On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Edmund Storms <stor...@ix.netcom.com>wrote:
> I wrote an entire book in order to place the evidence in one place and to > show how it relates to the claims. In 2007. The world's view was not changed by it, and it's obvious why. The evidence as reported in your book makes cold fusion less plausible. > If you do not know enough science to read and understand this collection, > than you have to accept somebody's word about what it says. You are then in > the position of believing either Cude or me or Jed, based on which of us > sounds more plausible. He is in the position, as are funding agencies, of accepting the judgement of the vast majority of experts (like the DOE panel and most Nobel laureates who have weighed in) or a small ragtag band of true believers. > Cude will win that argument because he says what you already believe and > he says it very well. > > I think the point is that this would not be possible if there were credible evidence for cold fusion. No amount of polemic can make high Tc superconductivity look bogus, for example. Cude will simply say the work describes error and I will say it does not. > How will you judge which of us to believe? It's not that the errors are necessarily obvious, especially from written reports, and can be exposed one at a time. It's that if the claims were true, the demonstrations would get better, as they invariably do with real phenomena. But instead they get worse, and less frequent, as is typical of pathological science. Some claims that Rothwell likes to repeat are so outrageously high (100 W with no input), that unequivocal demonstrations like the Wrights' flight should be easy to do, and yet when 60 minutes did a piece on cold fusion, they had nothing to show other than Duncan doing a calculation in a notebook. So how to judge which to believe? Look at what's come since. Does it make sense that in a decade or two since whatever evidence you talk about, there is so little (if any) progress? > Until you can buy a CF device from Wall Mart, I suspect you will not know > what to believe. That's the problem. Is there a single phenomenon that was not believed until a commercial product was released? This is just the silliest argument among many very silly arguments from the true believers.
