Alain, LENR violates no laws. It only violates assumptions. This
problem is overlooked in your treatment of unexplained events. I
expect parapsychology will also be found to only violate assumptions.
We humans keep making assumptions without any justification. If the
assumption is wrong, the conclusion must be wrong. It is the
assumption that must be tested. In the case of LENR, they made the
assumption the process is just like hot fusion. That assumption was
wrong. Once this error is realized, the claim starts to make sense.
Ed Storms
On Jan 12, 2014, at 4:33 PM, Alain Sepeda wrote:
Since I'm a bit conservative about sciences, but i'm clearly
materialist, I tried to have a method on how to treat unbelievable
evidences, not making the Huizenga or Taubes pathetic anti-science
claims, that anything far from theory is artifact, no need to check.
It is also not far from a better version of precaution principles.
my idea now is the following,
if you face an unbelievable result, first you try to find artifacts,
and YOU CHECK, that they explain your result FULLY.
If something remains, you try hard to reproduce the anomaly, until
either you find an artifact that EXPLAIN ALL, or a pile of
experiments that reproduce the anomaly.
You ask others to reproduce your anomaly, various way, helping them,
sharing, pushing them not to abandon too early...
If it is unbelievable and confirmed, then you can BELIEVE you are
wrong, but not be SURE. so you goal is then to CONTINUE, hard, to
reproduce, improve protocols, to re-confirm or find a problem...
what you should not do (or what public research should not do) is
abandon when facing an unexplained success.
Normally if like me you believe parapsychology does not work, it
will disapear with more tests...
another track of research is that if you have found an artifact that
you don't now (statistic, bias...) you will make a DISCOVERY of that
artifact.
it may even be useful.
for LENR if it was non nuclear, it would be a potential breakthrough
in chemistry, in energy storage, in catalysis, in thermal laws...
there is no excuse not to look at an experiment that stubbornly
violate the laws.
At best it change the laws, at worst you find a crazy artifact which
may be useful, if not salable.
for precaution principle, my variant is that anything that may be
dangerous, should be carefully studied, not ignored... at best to
discover it is save, at best to measure how bad it is, and how to
protect from it.
Unknown unknown is more dangerous than known danger, for an
intelligent being.
2014/1/12 Foks0904 . <[email protected]>
James,
The example you (and Beaudette) provide speaks directly to the
nonsensical denial based on "reproducibility". When politically
convenient for the science community, all experiments get compared
to over-simplified two-body interactions in vacua. Similar denialism
occurs in parapsychology research, where basically no artifacts can
be identified so the pseudo skeptics have now resorted to bringing
into question ALL statistical analysis in the field of psychology.
Its a sad joke.
Regards,
John
On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 5:48 PM, James Bowery <[email protected]>
wrote:
Beaudette, "Excess Heat":
Fleck's essential commentary upon the scientific methodology found
in his study of the Wassermann Test was set forth in the following
lengthy quotation:
The epistemologically most important turning point occurred with the
detection of syphilitic antibodies ... During the initial
experiments it produced barely 15-20 percent positive results in
cases of confirmed syphilis. How could it then increase to the
70-90 percent found in later statistics? This turning point
represented the actual invention of the Wasserman reaction as a
useful test. The theory of the reaction as well as the historical
and psychological circumstances surrounding its conception are of
less practical importance. If the relation of the Wassermann
reaction to syphilis is a fact, it became a fact only because of its
extreme utility owing to the high probability of success in concrete
cases. The moment this decisive turn occurred cannot be accurately
determined. No authors can be specified who consciously brought it
about. We cannot state exactly when it occurred nor explain
logically how it happened. (Emphasis in the original.)
I will assume that the Wassermann Test was a product of scientific
activity, and that its use held the status of being recognized as a
scientific test by the scientific community of its day and
continuing. (Fleck's book has been reissued by the University of
Chicago Press.)
On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 9:13 AM, Edmund Storms
<[email protected]> wrote:
I think we can agree the LENR effect is difficult to produce. Many
people have made it work, some with ease and some with difficulty.
About 800 examples are now described in the literature. However,
this success was not universal and has not revealed why it works
sometimes and not at others. This difficulty was used as a reason to
reject the claim because it justified the belief in the
impossibility of the effect. Now we know a lot more about the
reality of the effect, so that the difficulty in replicating is only
an inconvenience because a phenomenon can not be studied when it can
not be made to happen. However, this inconvenience means nothing.
LENR is an ordinary phenomenon of nature that we do not yet
understand.
I'm in the process of studying all the explanations and comparing
them to what is known in LENR and in general science. The failure to
make progress in explaining LENR is easy to see and a clear path to
the correct explanation is becoming obvious, at least to me. The
problem has a solution if you know where to look.
Ed Storms
On Jan 12, 2014, at 2:43 AM, Alain Sepeda wrote:
Beaudette blames the US nuclear physicists , deified after
Manhattan project, used with easy experimental setup where things
always works the same...
even nuclear experimentalist are too theoretical compared to the
least chemist or biologist...
when nuclear physicist denied LENr because it could not be
replicated at 100% , ignoring it was sure replicated.
when they stupidly asked for exact replication, which in real
science is the best way to replicate artifacts, they were behaving
like rotten kind used with easy science, easy experimental setup
and perfect theory.
i don't know if US Nuclear Physicist are the only to blame.
on other subject I see the same deification of theory, of models,
with observation ignored or tweaked when they dissent with models
or theory.
2014/1/12 James Bowery <[email protected]>
I wonder what would have happened if terrorists had killed all of
the faculty of all of the Ivy League schools, including CalTech on
April 15, 1989.
On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 1:48 AM, Peter Gluck
<[email protected]> wrote:
The lack of realism, combined with ignorance of the theoretical
physicists was only one subfield of the war lost by cold fusion. A
more holistic view of the situationi
is necessary I daretothink.
Nobody was able to explain CF- it seemed unknown nuclear multi-
mystery phenomena with a weak correlation between nuclearity and
the essential heat release take place. However, as the experimental
results have multiplied and diversified- the seemingly inborn
weakness of bad reproducibility has fatally eroded the reputation
of cold fusion.
The usual culprits- il-willed, sadistic, stupid, stubborn skeptics-
enjoy the help of the inner. inherent flaws of cold fusion.
All these facts can be simply understood if we admit that cold
fusion was discovered before its time- when it could not been
explained or demonstrated experimentally.
It iis very sad that these problems stay still unsolved
despite heroic efforts; and this shows the efforts are not going in
the proper direction. The scientific method
ALONE cannot solve the CF's existential problems.
Peter
On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 5:40 AM, Foks0904 . <[email protected]>
wrote:
I thought this was an interesting viewpoint expressed by B.J.
Hiley, David Bohms longtime collaborator, on the nature of
theoreticians and their relationship to experimental science. As he
puts it:
I didn’t mind doing it because I think it’s very important if
you’re doing theoretical physics to get a feel of what it’s like in
a laboratory, making things work. I’ve heard some theoreticians
talking and it’s quite clear they don’t even know what a laboratory
is. They’ve never been in a laboratory and they’ve never tried to
get even simple bits of apparatus working. They just have ideas of
what the measurement is—and it’s nothing like that. It’s much too
idealized.
I feel this captures perfectly the character of the controversies
surrounding Pons and Fleischman in 1989. Most of the critics of
their work were theoreticians who, beyond knowing what constituted
good neutron detection, didn't know a thing about what constituted
good lab work in chemistry generally and calorimetry specifically.
As a result the majority of people threw the baby (excess heat) out
with the bathwater (nuclear products). They were silly enough to
proclaim that P and F were "working outside their area of
expertise" when in fact its likely not a single critic from the
physics community would have even know how to set up an
electrolytic cell, let alone how to upkeep and monitor one over an
extended test period.
The rest of the article can be found here for those that are
interested:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2013/11/04/the-wholeness-of-quantum-reality-an-interview-with-physicist-basil-hiley/
--
Dr. Peter Gluck
Cluj, Romania
http://egooutpeters.blogspot.com
