Slashdot Mirror
Scientific American Column: 'It's Not Cold Fusion...But It's Something' (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Scientific American magazine has published a guest column on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) [putting] into context the history of what was mistakenly referred to as cold fusion and what happened. The bottom line is that there is compelling cumulative evidence for nuclear reactions taking place, including shifts in the abundance of isotopes, element transmutations, and localized melting of metals. Furthermore, those reactions do not have the characteristics of either nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Despite sharp criticism from much of the scientific community after the 1989 announcement by Fleischmann and Pons, the Department of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and other reputable organizations continued the research and published many papers.
The article reports that "to the surprise of many people, a new field of nuclear research has emerged," adding that even in the early 20th century, atomic scientists were already reporting "inexplicable experimental evidence of elemental transmutations."
Back in the 80's when my physics chops were far better I was sure they were on to something.
Just goes to show, that even in the scientific community, bias can play a part in what gets to the public. Just because they are scientists, doesn't mean they aren't human.
I hope those two guys get their due. They deserve it, and they took a ration of grief which damaged their careers. Fleischmann is dead- but someone should wrote Pons a check since he's still kicking around..
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Wohoo! Alchemy is a thing after all!
[The Universe] has gone offline.
It's alchemy! Alchemy I tell you!
"Perhaps most surprising is that, in the formative years of atomic science in the early 20th century, some scientists reported inexplicable experimental evidence of elemental transmutations. In the 1910s and 1920s, this research was reported in popular newspapers and magazines, and papers were published in the top scientific journals of the day, including Physical Review, Science and Nature."
Alchemy is ... real? I'm not talking about turning stuff into gold but turning some elements into others using certain ... what-looks-to-be chemical reactions?
If that's about Rossi's e-cat, then I go back reading Mickey Mouse...
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
LENR is great for scammers. It's like free energy but with better sounding "science" behind it.
Scammers with the necessary scientific background and a good sense of misdirection can easily fool scientists. Scientists are good at finding natural causes for surprising results. However, if the result comes from deliberate trickery and that the trickster did enough research to avoid breaking all the laws of physics, scientists can be fooled like kids at a magic show.
So I thing that many of the results for LENR are poisoned by such scams and any attempt at meta-analysis is doomed.
I took the pragmatic view at the time.
If it worked, engineers pretty much shouldn't care *how* it worked, or *why* it worked, to be able to make it useful.
The UCF studies were, to me, the most interesting ones. However, there was so much criticism heaped on them, and they were electrochemists, not physicists, and they announced it "the wrong way" (which is how most things are announced these days), and ... it was not worth tracking any more.
My favorite joke was base on Utah funding the research for "Pons and Fleishman" and ending up with a bunch of cold cream and margarine...
You are right. Therefore everything is true, and possible, but just being suppressed by scientists. So where is my warp engine?
I seen a few reports of something weird going on. I am not going to make assumptions that they are wrong or right. But it is discouraging to see such an utter lack of clear incremental improvements in measuring the anomalous effect.
Notice how in this article he name-drops Chandrasekhar to bolster the reputation of Lewis Larsen and thus the so-called "Widom-Larsen theory" without explicitly endorsing it or claiming it explains the purported experimental evidence.
Stephan
Color me skeptical. I know there are Slashdotters who happily buy into conspiracy theories on a wide range of topics, but - come on, Scientific American?
#DeleteChrome
Actually I realized the submitter is ... also the author of the column. So I guess that explains it.
Is this just your hunch, or is it backed up by something?
I ask, because if it is confirmed as a self-submitted slashvertisement, that will negatively influence my opinion of the piece and its authors.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I would be happy with a car that is powered by water.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Well, as a personal side project by guys working for NASA anyway. Not *quite* the same thing. As much as I want to believe it works, and think that enough evidence has been accumulated to test it properly in orbit, let's not pretend it's been tested with the resources of NASA behind it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle.
I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I read the linked article, and he refers to "ultra-low-momentum neutrons with a huge capture cross-section". Has anyone dug deeper into this? How do you create these neutrons? Or is it just pseudo-science?
Seems like if you could actually do this, there are a lot of crazy things you could do. Such as creating unstable isotopes that decay into something else. Either the decay by-product could be valuable, or the energy released...
Alchemy, anyone?
Whenever the main stream media wips up a shit storm to discredit some science and witch hunt those behind it, you know something else is afoot. Science doesn't work that way. If Fleischmann and Pons were right or wrong then other scientists are going to verify it, one way or the other, and that's that. At worst, it comes out that they did sloppy work and it looks bad on their CVs. But thats it and life goes on. That's how real science works -- in fact the vast majority or hypotheses and experiments prove to be wrong.
My guess is, it proved a very easy way for entrenched interests to defiance research into energy sources that could seriously disrupt the status quo.
:T:R:A:N:S:
However I like Krivit and his blog, so far there has been reproducible experiment. A result out of the ordinary which is not consistently reproducible outside of the marge of error, is not a result. It is interesting but that's about it. And that is what LENR suffer right now : a plethora of protocol, with some very limit borderline detection result, and nothing really reproducible. Look if there was a reproducible result with "take detector X, solution Y, place in such and such position boom you get more isotope, more X ray of such and such wavelength", that would have been known by now. The problem is, there is no such result. So until then, it is all talk no substance.
Someone takes a blog article with no cited evidence as gospel truth, then crows about how it validates their personal beliefs. Particularly ironic in this case, as said personal beliefs are about scientists always jumping to biased conclusions. You don't say.
A) when scientists turn out to be wrong, who is it that proves them wrong - is it blog authors or slashdot posters? No, it's other scientists with stronger evidence.
B) there may be interesting accumulated evidence in the LENR field, but this guest blog does not cite any, so does not prove or disprove anything.
C) Many labs tried to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's work, and couldn't. The public backlash was heightened by them having gone to the press before peer review, but the real fault lay with the media over-blowing the hype prematurely - and people accepting unquestioningly everything the media said.
C) If there are, as alleged, some interesting results worthy of further study, then hopefully some labs will follow them up further. LENR falls in the extraordinary-claims basket, so the proper response for most labs is to ignore it until more speculative researchers get around to producing evidence strong enough to merit a closer look. Has that happened yet? TFA thinks so, but does not make a case a reputable lab would find compelling.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle
They've also far more often been through the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, resisting it, turning out to be completely correct and still having a bunch of dimwits cherry pick a tiny number of times when that didn't happen an hold those up add some sort of proof that scientists should always listen to cranks.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
We have solid evidence for the "EM" drive. We even have a solid theory that makes testable predictions. MiHsC. Your comment represents abuse not scientific views.
Who modded this up? Come on mods! Really? --> "This time around it's even funnier considering we have next to no idea how radioactive decay really works or even seemingly random subatomic particle type changes." Anyone ever heard of Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Electrodynamics, and Quantum Chromodynamics? The theories of particle decays and reactions with none ever observed violations and which the LHC has spent billions of Euros to find flaws or way to improve without success so far.
Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle. I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.
This is just a variant of the Galileo Gambit. Yes, over the last 200 years there have been several instances where "science" (as in the majority of scientists) has been sceptical to accept paradigm-changing new claims. Semmelweis is one example, as is Alfred Wegener with his idea of continental drift. But for every genius causing a major shift in scientific opinion, there have been legions of bozos proposing perpetuum mobiles, morphic fields, magnetic water cures, electric universes, and other crap. And on the other hand, many earth-shattering new theories like relativity (both versions) and evolution have been rather quickly accepted, because they were presented with convincing arguments and testable hypotheses. As Sagan said: they also laughed at Bozo the Clown...
Stephan
I will donate to any Kickstarter/GoFundMe to bribe ANSI or NIST or someone to officially refer to it as Alchemy.
"then it's proven right"
By scientists.
If there are two competing theories, at least one of them is wrong. That does not represent a moral failing of the scientists that proposed that theory.
"If there are two competing theories, at least one of them is wrong."
Actually, I have a counter example to my own claim: wave-particle duality, where two contradictory theories were both proven correct. J. J. Thomson won a Nobel Prize for discovering the particle nature of the electron and his son George shared the Nobel Prize for discovering the wave nature of the electron.
If it's a secret, how do you know about it? Let me guess. You're a plasma universe person aren't you?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
But what about the gamma? No explanation there.
This isn't the only dodgy thing about this theory the whole electron-mass argument seems dubious looked at from a simple energy standpoint. They are claiming that the electrons in the metal hydride have a mass of well over an MeV for this to work. This is a HUGE amount of energy, about 6 orders of magnitude higher than any chemical energy. Basic energy conservation requires this mass to come from somewhere so where does it come from? Energies that large (by the time you have multiplied it by the number of electrons) are usually pretty obvious - it should be about 5-6 orders of magnitude higher than the energy stored in a battery of the same size.
People are splitting hairs. Proton reactions are not occurring but neutron capture is...
The point is F&P discovered something new that was worthy of more scrutiny and were politically tared and feathered.
with none ever observed violations
This is incorrect. The experimentally observed neutrino oscillations imply that neutrinos do have a mass which directly contradicts the Standard Model which assumes neutrinos to be massless particles.
The point though is that, prior to establishing a convincing body of evidence, which generally requires lots of independent experimentation and verification (i.e. broad acceptance at least to the point of being willing to dedicate resources to actually testing your claims) there is no reliable way to distinguish between those making correct and incorrect claims. After all, both are clearly incorrect as judged within the context of the established scientific models.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Its not a fallacy to make such an association as its directly relavant to the subject matter of how academia handles theories that question estabilished beliefs. Further Ignaz Seemelweis DID have evidence to back up his claim; Additionaly Darwin did not have as easy a time of it as you seem to be suggesting.
You seem to be the one guilty of such a fallacy by associating those who make correct claims with those who make incorrect claims when both have been rejected by academia. Look under the heading of "Guilt by association as an ad hominem fallacy" from the article you refered to. As it is a fallacy to treat the two sets as equivalent it is wrong to excuse missing important correct theories because other people make wild theories.
Well, the case of Semmelweis is not that simple. For one, his observations were correct - hand-washing of hospital staff with a solution of calcium hypochlorite did reduce incidence of puerperal fever -, but his theory that this was due to "cadaverous matter" was wrong, and he got lucky that his cleansing agent was antibacterial. It took until Pasteur and Koch came up with the modern germ theory of disease that the mechanism was reasonably understood. Also, Semmelweis became embroiled in the political fallout of the 1848 revolutions, which slowed down the scientific discourse. And despite this, it only took about 20 years until Lister developed antiseptic techniques that were widely accepted. Pons and Fleischmann gave their press conference in 1989, now 27 years ago, and that in an age when communication takes days to seconds, not months, to cross the globe.
As you yourself seem to acknowledge, it takes significant time and evidence until a theory reaches scientific acceptance. A new, competing, theory needs to be at least similarly compelling to be accepted. Scientist are naturally sceptic. To quote Sagan again: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - a sentiment shared by Laplace and Hume. The vast majority of claims that would overturn accepted scientific theories are complete crap. Of those that are serious and not obvious nonsense, most are still wrong. That's why the onus is on the proponent to demonstrate that they understand the field they work in, and that they have carefully considered other options and potential errors before people start spending resources on new claims.
Stephan
Right on! A bit milder formulated: His empirical data was dismissed without any attempt to reproduce and confirm it, because there was 'no theoretical framework explaining the results'.
A showcase of how criminally stupid (medical) scientists 'en masse' can be.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
His empirical data was dismissed without any attempt to reproduce and confirm it, because there was 'no theoretical framework explaining the results'.
The lack of an explanation for the observed results certainly didn't help, but there were an awful lot of doctors that had the opinion that they were gentlemen, and it was thus insulting to imply that they were somehow unclean and had to wash their hands.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
generally requires lots of
Not really.
What is required, is that people who didn't put any effort in trying to verify or falsify the given claim shut their mouth.
Then if nobody is trying to repeat the experiment, then science will just be delayed until someone finally does, not destroyed as in the case of Pons & Fleischman.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
The point is that Ignaz Semmelweis had empirical data.
You are wrongly equating empirical data with 'crap' in the same way as the (medical) 'scientists' in his time did, as a better look at it could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of women.
Is someone comes with falsifiable data, and his claim is interesting enough, then a scientist tries to reproduce the data and may express his doubts if he can't, but most certainly has to shut his mouth as long as he hasn't engaged in any such experimental activity.
Comparing people with ununderstood scientific claims ad initio with clowns and bozos is absolutely counter productive.
Fools laugh at anyone...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I got to do a rotation through the Navy lab that was working on LENR shortly before it was shut down. The folks running it were exactly the kind of scientist you want working on this: careful, self-critical, experienced, and most importantly, not part of a pro-LENR institute (they answered to skeptical Navy brass, not LENR true-believer donors and investors). Unfortunately, LENR is controversial, difficult to get funding for, and easy to tie up in regulatory red tape. They were caught in a strange Catch-22. As they were able to convince their bosses that nuclear reactions were happening, the facility and oversight requirements increased. At some point the safety and reporting requirements outpaced the resources they had access to. The Navy lab closed several years ago. As far as I know, there is no independent group like that studying LENR anymore.
Good point well made...
I'll defer to anyone who knows better, but my understanding is that non-zero neutrino rest masses do not contradict the Quantum Electrodynamics or Quantum Chromodynamics upon which the Standard Model is based. The elementary particle masses (electron, muon, neutrinos, quarks, etc) are not predicted by any of those or the Standard Model, but are free parameters determined by experiment for now. Thus the Model is incomplete, but accurate up to it's level of completeness. But my point is that at the level it is now it provides a very good model/quantitative predictions of "how radioactive decay really works or even seemingly random subatomic particle type changes" which the grandparent cavalierly dismisses. Of course when someone uses the phrase "really works" then we get into philosophical discussions which science doesn't address.
That's an awesome bit of science trivia - very cool.
BTW, examples like that is why science should never be said to "prove" anything - proof is the stuff of math, not science. Also, per current theory, electrons are waves, full stop, as is everything else, really. The waves are quantized, sure, but using particle as a metaphor will constantly lead one astray, and should really be abandoned.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Get a Tesla (or golf buggy or milk float ; whatever), a hydroelectric power plant and a dam to feed it with water ... there you are : water powered car.
Except, of course, that the power is actually solar power, not water power. The water is just a storage and concentration medium.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
What was destroyed? Are we not now accepting, after only a few decades delay, that yes there is in fact an anomalous process occurring?
F&P screwed up big time in irresponsibly presenting their findings in a grossly over-hyped manner before they had achieved reliable repeatability, and by so doing they cost themselves and their discovery a dramatic amount of credibility. That's on them. Had they instead reported their results responsibly, in academic journals rather than in a heavily publicized press event, then there would have almost certainly been far less backlash.
Criticism is an integral part of the scientific process, and is quite often accompanied by derision proportional to the publicity of the claim. That's why researchers normally pass around their preposterous new ideas to a handful of trusted colleagues for review and testing before making big public claims.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What was destroyed?
What about the careers, not to speak about personal lives, of Pons & Fleischman?
What about the taboo on further investigation of this subject with physics wanting to do so risking to have their career damaged/destroyed as well?
This must have had a negative influence on the further development of LENR science.
Although the current mechanism might be such, the way they presented their results should never have had any influence on the way the findings would have been received. I wouldn't have been surprised if some malice would have been in play as well.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Your professor was wrong and equating the reaction of your professor to what I stated is one more example of the false equivalence fallacy.
Your reasoning--if it even was something like that--is flawed.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
...they were gentlemen...
I'm trying really hard to see how this would be a valid scientific way of reasoning in any way.
Was this maybe meant as an excuse?
Didn't they teach math in them days? Could this 'scientific medical community' not work out the numbers and see how incredibly more important than their own egos this was?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
By being completely irresponsible with their announcement they gambled with their careers and lost. Had their results been easily replicable they would have become scientific superstars, able to write their own ticket for the rest of their life.
As for the chilling effect on further research, that WAS unfortunate, but was just a delay. Further research continued being done y many around the world, which is why it's starting to be taken serious by "the establishment" again. It's not even completely clear that there was a substantial delay - without their over-hyped announcement it might have taken considerably longer to gather a comparable amount of interest.
> the way they presented their results should never have had any influence on the way the findings would have been received
That would be nice if researchers were robots, but they're humans, just like everyone else. And science depends on replication - F&P made grandiose claims, and those require grandiose evidence, which they did not have (rule of thumb in science is you can never trust the original researcher's results - they're too invested and are liable to overlook confounding factors generating false positives).
When other excited researchers attempted to replicate their experiments the vast majority got negative results, and said so loudly and publicly - also called for, counter evidence needs to be presented as loudly as the original claims so that it gets heard. And, knowing with certainty that pretty much any experiment will generate a certain percentage of false positives, when the vast majority of independent replication attempts give negative results it's a pretty safe bet that the original results were one of those false positives.
Contrast that with what would likely have happened if F&P had instead done the responsible thing and shared there results quietly with a few colleagues, maybe publishing in some journal first. They would have gotten the same negative feedback, quietly, and likely proceeded with their same follow-up research that exposed the erratic nature of the results and some of the confounding factors. They would never have suffered the mass ridicule, but they also would have had far less chance of becoming "superstars" - had their experiments been replicable much of the community would have become aware of them through second- or third-hand confirmations, vastly diffusing the publicity F&P would have gotten.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No, you can't. Not unless there's some really compelling evidence backing them up. Anything that runs counter to the accepted laws of physics (like, say, triggering fusion at energies orders of magnitude below the accepted cross-section, without generating any of the predicted byproducts) is going to be ridiculed by the majority, which is why researchers who make such world-shifting claims typically quietly seek out widely respected allies before making grandiose claims in a broadly public venue - their respectability lends credence to your claims, and it's easier to convince them in private, where they can humor you without putting their reputation in danger.
Look at Relativity - Special or General. They are on the face of them, ridiculous. They run counter to accepted functioning of the universe, turning the entire concept of gravity and motion on their heads, and there was substantial resistance to adopting them. What made the difference was that they also perfectly explained some observational anomalies that were widely known and accepted, and made lots of testable predictions.
Similarly Quantum Mechanics, which is even more preposterous, but also explained widely recognized anomalies and made many similarly preposterous predictions *which could be easily tested* (such as the two-slit experiment with electrons).
And none of those were accepted right away either, it took years, decades even of argument and refinement before they were even taken particularly seriously.
Contrast with F&P, whose first announcement was an extremely public claim that their "impossible" physics, which they had no theory to explain (they were chemists after all), was going to change the world - and were then immediately found to have not even done enough research to have discovered how erratic their claimed phenomena actually was as almost everyone who attempted to replicate it completely failed to do so. Given that it's to be expected that practically any experiment will occasionally generate false positives, that has charlatan written all over it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
with none ever observed violations
This is incorrect. The experimentally observed neutrino oscillations imply that neutrinos do have a mass which directly contradicts the Standard Model which assumes neutrinos to be massless particles.
The Standard Model is not QM. QM says nothing about the mass of the neutrino.
Scientist are naturally sceptic.
But thanks to Semmelweis and Lister, artificially aseptic.
It was not up to them to make results 'easily replicable' and I don't equate enthusiasm with 'completely irresponsible'.
So, let me observe that our opinions differ, I still think the ridicule they received was quite too much.
You also forget the mass amplification factor which made the response so destructive to their careers:
It was only two of them that published the results so loudly to the community. But that community massively responded just as loud back, and that is a tad too loud for me, for them, and for the subject. So I still think they were treated unfairly, especially now that it seems they indeed were up to something, although their interpretation may have been lacking.
And how could they possibly have given the right explanation if even now people still don't know what exactly is going on?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
They didn't need to have a good theory, or easily replicable results (though making sure their results are replicable is *absolutely* a priority for researchers - a paper published without enough information to replicate the experiment is a paper that can only damage your career). All they needed to do was publish their anomalous findings quietly, in a venue suited for such early results, and they would have been fine.
Their problem was not their discovery, but that they "shouted it from the rooftops" You shout at the crowd, you've got to expect the crowd to shout back, and make sure you are prepared to handle that inevitable backlash. They didn't even try, and the crowd knocked them on their ass.
As for "especially now that it seems they indeed were up to something" - that is completely irrelevant. Unless you imagine that the research community had access to time-travel, their findings could only be judged by the information available at the time.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Unless you imagine that the research community had access to time-travel, their findings could only be judged by the information available at the time.
One would expect though that this kind of geniuses would suffer from a trait called 'memory', from which they could recall that sometimes people who present shocking data unjustly get burned by their own community, and so they could have decided to do the right thing: not to destroy them.
But no, the whole scientific community got in a frenzy and did it anyway. That shouldn't have happened.
Then now that it seems they indeed were up to something there wouldn't have been any problem to look back to.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Yes, there are occasionally false negatives. There are also many orders of magnitude more true negatives. Giving them all the benefit of the doubt would do far more damage to scientific advancement than occasionally delaying the advancement of a particular discovery by a few decades.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Wrong. This is just about proper human behavior, but I'm prepared to say you are right and I am wrong, just for the sake of stopping this exchange. :)
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Very well. And I'll concede that it would have been nice it the backlash had been less intense and more rationally mediated. I was sorely disappointed by the demonization of the subject in the face of the researchers who were getting positive results.
I just don't think it realistically could have gone any other way given human (and especially geek) nature. "Proper human behavior" is a nice ideal, but it's generally delusional to expect it from actual humans.
And given the long history of cranks making grandiose claims about inventing "free energy devices", I think the derision was to be expected, and that F&P really should have taken the time to think about what they were doing and make sure their results could actually back up their claims.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ok, point taken, over & out.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Back to Feynman, if the results are reproducible and current theory cannot explain it, there must be laws we don't know about.
What you say is true but there are two very important caveats: the results have to be reproducible and unexplainable by current theory. So far 'cold fusion' type experiments fail on one of these criteria: there is considerable doubt about the reproducibility since not everyone seems to be able to produce the same effects. Perhaps the new results are reproducible, I don't know, but at this point the situation is the same as the fable of the boy who cried wolf. There have been many such claims of results in the past none of which have actually been reproducible and so now when they make new ones is it at all surprising they are met with a combination of indifference and derision?
The problem here is not the response of mainstream science it is the irresponsible claims which this field seems to make on an almost regular basis. It is not belief in existing scientific models which is the cause of the negative response but rather a disbelief that the people making the claims have properly checked that the results really are reproducible. If we do miss a real effect here it will not be attitude of mainstream science which is to blame.