Stephen A. Lawrence <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I do not think there are any examples in the history of 20th or 21st > > century experimental science in which a con-man was able to fool > > experimentalists. > > Uri Geller, 1975, SRI. > Ah. I wasn't aware of that one. I gather that was something like a study of ESP. Puthoff and Targ concluded that the tests were "successfully enough to warrant further serious study." I would not call that con a big success. It doesn't take much to get a scientist to say, "I'd like to do more experiments." This about as difficult as convincing a cat to have another bite of filet mignon. ESP is difficult to study. It is psychological, and statistical in nature (assuming it exists at all). Puthoff is not a psychologist, so he is no expert. Calorimetry and measuring steam as about as different from ESP or psychology as branches of science can be. They are among the oldest, best established, and hardest of hard sciences. They do not depend on measuring behavior or having faith in a person. They are based on instrument readings. Just because it is possible to con a physicist into wanting to run additional tests, that does not mean you could fool an expert into thinking that hot air is steam. Conceivably you could do it for a short while with a device that the expert himself had no hand in building, with fake instruments or something, but this configuration was designed by the experts, and they brought their own instruments. Accusations of criminality have also been leveled against Dardik. Skeptics have concluded that he is a con-man who fooled many people, including: * McKubre, even though McKubre tested the technique in his own lab without Dardik or anyone else from Energetics Technology being present. * Duncan, even though Duncan wrote the book on calorimetry. These skeptics believe that Dardik has the power to deceive people from thousand of miles away, by tricks so powerful they affect instrument readings and computer data. In effect, they ascribe magical powers to Dardik. You might as well claim he could change experiments after he dies. McKubre is very careful. He calibrates. You cannot sneak into his lab in the middle of the night and push a few buttons or change a meter and produce a fake result. The people who ascribe this astounding ability to con men seem to have no grasp of what these experiments are like, or how careful someone like McKubre or Duncan is. One of them remarked to me that Duncan "could have caught the fraud" if he had secretly brought a helium detector into the lab at Energetics and surreptitiously captured a sample of gas from the cell. I pointed to this photo of a helium detector: http://lenr-canr.org/Experiments.htm#PhotosENEAFrascati I pointed out: 1. That is not something you can hide under your coat. 2. You have to design and experiment from the ground up to accommodate helium detection; most experiments are not leak-tight enough. 3. You don't just whip out a detector and attach it when no one is looking -- the process takes days or weeks. People who imagine cold fusion might be a combination of fraud and mistakes know nothing about the research, and nothing about science in general. - Jed
