I'm much more interested in how to
prevent recurrence of this kind of thing than I
am in punishing people for being human, i.e., biased.
The Wikipedia cold fusion article and most mass
media articles are a mish-mash of rumors,
amateur misinterpretations and ignorant
mistakes. That is regrettable but nothing to get
worked up about. If such articles were written
by professionals it would be a travesty. Some of
the 2004 DoE evaluations are travesties,
especially #15. I wrote that, "it has no place
in a serious scientific discussion, and it should be stricken from the record."
A mish-mash mixed up with facts. I disagree about
#15, it's quite valuable. As a demonstration of
what was the reality of the opposition to cold
fusion. Someone sensible and neutral, at the
outset, reading the evidence and the reviews,
would see that recommendation quite clearly, and
might even discount some of the other critical
comments as a result. One of the ideas I was
advocating -- very gently, actually -- was that
perhaps it was no longer true that the "majority
of scientists" rejected cold fusion, based on
that review, and that Wikipedia editors should be
careful about assuming the continuation of a
condition like that merely because it can be shown to have existed in the past.
In taking this position, i.e., as viewing the
evidence for "rejection by scientific consensus"
as very weak, the biggest obstacle was that the
Wikipedia skeptics would quote sources
sympathetic to cold fusion, and comments by cold
fusion researchers, that "most scientist reject
it." And then protesting, of course, that this
was stupid, that they should accept it because
it's real and there is proof. This played into
the standard response of fringe advocates of all
kinds, and the standard Wikipedia response to those claims.
So, everyone can do what they decide is best for
themselves, but I am recommending that the
"rejected" galoshes be parked outside and left
there. People who reject the massive evidence are
*not* representing scientific consensus, they are
only proclaiming their own ignorance. That
doesn't apply to cogent skepticism that points
out defects in evidence, real defects or possible
defects that haven't been ruled out yet. But it
does apply to most of what passes for "scientific criticism" of LENR.
If you are, say, a particle physicist, and a
newspaper calls you up for your opinion about the
latest research, don't answer with a knee-jerk
response that will make you look really stupid
later. Decline immediate comment, do your
homework, then call them back, and be careful.
Yes, this means you, Paul Padley of Rice
University, in reference to how you were quoted by the media:
Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who
reviewed Mosier-Boss's published work, said the
study did not provide a plausible explanation of
how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.
"It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to
explain how fusion could occur at room
temperatures. And in its analysis, the research
paper fails to exclude other sources for the
production of neutrons," he told the Houston Chronicle.
That review was included in an immediate report
on the neutron findings based on the ACS press
conference in March. It's pretty clear what
happened: the reporter had a report from the
conference, and wanted a comment from "the other
side." So the reporter called Padley, who
obliged, pretty clearly without having had much
of an opportunity, if any, to read the actual
paper in Naturwissenschaften, which did, indeed,
attempt to consider other possible sources. Even
Park became a bit more philosophical after that
press conference. A more sober but still
skeptical response would have noted the lack of
replication, would have called the results
"interesting," and might even have gone so far as
to say that "if confirmed, and if no artifact is
identified, this could indeed demonstrate that
nuclear reactions are involved." Which is pretty
much what the majority response seems to have been.
I.e., many have read about that experiment and
they are now waiting for confirmation to become
clear and published. The best experiment to
reproduce, so far, is the one reported in
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MosierBosscharacteri.pdf
, published in Eur. Phys. J. Appl. Phys. 46,
30901 (2009), DOI: 10.1051/epjap/2009067. All the
materials necessary to perform this experiment
will be available from me at modest cost within a
few weeks at most. (Any deviations will be clear;
for example, I didn't purchase gold, platinum,
and palladium chloride from Sigma-Aldrich, too
expensive, but from SurePure. It is always
possible that a variation like this would prove
to be fatal to the effect. But probably not. I'm
using the same stated purity as the Sigma Aldrich
materials specified in the Galileo protocol.)
(In my view, a "negative replication" isn't
harmful unless one draws unwarranted conclusions
from it. So, for substantial financial benefit,
I'm willing to take small risks, and if I find
out that SA materials work and SP don't, that
will provide more clues as to the extent of the
parameter space. And I'll report my results so
that others won't repeat the same "mistake." It's
only a mistake if we learn nothing from it. Want
to wait until I report results from my work,
that's fine, too. I can hold out for a while.
Even though my funds are limited, I'm starting to
get some support in the form of donations, from
more than one source, and loans have possibly
been offered that will cover my stock of
expensive materials. Platinum wire, whew! My Amex
card, after that charge, and when I tried to buy
some piezo sensors off eBay using PayPal, shut
right down. No problem, it simply took a phone
call in which I told them intimate details to
prove I was the same one they had under surveillance for so many years.)
