At 09:58 AM 12/17/2009, you wrote:
Steven Krivit wrote:
I'm sure Shanahan is finding immeasurable entertainment in these
messages. Particularly your comment about "certified fruitcake."
It is the season, though, isn't it?
Absolutely! And for the record, I'm crazy about fruitcake,
especially made with cognac. I don't know why people dislike it so.
I think that people like Shanahan and Morrison are good for cold
fusion, and I appreciate their contributions. They make the
researchers look good. They are good foils. Anyone familiar with the
facts will see, for example, that Shanahan has a screw loose when he claims:
1. There is no opposition to cold fusion.
2. And because there is no opposition, researchers have been able to
convince organizations such as the ENEA and the Italian Physical
Society to sponsor conferences, and they have magically hoodwinked
experts such as Robert Duncan to believe there is ~1 W input and ~20
W output at Energetics Technology.
He honestly believes that people such as the President of the
Italian Physical Society and Duncan are gullible fools who cannot
understand basic chemistry, and they have overlooked Shanahan's
technical objections. Shanahan, Morrison, Taubes, Park and these
others do have monumental self confidence! You have to hand it to
them. They think they know more about electrochemistry than
Fleischmann or Bockris; more about calorimetry than Duncan; more
about tritium than the top experts at Los Alamos and BARC, and more
about theoretical physics than Schwinger.
Look, Jed, you're right. Now, dump the collective victim complex and
start believing that other people, given the right opportunities and
time, will see it. What you've said about Shanahan is generally
correct. The response to Shanahan is diagnostic. Here he is, someone
with some actual credentials, and I welcomed him at the Cold fusion
article, because knowledgeable skeptics are needed, and was really
only disappointed because his criticisms were so shallow,
over-extended and largely without substance. There has been little
support for Shanahan, who would really like the article to be a
skeptical hit piece, far more than it is. There are, in the article,
at least some shreds of evidence that might lead a reader to read the
literature; at least readers can understand from the article that
research is continuing, it is not a dead field. They will end up with
an overly skeptical understanding if they read nothing more, and
that's a problem, for sure, but Shanahan's sense of frustration at
Wikipedia, which I believe is real, demonstrates how weak the
skeptical position has become.
It's failing and falling. Positive research reports are on the
increase, and negative reports have almost completely vanished. Want
to find something negative and recent, you'll have to be content with
Kowalski's paper responding to Mosier-Boss. And Kowalski clearly
believes that CF is real, he's merely criticizing some particular
conclusion, and, to my view, with some justification. It's great that
his criticism was published, even if he's wrong in some way.
When positive papers are being published in peer-reviewed journals,
and if the skeptical position were tenable, we would also see truly
negative publications passing peer-review as well. The idea that
there is a conspiracy of some kind against skeptical papers is beyond
belief. No, if there is a blackout on the cold fusion topic in some
"mainstream" publications, the skeptics have shot themselves in the
foot, but the other publications, willing to publish positive
articles, would also publish negative, if they could pass peer-review.
My own opinion is that there aren't continuing negative publications,
criticizing the continued positive publications, because it has
become really difficult to find convincing negative evidence. It's
not about the "difficulty of proving a negative," that's a red
herring. It's about the difficulty of explaining the positive results
and showing evidence that demonstrates they are artifact, like the
experiment done by the scientist who exposed N-rays as observer
imagination, by secretly removing a critical part of the device in a
demonstration, but the observations continued unchanged. Like the NMR
spectrum of "polywater" that showed the apparent origin with high probability.
The current skeptical bias, which may even be a general majority
view, is mere inertia, persistence of vision, and it will pass as the
evidence becomes more and more visible and more and more difficult to ignore.
