There are cycles in all things, even scientific progress and the public attitude to it. For example, economies swing between the extremes of warlord capitalism and the establishment of social consensus and the protection of labour. Equally in science we see swings between acceptance of its discoveries as heralding a new world order (1945) and denial of its validity and the rooting and punishment out of 'bad scientists' (2020) which while desirable tarnishes all science.

I like to think we are approaching peak denial, Covid and Theranos (and others) have between them done a lot to affect public acceptance of science as a new gospel, but once the necessary reforms of the peer review and research grant/due diligence are in place things will probably improve.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

science is self-correcting process is also not correct.

Good point

Science can be a self correcting process..but it often isn't

"Science is a self-correcting process"?

ignores the human factor

"science" is an ideal concept made of flawed scientists

Scientists are prone to arrogance,insularity and tribalism among other human failings

which inhibit self-correction

And these traits are exhibited in cold fusion, hot fusion research..any field of science research

In this video David Kidwell gives some good anecdotes about careful science eliminating false signals, even self correction and then talks about sharing data

but I detect a certain arrogance about his questioning of praseodymium synthesis by Iwamura;s group

in 2013 ,,,four years after the matter should have been put to rest ..as documented by Krivit..

Iwamura/Kidwell ,both scientists, both flawed..

New Energy Times - Issue #35 Special Report: NRL 2009 - The LENR Null Results Laboratory, Again

Quote from Zephir_AWT

Lets face it: the idealist idea that science is self-correcting process is also not correct. Occasionally even Holy Church admits the things like Big Bang or Evolution

Sorry Zephir. Big Bang is a childish idea. The farthest light we can detect is 13.4billion light years away....

But how long did it take us to make these 13.4billion light years????? Let's guess 100x longer.

In reality mass organizes in torus shaped structures and 13.4 billion light years currently just is the maximum communication distance. The cosmos must expand because mass fuses and produces photons what generates a pressure and reduces total gravitation. So what we can see is defined by the so called light cone.

There is zero need for a big band to explain cosmic expansion that in fact is far from being homogeneous.

On the other side science today is a self service organization. Friends of friends (FM/R/J/B - mafia) hold all important positions in research centers,UNI,Journals. Basically real science is dead as more and more cricket brains are promoted on chairs as you say e.g. doing string theory or quantum gravity, MOND (dark matter..), what I call LEGO science. FM/R/J/B - mafia is about controlling the world with minimal resources and maximum comfort ($$$$$$$) for members.

Do you know why thousands of scientist discuss about dark matter that has been claimed by the MOND anomaly. The explanation is quite simple. These idiots do not even understand Newton gravity...They believe a galaxy that did not yet complete one full rotation follows a central mass law....

Quote from Alan Smith

There are cycles in all things, even scientific progress and the public attitude to it. For example, economies swing between the extremes of warlord capitalism and the establishment of social consensus and the protection of labour. Equally in science we see swings between acceptance of its discoveries as heralding a new world order (1945) and denial of its validity and the rooting and punishment out of 'bad scientists' (2020) which while desirable tarnishes all science.

I like to think we are approaching peak denial, Covid and Theranos (and others) have between them done a lot to affect public acceptance of science as a new gospel, but once the necessary reforms of the peer review and research grant/due diligence are in place things will probably improve.

It’s interesting to note that wholesale changes of public sentiment and academic consensus are often precipitated by extreme situations. It’s not a coincidence that Gunnar Myrdal and John Maynard Keynes, working independently, both arrived at the lineaments of modern macroeconomics (read: countercyclical fiscal policy) at roughly the same time and for the same reasons.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

John Rennie, a former editor-in-chief of Scientific American

Sad but true... The magazine Scientific American has become a terrible source of information. Certainly not an example of the current state of LENR.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

he suggested that science journalists agree to wait six months before they report on new research results.

This former editor's suggestion is stupid, which suggests that John Rennie is not the brightest science magazine editor.

This recent article suggests that the present editors are not much better.

Quote from RobertBryant

Good point

Science can be a self correcting process..but it often isn't

"Science is a self-correcting process"?

ignores the human factor

"science" is an ideal concept made of flawed scientists

Scientists are prone to arrogance,insularity and tribalism among other human failings

which inhibit self-correction

And these traits are exhibited in cold fusion, hot fusion research..any field of science research

Display More

Not quite. Science is done by flawed scientists, it is made of a distributed and dynamic network of theories and evidence in which, overall, things get corrected. There is no guarantee how quickly errors will get corrected, I agree. There is (effectively) a guarantee that things improve over time. Having corrected a major error it would be very very unlikely to go back to the less good version.

And while scientists are prone to tribalism etc which inhibits self-correction, there is an opposite tendency for different groups of scientists to seize opportunities and correct each other. Science is one of the very few areas where someone with new ideas gets (greatly) rewarded if they pan out. That is motive enough for some people to question the status quo.

Quote from orsova

It’s interesting to note that wholesale changes of public sentiment and academic consensus are often precipitated by extreme situations. It’s not a coincidence that Gunnar Myrdal and John Maynard Keynes, working independently, both arrived at the lineaments of modern macroeconomics (read: countercyclical fiscal policy) at roughly the same time and for the same reasons.

Economics is not a science - but rather a set of theories built on very reductionist and unrealistic assumptions about human behaviour. Whenever those assumptions obviously and badly break you get new economics based on a different set of assumptions.

I don't like the claims of economics to be more than an exploration of possibilities.

Quote from Wyttenbach

what I call LEGO science

some players take timeout to reflect...but not officially..

like Ben Allanach

the current state of LENR needs to be considered

in the context of the current state of nuclear physics

which is currently in a state of inertia

where to next? and how? and how many $

"

This time, though, none of the more exotic particles and interactions that theorists hoped to see has been forthcoming. No ‘stop squarks’, no ‘gluinos’, no ‘neutralinos’. The null results are now encrusting the hull of the Standard Model, like barnacles on a beautiful old frigate, and dragging her down to the ocean floor. It looks like the centuries-long quest for top-down unification has stalled, and particle physics might have a full-blown crisis on its hands.

Has the quest for top-down unification of physics stalled? | Aeon Essays

After the success of the Standard Model, experiments have stopped answering to grand theories. Is particle physics in crisis?

aeon.co

On the subject of the way science corrects itself and the current state of LENR...

How might this affect how science corrects itself?

US Department of Energy signs five year Google Cloud deal

October 19, 2020

By Sebastian Moss

US Department of Energy signs five year Google Cloud deal

But it doesn't seem to be exclusive

www.datacenterdynamics.com

Quote

Google will provide cloud and workspace tools to the US Department of Energy.

The five-year deal will see DOE staff gain access to all of Google Cloud Platform's services, including Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, AutoML, Cloud GPUs and TPUs, Google Kubernetes Engine, and TensorFlow.

Department of Cloud

Department of Energy

The DOE said that it expects to use Google Cloud for everything from running machine learning models to predict which energy equipment will require preventative maintenance, to helping cities identify more cost-efficient renewable energy sources, to managing the exabytes of data coming out of DOE research facilities. - end quotes

Quote from THHuxleynew

Economics is not a science - but rather a set of theories built on very reductionist and unrealistic assumptions about human behaviour. Whenever those assumptions obviously and badly break you get new economics based on a different set of assumptions.

I don't like the claims of economics to be more than an exploration of possibilities.

Economics is the evolutionary force of science. Great ideas are forced into hibernation, until someone sees how to apply the idea to the economy. Why do we follow various persons and organizations doing LENR? Because we feel certain that there is energy to had from some form of LENR. We all have our reasons for hope. I can explain mine. I expect many of you can explain yours. We live, we evolve and we feel that economical energy will come from LENR. So, we keep looking for that.

I don't think Safire, BLP, UDH or any approach posted here (my own excepted due to personal prejudice) is going to be economical this year but I want to see it happen.

Quote from Drgenek

I don't think Safire, BLP, UDH or any approach posted here

The proponents of hot fusion don;t expect it to be economical anytime soon..2050++ for ITER's son

Quote from Gregory Byron Goble

On the subject of the way science corrects itself and the current state of LENR...

Along the same line...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Establishes Incubator Program for Artificial Intelligence

Dec 25, 2021

https://www.independentnews.com/news/regional_and_ca/lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory-establishes-incubator-program-for-artificial-intelligence/article_d7d94240-6659-11ec-9144-43945456023c.html

Quote

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has established an incubator program for developing large-scale scientific and commercial applications for artificial intelligence (AI).

LLNL has already entered into memoranda of understanding with Google, IBM, and NVIDIA, a leader in designing graphics processing units (GPU), with plans for collaborative “hubs” to speed development of AI for applied science applications.

Several existing projects will also come under the AI3 umbrella, according to LLNL, including continued work with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Advanced Micro Devices to demonstrate the power of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) on the El Capitan supercomputer, projected to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer when it is fully deployed in 2023.

LLNL is hopeful that other companies and research universities join the collaborative effort to pursue advanced-materials design, 3D printing, predictive biology, energy systems, “self-driving” lasers, and fusion-energy research. - end quotes

Quote from Zephir_AWT

Lets face it: the idealist idea that science is self-correcting process is also not correct.

I think the idea is correct, but the mechanism is not foolproof. Sometimes the self-correcting processes fail drastically. This is true of every other institution, so it is no surprise it is also true of science. Consider the industry with the most rigorous, most essential self-correction mechanisms of all: aviation. No industry makes more effort to prevent accidents than the people in aviation, from the airplane designers, to the pilots, mechanics, the people who load freight, the air traffic controllers, and everyone else. Their overall record of safety is astounding. An airplane at 30,000 feet is inherently the most dangerous environment people routinely go to. The slightest problem with the engines or controls can result in an explosion or crash. The engines run at temperatures higher than the melting point of metals in them, which is only possible with a thin layer of air between the burning fuel and the metal. All in all, it is an astounding accomplishment. Airplanes are so safe, you are safer in one than you would be at home taking a bath or walking down a flight of stairs.

HOWEVER, as we all know, airplanes sometimes fail catastrophically. There are crashes. There are poor designs that somehow elude detection. Boeing committed fraud, which crashed several airplanes.

Boeing Charged with 737 Max Fraud Conspiracy and Agrees to Pay over $2.5 Billion

Boeing Charged with 737 Max Fraud Conspiracy and Agrees to Pay over $2.5 Billion

The Boeing Company (Boeing) has entered into an agreement with the Department of Justice to resolve a criminal charge related to a conspiracy to defraud the…

www.justice.gov

No matter how rigorous the institution is, it is run by people, and people can always make mistakes or deliberately commit crimes. Academic science is far less rigorous than aviation. It is much less foolproof. It has to be, because you need a lot of leeway to make mistakes. As Stan Pons says, being half right in this business is a good batting average. In academic science some number of people will cheat, and publish fake data. Peer review and other mechanisms will reduce this, but not eliminate it. Mistakes will be made. Large numbers of scientists will misjudge the situation, as they have with cold fusion.

Many other institutions have rigorous self correction, error detection, and mechanisms to prevent crime. Examples include semiconductor manufacturing, surgery, and banking. Most of the time these institutions work. Occasionally, they fail. Semiconductors sometimes do not work right; surgeons accidentally amputate the wrong leg; banks sometimes accidentally hand out large sums of money. We know that these institutions work most of the time, because catastrophic failures are rare, and newsworthy. Airplanes do not routinely fall from the sky. When surgeons amputate the wrong leg, it is reported in the news. When a bank accidentally gave people $176 million on Christmas day, the news was reported prominently in the mass media. It did not go unnoticed. If such things happened routinely, banks would all go bankrupt.

Bank accidentally deposits $176 million into people’s accounts on Christmas Day

https://www.wfla.com/news/viral-news/bank-accidentally-deposits-176-million-into-peoples-accounts-on-christmas-day/

Scientists often boast that science is self-correcting. They should realize this nothing to boast about, because everything else is self correcting, including:

Paperclip manufacturing.

Rhubarb growing in Rothwell, England, which is at one corner of the UK's Rhubarb Triangle. *

In my experience, science is only so-so in self-correcting. Nowhere near as good as programming, accounting, grocery store product scanning, or placing telephone calls.

* This resembles the Bermuda triangle, only with rhubarb.

By the way, there really is a rhubarb triangle. I did not make that up. It is between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell. There is a sculpture of rhubarb in Wakefield. See:

Rhubarb Triangle - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

There has been quite a bit of 'rhubarb' on the forum

under control for the time being

Quote from JedRothwell

By the way, there really is a rhubarb triangle. I did not make that up. It is between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell. There is a sculpture of rhubarb in Wakefield. See:

isn’t Rothwell where the UFO crathed?

Quote from Drgenek

Economics is the evolutionary force of science. Great ideas are forced into hibernation, until someone sees how to apply the idea to the economy.

James Webb Telescope, LHC, and all other other cosmology and high energy pure physics would say that physics progresses a lot without any application to the economy.

It is true that technology is driven by economic factors - the most eye-catching example of this is Moore's Law - still amazingly partially operative in spite of being well past quantum limits for normal silicon semiconductor technology.

If however we had definite physics for LENR I think the technology would follow.

THH

Quote from SearchMe

isn’t Rothwell where the UFO crathed?

Not that Rothwell - the rhubarb triangle is in the UK.

Quote from RobertBryant

I think there is a little bit of expertise with some Forum members.

but you may need to show more calculations..

https://www.researchgate.net/p…context=ProjectUpdatesLog

Just a note. Of those 3 highlighted in red neutron waves the rightmost two do not exist (eyeballing). They are right down in the noise. I'd like to see a Bayesian analysis of the evidence for neutron waves at those values (rather than some other value). The evidence for hypothesised neutron waves from that graph would appear non-existent: and I would always defer to proper data analysis that would have to be Bayesian choosing hypotheses carefully.

THH