At 09:36 AM 12/4/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
People in a given field are sometimes biased against new ideas
proposed by outsiders. That is not because they are mistaken about
their own ideas. Their own ideas are valid, but the outsider's ideas
are an improvement. They oppose the ideas because -- again as I said
-- they know nothing about them.
Yes. That happens.
The cascade on cold fusion was facilitated by the claim that the
Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect was quickly associated with "fusion." I
still read material, recently written, that appears to assume that
Pons and Fleischmann claimed fusion, i.e., claimed the "impossible."
And then, of course, their claims "were not reproduced."
Yes, Jed, I know this drives you batty. After all, 153 Frenchmen
can't be wrong. Or something like that. However, Pons and Fleischmann
originally claimed substantial neutron radiation. They knew that this
radiation was far below what their heat would indicate, had the
reaction been d-d fusion. But even that low level was artifact. In
reality, in hindsight, the FPHE generates somewhere between little to
no neutron radiation. If there is anything, it's probably a secondary
effect. (And that's exactly what SPAWAR claims.)
*That* was never replicated, the opposite.
And the heat was not a "nuclear effect," in itself. By the time that
the nuclear ash was identified, the cascade had fully formed and
physicists were not paying attention. And why, indeed, should they
pay attention?
This was not a physics experiment. It was chemistry. The experts,
with few exceptions, were chemists. One of the real tragedies of
1989-1990 was that chemists failed to defend their own. "Nuclear" be
damned! These cells were generating heat, and chemistry wasn't
adequate to explain it, apparently, and contrary theories -- i.e.,
that there was some mistake -- were *never* confirmed. And once
helium was known to be generated commensurate with the heat,
scientifically it was all over. The correlation showed that the
measurements were not artifact, and the value of the correlation
established that, very likely, the reaction was indeed some kind of
fusion, mechanism unknown.
So why didn't the chemists stand up for their colleagues? My view has
become that it was not -- and is not -- the job of the chemists to
explain the FPHE, other than through describing the chemical
conditions. It was -- and remains -- the job of physicists,
particularly experts in quantum field theory. And, it turns out, such
people often had positive opinions about the possibility of cold
fusion, going way back. They knew that the approximations of quantum
mechanics used to rule out d-d fusion were just that, approximations,
and they knew that we didn't know enough about the solid state to
rule out "unknown nuclear reactions," which is what Pons and
Fleischmann actually claimed.
Had the chemists stood up to be counted, well, the American Chemical
Society is the largest scientific society in the world. The American
Physical Society, because of the large big-science projects, had the
political connections, and strong economic motives, but it was the
silence of the chemists that allowed the physicists to be so
effective in suppressing funding.
The historians of science have begun to examine the history of cold
fusion, and I expect to see much more in the future. This really was,
as Huizenga called it, the Scientific Fiasco of the Century, and he
didn't know the half of it.
I think the scientific method ensures that when a large group of
people study physical phenomena for a long time, most of their data
will be good, and their conclusions correct. If that were not true,
the scientific method would fail. Our textbooks and technology would
be far less reliable than they actually are.
A large group of scientists, some recruited by the DoE for the ERAB
panel report, and some funded by the DoE, did study the phenomenon of
cold fusion, but with utterly inadequate preparation and under time
constraints that made their negative results inevitable. The DoE
wasted a lot of money in this way, and they got nothing conclusive
out of it. The research itself was useful. It established part of the
parameter space for cold fusion. Basically, if you do what they did,
you don't see the effect. That's important to know!
The problem, though, was in the conclusions drawn from that research.
Somehow, because these were "reputable research groups," their
negative results were presumed to negate positive results from
others, which is preposterous. A failed replication is simply a
failed replication; only if conditions could be *exactly controlled*
could one even begin to assume that a failed replication is contrary
evidence to positive reports. Once the basic FPHE had been confirmed
by one or two groups, the search for cause or artifact should have
become intense. Instead, the scientific community largely turned away.
[...]
Frankly, that's silly. That reminds me of assertions that oil
companies are suppressing cold fusion. Or the counter-assertions by
opponents that cold fusion researchers are only in it for the grant
money. Believe me, there is no grant money in cold fusion!
There will be. Soon. There already is some level of funded research.
But nobody will get rich from this, not from the basic scientific
research. It will be done to resolve specific open questions. (For
example, a more accurate determination of the the heat/helium ratio
with the FPHE.) Massive searches of the parameter space will be
funded by private enterprise, probably, though some public research
might be done in this area.
What I see near-term funding for is targeted research to resolve open
issues, and particularly to nail down what has already been observed
and at least partially confirmed. This may extend into replication of
already-described effects, with improved instrumentation and more
detailed study.
Note: this kind of funding of research was the recommendation of both
U.S. DoE reviews of cold fusion. The 2004 review was unanimous on it.
It's really outrageous that forces against cold fusion were able to
prevent *any funding* from the DoE on this. Politically, we need to
make that point. The pseudoskeptics have been able to influence the
DoE to neglect the recommendations of their own expert panels.
Properly, there should be some faces with egg on them.
I know enough climatologists to know they are not living high on the
hog. They do not rake in the dollars. They work long hours on
tedious, demanding, boring science.
Life is not a conspiracy or a potboiler made-for-TV movie.
Right.
I have a great deal of respect for those skeptics who have actually
gotten their hands dirty and who have done cold fusion research,
attempting to replicate some-times elusive results. Some of what the
cold fusion community has routinely accepted may indeed be artifact.
Not every anomaly is a nuclear effect!
Scientific research should never be done to prove or disprove
something, except in this way: if we believe something, we test it.
We attempt, with whatever we can muster, to disprove what we believe.
In order to do that effectively, we may learn to avoid "believing"
anything. We just have ideas.
