Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
However, that comment from the review is actually conservative. Storms
does not state that biological transmutation is real, but is noting a
rather obvious fact: we reject the concept of biological transmutation
because we reject the concept of nuclear reactions at low
temperatures. . . .
It is conservative. Some people have difficulty understanding that in
science it is sometimes conservative to make a radical assertion, or to
reach an astounding, seemingly untenable conclusion. For a person
committed to following the rules, you have to follow them all the way,
regardless of where they take you. That's why Martin Fleischmann says:
"we are painfully conventional people." He means it.
You know, if bcrowell were a cold fusion fanatic, pretending to be a
pseudoskeptic, he couldn't do a better send-up.
May-bee. But I myself got tired of reading that sort of thing years ago,
and I have no desire to imitate it. It is a little like imitating
creationists who claim that: "Darwin never tried to address the
complexity of the eye, did he? So there!" See "Origin of the Species,"
chapter 6, "Organs of extreme perfection and complication:"
http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-06.html
I do not debate creationists but if I did, I would get tired of issuing
that particular rebuttal time after time, knowing that such people do
not do their homework and would not understand "Origin of the Species"
even if they did read it. Granted, it is a tough book, and so are the
modern versions of the theory such as "The Selfish Gene." No one ever
said that such ideas are obvious to the amateur, or easy to understand.
I have little patience with people who imagine that anything they cannot
understand in the first reading cannot be true. I like Oliver
Heaviside's comment about that. When someone complained to him this his
papers were hard to read, he responded: "That may well be -- but they
were much more difficult to write."
Mike McKubre has remarked that the skeptics attacks against cold fusion
are notable mainly because they are so weak. In debates such as Morrison
versus Fleischmann
(http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf) Morrison's
arguments are not clever, subtle, or close to the truth. Nor are they
deceptive or unfair. They are ludicrous. McKubre says: "I could do a
much better job demolishing many of the claims than skeptics do." I am
sure he could, and so could I. I do not know if I could write a
burlesque version of the skeptic's presentation, but I have written real
critiques of actual papers that point out more errors than the typical
skeptic is aware of.
That's not even considering the countless ad hominem attacks by
skeptics. I know more about the peculiarities of many researchers than
the skeptics do. I could probably do a better job on the ad hominem
front as well. I refrain from that because ad hominem arguments are
logical fallacies; the personal behavior and beliefs of researchers are
no one's business but their own; it turns out that most people
everywhere are as peculiar as the cold fusion researchers (although
perhaps more inclined to hide their oddness); and finally, because
gossip bores me.
Cold fusion is mired in academic politics. Probably no subject in the
history of physics has been so mired in politics and emotion. In the
social sciences, medicine, and in other academic fields such as
literature many subjects are now and always have been politically
charged. For example, social science conclusions with regard to racial
differences, race superiority and eugenics are fraught with emotion. The
fact that cold fusion is politically charged is partly a partly a
pocketbook issue, but most -- I think -- a coincidence of history. It
just happens that people discovered plasma fusion first, and cold fusion
second. People have an tendency to think that whatever they first
learned about must be the dominate type, and the best, most useful and
most correct type, and any subsequent discovery or invention must fit
the pattern of the first one. This tendency was noted by Francis Bacon
and many others. That is why you see theorists straining to find reasons
why cold fusion is able to "suppress" neutrons, as if the atoms in the
lattice somehow know about plasma fusion theory, and they are
frantically rushing around trying to stop those neutrons from emerging
from the reaction sites, like Maxwel's demon's playing whack-a-mole.
Anyway, one of unfortunate side-effect of the politics is that skeptics
have seldom read the literature and tried to write a credible technical
critique of the research. The ones who made an honest effort, Morrison
and Hoffman, were both nitwits in my opinion, and their papers and books
are ludicrous, as I said. (Lomax thinks that Hoffman has merit, but
McKubre and others at SRI, and I, disagree.) What is worse is that
people knowledgeable about the subject who could write more critical
reviews sometimes pull their punches. I know that I have done that, and
I know several others who have. This is not because they want to
"protect" people in the field. There is little or no collegiate
admiration among cold fusion researchers.
We do not mute criticism or pull our punches to protect others but
because we know that any report of weakness will be blown out of
proportion and used by skeptics to denounce the field in ways that are a
damn nuisance. It doesn't do any good to write a careful critique. The
people you are critiquing will probably ignore you -- because they have
heard torrents of nonsense. I have difficulty persuading them to fix the
English composition in their papers, never mind the content. The people
opposed to the field will quote the critique out of context and make
more of than they should. Getting back to the example from Darwin,
creationists often quote chapter 6 out of context to make it seem that
Darwin agrees with them, because Darwin begins by making concessions and
revealing the potential weaknesses of his own argument. That's how a
brilliant scientist makes an air-tight academic argument. You admit
there could be a weakness, you describe it as carefully as you can, and
then you confront it head on. Darwin wrote:
"Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of
difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave
that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered;
but, to the best of my judgment, the greater number are only apparent,
and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to my theory. . . .
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for
adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different
amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic
aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely
confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. . . . "
The creationists don't get it. They do not see what he is doing here.
They do not grasp the concept of a statement made "for the sake of
argument." They think any concession is a sign of weakness. Any argument
that begins by granting that you "freely confess" the opposing point of
view seems valid is a losing argument. This is similar to the way
skeptics fail to see that Storms is being more conservative by
discussing the biological aspects of cold fusion, not less conservative.
I understand why the CMNS discussion group is members-only and you have
to promise not to talk about it outside the group. I myself do not want
to participate with those restrictions, but I can well understand what
motivates them to set those rules. It is to avoid the kind of
distortions the skeptics will make of an honest critique.
- Jed
