[This is very sloppy thinking. Here is a message I sent to Labinger.]
Subject: Cold fusion is not a negative claim
Greetings. I discovered your paper: "Controversy
in Chemistry: How Do You Prove a Negative? -- The
Cases of Phlogiston and Cold Fusion." I have
often heard your central argument. I find it
intensely annoying. The way to disprove cold
fusion is clear cut. Melich and I described it in
an unpublished paper. This is a response to the
DoE 2004 anonymous reviewer #15 who wrote:
Claim 15.2. "As one of the reviewers stated, one
can never disprove something and this is my feeling about 'cold fusion'."
The notion that one "cannot disprove something"
is preposterous, and negates the scientific
method at many levels. Cold fusion can be
conclusively disproved by the following methods:
Show that several different calorimeter types
used millions of times over the last 180 years do
not work, and routinely give the wrong answer for
the range of heat they are designed to measure.
Prove that the laws of thermodynamics are
inoperative. Prove that x-ray film, tritium
detectors, mass spectrometers and the other
instruments that have repeatedly been used to
confirm cold fusion at high signal to noise
ratios do not work correctly. Either prove these
instruments and techniques do not work, or show
why thousands of skilled experts have
mysteriously failed to use them correctly over the last 20 years.
The anonymous reviewers' comments are here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DOEusdepartme.pdf
In short, this is an experimental claim, and the
methods of disproving experimental claims are
well established. They do not include appeals to
theory, or inventing new rules of science out of
whole cloth, such as the notion that
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence" (C. Sagan, "Cosmos" television
program). Skeptics have published 5 or 10 papers
attempting to find errors in the instruments or
techniques, but in my opinion these papers have
no merit. You listed one of these papers: [38] D.
R. O. Morrison, Phys. Lett. A 1994, 185, 118
129. If you find any others, please let me know.
I suggest you review Fleischmann's responses to
Morrison. You should have listed it in your paper. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf
- Jed
