At 06:00 PM 1/27/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I guess I would have to say that despite its many faults, the
Wikipedia article is better.
[than the Britannica article]. Yes. The Britannica is depending on
old information that was never really accurate, but it's not
surprising that this is what they'd have if they consulted nuclear
physicists for an article on "fusion," but the effect they claim
couldn't be confirmed is not a nuclear effect as such, rather fusion
is simply one hypothesis as to what causes the anomalous heat. And
the nuclear physicists, after finding that it was not simple to
confirm (then) were not about to consider the excess heat claim
legitimate until tea could be brewed on demand, and I'd bet that they
would reject even that. And, in fact, they did. Mizuno evaporated a
lot of heavy water....
(But that was tough to replicate... the whole "tea" thing was a huge
red herring. Don't brew tea with muon-catalyzed fusion unless you sit
it on your muon generator.... Might as well use the heat for something!)
Hey, that's an idea! Build a device for heating tea into my CF kits.
All it would take is a bit more power from the power supply.... Okay,
a lot more power.
I think what Wikipedia needs most is competition. If something like
Citizendium were to become as popular -- or nearly as popular -- as
Wikipedia, and if the governing philosophy of both remained
distinctly different, that would be good for both. There would be no
point in having two anonymous crowd-sourced reference books, both
governed by free-for-all rules. You want one to be more traditional.
Probably. The Wikipedia model is potentially more powerful, but it
needs to become a hybrid. I'm suggesting a fractal structure for
governance that would escalate disputes gradually until a level is
found where there is consensus (or possibly rejection of a dispute as
trivial piffle, many of them are.)
Wikipedia needs to respect experts, and, instead, it bans them, if it
happens that the expert knows more than the editors and contradicts them.
So Pcarbonn is topic-banned (so far, I haven't begun to do anything
about it except talk it up a little bit at Wikipedia Review), I'm
topic-banned, and Jed is indefinitely blocked which is similar to
being banned without a formal ban finding. Steven Krivit is not
blocked or banned because he was nicer than Jed and doesn't tilt at windmills.
Of course with regard to the search term "cold fusion" Wikipedia
does have competition: Cold Fusion Times, New Energy Times and (far
down the list, alas) LENR-CANR.org (by Google ranking and also
Bing.com ranking).
You serve a serious purpose, Jed. New Energy Times is more like a
popular magazine, but on-line. To each his own.
People who look at Wikipedia only are not seriously interested in a subject.
That's right. They just want some quick information, ordinarily. I
use it all the time. *Usually* it is more-or-less right.
And even where there is some pretty bad and biased editing, there is
a limit to what the cabal can get away with, which is why the article
on Cold fusion is as good as it is. And it would be quite a bit
better if not for snap judgments by some Arbitration Committee members.
I had actually gotten some of the notable theories into the article,
which until then had only a claim that there weren't any serious
theories, only "ad hoc" attempts at explanations. I'd done this in
spite of revert warring from an editor aptly called Hipocrite; but
the administrator William M. Connolley reverted the article back,
violating policy; ultimately, he lost his administrative privileges
over that and some related actions, like banning and blocking me, but
ArbComm does not, supposedly, make content decisions, it only
adjudicates behavior, and it also decide that I had violated the
policy against being a Pain In the Ass and tempting Reputable
Administrators into breakling policy to get rid of me.
Of course, WMC is now getting serious attention and my guess is he'll
be banned soon himself.
That's the WikiDrama. Seriously dysfunctional. Fixable? I think so,
but it is certainly not guaranteed!
The same forces that make Wikipedia grossly inefficient and often
lead it quite astray are the same forces, in kind, as led to a silly
and premature rejection of cold fusion. Science runs on consensus, in
the long run, a consensus produced by deep study of what's
controversial or new or unexplored, and that broke down with CF, and
experimental results were rejected and even impeached based on little
more than theory, and definitely not on conclusive demonstration of
artifact, incompetence, or fraud, as to the critical excess heat findings.
For some electrochemists to make an error with respect to neutraon
radiation detection was one thing, but it was quite another to infer
from this that the world's foremost electochemists, expert in
calorimetry, had made bonehead errors in what they were really good
at. And then trust hasty attempts at replication that clearly did not
demonstrate replication but rather only failed attempts, and
therefore to stuff their ears and ignore all the successful
replications that started pouring in....
Ironically, if the recommendations of the first DoE panel had been
followed .... it would have been sorted out! But the major journals
set up a blacklisting on the topic. Where in the philosophy of
science is blacklisting covered?
This is what actually interests me, even more than cold fusion....
I'm extremely skeptical about Steorn having any real overunity
anomaly, precisely because they have revealed no actual experimental
evidence that would lead to this as a reasonable explanation. But I'd
never suggest that a peer-reviewed journal reject a paper on some
anomaly because it contradicts theory, not even theory so well
established as conservation of energy and the "laws" of
thermodynamics. Not only can theory be wrong, sometimes, but it can
also be misapplied, as theory was in the cold fusion case.
