[extropy-chat] Cold fusion research

[Benjamin Goertzel]

John K Clark wrote:
> "Benjamin Goertzel" <ben at goertzel.org>
>
>
>> This control experiment has been run many times, however.
>>
>
> Thank you, you have provided a perfect example of why cold fusion "research"
> is so incredibly crappy, and ESP "research" is even worse; the idea that a
> control experiment is a luxury and not a necessity. But then, if you want to
> find something that doesn't exist it's best not to be too skilled in the art
> of experimentation.
>

As discussed in the CF literature, there are many different kinds of
control experiments you can run in this setting.

A control experiment using light water is only one of the options.

For instance, you can run a control experiment using a dead palladium
cathode, which is what some experimenters did.

As Julian Schwinger pointed out, a light water control experiment is a
bit suspicious because the underlying mechanisms of CF are not known.
Schwinger suspected that, if his theoretical understanding was
correct, a small amount of excess heat might correctly be observed in
a light water experiment because

"Through the natural presence of D20 in ordinary water, such control
experiments might produce an otherwise puzzling amount of heat."

So, arguably, a control with a dead palladium cathode is just as
meaningful, or more so.

However, when light water controls have been run, the results have
been as expected.

I don't see why you keep bringing ESP into the argument, by the way.
We could argue about that if you want but it would be a quite separate
argument and my attitude would be pretty different.  I am open to the
possibility of ESP and related phenomena being real, but my (not too
deep) study of the data has not strongly convinced me of this, unlike
the case with my study of the data regarding cold fusion.  But of
course cold fusion is a far simpler thing, and the amount of overt BS
out there about CF is a lot smaller.  With ESP, if there is any
"signal" there in the literature, it's a lot harder to detect in the
presence of all the noise.  I believe Damien has studied this topic
more carefully than I have and would be curious for his findings; but,
anyway, this has nothing to do with cold fusion.

One thing you should be clear about is that CF really does not violate
known physical law (to use an expression I don't like, since they
really are not laws, just observed regularities); as Schwinger,
Hagelstein and others have argued, it is apparently a manifestation of
known physics operating in a regime that was very little studied
before.  It's not as though there is some analytical theory of the
production of heat in the atomic lattice inside palladium under heavy
deuterium loading, and the CF results violate this analytical theory.
Rather, this is a complex physical situation for which the laws of
physics yield no analytical solution by any known means.  CF violates
nuclear physicists' hand-wavy analyses of the physics of these
lattices, but, so what?

It is not obvious to me that ESP would violate known physical law, but
reconciling it with known physics would certainly be a hell of a lot
trickier.

>
>> A number of his works in the area are available on that site.
>>
>
> Yes, on that site. Not in that respected peer reviewed journal, but on that
> site.
>

McKubre has published many journal papers in other areas during the
last 17 years.  He says he gave up on submitting his CF papers because
dealing with editors and referees was such a pain due to their
irrational bias against the area.  Sounds like a reasonable story to
me.

I myself have been more avid about publishing my bioinformatics work
than my AGI work, in part because dealing with editors and referees
regarding AGI is more of a pain.

>> From what I can tell he is a good researcher
>>
>
> And how did you determine that he was a good researcher, from ESP? Or did it
> come to you in a dream?

I estimated that because he has published papers in good journals on
other topics; and because he has a leadership position at a
well-respected research institute (SRI, formerly part of Stanford).
Also his papers appear to be carefully and thoughtfully written,
unlike some other stuff in the field.

Unfortunately, one consequence of the marginalization of CF by the
physics establishment has been that it has attracted a certain number
of nut-job or semi-nut-job "researchers", who do low-quality work; my
feeling is that McKubre is not one of these.


> It's not peer reviewed, there is no way to know if
> he did anything at all except sit at a terminal and upload a ASCII sequence
> onto a website.

Well, for that matter, peer review is not a protection against fraud
either, as has been repeatedly shown by experience.

As McKubre himself has pointed out, there is really no way to know
whether a complex experimental result like this is correct or not
except by situating oneself in the lab in question for several months
and very carefully monitoring all procedures.

I have not done that, so I have to make do with secondary indications...


>
> I don't know what to say, it's like something out of Monty Python. I can
> just picture John Cleese having a transcendental experience when he sees a
> magician at a child's birthday party pull a quarter out of a kid's ear. Have
> a little skepticism people!
>
>

I don't understand the "transcendental experience" joke, sorry.   I
have not (yet!) had any transcendental experiences regarding CF.  It
is not my area of research, and is not particularly important to me.
I have simply read the available information and come to the opinion
that the phenomenon most likely does exist.  Schwinger, McKubre,
Fleischmann, and many of the other researchers in the area seem
credible to me.

Time will tell which one of us is correct.

If you knew me better you would know that I'm actually a highly
skeptical individual.  It is not the case that I'm credulous and
accept any information I read that looks exciting.  I understand the
dangers of wishful thinking.  However, I also understand the dangers
of overly conservative thinking -- of rejecting new information
because it doesn't fit one's preconceived theoretical models; and of
believing something is true just because the official societal "owners
of the truth" say it is.

-- Ben