John Berry wrote:
The article on cold fusion is (without checking I feel confident in
saying) decent.
I'm sure many well established physicists would agree with it.
Naa. It is indecent.
Seriously, I will grant it is thorough, but it is so filled with
unfounded, torturously argued skeptical assertions -- or forlorn
skeptical hopes, they should be called -- that the overall effect is
to make it biased. It strains to give a false impression of the
status of the research. The authors bring up every known argument to
doubt the results, with practically no indication that these
arguments have no merit, and were proven wrong years ago. See, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Non-nuclear_explanations_for_excess_heat
This kind of argument resembles that of Richard Garwin on "60 Minutes." See:
http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#CBS60minutes
This is so over-the-top it goes beyond skeptical doubts well into
disingenuousness. Or insincerity. Or lying, to put it bluntly. Garwin
knows as well as I do that his arguments have no merit, for the
reasons I listed there. The Wikipedia skeptics, on the other hand,
are unfamiliar with the literature and have not observed an
experiment the way Garwin has, so they are probably sincere.
The Wikipedia skeptics I have communicated with sincerely believe
that all experiments are wrong. One of them urged me to stop devoting
any effort to the field because it is so obviously bogus. This was
after he spent several days reading papers, including McKubre's. For
a while he thought he had found an error in McKubre's paper. He then
admitted it was his mistake, but he remains certain that there must
be a mistake somewhere in that paper. I pointed out that 'there may
be an invisible or undiscovered mistake' cannot be falsified and
therefore it is not a valid assertion. That did not compute. The guy
is a professional scientist but he never learned that. Kind of like a
programmer who never learned you are supposed to give variables
logical and consistent names. (I have met such programmers.)
Most of the mistakes made in the analysis of cold fusion are at the
logical level, rather than technical or factual. I mean assertions
that cannot be falsified or logical fallacies. Before people get to
the point where they try to prove that McKubre's flow calorimetry is
wrong, they go off the tracks with assertions that don't even make
the cut logically.
Garwin did not make any logical errors, by the way. His assertion is
plausible and if it were correct, it would disprove cold fusion. But
it's wrong. The Sci. Am.'s assertion that "not all chemical
explanations for the excess heat were eliminated" is also plausible
and logical but factually wrong. Generally speaking, professionally
written critiques have technical errors rather than logical errors.
However, the 2004 DoE reviewers comments had every strain of error,
from soup to nuts. Melich and I tallied up errors in the reviews for
a day or two, and we found dozens, even without an exhaustive review.
A lot of those people would fail an undergrad course in the
scientific method. It is appalling to me that celebrated, highly
respected professional scientists could be so badly educated, and inept.
I am no scientist, but I would not have made such errors back in
junior high school. That's no great credit to me: I had a rigorous
old-fashioned training in logical thinking. If no one ever sits you
down and teaches you what "an appeal to consequences of a belief"
means, or "confusing cause and effect," you are not likely to know.
(Newt Gingrich, for example, often makes these two errors. He is a
smart guy but it is clear to me he has about as much education as a
12th century peasant. He knows facts galore but he has no training in
the elementary rules for thinking.)
Chris Tinsley also had a rigorous education. He and I often said we
felt like time travelers from the 19th century, let loose in some
decadent future in which people no longer actually learn anything in school.
The other thing that is missing from the modern era is the notion
that you should test things by experiment or observation. See for
yourself. The other day I got the sense that our civilization is in
peril while reading at "Dear Abby" column. Some woman wrote that she
and her husband are arguing about which direction a light bulb screws
in, and please tell us, Dear Abby. Abby told the woman "clockwise"
and added "lefty-loosy, righty-tighty." Now that is a fine ditty to
keep in mind, and I have often recalled it, especially when
upside-down under the sink or in some other confusion-inducing pose.
But, I wish I could have reached to both Abby and her reader, shaken
them by the lapels, and shouted, "for crying out loud, TRY UNSCREWING
A LIGHT BULB! Find out for yourself!!! Or just look at the threads!"
Cold fusion skeptics often suffer from this syndrome. In the early
days of the Internet I recall an argument that dragged on for days,
in which even the late Tom Droege -- a crackerjack engineer -- could
not decide whether a power supply (a transformer) might affect a
thermistor or mercury thermometer, producing a false temperature
reading. I wrote with increasing ire: "for goodness sake, put a
thermometer near a power supply and turn the thing on and off several
times. See for yourself!" No one did it. (But me, that is). Arguments
about science only be resolved by doing experiments, and making
observations. You would think that someone like Droege would know
that, but he didn't.
- Jed
