At 02:40 AM 6/30/2011, Rich Murray wrote:
Re: Ad Hominem against Joshua Cude, or is that "Ad Pseudonym" against
"Joshua Cude" ?
Rich: So I couldn't manage to find any quotes by Abd that were Ad
Psdudonym against Joshua, so I retract that claim and regret my error
and remind myself how very easy it is to shift into criticizing and
judging our fellows... I like his humorous, wry appreciation of how we
all get tangled up in the Rossi web.
Thanks, Rich. My operating position has become that the public
information does not allow us to come to clear conclusions about the
Rossi claims. If I'm correct, then those who do, in fact, make claims
of clear conclusion, either way, are merely displaying bias. It
shouldn't be suprising, bias is normal for human beings. We tend to
see what we want to see, and it's a constant effort for anyone
interested in science to overcome this, and we fail, often.
I've come to a hypothesis regarding how the Rossi excess heat results
-- in the public demos -- could be *very* incorrect, but that
hypothesis has not been tested, even though it would be easy to test,
should Rossi care to clear this up.
Jed is aware that there are problems with the demos, and that Rossi
has effectively refused to address them. Krivit's latest report seems
sober to me (somewhat to my surprise), what I see is that Krivit
reported what has been called "gossip," without fixing or claiming
some conclusion from that. The "gossip" addresses reasons to suspect
Rossi, on "character" grounds. That "human interest" is actually
important, for much depends, here, on our judgment of the character
of the claimant and his associates.
In the end, though, Rossi is correct in that if he succeeds with the
Defkalion demo, it's all moot. I've mentioned that there may be both
psychological and economic reasons for Rossi's apparent "con game"
character here.
Consider this: Rossi was heavily attacked, prosecuted, and even
jailed for alleged fraud or illegal activity. It would be a device to
recover from that, to create an impression of a repeat, to make his
behavior seem really, really fishy, and then pull the sheet off the
hidden proof, vindicating himself. If he's playing that game, he
loves it when he's attacked, because he believes that all these
attacks will look like idiocy, later. Of course, this is unfair,
because he's creating the appearance that attracts those "attacks."
But people are perfectly capable of thinking and acting like this. In
a sense, he's attempting to vindicate himself, because if it is
revealed that his appearance of fraud now was an illusion, it will
carry with it, by association, his past. Perhaps his intentions were
good then, too. Perhaps the old allegations were also false. Perhaps
his factory fire was truly an accident. Etc.
Joshua has played a useful role in the discussions on the Vortex
list. I'm hoping that there will be further cooperation, in exploring
what is behind the overall cold fusion controversy. I have, in the
past, excoriated Joshua for pseudoskepticism combined with anonymity.
I'm not going to belabor whether or not that was justified, but I'd
urge him to abandon the anonymity, if possible. There is nothing
shameful about real skepticism.
I am aware, though, of a certain risk to him if he does so. I've had
correspondence with some skeptics who are afraid of retaliation from
*other skeptics,* for even giving cold fusion the time of day. It was
something like "if it became known that I debated cold fusion, my
career would be over." Which I find fascinating as a window into the
oppressive character of orthodoxy. If that kind of pressure exists,
much is explained.
I've encountered a taste of this, myself, where a long-time colleague
went ballistic over my mention that cold fusion might be real. The
man had no knowledge or understanding of the research work that has
led me to that possibility, all he knew was theory. (He's a
mathematician, who has some substantial knowledge of quantum
mechanics.) It seemed impossible to penetrate his firm conviction. He
believed I'd been conned. When I mentioned that I'd put thousands of
dollars into "cold fusion kits," he assumed that I'd bought kits from
some fraudster, he clearly believes that anyone involved with cold
fusion is either massively deluded or a con artist. When I explained
that, no, I was making kits for sale, to replicate a published
experiment, he advised me, firmly, to get my money back, as much as
possible, by selling the materials and equipment, since there could
be no possible value to actually experimenting with this. A mutual
friend, a close associate of the mathematician, who became privy to
the correspondence, could see what was going on and tried to mediate,
to no avail. I was consigned, by this long-time friend, to the outer
darkness, and there were consequences within the organization where
we had cooperated.
His kind of science is "cargo cult science," where belief trumps experiment.
One cannot apply theory to "unknown mechanism," to calculate expected
results. That's clear! Cold fusion violates no basic, fundamental and
accepted scientific principle. It did violate expectations and
certain assumptions. Reading the early skeptical literature, such as
Huizenga, it's clear that a basic confusion existed between fusion as
a result and fusion as a known mechanism. The hypothesis that the
Pons-Fleischmann heat was produced by "fusion" then led to a belief
that the probability of this could be calculated, if "fusion" is a
mechanism, specifically d-d fusion. As a 2-body problem, d-d fusion
can be calculated to be effectively impossible. Further, if
unexpected catalysis occurs, the branching ratio would be expected to
produce results contrary to what was observed, i.e., the dead
graduate student effect. What all that analysis really showed was
that, if fusion was taking place, it was through an "unknown
mechanism." Yet this got translated into "impossible." What that
boils down to is a *belief* that there could be no unknown mechanism,
a variation on an old error.
"Unknown mechanism" was *unexpected*, to be sure. But impossible? No.
It's obvious that the unknown mechanism, if this be fusion, must be
very rare in nature, must require conditions not normally
encountered. In hindsight, there is evidence, the FP Heat Effect had
been observed before, but fusion as the cause was so unexpected that
the isolated observations were passed off as simply one of those
things that happen that will never be explained.
The FPHE is real. Many researchers have found excess heat in
palladium deuteride following the FP approach, and the evidence for
this is overwhelming. The FPHE could, in theory, still be explained
by some chemical mechanism, or by some systematic calorimetry error,
but no proposed mechanism is satisfactory, generally being ruled out
by controls and other experimental results. No paper has been
published that shows, by controlled experiment, a non-nuclear origin
for the FPHE. The idea that cold fusion was conclusively rejected
because of the early replication failures was simply one more belief
that arose. Replication failure is failure to replicate. To "kill" a
new theory based on experimental results requires demonstrating the
cause of these results by adequate controls in an experiment that
*succeeds* in replicating the apparent effect.
That is, if the effect is caused, say, by some defective
instrumentation or analysis, a conclusive refutation would consist of
repeating the error, then showing the nature of it. The Cal Tech work
did actually claim this, i.e., that apparent excess heat was caused
by poor stirring of the cells, because they found, with a cell or set
of cells, that apparent excess heat disappeared with stirring.
However, for reasons I won't go into here, that showing was
defective, they had not reproduced the F-P experimental conditions,
and it is ruled out for many showings of the FPHE, where stirring
would be irrelevant. Their "error" in those non-stirred cells was
their error, not the error of others. Nice try, though, Nate.
But, of course, there is something further, there is evidence that
the FPHE is correlated with the production of helium, which, if we
assume that the fuel is deuterium, would show that the *result* is
fusion, since the heat/helium ratio is observed within experimental
error of what would be expected from fusion of deuterium -- by any
mechanism -- to helium, with no significant other products, including
no radiation. It's still a mystery what the mechanism is, because
even pure fusion to helium (no other branches) would give us highly
energetic helium, i.e., 24 MeV alpha particles, which are not
produced, they would be detected, easily, from secondary effects.
So, to pull us back to the original situation, we have encountered
something unknown, and "unknown" seems to threaten people, it offends
them. Some of us, most of us, perhaps, fall back on orthodoxy, a
*belief* that there must be some mistake. Others fall into a belief
of some kind that the new work is real and must be accepted. However,
my understanding of what the scientific approach requires of us is
that we don't allow any belief at all, other than ordinary trust in
what we observe as being what we observe, which is extended, by
rebuttable default, to trust in what others report of their experience.
I just finished the Landmark Education Advanced Course, and one of
the Landmark "distinctions" is "Life is empty and meaningless and it
is empty and meaningless that "life is empty and meaningless." Yet
"what happened" is real, it is only our *interpretations* of what
happened that leave behind reality. When they say that life is empty
and meaningless, they are not claiming that this is "true," but that
it is useful as a "distinction" that allows us to leave behind the
traps of belief in assumed or created meaning.
This is not mere philosophy in Landmark, it's demonstrated and
observed and learned as a functional distinction that is liberating.
Landmark is considered by some to be a "cult." It's been fascinating
for me to explore this, I can easily understand why some would think that.
Rich, someone we both know very well has long been involved with
Landmark. Were you ever invited to check it out? If so, what happened?
