Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
If it only occurs once then it isn't scientific -- yet. You have to
reproduce it. If you cannot reproduce it, then eventually you must
conclude that you did not see it.
Nonsense. If you cannot reproduce it you must conclude that it is very
hard to reproduce. There's no need to conclude that you did not see it at
all (unless, of course, you weren't quite sure you saw it to start with).
My statement was sloppy. I did not mean that literally. Mizuno did not
conclude that events never occurred. He concluded they were caused by
random electronic noise rather than actual neutrons, so they had no deep
significance. He turned out to be wrong, but most of the time, most
researchers who reach that conclusion are right.
When a phenomenon is elusive, with a low s/n ratio, and when it may well be
electronic noise, a researcher has to draw the line eventually and stop
trying to figure out what causes it. That is unfortunate, but life is short
and we cannot exhaustively follow up on every single anomaly.
There have been a few instances in which irreproducible but high-sigma CF
events occurred. The best examples are the 1985 explosion in Fleischmann
and Pon's lab, and Mizuno's 1991 massive heat after death event. Even
though these could not be reproduced, because of technical difficulties and
safety concerns, the researchers themselves never had the slightest doubt
the events were real, and anomalous. I have no doubt either, because they
fit into the pattern of CF effects that *can* be reproduced.
It was most unfortunate that the 1985 and 1991 events were not recorded
properly with good instruments, and the physical evidence from them was not
preserved. F&P and Mizuno were inexcusably unprofessional in these
instances! Other researchers, such as Patterson, were far worse, because
they apparently caused dozens of even hundreds of high-sigma reproducible
events, but on all those occasions they used substandard, unreliable
instruments and manual data collection (pencil and paper) instead of
recording the data in a detailed, coherent, machine readable format. What
an idiotic, tragic waste!
- Jed
