On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Mary Yugo <[email protected]> wrote:
It is absolutely inane to ask critics to "read the literature". You think > we have nothing better to do than to spend time with unlimited quantities > of inadequate and difficult to understand papers? It's your job as > proponent of this technology to choose the few papers, in any exist, maybe > two or three best ones, for us to read. It should be papers that show at > least a watt of CLEARLY and PROPERLY measured excess heat with no infusion > of fresh fuel, running vastly longer -- orders of magnitude longer -- than > a chemical reaction or stored heat could provide. THAT is what Rossi > failed to do. THAT is what you have failed to point us to. And it's your > job as the proponent to do the pointing. It is not our job to go rummaging > through all the "stuff". > I don't think it's inane to ask people to read the literature. The whole LENR discussion is largely one about points that are raised in the LENR literature; or, ideally, it should be. Physicists working in string theory would rightfully expect interlocutors to be familiar with the literature in that area. We can have our doubts about the whole subfield, but if we're to engage it, I think they can reasonably ask us to do the difficult groundwork. Science is rarely something to be neatly packaged up and handed to people in a nice, pre-digested form. There are difficult papers, subtle details, fads, cranks, and so on. I think few would argue that there's an obligation to make things easy for newcomers, although this is obviously something that is nice to do. It's undoubtedly true that it would be easier to satisfy fierce critics of LENR in mainstream physics by doing some of the things you describe, but it seems to me that the whole conversation moved beyond that point about 15 years ago. Mainstream physicists couldn't be be persuaded to drop expectations about such things as fast neutrons before they would even grant consideration of an experiment, and the LENR people gave up and simply moved on. There doesn't seem to be a lot of desire to win fierce critics in mainstream physics over to LENR as far as I can tell. And although their input would no doubt be very useful, I would wager that the field can make progress without them. For these reasons I find it unlikely that you will get the nicely bundled package that you're looking for. In the absence of such a thing, it doesn't seem like there's much to be done apart from becoming familiar with the literature, at least so far as one's training permits. At a minimum, there are several books that give a summary of the field -- not sure if you've had a chance to any read them, but they're worth the time, I think.
