On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 6:48 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]>wrote:
> Suppose an experiment is like tossing a coin (or a series of coins). Run a > lot of experiments, you might see a long series of some outcome. That > doesn't mean that you can control this. > "Ordinarily, new scientific discoveries are claimed to be consistent and reproducible; as a result, if the experiments are not complicated, the discovery can usually be confirmed or disproved in a few months. The claims of cold fusion, however, are unusual in that even the strongest proponents of cold fusion assert that the experiments, for unknown reasons, are not consistent and reproducible at the present time. However, even a single short but valid cold fusion period would be revolutionary."- Dr. Norman Ramsey, Nobel laureate and professor of physics at Harvard University was the only person on the the 1989 Department of Energy cold fusion review panel to voice a dissenting opinion. Ramsey insisted on the inclusion of this preamble as an alternative to his resignation from the panel. What Dr. Ramsey meant by "revolutionary" is that there would be a new scientific field opened up. Science is the art of public reproduciblity and we're pretty good at it by now. If the effect is real, the scientific arts will very likely make it not only reproducible but commensurate with the body of theory. At that point it is a matter of engineering to make it controllable and we're pretty damn good at engineering too.
