Jed, you hit the hard point that I found in an article (a recent message). Your position is evident for someone with good scientific culture and good practical sense, but not "brainwashed" by academic training of Popper science philosophy .
It is evident if you are not popper-distorted that to prove the reality of a phenomenon, you just have to confirm the result of few experiments. Negative results are just failures, like is the crash of an early plane. However when you think that Popper rules the truth, and you forget logic, then you take any negative results as refutation of a theory... But cold fusion is not a theory, it is an anomaly. If you interpret Popper with a good logic, you see that Cold fusion is the famous "refutation" of a theory... one confirmed result is enough to refute the mainstream theory... only bad reasoning, non-logic heuristics and habits influenced by Popper, may make very intelligent people able to stupidly say that one experience that fail to show a phenomenon is an evidence that all the others that show it are artifact, and not an obvious failure to fulfill unknown requirements. a typical fallacy influenced by non logic reasoning as neural network does .... they mismatch the positively "negative-result" where a theory fails with the "failure" of cold fusion experiments which is of opposite kind. quickly answer to those 3 question, in less than 1 second: what is the color of blank paper ? what is the color of a golf ball ? what does cows drink ? and you will see the result of a neural reasoning. 2013/12/19 Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> > John Franks <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> Everyone will tell you, until you sort out the mechanism (not nuts and >> bolts) but how this would be possible in a conservative field, there is >> little point in experimenting. >> > > You have that backward. Cold fusion was discovered by experiment. We know > it is real because it has been widely replicated, often at high signal to > noise ratios. There is no theory to explain it. > > You seem to believe that science must begin with theory and then proceed > to experiment. That does happen from time to time, but more often it begins > with a discovery which only later is explained by theory. > > Even if you can show that theory predicts cold fusion cannot exist, that > only proves the theory is wrong. It is fundamental to the scientific method > that when theory and experiment conflict, experiment always wins. > > It may be that you are not familiar with the experimental evidence, such > as heat beyond the limits of chemistry, the fact that no chemical fuel > exists in the cells and no chemical changes are found, and the tritium and > helium. I suggest you learn about these things before commenting on this > research. > > I suggest you tone it down, and do your homework. > > - Jed > >
