Yes Joshua, I know you do not believe CF is real. You have been
consistent in this attitude for years as the evidence kept
accumulating. So, we now have a contest. Either you and other skeptics
are correct or I and other believers in CF are correct. You leave no
middle ground. Nature will be the judge and the final judging is
getting close.
But the winner in a contest generally gets a reward. I know what my
reward would be if I'm right. What do you expect your reward would be
if you are right? Suppose CF is just as you say, a delusion and
error, with all the evidence obtained by skilled scientists working in
at least 12 countries for 24 years being totally wrong. Do you think
you will become famous as the person who demonstrated that all these
people were wrong? Do you think books will describe you as one of the
sane voices of reason after the error on which CF is based has been
revealed? Of course, you are not attempting to reveal this error so
that fame for this achievement would not fall on you. So, I ask, what
is the reason behind this lengthly critique of what Peter says? If I
were you, I would think you would want a plan B if you turn out to be
wrong and became the fool.
As for my plan B, I will not need one because I'm simply reporting
what I see and what makes sense, as a scientist is required to do.
Science does not require me or anyone to reject every observation just
because it does not fit my or your concept of Nature. Nothing new
would be discovered if this were a requirement of a good scientist.
So, it seems to me, the believers are on the side of the Angels
regardless of the outcome while you seem to be playing a different
game than is normally required in science.
Ed
On May 3, 2013, at 2:52 PM, Joshua Cude wrote:
The recent editorial in Infinite Energy by Hagelstein represents the
incoherent ramblings of a bitter man who is beginning to realize he
has wasted 25 years of his career, but is deathly afraid to admit
it. He spends a lot of time talking about consensus and experiment
and evidence and theory and destroyed careers and suppression but
scarcely raises the issue of the *quality* of the evidence. That's
cold fusion's problem: the quality of the evidence is abysmal -- not
better than the evidence for bigfoot, alien visits, dowsing,
homeopathy and a dozen other pathological sciences. And an
extraordinary claim does require excellent evidence. By not facing
this issue, and simply ploughing ahead as if the evidence is as good
as the Wright brothers' Paris flight in 1908, he loses the
confidence of all but true believers that he is being completely
honest and forthright.
1. On consensus
Hagelstein starts out with the science-by-consensus straw man,
suggesting that consensus "was used in connection with the question
of the existence of an excess heat effect in the Fleischmann-Pons
experiment."
Please! No one with any familiarity with the history of science
thinks consensus defines truth (which I think is what he's
suggesting scientists believe). If it did, the ptolemaic solar
system would still be taught in school, and time would still be
absolute. Individual qualified scientists sufficiently motivated to
inspect the evidence make judgements based on that evidence, and,
since the modern physics revolution, avoid absolute certainty, their
judgements representing varying degrees of certainty.
Of course, consensus judgements do form, and are considered by those
unqualified or unmotivated to examine the evidence to get some idea
of the validity of a phenomenon or theory. While consensus does not
define truth, a consensus of experts is the most likely
approximation to the truth. And the stronger the consensus, the more
confidence it warrants. Sometimes the consensus can be very strong,
as in the current consensus that the solar system is Copernican. I
have not made the astronomical measurements to prove that it is,
although my observations are certainly consistent with it, but my
confidence in the description comes from the unanimous consensus
among those who have made or analyzed the necessary measurements.
Likewise, confidence in the shape of the earth is essentially
absolute, and serious humans dismiss members of the flat-earth
society as deluded, or more likely dishonest.
So, when it comes to allocating funding, hiring or promoting, or
awarding prizes or honors, there's really no option but to consult
experts in the respective field -- essentially to rely on the
consensus. It's the worst system except for all the others.
Hagelstein claims that cold fusion is an example of the Semmelweis
reflex, in which an idea is rejected because it falls outside the
existing consensus. That reflex is named after the rejection of
Semmelweis's (correct) hand-washing theory in 1847, which Hagelstein
cites. Then he goes on to mock a scientific system in which ideas
outside the consensus are rejected and the people who propose them
are ostracized in a ridiculous parody that bears no resemblance at
all to the actual practice of science. It's the usual way true
believers rationalize the rejection of their favorite fringe
science. But it's truly surprising to see that Hagelstein has no
more awareness of the reality of science than the many cold fusion
groupies who populate the internet forums. Of course there is a
certain inertia in science, and that is probably not a bad thing,
even if it sometimes has negative consequences, but there's so much
wrong about the way the phenomenon is applied here:
i) Hagelstein fails to mention that in 1989 the announcement of P&F
was greeted with widespread enthusiasm and optimism both inside and
outside the scientific mainstream; that Pons got a standing ovation
from thousands of scientists at an ACS meeting; that scientists all
over the world ran to their labs to try to reproduce the effect to
get in on the new and fantastic revolution; that eventual uber-
skeptic Douglas Morrison was breathlessly optimistic writing: " I
feel this subject will become so important to society […] the
present big power companies will be running down their oil and coal
power stations while they are building deuterium separation plants…"
and so on. In fact, people took great pleasure in the idea that a
couple of chemists could so revolutionize science. Semmelweis
received no such reaction. Cold fusion was an example of the anti-
semmelweis reflex, where people delight in bucking the system. It
wasn't until people started doing experiments and examining the
evidence of others that skepticism began to dominate.
ii) In spite of inertia in science, the most revolutionary ideas in
physics were accepted immediately. Einstein's photons and Bohr's
discrete atomic levels and deBroglie's particle waves were all
embraced, because they fit the data. The most celebrated and honored
scientists are the ones who revolutionize thought, in direct
contradiction to the claims of Hagelstein. For example, he writes
"If one decides to focus on a question in this context that is
outside of the body of questions of interest to the scientific
community, then one must understand that this will lead to an
exclusion from the scientific community. " So were Einstein, Bohr,
and deBroglie excluded from the scientific community? No, they were
all given Nobel prizes. Some exclusion!
Now, he might argue that that's ancient history, and the problems
he's talking about are recent. In fact he writes: "There are no
examples of any researcher fighting for an area outside of science
and winning in modern times." I'm not quite sure what he's trying to
say here. *His* example was from 160 years ago, and that was
egregious, but is he now saying it doesn't happen any more? Isn't
that a good thing?
There are certainly still examples of results that fall outside the
current consensus. Things like dark energy and the accelerating
expansion of the universe, for example. This was completely contrary
to expectations, but was accepted rather quickly, so to that extent
Hagelstein is right; they did not have to fight for the area. It
resulted in a Nobel prize in 2011, and here's what Perlmutter said
in his Nobel speech: "Perhaps the only thing better for a scientist
than finding the crucial piece of a puzzle that completes a picture
is finding a piece that doesn't fit at all, and tells us that there
is a whole new part of the puzzle that we haven't even imagined yet
and the scene in the puzzle is bigger, richer than we ever thought."
Science celebrates innovation and discovery; it does not suppress it.
There are other examples like high temperature superconductivity,
also unexpected and unexplained but accepted immediately, and also
resulting in a Nobel prize (in record time).
There is also the discovery of quasicrystals by Dan Shechtman. This
discovery actually did meet considerable resistance, and required
Shechtman to fight for his area. Pauling said there are no quasi-
crystals, only qausi-scientists. But it was not like cold fusion in
that his results from the beginning were published in the best
journals, and he began winning awards for the work only a few years
after the discovery, and in 2011 he was also given the Nobel prize.
There is also the example of the faster than light neutrinos. Most
physicists were skeptical, but the idea was certainly given a
hearing: Here's a scientist quoted in a recent report in the
Washington Post: “The theorists are now knotted up with conflicting
emotions. As much as they support Einstein, they’d also love for the
new finding to be true. It’d be weirdly thrilling. They’d get to
rethink everything. If neutrinos violate the officially posted
cosmic speed limit, the result will be the Full Employment Act for
Physicists.”
So, it's nonsense to suggest that working outside the current
consensus leads to exclusion. (It can, of course, if the area really
has no merit.) Scientists crave revolutionary and disruptive
results. It's very clear that honor, fame, glory, and funding come
to those who make major discoveries. Not those who add decimal
points. The most famous scientists are those who revolutionized
fields. The buzz words in grant proposals are "new physics" or
"physics beyond the standard model". And that's why the world (the
scientific world) went briefly nuts in 1989. Everyone wanted to be
part of the revolution; no one wanted to be left behind.
And the fact that Hagelstein had to go back 160 years for a really
egregious case of suppression is an indication that things have
improved. And even in that case, Semmelweis's ideas were vindicated
in about 20 years, although it was too late for him. I'm not aware
of a modern example of a bench-top (small-scale) phenomenon that was
rejected by the mainstream for decades, that proved to be right. And
cold fusion is very unlikely to change that situation.
2) quality of the evidence
As already mentioned, Hagelstein hardly considers the quality of the
evidence. However, when he wrote "The current view within the
scientific community is that these fields [nuclear physics and
condensed matter physics] have things right, and if that is not
reflected in measurements in the lab, then the problem is with those
doing the experiments. Such a view prevailed in 1989…" he admits
that the evidence was, at least at the beginning easy to dismiss.
(What he ignores here, as he did earlier in the paper, is that at
first, most (or at least much) of mainstream science *did* accept
their claims and started to look for ways to modify known theories.)
But then, in the next sentence, he suggests the quality of evidence
has improved without giving any specific reason to think so: "Such a
view prevailed in 1989, but now nearly a quarter century later, the
situation in cold fusion labs is much clearer. There is excess heat,
which can be a very big effect; it is reproducible in some labs;
there are not commensurate energetic products; there are many
replications; and there are other anomalies as well."
It's difficult to imagine a more vague testimony in cold fusion's
favor. Is there any year in the 90s that that could not have been
written (or that some form of it wasn't)? It as much as admits the
opposite of what he claims: the situation in cold fusion labs is no
clearer now than it ever has been. And a little later in the paper,
he admits that explicitly when he says: "aside from the existence of
an excess heat effect, there is very little that our community
agrees on".
Hagelstein makes almost no specific reference to experimental
evidence, and one example he chooses, if examined, emphasizes its
marginal nature.
He says that Morrison frequently cited negative results from the KEK
group, but then rejected their positive result. But in the latest
KEK paper (1998) , one finds: "Since spring of 1989 we have
attempted to confirm the so-called cold fusion phenomenon … Until
now a burst-like heat release, equivalent to 110% of the input
electric power, was observed in one cell…Further studies as well as
reproductions of the anomalies are becoming highly essential to
understand totally these abnormal phenomena."
That's a bit selective, admittedly, since they also claim weak
evidence for helium and a very low neutron signal "once", but still,
9 years, and one positive excess heat cell in a burst-like heat
release with a COP of 1.1? Is it any wonder, the funding was
cancelled? And the authors were equivocal too, writing in the
summary: "The heat burst in particular must be reproduced repeatedly
to solve the question whether it is nuclear origin or not. It seems
Morrison's skepticism was well justified.
So, it is not simply the disagreement with established physics that
led to the rejection of cold fusion. It was (and is) the low quality
of the evidence, which never seems to get better. Hagelstein would
do well to face that truth head-on.
3) Career calculus
The end of Hagelstein's essay devolves into a pit of paranoia and
self-pity. When he asks "how many careers should be destroyed in
order to achieve whatever goal is proposed as justification? " he
has gone off the deep end. No one does calculus with anyone's
careers. But science is about making judgements, and scientists
spend a large fraction of their time exercising their judgement,
both to direct their own efforts, and in the service of others as
reviewers for journals, hiring and promotion committees, granting
agencies, and awards organizations. Great scientists are venerated
by other scientists for their accomplishments. It is only fair that
their failures, as judged by the same body, count against them.
P & F were distinguished scientists precisely because they had
impressed mainstream science with their work. When mainstream
science rejected their claims, it was (is) incumbent on the
mainstream to express that rejection, without regard for the
consequences. And anyway, Pons had tenure and Fleischmann was
retired. They were as protected from career destruction as they
could be. They went to France voluntarily to take advantage of a
funding opportunity, so to the extent their careers (or their
legacies) were "destroyed", it was their own doing. They opened
themselves up to harsh criticism by not only going public, but doing
it in a non-scientific, uncharacteristically incautious way. Witness
the almost painfully slow and tentative announcements of the Higgs
boson or of the FTL neutrinos. P&F threw caution to the wind. They
were adamant and they became angry. I think they got what they
deserved.
What does he expect? That science should pretend to accept claims,
even if they don't, in order to preserve the careers of the claimants?
Hagelstein's conclusion that science should approve of efforts in
cold fusion to see progress in the field, is based on the premise
that cold fusion is real. If science rejects the premise, then the
conclusion does not follow.