warning: long.QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Wed 23rd September 2009, 5:51pm)
Being wrong doesn't make a theory "pseudoscientific". What makes it pseudoscientific is refusing to allow the theory to be tested, refusing to accept or consider evidence that suggests that the theory is incorrect, or stating the theory in such a way that no evidence could possibly be produced so as to falsify the claims made by the theory.
Yes. There is a phenomenon which is a mirror of pseudoscience, perhaps the best name I've seen for it is p
seudoskepticism. Pseudoskepticism refuses to consider evidence in favor of a theory, because the theory "has been discredited," i.e., rejects fact ("evidence" is fact, when properly framed) due to rejection of theory that the fact might imply.
What became more and more clear to me as I read the literature on cold fusion was that this is what happened. Defects in Fleischmann's research in narrow areas were exaggerated and extended to cover and reject by association his entire work; replications were ignored with a host of excuses and thus it was proclaimed that the work hadn't been replicated. The editor of Science proclaimed cold fusion "dead." He's now dead, and the field he tried to bury isn't. Since when did a journal editor gain the right to declare an entire field of research, with as many as hundreds of active researchers at the time, "dead"?
In 1990, apparently, because it seemed he got away with it, for years. It's truly a great story, showing how far the "consensus" can stray from being solidly grounded in experiment and the scientific method.
Fact: many research groups have reported unexpected heat, way above experimental error margins, nuclear radiation, helium correlated with the heat, and elemental transformations in the palladium deuteride system (and in some related condensed matter systems). That is an uncontestable fact, and each element in this fact can be specified. Key word is "reported." Does that mean that cold fusion is taking place? Well, that's a theory, an interpretation, not a fact. What we would hope is that those who issue opinions on theories would know the facts!
Better question, is the reported excess heat real? What we can say at this point is that it is unexplained, except through theories that involve nuclear reactions, and none of those theories are fully satisfactory. Some have made predictions that panned out, such as Preparata's prediction that helium would be the predominant ash (and which then predicts that the helium would correlate with the heat, as it does as reviewed in p.r. secondary source). Given the variety of approaches toward measuring the heat, the explanatory theory of simple measurement error has become untenable. While there has certainly been some sloppy work, much of the work in measuring the heat has been by experts in such measurements, and they have used many different methods.
So, then, is there some other explanation besides nuclear reactions? Hydrino theory does provide two possible routes to explain the energy: one would be the formation of hydrinos, expected to be, through Mills' theory, highly exothermic; it's a non-nuclear explanation. However, in theory, again, hydrinos would be like muons, because of the reduced orbits, and might catalyze fusion as muons do.
But accepting hydrino theory turns on its head more accepted physics than the other cold fusion theories do; some of them, though still unsupported by demonstrated experimental predictions, don't require any new physics at all. (There is no new physics, to my knowledge, in Takahashi's Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate theory, and the problem with its acceptance isn't the supposed unlikeliness of quad fusion -- that's an error based on the assumptions of plasma physics where nuclei are not confined, and four deuterons is simply two deuterium molecules assuming a favored tetrahedral arrangement if such are confined cubically -- rather, it is that there seems to be less effect from the hot alphas predicted; but I've been unable to find any clear source on that. There are hot alphas, that's known, and some of the effects are known, but people in the field seem to think, not enough.)
A true skeptical approach would avoid acceptance of theories that are not solidly supported by ample accurate prediction from them, and this would include the continued acceptance of theories that fail to predict behavior under new circumstances, not previously tested. It doesn't mean that one throws out the old theories; we did not throw out Newton's equations of motion because they were found not to apply under relativistic conditions. A true skeptic would be skeptical of all impossibility statements. Which doesn't mean that he rushes out and invests in BlackLight Power. The skeptic remains skeptical.
No theory is "scientific" if it cannot be falsified, and theories cannot be falsified if contrary evidence is discarded because it contradicts the theory!The pseudoskeptics on Wikipedia mistook, and not beginning with me, attempts to include reliably sourced information that implied possible error in the "accepted facts about cold fusion" as pushing a fringe POV. Had these been attempts to assert the reality of cold fusion, the resistance and associated skepticism would have been quite appropriate. But they were not; rather, they were simply attempts to balance the article based on what is in reliable source. It came to the point that ordinary reliable source was being rejected because of the identity of authors (ignoring the implications of a reputable, independent publisher) and the supposed contradiction of implied theories, rejected by the "mainstream," but there is no mainstream as a coherent entity, there is only a collection of decisions made by editors and reviewers at peer-reviewed publications, or occasionally by review boards the like. And a large body of diffuse opinion, largely based on what is in media reports, and which we cannot really call "scientific."
Arguments that made some sense with, say, homeopathy, i.e., that isolated peer-reviewed publications didn't represent mainstream acceptance, were applied, explicitly, to cold fusion during the RfAr, it's in the evidence of Enric Naval that was cited as proof of my "tendentious editing." Enric's evidence, if one tracked it down through the links, presented some numbers about the proportion of peer-reviewed papers that were favorable or unfavorable to cold fusion, making it look like most papers were unfavorable. That was the opposite of the truth; the bibliography cited classifies papers as positive, negative, and neutral. In 1989, there were twice as many negative papers as positive, but it evened out in 1990, and every year after that, there were more positive papers than negative. What Enric did was to present the data as the numbers of positive papers compared to the total. Implying, then, that there were more negative than positive, by not mentioning "neutral." The excluded middle. If he was aware that he was doing that, he was a liar, it's quite possible to lie with true statements, because the essence of "lie" is intention to deceive.
Because the belief is common that cold fusion was rejected, my guess is that arbitrators, looking at Enric's evidence, didn't check the sources, because those numbers would confirm the belief, and they discounted my explanations either because they had come to believe I was tendentious and probably not worth checking out, or they simply didn't read them, which would have been understandable; in this case, though, I know that some arbitrators
did read, so.... why didn't they tell the others?
I've left Wikipedia because of the failure of the best editors to defend what I was doing, not because of the jerks. Without that defense, I had no more reason to expose myself to the jerks in that environment. I rather doubt that conditions will be significantly better in three months.... but I could be wrong.
(The bibliography is the Dieter Britz bibliography. Jed Rothwell has done a detailed analysis of that bibliography, I cited it in quite a few places, it's whitelisted and very useful. He contests some of the neutral classifications as actually being positive; Britz was looking from a particular perspective, Rothwell claims. But, in any case, positive peer-reviewed papers, even as classified by Britz, now greatly outnumber negative ones, and recent publications have been almost entirely positive, and though the numbers greatly declined, in recent years they have been on the upswing, plus there have been some major publication events, such as the American Chemical Society's peer-reviewed
Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, published by Oxford University Press, 2008, which was discussed extensively on the Reliable Source Noticeboard, pretty roundly ignored by the Cab editors that ArbComm turned the cold fusion article over to. The discussion was just archived.... The book is cllearly RS, contains quite a few reviews of the field, so it's peer-reviewed secondary source, recent, independently published, all the goodies, supposedly golden. And Enric dismissed it on RSN with "Hate to rain on your parade, but cold fusion is pathological science."
At least he didn't say "pseudoscience." But I'm not sure that "pathological" is better. It implies that anyone who gives any of it any credence is sick, deluded, or worse, quite possibly engaged in fraud.
Because he says so. Mathsci could remedy this. He could decide to check out the sources, instead of relying on math based on old accepted assumptions for his understanding of a physical sciences, and start to edit the article to conform to sources and guidelines. The error of failing to investigate the physical evidence, or, worse, rejecting it because one has a satisfying theory, is a very old one. We could call it pseudoscience, though, perhaps, it's pre-science.
There are people who believe or strongly suspect that low energy nuclear reactions are taking place. What's the evidence on which they base this? The pseudoskeptics ascribe it all to wishful thinking, hopes that the world's energy problems could be solved, or, worse, greed for fame or power. But ... is there any evidence, some small voice must be saying?
(I have no opinion that cold fusion will ever be a practical energy source, and that possibility has nothing to do with the science of low-energy nuclear reactions. The "brew me two cups of tea" argument is utterly unscientific. By the way, it used to be "one cup of tea" (Richard Garwin), but perhaps he's realized that they are getting close to one cup, he'd better up it some.
For Wikipedia, what evidence exists that is documented in reliable source? Especially in peer-reviewed secondary source? *All* that evidence should be mentioned somewhere on Wikipedia, not in redundant detail, but in substance. It's been excluded; Wikipedia did not invent this exclusion, but it need not maintain it, and it has been. The world has been moving on, the sources no longer represent the views that were prominent twenty years ago, there was a very visible shift in 2004. As I've written, the overall balance may not have shifted toward acceptance, but we don't actually know. Compared to the positive, there is very little recent negative source. Were there no significant positive source, that would be one thing, but ... there is plenty.
Against this, Mathsci has only his belief that he helped to ban a "disruptive editor." He's never engaged in any serious conversation on the topic. It's pretty obvious what is going on. The usual.
This post has been edited by Abd: Thu 24th September 2009, 12:00am
JzG, same old same old, Repeats old claims
Abd JzG, same old same old Mon 14th September 2009, 3:12pm
Mon 14th September 2009, 3:12pm
