On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 3:38 AM, Joshua Cude <joshua.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
I disagree. The implications of cold fusion are what got the world in a > tizzy in 1989. Everyone, including many (if not most) scientists were > prepared to embrace cold fusion *because* of the implications. Thousands of > scientists cheered and experimented, and wanted the revolution to be true, > and wanted to be part of it. It was the failure of the claims to stand up > to scrutiny that caused skepticism. > This argument is very familiar. My apologies if I made a point that has been rebutted several times already. > And I think you use the term "conspiracy theory" incorrectly. In the > case of the ecat, it's really a just run-of-the-mill deception on the scale > of John Ernst Worrell Keely (whose lab was full of concealed tricks) or > Papp or Stoern or Madison Priest (who ran a secret cable across a river) or > countless others, and on a rather smaller scale than Bre-X or Madoff. > Your knowledge of hoaxsters is formidable. One gets the impression that it is a field of knowledge unto itself. This narrow parsing of the term "conspiracy theory" does violence to its use in everyday speech. The monitoring of the input was comically inadequate, if there is any > possibility of deception, the blank run used a different power regimen, the > claims of power density 100 times that of nuclear fuel without cooling and > without melting are totally implausible, the lack of calorimetry is > completely inexplicable. > I don't see how you come to that conclusion. I get the impression the input monitoring was actually pretty good, and that there have been some crossed signals with different authors of the report as to what measurements were actually carried out. > This is not some sloppiness. This is far below ordinary scientific > standards, particularly for a claim like this. > I will defer to you on this one. > Most scientists, I expect, believe that a completely unequivocal > demonstration of claims of Rossi's magnitude would be a trivial thing to > stage, and would bear no resemblance to the farce that we are seeing. > If there is any point of unanimity here (and there are very few), it is that Rossi does himself no favors by being squirmy. I don't think this is a point that is contested. Once that is acknowledged, the question is whether he's simply being squirmy, or whether he's doing something more. I rather like the fact that people here generally proceed on an assumption of innocence until such an assumption becomes untenable. Eric
