Harry Veeder <hveeder...@gmail.com> wrote: Call me a moron, but without more context it is not obvious to me that > this qualifies as an idiotic rejection letter. >
Here is a message about that letter that I posted in 2006. *Famous letter from Lindley* During the course of a discussion elsewhere, I uploaded a famous letter from Lindley to Noninski: http://www.lenr-canr.org/Collections/Lindley.jpg The first paragraph is remarkable. Noninski wrote a critique of Lewis, and Lindley sent the critique to Lewis himself for "advice." In other words, he asked Lewis whether a critique of his paper should be accepted or rejected, and Lewis decided that his own work was valid and should not be critiqued. However, this is not quite as bad as it looks. Note that the paper was rejected by an "independent reviewer" in the first round. As I recall, this letter was sent after the second or third round. Noninski tried to rewrite the paper to satisfy the independent reviewer. In the later round, Lindley decided to skip the independent review and have this paper checked by Lewis directly. The first paragraph is, shall we say, unconventional and surprising. Let's leave it at that. When you look carefully, you will see that it is the second paragraph which is truly mind blowing. This copy was sent to me by Melvin Miles, and I believe it was he who marked the second paragraph. Read it carefully. For lack of a better word, let me suggest you savor it, and analyze it step by step, the way a translator might carefully takes prise apart a cryptic sentence in an ancient document in a forgotten language. You may have to read through it several times before you realize what Lindley is saying, and what he demands of Noninski. Let us list some of the weird assertions Lindley has packed into these few short but telling sentences: 1. Lindley demands that Noninski find a single reason -- an equation -- that would simultaneously prove that all negative experiments, including Harwell and others, are actually positive. 2. In other words, but Lindley asserts that all cold fusion experimental results are uniform. The experiments all produced the same result. One explanation must account for all of them. Lindley rejects the idea that some null experiments failed for one reason and some for another. Actually, it appears this idea never crossed his mind. He thinks that all experiments produce a single yes or no result that can only be explained by a single set of equations. The effect either exists or does not, and all experiments automatically prove the issue one way or another. In reality, Lewis got positive heat but he made a mistake in his equation, so he did not recognize it. In many other experiments the result was actually negative because the cathodes cracked, or people did not wait long enough, or the surface was contaminated, or the experiment failed for any of a hundred other reasons. Lewis made a mistake in his equations, but many other researchers used in the proper equations and actually did get a negative result. Noninski did not prove that other negative results were actually positive, and he never set out to do that or claimed he had done that. He did not even address these other experiments. But Lindley assumed this is what Noninski was trying to do. We assume that the wide variety of puzzling and varying results, both positive and negative, indicate that the experiment is complicated and that it is difficult to understand what is happening. Again, this thought apparently never crossed Lindley's mind. 3. Getting back to wild assertions, Lindley apparently believes that Noninski's methods are "unorthodox" and that he is trying to make a special case, or invent new physics, when in fact Noninski is only asserting that ordinary, conventional equations should be applied. Noninski is saying that Lewis made a mistake. (To summarize very briefly Lewis assumed the calibration constant changed, when in fact it remained the same and the apparent change was caused by excess heat.) It is astounding that an editor of Nature could be so appallingly ignorant of how experiments are conducted, how varied & complex they are, and how people go about interpreting the results. Lindley seems to have comic book level understanding of experimental science. - Jed
