On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Joshua Cude <joshua.c...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Elsewhere I have argued that it is much more likely that an artifact >> mistaken as excess heat is correlated with high loading, or the conditions >> that produce high loading, than that nuclear reactions are so correlated. >> And while I can't identify such an artifact, neither can you identify a >> nuclear reaction that fits the claims. >> > > I do not need to identify the reaction. The tritium and helium proves it > is a nuclear reaction. The precise nature of it is irreverent. > Whoa. Proves? So here you conflate tritium with excess heat. The tritium claims, even if they were real, would not prove that the claims of excess heat are nuclear. You said that yourself: "No one says that tritium "proves" that P&F's claims of excess heat is correct. Tritium cannot prove that calorimety works. That's absurd. " The helium results, particularly the ones that have survived peer review, are far too close to background and detection limits to be convincing. Which if course is why most people are not convinced. So, no, there is no proof it is a nuclear reaction, any more than there is that is an artifact. And if you don't have to specify the nuclear reaction, skeptics don't have to specify the artifact. And between the two possibilities, given history of calorimetry, and the history of nuclear physics, and the erratic behavior of cold fusion, artifacts are a far more likely explanation. > You, on the other hand, are saying there may be an artifact that causes > problems with instruments perfected in the 19th and early 20th centuries. > You yourself said that "calorimetric errors and artifacts are more common that researchers realize" . It doesn't matter how old the instruments are. It's always possible to mismeasure heat, and it doesn't have to involve a failure in the measuring instruments. You are saying this artifact has never been observed in any other > experiment, and yet on 17,000 occasions in this field only it suddenly > occurred so that *every single case* of excess heat is an artifact. It > has to be every one. If even one is real, that makes cold fusion real. > There may be many artifacts, which is why the magnitude of the effect is so erratic and unpredictable. But obviously, skeptics argue that every single case of excess heat is an artifact or error (or trick), just like bigfoot skeptics argue that every single image or footprint or whatever is an artifact (obviously different artifacts for images and footprints), and just like homeopathy skeptics argue that every single claim of vague improvement is psychological, and just like perpetual motion skeptics argue that every single claim of over unity motors are artifacts, errors, or tricks. And just like every single claim of polywater (in hundreds of publications in much better journals than cold fusion gets into) turned out to be artifact. And just like every single observation of vulcan turned out to be an artifact. And just like every single claim of evidence for a young earth is held to be an artifact by the mainstream. And just like every single claim of evidence for the ether (over a century) turned out to be an error in interpretation, according to the current dogma. And so on. Here's a bigfoot believer making the same argument you make for cold fusion (from J Milstone): "The sheer mass of reports alone should point to something of substance to the topics and it’s just as loony to believe that all the reports, trace evidence, photographs or other pieces of evidence that obviously interest these people from all walks of life is bogus, misconstrued or originating from a too many beers in the woods." It doesn't sound any better coming from cold fusion true believers. > You are saying that you cannot identify this artifact. That means your > claim is not falsifiable, so it is not scientific. > > Please! I can't identify the artifacts in bigfoot sightings, or the synapses that pose as cures in homeopathy, or the tricks in perpetual motion machines, but that doesn't mean it's unscientific to be skeptical of those phenomena. If it did, all scientists would be unscientific, which would make the term useless. Furthermore, it's easy to imagine experiments that exclude artifacts, making them falsifiable. You have said that no scientist could deny palpable heat from a completely isolated device. So boil the water in an olympic pool with a few grams of metal hydride, and artifacts are excluded. That's an extreme example, but if cold fusion experiments were quantitatively reproducible, if they were reproducible from lab to lab with written instructions only, if they scaled in some reasonable and consistent way with the metal, then artifacts would be excluded. But they don't. McKubre has said there has been no quantitative reproducibility, and he and Storms (here, a day or 2 ago) have said written instructions are not enough. Cold fusion results are much more characteristic of a combination of errors, artifacts, and confirmation bias. And anyway, you can't identify a nuclear reaction either, so by your argument, that's not scientific either. > Also you are saying that causality can run backward in time. > > Not even close. You're not going to make any progress convincing the world of cold fusion with these sorts of meta arguments about how can so many marginal results be wrong, any more than any of the other fringe sciences will. You have to get better evidence. It's as simple as that.
