What I find interesting is that when confronted with that idea, many physcists just get stuck at the original claims and don't understand that there is likely a novel phenomenon of some sort, deserving of study.
As if two quiet, humble, respected PhD's in electrochemistry were crackpots orchestrating some kind of scam. I feel sorry for the decades of shaming they had to endure (Fleischmann died 4 years ago; Pons is still alive).
The attitude was that if their claims weren't 100% right and 100% reproducible, they're scum. When some of the results were turning out to be negative, it seemed that almost no physicist was willing to say, hey wait a minute, it's not cold fusion but maybe there's a new interesting unknown phenomenon there.
The attitude was that if their claims weren't 100% right and 100% reproducible, they're scum.
In fact, I've been downvoted and ridiculed for things like requesting a source be given, or quoting a mainstream textbook (which disagreed with a user.
HN is better than most imho, but most internet forums seem to be characterized by groupthink rather than vehement adherence to an ability to verify the truth of what one is claiming. I'd rather be in the company of the latter, even if they do ridicule you if your claims are not verifiable.
They'll interpret friendly corrections as rudeness, and won't actually stop making wild unsubstantiated claims until you escalate to genuine abrupt rudeness and/or banning.
Also, they'd probably be accused of "groupthink" for trying to maintain that objectivity by those who disagree with the conclusions. Humans are hard to deal with.
Sadly, mainstream science can be as vicious in persecuting heretics as the Church was.
From lobotomy, which was a common practice back in the day, to electroshock therapy to unconventional people (not legitimately crazy, just anybody as long as their parents/guardians convinced there was "something wrong with them" e.g. from gay to wanting to live a bohemian life and having a conservative family).
And of course modern science happily collaborated with all kinds of power to give us the atomic bomb, biological weapons, and other atrocities.
Convinced, as a scientific establishment, that your theories/dogmas about being straight/gay are correct, and subjecting the "sick" into electroshock and other therapy is not persecution?
What's the definition of persecution you are using that doesn't include such cases?
And things such as lobotomy/heavy drugs/etc which were applied to all kind of strays/dissidents from mainstream values/conventions (and not just legitimately crazy people) is also classic persecution. And it didn't just happen behind the "Iron Curtain".
That's exactly right!
The intent behind the medical practices you list is not to oppress, but to cure. It's misguided, horrific, tragic, etc., but persecution it is not.
>What's the definition of persecution you are using that doesn't include such cases?
The usual one. Citing Merriam-Webster:
1. to harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict; specifically : to cause to suffer because of belief
2. to annoy with persistent or urgent approaches (as attacks, pleas, or importunities)
The key point is that persecution is generally understood to require some sort of punitive or retaliatory intent, which is not at all the case of the practices you mention.
Moreover, you seem to be confusing "the scientific community" with "the political community", the latter of which is largely responsible for the misuse of scientific discovery in cases of actual persecution. N.B.: none of this was done in the name of science. To say that science has persecuted mankind to the extent that religion has is patently absurd.
In fact, and with my sincerest respect (really!), much of your above posts are absurd, conflating political/ideological persecution with varying forms of misguided medicine, recklessness, short-sightedness, etc. To be sure, these are all Bad Things, but persecution is a rather narrowly-defined concept, especially in colloquial use.
That's wrong.
For one, the church also did legitimately believe that they were curing (saving the soul, etc) of those they persecuted. So the "good intentions" of those doing such acts is not the defining criterion.
Second, such science was used to promote political and moral agendas (there was nothing to cure in a homosexual, and even less in more blatant cases, e.g. putting people in favor of black civil rights or women's rights/suffrage in psychiatric asylums or shock treatment).
Here's but one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis
There are of course other places that used similar techniques (from USSR and Nazi Germany to Britain, nordic countries and beyond).
>Moreover, you seem to be confusing "the scientific community" with "the political community", the latter of which is largely responsible for the misuse of scientific discovery in cases of actual persecution.
The scientific community was (and still is in various cases) complicit in adopting the political ideas (or promoting them in the first place), assisting those in power with scientific (or "scientific") theories and diagnoses, and enforcing them in practice. It was actual doctors, with degrees et al, that did those things, not politicians...
Well, all, or almost all "religious wars" have historically been cover-ups for expansion of territory, power plays between populations, and money grabbing. So religion was just a pretext there.
I can't now remember exactly what news story I read, but basically it made no sense at all, unless true religious belief was the motivation, rather than selfish greed.
Perhaps it had a lot with the fact that they never allowed to perform independent measures and they never allowed to really perform the experiment in a controlled way.
But I think my claim has more to do with Rossi's E-Cat than with the original P&F experiments
The issue at the time was that they released their results to the press before their results were vetted. They became instantaneous celebrities, and it wasn't clear that it was against their will.
They were very coy about the setup (patent issues? I'm not sure); there was no theoretical model that fit it; and quickly nuclear physicists were pointing out that with the kind of reaction they were talking about they would have been fried by the (radiation) by-products.
The field was very excited (See: "fifth force" for another tale of excitement in my grad-school days). After all, any time there is a result without even a model from which an explanation can possibly derive you are looking at a bunch of new ideas. This means people get to be imaginative, there's sure to be lot's of funding for it, etc. Great times ahead!
Others tried to replicate the results, but since the full experimental setup wasn't being revealed they had to guess. Their attempts at replication failed. This was not the way physics research was conducted, and people started getting pissed off. It was time for more details and proof that they actually got the results they claimed.
With that proof not forthcoming (some started claiming they had built a fuel cell rather than a fusion reactor) they faced a lot of criticism for their PR processes and closed-mouth policy. The damage to their reputation was irreparable.
To my knowledge nobody has yet been able to reproduce the original claims, but I haven't followed in a while.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/cold-fusion-energy-advances-2...
http://lenr-canr.org/index/Summary/Summary.php
It has multiple times. But if you really spend time looking into this it gets very interesting. It seems like the Pd Fleischmann & Pons used was no ordinary one.It came from a recycling process and had nano structural properties. Most likely it was not even very pure but contained certain impurities that made tho whole process that effective. See the publications of Navy Research in the last months.
BTW: There are unified models that explain LENR very well, it just does and will never work under the current accepted paradigm - I personally give shit about paradigms, I use falsification and solomonoff induction only :)
Here are the last two paragraphs of the article:
> Recently, I told this story in a Philosophy course we teach at Caltech called "Ethics of Research." The first question, when I finished my tale, was, do I believe in Cold Fusion? The answer is, no. Certainly, I believe quite firmly the theoretical arguments that say Cold Fusion is impossible. On the other hand, however, I believe equally firmly in the integrity and competence of Franco Scaramuzzi and his group of co-workers at Frascati. I was disturbed when I saw that Franco had gotten caught in the web of science-by-news conference in April 1989 (although I was truly pleased that he finally got the long overdue recognition his agency ENEA owed him), and I was even more distressed when I learned that Franco and his group had observed excess heat (the "bad kind" of Cold Fusion). However, I have looked at their cells, and looked at their data, and it's all pretty impressive. The Japanese experiment showing that heat nearly always results when x is greater than 0.85 looks even more impressive on paper. It seems a particularly elegant, well designed experiment, at least to the untutored eye of a physicist (what do I know about electrochemistry?) What all these experiments really need is critical examination by accomplished rivals intent on proving them wrong. That is part of the normal functioning of science. Unfortunately, in this area, science is not functioning normally. There is nobody out there listening.
> I suppose that, if nuclear fusion really does take place whenever x is greater than 0.85 in palladium, the world of conventional science will eventually be forced to take notice. If not, then the whole story I have told you is nothing but a curious footnote to a bizarre and ugly episode in the history of science. Either way, I think the story illuminates the inner dynamics of the scientific enterprise in a way that few other stories have done. For that reason alone, it may be worth telling.
The whole article is here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/fusion_art.html
Can you (or anyone) describe in layman's terms the significance of 'is x > 0.85?' Looking back to 1993 from today, did the 'critical examination' the author said should happen, ever happen?
"The issue is how much deuterium gets into the metal. The ratio of the number of atoms of deuterium in the metal to the number of atoms of palladium is called x. It turns out, by means of electrolysis, or by putting the metal in deuterium gas, that it is rather easy to get x up to the range of about 0.6 or 0.7. That is already a startlingly high figure. If there are almost as many deuterium atoms as palladium atoms in the material, the density of deuterium (a form of hydrogen) is essentially equal to that of liquid hydrogen rocket fuel, which can ordinarily exist only at extreme low temperatures. In other words, palladium (and certain other metals including titanium) soak up almost unbelievable amounts of hydrogen or deuterium if given the chance."
Something might be happening around that concentration. Or maybe it’s just experimental error (again). But it is interesting that you can cram so much Hydrogen (or Deuterium) into close proximity by absorbing it into a metal & that fact means that these ideas aren’t completely crackpot.
I found the physicist reaction "it can't be nuclear, it has to be chemistry" a bit disturbing. The cell was said to contain all of 4 elements, and none of the physicists were offering an explanation for what chemical reaction the two chemists were missing.