At 04:14 PM 12/29/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Mark Gibbs <<mailto:mgi...@gibbs.com>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.
Jed, Mark is not a scientist and does not pretend to be one. His
statements are not statements of science.
I cannot think of a way to say that politely.
Don't say it at all, then. Didn't you get that in kindergarten?
Mark is not a troll. He's a reporter or writer who seems to be
developing an actual interest in the field.
Look, you have been studying cold fusion for, I think, more than
twenty years. You are one of the most widely-read people connected
with a field. You are not a scientist, i.e., not formally, but you
are correct about the scientific method. But there is no right to
demand that *anyone* follow the scientific method. Mark was just
making a statement about what would lead cold fusion to be recognized
as a great invention, and he was half-right.
That is, it will take practical application. Theory is irrelevant to this.
And Mark is not likely to grasp in a few months or even a few years
what you know from twenty.
[...]
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?
Jed, he wrote that you were getting overheated. You may think that
you are calm, but you are on a rant, and it's not about Mark. It's
about years of the insanity that you have confronted.
Mark made no demand. He's correct, he simply answered a question, and
the only thing wrong with his answer is that he thinks a testable
theory is needed. There is a testable -- and widely tested -- theory,
that deuterium is being converted to helium, generating 23.8
MeV/He-4. And that has not turned cold fusion or LENR into the
Greatest Invention of the Year.
Only practical application would do that! (And theories are not
inventions and theories don't win the Invention Awards.)
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>http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=187
Yes. True. And what Mark says is still true, as to practical
application. He was simply incorrect about "testable theory." That
won't have any effect. Perhaps he meant "theory of mechanism," but we
have such theories. They don't -- and won't -- make the difference.
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.
That's true. Now, Mark, as a writer, might possibly have some
influence on this, at some point. Obviously, he felt insulted. Is
that what you want?
(To be sure, you did somewhat apologize, but it was what we call a
weak apology, i.e. something like, "I'm sorry if this is impolite,
but you really are an ignorant moron. Sorry, just a fact." Very weak
apology. Instead, Jed, I suggest you find what you can agree with,
with Mark, *and agree with it.*
Mark makes mistakes in his review of this field. That's practically
inevitable, I've seen nobody pick this up and get it all right
immediately. I'm still picking gnats out of my teeth, after three
years of pretty intensive study. (I study by writing, and learn by
seeing experts pick it apart, when they are kind enough to do so.) So help him.
You helped me, Jed, with your generosity, as you helped many others.
Mark, please meet Jed Rothwell. He can be a bit cranky, but I assure
you, he's worth knowing.
And, by the way, meet Edmund Storms. Likewise he may seem to be
cranky, but he's one of the most patient disputants I've encountered.
I disagree with him frequently, and he gets irritated, but keeps on
ticking. If you have a question about cold fusion, as to the
experimental work that has been done, he's the expert, he probably
has the broadest knowledge.
His physics sucks. (Abd ducks.)
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, he was talking to you. He's got a point.
You have a totally different point. If Mark really wants to
understand cold fusion, as much as he could understand it without
getting a related degree, he will have a lot of work to do. But Mark
did not *demand* a theory. He made a mildly incorrect statement about
the place of theory in popularizing cold fusion, and it obviously
pushed your buttons. I get it. But he's the wrong target. He's not a
scientist. There are scientists who have made the demand you talk
about. There have been important reports of experimental work,
rejected by journals, with some reviewer writing "no theory to
explain the results" as a rejecting note.
What was *wrong* with the original Pons and Fleischmann paper was
that they included a bit of theory. They attempted to explain their
results by mentioning nuclear reactions. They got the wrong
reactions, what they described isn't happening, apparently, unless it
is a tiny levels. But it was, in fact, fusion, we now know that.
At that point, the evidence for "nuclear" was almost entirely
circumstantial. Plus they had a neutron artifact.
I'll repeat this: Mark is not obligated to follow the scientific
method. Researchers and scientists are.
For others who read this, the only theory that is being taken
seriously at this point that purports to say that "it is not fusion"
is Widom-Larsen theory. To my understanding, that theory is next to a
hoax. And, if you read it carefully, it is *still* claiming that
deuterium is being converted to helium, just in addition to some
other products *which are not observed at the levels expected if W-L
theory is the mechanism.* There are claimed intermediates, but those
do not persist.
The conversion of deuterium to helium is "fusion." W-L theory
purports to show a *different mechanism* than "d-d fusion." But if
the result is helium, and deuterium is the fuel, as is claimed in W-L
theory -- among other results -- *fusion is taking place.* Saying
that "it is not fusion," Steve Krivit is making a purely semantic
argument, a claim that "fusion" refers only to a *specific process*,
i.e., "d-d fusion," when the term is quite general, in addition to
being used specifically.
