Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
No argument can be settled and no progress made unless you abide by
this rule: experiments are the only authority.
There is a problem with your view, Jed. You are proposing an
absolute standard for deciding issues but no mechanism for the
decision. You left out *who* and *how* such decisions are made.
That is only a problem when -- as I said -- the experiments are
difficult to interpret, or inconclusive. For example, the 1919
eclipse data used to verify relativity was difficult to interpret.
Only an expert could work through the details. (See Collins & Pinch)
Some aspects of cold fusion, such as helium or neutron detection,
call for expert knowledge. These are difficult to judge. Many excess
heat results are marginal and unconvincing, and cannot be believed
without extensive modeling and calibration. However, other results
are clear and can be understood by anyone with a junior-high school
level of physics and chemistry. After 1990 there were enough of the
clear-cut results to make an airtight case.
After Will et al. reported their tritium results, which confirmed
TAMU and Los Alamos, every journal and newspaper on earth should have
announced that cold fusion is real. Many previous experimental claims
were universally accepted with less convincing evidence than this.
Any article that calls into question the existence of the phenomenon
today is unscientific blather.
If cold fusion was held to the same conventional standards applied to
all other discoveries, people like Huizenga and Park would be
dismissed by every serious thinker. Even Wikipedia would fall in
line. Cold fusion is the only subject in the Scientific American
described in fact-free riffs of the imagination written by people who
brag that they know nothing about the subject! See:
<http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#SciAmSlam>http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#SciAmSlam
As Obama said in the debate about conservation: "It's like these guys
take pride in being ignorant."
We have gotten used to this mess. We forget how strange it is. We
take it for granted that Sci. Am. and other mass media will publish
articles about this one subject that are fact-free compendium of
stupid mistakes and absurd rumors. This is unprecedented. Of course
the mass media often gets things wrong, but not to this extent. I
expect you could search through 150 years of Sci. Am. and not find
any other articles about relatively simple experiments that are so bollixed up.
- Jed
