On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 7:08 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
> Joshua Cude <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> Furthermore, it's easy to imagine experiments that exclude artifacts, >> making them falsifiable. >> > > Yes, it is. And all of the mainstream experiments have excluded artifacts. > No, they haven't. Not to the satisfaction of most scientists. The erratic nature, the absence of interlab reproducibility exclude real effects more plausibly than they exclude artifacts. > That is why you and all the other skeptics have never identified a single > artifact in the work of Fleischmann, McKubre, Storms or any other major > researchers. You would have found one by now if there were any. > > That is why you and all true believers have never identified a single nuclear reaction that fits the evidence. You would have found one by now if there were any. > You claim there are artifacts, but since you never say what they might be, > or show any evidence that they actually exist, you might as well be saying > that unicorns are causing false excess heat. Your assertion cannot be > tested or falsified. It has no meaning. > > You claim there are nuclear reactions, but since you never say what they might be, or show any evidence they account for the heat, you might as well be saying that unicorns cause the excess heat. Etc. > >> You have said that no scientist could deny palpable heat from a >> completely isolated device. So boil the water in an olympic pool with a few >> grams of metal hydride, and artifacts are excluded. >> > > An Olympic pool is far too big. This same test has been done hundreds of > times on a small scale, boiling away water with no input in a test tube. > There is no chance the water was not actually boiling, and there is no > chance this came from stored chemical energy. > > Those experiments are anecdotal, not obviously isolated, not independently witnessed, and totally unreproducible. The only published ones are from the early 90s. That's why you wrote " ... It is utterly impossible to fake palpable heat.... I do not think any scientist will dispute this. ..." in the future tense. That's why people to this day think fractions of a watt are exciting, and even those are scarce in the literature. > Scaling up this experiment to an Olympic pool would not make it more > convincing, and it would not improve the signal to noise ratio. You are > moving the goal posts and setting this absurd goal > First, it's not absurd, because true believers often talk about GJ/g potential energy density, and that would be enough. Second, it was not stated as a necessary condition (as I elaborated later), but as a demonstration that artifacts are in principle falsifiable. > > >> That's an extreme example . . . >> > > It is a preposterous example. > > > To restore the elaboration… That's an extreme example, but if cold fusion experiments were quantitatively reproducible, if they were reproducible from lab to lab with written instructions only, if they scaled in some reasonable and consistent way with the metal, then artifacts would be excluded. But they don't. McKubre has said there has been no quantitative reproducibility, and he and Storms (here, a day or 2 ago) have said written instructions are not enough.Cold fusion results are much more characteristic of a combination of errors, artifacts, and confirmation bias. And the slow decrease in the publication rate is consistent with that as well.
