Tommaso Dorigo comments the latest finding and admits that the methodology looks very sound. Tommaso is not able to find any other explanation than fraud for the unpleasant fact that cold fusion occurs contrary to what text books tell us.
Lubos, who he is ready to accept that we live in the landscape of 11-dimensional M-theory at some brane without able to predict anything as physicists and test this belief in any manner, has attacked vigorously against new nuclear physics using instead of facts all his rhetoric skills to convince the readers that the people involved with cold fusion are swindlers, idiots, etc... - only "communist" and "criminal" seem to be missing from the the list.
I have commented cold fusion several times in my blog discussing also the TGD based views about cold fusion involving dark phases of matter realized as phases with non-standard value of Planck constant. I have also developed alternative variants of the model in my books (see this and this).
The most recent model (see the article) starts from the model of Widom and Larsen reported to explain the observed isotope ratios, and assuming that the basic step of the reaction involves the transformation of proton to neutron by absorption of orbital electron. Contrary to naive intuitions, weak interactions would be involved in an essential manner in the process! To my opinion this is however one of the weak points of the model at quantitative level although I believe that weak interactions are involved. Second weak point is the assumption that neutron approaches the target with extremely low velocity thus making the interaction cross section very large (proportional to inverse of the relative velocity). Here the new dark physics predicted by TGD would come in rescue: as dark variant of weak interaction physics with weak boson Compton scale scaled up to atomic length scale would make impossible possible. Below the scaled-up scale weak bosons would behave like massless particles and weak interactions would get as strong as electromagnetic ones. Also the de-Broglie wavelength of neutron would be scaled up since it is proportional to heff: this is equivalent with having very low relative velocity.
My sincere hope is that hard empirical facts could eventually force the main stream colleagues to admit that something in our standard view about physics is badly wrong as also the failed attempts to understand dark matter and dark physics have repeatedly demonstrated. I do not however expect any fast changes. The natural dynamical time scale for the phychology of face keeping is of the order of human lifetime!
Addition: In his blog posting about latest developments in cold fusion Lubos demonstrates that he has become a parody of himself, kind of a living joke. Lubos talks about scientific method and would certainly agree that objectivity free of non-emotional attitude is one of its basic signatures. Lubos is however exploding of anger and his arguments rely on personal insults instead of contents. The basic tragedy and paradox of Lubos is that he always reacts instead of acting. Instead of realizing that all ideologies are dangerous because they do not allow freedom of thought, he sees communism as the Devil. The irony is that he behaves just like an ideal communist respecting authorities more than anything else and experiencing those who think differently as enemies. Lubos even sees conspiracy against quantum mechanics and blackholes! Lubos has become age-fan of the dying M-theory and - in amusing contrast - extremely conservative believer on the most hardnosed reductionism. Hence for Lubos the physics below TeV energies is fully done and any-one who considers that cold fusion might be something real and that biology might involve some interesting new physics is swindler, criminal, crackpot, communist,.... - there is long menu of options and you can choose whatever you like!
I want to make absolutely clear that I am not a fan of cold fusion. My attitude is different because TGD predicts new physics in all scales and allows to consider models for how cold fusion would happen. TGD is a genuine theory rather than some random model cooked up to explain some anomaly or unexpected observation (say dark matter or dark energy or why supersymmetry is not seen at LHC). If I would still live in the old ontology, I would certainly have a temptation to accept conspiracy theories as an easy way out of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is what scientist should be able to tolerate and here the problem of Lubos and many others is.
8 comments:
Thanks. Nice essay and analysis
I removed a stupid comment of an individual calling himself/herself "tyy", on basis of mail address he/she is from Finland, probably from local academic circles, which are extremely irritated by the undeniable success of TGD.
I encourage discussion but I criticism must be based on contents. Saying just "crackpot" is not criticism, it is stupidity.
I encourage "tyy" to go to elementary first year course about philosophy, and devote to the question what critical thinking is.
Dear Matti,
I find your idea of extended-range qcd forces (a few picometres) most interesting, although I am not proficient in your model. Could these be understood as dual-qcd at ranges beyond 1/LAMBDA where ALPHAstrong>1?
Dear Constantin,
in TGD framework one cannot understand this as dual QCD.
The hierarchy of Planck constants implies a hierarchy of Compton scales proportional to h_eff=n*h assuming that p-adic mass scale of say weak boson or gluon remains the usual one.
p-Adic length scale hierarchy suggests also the possibility that the mass scale varies and I have considered the possibility that both scale hierarchies are present in living matter.
Also neutrinos might realize p-adic length scales. One almost prediction is what I call M_89 hadron physics in TeV scale. LHC probably demonstrates whether it is realised. The 135 GeV new Higgs candidate could be pion of the M_89 hadron physics.
For large values of h_eff the dark variants of weak bosons or gluons would have long Compton wavelength and therefore the range of interactions would increase since these bosons would behave as massless particles below the Compton length defining the length scale above which they look massive. Scaled up weak or strong scale could define important biological length scales. There are four Gaussian Mersenne primes between cell membrane thickness and 2.5 microns- size scale of cell nucleus: this is a number theoretical miracle and these scales could define QCD type physics.
There is an intriguing finding by topologist Barbara Shipman that honeybee dance could be modelled using the flag manifold SU(3)/U(1)xU(1) identifiable as the space of choices of color quantisation axes assignable to color group.
She went on to propose that quarks for some mysterious reason are important in biology. Scaled up QCD would explain this.
Stephan Pomp is also becoming a parody, with latest electri theory... the fanclub seems quite incompetent in electronic, like not understanding that a wattmeter don't care of resistance change of the load, not even if it is an active load...
they accept that theory that does not match the numbers and assume that Industrial Heat bring dead reactor, just hoping the reactor will be measured so badly it will look like working...
those guys are desperate like 9/11 truthers...
It is Groupthink at it's best... they take incredibly high risk, sure of their theory , thinking that they don't even need to check if it is coherent with the science they know already...
fantastic in a way... a psychiatry experiment.
make me think of somatoparaphrenia...
a physicist equivalent of somatoparaphrenia.
This fanatic opposition towards new ideas and findings is interesting - and also very unpleasant as I can tell;-) - phenomenon.
Especially in finnish academic circles "huuhaa" is the term used about practically any research work, which introduces a new point of view whereas pseudo research doing again something which has been done long ago, is always qualified with positive attributes like serious, etc…
I heard a radio discussion about this some time again. An argument of finnish historian who has also suffered from "huuhaa" labelling was that academic people experience sub-consciously scientific dogmas as supports of their personal
identity and feel subconscious - if not conscious -fear when their dogmas are challenged. The fear is understandable: if the dogma is wrong, nothing helps: not physical violence, not intelligence, not rhetorics. Face is lost.
This fear might explain why these warriors of old dogmas tend to have so lopsided views and get so incredibly aggressive when something creating cognitive dissonance appears.
you describe the rationality of this seemingly stupid groupthink.
they protect selfish losses of ego in their environment.
another factyor that is well described by Roland Benabou in his groupthink papers on Mutual Assured Delusion, is that
they can revert that argument to say realist are deluded.
but what defend us is not a theory, it is mass of experments, common sens on human behaviors, and calorimetry...
the solution to what Feyerabend describe as a desperate incapacity to see you are deluded, is in evidences... the symptom is that peple ignore evidence...
anyway they name evidence thinsg that are not (innuendo, absence of fact) and the label our evidenc as void becaus eof ad hominem argument and theory.
really there is a big work to make a theory not on groupthink diagostic, but how to distinguish the two cognitve equilibrium, separating realism and deluison by objective argumnts taht don't depend on the groupthink itself...
in LENR peer review, the acceptation of facts , is victim of the groupthink, and scientific method, even when respected , cannot be seen are respected...
there are arguments, but when you apply them to real pseudo science like homeopathy, conspiracy theories, they cannot make a difference, and anti-lent deniers use that good argument to state that they are right (a fallacy, but they are right we cannot know who is right).
it could be a fantastic debate it it did not have practical consequence.
Big blunders in collective thinking relate to wrong implicit philosophical assumptions. What makes me happy is that there is a clear change taking place in this respect. Physicisists are saying publicly things that they could not say for decade ago.
What is clear to me that physics must extend its scope and get rid of the reductionistic dogma which has led to the recent delusion that physics can be done only by building new accelerators. The physics of life and consciousness is a white area of map and if physics is not to become a dead branch of science it must direct attention to this direction.
A comment concerning homeopathy and water memory which is what is actually studied scientifically. Phenomena can be real although the theories about them can be wrong as also the beliefs about implications of the phenomena. There are good reasons to believe that water memory is real even it cannot be understood in standard physics framework. Homeopathy as a medical application of water memory is of course as challengable as much of the ordinary medicine as application of biology!
It is clear that low frequency em radiation is important for both water memory and living matter (consider only EEG). The recored low frequency spectrum of molecule can reproduce the biological effects caused by molecule and mimick its presence.
Water memory relates also to biophotons whose study began 90 years ago but has been silenced by the main stream biology accepting only bio-chemistry and genetics based on it. There is a long tradition related to the effects of low frequency em fields: Popp, Gariaev, the work of whose group suggests that genetic code could have also electromagnetic representations: this would not be surprising if one thinks as a person living computer age. There is endless variety of different representations of bit sequences around us. Nobelist Luc Montagnier's group has shown that even remote replication of DNA become possible. Gariaev's group has demonstrated analogous effects much earlier. These phenomena are certainly not easy to understand in standard physics context.
In the case of homeopathy standard objection is that practically not a single molecule is left in water in the preparation process. If water forms a representation of the molecule producing the same biologically active low frequency spectrum as the original molecule, the situation changes.
What this representation is, is suggested by Pollack's group's work about fourth phase of water involving the formation of negatively charged exclusion zones as a reaction to incoming radiation. Free energy researchers have been talking about similar findings for decades but no one has taken them seriously. Brown's gas has been discovered in previous century and provide example of fourth phase of water!
Thus taking water memory for a moment seriously leads to profound questions about the nature of prebiotic life: could it be that water is living in some sense and that chemical life emerged from this primordial life?
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