Mark Gibbs <mgi...@gibbs.com> wrote: So, your considered and thoughtful way to address what you see as someone's > misunderstandings and to educate them is to be insulting and to attack the > man while you address the argument? >
Look, I am sorry, but your statements violate the scientific method at an elementary level. I cannot think of a way to say that politely. When I say "elementary" I mean it literally: elementary school and junior-high introductory textbooks all say: * Science is based on experiments. When replicated experiments conflict with theory, theory must be revised. * Most phenomena are first discovered by experiment and confirmed, and only later explained by theory. * It is NEVER necessary to explain something by theory before you accept that it is real. Experiments prove it is real. Theory explains it. Those are two different things. This is *absolutely fundamental* to the scientific method. If we reject a finding because we have no theory, or ignore it, or refuse to fund it, scientific progress will come to halt. You have failed to grasp this! Again and again, you have ignored these fundamentals. You need to stop, read what the people at EPRI wrote, and think carefully. Pay close attention to this! EPRI said *nothing* about theory. Fleischmann, Pons and the others said nothing about theory. This is not about theory. Theory does not enter into this discussion. This is experimental science, not theory-based science. (There are theory-based sciences, but this is not one of them.) You cannot demand that an experimentalist propose a theory before you accept his results. That is not his job. That is not how it is done. When penicillin and other antibiotics were discovered, no one had any idea how they worked. If we had followed your standard for cold fusion, we would not have funded, developed, or used them until 30 years later when biologists finally explained them. We would not have developed the airplane until the mid-1920s when the first comprehensive theories explained wing lift. The Wrights used pragmatic engineering models based on instrument reading from their wind tunnel. They made no effort to develop a physics theory, although they were first-rate physicists. They were engineers, not fluid-dynamics physicists. You cannot demand a practical device before you accept a scientific observation. You can't demand practical devices when we are still trying to control the reaction in the laboratory. That is like demanding a fully cooked wild turkey dinner before we leave the house with the shotgun. We have to find the bird and shoot it before we cook it!!! Why is that so hard for you to grasp? FIRST we do the research. THEN if we are skillful and lucky we will have the technology. Research is expensive. You have to have dozens of complicated machines, as you see in the photos here: http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=187 You want to know how much research costs? Take the best estimate, multiply by 3, multiply again by 6, and add in a fudge factor of 80%. You want to know how long it will take? Longer. Just . . . longer. How hard it is? Much harder than anything that most people do their whole lives. It is like taking final exams in college level chemistry *every single day*. It is a miracle that any scientist succeeds at this game. Do scientists make mistakes? Yeah. As Stan Pons says, "if we are half right we are doing great." They have made good progress despite the difficulties. Give them the tools and the money and they will probably succeed. > If you want to promote understanding of LENR and be respected as a > proponent you need to stop being emotional and ritualistically antagonistic. > If you want to be taken seriously you will try to understand the roles of theory and observation, and the fact that an observation can be proved without a theory. You need to read what the experts at EPRI wrote, and you need to understand what they meant. Stop demanding a theory. Stop re-inventing the rules of the scientific method. - Jed
