Kevin O'Malley <kevmol...@gmail.com> wrote: We need to know where to draw the line. Which facts do we consider so > obvious that when someone denies them, they're a debunker rather than small > 's' skeptic. >
It is a judgement call. Science is objective, yet at the finest level of detail, it is a judgement call. It has a strange duality. The key question has always been: How many replications does it take to ensure an effect is real? Everyone will have a different answer. A knowledgeable person will want to look at the papers, and evaluate the skills of the researchers, the choice of instruments, the signal to noise ratios and so on. For an experimental finding as surprising as cold fusion, I think most people will demand 5 or 10 "quality" replications from professional labs. What constitutes "quality" is partly matter of opinion. Somewhere between 10 replications and 180, it becomes irrational to deny the effect is real. Is that number 15? 20? 50? Only you can decide, but I would say that by 1990 there were so many replications of heat and tritium that any continued doubts were irrational. A Bayesian analysis sheds some light on this. (See Johnson and Melich). Still, deciding exactly where you draw the line becomes a little like Mandelbrot's question: "how long is the coast of England?" The closer you look, the fuzzier it becomes. - Jed
