On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 10:00 AM, Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote:
Then they have not considered the obvious. Unless there is fraud at the > felony level, then Rossi has probably discovered something valid, and > incredibly important to Society > It's the implications that get people caught up in the conspiracy theories. The implications are too much for people to handle. They make it hard to give objective, reasonable consideration to fairly mundane experiments and to apply Occam's razor to the evidence. The most reasonable explanation is not that there was wire fake or massive output over-calculation or fraud or sloppy, incompetent scientists. These are all possibilities, one presumes, but to a fair-minded observer, the most likely explanation at this point is that there's could be some new science to be worked out. Perhaps there was some sloppiness. Or perhaps the details we've been glued to are the kinds of flaw that normal scientists introduce in the course of normal scientific work and that are normally addressed behind the scenes during peer review. I'm sure there are many papers uploaded to ArXiv that suffer from defects, and those flaws are gradually ironed out over the course of peer review. This paper is different, since there is a whole industry of Rossi watchers waiting to pounce on it. Let's be fair. How many papers subjected to this kind of scathing attention, out in the open? The potential downstream consequences drive smart people bonkers. They lose their cool and put in place requirements to which they would never hold the establishment of another empirical phenomenon such as superconductivity or cloning. In this regard it is about the consequences and not the empirical basis of the stuff we're looking at. Simple heat measurements, sure. But the consequences are all out of hand, so the simple heat measurements all of a sudden become waaay complex. As a practical matter, I think we just have to get used to this situation and adapt to the double standard. There is no use in insisting that physicists and antagonistic Rossi watchers adopt a reasonable standard of evidence when they have no intention of doing so. They want the whole Sagan/Truzzi "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" formula to be applied (I'm using "formula" in the ancient sense, of a ceremonial incantation). They will not suffer a revolution in physics through a demonstration that is less than flawless. I doubt they can be persuaded out of this demand. I think it is a tactical error on our part to assume that they can be. So either a higher bar must be cleared in the case of LENR or Rossi or one of the other entrepreneurs will need to succeed in the market. People should get used to this and adapt. That means jumping through extra hoops, including picking over every nit and worrying about whether LaTeX was used for the writeup. People should let go of the idea that this stuff is going to be sorted out in a sane, reasonable way. It's either an absolutely ironclad set of demonstrations, or it's a mass market device. This has little to do with the science of it. I am addressing purely practical considerations. People should not get upset when trifling details are pored over ad nauseam. I don't see any other way forward if this stuff is to make it through the gatekeepers of physics. Eric
