On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 11:16 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]>wrote:
> > Some experts do make mistakes, naturally. But not every single one of > them, > No, just the ones claiming nuclear reactions. They represent a small fraction of experts. day in day out, for years, when measuring heat at the watt level with > instruments perfected between 1840 and 1910. That would never happen in the > life of the universe. If that could happen, experimental science would not > work. > > > Now you're just repeating yourself, so I will too. Cold fusion is a theory to explain a wide range of erratic results. There are many examples 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's were in much better journals. And 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. In short, the phenomenon you say couldn't happen is so common, it has a name: pathological science. And it isn't as if the true believers were chosen at random to do cold fusion experiments and they all claimed positive results. The people claiming positive results are the remainder after considerable filtration. In fact in the 2 cases when panels of experts were enlisted to examine the evidence, their judgements were that cold fusion had not been proven. And while it just doesn't seem likely to advocates that so many scientists could be wrong, when the results are as weak as cold fusion results, in fact it is likely. What is not likely is that so many results, from so many different experiments, could all fail to stand out. With an energy density a million times that of dynamite, something more definitive would be expected to appear. Finally, while you find it hard to believe that so many scientists can be wrong, the alternative is that a great many more scientists (i.e. mainstream science) are wrong. A consistent, robust picture based on 60 years of copious and reproducible experimental results would have to be wrong. That's far less likely than a mistaken interpretation of wildly erratic and inconsistent experimental results.
