Jeff Fink wrote:
With the exception of you, Mr. Malloy, and me, the contributors to
this forum represent the most amazing dichotomy I have ever
encountered. With open minds and open eyes they fearlessly assail
the bastions of physics, and with rather meager amounts of
experimental data and observations, manage to crack its foundations.
This is a huge misunderstanding.
Yes, some people here fearlessly assail the bastions of physics. But
Fleischmann and I (and many others) see ourselves as fearlessly
DEFENDING the bastions of physics. We are "painfully conventional
people" and we think the skeptics have lost their minds, and lost all
touch with reality. We think they have forgotten the conservation of
energy, the laws of chemistry, the primacy of replicated experiments
over theory, and so on. We are normal. They are the outlandish
weirdos. All the things they accuse us of, such as handwaving and
inventing crazy theories to explain away facts, are actually what
they do -- not us.
Most of the world sees it the other way around, but that is because
people do not know the detailed facts of the matter.
Fleischmann and I think that science has hardly begun and there are
vast areas of ignorance and undiscovered facts. He says, "whenever
you hear someone say 'that's a closed field, we know just about all
there is to know,' I can tell it is about to erupt in confusion and
be overturned." However, this is not to say that established laws, or
foundations, such as conservation of energy or conventional nuclear
theory is likely to "crack." At worst, the textbook laws are special
cases, or limited cases, and they will have to be extended or tweaked
to explain cold fusion. (I think I speak for Fleischmann on this
matter -- I have had long conversations with him about these matters.
But I apologize if I have misrepresented his views. In any case, many
researchers believe this to be the case.)
Therefore, it is not surprising or uncharacteristic of people like me
to assume that biologists are correct, and natural selection can
account for all of the observations they have made so far. As I have
often said, I assume that experts such as Fleischmann and McKubre are
right, and people who know nothing about calorimetry or
electrochemistry such as Morrison and the editor of Sci. Am. are
wrong. Not only do I assume that, but I am well-enough versed in the
technical arguments to prove it in detail, to my own satisfaction anyway.
A person must often take expert opinion on faith, because we can
seldom work through the arguments in detail. However, in the case of
cold fusion and natural selection, I have actually worked through
many detailed arguments. I have done hands-on cold fusion and
biology, and I have read a great deal of both.
(At ICCF conferences I sometimes find that I know more specific
details about a wider range of cold fusion experiments than some
experimentalists know. I have what you might call a worm's eye view.
Details are all I know. I do not understand advanced physics and
chemistry, but I happen to know, for example, in considerable detail
how Irina Savvatimova used thermal ionization mass spectroscopy
(TIMS), which involves heating up a sample until it ionizes, and then
accelerating the ions through a magnetic field . . . etc., etc.. I
had to figure that out what's what with TIMS in order to edit the
paper she sent, because she used the wrong words for TIMS jargon. She
directly translated the Russian terms.)
I am no expert, but not a clueless amateur either. This forum is not
appropriate to argue out the details of creationist theory, but based
on what I know of biology, I think it has no merit. It is as bad as
Morrison's objections to cold fusion. I am not going to say any more
than that, because it is off topic.
- Jed
