[extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings

[Ben Goertzel]

> "Damien Broderick" <thespike at satx.rr.com> Wrote
>
>> This simply isn't the case. The canonical paper is Fleischmann,
>> Pons, Anderson, Li and Hawkins, "Calorimetry of the
>> Palladium-Deuterium-Heavy Water System," J. Electroanalytical  
>> Chemistry,
>> 287, 293, July 25, 1990.
>
> BULLSHIT! I most certainly am NOT wrong. "Electroanalytical  
> Chemistry" is
> not Nature and I've never heard of the rag. It was ignored  
> seventeen years
> ago
> when it was published and it's ignored today; and with good reason.


>

John Clark,

Regarding the Journal of Electroanalytical chemistry, according to

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/504087/ 
description#description

"
Impact factor of this journal
2005: 2.223
"

This is not extremely high or anything, but nor is it disastrously  
low; it is higher than plenty of other respectable science journals,  
as noted e.g. in

http://www.bioscience.org/services/impact15.htm

Anyway, judging a piece of science by the fame of the journal it's  
published in is really not very sensible.

I am no expert on cold fusion, but what I have read suggests to me  
that (as Damien and Eliezer agree) it is not "clear and obvious BS."   
It may or may not be what Pons and Fleischmann said it is, but, it  
seems like it is probably something not explained by contemporary  
scientific theories.

This seems to relate to a recent thread about philosophy of science,  
in which I pointed out that science is a human, sociological  
phenomenon in which "truth" is ultimately judged by groups of people  
and their intuitive judgements rather than purely by objective and  
rigorous mathematical/empirical criteria.

A case like cold fusion, where the phenomenon is hard to replicate  
and the politics are considerable, is precisely the sort of case  
where this "sociological" aspect of science comes to the fore.

Apparently you have the tendency to ignore, deny or minimize evidence  
that appears to contradict your own simplistic philosophy of science ;-)

-- Ben G