[extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings

[Ben Goertzel]

On Feb 2, 2007, at 12:08 AM, John K Clark wrote:

> Ben Goertzel" <ben at goertzel.org>
>
>> Beaudette's book gives an excellent guide
>
> Excellent? How did you determine the book was excellent ?

It presented complex information clearly, and served as a good guide  
to the
more technical research literature (published journal papers, and
conference papers), which I also dug into a bit.

For links into the literature, a starting-point is:

http://www.lenr-canr.org/
http://www.lenr-canr.org/LibFrame1.html


> What reason do you
> have for thinking  even any of the facts it touts actually happened as
> advertised?

I agree, it could be the case that dozens of researchers at various  
university labs over the
last 17 years have falsified their CF experiments and corresponding  
journal
and conference publications, through dishonesty or mass insanity.

It could also be the case that the Moon landing was falsified, and  
humans never really went
to the moon.  I never saw the Moon landing myself in person, nor  
personally talked to anyone
who did -- I just watched it on TV, and read about it.

I could be a brain floating in a vat filled with LSD, cayenne pepper  
and cream cheese, hallucinating
I'm sitting at a desk typing on a computer...

etc. etc.

If CF is wrong, I don't think mass dishonesty or insanity is the best  
explanation, actually.

The published CF experiments that appear to confirm the production of  
excess heat, have been
done using a wide variety of experimental setups and calorimetric  
apparatus.

It is certainly possible that there are strange, systematic errors in  
this wide variety of calorimetric
apparatus, which are not understood by any current practitioners of  
calorimetry.

However, based on my review of the literature, this seems less likely  
to me than the actual reality
of the CF phenomenon.

I am not sure why you find it so bizarre to imagine that some kind of  
non-binary nuclear fusion
(multiple nuclei fusing, rather than pairwise fusion) could exist,  
when the right materials are
sufficiently compressed together in the right conditions
and enough charge is passed through them.  There is certainly nothing  
in basic physics that
prohibits this, as our current understanding of nuclear physics is  
based on a lot of crude
approximations.  Perturbation theory is not exact, and so far as I  
know no one has done any
extremely detailed computer simulations of the conditions that exist  
inside the cell during CF
experiments.


-- Ben