Thanks Jed for trying to keep such people honest. You do a masterful
job. You might ask the dear Professor a question about honesty since
his article was about moral and honest behavior in science. Clearly, to
publish fraudulent information supporting a discovery is wrong. Is it
also not equally wrong to report fraudulent information dismissing a
discovery? Does not a respected scholar have an obligation to learn
something about a subject before dismissing it? Would the professor
respect a scientist who simply made up information in his publication?
Why is the information he has published about cold fusion any different?
Ed
Jed Rothwell wrote:
Here is romanticized view of scientists, which includes a dig at cold
fusion:
http://www.crisispapers.org/essays7p/sci-morality.htm
I wrote the author a letter, which he uploaded here, along with a
rebuttal by an anonymous professor who buys his opinions wholesale from
Robert Park. I could probably have written the Professor's side of the
debate better than he himself managed to do it, since left out a few
cliches such as "extraordinary claims . . . bla, bla, bla."
See:
http://www.crisispapers.org/features/ep-blogs.htm
Here is my response to the author, Dr. Partridge:
Thanks for putting the messages in one place. It looks good.
I agree the professor should have the last word, especially when he
claims that Julian Schwinger and Heinz Gerischer were "isolated" and
they resembled "ESPers," or that Naturwissenschaften and the Japanese
Journal of Applied Physics are not "principal physics journals" and the
Japanese Institute of Pure and Applied Physics is a "peripheral
scientific organization." It is Japan's preeminent physics society,
equivalent to the APS or the Royal Society. This is like saying Toyota
is a "peripheral" automobile manufacturer. Such assertions speak for
themselves! No rebuttal is needed.
The professor illustrates why it is essential to look carefully at
primary sources, and at the actual content of a claim, rather than
trying to judge based on rumors and second-hand impressions, and by
one's fragmentary impressions of, say, a foreign physics society one has
only vaguely heard of, or never heard of. The professor dismisses the
claim based on an opinion expressed by Robert Park, which in turn was
based on what some other unnamed people told Park. This is a third-hand
opinion, or perhaps fourth hand. No one in this chain of whispers has
cited an experimental fact or figure. No one has demonstrated knowledge
of what instruments were used, what was measured, what the
signal-to-ratio was, or any other salient, objectively measured fact. It
is hard to imagine a less scientific approach!
Regarding your statements, I never asserted that there is a conspiracy
against cold fusion. That's absurd. I know most of the main opponents,
and they are not conspiring together in any sense. See chapter 19 of my
book, which you can now read in English, Portuguese or Japanese:
http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm
Also, you made an annoying technical error in your statement, and I wish
you would correct it. You wrote:
"Mr. Rothwell will surely complain that the critics of Cold Fusion have
no right to dismiss the theory if they refuse to read the published
reports."
Cold fusion is not a theory; it is an experimental observation. There is
a world of difference. Most cold fusion researchers are
experimentalists, and it irks them when people confuse them with
theorists. To be more exact, cold fusion is: "a set of a widely
replicated, high signal-to-noise experimental observations of excess
heat without chemical ash, tritium, gamma rays, helium production
commensurate with a plasma fusion reaction, transmutations and other
nuclear effects that have been published in mainstream, peer-reviewed
journals of physics and chemistry." That's a mouthful, but anyway,
please call it an "experimental observation."
You wrote:
"I feel confident that if and when Cold Fusion can come up with
unequivocally and decisively replicable experiments, mainstreams
physicists will take notice."
In my opinion, they came out with unequivocally and decisively
replicable experiments in 1990. But I do not know why you are so
confident that mainstream physicists will take notice of such things. I
can list hundreds of major technological and scientific breakthroughs
that were ignored or denigrated for decades. See, for example, the
history of marine chronometers, aviation, semiconductors, hygiene
(Semmelweis), pasteurization (which was not enforced in New York City
until 1917), the effects of AIDS in women, helicobacter and ulcers,
amorphous semiconductors, and the maser and laser. Someone who calls
himself a "gadfly" should know this kind of history. It shows that
gadflies are important, and that people often swat at them. Regarding
the maser, here are some thought-provoking quotes from the autobiography
of Nobel laureate Townes:
"One day after we had been at it [maser research] for about two years,
Rabi and Kusch, the former and current chairmen of the departmentboth
of them Nobel laureates for work with atomic and molecular beams, and
both with a lot of weight behind their opinionscame into my office and
sat down. They were worried. Their research depended on support from the
same source as did mine. 'Look,' they said, 'you should stop the work
you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not going to work.
We know it's not going to work. You're wasting money. Just stop!'
The problem was that I was still an outsider to the field of molecular
beams, as they saw it. . . . I simply told them that I thought it had a
reasonable chance and that I would continue. I was then indeed thankful
that I had come to Columbia with tenure. (p. 65)"
Six months after Townes et al. built the first maser, they completed
another one and operate the two together in tests which proved the
functionality of the devices and purity (regularity) of the signal.
Skeptical opposition continued for a few years:
"Beforeand even afterthe maser worked, our description of its
performance met with disbelief from highly respected physicists, even
though no new physical principles were really involved. Their objections
went much deeper than those that had led Rabi and Kusch to try to kill
the project in its cradle . . .
Llewelyn H. Thomas, a noted Columbia theorist, told me that the maser
flatly could not, due to basic physics principles, provide a pure
frequency with the performance I predicted. So certain was he that he
more or less refused to listen to my explanations. After it did work, he
just stopped talking to me. . . .
. . . I visited Denmark and saw Niels Bohr . . . I described the maser
and its performance. 'But that is not possible,' he exclaimed. I assured
him it was. Similarly, at a cocktail party in Princeton, New Jersey, the
Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann asked what I was working on.
After I told him about the maser and the purity of its frequency, he
declared, 'That can't be right!' But it was, I replied, and told him it
was already demonstrated. (p. 69)"
Most cold fusion researchers are retired professors in their 70s and
80s. They are the WWII generation, which means they are open to change,
and they base their opinions on experiments, not theory. They tell me
that although there has always been opposition to new ideas, it seems to
be worse nowadays. Science has grown increasingly conservative. Back in
the 1940s and '50s, von Neumann might have dismissed the maser out of
hand at first, but I expect that after hundreds of peer-reviewed
replications were published in mainstream journals, he would have gone
back to read them, and he would have changed his mind. Nowadays people
like Park and your friend the professor never budge. They never do read
the journal papers. They make up their minds from first impressions and
newspaper articles instead.
- Jed
