Jed, What I meant that you need to accumulate a lot of reports around the world and over time to infer a pattern and make a useful inference about the phenomenon. For example, if many witnesses over the years see meteorites coming from a particular location in the sky and during a particular time of the year then you can come to the conclusion they are witnessing a meteor shower associated with a comet trajectory. Even single observation would be useful but just data points in a overall pattern.
But this cannot be applied to LENR because the claims of LENR go beyond well known science.We need much more than anecdotal evidence. Nobody questions the existence of meteorites or birds. But even multiple reports of UFO don't convince the scientific community because there are simpler explanations to account for the observations. Furthermore when single observations for which there is stronger evidence as photographs, radar traces and so on usually the UFO hypothesis don't survive the scrutiny. I don't want to go all the way to say the LENR in general is close to the UFO phenomenon in terms of scientific quality but I would not refrain to say that for what concerns the Rossi's story. Giovanni On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Giovanni Santostasi <gsantost...@gmail.com> wrote: > > With meteorite sightings you have many witnesses in many countries. > > > Not always. In many cases, only one witness sees them. In all cases of > birdwatch sightings, or right whale sightings, only one observer sees them. > > > >> Until LENR is something that every amateur enthusiast can reproduce and >> post on youtube, it will remain in the realm of pseudoscience. >> > > That will never happen. But tell me something. As you know, amateur > enthusiasts are not capable of reproducing the top quark, or cloning a > mammal, or performing open-heart surgery. Amateur enthusiasts cannot launch > robotic probes to Mars. They cannot build tokamak plasma fusion reactors. > There are thousands of other experiments and procedures they cannot do. Do > you say these are all in the realm of pseudoscience? > > - Jed > >
