4 ms·

From five years ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov16.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov... And e

From five years ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov16.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov... And even the best research is plagued by cold fusion's most nagging problem: a long history of failing to reproduce experimental results. McKubre is one of the more respected people in the field, and in more than 50,000 hours of experiments, he says, he has recorded 50 times when the setup "unmistakably" produced excess heat. From tonight's 60 Minutes, an exciting new result! McKubre says he has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government. Or, um, not. Sounds like he hasn't made much progress in the last five years. He's still stuck at "about 50" irreproducible results out of twenty years of experiments. Also, he still has no theory. This guy's only reproducible result is his ability to convince credulous journalists to publish stuff about him every few years. Wake me up when the Physical Review Letter is accepted for publication.

Adam503 18y ago
60 Minutes went to the American Physical Society to provide an impartial scientist to 60 Minutes to go out to one of the labs where the work was being done and do a hands on review of the work being done. That scientist went to that lab, looked closely at everything for 2 days, came back and said "something interesting is going on." He also said he was shocked he's coming back to tell 60 Minutes that something interesting was going on. What have we got now with M Theory? 7 new dimensions we haven't explored at all and alternate universes now going out ad infinitum... that means the potential explanations why palladium makes deuterium go all funky would be almost as infinite considering our current state of 4 dimensional scientific inquiry processes in a potentially 11 dimension universe.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  That scientist went to that lab, looked closely at everything for 2 days... Yeah, that also worked for Uri Geller. Scientists with Ph.Ds investigated his spoons! They found no gimmicks! Of course there's nothing wrong with the equipment that anyone can find by staring at it for two days. Let's do a little math. Consider the guy from SRI. He has been working on cold fusion for twenty years. The experiment is always described as "incredibly simple", so he probably should have been running it daily all that time, just cranking it over and over with the goal of getting perfect reliability and repeatability. But let's assume that, instead, he thinks really hard every time he turns on the equipment, so his group has run it about once a week. Once a week for twenty years is about 20x50 = 1000 experiments. He reports approximately 50 non-reproducible positive results. That implies that he gets negative results about 95% of the time, maybe more. So the instrument basically works. 95% of the time, the measurement shows that you get out exactly what you put in. That's pretty good! I've worked on lots of graduate-level experiments that have a far higher failure rate. (This isn't manufacturing. Your equipment is often literally held together with duct tape.) Of course you're not going to find an intermittent problem in a 95%-accurate instrument by staring at the thing. You will have to work with it for a while. And even working experiments will yield a certain percentage of mysterious anomalies that you will never understand. There's a power surge. One of the instruments has an intermittent software bug. One of the sensors burns out slowly, spending several months giving erroneous readings before it finally fails. A solder joint starts to work loose. Some piece of metal contacts your thermocouple and creates a bimetallic junction. There's a ground loop. Static electricity. You misread a dial. You nudge a knob without noticing. Your materials come from different batches at the supplier. Some of your students use a different procedure than the others. That's why irreproducible results have such a bad reputation. Everyone gets them. There are the stuff of legends ("gremlins", "Magic/More Magic", etc.) precisely because everybody gets them, and because they often lead you astray. You cannot hope to explain them all, because they are irreproducible! If you hope to pull an actual observation out of the noise, you either need to design a cleaner experiment, or make very careful observations and use statistics to pull out correlations ("Hey, every anomaly has occurred between midnight and 3am!" "Hey, every bad chip has come from a wafer that was handled by the guy who was once cited for forgetting his gloves!"). Then you construct hypotheses, and then zero in on those hypotheses. ("Hmm, if we feed the grad students more coffee the anomalies at 3am go away." "We lectured the guy about wearing gloves and the failure rate dropped by 85%.") If you can't reproduce the experiment after a lot of effort, you need to seriously consider the possibility that you're fooling yourself. I've seen a lot of scientists fail this test, temporarily or (sometimes) for entire careers. The other point to make is that scientists fight like tigers in print, but are often very polite in person, and exceedingly polite on camera. Remember: Scientists are anonymously graded by each other. You have to appear to fight fair, or your colleagues will downgrade your reviews and your grants will get rejected. So to get a scientist to make fun of another scientist's equipment on camera is like convincing the Pope to smack a non-Christian with a mace on live television. We prefer to eviscerate each other's manuscripts... often anonymously. That's why so many of us prefer to wait for something to appear in print... and why the cold fusion guys are justly vilified for going to the press before getting their work accepted by a journal.
  - Adam503 18y ago
    You were pretty casual in your dismissal of a scientist the American Physical Society recommended as an impartial judge. Do you even have the faintest clue what organization's judgment you have so casually dismissed? You better go look. http://www.aps.org/ http://www.aps.org/
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
Couple of points for clarity: 1) It's not just McKubre. The article mentioned dozens of other labs and actually had a peer review done of an Israeli lab. The DARPA report was a review of all of those efforts, not just McKubre. 2) The fact that energy is being created "seems" to be reproducible, just not regularly reproducible. That is, there seems to be a cause-and-effect, but nobody is exactly certain of the cause 3) A theory is not needed for further investigation. In fact, more data is needed in order for possible theories to come out -- that's the process of abduction It's not "normal" science, but it's obvious that it's the scientific method going on -- we're just at the first stage which is data collection. If the data is anomalous with existing theory, then either the data is wrong or existing theory needs to be modified. That's true whether a new theory is put forth or not. I'm satisfied that there is something strange enough there to merit further study. Certainly not derision.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  A theory is not needed for further investigation. On the contrary. Every experiment is backed up by some sort of hypothesis. (Otherwise it's not an experiment. It's called "divination": You're noodling around with some equipment to see if something "interesting" turns up. And it always does. The human mind is very good at finding "interesting" patterns in random noise.) Hypotheses don't always have to be in accord with the body of existing theory. When Planck invented quantum mechanics, it was essentially just a mathematical trick that made no sense in the context of Newtonian mechanics. It was a free-floating rule of thumb: Gosh, if we pretend that light comes in these "packets", we can compute the observed experimental result! And that experimental result was so solid, and the fit between quantum theory and the result so perfect, that eventually the rest of physics had to be unraveled like a sock and reknit around that one hypothesis. But the hypotheses that are connected to theory are much stronger. (They gain strength from all the experiments that went into confirming the theory.) If one's hypothesis (e.g.: "you can get fusion at room temperature because of mumble mumble catalysis mumble the influence of unknown impurities in the palladium mumble mumble") doesn't manage to score a big experimental confirmation (e.g.: making enough heat, consistently, to boil one's tea) or to connect itself to the body of existing theory... it's very vulnerable. Because there's a much simpler, well established, experimentally-supported theory to explain these results: These folks have a hypothesis ("cold fusion exists"), they do the experiments, they cherry-pick the results which look good and they find reasons to discount the ones that look bad. They need not even be doing this consciously. (Believe me when I tell you: This happens all the time. In every lab I've ever seen.) Finally, when you ask me to avoid "derision", it suggests that you don't understand how science really works. Derision is the pillar on which science is built. (Though we usually prefer the politer term, "skepticism".) The central principle is "I don't believe anything which hasn't been replicated by a skeptic, because people are too trusting and hopeful and are blind to their own mistakes. Frankly, your equipment is probably broken and your students are probably ignorant; I only trust myself. And, come to think of it, I don't even trust me very much -- I should convince my skeptics to replicate my results so that I can believe me." Of course, the best scientists manage to think this way while also appearing as kindly, smiling, eternally optimistic sages. ;) You wouldn't think, to look at Einstein, that he had balls of steel, a big ego, and a vast reserve of skepticism, but he surely did.

Adam503 18y ago

60 Minutes went to the American Physical Society to provide an impartial scientist to 60 Minutes to go out to one of the labs where the work was being done and do a hands on review of the work being done. That scientist went to that lab, looked closely at everything for 2 days, came back and said "something interesting is going on." He also said he was shocked he's coming back to tell 60 Minutes that something interesting was going on. What have we got now with M Theory? 7 new dimensions we haven't explored at all and alternate universes now going out ad infinitum... that means the potential explanations why palladium makes deuterium go all funky would be almost as infinite considering our current state of 4 dimensional scientific inquiry processes in a potentially 11 dimension universe.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
That scientist went to that lab, looked closely at everything for 2 days... Yeah, that also worked for Uri Geller. Scientists with Ph.Ds investigated his spoons! They found no gimmicks! Of course there's nothing wrong with the equipment that anyone can find by staring at it for two days. Let's do a little math. Consider the guy from SRI. He has been working on cold fusion for twenty years. The experiment is always described as "incredibly simple", so he probably should have been running it daily all that time, just cranking it over and over with the goal of getting perfect reliability and repeatability. But let's assume that, instead, he thinks really hard every time he turns on the equipment, so his group has run it about once a week. Once a week for twenty years is about 20x50 = 1000 experiments. He reports approximately 50 non-reproducible positive results. That implies that he gets negative results about 95% of the time, maybe more. So the instrument basically works. 95% of the time, the measurement shows that you get out exactly what you put in. That's pretty good! I've worked on lots of graduate-level experiments that have a far higher failure rate. (This isn't manufacturing. Your equipment is often literally held together with duct tape.) Of course you're not going to find an intermittent problem in a 95%-accurate instrument by staring at the thing. You will have to work with it for a while. And even working experiments will yield a certain percentage of mysterious anomalies that you will never understand. There's a power surge. One of the instruments has an intermittent software bug. One of the sensors burns out slowly, spending several months giving erroneous readings before it finally fails. A solder joint starts to work loose. Some piece of metal contacts your thermocouple and creates a bimetallic junction. There's a ground loop. Static electricity. You misread a dial. You nudge a knob without noticing. Your materials come from different batches at the supplier. Some of your students use a different procedure than the others. That's why irreproducible results have such a bad reputation. Everyone gets them. There are the stuff of legends ("gremlins", "Magic/More Magic", etc.) precisely because everybody gets them, and because they often lead you astray. You cannot hope to explain them all, because they are irreproducible! If you hope to pull an actual observation out of the noise, you either need to design a cleaner experiment, or make very careful observations and use statistics to pull out correlations ("Hey, every anomaly has occurred between midnight and 3am!" "Hey, every bad chip has come from a wafer that was handled by the guy who was once cited for forgetting his gloves!"). Then you construct hypotheses, and then zero in on those hypotheses. ("Hmm, if we feed the grad students more coffee the anomalies at 3am go away." "We lectured the guy about wearing gloves and the failure rate dropped by 85%.") If you can't reproduce the experiment after a lot of effort, you need to seriously consider the possibility that you're fooling yourself. I've seen a lot of scientists fail this test, temporarily or (sometimes) for entire careers. The other point to make is that scientists fight like tigers in print, but are often very polite in person, and exceedingly polite on camera. Remember: Scientists are anonymously graded by each other. You have to appear to fight fair, or your colleagues will downgrade your reviews and your grants will get rejected. So to get a scientist to make fun of another scientist's equipment on camera is like convincing the Pope to smack a non-Christian with a mace on live television. We prefer to eviscerate each other's manuscripts... often anonymously. That's why so many of us prefer to wait for something to appear in print... and why the cold fusion guys are justly vilified for going to the press before getting their work accepted by a journal.
- Adam503 18y ago
  You were pretty casual in your dismissal of a scientist the American Physical Society recommended as an impartial judge. Do you even have the faintest clue what organization's judgment you have so casually dismissed? You better go look. http://www.aps.org/ http://www.aps.org/

DanielBMarkham 18y ago

Couple of points for clarity: 1) It's not just McKubre. The article mentioned dozens of other labs and actually had a peer review done of an Israeli lab. The DARPA report was a review of all of those efforts, not just McKubre. 2) The fact that energy is being created "seems" to be reproducible, just not regularly reproducible. That is, there seems to be a cause-and-effect, but nobody is exactly certain of the cause 3) A theory is not needed for further investigation. In fact, more data is needed in order for possible theories to come out -- that's the process of abduction It's not "normal" science, but it's obvious that it's the scientific method going on -- we're just at the first stage which is data collection. If the data is anomalous with existing theory, then either the data is wrong or existing theory needs to be modified. That's true whether a new theory is put forth or not. I'm satisfied that there is something strange enough there to merit further study. Certainly not derision.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
A theory is not needed for further investigation. On the contrary. Every experiment is backed up by some sort of hypothesis. (Otherwise it's not an experiment. It's called "divination": You're noodling around with some equipment to see if something "interesting" turns up. And it always does. The human mind is very good at finding "interesting" patterns in random noise.) Hypotheses don't always have to be in accord with the body of existing theory. When Planck invented quantum mechanics, it was essentially just a mathematical trick that made no sense in the context of Newtonian mechanics. It was a free-floating rule of thumb: Gosh, if we pretend that light comes in these "packets", we can compute the observed experimental result! And that experimental result was so solid, and the fit between quantum theory and the result so perfect, that eventually the rest of physics had to be unraveled like a sock and reknit around that one hypothesis. But the hypotheses that are connected to theory are much stronger. (They gain strength from all the experiments that went into confirming the theory.) If one's hypothesis (e.g.: "you can get fusion at room temperature because of mumble mumble catalysis mumble the influence of unknown impurities in the palladium mumble mumble") doesn't manage to score a big experimental confirmation (e.g.: making enough heat, consistently, to boil one's tea) or to connect itself to the body of existing theory... it's very vulnerable. Because there's a much simpler, well established, experimentally-supported theory to explain these results: These folks have a hypothesis ("cold fusion exists"), they do the experiments, they cherry-pick the results which look good and they find reasons to discount the ones that look bad. They need not even be doing this consciously. (Believe me when I tell you: This happens all the time. In every lab I've ever seen.) Finally, when you ask me to avoid "derision", it suggests that you don't understand how science really works. Derision is the pillar on which science is built. (Though we usually prefer the politer term, "skepticism".) The central principle is "I don't believe anything which hasn't been replicated by a skeptic, because people are too trusting and hopeful and are blind to their own mistakes. Frankly, your equipment is probably broken and your students are probably ignorant; I only trust myself. And, come to think of it, I don't even trust me very much -- I should convince my skeptics to replicate my results so that I can believe me." Of course, the best scientists manage to think this way while also appearing as kindly, smiling, eternally optimistic sages. ;) You wouldn't think, to look at Einstein, that he had balls of steel, a big ego, and a vast reserve of skepticism, but he surely did.