From: colin@physci.uct.ac.za (COLIN HENDERSON)
Subject: Re: Something I didn't know
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 92 12:18:06 GMT
Organization: University of Cape Town

In article <921215181833_72240.1256_EHL69-1@CompuServe.COM> Jed Rothwell <72240.1256@compuserve.com> writes:

>To: >INTERNET:fusion@zorch.sf-bay.org


>Let me get something straight here. You are an electrochemist. You have been
>pontificating and making these statements all these years, and you even got
>cited by Morrison at Nagoya (you lucky dog!). Are you telling us that you have
>never even performed an experiment? Not with palladium, not with nickel?
>Nothing? Do I understand this correctly? Have you ever been in a lab where a
>CF experiment was underway? Ever been to a meeting, at least?

>If you have not done an experiment, and not even met with the people who have,
>then you have no business passing judgement on CF like some kind of expert.

The way science is supposed to work, someone in his field should 
be able to be an expert just by reading all the literature.  That's the 
whole point of publishing.  If Dieter, an expert electrochemist, can't be an 
expert in CF by reading the papers, and I think we'll all agree that he 
has :-), then there's something wrong with the way the papers have been 
written.

> You cannot judge a brand new field of science if you are not
>even willing to run an experiment or two.

I suppose a referee of a journal has to do every experiment submitted to the 
journal?

> At least you should get a feel for
>the procedures and problems involved.

Any scientist gets a feel for the routine and not so routine procedures in 
his field, by performing them in various experiments.  We can infer from 
the literature that CF experiments (as no-one it seems to me has explicitly 
stated the contrary) can be performed using standard electrochemical 
techniques, so an electrochemist should know, and have a feel for, exactly 
what's involved.  

> It is absurd. Other people have done the
>Mills experiment dozens of times, they have published papers, uploaded
>comments, raw data, and suggestions. You haven't even lifted your little
>finger (I gather), yet you claim to know more than them.

I think Dieter's complaint is that quality of the papers seems to imply that 
the validity of the data is in doubt.  You can't just do an experiment.  You 
can't even just do it properly.  You must also write it up properly.  It's 
called "division of labour".

>Your opinion is worth
>more than Srinivasan's experimental data? Where did you learn science, K-Mart?

All data is not created equal.  I need to be convinced that it's good.  S's 
data means very little to me.  So I ask an expert opinion.


>Here you are in a fully equipped electrochemical lab, and you not even willing
>to spend a couple of days running a simple little Mills cell! What kind of a
>scientist are you? You cannot not learn science by reading papers and
>uploading cynical comments about them.

Now this is dead against the philosophy of science.  All theorists cut down 
at a stroke!

> If you are so darn sure it does not
>work,

Dieter's never claimed that.  He's remained *unconvinced* that it *does* 
work.  Two vastly different concepts.

> then you should have the guts to do an experiment or two, and tell us
>what happens. If you have time to do all this librarian work, surely you have
>time to mix up some potassium carbonate.

There's no point in doing an experiment unless you do it properly, so that 
you can trust your results 100%, so that  you're prepared to put your head 
on a block in defense of your experiment, etc etc.  For Dieter to do 
anything worthwhile in the CF field experimentally, he'd have to spend as 
much time and money as Tom at it.  He's employed to spend his time doing 
other things.

You can't say in one breath that the experiments are very difficult, need 
much care, time, money, etc., even for an electrochemist, and then say that 
Dieter must rattle one up which passes the stringent peer review tests in 
his spare time.  We can't all be experimenters on every experiment.  Some of 
us must be peer reviewing at some time :-).

>You sound just like one of those old line COBOL programmers I used to know,
>who never wrote a single line of Pascal, but who used to rail on about
>"structured languages are a bunch of nonsense and garbage." You never did it,
>you never saw it, you don't know anything about it. Period.

Crap.  If you were saying that about me, then you'd be correct, because I'm 
a nuclear physicist (I like to think), not an electrochemist.  So I'm a 
programmer, but I don't write your language.  Now Dieter's in the field, so 
he's a Pascal (if you insist) programmer.  You're saying: "you've never 
written a programme to do x (which is a subset of the programmes Deiter's 
expected to be have been able to write during his career) therefore any 
comments you make about other people's attempts to write such things are 
garbage."

I'd strongly suggest some reading of the philosophy of science is in order 
here.
--

Colog "nku-e-shweleng" the Henderdog
Physics Dept, UCT, South Africa.
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion