At 09:33 AM 11/25/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
History of Science
Controversy in Chemistry: How Do You Prove a
Negative?—The Cases of Phlogiston and Cold Fusion**
Jay A. Labinger* and Stephen J. Weininger*
http://www.uaf.edu/chem/481-482-692-Sp06/pdf/labinger-1.pdf
This is a common straw man argument made against
the low-energy nuclear reaction findings. It
arises from an assumption that it would be
necessary to prove that cold fusion is truly
impossible in order to convince the cold fusion
researchers to give up. As you've shown, Jed,
what *could* be done is to show that specific
experimental results were probably artifact.
There are aspects to the argument made which are
valid; the problem is that these aspects either
no longer apply or were misapplied in the first
place, and then assumptions have existed that
extrapolated possible criticisms of early work
into general criticisms of all work.
Let me start by making the arguments. I'll start with what is most true.
Publication/reporting bias. If many people are
looking for some phenomenon, and even if the
phenomenon does not exist, if many experiments
are performed, but only results tending to show a
positive finding are reported, it can appear that
there are many positive results and few or no negative results.
Shotgun correlation. Many different phenomena are
asserted to represent LENR. Specific and clear
replications are relatively rare. So a series of
disparate anomalies are asserted to prove a
general class of phenomena without ever clearly
showing and confirming *one* result.
Cold fusion results are highly variable. This
starts to get much less true. Some approaches are
highly variable, some seem quite reproducible.
The claim that better instrumentation always
resulted in a reduction of the effect, quite
simply, is false. That happened sometimes,
sometimes not. When the "better instrumentation"
was an independent replication failure, well, it
was a replication failure, and replication
failure, especially with the P-F approach, was
the norm in the early days. It was quite a
difficult experiment, and that was one of the big
errors: presenting it as if it were easy, just
plop some palladium rods in some heavy water, add
something to make the heavy water conductive, and start the electrolysis.
But science shouldn't be punished because of
errors in a press conference, nor, in fact, for
even more serious errors in reporting. That
Fleishcmann incorrectly and clumsily reported
neutrons, where he wasn't an expert, should have
no impact on the credibility of his calorimetry,
where, indeed, he was an expert. But the
rejectors, by and large, were nuclear physicists,
with no particular respect for Fleischmann's expertise.
The paper, to its credit, mentions the
heat-helium correlation. The authors then attempt
to toss cold water on it by raising, again,
general theoretical objections, and appear to be
unaware that this correlation exists across many
reports by different research groups, and is
statistically of high significance. Extraordinary evidence, indeed.
The weight they place on theoretical objection is
way too high, in this case. Cold fusion did not
actually violate heavily validated theory. The
idea that low-energy nuclear reactions could not
take place was never well-demonstrated by
experiments that probed the edges, the unusual,
and that's exactly what Fleischmann was doing, according to his later accounts.
That the condensed matter environment could
affect nuclear reactions was already known, in
some unusual cases. The barrier between chemistry
and physics wasn't absolute. What was also
understood, in theory, was that quantum mechanics
was an approximation, not accurate when applied
to multibody problems, so the theoretical
objection to cold fusion was weak. Fleischmann
explained that he expected that he would find
that differences between the predictions of
quantum mechanics and reality (which would
require, at least, the far more complex math of
quantum field theory or quantum electrodynamics, would be below measurability.
He was wrong, and he was still working on the
problem when patent issues forced premature revelation of his work.
Various phenomena that may have been, in fact,
cold fusion or low-energy nuclear reactions had
long been reported, but always dismissed readily
as impossible. To take the theory as requiring
the rejection of reproducible experiment, though,
is to fossilize science. So the issue boils down
to reproducibility, generally. (Even without
reproducibility, some rare phenomena can be and
have been accepted. We can't reproduce
earthquakes, to give Hoffmann's example to his pseudo-skeptical student.)
To demand, as an example, commercial-level power
production before considering LENR real, is to
put the cart before the horse. What if it turns
out that, at least with existing approaches,
commercial power is impossible? Nobody has
rejected muon-catalyzed fusion because it isn't
commercially viable! We all know that scaling up
cold fusion and, at the same time, making it
reliable, is quite difficult. So far, reliable
methods, relatively low heat, but well within
statistical significance. Less reliable methods,
sometimes, much more heat, and still a convincing
demonstration when an entire series of experiments is reported.
(That's always a concern, to be sure. If I do a
hundred experiments, and decide that ninety of
them must have been "wrong" in some way, even
though I tried to make them identical, I could
present a pretty convincing series of ten
experiments..... but that's a novice error, in
science, and nothing discredits a scientist like
cherry-picking of data, it's almost as bad as outright falsification.)
