From: Dieter Britz <BRITZ@kemi.aau.dk>
Subject: RE: Something I didn't know
Reply-To: Dieter Britz <BRITZ@kemi.aau.dk>
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 17:51:07 GMT


Originally-From: Jed Rothwell <72240.1256@compuserve.com>

>You got your sources mixed up, Dieter. That news did not come from me. Who
>announced a prototype? A prototype of what, a reactor? Please find out, and
>tell us more.

OK, I mistakenly thought you were involved in that consortium that plans a
prototype for the end of 1992. So sorry. ARE you (i.e. Clustron) planning
one?

>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?

No, no, no, no, yes, no and no, resp. Look here: I have normal duties that
don't involve wild goose chases. I have in fact given a large slice of my
time collecting that bibliography and I am glad that most scientists have
voted with their feet, as it were, so that what is coming now is just a
trickle. For a while, I felt guilty giving it so much time. But I never have
seen the sort of evidence that drives me into the lab to try a cold fusion
experiment. Ni and plain water? You must be joking. I look at it this way.
There is hardly anyone besides Mills and maybe Farrell, who takes the Mills
"theory" seriously. A lot of people insist, however, that never mind the
theory, the experiment works. But the likelihood of a far-out dubious "theory"
accidentally hitting the mark and predicting an experiment that evokes a
completely unrelated but unknown effect, is so small that it is not worth my
time to have a go at it.
Actually, if the right grad student comes along, I might just get him/her to
do that experiment, just to find out what known effect or error or whatever
IS producing that heat, or the appearance of it. Myself, no thanks, I have
my ongoing research to get on with.

I don't believe I pontificate, but I do comment, and I do perhaps get a bit
cynical now and then, in the face of garbage purporting to be science. Yes.
Please get this straight, Jed: I have never closed my mind to the possibility
of cold fusion. I have said countless times that I favour fractofusion, if I
favour anything, as the likely mechanism for, say, Jones-level results. There
may even be some mechanism producing heat in FPH-type cells, though almost
everything I read points to an error. As I also have said countless times,
there is that Belzner et al paper, though, to give pause. So I wait for
more believable results. I will get cynical and derisive, if you offer me
nonsensical theories or nonsensical violations of known science, or weak
ad-hoc justifications or dubious evasions. While I don't really want to join
those skeptics who exempt Professor Jones from criticism (after all, his
claim, 13 orders of magnitude lower than FPH's, is still 40-70 OOM higher
than known fusion theory), I do say that he is one of the few who have
conducted themselves like real scientists. He calmly defends, in a rational
manner, his 4 sigmas; he double- and triple-checks, he distrusts his own
results; he has never, to my knowledge, defended indefensible results with
new explanations of why they are significant. He does not hedge with vague
allusions to parabolic interpolations or fancy Kalman filtering. If one day
he does an experiment that points to everything so far being an error, he will
be the first to say so, I am sure. This I can accept. Amateurish, hot-under-
the-collar rantings, no.

You once told me, Jed (before I became your favourite enemy) that a particular
bit of raving you did (on the SKEPTICS list, remember?) was just an act.
Maybe you are still doing this act. Believe me, it doesn't do you much good
here, on the contrary, it damages - has damaged - your credibility.

>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.
>Shame on you! You cannot judge a brand new field of science if you are not
>even willing to run an experiment or two. At least you should get a feel for
>the procedures and problems 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. Your opinion is worth
>more than Srinivasan's experimental data? Where did you learn science, K-Mart?
...
>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. If you are so darn sure it does not
>work, 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.

Wipe off the froth, take a few deep breaths and calm down. I am not obliged to
do anything you think I should, nor am I obliged to believe anything you tell
me. But I note in the above that you are back with saying that it's so easy
anyone can (and should) do it. Only the other day you were telling us how
terribly difficult it all is, which is why that demo didn't work.

>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.

I mostly use FORTRAN.
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Dieter Britz alias britz@kemi.aau.dk
Kemisk Institut, Aarhus Universitet, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
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Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion