Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Subject: Open-minded versus empty-minded
From: jonesse@physc1.byu.edu
Date: 18 Dec 92 11:34:00 -0700
Followup-To: Rothwell's recent postings
Distribution: world
Organization: Brigham Young University
Summary: On xs heat and nuclear products

This is reposted from 16 Dec. since Jed Rothwell said he had not seen it
when I checked with him via e-mail.  It responds also to Jed's comments that
if xs heat is real, CF is also real.  I heartily disagree.  If energetic
nuclear products are found, a nuclear reaction can be claimed.  Other
explanations have been found for xs heat (see e.g. my posting "Silicates
and Aluminates" in November).  Helium, as in Yamaguchi's experiment, can
be accounted for as contamination from glass or from the atmosphere in
every case I've seen (P/F therefore withdrew their claims of helium
production in Pd in 1989 as did Paneth and Peters back in the late 1920's.)
Any connection between xs heat and nuclear reactions remains unproved.


In his 14 Dec. posting "Harder than she thought," Jed Rothwell makes the
following statements:
"Another comment of Jon Webb's deserves comment, because it is a classic
case of pathological non-science.  It violates the rule established by
Kepler while examining the data of Tycho Brahe:  the Data is Right, You
are Wrong.  This is the whole ball of wax, the very basis of science and 
of the Renaissance, and the Jon Webbs of this world are still -- literally
-- living in the Dark Ages, intellectually.  I am not kidding."
"A scientist's job is to judge results based on instruments and replica-
tions. Nothing else matters!  Previous ideas about what is possible, 
what is rational, what fits and what does not fit, have absolutely no role
in science.  Data is truth, all else is speculation."
"You must deliberately put all theoretical considerations aside when
judging results.  It is like Zen meditation; you start by clearing your
mind of all preconceptions, prejudice, value judgements, and conscious
ideas, you must make it a blank state."

Not so fast, Jed.  (Such statements have been rather common in the "Cold
Fusion" series of quasi-scientific conferences, incidentally.)

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.

We can be open-minded without being empty-minded.

Consider Einstein's equation  E = mc2.  This was logically deduced in 1905, I
believe, but since has been tested EXPERIMENTALLY many, many times.  If someone
says that he has produced heat (E) by nuclear reactions without corresponding
mass(m) change, or (equivalently) commensurate nuclear products, he (or she) is
not just going against the grain of the establishment or of speculation, he is
challenging thousands of experiments which have tested the relation E = mc2.

Note that there is an equals sign here; it is not enough to have a handful of
neutrons (as some claim, I among them) then to say that the xs heat of Pons/F.
or McKubre is therefore nuclear.  Nonsense.  The neutron fluxes we report
are a factor of roughly 10 trillion less than required to produce one watt of
xs power.  Properly interpreted using E = mc2, then, our results REFUTE the
claims of P/F of xs heat production by nuclear d-d fusion.  Even now, NO ONE
has shown bona fide nuclear products commensurate with xs heat.  (Not even
Yamaguchi -- see my earlier postings on this.  Certainly not P/F or Takahashi or
Notoya or McKubre or Mills or Bush or Storms or Srinivasan.) 

If a very small nuclear effect exists, as we have claimed, I predict it will
fit in with other experiments and E=Mc2 in particular.  Such a result may 
dramatically alter notions about helium-3 and tritium production in the earth,
for example.  But in a way consistent with existing observations.  We don't
empty our minds of these.

While I was doing my PhD. thesis work at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center), I remember a joke (possibly by Bjorken) as follows:  scientists when
they die are allowed to fiddle with nature, but they are constrained by 
experiments which have already been performed.  This story may help clarify
my argument:  discoveries we may make will be consistent with previous,
verified discoveries, though not necessarily with theories which extrapolate
beyond the data base.  (And there is certainly a possibility of error in
putative discoveries.)  There is for good reason inertia in the scientific
community about claimed discoveries, and a peer-review and replication system
is naturally in place.  It is attempts to do end-runs around peer-scrutiny, such
as hyped-up press conferences and other misuses of the media, 
direct appeals to legislative bodies for money, use of lawyers to 
threaten other scientists, shifting of energy scales in gamma-ray spectra
 -- such actions most scientists find reprehensible, even pathological.

Yours Truly,
Steven E. Jones

P.S.
The notion of energy transfer to a metal lattice, without emission of energetic
nuclear products, I explore in "Nuclear reactions in deuterided solids versus
excess heat claims" (Jones, Fusion Technology, 20:915-923, Dec. 1991).  I
argue that this notion 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.


Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion