On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Suppose, in a parallel universe, scientists in 1990 did science instead of > treating theory as a form of religion. > If theory were treated as religion, no one would have paid attention to P&F, but they did. They were given a standing ovation from thousands at the ACS meeting. Scientists all over the world were giddy with excitement. And many nuclear physicists did experiments to test it. Why would the do that if they were religious. If theory were treated as religion, high temp superconductivity would have been rejected; no one would pay attention to the faster-than-light neutrino claims; indeed no one would have broadcast the result in the first place, being sure it was due to errors; no one would have paid attention to the notion that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. And so on. In fact, there is no evidence that progress in science has slowed at all in the last 20 or 30 years. And scientists crave revolutionary and disruptive results as much as they ever did. It's very clear that honor, fame, glory, and funding come to those who make major discoveries. Not those who add decimal points. The most famous scientists are those who revolutionized fields. The buzz words in grant proposals are "new physics" or "physics beyond the standard model". And that's why the world (the scientific world) went briefly nuts in 1989. Everyone wanted to be part of the revolution; no one wanted to be left behind. Here's a scientist quoted in a recent report in the Washington Post: “The theorists are now knotted up with conflicting emotions. As much as they support Einstein, they’d also love for the new finding to be true. It’d be weirdly thrilling. They’d get to rethink everything. If neutrinos violate the officially posted cosmic speed limit, the result will be the Full Employment Act for Physicists.” Imagine that 20 years later, unfortunately, there had been little progress > towards practical cold fusion, just as there was little progress in > incandescent lights for 20 years. Many people say the effect will forever > remain an laboratory curiosity with no practical value. > Many, but not all. But that's not what they're saying about cold fusion. They don't believe it happens at all. Not that it is impractical. If it isn't happening, it can't be practical. That makes it very different from the situation with electric light. > Then Rossi announces his results, and we are right back to 1879 with > Edison. > No, because in spite of Rossi's dozen demos, people still don't believe in the proof-of-principle, something established decades earlier for Edison. Many other people who have been struggling to make the thing practical > denounce Rossi / Edison, saying there is no way this outsider -- this > interloper! -- could have stolen the march on us professors. > Actually, you claimed before that not many of the people struggling to make cold fusion work were doubting Rossi. Have you changed your mind? I suspect there are some, but many cold fusion advocates, Storms e.g., also advocate Rossi. They said his tests prove nothing, which is actually true of Edison, but > not Rossi. > Not in the view of most scientists. All of Edison's tests proved light from electricity. None of Rossi's tests prove heat from nuclear reactions. > They complain that he will not let anyone examine the bulbs or do an > independent test. They said his results clearly violate theory. > Who claimed Edison's tests violated theory? As for Rossi, they simply lack evidence. Scientists will accept revolutionary results, and love to be part of the discovery, but they will not reject a successful theory without good evidence. Rossi has not provided even weak evidence for his claims. There are many parallels. That is not a bit surprising. Read the history of > most other important breakthroughs in the last 250 years and you will find > that most of them pan out along those lines. > I've asked before, but is there an example of a small scale phenomenon, like cold fusion or the light bulb, or electron diffraction etc. that was rejected in principle by mainstream science for 20 years, that was eventually proven correct? You always get a large crowd of "skeptical" detractors who claim it is a > fraud and lunacy. > You also get such a crowd when it is fraud. So, you can't use the existence of skeptics shouting fraud as evidence that it's not. To be a persecuted genius, it is not enough to be persecuted. > Even when they are well educated and capable of reading the facts and > understanding the claims, they *never read anything*. Frank Close, Robert > Park and Mary Yugo are modern examples. > Park has not chimed in on Rossi, and Maryyugo has not chimed in on cold fusion. There is absolutely no need to know anything about previous cold fusion experiments to pass judgement on the thermodynamic claims of Rossi. kilowatts are kilowatts, and if Rossi claims he can produce kilowatts of thermal energy from a few grams of nickel, he should be able to demonstrate it to anyone, regardless of their background in cold fusion. In fact, the main problem with cold fusion is that the claims are grandiose, but in order to understand it, we are told, it is necessary to read 1000 papers. But I can't run my car or heat my house with graphs and charts. Surely, if Rossi is right, it won't be necessary to read your library to benefit from it. Cold fusion is said to be on the verge of replacing fossil fuels, but I can demonstrate the energy content of a drop of gasoline to a child. And yet, Rossi can't demonstrate a million times higher energy density to scientists... unless they read 1000 cold fusion papers first. Finally, this doesn't explain the skepticism of several cold fusion advocates, including Krivit, Ahern, and a few commenters here. > You get a crowd of academic scientists who insist that the discovery is a > violation of theory and therefore it cannot exist. > You know very well that that's not the central objection, and certainly not the only objection. It is obviously not the objection of Krivit and Ahern. Scientists wouldn't care a whit that theory was violated if the evidence was robust. It's the absence of evidence that is the main objection. You can do 10 replications or demonstrations, or 100, or ten thousand. > These people will not be swayed. > That's true if they are all like the ones Rossi has performed. But one single demonstration of an obviously isolated device, obviously producing energy by say heating a large pool of water, producing its own weight in chemical energy (or 10 times that) would convince pretty well anyone that Rossi has a new energy source. > The only way to get them to shut up is to sell lots of machines. > Not true. The Wright brothers shut up their skeptics with a single demonstration in France. (And yes I know some hicks in backwater America remained skeptical, but we're talking about educated skeptics here, and anyway, in the internet age, such hicks are kind of rare anyway.) > Finally, there is usually a small number of savvy investors and bankers > who have enough sense to fund the research. They end up getting the gravy. > Or losing their shirts.
