Philip Winestone wrote: >Pathological scepticism is not the same as deliberately lying to cover up >meaningful results.
That is true. But in the case of the NHE and Toyota, I sense that the decision makers do not believe the results, so they lie about them. I think that is also how the people at MIT felt when they covered up their 1989 results. As I recall, Gene Mallove agreed with me. Our guess, based on talking with these people, is that when they saw positive results emerge, they thought something like this: "Damn, that looks like excess heat. It must be some kind of crazy instrument error, or just noise. But I better get rid of it, because if this goes public people will say that we here at MIT / NHE / CalTech also got excess heat, and the rumors will go on for years." The signal at MIT was marginal at best, and some CF researchers such as Ed Storms think it probably was noise. The Miles experiment at the NHE was clearly excess heat, but my sense is that the director there was sick and tired of the whole thing and he wanted to get the program over with. He probably knows that CF is real, but he figured that by then they had blown $20 million and it was not going to pan out into a useful produce, so why drag it out. The people above him, and at Toyota, clearly feel that CF is a bunch of garbage and they had been had by Fleischmann and Pons. They felt this way because they think that Robert Park, the APS and the U.S. DoE is more credible than their own researchers. That's what the researchers told me. The U.S. Navy feels the same way. They ordered their own researchers to stop based on articles in the New York Times. Apparently they think some idiot reporter is better qualified to judge calorimetry than a Distinguished Professor with 50 year! s of experience. In the DoE 2004 reviewer's comments, you can see people making up ridiculous excuses in order to dismiss the results, put the subject out their minds, and get back to serious work. You can see they never took it seriously long enough to think about the data. Their statements were a thoughtless, reflex rejection of facts, which is indistinguishable from lying. The problem is that the decision makers themselves, in high places in the government, corporations, and the science reporter at Time magazine, for example -- haven't got a clue about these issues. They know zip about basic science & technology. I have spoken with them from time to time, and I used to be shocked at their ignorance, but now I am used to it. They do not know the difference between nuclear and chemical changes. They cannot explain the difference between hardware and software. They essentially have no idea where electricity comes from. When I have tried to explain how it might be that it takes more energy to grow, harvest and process corn than you get from ethanol, top reporters and policy makers have told me I must be wrong because that would be a violation of the conservation of energy. Taubes was supposedly trained as an engineer but his book reveals that he does not know basic facts that I knew perfectly well in 7th grade. He thinks that when you stir a cold ! fusion cell, the liquid on one side might be still be 50 deg C hotter than the other side. I see this as part of a society-wide failure in education. I do not think people decades ago were any better educated. More to the point, my mother did not think so, and she was here, observant & well educated decades ago, so as the Beatles said, "your mother should know." (And born a long long time ago.) She said in the 1920s most people in New York City had no idea where Europe was, or even where the Statue of Liberty is. But back then, society was less technological and there were fewer science-based decisions to make, so the ignorance did not cause as much damage. - Jed
