On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > As a practical matter the experimental method works. There is no > possibility that every single researcher has made a mistake in every single > high signal-to-noise ratio result. That would not happen in the life of the > universe. As I've often said, if that could happen we would still be living > in caves. Technology would not exist, never mind science. > > You're just repeating yourself, so I will too. Cold fusion is a theory to explain erratic calorimetry results. There are many example of theories used to explain results that turned out to be wrong. The ether is one example, and it was believed for a century. But of course I shouldn't need to tell CF advocates that scientific ideas held by many scientists can be wrong. That's the bread and butter of their defense of the field. In fact, there are many examples of phenomena widely claimed to have been replicated, for much longer than CF, which are nevertheless rejected by mainstream science. Things like perpetual motion, UFO sightings, any of a wide range of paranormal phenomena, many alternative medical treatments, and so on. Most of these will probably never be proven wrong to the satisfaction of their adherents, but that doesn't make them right. Some arguments for homeopathy, sound eerily similar to CF arguments. Check out this one from the guardian.co.uk (July 2010) "By the end of 2009, 142 randomised control trials (the gold standard in medical research) comparing homeopathy with placebo or conventional treatment had been published in peer-reviewed journals – 74 were able to draw firm conclusions: 63 were positive for homeopathy and 11 were negative. Five major systematic reviews have also been carried out to analyse the balance of evidence from RCTs of homeopathy – four were positive (Kleijnen et al; Linde et al; Linde et al; Cucherat et al) and one was negative (Shang et al)." This is for medicine diluted so that on average less than one molecule of the starting material is present per dose. And while you incorrectly deny the claimed replications of polywater, it is quite similar.There were 450 peer-reviewed publications on polywater. Most of those professional scientists turned out to be wrong. There were 200 on N-rays; also all wrong. Cold fusion has more, but polywater had more than N-rays, and if you can get 450 papers on a bogus phenomenon, twice as many is not a big stretch, especially for a phenomenon with so much greater implication, and if an unequivocal debunking doesn't come along.
