Mark Gibbs <mgi...@gibbs.com> wrote:
> I am sorry to be abrasive, but this is ignorant nonsense. >> > > Alas, you really aren't sorry. That's just a technique to try to avoid > being called out for incivility. > No, it is pro-forma, Japanese style. It is what you say before you are forced to be uncivil. > "Far closer"? How close? Next week? Next month? > That would depend on academic politics and funding. It is not a scientific question. If a reasonable level of funding had been made available in 1990 we would probably have cold fusion automobiles by now. To address the technical issues: let us compare cold fusion to plasma fusion. A tokamak reactor costs $1 billion to $15 billion. The longest, most powerful plasma fusion reaction in history at the PPPL was 10 MW lasting 0.6 s; 6 MJ. It took far more input energy to sustain the reaction than it produced. Cold fusion reactions have produced 150 MJ at 100 W or more, lasting up to 3 months. In some cases it takes not input energy to sustain the reaction. That is, by any measure, more practical than plasma fusion. The only thing lacking in cold fusion is control over the reaction. If we had that, we could easily make prototype devices. Plasma fusion research has continued for 60 years. It costs more every month than the entire amount of money spent on cold fusion since 1989. So, cold fusion has made far more progress per dollar and per man-hour of work. > And throwing in other scientific experiments - no matter what their payoff > might or might not be - is simply setting up a straw man argument ... > A scientific experiment cannot be evaluated by "payoff" but only by the s/n ratio and the knowledge it contributes to science as a whole. Science is not a practical or useful endeavor. It sometimes contributes practical results to daily life, but this is never assured, it is cannot be used as a metric to evaluate the results. Some of the most important scientific breakthroughs of all time, such as Newton's, had no practical use for decades. > There is no practical device yet, merely a lot of unverified claims and > overdue promises. > The claims have been verified thousand of times in hundreds of major laboratories. 14,000 times, according to the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Normally, when a claim of this type is confirmed by Los Alamos and 3 or 4 other major labs, every scientist on earth accepts it. This one has been confirmed time after time, in experiments published in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. For a scientist not to believe it is lunacy. It is the betrayal of the scientific method, and the abandonment of all rational standards of belief. If you don't believe replicated experiments you have no basis to believe or reject anything in science. > Sure, there's lots of interesting experiments but is there a testable > theory? > Theory has no bearing on the validity of a scientific claim. There was not theory for nuclear reactions in the sun before 1939, and no theory at all describing cellular reproduction (DNA) before 1952, but there was not a scientist on earth who denied that the sun shines and that cells reproduce. > I'm not asking for a handwaving kind of explanation, I'm asking for a > theory that can be tested. > You are asking for something that has never, in the history of science, been considered a valid criterion to reject an experimental claim. NEVER. You turn the scientific method upside-down. First we discover things by experiment. Then we explain them. Not being able to explain them is never a reason to reject experiments. - Jed
