At 04:25 PM 12/2/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Here is a good example of an article about "climate-gate" that
includes mythology about cold fusion, from some guy named Poe who is
allergic to doing his homework:
<http://westvirginia.watchdog.org/2009/12/02/w-va-scientists-split-on-climategate/>http://westvirginia.watchdog.org/2009/12/02/w-va-scientists-split-on-climategate/
I added a comment, which has not yet appeared.
I suppose someone reading my comments would be inclined to ignore
them or reject them because they are so far from the mainstream
version of cold fusion history. In this case, I began the response:
"The Defense Intelligence Agency, the Italian ENEA (equivalent to
the DoE), the Italian Chemical Society, Physical Society, and
National Research Council (CNR) have all recently recommended that
governments expand their support for cold fusion. . . ."
I expect the author will think I am crazy, and reject this message,
even though he can click through to the ENEA site and confirm what I
wrote. The gap between my version and the mass media version is so
wide, my version sounds like a fantasy. I sympathize with that. If
someone told me the moon landing was faked, I probably would not
take it seriously. On the other hand, if they gave me a hyperlink to
a document at a NASA website affirming this, I would at least check it out.
Keep it up, Jed. And the less polemic you are, the more you simply
present a sentence like that first one, the more that *readers* will
check it out. If you seem highly attached to some outcome, many,
maybe most, won't bother looking at your sources because they can
plainly see you are a fanatic.
Frustrating, I know. But it's part of the natural filtering mechanism
that humans use to efficiently allocate their time.
In off-line discussions with skeptical physics professors, and
wannabe physicists, I have often suggested they read something
rigorous, such as McKubre, M.C.H., et al., Isothermal Flow
Calorimetric Investigations of the D/Pd and H/Pd Systems. J.
Electroanal. Chem., 1994. 368: p. 55:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf
I do not know if they follow through on this, because I never hear
back from them. I have no idea what they think. I doubt they are
sitting around gobsmacked, the way I would be after reading an
official NASA document about the fake moon landing.
Patient persistence will pay off, eventually.
I recall only one, a Wikipedia skeptic, who wrote back after I
pointed him to this paper. He thought he found an error, in a
confusing phrase in the paper. It took me a while to untangle it.
Even though he admitted this was not an error all, he still says
that all cold fusion results are wrong and he urged me to drop the
subject and stop wasting my time on it.
Conclusion-driven. Common error.
Along the same lines, a few journalists have challenged my
assertions about the ENEA. I say "see for yourself" and point them here:
<http://iccf15.frascati.enea.it/>http://iccf15.frascati.enea.it/
I don't recall any that responded.
People don't like to have their paradigms challenged. You know who
wrote that, right?
People should make a distinction between:
1. Debatable issues that depend upon expert judgement, such as calorimetry.
2. Matters of opinion, such as who should win an election.
3. Matters of fact. It is a matter of fact that the ENEA sponsored
ICCF-15. You can look it up. It is a binary assertion, either Yes or
No, with no ambiguities.
Yes, you are correct. We should. Sometimes, though, we assume that a
fanatic is presenting warped evidence, cherry-picked.
In this article, Poe is quoted as saying that no one replicated. It
is a matter of fact that many scientists claim they replicated.
That's in category 3. Whether they actually replicated or not is in
category 1: it must be debated and settled by expert judgement.
(Obviously, I think it has been settled.)
Yes. And in a Wikipedia article that was being written according to
the Wikipedia guidelines and wikitheory, as written years ago, the
distinction would be clearly maintained.
It's obvious that the calorimetry question isn't "completely"
settled, simply because there are still many people who think it was
settled in the other direction, including scientists who ought to
know better. But I don't see, in the recent peer-reviewed literature,
any serious questioning of the position that there is excess heat. By
a fair understanding, it was really the majority position in 2004,
that is, a majority among the knowledgeable, those who actually
examined the evidence. What does Britz think, by the way, about
excess heat? Has he betrayed his current position?
I will grant, it is sometimes hard to know which category an
assertion falls into.
Not with sufficient care. However, with matters of fact, there still
is an issue of how they are presented.
