On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Kevin O'Malley <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I would estimate the chance of making a mistake that leads to positive > result to be 1 in 4. You can use whatever estimate suits your fancy > afterwards. That means 3 in 4 are genuine, mistake-free positive results, > right? So let's be even more generous to the argument and make it 1 in 3. > So if 3 independent labs generate positive results due to mistakes, it's 1 > in 3^3 or 1 in 27 chance of happening. In my book, if there was a 1 in 10 > chance of a professional scientist generating such errors, he should be > fired; but that's just me. > > Since there have been more than 14,700 replications (see below), the > chance of measuring errors or noise causing false positives in replication > would be 1/3 ^ 14700, which is ~10^-5000 > Wow. I had no idea. Now, why didn't they just do this bit of math for the DOE panel instead of trying to convince them with boring old scientific evidence. You can't dispute 10^-5000, so they would have all been convinced cold fusion is real, instead of 17 of 18 saying the evidence was not conclusive. And then all the funding they wanted would have been theirs. Have you contacted the DOE? But statistical analysis depends on the assumptions. Mine would go like this: There is an appreciable chance that calorimetric artifacts or errors would appear in cold fusion experiments. Rothwell writes: "calorimetric errors and artifacts are more common than researchers realize". In some of those cases, the scientists would be convinced that apparent excess heat must be nuclear. For those scientists, if they keep at it long enough, the chance that they would see more artifacts or commit more errors supporting their ideas approaches 100%, influenced by wishful thinking and the huge benefit to man and themselves that successful results promise. So, then any number of successful claims are possible limited only by the time and energy true believers are prepared to invest, and the amount of funding they can find to support them. Storms wrote: "...many of us were lured into believing that the Pons-Fleischmann effect would solve the world's energy problems and make us all rich." Cold fusion is not the first phenomenon where this apparently unlikely situation of mass delusion has occurred.
