On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> He said nothing that "skeptics" did not say in 1990. > Please. My main argument is the complete absence of progress in 24 years. No one argued that in 1990. I refer to your 2001 opinion that the results fail to stand out, and to the opinion of the 2004 DOE panel. That McKubre's claim of high reproducibility was premature. That in 2008 he admits the absence of quantitative and inter-lab reproducibility. That the size of the claimed effect has gotten smaller (and the number of publications dramatically smaller), which is consistent with pathological science. > Everything they said then and that Cude repeats now was promptly disproved > by experts back then. > The best rebuttal would be better evidence, which never comes. In the last decade, only a few refereed publications claim excess heat, and only in the range of one watt. And nearly all the excitement in the field is about experiments with completely unreliable calorimetry, many of of them reported by companies looking for investment, headed by people with no experience in science like Rossi, Godes, Dardik, Mills. Cold fusion represents an energy density a million times higher than dynamite from a table-top experiment. If it were real, it would not resist protracted experiment for a quarter century. It would be easy to prove unequivocally. It would not need to be defended by the likes of you, or Krivit, or Lomax, or Carat, or Tyler, or Alain, or any of the other groupies who have no background in science. > > My sense is that Taubes is sincere. He says this stuff because he is a > scientific illiterate. > This from the guy who spent weeks two years ago arguing that steam cannot be heated above 100C at atmospheric pressure.