At 07:51 PM 8/20/2012, Harry Veeder wrote:
On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 5:23 PM, James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>
>> if conditions are kept the same, it can suffice *for comparisons.*
>>
>
> What if the comparison is between a known heat source (ie: "unity") and a
> suspected anomalous heat source (ie: "above unity")?
>
> Why isn't that adequate for a qualitative demonstration that puts to rest
> all questions concerning the _existence_ of the phenomenon?
I don't know why it isn't good enough, but until independent
replications are made the possibility of fraud or faulty instruments
will be used by prominent skeptics (such as the editors of Nature and
Scientific American) to dismiss the achievement.
Well, mostly they ignore all current publications and results. Harry
is referring to very old comments, for the most part. I think there
have been some relatively recent comments from Scientific American,
but even those were pretty old.
What's happening is that publishers who publish cold fusion research
(such as the largest scientific publishers in the world, Elsevier and
Springer-Verlag, and the largest scientific society in the world, the
American Chemical Society) are gradually eating the lunch of smaller
publishers like Nature and Scientific American. It's an unstable
situation. It will collapse, eventually.
I've debated this with plenty of pseudoskeptics. They claim that
Elsevier and Springer-Verlag are only motivated by profit.
Yes. So? The point is that these profit-making publishers, with much
at stake, are risking their reputations by publishing material on
cold fusion. Naturwissenschaften was founded in 1913, has a high
impact factor, and is Springer-Verlag's "flagship multidisciplinary
journal." They started getting so many cold fusion papers, once they
started publishing a few, back almost ten years ago, as I recall,
that they needed to appoint a LENR editor, and appointed Storms.
The pseudoskeptics frame this as "cold fusion fanatics took over
Naturwissenschaften," and they claim that NW is a "biology journal."
That's based on the bulk of articles currently being about biology.
It's totally irrelevant, NW actually prefers cross-disciplinary
articles, so the biology articles often have some other twist to
them, such as biophysics or the like.
Realize this: the pseudoskeptics are behaving like fanatic
pseudoscience supporters. They are claiming that the scientific
journals are "biased." They swallow and promote every alleged fact
that appears to support their position, and ignore massive evidence
to the contrary. They think that cold fusion is like homeopathy,
which is preposterous. Their own position more resembles that of
those attached to homeopathy in spite of the lack of evidence.
(The situation of homeopathy is complex, and when I refer to lack of
evidence, I'm referring to evidence supporting a theory of action
that depends on very high dilutions, that would be effective in
carefully-controlled double blind work, not of the overall
effectiveness of homeopathy as a treatment regimen or practice, which
may be effective for entirely independent reasons.)
These are all signs that the pseudoskeptical position on cold fusion
is actually dead, we are only seeing an illusion of continuance.
There remeans real skepticism, which properly applies to any new,
unconfirmed findings, and which, properly, leads to investigation.
