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Re: COLD FUSION



At 22:22 -0400 7/2/03, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:

At one point the ETI team sent their cathode to Mizuno and in his
laboratory this cathode produced excess heat. The same cathode,
however, did not produce excess heat in Texas. Likewise, Mizuno's
cathode worked in Japan but not in Texas. And this happened despite
the fact that scientists cooperated to make the experiments as identical
as possible. How can this be explained? What should one think about a
situation in which six groups are able to demonstate excess heat and
one is not able to demonstrate it?

I would say that it means that one group or the other is seeing
things that aren't there, because that is what they desperately want
to see, or there is a subtle difference in the experimental setup
that has been missed, or one group is cheating.

The first alternative is what happened to Blondlot in the N-ray
fiasco. But it happens rather often, especially when the signal to
noise ratio is very low. There is a story told by Brown in his
biography of Chadwick, that, during the years when the debate raged
over whether the beta-spectrum was continuous or discrete, Chadwick
had become convinced early on that it was continuous, but a
well-respected lab in Vienna was consistently giving results that
favored the discrete spectrum, so Rutherford sent Chadwick to Vienna
to look at their experimental setup. As it happened, the Viennese lab
used female students (not necessarily science students) to read the
scintillations on the phosphorescent screens, and they were finding
the evidence for discrete energies. Chadwick watched them at work for
a while and found two things about their procedures that he didn't
like. First, the women were not properly dark-adapted when they began
their scanning duties, and second, they were told where to look for
the scintillations. If you have ever taken one of those vision
sensitivity tests that opthalmologists use, you know that many of the
light flashes you might see during those tests are bogus. You can
fool yourself into thinking you saw a flash when there wasn't one.
That's what was happening to the Viennese women. As soon as Chadwick
had them get properly dark-adapted, and stopped telling them where to
look for flashes, they stopped seeing the ones they were expected to
see, and the pattern became random. The Viennese lab withdrew its
claim that the spectrum was discrete.

Because he was a nice guy, Chadwick allowed the lab to discretely
backtrack on their claims, rather than blowing the whistle on them,
as Robert W. Wood did to Blondlot.

When two different groups get contradictory results, it seems pretty
clear to me that one of the groups is getting it wrong. I can't say
definitively which it might be in this case, but my money is on the
Texas lab being right.

Hugh

"The race doesn't always go to the swiftest, but that's where the
smart money is bet."
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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