Lawrence de Bivort wrote:
Like it or not, he IS a scientist, and quite
prominently respected as one. And more than
that, he is an influential scientist.
No. As I shall show below, when the subject of
cold fusion comes up, this person suddenly stops being a scientist.
And, yes, he reached the point where he doesnt
want to hear anything new about CF.
That is perfectly reasonable. Life is short and
no one has time to investigate everything.
However, if he does not read the literature he
has no right to any opinion on the subject, positive or negative.
He did not reject the notion that there has been
progress in CF; he did assume that there
probably hadnt been enough to yet bring it the
amount of credibility that might lead him to
take another look at CF. I want to stress that
this person is rational, friendly, dedicated,
not uncurious, and quite accessible. He is, in a
nutshell, a good, smart and credible person.
Not with regard to cold fusion. He has no
credibility because he has read nothing and knows
nothing about the subject. His assumption has no
basis. Just being an expert on the general
subject area does not give you a free pass.
Experimental science is always about specifics. I
am an expert programmer in many ways but I know
little about Internet security, except what I
read in the ZoneAlarm documentation. So I have no
business pontificating about that, and no
credibility. If someone gave me a month to learn
about Internet security I would soon know much
more than most computer users. If this scientist
were to take a month to learn about cold fusion
he would soon know more about it that I do. But
until he does that, he knows nothing.
By framing materials I mean a written item
that out-frames this basic antipathy toward CF.
That is, it presents CF in such a way that it
systematically overcomes each of the causes of
the antipathy. Much of doing this is linguistic
it requires the use of precise and well-conceived language.
The books by Beaudette and Storms fill the bill.
As I said, this is not by any reach an unreasonable person. And, I think, he
is typical of many physicists and chemists when it now comes to thinking
about CF. If you can't win this fellow over, there will be many others who
won't be won over. And this means, generally, that CF will continue to
struggle under and suffer from the weight of skepticism.
He is typical. He is also probably a lost cause.
All discoveries and inventions in history have
opposed by people like him. With regard to cold
fusion he has forgotten the fundamental rule, as Rob Duncan put it:
"The Scientific Method is a wonderful thing, use it always, no exceptions!"
I am sorry to be dogmatic but yes he is
unreasonable. A trained scientist who makes
assertions about experimental evidence he has not
read is unreasonable by definition. It is hard to
imagine a more clear-cut example of being unreasonable and unscientific.
Here is the crux of the matter. Social science
research has shown that people's minds and
imaginations are not unified. The mind and
personality are not one entity. Apparently,
multiple thought processes occur within your
brain and they are often at odds with one
another. In other words, a person can be
perfectly reasonable, logical, objective and
scientific about one subject, but just the
opposite about another subject. The person will
not even realize he is being inconsistent. This
happens to everyone, albeit to some more than
others. This is not an illness or abnormality. It
is simply the way the mind works.
T. H. Huxley was a brilliant scientist, and one
of the greatest educators in history. He was
beloved by his students. He was kindly, gentle
and as a scientist objective and fair down to his
fingertips. And yet regrettably he was deeply
prejudiced against black people. (Perhaps this
was because some of his American relatives were
on the wrong side of the Civil War.) He failed to
realize how grotesquely unscientific and unfair
this bigotry was. Most people in his era had
equally bigoted views, but one would hope that
such an enlightened person would transcend the
limits of his time. After all, many smart people
in the past such as Francis Bacon were free of race prejudice.
I have no doubt your friend knows the scientific
method in his sleep. He knows perfectly well that
experimental evidence trumps theory; that all
judgments must be made on the basis of a careful
and complete examination of the relevant data;
that physics is still empirical (as Schwinger put
it); and so on, and so forth. You can read such
platitudes in any junior high school textbook and
I am sure your friend knows all of this as well
as I do. If your friend had been drinking wine
with Robert Duncan in Rome a few weeks ago, he
would have heard exactly what I just said, and I
have no doubt he would nod and murmur agreement
without a second thought, and he would chuckle
knowingly at Duncan's stories of scientists
acting badly and not following these rules.
However, the moment the subject turned to cold
fusion he would suddenly abandon all of these
fundamental rules and take an irrational,
hysterical anti-science approach, more or less
like a 4-year-old sticking his fingers in his
ears and yelling "Nanny nanny boo-boo I won't
listen! Shut up, shut up!" And all the while he
does this he would remain totally oblivious to the fact that he was doing it!
That's what people do. It is human nature. We
cannot do anything about it. We have to work with
people who are not inclined to go bonkers lose
objectivity with regard to cold fusion. There are
plenty of such people. Hundreds of thousands have
downloaded papers at LENR-CANR.org.
You are welcome to forward this message to your
friend, but I expect it would be
counterproductive. People who are acting
irrationally seldom correct their behavior when
someone else points it out. Therein the patient
must minister to himself, as the doctor told Macbeth.
- Jed
