On 12/15/2009 02:04 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
I'm not going to reject Steorn just because it flies in the face of solidly established theory, and it certainly does that far more than cold fusion -- which really just contradicted a poverty of imagination, not actual conservation of mass/energy or momentum -- but that doesn't mean that I'll dump these theories because of the publicity-generating behavior of some seemingly slick characters.
CF violates numerous RULES OF THUMB regarding circumstances in which fusion could be expected to occur; some people have confused those rules with laws of physics. CF claims violate no actual laws of physics.
Steorn's claims, on the other hand, flatly violate physical law as currently understood in the context of electromagnetic theory.
When a poorly supported claim, for which no clear evidence and no independent verification exists, seems to disprove conclusions which are based, quite literally, on centuries of experimental evidence, well... let's just say that, based on prior experience, the odds in favor of it being "for real" are not large.
The correct comparison here might actually be to compare Steorn with one (hypothetical) researcher who claims that all of the positive CF results can be explained away by the results of one experiment he's done, and the theory he constructed based on it. Would you believe him, or would you continue to believe the results obtained by the other scientists?
In the case of Steorn, one company is claiming that all physicists for the past century or so have been befuddled over the way magnets work; only the folks at Steorn really understand it, and we should believe them (and send money), even though they have no conclusive proof of their claims, and have in fact published no coherent theory explaining what their claims really are.
Is this really a no-brainer? It looks like it to me.
