NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/sci/physics/fusion/3072

Text File | 1992-12-22 | 13.8 KB | 239 lines

Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Path: sparky!uunet!think.com!ames!pacbell.com!tandem!zorch!fusion
From: Jed Rothwell <[e-mail]>
Subject: Brilliant as usual, wrong as always
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (Scott Hazen Mueller)
Reply-To: Jed Rothwell <[e-mail]>
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 19:21:20 GMT
Lines: 227

To: >INTERNET:[e-mail]

I gotta respond to that great essay that Steve Jones wrote! Marvelous! But
flat out wrong and incorrect, like Doug Morrison. You guys are brilliant, but
you miss the point.


"Any connection between xs heat and nuclear reactions remains unproved."

First of all, since the excess heat exceeds the known limits of chemistry (15
or 20 electron volts per atom) by many orders of magnitude, then it is must be
either a nuclear reaction, or something completely unknown to science, like
shrinking hydrogen. Let us agree about this once and for all, please. We can
be absolutely certain, by now, that CF heat is not chemical, so the most
conservative conclusion is that it must be nuclear. You would have to have
some mind-boggling evidence to prove anything more exotic, like shrinking
atoms.

Second, let's go back to Hume's causality here. If it gets hot nearly every
time the sun comes up, we don't need to know the chain of causality, we are
forced to assume there is a connection between sunlight and heat. Sciences
like biology, epidemiology and sociology would never work if this wasn't the
case. If Srinivasan sees excess heat every time, and varying levels of tritium
nearly every time, and he runs the experiment often enough, then we have to
conclude:

1. There is a reaction that generates excess heat far beyond the limits of
chemistry.

2. This reaction also generates tritium, neutrons and other nuclear products,
in curious and inexplicably varying amounts; HOWEVER, only a nuclear reaction
can make tritium; it cannot come from a chemical reaction.

Conclusion: since nuclear event 2 is always accompanied by heat event 1, they
must be related together by some unknown causal connection. If it happens
often enough, it is surely connected, says David Hume and me. There must be a
nuclear component to the CF heat reaction. Okay, maybe CF is partly due to
shrinking atoms or who knows what, but various kinds nuclear events are also
occurring -- with absolute certainty! -- and they *must* *have* a causal
connection to the heat. The connection does not have to be simple, or
proportional, and it does not have to happen in every case. To give two
examples from other fields:

     Sunlight does not cause the temperature to go up to exactly the same
     level every day. Furthermore, the causal connection is overshadowed by
     other factors from time to time. Often in the winter, the weather gets
     colder after the sun rises, when a cold front moves in.

     Exposure to AIDS virus in unsafe sex does not always result in infection.
     The causality is absolute, and unquestionable, even though event 2 does
     not always follow event 1.

CF tritium generation varies all over the place and sometimes appears to go
away altogether. That observation does not, and cannot, prove that
measurements of 3000 bq/ml were wrong. It proves that whatever the reaction
is, it is complicated, and it works in different ways to generate different
amounts of product, depending upon unknown circumstances. Fission bomb
explosions also produce different amounts of product and types of product
depending on the bomb ingredients and upon length and intensity of the
reaction. I will grant, the amounts do not vary as much as they do in CF, but
my point it, not all nuclear reactions are a simple and predictable as d-d
reactions in plasma. I am confident that some kind of product will be found,
eventually, from every variation of CF, however many variations there turn out
to be. Lots of tritium in one case, lots of helium in another; the products
must be there, and they will be found. On a winter day, when the sun comes up
but the weather turns colder anyway, that does not mean that the heat
mystically disappeared, or that causality is disproved; it just means there is
more to the problem than you thought, and something has interfered with the
heat and overshadowed the effect of the sun.

You do not have to know the precise mechanism to be certain that a causal
connection exists. We know that smoking causes cancer, even though we don't
know exactly why yet. Physicists may not like approximations and Hume's
causality; they may not feel comfortable with it, but the rest of us chemists,
biologists, computer programmers, engineers, and chefs depend upon it! It
better work, or we are in big trouble. You have to believe that high
temperature superconductors exist now, and will exist tomorrow, even though
you don't know know what causes them to work.


Another point of disagreement. Steve says:

"The scientific principles we work and judge by are correlated with a large
data base. Of course these principles are subject to modification, but only
within the realms of prior (correct) experimental data.  We cannot just throw
this accumulated data base away."

Oh yes we can, and yes we must! That is our karma. If you measure excess heat,
and you are certain of your results, then you must throw away absolutely any
theory that says the heat can't be there. I have a kind of vision, or a
dreamlike scenario of how science works. Childish perhaps, but imagine, if you
will, a gigantic, old fashioned laboratory scale:

     On one side sits a small glass jar with a thermometer sticking out of it,
     registering, say, 80 degrees C.

     On the other side sit the entire faculty of MIT, CalTech, and Tokyo
     University, a pile of 100,000 textbooks, and the accumulated weight of
     theories from Newton to Feynman.

Which is heavier? Which is Truth? Which wins? The experiment, of course. The
instruments never lie, and in the end, when enough people have checked, and
the experiments have been replicated enough -- as they have been now -- the
instruments are always right. The weight of 10,000 theories and 100,000
principles, precedents, and preconceptions cannot make one tiny bit of
difference! They have no role to play in the debate! Experimental evidence;
data -- is the Voice Of God, and you cannot overrule it, or naysay it, or
ignore it.

One conclusive experiment can and MUST overrule the entire existing database,
no matter how certain or long established it may be. One conclusive fact that
does not correlate with the database means that the entire database structure
is wrong, the entire house of cards has collapsed, because you can never
overrule nature. Man is *always* wrong, and nature is *always* right, and it
does not matter one bit how surprised that makes us, or how profoundly
ignorant we have been all these years, before we found CF. God does not care
what we thought we knew, or how surprised we are when we find out we are wrong
again, as usual. People have been wrong, and wrong, and dreadfully wrong about
the laws of physics and nature time after time throughout the history of
science. I do not think that any mortal creature can be certain of nature's
secrets. There will always be more in heaven and earth than dreamt of in our
philosophy.

Devices and machines that no scientist would have believed could exist, and
that no scientist could have begun to understand 120 years ago, are
commonplace today: computers, atom bombs, X-ray machines, televisions,
superconductors... These things would be far more weird, inexplicable, and
incomprehensible to a scientist in 1870 than CF is to you. The development of
modern science has violated and overthrow far more theories than CF now
threatens.

I don't think that questions about the mass change and nuclear products of CF
have been answered yet. The heat is certain, but the products have yet to be
measured definitely. But pretend, for the sake of argument, they have been. We
know already that CF is nearly aneutronic. Okay, suppose, for sake of
argument, that it turns out to be D-D fusion after all, because it is late
1994 and lots of other people have replicated Yamaguchi with a variety of
different experiments. Okay, a million, million previous experiments showed
that E = mc^2. So what? Every single one of them was wrong. Period. It does
not work in metal lattices under electrolysis, and Einstein was flat out
wrong. His law turned out to be an approximation, or a generalization, or a
special case that does not work in every domain. It works okay in a plasma,
but it fails in condensed matter. So what? Einstein showed that Newton's laws
were limited and did not work near the speed of light; so maybe CF will show
that Einstein's theories work in a plasma, but not in a metal lattice. If that
is what CF shows, then that is what it shows, and too bad for Albert. I am
sure he would not mind.

If that happens, it will be back to the drawing board for you. You will have to
reinvent the whole works. The number of previous experiments; the number of
failed experiments; the central importance of the theory that gets overthrown;
the previous experiments in different domains that supported the theory... all
these factors are completely irrelevant. You must forget them; you must not
even consider them for one moment as you examine experimental data. Put the
whole history of science, and everything you ever knew, out of your mind. The
only question you ask is: what does this thermometer tell me? Thermometers
speak truth; textbooks and theories are speculation and guesswork.

Of course, this process of overthrowing old ideas does not, and should not,
happen in an instant. It should take years. Naturally, my "image" here of the
"Scales Of Truth" is far too simple -- I am just painting a mental picture. We
all agree that in real life an experiment in a glass jar does not cut the
mustard; you have to do hundreds of experiments, in dozens of different
calorimeters, and you have to measure the power in, the gas out, and so on,
and so forth, very carefully. However, that has been done in spades! Look at
McKubre, look at Srinvasan, Mizuno, Notoya, Kunimatsu, P&F, Storms, Oriani,
Celani, De Ninno... you have conclusive data already! If that doesn't satisfy
you, for goodness sake do an experiment yourself. You will see it if you try
hard enough; if it works in California, it will work anywhere.

Maybe it will turn out, as you say, that "The notion of energy transfer to a
metal lattice, without emission of energetic nuclear products... is
inconsistent with speed-of-light constraints coupled with Heisenberg
uncertainty and conservation of energy and momentum principles. There exists a
large body of data consistent with these principles..."

Maybe you are right about that. If so, that whole large body has to be taken
to the graveyard and buried along with all the other bodies of wonderful but
incorrect knowledge. Mankind has been burying it's favorite theories for
centuries, and I am sure there is plenty more room left in that graveyard,
because you and I are no smarter than Newton, Darwin, or the ancient Greek
philosophers and mathematicians, and they believed all kinds of crazy
nonsense. So, it stands to reason that almost everything you and I believe is
also silly, incorrect, incomplete nonsense, and that people in 300 years will
consider us only a little smarter than cavemen. They will say our science was
slightly better than superstition, our medicine a shade more effective than
voodoo. They will say that we did the best we could, given the absurd ideas we
inherited, the primitive state of our instruments, our wretched education
system, and the barbaric, medieval turmoil of war, chaos, famine, poverty and
plague that has beset our poor 20th century. But, even when they grant we had
a lot misery and limitations to overcome, people will still marvel at our
stupidity, just as we are amazed and disappointed to read that Newton devoted
much of his genius to alchemy.

Don't fret about having to toss out poor Heisenberg just yet; you may not have
too. It is much too early to get all worked up over losing him. In retrospect,
most changes and revolutions are not as dire and disastrous as they appeared
at the time they happened. In 50 years, everyone will take the heat from CF
for granted, and they will wonder why we thought it would wreck so many
theories. My bet is that CF will *not* overthrow Heisenberg, you will find a
loophole for him somewhere. But if you are right, and CF buries him along with
all the other Incorrect Geniuses, too bad for him. No theory lasts forever,
they will all eventually be found wrong, or incomplete, or merely special
cases. Don't fret about losing them, you can always invent new ones.

Remember always that data is the Holy Grail of science. You don't believe in
ESP or mind reading, and neither do I. Not one bit. But suppose some guy I
have never met walks up to me, and tells me *exactly* what I am thinking, in
every detail, and he keeps it up for hour after hour. He comes back the next
day and does it again. Suppose he tells me the innermost secrets from my
childhood; suppose I think of a number, and he tells me what it is, and I
think of another, and another, and he gets it right 100 times in a row. Okay,
so then I will believe in mind-reading! Absolutely. You would too. Any
rational person would. If you see definitive proof of something, right in
front of your eyes, then you *must* believe it because you are a scientist,
and scientists always believe what they see, not what they have been taught,
and not what they want to believe. Definitive evidence, no matter how shocking
or mind-boggling it may be, is Truth, and Truth Is All. That is why scientists
came to believe in X-Rays, atoms bombs, black holes, and other mind-boggling
phenomena, which -- in their day -- were a heck of a lot stranger than CF.

- Jed


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