NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/sci/physics/fusion/3022

Text File | 1992-12-17 | 2.5 KB | 47 lines

Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Path: sparky!uunet!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!uchinews!dent.uchicago.edu!greg
From: [e-mail] (Greg Kuperberg)
Subject: A serious post, finally.
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (News System)
Organization: Dept. of Mathematics, U. of Chicago
References: <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 17:00:58 GMT
Lines: 35

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (mitchell swartz) writes:
>    Deiter Britz has done a very credible and great service by his
> magnum opus of compilations.  Notwithstanding that, science is
> systematized knowledge.  People get education from experience.

There is a very famous incident in the early days of experiments with
weak interactions in which Richard Feynman looked at an experiment
that didn't agree with theory and concluded that the experiment must be
wrong.  He didn't know why it was wrong, but his basic position was
that the theory in opposition to it was a sober assessment of the
implications of many previous experiments and had more credibility
than a difficult experiment.  It was bold and controversial, but
in the end Feynman was right.  There was a subtle error in the data
analysis of the experiment.

In the case of cold fusion, a large number of very good physicists and
physical chemists have looked at the excess heat experiments, often
with the advantage over Feynman of full knowledge of the data analysis,
if not the experimental procedure.  Their conclusion is that they
aren't interested in some BS that can come out of using rusty alligator
clips and throwing out all "bad runs".  To say that they don't have to
do experiments themselves is an understatement.  There is no reason
for them to do their own experiments.  But at first many of them took
Fleischmann and Pons at their word and did their own experiments
anyway.  Although many of them did a first-rate job, they only got
denigrated for getting negative results.

The conclusion of many people in this group is that all these
physicists aren't so smart after all and they are weighed down by
conservatism and establishmentism.  But somehow these very same
flunkies managed to temporarily repeal their titanic inertia and accept
two other revolutions in physical chemistry, high-Tc superconductors
and buckyballs, just as their thesis advisors accepted semiconductors
and their colleagues went to Silicon Valley and made a billion dollars.
Think about it.