From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Date: Fri Mar 28 1997 - 13:27:40 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> > CSICOP are themselves about as credible as the above mentioned accused. They
> > are more interested in maintaining their DOGMA (early 20th century scientific
> > understanding) than in finding the truth. They have repeatedly refused to
> > publish ANY papers that might suggest there are "psi" phenomona at work. For a
> > scathing critique of CSICOP I suggest you read Robert Anton Wilson's "New
> > Inquistion".
>
> That particular hatchet-job, which I have indeed read, is just a sloppy
> attempt at faulting CSICOP for doing what they were created to do, and not
> necessarily what Wilson or others think they should do. CSICOP's mission
> is to be skeptical; that's their charter. They have no interest in being
> "balanced" or presenting "suggestive" evidence for psi, because there is
> more than enough support for such ideas elsewhere. Their mission is to
> demonstrate that every piece of so-called evidence for psi phenomena can
> be adequately and more simply explained by chance and trickery. They do
> quite an admirable job of that, and are a good source of info on that.
So they can hardly be described as a balanced or unbiased source, so
they are therefore not scientific.
>
> > As far as Puthoff is concerned, he has published several papers regarding ZPF
> > and the Casimir effect in "Physics A" - a conservative journal if there ever
> > was one.
>
> The Casimir effect is a real observation, and demands further research and
> explanation. The early explanations offered by Puthoff and others may very
> well turn out to be the right ones--time will tell. But given that he has
> been duped in the past, I feel quite justified in being skeptical of his
> claims now.
You claim he has been duped, so therefore you use this opinion to add
credence to your other scepticism. Talk about non-Bayesian.
>
> > Regarding Flieshman and Pons, their only mistake was bad Public Relations. The
> > verdict is not out yet on cold fusion - there are still too many experiments
> > acheiving anomolous results and excess energy. Every so called critic of cold
> > fusion I've heard so far has yet to present solid unrefutable evidence to the
> > contrary.
>
> Their mistake was not behaving like scientists at all. They called press
> conferences before getting their work reviewed, and before letting anyone
> else reproduce their result. To date, no one has reproduced their result.
> There is no reason to suspect cold fusion isn't possible, and those who
> dismiss any such attempt are indeed being hasty. But possibility doesn't
> equal a repeated experiment. When someone with some scientific integrity
> produces energy that way, and others can reproduce the experiment, and
> it stands up to criticism, then I'll be the first in line to buy stock.
There are several groups who are demonstrating sustained operation of
devices using the same principle. That the patent office has prematurely
ordained that cold fusion is impossible and refuses to grant any patent
claiming that phenomena is used by critics to "prove" its fakery. I have
personal knowledge from people at WPI and UW that ran experiments to try
to "replicate" Pons & Fleishmann's experiments that they 1) did not
exactly reproduce the experiments (they used different metals and
solutions hoping to get the same effect differently, so they could make
their own patent claims to the different technique), 2) they did not use
the specified method of purging normal hydrogen gas from within the
metals used as electrodes and replacing it with deuterium, which is
needed to pretreat the electrodes to be usefull in catalysing fusion
within the structure.
That a Japanese lab has demonstrated a similar device which catalyses
hydrogen and I beleive potassium, rendering calcium as a measurable
excess in the solution shows that this is a phenomenon which is by
definition, nuclear fusion. How exactly it works is still under debate.
>
> Some who have heard me before decry the act of judging ideas by their
> holders instead of on their merits might well call me on it now. They
> would be right in a sense: I am using the reputation of a man as a short
> cut to evaluating his ideas. I plead guilty, but with some justification.
> I am not exercising /final/ judgment on the ideas by their holders, only
> allowing their identity to guide what evidence I spend most time on. And
> I judged the men themselves on their reactions to earlier evidence, not
> vice versa. Before their cold fusion debacle, I would have given no more
> or less weight to the opinions of F&P than to anyone else. Now I give
> less. If they reform themselves somehow, they might regain my respect.
>
> I admire theoreticians who speculate wildly on the limits of the possible.
> I admire experimentalists who verify and falsify their conjectures. What
> I do not admire is men who mistake one for the other.
>
I admire people who redefine our perceptions of what the limits of the
impossible are.
--
TANSTAAFL!!!
Michael Lorrey
------------------------------------------------------------
mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive
Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com
Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/
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------------------------------------------------------------
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]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256;
&S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}
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