At 01:54 PM 10/19/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
The AIP responded to Marwan as follows:
AIP has declined to publish the conference proceedings volume
entitled "Symposium on New Energy Technology" based on an internal
scientific review of the final material delivered to us. Our
conference proceedings series, like most others, does not provide
the authors access to an external peer review process. If the
authors involved in this symposium are interested in receiving
detailed reports on their work from the scientific community, we
encourage them to submit their work to one of the scholarly journals
in the appropriate field.
This is certainly not surprising. An "internal scientific review"
will include, for the AIP, quite likely, highly biased individuals
who aren't going to be convinced by a cold fusion hot water heater.
"They are just imagining that they are warmer, those clever cold
fusioneers have monkeyed with the thermostat so that it appears to be
heating water, but it isn't."
Well, maybe a cold fusion hot water heater would convince them. But
it's entirely beside the point. We see the skeptical arguments all
the time, they are based on a set of firmly held assumptions, a
number of them, and unless there is some formal back-and-forth
process, it is impossible to uncover and show that these assumptions
are unwarranted.
The basic one, going way back, is that if there is excess heat, if
there is helium, for example, then the physics textbooks would have
to be rewritten, because deuterium fusion doesn't behave like this.
The assumption underneath this is a strange one, it is that the
reaction, if it exists, must be "d-d fusion." Since there are no
neutrons, no He-3, and, with helium, no gamma rays, *therefore* the
results must be in error.
Of course, there is an alternate conclusion, just as logical:
"Therefore this is not d-d fusion."
One of the great sources of confusion in this field, literally
con-fusion, was the quite correct insistence that d-d fusion could
not be completely ruled out, because perhaps some mechanism could be
found or understood that would explain the different branching ratio
and dumping of the energy as heat instead of as radiation, etc. That
makes perfect logical sense, but politically, it was an error.
Politically, the cold fusion researchers should have been saying,
from the beginning, "We agree. This is, most likely, not "d-d
fusion," it is something else. And then insisting on experimental
results vs. non-existent theory. Since there cannot *ever* be a
theory that says "the unknown is impossible." That's not science,
that's religion -- i.e., a kind of "scientism" that believes that we
already know everything we need to know about theory as the basis of reality.
This is disappointing, I'm sure. But their advice is sound. Submit
the papers to ordinary peer-reviewed journals, preferably mainstream
ones. Then publish, as needed, the reviewer comments and the
rejection, if it's rejected. I do know that one of the saner
skeptics, Dieter Britz, has claimed that some papers are rejected by
mainstream journals because they are of low quality.
But if a mainstream journal is rejecting a paper because it doesn't
contain a theoretical explanation of otherwise interesting results,
we should know, for the future, and we should make sure that this is
documented, because future generations -- which might be next year!
-- will want to see just what idiots these editors were.
And there are definitely mainstream journals, now, not afraid to
publish papers on cold fusion. I'd say, though, go for the gold.
Submit to Nature. Submit to Science. And, indeed, submit to the AIP
journal. Find out if they are still idiots.
Alternatively, you will get criticisms of your paper that you can
answer, or you can improve your work and writing about it.
And if journal publication is impossible, if there is a wall of
rejection, maybe your paper isn't so good! Make sure that your
results get published anyway, as conference papers or the like. No
experimental or theoretical work should be wasted, and if it is made
readily available, it is not wasted.
A dedicated skeptic, this Kemosabe fellow, has a theory that
Naturwissenschaften published the Storms Review as a Hail Mary play.
He believes that they are desperate to improve the standing of
Naturwissenschaften, so they are gambling that cold fusion turns out
to be true, and they will come out smelling like roses.
Yes. They will, indeed. Note that the top two publishers of academic
journals are Elsevier and Springer-Verlag, and they are all betting
the same way, they are publishing material that is positive on cold
fusion. The skeptical position is becoming fringe. Consider how Kirk
Shanahan was treated at Journal of Environmental Monitoring. He looks
like a fringe lunatic. Which he is!
Do *not* attack the AIP. Quite simply, they are in over their head.
Cold fusion is generally a chemistry experiment, not a physics
experiment. I uses the tools of chemistry. Ask a physicist to review
it, you might as well ask an ornithologist. A theory paper, maybe.
But particle physicists are quite accustomed to taking the shortcuts,
the approximations, of 2-body quantum mechanics. The good ones will
be quite aware that they are in over their heads, literally.
Who would have thought that quantum field theory would *predict* 100%
fusion from Takahashi's TSC configuration of two deuterium molecules?
Off the top of my head, and off the top of about everyone else's,
would be the idea that if 2D fusion is very rare, 3D and 4D fusion
would be rare upon rare, i.e., age-of-the-universe kind of rare. But
Takahashi got onto multibody fusion from an experimental finding in a
*physics* experiment, bombarding palladium deuteride with deuterons
at energies below normal fusion energy. He found 3D fusion to be
enhanced by 10^26 over expectation.
The physicists should have been all over that result. Did any attempt
to replicate it? This experiment showed that the conditions of
condensed matter were *radically* different from the conditions of
free-space plasma interactions.
No, they were asleep at the switch, lulled to sleep by the impression
of their own theoretical superiority.
It's time for cold fusion researchers to stand up and be counted. You
have nothing to be ashamed of, quite the contrary. You will be
recognized, it has become unavoidable, just a matter of time.
And none of this means that your work, personally, is of high
quality. Cold fusion researchers, it is not uncommon, have drawn
unwarranted conclusions from their work, on occasion. Twenty years of
conference presentations without critical peer review may have dulled
the skills of some authors.
But Dr. Storms is now LENR editor at Naturwissenschaften. If your
paper is rejected there, it will be because the quality is low, it
needs improvement, it will not be because "cold fusion is impossible."
Don't submit first to Naturwissenschaften. Submit to other mainstream
journals, and, if denied unfairly, then run it past
Naturwissenschaften. This journal is not so well-known, but it is
comparable to Scientific American in impact factor, as I recall. It
is definitely mainstream, and has fully competent reviewers. Don't
expect to be treated with kid gloves! I'm told the reviewers are
tough as nails.
Storms is not about to wreck this opportunity by approving of poor reports.
Just realize how stunning it is that NW published that review last
month. The abstract, folks, the abstract! Notice that this is the
first page of the issue. They are not hiding this under a bushel.
Naturwissenschaften has committed to this field, and is staking their
reputation on it.
Maybe it is a Hail Mary play, but certainly one that they fully
expect to play out well for them. Their main competitor, Elsevier,
has been publishing in the field as well -- such as the Krivit
encyclopedia of electrochemical power sources articles -- but they
have not committed on this level, to actually feature such a review.
I'm convinced that they thought long and hard about this, this was
not some wild-hair idea of the managing editor.
(And the claim, that's been made, that Storms, as LENR editor, simply
approved his own paper, is what, in this business, we call,
technically, "Really Stupid." Storms has denied this, but it was a
crazy idea in the first place. It assumes total incompetence on the
part of the NW managing editor. That kind of assumption, indeed,
seems to be common for the pseud-skeptics. I.e., anyone who thinks
differently than them is a fool, incompetent, influenced by dreams of
"free energy," or maybe even a fraud.)
We do recognize that we have informed you of this decision late in
the process, which is why, in our letter of 18 October 2010, we
offered "to facilitate the printing of the Volume book for the
attendees of the Symposium." We understand that you declined this offer.
AIP considers the matter closed and will not enter into further
correspondence.
Regards,
Mark Cassar, Ph.D.
Publisher, Journals & Technical Publications
American Institute of Physics
Thanks for sharing, Mark. Really.
It is not necessary to waste money on the printing of the volume.
I suggest this: any author who wishes to do so can, and should,
submit the paper to another journal, perhaps as I've suggested, and
if turned down, to a journal more likely to be supportive.
Alternatively, the papers should be made available at lenr-canr.org.
In any case, whenever possible, preprints should be made available.
Elsevier and Springer-Verlag, I understand, allow authors to freely
distribute (there may be some conditions) preprints. The preprints
mean that the information is freely available, which then saves
researchers significant money. Dieter Britz has been able, so far, to
obtain copies of papers for his review, but he's noting that this
costs his library money, and since he has retired, he is not
confident that he'll continue to be able to obtain papers, unless
authors send him preprints.
The entrenched skepticism among some scientists will die hard, it
will not completely disappear until they have all died or become incompetent.
For now, it's amusing to see how readily people who should know
better commit themselves to *really stupid statements,* rooted in
ignorance, but confidently asserted, and impervious to reasoned
argument. This Kemosabe fellow, whose arguments and position are
quite familiar, is an example.
The skeptical structure becomes a Rube Goldberg assembly of
interrelated arguments, self-reinforcing, such that you can refute
one piece of it, and the person has many other reasons to continue
believing the same.
Years ago, I noticed among certain personalities that they'd have ten
reasons to believe what they believe, and if you showed them that one
of them was in error, they would say, "But I have nine other reasons,
they can't all be wrong." And then, if you showed them another error,
they would say the same thing again. They would not reduce the number
of other reasons. This, I've called the paranoid mind set, it is
paranoid thinking, at root. (Paranoia is not all about fear, it is
about self-reinforcing arguments and beliefs, it's about how a person thinks.)
It is more common than we might imagine!
People are highly resistant to attack on their belief systems through
logical argument, or any other approach, for that matter, beyond
patience and the development of rapport, and even then a very
cautious approach is normally required, because attacking a belief
structure will be seen as hostile and suspicious. The Socratic method
is possibly effective, but look at what happened to Socrates!
It took me a long time to come to an understanding that this
resistance was functional behavior, it is necessary, if highly
inconvenient sometimes! People cannot consider all the arguments all
the time, and because depth takes a lot of time, if they do not
assign a belief the necessary time -- and they don't have the time,
typically -- they, if they readily accepted fair-seeming arguments,
would become vulnerable to rhetoric, dangerously so. (They already
are vulnerable, but it's more complicated than I'm saying, this has
to do with social structures, and one of the ways around this
resistance is through social structure and repetition over time.)
