At 03:52 PM 6/15/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
In this book, Goodstein peddles the same nonsense he did in this
paper, claiming that "nothing has changed":
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GoodsteinDwhateverha.pdf
Jed, you are misquoting him, if you are referring to the paper.
From the paper introductory note:
This book was published in 2010! The statement that nothing has
changed is nonsense.
Sure. But he did not state that "nothing has changed."
But rather than that statement, I guess I intended to cite some of
this drivel about Scaramuzzi, and Goodstein's sickening false modesty:
Recently I told this story in the philosophy course on scientific
ethics that I teach at Caltch . . . [wouldn't you know it! - JR]
When I finished may tale, the first question I was asked was, "Do
you believe in cold fusion?" The answer is no. Certainly I believe
quite firmly in the theoretical arguments that say cold fusion is
impossible. On the other hand, however, I believe equally firmly in
the integrity and competence of Franco Scaramuzzi and his coworkers . . ."
I would like to ask Goodstein whether he believes in the laws of
thermodymanics, and whether he thinks calorimeters and tritium
detection work, because if he does, the scientific method compels
him to believe that cold fusion is real.
So boring, Jed. You have spent so long railing against the idiots,
you have taken on their reflection. It's all or nothing. Goodstein is
saying he has got a conflict. His understanding of theory says, no,
this is impossible. His understanding of what experiments have been
done, and the "integrity and competence" of certain scientists whom
he knows, says, not so fast!
A person with a reaction like that is actually on our side, his
knowledge is merely incomplete. For a skeptic to doubt that
experiments are being properly interpreted is not to "contradict the
laws of thermodynamics," though. Goodstein doesn't go so far, in
fact. He is pointing out his dilemma. Now, perhaps he doesn't
actually have a dilemma. Perhaps he knows. Or perhaps he doesn't. On
the "doesn't know" hypothesis, it's hard to understand how he could
write this new material, published in 2010, and not be aware of the
research. I could forgive it, coming from earlier. The very fact that
there are about 3000 published papers (which ought to be a clue in
itself) makes it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. There
is a small body of truly critical experiments that one needs to
become aware of. Huizenga noticed one, but possibly by the time that
was confirmed, he'd completely lost his ability to understand what
was going on. Huizenga didn't have to note Miles' work, he could
simply have left it out. But he didn't..
Jed, it's always a balance. Nobody does "all bad" and nobody does
"all good." And that includes Huizenga. Hey, he compiled historical
material that was very useful to me.... His interpretations and
litany of "impossible!" were merely tiresome.
Goodstein was, for a long time, one of the beacons of the mainstream
scientific community allowing that "Hey, long shot I know, but maybe
something is going on here that we should check out." That was, in
fact, the official position of the Huizenga DoE report, forced by
Schwinger, to be sure, but there. The CF community should have
hammered on that and should have broght it up, like maybe once every
five minutes. "The 1989 DoE review considered there to be open
research questions, how about publishing this paper on exactly that?"
It would have helped to have had a press secretary. Newspapers love
press releases. Free content. Do it carefully and right, free
publicity. Win win.
Where was the press release on Miles' work? We didn't expect him to
release one, did we? The whole community got so burned by the
premature press conference held in 1989 that it overreacted. The ACS
press releases in 2009 and this year were great and extremely useful.
The 2009 one got the neutron evidence splashed all over many
newspapers and other media sources.
It's time to organize, way past time. I'm available. Hopefully,
though, there will be enough money to get some real professional
expertise. The money will come back, the talent is worth paying for,
though we can start without it.
You can't choose to ignore widely replicated, high-sigma data.
Certainly you can. But did he? There is another hypothesis that, for
whatever reason, he's playing a political game, trying to serve as a
bridge, not burning the bridge approaches on either side. That's fine
by me. He's retired, and there is no percentage in it for him to poke
old friends in the eye. He can nudge them with his ambivalent
position, and that's useful.
And if he cannot judge the calorimetry, who the hell does he think
he is expressing any doubts about it?
I don't see any doubts expressed about the calorimetry, Jed.
If he thinks he can judge theory well enough to assert with
confidence that the theoretical "say cold fusion is impossible" then
surely he understands 18th and 19th century calorimetry.
But he is very precisely and exactly not asserting that "with
confidence." He's quite aware of the problem. It seems he's a people
person, his personal connections with Scaramuzzi were very important
to him. Other connections like that exist, and could be very
important to helping the scientific community complete the conversion
process, the turning of the corner. Tell me, what about Dieter Britz?
Isn't that a more telling case?
Surely he knows the literature. And surely he knows the critical
evidence, i.e. the core finding of heat/helium correlation, which is
such a strong piece of work, and reasonably confirmed with higher
accuracy than Miles' work, that establishes a presumption that there
is something going on that can produce helium with the energy of
deuterium fusion, which is either deuterium fusion or a damn good
imitation, such as 4d->Be-8->2 He-4, or the like (which doesn't have
the branching problem but has only a theoretical rate problem, and we
all know how catalysis can whack "theoretical rate" upside the head).
I'd love to have a conversation with Goodstein and maybe I'll get to. Or not.
In his Accountability in Research paper, which I find appalling, he
has the exact same sentence on p. 13.
Yeah. That sentence doesn't say what you misquoted him as saying.
Here is the paper from your web site, I quoted it before.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GoodsteinDwhateverha.pdf
The article that follows was written in 1994, and first appeared
in The American Scholar (vol. 63 p. 527). In the three years since
then much has happened, but little has changed. There have been
reports of increasingly reliable production of excess heat, and of
the detection of 4He residue, and much more. Nevertheless, the most
remarkable fact remains that cold fusion has neither been accepted
by mainstream science, nor has it withered away. The general
situation that the article describes still seems to be in place today.
Nowhere in the paper does he say "nothing has changed." In the
introduction he makes it clear what he's talking about. He's not
talking about research results and new theory. He actually states
that there has been a change in this, with "increasingly reliable
production of excess heat," and, most importantly, the "detection of
4He residue." What is it that has not changed much, but only,
perhaps, "a little."
Not the soundness of the cold fusion hypothesis, but the attitude of
"mainstream science." And the attitude of the researchers in the
field, research has not "withered away" as was confidently predicted
by those thinking that Langmuir's criteria for pathological science
would apply.
I have to agree with Goodstein, with a huge caveat. "Mainstream
science" must mean something like "most scientists," but not
"experts," those familiar with the literature, who are normally the
mainstays of scientific consensus. Cold fusion is an exception, the
acceptance of cold fusion research as legitimate and even important
is proportional to the degree of knowledge of the literature, as a
rule. That's why a 2004 DoE review would have become vastly more
favorable, as to the science, than the 1989 review. Some of those
reviewers, at least, either were familiar or became at least a little
so. Again, when the DoE said that little had changed in their
recommendations, that was about funding, not science. To translate
the significance of the recommendation, since they did not spell it
out, there was no sign from the research that the effect was
well-enough understood to justify a massive program. LENR might well
be real and practically useless, like muon-catalyzed fusion.
You and I might think that unlikely (certainly I think it is a
possbility, but I think it is more likely that applications will be
developed eventually, particularly after the phenomenon is better
understood. The basic recommendation of the DoE "remains the same":
basic research, funded under existing programs. We should all get
behind that, emphasize it, push it, praise it, etc. And continue to
rattle the cage of journals who don't follow the clear recommendation
for publication under peer review. On the other hand, I've got no
problem with a few European journals getting most of the glory.
