Doug Shaver

Yes. I didn't mean to suggest that it was never referenced. I was just noting why there was never any debate about who has it. You don't argue about who has it in a community where it's taken for granted that everybody has it.

gstafleu

That is the process of falsification, see patcleaver's posting above. If a hypothesis is falsifiable, and you can provide the falsification, that may be the fasted way to dispose of the hypothesis. This, e.g., is what the Myth Busters do, and it is perfectly valid science.

Gerard Stafleu

Amaleq13

Agreed. Though my comment was in a response to your post, it was directed at the same audience as your post.

patcleaver

The discovery institute can raise 5 millions dollars a year to promote junk science theories. The creation museum can raise 27 million dollars for exhibits for junk science theories. However, there are almost no grants available for research to debunk pathological pseudo-sciences. All that most scientists can do is donate their own time to point out flaws in the research of the pseudo-scientists, and assert that there is no credible evidence for the claims of pseudo-science.

--------------------

Regarding cold fusion

By 1988 Fleischmann had an international reputation as a productive and innovative electrochemist. Between 1985 and 1988 he coauthored 29 peer reviewed papers with his former student, the American chemist Stanley Pons. Fleischmann and Pons had a reasonable basis for their hypotheses that their experiment might succeed. They invested $100,000 of their own money into the experiment. Before then, nobody had tried electrolyzing heavy water with a palladium electrode. They measured 10W of excess heat output and 104/s neutron emissions. The University of Utah insisted that they announcement their findings in a press conference in March 1989 over Fleishmann's objections. However, it was a serious breach of scientific procedures that results should be published in peer reviewed journals to safeguard the veracity of scientific announcements. The announcement created a media circus that lasted for months. Their experimental results were eventually published in a peer reviewed journal. On April 10, a team at Texas A&M University announced that they had observed excess heat, and another team at the Georgia Institute of Technology announced that they had observed production of neutrons. On April 12, Pons received a standing ovation from about 7,000 chemists at the semi-annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.

The initial experiments that followed the announcement were not made to debunk their experiment, but was a rush for the glory of being the first to replicate Fleischmann and Pons' results. In late April 1989, the team at Texas A&M University admitted that their claim of excess heat was probably a measurement error, and the team at Georgia Institute of Technology admitted that their neutron detector had malfunctioned. On May 1, the American Physical Society held a session on cold fusion at which dozens of research teams reported that they had failed to replicate Fleischmann and Pons' results. A US Department of Energy panel concluded in October, that government funding for cold fusion should be ended.

Even after it became clear that the Fleischmann and Pons experiment could not be replicated, cold fusion research continued because many scientists believe that there is a reasonable possibility that it could be made to work. Toyota invested $30 million dollars in a cold fusion laboratory in France that was directed by Fleishmann until 1999. France and Japan continued to seriously fund research until 2006. Their was a popular myth that cold fusion had been debunked long before there was a scientific consensus that electrolysis type cold fusion research was a dead end. The total research investment in cold fusion is more than several hundred million dollars and still there is no reproducible experiment that the Fleischmann and Pons apparatus produces cold fusion and no experiment that produces excess energy using cold fusion.

Other types of cold fusion have been accepted for a long time.

It was discovered in accelerator experiments in the 1950's that a muon traveling through room temperature deuterium could produce on average 150 fusions into helium. However, it takes more energy to produce a muon than is produced by 150 fusions.

In July 2002, Taleyarkhan, then at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee announced in a peer reviewed article in Science that he produced cold fusion at room temperature in heavy acetone by sonoluminescence (using ultrasonic energy to produce bubbles that collapse causing tiny regions where temperatures reach 10 million degrees). His results were rejected when several research teams failed to reproduce them. However, later his results were verified by a team led by Edward Forringer of LeTourneau University at the University in Texas in November 2006 (Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, vol 95, p 736) and now they are accepted. Unfortunately, the ultrasonic energy that is required exceeds the energy produced by fusion, and nobody has suggested any system of generating excess energy using this method.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion

mountainman

It might be called the prevailing paradigm of the hegemon.

Best wishes,


Pete

spamandham

I agree this is the process of science, as well as inquiry in general, including here. The "burden of proof" belongs to all who hold a stake, not merely to whoever makes a 'positive claim'. ...a clever 'debater' can usually make such claims in the form of a question anyway to skirt the 'burden of proof'.

"That's ridiculous. I'm not even going to address it." is a direct way of expressing that you hold no interest and will not even entertain an idea. But to the extent you do hold an interest and simply wish to force a participant to "prove" something, it seems like gamesmanship - which, for me at least, is counter productive to the reason I hang out here.

Amaleq13

Only if one considers intellectual honesty a hegemon.

mountainman

Historians assume that the evidence on the table of history is sufficient to support the theories of its historical relationships which they themselves put forward, and the collective of which are normally viewed (in the longer term) as paradigms. The ruling collective of theorists and their supporters (in any one field, not necessary BC&H, could be scientific) I am refering to here as the hegemon.

What is involved in a paradigm shift? An increase in intellectual honesty or an increase in intellectual maturity?


Best wishes,


Pete

Doug Shaver

Good 'nuff.

Doug Shaver

Have you read Kuhn's book?