At 01:47 PM 5/7/2010, Terry Blanton wrote:
Wait a minute. Why should I care about two people, who are both
wrong, arguing with each other? :-)
Because even a stopped clock is right twice a day....
Seriously, Shanahan, it must be realized, is the best the skeptics
have at this point. He's raising, explicitly, the issues that can
still be raised, with a sort-of straight face, with the experimental
evidence for cold fusion. Further, notice that Shanahanan's paper was
allegedly prepared pursuant to a DoE contract. It's badly written for
that purpose, but there could be serious implications here.
I suspect that the paper will not be published as-is by the Journal
of Environmental Monitoring. If it is, it would indicate a serious
lack of peer review, there is too much in the paper that isn't
sustainable on examination. But I could be wrong, and we should be
prepared to address the flaws in this paper.
As to Krivit, he's mostly right in his response to Shanahan, though
his response does not address the specific flaws in sufficient
detail, and Krivit himself doesn't get some of the issues.
Krivit is arguing with Shanahan and using the occasion to make some
of his own points about the whole cold fusion community. Shanahan is
arguing with the whole cold fusion community, not with Krivit.
The issues that Shanahan raises should be addressed; many of them
already have been, which is a problem with Shanahan, he distorts and
misrepresents what has already been done. Shanahan is taking the lazy
approach: the sit-back skeptic raises objection after objection about
why some new result and conclusion isn't "proven." A working
scientist will be skeptical in the other direction as well. Shanahan
is raising objection after objection, but never actually demonstrates
that any of the objections are more than allegedly possible alternate
hypotheses. At some point, when piece of evidence after piece of
evidence arises, all with independent objections, one must start to
wonder what is *really* happening. And real debunking of real
pathological science requires actually showing that artifact is
artifact, not just that it "might be" artifact, when we are looking
at thousands of independent reports of a phenomenon.
Let me put it this way; is this a civil or a criminal case? In a
criminal case, if cold fusion would convict someone and send them to
life in prison, I'd have to vote against conviction, maybe, but it
would be tough. The evidence is quite strong, overall. In a civil
case, if cold fusion would award a huge settlement to a plaintiff,
I'd award the settlement, because in civil cases, the standard is
preponderance of the evidence.
The issue before funding agencies should be preponderance of the
evidence, not "proof beyond a shadow of doubt." Preponderance of the
evidence is now clearly on the side of cold fusion, and Shanahan is
desperately reaching, as an attorney for the defense of traditional
theories, to find every possible pretext for dismissing it all. It won't work.\
I've now glanced over the rest of the paper. He drastically
misrepresents the triple-track issue. Triple-tracks are definitely
dramatic and interesting, and they are not what he claims they might
be, simple coincidence of pits, because in some of the images, three
grooves at the base of the pits can be seen leading to a common point
of origin that is quite small. Shanahan is looking at a piece of
elephant dropping, and missing the elephant, the proton knock-on
tracks found abundandtly on the back of wet CR-39 and missing from
the front. These tracks are spatially located opposite the cathodes.
Shanahan is creatively coming up with various alternative hypotheses,
such as mini-explosions that can pass through mylar to cause pits.
Why mini-explosions would happen without fusion he assigns to an
oxygen bubble reaching the cathode, I believe. But that would not
cause an explosion, it could cause a burn. The shock waves reported
were not terribly energetic; in those experiments the cathode was a
piezoelectric detector used as the substrate for codeposition,
maximally sensitive to what was going on on their very surface. He's
got an image of some kind of focused energy transmission -- from a
chemical explosion that wouldn't happen, that requires a
stoichiometric mixture, which would not exist at the cathode -- that
passes through, not just a 6 micron piece of mylar, but through a
1/16" piece of CR-39 to pit the back. Or he has oxygen bubbles
causing pits on the back, but explains not why these pits would be
aligned with the cathode wires. I'll write more with a specific critique.
he doesn't understand that the mylar used in the wet configuration by
SPAWAR was the protective mylar that comes on rad-detection CR-39,
normally peeled off to start detecting. It was accidentally left on,
and that's when they started to see that there was something going on
besides alpha radiation. Proton knock-on requires a hydrogen-rich
material for the neutrons to get the protons to hit.... that's why
these tracks aren't seen so much on the front side, but are found in
copious quantities on the back. Neutrons themselves leave no tracks.
