[extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings

[Damien Broderick]

At 01:31 AM 1/23/2007 -0500, John K Clark wrote:

> > Beaudette documents at great length, a large number of working
> > replications have run hotter than predicted by conventional theory.
>
> From High School science fare experiments.

Anyone who bothers to read Beaudette's book will find that this is 
not the case. In a chapter on early validation/corroboration, he 
lists the consistent work--which used several variations in protocol 
and hence guarded against some common unknown error--by established scientists:

Dr. Michael McKubre, SRI International
Prof. Richard Oriani, U. Minnesota (whom I cited in a previous post)
Prof. Robert Huggins, Stanford University
Melvin Miles, Naval Weapons Center, China Lake
Drs. Y. Arata and Y-C. Zhang, Osaka University

This confirming work was all done by 1994/5, and has been continued 
by other researchers. In some instances, revealingly, the DOE panel 
on the effect accepted early reports of failure to replicate by some 
of these researchers, then refused to heed or include their 
subsequent successes. It's politics, not science as we would wish to 
know it, Jim.

>I would think the most important
>scientific discovery of the last century could do better than that.

 From reliable reports, it seems that the "cold fusion" (probably a 
misnomer) excess heat effect generates low-grade heat. It's not a 
nuclear bomb in a test tube, it's not likely to drive a rocket to 
Mars. And I somehow doubt that it could be seen as more important 
that, say, S. and G. Relativity, quantum theory, antibiotics, lasers, 
stellar nucleosynthesis, the structure of DNA and its code, the 
expansion of the universe, the *acceleration* of that expansion, the 
development of electronic computers...

Damien Broderick