On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 10:57 PM, Kevin O'Malley <kevmol...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Joshua Cude <joshua.c...@gmail.com>wrote: >> >> >> You're right. Polywater is different from cold fusion in that it was >> debunked to everyone's satisfaction. >> >> That may or may not happen in cold fusion, but it hasn't happened yet. >> > > ***Then by your own reasoning, LENR is not pathological science. > Again with the semantics. I don't really care what word you use. To me, both polywater and cold fusion are almost certainly bogus phenomena, they followed similar publication trajectories (if on somewhat different time scales), made essentially no progress after the alleged discovery, and kept a following long after the mainstream had largely dismissed them. They're not identical. Cold fusion got far more attention and love at the start, but polywater got more legitimacy for a longer period (with publications in Science and Nature etc). Since the polywater debunking has been mostly accepted, it can be used as an example of how a large number of legitimate scientists can all make similar blunders, or interpret erratic data in a similarly bogus way. It makes the bogosity of cold fusion much more plausible. In my vocabulary, both are examples of pathological science. Your mileage may vary. (By the way, if you look at another thread here, you'll see that even polywater has not been completely dismissed by everyone. It's the nature of pathological science…)
