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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."
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.
Part of the problem is that while they claim there's no proof that it's caused by man, they also implicitly take the next step and imply that it's not that big a disaster.
What I don't see is the notion that it's not caused by man but it's still a massive problem and we need to do something about it. 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 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?
If some area of research is claimed as "discredited" it should mean that a higher burden of proof is required. There's no reason to shun cold fusion and declare that any research in it is wasted, that's unscientific. However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab. Part of the shunning of cold fusion also came from the embarrassment factor, as a lot of people had been quickly interested in it, world wide news reports, early hype followed by disappointment.
For astrology, it's been discredited over and over and over. There's never been any hint of evidence into validity, not even preliminary theories. The burden of proof to be accepted as a valid scientific researcher here is vastly higher than with cold fusion.
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.
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.
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
I don't know about perpetual motion but I have often thought that there should be a way to use gravity outside of the ways it's already commonly used, I just have never come up with one.
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
The problem with climate change is we don't have a control group.
We know that Earth has gone through hot and cold cycles before (the Sahara was once a rainforest) so establishing a clear cause-effect relationship is impossible since we don't have another depopulated Earth to use as a control.
Part of the problem is that while they claim there's no proof that it's caused by man, they also implicitly take the next step and imply that it's not that big a disaster.
ORLY?
The last I heard, the only way the issue of whether the claimed climate change is, as also claimed, caused by man (by fossil-fuel sourced carbon dioxide emissions) entered into it is that, if such human emissions are not a major causative factor, reduction of them by draconian government intervention is useless. (Worse than useless, actually, since the economic disaster such intervention represents could destroy the possibility of applying some effective solution if it is actually needed. For instance: If the planet is disastrously cooking and all else fails, we could orbit some continent-scale sunshades - but only if we could still afford an industrial-scale space program.)
That is a completely separate issue from whether climate change is happening. It is also separate from whether, if it is happening, it is a disaster, an annoyance, neutral, or even a good thing.
There are a lot of steps from "We noticed the temperature measurements are bit different from a century ago." to "We must reverse this trend, even if it means destroying industrial civilization, and freezing in the dark, and the exercise of totalitarian governmental power, or we'll all die!" Government and financial figures have jumped over all the steps - straight to the convenient-for-them totalitarian intervention and billions of dollars siphoned off from production to the operators of carbon credit markets - before the first couple steps were exposed to any substantial peer review.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
$0. You just have to submit it and get voted onto the front page. Easy as pie.
I like pie.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So we wait until the sky falls? Given lots and lots of evidence of climate change already happening? Don't give up smoking until the xrays show a tumor.
Your "way of life" is trivial to change. Stop driving some wannabe-cowboy SUV that does 3mpg on a good day, start recycling, turn the lights off when you're not in the room, etc. Cut back on American style conspicuous consumption.
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.
No, the climate change deniers are definitely caught up in fantasy. Cold Fusion may be the same, but we don't know that for sure, like we do with the heavily-propagandized, dangerously-misinformed, right-wing extremists.
Unfortunately a lot of money was spent to turn ignorant Conservatives into completely deranged right-wing lunatics, and it worked. They now live in an alternate reality.
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."
since we don't have another depopulated Earth to use as a control.
If the other earth was depopulated, it would not be a "control".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Don't give up smoking until the xrays show a tumor.
I think I'll get a 100th opinion.
Whale-nado is the followup to Sharknado.
Table-ized A.I.
Labeling certain topics as taboo and censorship is a dangerous slippery (political) slope. Politics has NO place in Science.
Isaac Newton wrote more about alchemy then physics; just because someone has an interest outside the rigid straight-jacket of Science doesn't imply that there are no interesting discoveries to be made. We don't know unless someone does the research regardless of people's perception.
Or, we could just make the upgrades we have known for years we need to make and solve it that way.
most of them claim to be "not a scientist, but..."
I think it starts there.
No, wait until the sky falls then blame the scientists for not being able to convince you before it was too late.
Politics has NO place in Science.
Which is why science as an institution is always problematic.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab." How to go beyond that when you can't even get your simple papers published, that's the problem.
Since the advent of computers and large data sets of accurate birth records, it is now possible to develop falsifiable astrological hypotheses. This would be inexpensive research. But I doubt that this will be done in the next decade or so, since the scientific community is too strongly invested in its irrational prejudice against astrology.
Will
From what I understand, the article claims that because a few people (or their predecessors) seems to be swindlers, the entire field is considered bogus.
The entire field is not considered bogus, there are people that work on it as an actual science and they are well respected even though they work on something that may never be successful or proven.
The problem is that those particular people (eg. Rossi) are ACTUALLY swindlers, they may taint the field in the public's eye (as if anyone really knows/cares outside us geeks) but no science body is going to ever take them seriously if they can't actually produce proof.
If someone produces proof one way or the other (eg. it's impossible due to this chemistry/physics law or this combination of elements works according to this model), they would be respected as a scientist and be published IF their science is good; they would not be dismissed on the basis that Rossi has been trying to sell his junk for years which is what the article is claiming.
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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.
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.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Well said, however, I disagree regarding cold fusion in particular. It should be shunned because it flies in the face of physical laws.
Proved these physical laws beyond a shadow of a doubt, have you? Then why is there still so much of phsysics, cosmology, etc still unexplained? Why bother with the LHC or anything else, let's just shut it all down. Ramze apparently knows all the physical laws already.
They said the same about radiation back when the Curies first demonstrated that radium was generating excess heat just sitting there apparently, by known physical laws, doing nothing.
You're assuming a mechanism and poo-pooing the observations because your mechanism wouldn't allow them. Fine, the excess heat produced by "cold fusion" is not produced by nuclear reactions as high-energy physicists understand them. So, where is it coming from?
Throwing deutrons at each other at high speed to overcome the Coulomb barrier is one approach. Having them sit quietly next to each other within a cell of, say, a palladium crystal lattice so that, eventually, they'll quantum tunnel is another. (I have no idea if that's the actual mechanism, but it fits many of the observations.)
It may well turn out that "cold fusion" isn't a particularly useful method of generating energy (just like, so far, hot fusion). Muon-catalyzed fusion is a recognized form of cold fusion, it's just that the muons don't last long enough to make it worth while. But the effect (if real) may turn out to have other uses.
-- Alastair
Since anthropogenic global warming has only been possible since the 1950's, there would be plenty of control group in the historical records, if they would quit adjusting the data.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Many Early Astronomers would cast Horoscopes for rich Patrons to finance their science.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I don't want to heat up an oven, so I will develop "cold cooking".
You mean like a microwave? Or perhaps induction cooking?
From the linked article: "Fossil and temperature records over the past 520 million years show a correlation between extinctions and climate change"
And we all know that correlation equals causation, don't we? The article points out the single charted metric of atmospheric composition and matches that against extinctions, and derives the foregone conclusion that CO2 increase causes extinctions. Nothing about any other possible causes; the goal is to show that increased CO2 is evil, and they've found this correlation, and that's proof enough for them.
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...
The climate constantly changes, always has, always will; so say what you really mean.
OK. The best models we have of climate suggest that anthropogenic gasses emitted into the atmosphere (most importantly carbon dioxide) have the same effect as naturally occurring gasses, and the current best estimate for the warming effect of carbon dioxide is that is causes between 1.5 C and 4.5C average global temperature rise per doubling of concentration.
The effect has been known for over a hundred years. It explains why the Earth is not frozen.
There has been no warming for over 18 years in RSS data,
If you cherry pick the right data. Here you go: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/msu/time-series/global/lt/nov/1mo
The satellite measurements are somewhat inconsistent. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/mar/25/one-satellite-data-set-is-underestimating-global-warming
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).
However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab.
No! That's the very trap that we are trying to avoid!
If we follow that rule, then 100 independent labs may get "relevant results" and they won't publish, so they won't know about each other. Nobody is going to fund some big effort to try to reproduce this in a bunch of labs. The only way to move forward is for 1 lab at a time to test it, and publish their results - positive or negative. Then, after a time, meta-studies will correlate what the labs did and their results, and patterns may emerge. THAT is how science works. Small steps. If we are afraid to publish those small steps, especially the unsuccessful ones, then we will never move forward.
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
Nobody in their right mind would really call Muon-catalyzed fusion as 'cold fusion'.
cold fusion - it worked like claimed, would be damn easy to verify to actually happen.
but.. for some strange reason they skip peer reviews and scientific process and look for private money they then use.
"Fine, the excess heat produced by "cold fusion" is not produced by nuclear reactions as high-energy physicists understand them. So, where is it coming from?" uh. you would need to have the excess heat first, after that you can find out where it is coming from if you bother - that wouldn't really matter until later. IF YOU HAD the excess heat you WOULD HAVE PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS and could easily generate practical apparatuses to verify the claims that your machine generates power(heat) from either a) fusion or b) some unknown source.
if it was from fusion that would be pretty straightforward to measure too through various mechanisms, by observing radiation, by observing if the atoms have changed. if you ruled out that you would probably find the real process then.
difference with curies experiments was of course that you could shown them to be true fairly easily compared to rossinis.
the burden of proof is on the pseudoscience - if not, then you might just as well start believing in ghosts and join scientology.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The only known way to do that is with intense heat (heat is just movement -- so fast moving particles) and pressure (pressure is just density of the fast-moving particles).
But see, Muon-catalyzed fusion. As the article notes, it allows room temperature fusion, but requires significantly more energy to make the muons than you get out of fusing the hydrogen so it doesn't seem to be a viable research path. However, it's been known for 60 years, lab tested and was predicted by and agrees with theories, so we can't say that fusion can only be done with intense heat and pressure.
This doesn't mean that that's what Rossi's doing. He's most likely a fraud, which is why he has no theory to explain his results and won't let anyone test his apparatus completely independent of him. But that also points back to the article's theory - fraudsters push us from being appropriately skeptical into outright denial, without sufficient evidence to actually support our denial of the underlying theory and, as you did, in conflict with existing theories and evidence. Bad, fraudulent science breeds bad science in the rest of us.
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.
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!
It's widely believed he died a virgin. I'm not going to claim it as definitely true that he never had sex, it's one of those historical claims that's basically impossible to verify, but there you go. He did have issues with women, though. During a disagreement with John Locke, he sent a letter including the charge that Locke "endeavoured to embroil me with woemen".
Rossi is actually very clever in his scam. He doesn't claim to have created cold fusion, he explicitly claims that he doesn't know the underlying mechanism behind it. If you read his releases carefully, he's laid enough breadcrumbs that you could explain what he's doing as catalysed nuclear decay (which is more interesting than cold fusion, but still doesn't have any kind of theory behind it), which will let him run the scam for even longer once the claim (that he never personally made) that it's fusion is discredited.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For astrology, it's been discredited over and over and over. There's never been any hint of evidence into validity, not even preliminary theories.
OTOH, there are good reasons to think that certain things, like eg. an opposition between the Sun and any of the inner planets, would have a negative influence on events on Earth ;-)
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:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Those who doubt that climate change is caused by man, and isn't an unmitigated disaster face the same condemnation, don't they?
"Look! They laugh at us CC deniers just like they laugh at the Time Cube guy!"
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Cut back on American style conspicuous consumption.
That's the whole point. Climate change denial is based on the assumption that any change to the consumer lifestyle is evil communism, and that therefore climate change must be incorrect somehow.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The data is easier to see with linear trend lines
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
The problem with climate change is we don't have a control group.
We know that Earth has gone through hot and cold cycles before (the Sahara was once a rainforest) so establishing a clear cause-effect relationship is impossible since we don't have another depopulated Earth to use as a control.
So since we can't do pure science we should do nothing?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Wasn't there a study which suggested that people born at different times of the year (ie different star signs) favoured different professions?
The only one I remember that was plausible was that professional sports people tended to be born early in the school year.
This is for a perfectly obvious reason. If A is born on 1st September , B is born on 31st August and the school year starts on 1st September, then B is going to be 364 days younger than A in the same school year. So A will be practically a year more physically developed, and that can make a big difference as they're growing up and competing against slightly smaller and weaker opponents all the time.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab." How to go beyond that when you can't even get your simple papers published, that's the problem.
Publish them yourself on the internet, work as a prostitute to fund your evening research efforts. It will pay off, as pretty soon you're going to be the richest guy in the history of the planet.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Creating sustained energy from room temperature fusion is as laughable as someone levitating with the power of their mind.
You insensitive clod, I levitate myself from my bed every day with the power of my mind! If you shot me in the head, I wouldn't get up tomorrow morning.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Well said, however, I disagree regarding cold fusion in particular. It should be shunned because it flies in the face of physical laws. Creating sustained energy from room temperature fusion is as laughable as someone levitating with the power of their mind.
Wow, if you weren't actually being serious, I would say that was an excellent impression of every arrogant twat who has ever loudly declared something to be impossible only to be soundly proven wrong.
Also, I can think of several ways someone could levitate with the power of their mind. For example, one could argue that a helicopter, being an invention, is a way that people levitate using mind power. Or, you could simply capture electrical power generated by someone's brain and store it until you have enough power to levitate them using any of a number of methods
Wow, if you weren't actually being serious, I would say that was an excellent impression of every arrogant twat who has ever loudly declared something to be possible by playing with words.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Hell if we can allow the nutritionist to tell us that a little bit of salt will cause us to die right away
No one says that.
But if you think that what you eat or drink is irrelevant to your health, try living on a diet of PVC and vodka for a few months.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It's widely believed he died a virgin. I'm not going to claim it as definitely true that he never had sex, it's one of those historical claims that's basically impossible to verify, but there you go. He did have issues with women, though.
I think it's safe to say that, if Isaac Newton were alive today, he'd be posting to slashdot.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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
From the linked article: "Fossil and temperature records over the past 520 million years show a correlation between extinctions and climate change"
And we all know that correlation equals causation, don't we? The article points out the single charted metric of atmospheric composition and matches that against extinctions, and derives the foregone conclusion that CO2 increase causes extinctions. Nothing about any other possible causes; the goal is to show that increased CO2 is evil, and they've found this correlation, and that's proof enough for them.
You get your science data from the Republican little book of Gawd didit?
There were many causes of extinction - Atmospheric oxygenation, Snowball earth, chicxulub impactor. Note that first one - How can Oxygen be bad? we need it to breathe!
People who have a problem with the idea that the so called greenhouse gases retaining energy probably have a real issue with the idea that Oxygen levels have had anything to do with extinction events.
So any article that purports that CO2 was the exact cause - or even correlated attraction - of all the extinction events is emphatically wrong. It, or another greenhouse gas is critical to maintaining the atmospheric energy retention needed to sustain life. But just like Oxygen, it has it's limits.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
> I except that in 120 years, the word 'science' will similarly have been deprecated as a collection of fanciful ignorance and a new term will be used in its place.
I share the sentiment as well. I use the term neo-science for the day when Physics and Meta-Physics are unified.
Currently, Science/Scientists are completely ignorant of Consciousness and Meta-Physics, why Time (appears) to flow only one direction, why Space-Time are linked, and everything related to Non-Physical Reality despite the years of data of experiential knowledge.
Once Science has the courage to stop self-censoring its domain of knowledge it will move outside its box.
No, wait until the sky falls then blame the scientists for not being able to convince you before it was too late.
No- silly, you blame the liberals.
We had a bad river acidification event where a new highway went through a local mountain pass. They cut through pyritic rocks and dumped them in several places, the largest was filling in a valley with the rocks cut out.
Geologists and environmentalists were screaming bloody murder in the run up to construction. Roundly ignored. In fact the construction was completely exempted from environmental review. Then the creeks started running orange as the pyritic rock released sulfuric acid in a reaction with rainwater, mostly as the filled-in valley acted like a gigantic teabag.
Then the construction and politicos tried to say "We had no idea!", after which a geologist noted that they damn well did have an idea, given that in a previous highway cut, a small amount of pyritic rock was exposed, and was used by schools as a geology class tourstop showing an unusual but real non-coalfield pyritic exposure.
The bad part was that the acidic water was very near drinking water wellfields and had already contaminated a number of wells, and the rocks had been used as fill in several places.
So they had to go in, remove the rock already dug out place it in a new monitored landfill with limestone to help mitigate the acidic runoff, come up with a way to stabilize the rock exposure - which was a weird netting on the steep slope with pockets to hold the limestone mitigation agent.
All to prevent the destruction of the entire valley's drinking water, some pristine fisheries, and correct the mess they made.
Now you and I might look at the situation and note that the construction folks and the politicians that exempted this site from environmental review might have been at fault.
Nope - not at all. In an amazing feat, it was the fault of the tree huggers and geologists who complained that they shouldn't have put it there!
Because if they hadn't complained so much the politicians and construction people wouldn't have ignored them.
tl;dr version: When people's science knowledge isn't based on science, don't expect their logic to be based on logic.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Am I the only one here to think that the E-cat might not be bogus, after all?
Yes.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
OK. The best models we have of climate suggest that anthropogenic gasses emitted into the atmosphere (most importantly carbon dioxide) have the same effect as naturally occurring gasses, and the current best estimate for the warming effect of carbon dioxide is that is causes between 1.5 C and 4.5C average global temperature rise per doubling of concentration.
The effect has been known for over a hundred years. It explains why the Earth is not frozen.
The greenhouse effect is critical to life in the first place. This is why I have such fun with denialists. I have yet to get any answer to why atmospheric energy retention either is not real at all - in which case they have to come up with a new reason that it seems to be doing that, or if they do admit the obvious, why it fails based on the input we have made to greenhouse gases.
The answer? Crickets chirping.
They have no answer, because their objections are politically based.
If you cherry pick the right data.
And how! But the problem is twofold.
1. We're dealing with people who have a pecuniary interest in continued use of things like coal, or tobacco products. As in the case of Exxon, they did have science-smart people who actually knew a long time ago that the AGW effect was real, but lied about it.
2. We have people who don't know much about science, but are happy to hear what they would like to hear, and if it takes ignoring data, they'll present what they have been spoon fed to enable their fear of change.
Do you even think that denier will look at your citations? The fact that Exxon knew and lied about AGW, which would make any rational person re-think their opposition to AGW, only causes the true deniers to double down.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Wow, just wow...
Between dumb people thinking [insert sky wizard here] will save the planet, and dumb ass money-hungry republicans saying money is more important than survival, we a pretty well fucked in the long term.
Pascal's wager used to be good logic and effectively neutral (If there is no god, it gives me no issue believing in one, because of the small chance that god does exist is worth the theoretical payoff), because a hands-off "let god fix it" approach couldn't make any difference, but now Pascal's wager has become dangerous. No longer can "ignore everything and just let things take their course" can now cause an extinction-level event wiping out all of our great granchildren. A fools game to not take seriously the threat of atto-tons of CO2 being released into the atmosphere.
It's a very serious existential threat to our whole species. The environment is already giving us a pretty serious distant early warning. Time to become a grown-up species and be responsible beings that realize our tiny blue dot is our only home in this monstrous universe.
I'm putting my money on you being the moron.
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.
Frequently.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Politics is in science weather you like it or not. See AGW.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Huh? Another Earth without a carbon-spewing species on it would be a perfect control. Things that happen on both could be attributed to natural-only effects, while things that only happen on the populated Earth could be attributed to the carbon-spewing species.
So in your mind Astronomy isn't a science?
Want a sig like mine? Join ACM's SigSig today!
Look, we've known for over a century that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Arrhenius gave some estimates as to how much warming he'd expect from certain concentrations in the air. We've been putting carbon dioxide in the air in large quantities, enough to raise it from 280ppm to 400ppm, and so we'd normally expect temperatures to increase. We can tell it's what we're putting in the air by isotopic analysis, since fossil fuels have very little or no carbon-14 in them. We can also do back-of-the-envelope calculations showing that our fossil fuel use could indeed account for all the increase. Finally, we have carefully documented rising temperatures.
The obvious answer is that we've been heating the planet by putting more CO2 in the air. Any explanation that doesn't include this has to show what of the above statements is wrong.
Now, if it happens that the warming is not due to us, for whatever reason, it will certainly be exacerbated by our carbon dioxide production, so cutting down will provide some mitigation of the warming.
You also appear to think that there's no middle ground between continuing as we are or clamping down on CO2 emissions to the point that we destroy the economy. Exactly who do you think advocates the collapse of the world economy as a solution? The ones I've heard are talking about reducing CO2 emissions by becoming more efficient, using more renewable and nuclear energy, that sort of thing, which isn't going to hurt the economy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Most human logic is based on arbitrary logic. It only depends on whether the base points of your logic are set in reality (ie science) or non reality (faith-delusion-myth).
I have a similar story from just a few weeks ago about a guy on YouTube who claimed that the 'environmentalists' had been lying for decades and DDT was safe. Stupid just doesn't describe it.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
It's also been validated over and over and over but not by anyone with a reputation to risk. The bias against astrology is so strong that it is usually discredited without being properly understood, and the successes are ignored. And it's near impossible to get the funding to do a proper serious study.
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
There's a pretty large number of things humans have done and are doing to affect things that aren't putting CO2 in the air. Deforestation might be the big one, but there's also things like overfishing and water diversion. Without controlling for things like that, how are we supposed to measure the effects of CO2 that precisely?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There was a study out in California that I read in something from Skeptical Inquirer. The investigators collected facts on a number of people, and talked to commercial astrologers, and asked if they could match the bio to birth date, time, and location. The astrologers believed they could, and that it was a fair test. In fact, they performed at chance levels. This seems a much better test than using computer records to determine arbitrary things.
Scientists don't have an irrational prejudice against astrology. Astrology makes statements about the relative positions of heavenly bodies that can have no possible linkage to the baby being born that can be explained scientifically. The only possible connection is mystical, which doesn't usually have much effect on the physical universe. It has amassed a set of principles and such that, as far as I've ever been able to tell, were never tested empirically. (I dabbled in astrology when I was a lot younger, so I know something of this.) There's no clear record of accuracy, and a reading compared with a description of a person will typically have to be adjusted to fit. In other words, it looks like snake oil.
I'm perfectly willing to believe in mysticism, but when it makes objectively verifiable statements I want to verify them, and I will go where the evidence shows me.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If I knew how to do cold fusion as a practical power source, I probably wouldn't go the scientific route. I'd make an example machine and demonstrate it, file the appropriate patents, and then invite the scientific community to examine it and try to figure out what the bleep is going on, while I sat back and collected insane amounts of patent licensing fees.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I honestly don't know if I should tell you "well played", or suggest you go back to the doctor for a medication check.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm working on a way to collect interest on time saved with Daylight Savings Time, myself. If I can save anything else, I can usually find a way to profit from it, so why not DST?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
yeah no clue there, I was thinking of things like elevators, self winding watches, and hydro electric dams. {I attribute these to gravity although it's really gravity + something else}
I figure somebody will come up with a simple, cheap, and novel way to use gravity eventually. It won't be perpetual motion, probably won't power your house, or be on the scale of hover dam, it will probably be simple and everyday.
It happens all the time something that no one had ever thought of or maybe appeared impossible is suddenly made and every one is thinking "wow! That is so simple why the heck didn't I think of that."
Pascal's wager used to be good logic and effectively neutral ...
Pascal's wager falls apart if there is more than one incompatible alternative for the "There is a Heaven and this is how you get there." side. There are many. (Most of them claim that adhering to another is damming, as well.)
It also breaks down if there are substantial costs to betting on religion (and you don't allow the "infinite reward" claim to swamp your estimate of the probability of its truth.)
[global warming / climate change is] a very serious existential threat to our whole species.
That - with a particular form of it, and a particular, single, solution prescribed for it - is the claim. It may even be correct. (I'm not going to even get started on the explosion of issues with evidence, alternatives, etc.)
Unfortunately, it is being promulgated as a "One True Religion", rather than being subject to proper scientific debate and examination, and is being used to sell a particular, very expensive, product that may be anything from salvation, through snake oil, to deadly poison.
As with (any other) religion, Pascal's Wager breaks down unless it's the only play in town. Get back to me when its adherents are willing to expose the raw data, along with their reasoning and calculations, to open analysis, rather than using governmental power and money, and politically correct social pressure, to shut down anyone who even mentions any alternative, or questions any aspect of their claims.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Most human logic is based on arbitrary logic. It only depends on whether the base points of your logic are set in reality (ie science) or non reality (faith-delusion-myth).
I have a similar story from just a few weeks ago about a guy on YouTube who claimed that the 'environmentalists' had been lying for decades and DDT was safe. Stupid just doesn't describe it.
Yeah - weird about the DDT thing. Eggshell thinning and raptor decimation and endocrine disruption aside, it's heyday was only going to end eventually as insects have developed resistance to it. But the kooks seem to think that it's still a wonder insecticide
Oh - and in the places where DDT was used until recently - they have developed that resistance. So we'd get the birds made extinct, the birth defects, the feminized males, and all the other side effects, with little to gain for the wonder insecticide.
By the way, we know about the resistance because DDT is still allowed as a vector control in some cases, but first it has to be proven that insects haven't developed resistance to it before use. Betchya youtube guy didn't know that.
But yeah, they'll blame those whacko tree huggers who use science instead of politics as a metric for determining sciencey things. That's the ticket.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No, there wasn't. You must have dreamt it.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Self-publish it? It'd be easier if there was some universal media platform that allowed you to publish text, data and videos in a fashion that enabled anyone anywhere in the world to access it easily for almost no cost.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
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 meant the current AGW. Please note those "mass extinctions" were due to 30C+ climate changes, not 2C.
30C+ climate changes? What have you been smoking?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Science concerns itself with what is observable and testable, and logically/mathematically consistent. I would suggest you attend to your own ignorance before you worry about what "scientists" are ignorant of.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I have not seen any evidence that we know anything about "engineering" climate change. Anything we do will have unforseen consequences and could it's self cause disaster.
"If you don't know what you are doing, don't punch the buttons."
And don't believe Hollywood and the Comics, they are not reliable sources of information! 8-)
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.
Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers went into great detail about the feedback loop of being slightly older and therefore slightly more developed physically and coaches spending more time working with these kids because they perform better than the slightly younger, less developed kids. The result is that being slightly older than the other kids in your grade level results in a greater chance of being a "star" athlete. Hockey was one sport mentioned.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I disagree. Just because someone, or even a consortium or "consensus," labels an area of research "discredited" doesn't mean the burden of proof should be greater. To increase the burden of proof is to design in denial to the scientific method and gives undue weight to maintaining the status quo regardless of the proof at hand.
The only burden of proof needed is externally verified repeatable results. Any burden of proof larger than that is prejudicial and has a chilling effect on publication, discussion, acceptance, and ultimately the advancement of science. Care to ask Galileo about requirements for a "higher burden of proof?"
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I don't mean burden of proof to prove something. But an extra burden of evidence to get people's attention. After all it doesn't take too much evidence to have an unusual result and then have other scientists become interested. But it takes a lot more evidence if it's in an area that's not looked on favorably or which does not have a reasonable/testable hypothesis to explain the results.
I wonder which is worse: old physicists trying to be philosophers, or old philosophers trying to be physicists.
When the liberal elites stop stomping all over the earth with the huge carbon footprint their private jets make, I'll stop driving my 1985 Ford F150.
Liberal elites? What fantasy planet do you live on?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
> Cold fusion is bullshit.
Says the Arrogant Coward who pretends to know more then ...
Lockheed Martin:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/...
And the U.S. Navy:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/K...
Your proof is _where_ again?
Yes. Because we are talking mountains here. 1K temperatur change means the permafrost limit moves up 1000 feet. Slopes that have been locked into permafrost 100 years ago are now thawing and 1000 feet of rocks can turn into mudslides.
Other planets are heating as well, indicating a non-anthropic cause.
The dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor. In comparison, everything else is a rounding error.
It doesn't matter though, we will get draconian regulation of fossil fuels. That horse has left the barn. Time to invest in renewables and, yes, low-energy nuclear.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
It must be comforting to live in such a simple world, but I suspect you will do a lot of damage before the model discrepancies force an update.
No one sane would consider me conservative, in any regard. I consider AGW a very poor explanation for the established facts (which include dramatic ongoing climate change).
I consider low-energy nuclear reactions to be extremely well-established, and doubt that the physics community will persist in resisting the tide of evidence, now that Robert Park is well-dead and buried.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
> cold fusion - it worked like claimed, would be damn easy to verify to actually happen.
Firstly, it is increasingly easy to verify low-energy nuclear reactions, as the exponentially expanding body of verifications attests.
Secondly, observations of low-energy nuclear reactions are not dependent upon theoretical explanations.
Thirdly, there are a wide variety of hypothesized mechanisms whereby nucleon-nucleus interactions may occur at low energies. Your comment was quite vague, and its coherence depends upon the structure of a particular hypothesis, which one is left unspecified. This makes the premise irrefutable, and hence meaningless, and therefore the inference is meaningless.
Fourthly, peer review and traditional scientific process is not skipped by all researchers in the field. Yes, there are a number of notable amateur or commercial researchers who are not particularly interested in playing the game we call science. Their success or failure will be measured in practical devices being applied in industry or infrastructure. not by the progress of mainstream science. That's perfectly alright. Science will catch up, if they manage to leap ahead.
Fifthly, there is nothing pseudo-scientific about observing phenomena with careful instrumentation, submitting processes to peer review, hypothesizing physical mechanisms which may underlie the observed phenomena, and formulating experimental procedures to test those hypotheses. This is occuring in LENR, but for the most part it is occurring in minor journals and specialist conferences, whereas in the absence of an irrational aversion to the topic, it would benefit from wider scrutiny and the attention of a larger proportion of the professional scientific community. Given the quality and level of the results observed to date, this would be much to the benefit of society at large, as it can be foreseeably expected to result in technological advance and diffusion at a higher rate than observed so far.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-