alainco wrote:
QuoteMy point was not to criticize LHC, but to pinpoint the double standards in critics.
This is such a nonsense comparison. It's like comparing the evidence for flight to the evidence of the advance of the perihelion of mercury to support general relativity.
Everyone understands what flight is, even if they don't understand aerodynamics, and it is relevant to everyone. And everyone can understand the evidence for flight.
But in the case of the perihelion of mercury and GR, very few understand either of them, or how to measure them, or what they mean.
Understanding the evidence for the Higgs boson requires a great deal of training and experience, not to mentions study of the experiments themselves. Most people are not qualified to evaluate the evidence, nor is any of it particularly relevant to them.
The claim of an energy source with an energy density a million times higher than petrol that is accessible on a table top at ordinary conditions is every bit as ordinary and relevant as flight, and if it were real, would be provable to anyone. Advocates repeatedly pontificate about how it will power our cars, heat our homes, and replace fossil fuels. And yet, they can't even prove it's real.
An additional difference between cold fusion and any of the above is that it is an extraordinary claim contraindicated by a century of robust experimental evidence.
Anyway, a brief reading of the systematics, blinding, double-checking and so on used for the analysis of the Higgs experiment is all it takes to understand that no experiment in cold fusion has ever taken similar care -- at least not the ones claiming positive results.
For example, thirteen of the 25 values used in Storms' 2010 review of the heat-helium results come from McKubre's gas-loading experiment, reported sketchily in a conference proceeding in 2000. He uses the data from one cell out of 16, and treats the observations as 13 independent measurements. This is grossly misleading for reasons I've outlined here before. Briefly, both heat and helium could be caused by artifact, and since the level of both is a matter of time, the correlation is meaningless. The paper is woefully inadequate as a scientific report. Much is left out, and many questions are unanswered, so it's not surprising that the work was never published in a proper journal, and for the same reason, it is completely unjustified to use the data from a single dubious cell to comprise more than half of the data points contributing to Storms helium ratio in the 2010 review.
Storms' consolidated evidence for the correlation is cherry-picked, and based on his judgement. Comparing it to the scrutiny the LHC evidence was given, is a joke.
QuoteYou never have proven any of the artifact in He4/Heat you claim,
Most of the data Storms uses to claim such a correlation have not even passed the modest standard of peer review, and those that have have been challenged in the literature.
It's not possible to prove an artifact based on a written report, especially badly written reports. But it's also not necessary to prove artifacts to maintain skepticism. If the claim is extraordinary, and the claimed observations are more plausibly attributable to artifact than to unprecedented nuclear reactions, then it is reasonable to remain skeptical.
The onus is on the person making the extraordinary claim to exclude the possibility of artifacts, and in the case of heat helium, the most prominent experimentalists (McKubre and Miles) have both admitted the possibility of artifacts, and that better results are needed.
QuoteI propose the theory that all is explained by double standards and irrational desire to be right. This is a theory that match well the evidences.
No way. Scientists are well aware that if cold fusion were real, its vindication would be inevitable, so if they thought it had a reasonable chance, there is no way they would suppress it for fear of being humiliated when proven wrong. That is, the desire to be right would cause them to be very careful before rejecting cold fusion. That's obvious from the way it was treated in 1989.