At 02:50 PM 3/26/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Someone named James Riordon, who has a rather weak grasp of the
notion of academic freedom, wants people to attack the APS for
allowing a discussion of cold fusion. He wrote:
Cold fusion has become the iconic example of pathological science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science
He really should look more carefully at that article. It's an example
of how Wikipeida works, when it works.
The lede to the article says:
Examples of pathological science may include
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#Martian_.27canals.27>Martian
"canals", <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray>N-rays,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater>polywater,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory>water memory, and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion>cold fusion (which remains
controversial as there is ongoing published research).
The lede is supposed to include material that is well established.
What's going on here? Well, there is material that fits Wikipedia
definition of "reliable source" -- don't confuse this with "a source
which can be unconditionally trusted," for it doesn't mean that, it
really means "independently published by a publisher with some
reputation to uphold," or something like that -- that calls cold
fusion Pathological Science. That's just a fact, Jed. Doesn't mean
it's true. It means that it is being or has been notably claimed,
and, mirable dieux, there is a "remains controversial" clause there.
That's true too, eh?
I.e., some idiots are still claiming that cold fusion is pathological
science. Note that the article generally has not had that
pathological science tag, though some skeptics tried to put it there.
By consensus on Wikipedia, Cold fusion is "fringe physics," which is
hardly even perjorative, it just means that support for it is a
minority position. To be fair, it should be bumped up to the
"emerging physics" category, because it's looking like its far more
accepted than fringe topics normally are. If I were editing the
article, I'd be claiming that it isn't a physics article at all. Not
until the origin of the effect is known! What if it's just chemistry?
Like, hydrinos or something like that, or some other phenomenon?
Complicated, isn't it? Glad I am I'm not having to make decisions
about that article.
It's sad that people are taken in by this, and shameful that the
American Chemical Society is complicit in the sham. As a Public
Information Officer at the APS and the president of the DC Science
Writers Association, I feel that the media office at ACS is acting
irresponsibly in holding press conferences on cold fusion.
Yeah, they are impinging on his turf. Well, the physicists blew it.
They have, more or less, forfeited their place at the table, until
they get a little humility, and realize that *chemists* might know
more about a chemistry experiment, which these things usually are,
than physicists. This is really cool that this is getting notice from
Riordan. Doesn't he know the old saw about publicity?
Michael Bernstein is listed as the main contact on the ACS cold
fusion release. It would be great if he could come to the DC Science
Writers Professional Day event on April 17 (www.DCSWA.org) to
explain himself during our session on ethics for PIOs. I'll happily
cover his registration fee.
What ethics, exactly, did he allegedly violate? He issued the release
last year too, the one that made a big fuss about neutrons from Pam's
codep work. I wonder what Riordan has to say about that? Is he going
to complain to Congress about the US Navy wasting a tiny amount of
money on this Cold Fusion nonsense? Does he realize that, when one of
the skeptics makes a big fuss about no cups of tea being brewed for,
what, a few hundred thousand dollars of research funing maybe, at
most, I think, some congressman just might ask how many cups of tea
have been brewed with excess heat from those giant hot fusion
thingies that are soaking up so many billions of dollars?
I hope Bernstein takes him up on the offer and goes. Perfect
opportunity. That group isn't a bunch of physicists, it's a bunch of
people who, as to science, are probably pretty ordinary. Piece of
cake, I'd expect, if Bernstein is well-prepared. There fall a few more dominos.
<http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2010/03/chemists-taken-in-by-cold-fusion-again.html?showComment=1269628795280_AIe9_BGTP1g6lXi0nm2IUb9zDu0d-mRBqaxA3mohI-BEjy8sWNM09bD6I7Bo_nVoidXby6s-qthr-BupKFruVqn7t7D7MAuJ57ddRxYmEKEWzwyontMtvPrffijwcVeZ1MMIdvuh31b3bn3tmzol-tnQEqUMCCDhX49Zn5AhdRqejFTaDzG3B_t7vK-6vH1_IZoYr31oIbGMUwAtFak96SIloCRfDuSY8FvhS2OFzoHfulIv79OU3KwqabiWDH8H4I-eQT6KeY0k#c5923596042018909191>http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2010/03/chemists-taken-in-by-cold-fusion-again.html
Look, this is all good, Jed. When you've been on the bottom, being
walked on, there isn't much of anywhere to go except to vanish or
rise. The more obstinate someone like Riordan is, the more people
will notice, hey, wait a minute. I thought this was all dead years
ago. Why is this still being talked about? And so some of them will
look. And that's what it takes. People trying to understand what the
fuss is. Those whose minds are firmly made up are getting older and
dying. In fact, in a way, they began dying by making up their minds.
People who stay young don't do that. Sure, so are the researchers
geting old, many of them, but their work will live on. The inane
pseudo-skeptcism of the old guard physics establishment will be
forgotten, or will be an embarassing part of otherwise decent
careers. It happens. Famous scientists, in the past, screwed up. But
most of these guys aren't really famous. The Nobel Prize winners,
those whose opinions I know, seem to have bunched up a bit on the
cold fusion side, though maybe many simply kept their mouths shut,
which is wise when you don't have time to investigate, eh?
Okay, from the blog:
The ACS embraces cold fusion with an inexplicable enthusiasm. As a
former associate editor for one of their journals, that embarrasses
me just a bit. (BTW, the photo above from the ACS press release
about their cold fusion session appears to show one of the most
pathetic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter>calorimeters I've
ever seen outside of a science fair.)
Good that he's embarrassed. On the other side, some chemists might be
embarrassed about him. After all, he worked for them as an editor....
I don't know why that calorimeter was featured, probably it was the
prettiest photo they had. It's intended for science fairs,
on-the-cheap projects, so, note, the comment is actually a
compliment, he simply didn't understand what it was about.
More accurately, it is intended to make accurate cold fusion
calorimetry easily available, and is a very modest project. I was
more interested in it because it shows me that Dr. Miles is still
active, which is a story of human interest, something lost on
Riordan. I read the bio on Riordan, aka Buzz Skyline, being slightly
distracted by Becky Thompson-Flagg. Glowing pickles? Sounds cool to
me, I have a sneaky feeling she'd be interested in neutrons in the
kitchen. She certainly doesn't look like the stuffy type. Little does
Riordan know, we are eating away at the ground beneath him. Pickle by pickle.
http://www.physicscentral.com/about/team.cfm
If I were on the board of the American Physics Society, I'd be a tad
concerned about my media relations officer using the APS web site and
name to attack the largest scientific society in the world, the
American Chemical Society. But I'm not going to tell them. I'll leave
meanness like that to people like Park. Didn't he used to work there
too? History is not going to look kindly on these people.
In the days after the initial announcement 21 years ago, the
excitement among both chemists and physicists was off the charts.
The disappointment that followed, after we had a chance to let the
news sink in, was just as extreme. As far as I know, the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Inconsistencies_with_conventional_physics>same
problems with cold fusion that were identified back then still exist.
Brilliant. They had the patience of grasshoppers. "As far as I know."
I.e., he hasn't looked. The early objections have all been answered.
What is he citing for his information?
This is really, really funny! The Wikipedia article, which I know
very, very well. We had gotten it to the point where it was actually
starting to tell the story of what happened after the early days,
when it was reverted back. That article is full of nonsense, just
plain stupidity in many cases, the odds and ends of edit wars that
went back and forth. It doesn't contain the work that answered the
objections. You will look in vain there for the evidence about
helium, what's quoted is an error made by the anonymous bureaucrat
who wrote the 2004 DoE review.
So ... the media relations officer of the APS gets his information
from the Wikipedia article. I love it! I wrote some of that.
Everything I put in was rigorously sourced. The cabal editor who knew
nothing about cold fusion (not even from a skeptical point of view),
took out what's known because he didn't like the source. It was from
a researcher in the field (which is not relevant by Wikipedia policy,
what matters is the publisher and the publishing process). So I added
another source. He took it out again. I added a third source. He
finally left it in, and it seemed like it was going to be stable. But
then a cabal administrator, who also knew nothing about cold fusion,
from either side, took the article back before all of this, just
because he could. The article was under protection because of edit
warring (not from me!). He lost his administrative privileges over
this whole incident, by the way, but that doesn't get the article
back! Why "cabal"? Long story. The cabal editors ere interested in
maintaining a "scientific" point of view in global warming articles,
excluding skeptics, as well as an anti-fringe postion elsewhere, they
were trying to remove everything that might be "fringe" from the
encyclopedia, even if reliably sourced. Wouldn't want people to be
fooled by those wild-eyed fringe fanatics, eh? Maybe Riordan is
actually one of these editors. Wouldn't surprise me!
This is what is in the article about helium:
In the report presented to the DOE in 2004, 4He was detected in five
out of sixteen cases where electrolytic cells were producing excess heat
Try to find that in the report presented to the DoE. It's not there.
I pointed that out. But, see, the summary says that. That looks like
a totally weak finding, eh? It would be if that was the finding! I
analyzed all of this on the talk page, it's bleeding obvious if you
actually look at the report instead of just the summary. Is the
summary more reliable than the report itself? Technically, neither is
particularly reliable, they are merely notable opinions. But the
cabal wanted that report in the article, because it is easily viewed
as negative. If you don't know your seat from a pit in the floor. The
report was actually a vast change from 1989.... if not for a number
of panelists who pretty clearly weren't going to look at anything and
who were muttering about fraud and sloppy research, it would have
come up with a majority position for the reality of low energy
nuclear reactions. The helium evidence, for whatever reason, was
drastically misinterpreted, the reviewer's error followed a lesser
error by one of the reviewers. In fact, the helium evidence is
conclusive. Period. Helium is being produced, correlated with excess
heat, at a figure that strongly hints at deuterium as a fuel and
helium as a product. Consistently. Cells that don't produce excess
heat don't produce helium. Those that do, do.
At this point, the pseudoskeptics should just get over it. It's
really all over except for the shouting.
Yes, the payoff of an essentially inexhaustible energy source that
runs on seawater is huge, but the science just doesn't make sense.
All the wishful thinking in the world isn't going to change that.
This is the usual red herring. Fleischmann was not looking for an
"inexhaustible energy source." He was testing the edges of the
application of two-body quantum mechanics to the condensed matter
environment, and picked the palladium deuteride environment as a
place where, as a very long shot, he might be able to detect a
difference between the predictions of quantum mechanics and the far
more difficult quantum field theory. The theory that is cited as the
reason to be so thoroughly skeptical had never been tested like this,
and it was precisely that theory that Fleischmann was attempting to
confirm. Boy, was he surprised when he found what he found.
Cheap energy? Well, obviously, eventually something might come out of
this. It might not be in my lifetime. So? That's just bilge! What
"science" doesn't make sense? What is being reported is excess heat
in palladium deuteride, that the chemists, experts on measuring heat,
say isn't chemistry. And helium. And neutrons, just a few, just like
being a little pregnant. None of it is supposed to be there. So,
indeed, it doesn't "make sense." He's confusing experimental science
with theory. What theory? There is no theory that is widely accepted,
but the round "theory" of nuclear reactions isn't controversial any
more, among those who know the experimental evidence. And that's why
papers are being accepted under peer review at major publications,
and that's why the American Chemical Society, after many years of
absence, started holding cold fusion sessions again, and has expanded
them each year. In short, the theories, as of yet, don't "make
sense," though some are more sensible than others. Riordan is
fighting a ghost, dead imaginings, while reality is starting to rain on him.
Please, my chemical society friends, let it go. It's one thing for
cold fusion scientists to present talks at meetings and submit
papers to peer reviewed journals. But for heaven's sake, don't
endorse this stuff with press conferences! Wait until one of them
makes a working battery or something. Otherwise, you're raising the
public's hopes for something that is broadly considered junk science
at best, and is frequently fodder for con artists stealing money
from retirees for worthless cold fusion energy schemes at worst.
I thoroughly enjoyed the press conference, it was a chance to see
some of the most reputable and knowledgeable people in the field,
speaking and answering questions. None of them are selling anything
but science. I'll agree with one thing, it should be made very clear
that there have been many attempts to turn this phenomenon into
practical devices, and apparently hundreds of millions of dollars
have been spent. What the panelists were saying to the press was that
this isn't ready for commercial applications yet, we need to
understand the science much better. If the physicists would get off
their collective duffs and start actually trying to make sense of
reality instead of lolling around in their fantasy of complete
knowledge (as to this area), we might actually get somewhere. If
these experiments are artifact, how? What is causing this effect to
be reported in thousands of papers by hundreds of researchers all
over the world? "Collective delusion" gets old after a while if the
mechanism of the delusion isn't found, as it was with N-rays and
polywater, thanks to researchers who actually did the work instead of
just sitting on their skeptical laurels.
(Yes, there are hot fusion physicists and serious theoreticians
working with cold fusion, Riordan seems to be completely unaware of this.)
As to retirees, I'm one, but I'm also the "con artist." I'm investing
in my own business, I'll try to be one of the few who have actually
made money from this, though it will only be a little, I expect. I'm
not going to be selling "cheap energy," but science, simply, cheap
kits for replication of the experiments of others. Yeah, perhaps for
those science fair projects that Riordan is so contemptuous of.
That's where some young people start to get their hands dirty and
really take a look at reality. Riordan should try some hands-on
science in an edgy field. Maybe he'll buy a kit from me!
