On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 7:53 PM, William Beaty <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2011, Joshua Cude wrote: > > ,in the data by orders of magnitude (10^10 if I remember), from the fact >> that the highest values came from BARC within weeks of the press conference >> (for what is supposed to be a very difficult experiment), that they have >> gotten smaller over the years, and don't come close to accounting for the >> measured heat, it is reasonable to conclude that they do not provide enough >> evidence to suggest nuclear reactions at room temperature in benchtop >> experiments create measurable heat. >> > > One brief question to clarify a small confusion. > > I noticed that in the last week or so you've mentioned that values have > "gotten smaller over the years." Perhaps I'm missing something. Do you see > this decrease as evidence of problems? Why keep pointing it out? ( Or did I > miss an earlier explanation? ) > > > It is characteristic of artifacts that as experiments improve, they get smaller. On the other hand, real effects -- desirable effects -- almost invariably become more pronounced as more people work on them, and the experiments get better. This is true even if the theory is not understood, just from systematic, or even non-systematic, search of parameter space. Better conditions and recipes are found, reported, repeated, and extended. It's the way science works. Especially science that can be performed on a benchtop. A good example is high temp superconductivity, where higher critical temperature and critical current densities seem to be reported every year (although many claims do not bear up under scrutiny), in the absence of a widely accepted theory. (The relatively slow progress in plasma fusion is not difficult to understand when you realize that experimental iterations are measured in decades, considering progress should be expected to be exponential in the number of iterations.)
