[extropy-chat] Cold fusion research

[Ben Goertzel]

Hi,

I'm not an experimental scientist but I do have a bunch of experience 
analyzing very noisy data gathered by experimental scientists, sometimes 
using bad experimental designs, so I do have some idea of the variety of 
things that can go wrong.  But this has been in the biology domain, not 
chemistry.

BTW my original training was in math, not CS.

And, you have not explained to me why you think McKubre (the guy from 
SRI) did his work incorrectly or sloppily.  You have pointed out why 
some other researchers did not use the kind of controls you think they 
should have; and you are probably right about the kinds of controls they 
should have used, but this does not invalidate the results of other 
researchers such as McKubre who did use the kind of controls that you 
suggested (light water controls).

> Hitherto I avoided saying it, but you don't sound like you're
> experimentalist enough in order to be qualifed to review the experiments. Not
> just because you're not a electrochemist, or a cold fusion researcher,
> because you're lacking the basic understanding of how to plan
> an experiment in natural sciences. 
Sorry, this is just not true.  I have participated in experimental 
design in the biology domain, and I do understand the role of controls 
in experimentation.

One thing I find interesting in this dialogue is the high level of ad 
hominem attacks involved.  Mostly leveled by John Clark, but now you 
seem to be getting into the game too.   Too bad.

> In fact, if you believe all the claims
> on LENR-CANR -- and there is no reason to be picky here -- 
Why would you say that?  Of course there is reason to be picky: some 
effects have been reported by a large number of researchers, some 
apparently quite reliable like McKubre.  Others have been reported only 
by a single researchers whose reputation is not as easy to gather 
information about.

>  
>   
>> However, when light water controls have been run, the results have
>> been as expected.
>>     
>
> Meaning, what? I recall that some experiments on LENR-CANR claimed
> light water works just as well as heavy water. So which is it? You
> can't have it both ways.
>   

I did not survey all experiments, I read Beaudette's book and some 
papers by McKubre and a few others who appeared to be reliable.

It seemed possible to Schwinger, who knew more physics than you (let 
alone me), that the phenomenon might work in some circumstances using 
light water.

>  
>   
>> 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
>>     
>
> So it's fusion, but not fusion as we know it? There's a world of
> a difference between mass defect in chemical reactions, and nuclear
> reactions, and if you fuse two nuclei, then the recoil won't be
> conveniently and magickaly be absorbed by the lattice, the reaction
> results are so energetic they don't see the lattice at all.
> They will plow across it, and in fact emerge in the open space,
> where they're not difficult to detect (and be it by loss of hair, 
> teeth, and bloody stool, which is what one should expect from
> power densities of a nuclear reactor's core).
>
>   

Sorry but I will accept the intuitions of Julian Schwinger, and 
Haseltine (an MIT faculty) over yours.

I am not a physicist, and my knowledge of physics is pretty much 
entirely from studying mathematical and theoretical physics.

However, you are making highly confident statements that contradict what 
Schwinger, Haseltine and others with more track record in physics than 
you have stated.  So I don't see why I should accept your theoretical 
intuitions over theirs, sorry...

>> 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
>>     
>
> You have no idea how far into hot water you're putting yourself with
> that statement. It's like expecting your program would run completely 
> differently if you painted your computer case a different color. Because,
> you know, it's all complicated and mysterious, and we've never ran
> that particular program on that particular computer, and have painted
> the case with the particular color. And did we accont for the moon phase,
> and is the room feng shui right? Puh-leeze.
>   

IMO, that is not a very good metaphor.  Julian Schwinger disagreed with 
you, along with a number
of other good physicists.  Whereas you will not find a single Nobel 
prizewinner nor MIT or SRI
scientist who will argue that a program will run differently if you 
painted the case a different color.
>   
>> 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?
>>     
>
> So E=mc^2 is incorrect, but, so what? And white is black,

I really don't think E=mc^2 would need to be revised to account for CF, 
sorry.

> It is the only way to find fraud, and in practice it works very well.
> If you fail to do peer review you're *guaranteed* to have fraud. And
> if you tolerate fraud among your peers, I really really wonder about
> what's wrong with your head.
>   

I was tempted to say "I wonder what is wrong with YOUR head, and John 
Clark's, that you find it necessary
to make ad hominem attacks against people who disagree with you!!!"

But I don't really wonder.  It's an age-old phenomenon with well-known 
explanations in evolutionary psychology.

>>
>> Time will tell which one of us is correct.
>>     
>
> I think the time already did. You're not.
>  
>   

If you think your definitive know-it-all tone makes you in any way 
convincing to me, you're wrong.  Rather, the opposite.  It tells me that 
you are sufficiently closed-minded and emotional that your opinions are 
probably not worth listening to, except in areas where you have a really 
extreme amount of personal experience and expertise, which this 
obviously is not.

>> 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.
>>     
>
> If the bulk of science would operate under such conditions we never
> could get anywhere done. FWIW, there are enough individuals which would
> investigate about anything, and in fact this is what has happened with
> CF. All that work so far hasn't produced anything.

Well but that's not just true that it hasn't produced anything...

Anyway, I am now sick of discussing this with you, just as I got sick of 
discussing it with John Clark.

Your arguments were certainly at a much higher level than Clark's; but, 
in the end you provided no convincing refutation of the phenomenon, only 
a critical analysis of a small subset of the experiments (and, notably, 
NOT the ones I pointed out to you as apparently most convincing, which 
did involve the kinds of controls you suggested).

My biggest lesson from this dialogue is the strong emotion that it 
elicited from both John Clark and yourself.  Wow.  I think the 
closed-minded, emotionally-hostile attitude you two display is every bit 
as damaging to science as the opposite emotional/cognitive error, in 
which people blindly accept whatever bullshit they want to believe. 

I do have a lot of respect for the overall scientific process, which 
allows progress to keep going in spite of closed-mindedness, hostility, 
gullibility, wishful-thinking, and all the other human weaknesses.  The 
scientific process is not optimal but it ultimately does work, which is 
why I predict that within 20 years from now CF will be mainstream science.


-- Ben