Clearance Items

Quote from Kevmo

I do not have to be the one going to London to do this. Anyone near there can use this money and visit the lab.

Fine... I’ll do it... If you insist.

Just send me 10K so I can get a helicopter there and back. Seems pretty fair.

Think of it as a favour Kev. I imagine you’re one of those people who aren’t very good at being on a plane. ‘Escorted off by police' as the newspapers say. Probably in Ireland to avoid putting up with you for an extra hour.

Great! Bitcoin transfer OK? Best these kind of dealings are kept anonymous, I reckon.

Although it all might be a moot point seeing as no-ones been daft enough to stump up any readies yet. You should advertise it on ecatworld perhaps? That lot aren’t exactly known for their critical thinking skills.

I think 100K for travel is cheap. Considering what planet you are on.

I thought this strange offer by Kevmo to do the job for $100,000 was a joke. It is not a joke, because he has a real GoFundMe Appeal. He actually would accept money. If this continues it will be a public relations disaster for cold fusion. I would consider it an out-and-out fraud. This must be stopped, immediately. As I said above, I think Alan Smith is in the best position to stop it, because it is his laboratory Kevmo proposes to visit. I strongly suggest Smith should contact GoFundMe and alert them to a fraud. Also, perhaps, append a message to the Appeal.

I assume you can warn the GFM people about this. I don't know much about that web site. I helped raise money for Mizuno through GFM, but other people made the arrangements and handled the communication with GFM. GFM got in touch with me asking me to ask Mizuno for some ID so they could tell he is a real person and a retired professor. I translated the message, explained it, and sent it on to him. That gave me the impression the GFM people take their responsibilities seriously and they try to prevent fraud.

Quote from clarifier

... it totally plays in the hands of the sceptics, because even if, since 30 years, 300 million dollars were spent on cold fusion

Where did you read it was $300 million? I doubt it was even $50 million.

Quote

Claims to be a working permanent magnet (only) motor. Claims not to be a perpetual motion machine because "the magnets eventually wear out" and have to be recharged. They imply it runs on the energy "stored in the magnets" but magnets store very little energy, even massively powerful magnets. Anyway, why not use some of the electrical energy it "produces" to recharge the magnets, the it would be perpetual motion.

You just have to listen to the inventor Dennis Danzik to get the measure of it.

Is anyone here suggesting that there is any chance at all that this is legitimate?

No chance - its absolute crap wasting our time with perpetual motion denial. Whatever next - and the Qi stuff is a load of BS too.

I think the term pathological skepticism is frequently misused in these parts to the extent that it has very little meaning. Most LENR believers (I don't like that term but I don't know of a good replacement) seem to think that anyone who is not convinced that LENR is a proven phenomenon is a pathological skeptic. I can't help but notice that quite a few of these people do not accept that anthropogenic climate change is real. By my standards, that position is far more akin to pathological skepticism than not being convinced about LENR.

Language is dynamic and the meanings of terms can change over time and not always for the better. The term pathological skepticism is aptly applied to Holocaust deniers, flat earthers, and moon landing deniers. Using it for not being convinced about LENR makes the term nearly meaningless. Of course, many of you will deny that vigorously and we can argue whether that in itself is pathological

Quote from interested observer

Most LENR believers (I don't like that term but I don't know of a good replacement) seem to think that anyone who is not convinced that LENR is a proven phenomenon is a pathological skeptic.

Nope. I have not done an opinion poll, but I suppose that the vast majority of people not convinced that LENR is a proven phenomenon are that way because:

They know nothing about it and have no strong opinion. They read somewhere that the experiments were never replicated and they dismissed it from their minds.

That's not pathological. That's normal. Just about everything I "know" (or think I know) about science and technology is based on similar thin evidence. Or hearsay, really. I read in the Scientific American or the New York Times that some discovery has been made. Or that questions have been raised about a claim. I think, "huh, that's interesting." And I never think about it again. Anyone who looks up cold fusion in Nature or Wikipedia, or Sci. Am. or any other authoritative site will read:

It was never replicated.

It was a mistake.

The reasons it was a mistake were quickly discovered.

That's what those sites say. If I read that about cold fusion, without knowing any details and without reading original sources, I would assume that is correct. Most of the time what you read in Nature or the New York Times is correct. They are usually reliable sources of information.

There are a small number of pathological skeptics. They are people who have read the literature. Or at least, they have been told the literature exists, and invited to read it. This, they refuse to do. Or, they read it but they come up with an endless stream of preposterous reasons to ignore or dismiss the claims. Such as droplets being magically pushed up test tubes which would not actually explain anything. In effect, they claim that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. These people are delusional. They are fanatics. They think they are the mainstream because they happen to stand with Nature and the DoE. They think the cold fusion researchers are fanatics, but they have it backwards. As Fleischmann said, we are painfully conventional people.

It happens that some of the people here who argue against cold fusion are pathological skeptics and fanatics. If they were not, they wouldn't argue against it. They would be convinced. A normal person does not go around saying (in effect) that calorimeters don't work, calibrations are meaningless, and the heat of vaporization of water has no meaning.

Some of these people have a strong inborn urge to conform. They believe what Nature and other authorities tell them to believe.

Finally, there are people at the DoE, or the APS who are not pathological skeptics, and not fanatics or conformists. They fall into a different category. They are ruthless political animals. They care only about power and money. They crush anyone who opposes them, or who threatens their funding. They will lie, cheat, and casually destroy careers and lives. Unfortunately, many large projects such as the Hubble Telescope are overrun by such people. The more money there is at stake, the more likely such people will be in charge. Cold fusion threatened the plasma fusion budget, so the first group of people who attacked it were the plasma fusion bigwigs. They did not come up with ridiculous fanatical non-science such as magical droplets. They don't do science at all. They called the Boston Globe within a few day of the announcement and told the reporters that Fleischmann and Pons were frauds and criminals and the claims were fake. That's what they say now, to any reporter who asks.

There is also a large group of scientists who believe whatever you pay them to believe, as Stan Szpak put it.

@Jed: "There are a small number of pathological skeptics. They are people who have read the literature. Or at least, they have been told the literature exists, and invited to read it. This, they refuse to do. Or, they read it but they come up with an endless stream of preposterous reasons to ignore or dismiss the claims."

In the Google thread (#156) you said that there were thousands of pathological skeptics with regard to cold fusion. That doesn't strike me a small number at all. But if your screening criterion is that if a person is told that the literature exists but hasn't read it, they are a pathological skeptic, then there are indeed oodles of them. As you say, most of us glean whatever it is we know and think we know about scientific topics from top-level media sources. There is little choice in the matter unless one has infinite amounts of time and infinite amounts of curiosity. Unfortunately, a substantial amount of what is written about every technical topic is at best not really correct and, quite often, dead wrong. Hard to know how to get out of that trap. Then again, the situation is not exactly limited to science these days.

This brings back the topic I raised in the Convince a Skeptic thread: why should a skeptic care? Given that the background signal about cold fusion is rather negative, why should a skeptic burrow deeply enough into the subject to possibly change his opinion? The fact that there exists a body of literature is not really a compelling argument. There exists a body of literature on practically any topic you can name and the uninformed skeptic is hardly in a position to judge the quality or validity of such literature. It's a problem alright. But while it is convenient to label anybody who rubs you the wrong way as a pathological skeptic, marginalizing people who don't have sympathetic views in this way does not change the landscape in any useful way.

Quote from interested observer

In the Google thread (#156) you said that there were thousands of pathological skeptics with regard to cold fusion. That doesn't strike me a small number at all.

Worldwide, it is a trivial number.

Quote from interested observer

But if your screening criterion is that if a person is told that the literature exists but hasn't read it, they are a pathological skeptic, then there are indeed oodles of them.

Let me refine the definition. As I said above, suppose someone glances at Nature or Sci. Am. and reads that cold fusion does not exist. They don't think twice about it after that. That is not pathological. Even if someone tells them in passing "there are papers about this, you know" they might not bother to read them because they trust Nature and they are not particularly interested. They are not pathological because they don't argue.

However, suppose that person then goes to Wikipedia and continually erases any addition to the article claiming that cold fusion might exist. They erase lists of conferences. They delete Wikipedia articles about researchers who contributed to cold fusion. They write angry letters to the editors when any newspaper mentions cold fusion. Or they come here and post comment after comment. And the whole time, they refuse to read anything about the subject. That, I submit, is pathological. It is hard to know how many people there are like that, but there are enough to make it impossible to upload information about cold fusion to public web sites such as Wikipedia. We know those people are ignorant and they refuse to read any original source documents because what they say is nonsense.

There are also people who appear to be obsessed with the subject, and determined to prove some crackpot theory showing why it does not exist. They resemble people who are convinced they can disprove Einstein's theories, except the anti-cold fusion fanatics are determined to erase all science going back to J. P. Joule.

I read the recent U.S. Air Force UFO claims. I thought: "That sounds unlikely. I don't know much about avionics, but I'll bet that's an instrument error." That's as much thought as I gave to it. I am not interested, and I am not qualified to evaluate the data. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a lot more data about this somewhere, but I am not going to read it. I am not a pathological skeptic because I am also not going to argue about it, or to declare I am certain the claims are wrong. I am neutral, trending negative. I would never go to a discussion group web site about this and post messages against the claims.

There are people strongly opposed to cold fusion who make it impossible to fund an experiment or publish a paper. Such as the management at the DoE. I do not know whether they have read the literature. They never make technical claims. They simply say that cold fusion was never replicated. They do not argue. I don't know if they believe what they say, but I wouldn't call them "skeptics" or "pathological skeptics." Maybe they should be called "deniers."

There are people who read the papers but fail to understand them. They are not pathological. Just wrong. Some of them are professional scientists but they make elementary mistakes such as confusing power and energy. See p. 8 for example:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanlettersfroa.pdf

Your redefinition seems reasonable. I’m still not convinced that the people you discuss above should be branded as pathological skeptics, which in my thinking has a fairly specific meaning. But without a doubt the behavior you describe is quite pathological.