On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I would like to explore this dreadful history a little more, because I > know a lot about it. > Certainly not because it has any relevance. What you're saying is that two countries are at war, one claims they will crush the other, and the other doesn't believe it, and therefore cold fusion is real. But for me, I'd associate the US with cold fusion skeptics, and Japan with the true believers. (In truth, I don't think the episode is in the least instructive to this debate.) Anyway, what about when Napolean said he would crush the 7th coalition at Waterloo? The coalition didn't just accept that and roll over either, and they of course were Napolean's waterloo. Or how about Sonny Liston, the heavy favorite in 1964 against Clay (Ali)? He said on the eve of the fight: "Cassius, you're my million dollar baby, so please don't let anything happen to you before tomorrow night." Ali didn't back down though, and the rest is history. Of course Ali was far more vocal in his predictions, but in war and fights, both sides usually expect to win, or there wouldn't be wars. > Cude and others have often said: "If there was any chance cold fusion is > real, of course smart people would support it. Everyone wants to see > zero-cost energy." Then they say, "since smart people do not support this > research, that proves there is nothing to it, and no chance it will result > in new technology." > Obviously, no one could say that many smart people rejecting something proves it's wrong. What it proves is that the evidence for it is not conclusive or unequivocal, which is what true believers claim. Scientists make their judgements based on the evidence, and the vast majority judge the evidence to be weak, and given the overwhelmingly strong evidence against it, they remain skeptical. It's true that most scientists have not kept up with the details of cold fusion research, or even of its broad strokes, but in 1989, nearly every scientist on the planet looked pretty closely at cold fusion, and concluded it was almost certainly bogus. Since then, the evidence has not gotten any better, and so there is no reason to revisit that consensus. What most scientists (at least nuclear physicists) learned when they considered the possibility, was that if the claims of cold fusion advocates had merit, unequivocal evidence would almost certainly be rather easy to produce. And once produced would be submitted to and accepted by a prominent journal like Science or Nature. That hasn't happened. Also, a panel of experts enlisted by the DOE met in 2004 and examined the best of the evidence up to that time, and 17 of 18 said that evidence for LENR was not conclusive. And if do sample the informed opinion, by looking at the results of peer-review in prominent journals or by granting agencies (like the DOE panel), or by the fact that the APS recently rejected the publication of the ICCF conference, then you find that the consensus remains strong that cold fusion is almost certainly bogus. The difference between 1989 and now is that then we had two believable (even distinguished) guys who seemed to have stumbled on (or intuited their way to) a revolutionary claim that would be hard to get wrong. Now, we've got much more distinguished people who claimed negative results, who have looked carefully at the positive results and found they don't stand up, and most importantly, we've got dozens or even hundreds of people who have spent a long time looking for results, and the evidence still doesn't stand up. And experiments are not better (or at least the results are not better), and the theories are no more plausible, except to True Believers. Every new claim that is no better than the previous claims makes it look more pathological, not less. Moreover, there's no one left working in the field with the distinction of Fleischmann; all that's left is a bunch of mostly senior, run-of-the-mill scientists. So what happened in 1989 fits the pattern for some physics discoveries, and that's why people took notice. What's happened since fits the pattern for pathological science, and that's why it's now being ignored. > > Cude, Frank Close, the editors at Scientific American and others are not > worried that they might be holding back a valuable technology. [...] > You wrote a lot of words to say simply that skeptics consider the possibility of cold fusion being real exceedingly remote. The additional verbiage replaced by an ellipsis (as well as the entire Japanese story) was intended to put this attitude in a bad light, but then you say: > They are as certain it is wrong as I am certain that creationism is wrong. > completely deflating your argument. Because none of it was specific to cold fusion, but to the general idea of being too confident that something is wrong. And here you are, certain that something is wrong. The truth is that there *are* varying degrees of certainty about things. We are certain of the conservation of energy, and that a dropped rock falls to the ground, and we ignore proposals of perpetual motion or anti-gravity, unless the evidence is as good as the existing evidence contradicting these things. The main problem with cold fusion is that people are not sufficiently familiar with nuclear physics to know how justifiably confident nuclear physicists are that cold fusion doesn't happen. And so, when in that words of a prominent believer, cold fusion is his reluctant mistress, or it depends on mother nature's mood, then that is not good enough to question the overwhelming evidence from 60 years of experiments that suggests it should not happen. > > "While every result and conclusion [cold fusion researchers] publish meets > with overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, they resolutely > pursue their illusion of fusing hydrogen in a mason jar. . . ." > > That is not hyperbole. They mean it. > > Except for the word "delusion", that statement is a simple observation. The overwhelming evidence to the contrary is the evidence from copious experiments all elegantly consistent with a robust picture that is highly inconsistent with cold fusion. It's not an absolute rejection, but it means that evidence for cold fusion has to be better than a reluctant mistress to be taken seriously.
