Add a Comment
Email This
Statistics
RE: Language These Days
You wrote:
"The mainstream physics community doesn't accept the conjectures surrounding the Fleischmann-Pons experiment."
That is incorrect. The mainstream physics community is divided on this question. Roughly half do accept the results, and half do not. This estimate is based on the DoE review board opinions, and on a public opinion poll of scientists and engineers in Japan. It is also based on the fact that many prominent peer-reviewed journals publish papers on this subject, especially in Japan, Italy and China, albeit not as often in the U.S.
I believe that the subset of physicists who have read the literature on cold fusion overwhelmingly agrees the effect is real. I base that on the comments and responses of the readers at LENR-CANR. They have visited 870,000 times and downloaded 1.2 million papers. Hundreds have told me they are convinced, and only a handful expressed doubts. Even if we assume that only friendly readers will contact me, it is still difficult to imagine that readers have downloaded all those papers, and that many readers download 10 or more papers, yet most of them consider these papers to be invalid nonsense. Why would they bother?
People who oppose cold fusion often claim that "a large majority" agree with them, but they have no objective evidence to bolster this assertion. There are, of course, thousands of vituperative attacks against cold fusion, which you can easily find on Google, but this tells you nothing about the opinions of experts. Nearly every attack on cold fusion that I have read was written by someone who knew nothing about the research. People who have not read the literature and cannot make a solid technical argument to support their opinion no right to an opinion. This is science, not American Idol.
". . . you present your claims as if they're accepted by the community, when they're not."
These are not my claims. They are published by professional scientists in peer-reviewed journals, in hundreds of papers. That, by definition, means they are accepted -- at least by the editors and reviewers. There have been about a dozen peer-reviewed papers by skeptics that try to disprove these claims, but in my opinion they have no merit. You can read some of them at LENR-CANR and decide for yourself; see Jones and Morrison, for example.
"For those of us who aren't physicists, the responsible interpretation of this situation is that the mainstream community is right and you're wrong. In that context, wyldeling's statement is entirely sensible."
A physicist has no special qualifications to judge public opinion. You and this author have no clue what the mainstream science community thinks about cold fusion. A physicist who has not read the literature on cold fusion is no more qualified to judge the technical issues than the cop on the corner is. A physicist who offers an opinion without a solid technical reason is not acting as a physicist.
"Now, it happens that he is a physicist, and presumably capable of evaluating the data for himself."
If he has evaluated the data, and he has a good technical reason to doubt the results, he should publish a paper describing his reasons. Otherwise, he has no business claiming that the results are wrong. All views must be held to the same standard of academic rigor. A negative opinion does not get a free ride. That is why there have been so few skeptical papers that attempt to disprove cold fusion -- because the skeptics do not have a leg to stand on. To disprove cold fusion you must first show that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, and then you have to show why x-ray film and mass spectrometers do not work, and why tritium measured at a million times background is not real.
"Personally, I'd be happy to hear what he has to say about the stuff on your site, if he feels it's worth his time to review. To me, it looks like a pretty much archetypal pseudo-science site."
You are saying that papers published by Los Alamos, SRI and BARC are pseudo-science? Of course there are many less convincing papers, but it is a library, not a journal, so we are open to everyone -- including the skeptics, whose claims are archetypal pseudo-science, as you say.
RSS
Language These Days
Was this person from Europe? I ask because many European languages use the third person impersonal very often, even when we in the English language usually would not. This is especially so within the sphere of academics. Perhaps there was something lost in translation.
Also, I understand what you say about science being heartless and excessively detached. Steven Hawking is the most creative science author that I have read. You hardly see a single usage of "one," and he presents the scientific journey as that of every inquisative mind. Instead of "one," like yourself, I think he prefers the "we" variant.
I susepct that this dynamic is a result not only of modern science, but also of modernity in general. Heidegger said that those who use this third person impersonal are actually living inauthentically. He went on to say that we humans are so used to being treated as objects today, that we treat language in the same manner. We speak or write at times with little regard for the words of which we make use or for their significance/function. Language has thus lost much of its poetic, meaningful quality.
There is an impoverishment of many modern languages at work involving, for instance, the near loss of certain verb tenses, the narrowing, simplification, and phasing out of vocabulary in lieu of slang, a growing distinction between literary and spoken usage, a lack of courtesy in our everyday parlance, etc. We live in a strange age indeed. It seems that much of language today is being "abused" as you say.
View Full Discussion