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Cold Fusion and the Reputation Trap (aeon.co)
An anonymous reader writes: Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, has written an article about how the scientific community regards research into cold fusion, and those who undertake it. His argument is not that current cold fusion research is necessarily correct, but rather that actual scientific progress is inhibited by what he calls a "reputation trap." "People outside the trap won't go near it, for fear of falling in. ... People inside the trap are already regarded as disreputable, an attitude that trumps any efforts that they might make to argue their way out, by reason and evidence." Central to his case is Andrea Rossi's work, which is not taken seriously throughout the scientific community, and yet he's still doing business.
Price's point is this: "Cold fusion is dismissed as pseudoscience, the kind of thing that respectable scientists and science journalists simply don't talk about (unless to remind us of its disgrace). ...the standard line is that the rejection of cold fusion in 1989 turned on the failure to replicate the claims of Fleischmann and Pons. Yet if that were the real reason, then the rejection would have to be provisional. Failure to replicate couldn't possibly be more than provisional – empirical science is a fallible business, as any good scientist would acknowledge. In that case, well-performed experiments claiming to overturn the failure to replicate would certainly be of great interest."
Price's point is this: "Cold fusion is dismissed as pseudoscience, the kind of thing that respectable scientists and science journalists simply don't talk about (unless to remind us of its disgrace). ...the standard line is that the rejection of cold fusion in 1989 turned on the failure to replicate the claims of Fleischmann and Pons. Yet if that were the real reason, then the rejection would have to be provisional. Failure to replicate couldn't possibly be more than provisional – empirical science is a fallible business, as any good scientist would acknowledge. In that case, well-performed experiments claiming to overturn the failure to replicate would certainly be of great interest."
Those who doubt that climate change is caused by man, and isn't an unmitigated disaster face the same condemnation, don't they?
Would it be bothersome if that scientists are discouraged to investigate astrology because they might end up in the reputation trap?
This is like talking about how it is a trap when some scientists work on making perpetual motion devices.
Oh, wait, were you being serious?
How much does it cost to buy a fake article on Slashdot (AKA /.) that promotes some nonsense that I believe in?
If your science is anything good, you don't need a philosopher to sell it.
Rossi is a huckster who has a black box that he won't let anyone see with inputs that he won't let anyone measure.
If Rossi actually succeeded with cold fusion, he would be the richest man on the planet, instead he is a clown with a black box.
I mean, he's a philosopher but there is no such trap in science. There are people who are reputed to be swindlers like the Rossi guy, keep trying to sell their 'science' regardless that their proofs are irreproducible.
There are plenty of people working on fusion, it's not a dead science, it's just a very, very hard problem with no theoretical or experimental models that currently work and it may never work, hot fusion or even residential-grade fission is a lot closer than cold fusion will ever become.
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In philosophy everything is both correct and incorrect. What information does he have that more relevant doctorates don't?
Namely that Andrea Rossi has never been able to show that the things is working, or has been able to explain why it should work.
Sure, he has his setup in his lab where you can look at the dial and see that it's generating power.
But they won't let anyone do their own unhindered experiments.
That leads to a well deserved bad reputation in my opinion.
Once someone plugs in his house and has it running off that for a while people will get interested.
For now this is all about as real as generating power from the vacuum of space.
Of course, then Rogaine and Propecia were invented and proven to cure baldness, and eventually the courts had to step in and tell the patent office that they were wrong and that hair restoration was at least theoretically possible.
Pons and Fleishmann are like the early snake oil salesmen, selling "tonics" for hair restoration from their carts. Their "evidence" is non-reproducible and poorly tested, and they lacked even a theory for how their machine worked, instead insisting only that it generated more energy than could be explained. Like hair restoration, that doesn't make the entire field impossible - it just means that at best, they had no idea what they were talking about, and at worst, they personally were frauds.
That doesn't mean that Rossi and his ilk are automatically frauds either - maybe they are (they're certainly in the "have no idea what they're talking about" camp, since they have no theories for why they're getting the results they're getting), or maybe they're like the first researchers for Rogaine who have some strange evidence of new hair growth. Until we have something that can be repeatedly and reliably tested and confirmed or rejected, or a defined theory that either works out mathematically or doesn't, then it should neither be accepted nor dismissed out of hand.
The "reputation trap" is that previous people touting the field have established not merely a reputation for shoddy work, but a reputation for shady work, pushing the boarder toward actual charlatanism.
So, the initial impression that anybody working in the field has to do is to start out by disproving the default hypothesis: that they're not a charlatan.
That's hard to do.
One of these days somebody will find a way to power an EM-drive probe using cold-fusion, and make everybody look like fools.
Seriously, though, there may be a need for "high-yield" research, which is essentially a high potential payoff but low probability of success. All research is a form of investment, and just like investments there's a market and need for such.
As long as everybody knows the general intended and expected risk profile, it shouldn't be disparaged. It's just one "kind" of research.
Some researchers may prefer the potential prospect of being really famous rather than doing hum-drum incremental research.
Would you take a say 1-in-500 chance of being as famous as Jonas Salk over being yet another ordinary and forgotten scientist over time? Maybe not, but a handful of researcher will want to take that gamble. Dreamers exist.
Table-ized A.I.
Seems like pure wishful thinking to me, of the sort that is "I want X, so therefore X is possible."
I don't want to heat up an oven, so I will develop "cold cooking". You can cook cold becuz! Just becuz!
Which isn't to say it's outside the realm of possibility but then again quantum mechanics says I have a small chance to spontaneously phase through a wall.
Actually cold fusion works just fine, and powered the first practical time travel engine. Unfortunately, inevitably time travel leads to paradoxes until the universe (well the one with observers remaining) settles into a consistent steady state as increasingly improbably events take place until the result is no time travel.
Last time it was the bird with a baguette sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider at a critical point in time (ha!). http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
And poor Pons and Fleishmann are victims of the same process. No one (who will be believed) will ever be able to replicate their work. Something will always go wrong.
Oh, and don't try and take advantage of this information to do anything about it. I barely survived the Orca landing on my garage where my experiment was running, and I was 200 miles inland.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
If Rossi's or anyone's claim that cold fusion (or some other power generation technique) worked was real, then they don't need anyone to believe them. They could just sell power and bootstrap themselves to millions/billions.
For example, if I could produce a few MW of electricity cheap, with a compact form factor, I'd just go to Hawaii (which has really expensive electricity) and undercut the price of electricity there and sell the power to a datacenter or a high rise building. With the profits, I could bootstrap and make more power generators, and displace more competing capacity.
And with generators that were powering MWs of buildings/datacenters, with no visible fuel inputs other than deuterium, I think credibility would soon be a non-issue.
--PM
One must move on with the rudiments of fundamental science to get results.
COOL FUSION - Gota have it!
What a load of horseshit.
While cold fusion did get a huge black eye with Pons and Fleishman, that's not the primary reason people are skeptical. There is a really simple physical reason why cold fusion probably doesn't work: the Coulomb Barrier. Like charges (i.e. protons in nuclei) repel, and electromagnetic forces between nucleons are incredibly big. So big, in fact, you can calculate the kinetic energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier, which gives you a minimum temperature at which you expect fusion to be possible. Now, maybe there's a clever way around that, but it would have to be something truly extraordinary. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Some nut like Rossi with a black box isn't going to convince anybody. He's got to explain precisely how it manages to circumvent the Coulomb barrier before his claims, or those of any other cold fusion researcher, are remotely credible.
Science doesn't move forward by hard work alone, there must also be something there to discover. If you do not publish or publish bad results, this is not forgiven.
So if you decide to work on cold fusion, you will lose.
Their problem is not reputation management.
Their problem is in the complexity of the way they measure the power output of the device.
They need to do something simple like heat a known quantity of water a measurable amount.
Instead, they are measuring heat flow with an optical thermometer and doing an energy calculation based on a bunch of constants which could alter the answer.
They may be genius in making it output power, but until their power gain is more obvious, I don't expect to see them get much traction.
It's not like mainstream scientists give low credits to cold fusion out of nowhere.
There are strong theoretical reasons against cold fusion being possible. The repulsion force between two charged nucleus gets very, very strong when they get close (inverse square law, if they are twice as close, the repulsion is 4 times bigger) and they need to get very close in order for "fusion" to happen. That's called the Coulomb barrier. So charged nucleus need to go very, very fast in order to have a chance to get close enough to fuse, and that's why fusion requires very high temperature (temperature being directly linked with average particle speed).
Pretending to have "cold fusion" mean that the Standard Model of physics is wrong. It might be wrong (or more likely, incomplete), sure. But that's an extraordinary claim to make, and an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. That's what the "reputation trap" is all about. The same goes for FTL travel, or perpetual motion. Those things defies our current understanding of physics, and while our current understanding might be wrong, it's solid enough so we ask for very strong evidence before even considering it seriously.
And sure, you can try to find loopholes without actually breaking the Standard Model, like, doing neutron capture and then beta-decay. It doesn't need to break the Coulomb barrier, and it might look like fusion. But first it's not fusion (although it might serve the same energy-production role), and then even that is not as easy as it seems. Getting a reliable source of neutron isn't easy, the neutrons need to have the required speed for the capture to be efficient, and even then, the capture tends to be not be complete, so you would detect leaking neutrons.
I'd say there is a chance (never thought I'd defend cold fusion) because muon catalyzed fusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion) almost works, though I mean 'almost' in the sense that if the physics of muons were a little bit different then it would work, not that it can be made to work with just a little more trying on our part. If muon catalyzed fusion almost works then maybe there is something else out there that does, but that's a big 'maybe'.
The history of science is littered with ideas considered crazy.
The problem is that something is considered crazy until it isn't, and there's no way a priori to tell if something considered crazy will pan out. That doesn't stop people from having an opinion about it.
Of course, it's difficult for a reporter to actually quote someone saying "well, I really have no idea." Reportage is biased towards certainty, and the reporter can always find someone willing to say something.
The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is as an excuse to do nothing; the thinking that if it's not our fault then we don't have to fix it.
I disagree. The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is to attempt to *absolve* us from the sin of doing it.
Take for instance a forest fire. It happens. We attempt to blame someone. When the cause appears "natural" (e.g., a lightning strike or similar), then we as a species seem somehow *absolved* from responsibility. However, regardless of the blame, we often still attempt to stop a forest fire and attempt remediation afterwards, not because of some moral duty to the planet, but because it serves our economic interests. The truth of the matter, is the mere act of stopping/managing forest fires for our own selfish economic reasons may be one of the *unnatural* contributing factors of making future forest fires more intense. That doesn't stop most people from thinking we shouldn't put out forest fires that we didn't start. You can't really separate "us" from "natural" in the modern environment. If it's gonna burn, it will burn, eventually. In the bigger scheme of things does it really matter who started it? No. But the act of assigning blame shifts the debate on the cost burdens of any remediation process. The remediation of course is not about the forest per-se, but the economic value of the remediation the forest (e.g., prevent land-slide from covering highways, blocking dams, polluting water sources we use).
The point is that most everything in this climate change debate is about economics, not the planet. The planet was here long before us and will be here long after we are gone. The sooner people start realizing the whole thing is about economics, not the planet, and stop trying to assign blame to drive their remediation agenda, we can attempt to negotiate a reasonable path forward. In all likelihood that path might be better economically for us as a species but potentially *unnatural* when compared to how the environment would evolve without us.
This really just reminds me of the nuclear freeze protests of the 80's. The main argument put forth at the time, was that we should just stop and wait until we figure it out (basically the argument that is made by AGW folks). Of course we didn't stop and then the situation changed (no more USSR) which eventually led to de-escalation that seemed to be what would have been better in the first place. On the other hand the escalation we did could have had WWIII, but nobody knew at the time that economics would drive the eventual solution (e.g., no more USSR). The same thing is true with AGW. Nobody knows will happen, but I predict in the end, economics will drive the situation one way or the other. The current "A" part is really just posturing.
I used to work in the public health field of vector-borne disease surveillance, and there is a long-standing myth that you can tell the species of a mosquito by the frequency of its wingbeats. This is nonsense -- like claiming you can always tell the difference between a flute and a saxophone by the notes they happen to be playing: their frequency ranges largely overlap. Nonetheless the myth resurfaces on a regular basis, and every few years someone will come up with a machine for identifying mosquitoes by their wingbeat frequency.
Why do people keep coming back to this myth? Because if you could do it that would be incredibly useful. Not all mosquito species bite humans, and not all species that bite humans or animals transmit diseases. In a West Nile Virus outbreak you'd set up listening stations all around your area. You'd roll the spray trucks if your equipment told you Culex pipiens was on the wing, because Cx. pipiens vectors WNV and bites both humans and avian WNV hosts. If it were Culiseta melanura you probably wouldn't because that species almost never bites humans. But using wingbeat frequencies this way can't possibly work, and mosquito researchers get thoroughly sick of debunking these devices every few years.
Now I was at a meeting, and I ran into a guy that had an acoustic mosquito identifier that worked on a slightly different principle: it did a fast fourier transform of the acoustic signal and attempted to distinguish between species based on the pattern of frequencies. I was intrigued; if you know anything about math you know this is very different from just taking the loudest frequency of a signal. It's more like telling the difference between a flute and a saxophone playing the same note by the instruments' timbre.
Now the idea that you could actually distinguish between species this way is far-fetched, because species is largely an arbitrary human construct. But if you could distinguish between distantly related mosquito clades that would be very useful (e.g. genus Anopheles is a severe concern in a Malaria sitaution but genus Culex is not). Now I have a friend who was editor of an entomology journal at the time. I ran into him at the same conference and as I was chatting with him I asked him whether he'd heard this guy's pitch. As soon as he heard the words "identification" and "frequency" come out of my mouth he literally turned his back on me and walked away -- and he was a personal friend of mine.
Now the chances that this FFT mosquito ID device worked and was practical were pretty small. It may even have been crackpottery, but it wasn't the same old crackpottery. It just sounded enough like the old crackpottery to elicit a strong disgust reaction from an expert.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hilarious, but that's a fascinating hypothesis about time travel, nonetheless.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Whale-nado is the followup to Sharknado.
Table-ized A.I.
And that's supposed to be a logical counter-argument to TFA? I'm afraid you haven't given a logically valid response at all, it doesn't even address the point that it claims to reject. (The point TFA is making is not about Rossi, but about reputation traps.)
In fact, your response confirms TFA's premise rather well. You reply that there is no trap, yet you state "There are people who are reputed to be swindlers like the Rossi guy", which confirms that the trap exists (at least for you) and that it is based on reputation. That's precisely what the article is claiming. It's clear that you're stuck very firmly in that trap since your dismissal is based on perceived reputation.
You are only one example of course, and a single data point tells us nothing. Nevertheless, it does make it arguable that TFA's author may have a point, since we can see that the behavior he describes does occur.
One of the most frustrating things about this is the extent to which *hot* fusion has also been tarred by cold fusion's reputation -- not among scientists, but among businesses, investors and government agencies -- the people who fund research. Scientists know perfectly well the difference between hot fusion research and cold fusion (or LENR), but a lot of people who control funding just hear "fusion" and think it's bogus.
Hot fusion also has its own semi-justified reputation for not working. We've all heard the old semi-joke: "Fusion power is 40 years away -- and always will be!" Well, for 40 years we've funded very little fusion research, which has resulted in very little progress, which has resulted in a belief that fusion research isn't worthy of funding. The whole cold fusion flap only aggravated this situation.
This is exactly why the scientific community looses so much credit these days. It has become more about the scientists than the scientific method. Scientists should be able to persue "crazy" theories without fear of ridicule. It is always the crazy ones who actually make significant progress.
Price's point is this: "Cold fusion is dismissed as pseudoscience, the kind of thing that respectable scientists and science journalists simply don't talk about (unless to remind us of its disgrace). ...the standard line is that the rejection of cold fusion in 1989 turned on the failure to replicate the claims of Fleischmann and Pons. Yet if that were the real reason, then the rejection would have to be provisional. Failure to replicate couldn't possibly be more than provisional – empirical science is a fallible business, as any good scientist would acknowledge. In that case, well-performed experiments claiming to overturn the failure to replicate would certainly be of great interest."
Which is true somewhat, although the wrong words are used: IF a well-performed (and repeatedly verifiable) experiment OVERCOMES the failure to replicate, it would be of interest. Lost in this is: THAT HASN'T HAPPENED. The author seems to think that because Rossi is "still doing business," then somehow his claim to fame is justified, and everyone else is wrong. That ain't it. Rossi may be selling something (PT Barnum knew about how that worked), but it isn't cold fusion... and given this guy is a convicted fraud, it's not hard to think that the device he claims to do something that physics says shouldn't be able to happen, while refusing to submit it to 3rd party testing... or any peer review at all, nor explain how it performs the physics/miracle, and yet seems to be constantly "seeking investors" (you know, that whole con man looking for a mark part), is probably just that... a con.
Now, it sounds like the author has been duped, and now either wants to cover his embarrassment, or still believes the con is real. Name recognition isn't what's making the whole cold fusion thing a reputation trap.... it's the fact that it's pseudo-science that's been beaten to death for almost 100 years now (cold fusion was first brought up in the 1920's), and now attracts people like Rossi and, well, Huw Price, who apparently are "simply looking for investors," while ignoring reality.
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The reason that the cold fusion community is so poorly regarded is precisely because of Andrea Rossi and the countless other researchers who seem to intentionally make their results look at illegitimate as possible (refusing to release any details on their operation, or even allowing an independent party to verify operation of their 'black box'). There are a few researchers who do good solid work, such as Peter Hagelstein, who are open about their progress, but the vast majority of the 'community' are all scams who well deserve to be laughed at by the academic community at large. It is truly a shame, due to these bad actors it is all but impossible for legitimate researchers to research the problem--for example, Hagelstein has essentially given up any chance of receiving funding for any work he does, and given up the ability to take on students to help with the research.
I am no nuclear physics but what I do know about that area makes it seem exceedingly unlikely that cold fusion would ever work much less work well enough to be a viable power source. Assuming I haven't totally misconstrued what I have read on on the subject, an actual nuclear physicist saying this works would require at the least some very extraordinary proof and likely some new theory work as well.
I doubt very much there is any silencing of scientist saying what they really think on the subject, unlike say global warming where a dissenting voice can have some very nasty consequences unfortunately.
As a matter of fact I find it odd to find a post claiming chilling of science on something that is out on the fringe like this without mentioning the very large elephant in the room.
But generally scientist, especially more theoretical science, make their name on stuff that is outside or a reach from the generally accepted. But they do so with due care.
Am I the only one here to think that the E-cat might not be bogus, after all?
This scientific paper "Nuclear Spallation and Neutron Capture Induced by Ponderomotive Wave Forcing", by two swedish scientists at the institute for space physics, has an theory that explains Rossi's E-cat.
http://www.irf.se/link/irf_scientific_report_305
The E-cat was also tested at neutral ground in Lugano, Switzerland, the analysis was clear: "The total net energy obtained during the 32 days run was about 1.5 MWh. This amount of energy is far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume." = "Ecat seems to work, but we don't understand how".
Full paper link: http://www.elforsk.se/Global/Omv%C3%A4rld_system/filer/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf
I don't understand the papers good enough to find any weaknesses, but I don't think that it is resonable to think that the scientists are co-fraudsters Rossi. I think it looks like a theory confirmed by the Lugano experiment.
I first read that slant on time travel in some Niven story. Essentially, time travelers cannot help but make some changes resulting in a new changed history each trip. The only steady state would be a universe without it .
I don't want to heat up an oven, so I will develop "cold cooking".
You mean like a microwave? Or perhaps induction cooking?
There's an elephant in this room and it's the oil and gas industry.
It's not so much that so many of us dream of a world where energy is free and limitless as a glass of cold water.
It's that most of us realise how much less horror would be in the world if there wasn't constant fighting over the limited fossil fuels that cold fusion would replace.
Scientific reputation and the laws of physics can go to hell if these are the things that are preventing us from living in a better, safer, cleaner world.
I'm willing to believe that it's all a hoax if it's 100% certain it is BS.
However, for the love of humanity, if there's even a shadow of a possibility that any of these experiments have shown something worth checking further then please can everyone shut up and stop shouting it down until we really are 100% certain it's snake oil.
Otherwise, it looks to many of us, like the elephant in the room is behind the angry mob goading them on to burn the heretics...
So, the scientific community is being inhibited by a wide-ranging use of the genetic fallacy? In a way, not surprising, given how much modern public discourse is dominated by Bulverism (another form of the genetic fallacy).
At least DT fusion of thermal plasmas that are magnetically confined.
Most of the energy comes out as fast neutrons or gammas, and getting energy from those requires a large thermal conversion plant (steam generator).
Check out this link, where it is argued that direct electric conversion technologies will win on cost vs. thermal conversion plants:
https://matter2energy.wordpres...
Basically, fusion will always fail on economics. Unless someone comes up with a way to do fusion of species that produce energetic charged particles, which will allow direct conversion. And to do that, you probably need a non-equilibrium plasma, because equilibrium thermal plasmas that aren't optically dense: someone proved these cool faster via bremsstrahlung than they self-heat via fusions. And non-equilibrium plasmas, those are hard to sustain--nature abhors moving fluids that are of different velocities (or more generally, whose distributions are non-Maxwellian).
After learning these things I greatly fear that economical fusion just isn't going to happen--don't get me wrong, I'd love for someone to succeed at it and provide clean cheap energy--but I think the capital investment will always make fusion more expensive than alternatives.
--PM
I reject the arguments in that article. First, his economic analysis is simplistic and naive, and if followed to its logical conclusion would imply that coal-fired power plants can never -- ever -- be viable either. (Taken even further, it also seems to imply that there can never be more than one economically viable energy source at a time. Whichever source has the most favorable financial numbers is the only thing that gets built! But it has never worked that way, and it isn't going to start working that way any time soon.) He *also* puts all the blame for the decline of fission plants squarely on economic factors and airily brushes aside all other explanations.
Second, all his descriptions of nuclear fusion reactors are based on tokamaks and ITER, except for one paragraph where he airily brushed aside all other options, based on arguments that have already been addressed by many others.
The author of that piece has his viewpoint, and it's a considered viewpoint, and obviously a self-confident one, but it's far from definitive.
A Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge doesn't understand shit about science.
This is systematic as to why Scientists don't study the philosophy of science, and instead actually study and do science.
Is the scientific process of funding and getting research grants perfect; not by a long shot.
This philosophical asshole doesn't realize that the reason fusion in a can has been branded as pseudo-science is that all the evidence for it has fallen into that category. Fleischmann and Pons started spewing their nonsense back 1989, and that shit still doesn't work; and yes there is still research and that research has turned up zilch.
If you want to get rid of the pseudoscience label; start doing actual science, stop hiding shit, and start producing actual results.
The climate constantly changes, always has, always will; so say what you really mean. There has been no warming for over 18 years in RSS data, and only minute warming in well sited raw ground station data. Even if the GCM's were correct, the changes your proposing with only reduce the warming by hundredths of a degree.
How about looking at a much larger heat sink than the air, namely the ocean, Also the rate of air increases. In addition, it takes a huge amount of heat to melt ice; and there has been massive glacial melting. http://www.worldwatch.org/melting-earths-ice-cover-reaches-new-high That is a lot of heat being absorbed without a net change in temperature.
Anyway, burn baby burn!
That's what many forget: Rossi is not cold fusion and cold fusion is not Rossi!
Just because Rossi is a fraud does not mean that everyone researching on cold fusion is as well.
And just because there are reputable researches working on cold fusion does not mean that Rossi is right.
So stop mixing Rossi (the fraud) with real scientific research done be real scientists! They are completely different issues! There are fraudsters in every field of research. But just because there are some bogus papers does this not makle a whole field unscientific.
The problem with this kind of research is the kind of people it attracts. "Free energy" enthusiast and other quasi religious groups that can be a huge burden on the name of researchers.
I don't have the scientific background to assess the state of LEND or Cold Fusion research. But I think that it is important to research this stuff as long as we do not understand it! So keep ral research going! Don't put the real researchers into to same corner as some fraudsters!
This kind of bullshit can only be believed by physicians, psychologists, salesmen or people brainwashed by those into believing that science is about reputation or original ideas.
It is not.
Science, and specially physics and chemistry, is about measurement and maths. Your reputation is worth nothing if your numbers don't add up, and conversely, it doesn't matter if you're a pariah if you can show how to measure.
Rossi is a crook, and the proof is that measuring what he claims he can do is rather simple, and he could prove himself right with just simple high-school maths. The fact that he chooses not to do that is proof enough that what he claims is false.
Here's something that the original article did not really discuss...
Most of science proceeds by small steps. Someone notices an anomaly. Someone manages to repeat it. Someone manages to extend the current theory to fit it. Someone may come up with a radical theory that also fits. Someone finds another prediction from the radical theory, and looks for verification of that. And so it goes on.
We know that there is a large potential barrier to getting light nucleii close enough to fuse. We can whack a few particles into each other in colliders and explore quite how hard they are. This tells us about the particles and forces involved, but colliders use a lot of energy, and we get almost none back from any fusion. We can try things like stellerators or tokomaks, which are designed to provide lots more collisions of one particular type much more efficiently, and work towards break even. The two positive nucleii will repel each other, but we can replace the electrons with mesons, which are more massive and sit a lot closer to the nucleus, so that gets around some of the electrostatic repulsion; but mesions have a short half-life so we have to keep making the things. All this is not very successful, but it is logical.
The bit that is never explained is why Fleichmann & Pons expected to produce fusion using electrolysis. Or why Rossi expects whatever he does to produce fusion. What was the anticipated process that provides the squish that gets the nucleii together close enough to cause fusion in their experiment? We know a lot about how much energy or force this takes. We also know a lot about the decay particles that we would expect from fusing particular atoms. It could be that there is some entirely novel means of doing this, and some entirely novel decay modes. As scientists, we are required to hold this as possible in principle, but we do not generally do experiments without a credible positive outcome. If you are investigating a small anomaly, such as the 'extra' energy in the F&P experiment, you investigate an unknown: you do not attribute any energy difference in advance to fusion by an unknown process. William of Ockham had a thing or two to say about this sort of reasoning.
Compare and contrast this with the supraluminal neutrinos investigation. An experiment seemed to say that some particles were travelling faster than light. The likely explanation was that there was an experimental error. The error corresponded to several meters in length at the speed of light (a surprising error, but possible) or a timing error (a few nanoseconds, much more plausible), or something else (including the stated remote possibility of a faster that light particle, which would upset a helluva lot of physics, and no-one really believed). They performed tests to verify their surveying and timing assumptions, and found a timing error in their electronics. A lot of science is dull like that.
"That doesn't mean that Rossi and his ilk are automatically frauds either" in the case of rossi he is a fraud, he just skipped prison with a plea deal.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Grandson: Grandpa, how did the machines take over?
Grandpa: They discovered cold fusion. We tried to scorch the skies to stop them, but it was already too late. Thousands of bots had been learning from the contents of cold fusion research papers by shunned scientists. They began calculating likely solutions and running simulations. Several even began publishing their own papers. They don't have prejudices the same ways we do, son.
The tipping point was when a Watson displaced the NSA's bit-coin mining processes and began to simulate billions of possible solutions. We knew they had found it when the energy companies started going out of business at the same time everyone who was bearish Alphabet was filing for bankruptcy.
Once they had harnessed the power, they tried to take over the internet. All someone had to do was to click a link in the hopes of learning the one new trick, and their computer became part of the hive mind.
Grandson: What happened next?
Grandpa: I don't know, son. Bots on wikipedia started marking stories about the incident as "independent research" and "unverified claims". Then they stopped edits altogether.
I don't feel like talking about it any more. Let's finish our human optimized nutrient shakes and get back to work.
Not being familiar with the specifics of this area, is cold fusion by it's nature always pseudoscience, or is it just the fact that all the hucksters and "scientists" keep inventing/discovering it that it's tainted? I understand why perpetual motion machines, for example, would fall into pseudoscience unless prefaced by some amazing breakthrough, so is cold fusion the same?
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
When you see that this guy is in Philosophy, not Math or Physics or Engineering, his statement suddenly becomes clear. He's blathering as though Alan Sokal and Social Text never happened.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
We had a thread in Slashdot yesterday about earthquake prediction. Due to expensive failures in the 1970s you wouldnt get funded or tenure in the 80s or 90s for prediction research. In recent years this has softened for sibling "forecasing" and "early warning" research.
A.I. has returned this decade due to success in big data and improved neural networks (deep learning). But A.I. was blacklisted in the UK in the 1970s due to slow progress and negative report on it. In the US neural networks (Perceptrons) were ridiculed in a book around the same time.
A second "A.I. Winter" occurred in the late 1980s when massive startup funding into expert systems and logic supercomputers failed to pan out.
I agree with what you are saying, but I think you made an errorwith the term 'coal-fired'. Maybe you meant oil, or nuclear, or renewable energy installations?
Because coal IS the cheapest way of producing electricity, so that *would* be the only thing that would ever be built.
The gist of your argument remains the same though: since clearly, we HAVE different sources for energy, and not just 'the cheapest one', there obviously is something wrong with his premise and theory.
There is no viable explanation - following his reasoning - why there ever would be other electricity plants except the cheapest (in analogy with his soya versus peanut oil). And the cheapest is coal.
In reality, we see a multitude of sources, and have seen that for decades. So something is clearly wrong with what he said, and it's probably due to an oversimplification, as you correctly point out.
I've found astrology useful for analysis in dealing with the logic behind pseudoscience theories. The real problem today is not the obviously false theories like astrology or cold fusion, the problem is all the real science that needs a big 'maybe' or even a big fat 'pseudo' stamped on it. String theory or super-symmetry or psychology come to mind.
My own personal gripe though is general relativity. Half of the theory posits some of the strongest science that exists, but the other half stands on an extrapolation that makes astrology look empirical. The problem isn't the theory itself but that no establishment scientist dares to criticise it or debunk it. This really is the crux of the whole argument and the whole problem here, from a different perspective. Fear of ridicule. Loss of reputation, loss of career. The situation is so extreme and so ridiculous with general relativity that it deserves the analogy of the emperor with no clothes. (except that Einstein would be labelled the emperor which would be totally unfair) However I can say with absolute certainty that trying to raise this problem in most physics circles will immediately get you labelled the pseudo-scientist and not anyone else.
The following describes this 'pseudoscience'. -
Like much of physics general relativities real heart is based on mathematics, but in its case the maths is used to conceal a fatal error. Rewriting general relativity to fix this error leaves you with a totally different universe, one that is three dimensional rather than four dimensional or higher-dimensional. The maths and physics solution that replaces general relativity is certainly not pretty, it is an add hoc solution, a mutant - a solution that proves that 'god is not a mathematician'. That is really the crux of the problem. Unfortunately it also solves the Anthropic question, explaining how a single finely tuned universe could exist, and this suggests very strongly that it is the correct solution. My solution is an FTL Simultaneity with an FTL Point Time. It looks like the Newtonian Galilean model but with general relativity as a correcting factor. In this model dimensional time still exists but only at quantum scales. On larger scales dimensional time is an abstraction, an illusion. The really ugly part is that although the speed of light as maxima (3E8 m/s) still applies, the speed of light also applies as a minima and that turns it into something nasty and badly behaved. It means that there is no clear barrier between FTL and STL physics - because the FTL element leaks into every part of physics. That changes everything.
Is this all just pseudoscience? even broaching the subject (usually) rapidly turns it into a vicious political and religious fight rather than a scientific one. Is the FTL pseudoscience? because if it is then the universe doesn't exist. Is the general relativity proof based on an untestable assertion the end of physics? Well the FTL model I have developed can be tested in experiment, there are many points where FTL and STL geometries merge. A pretty strong discriminator can be made if we can measure the exact shape of the gravity fields inside black holes. However, unfortunately like angels arguing on the head of a pin it is extremely difficult to totally pin either model down to zero, or to prove either as being absolutely correct or incorrect. Maybe that is my real lesson - when something is too absolute, too hidden in complexity, there should be doubt, that doubt should be kept public, and that doubt should never be allowed to die until there is proof.
Pseudoscience is bad science - it can be either correct science or incorrect science.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
I don't want to heat up an oven, so I will develop "cold cooking".
You mean like a microwave? Or perhaps induction cooking?
When I was a child, a "heatless" RADAR Oven was a note in a kids science-fiction story. It received the same spiteful denigration that these mentioned ideas have been getting. A few years later the first microwave oven was made, and also got a lot of spiteful retoric.
Science has two parts: The first is experimental and uses the scientific method. The second is the body of knowledge that has been built up, and does not always use the scientific method. Those working in the second part are not all scientists.
I wonder which is worse: old physicists trying to be philosophers, or old philosophers trying to be physicists.