Those (not so) backward Syrians--and their powerful friends

[Splinty]

If cold fusion works, how come there are no low temprature stars? I mean stars are the ultimate fusion engine in nature right?

[Kurtz]

Reproducability and peer review. That´s all I ask for from anyone who claims to be a scientist.

But playing the "the Establishment is trying to stop us"-card isn't proof of anything.

"What you have to ask yourself is, who wants this discovery? Do you imagine the seven sisters [the world's top oil companies] want it? Does it fit into any idea of macroeconomics or microeconomics? I don't think so. And do you really think that the Department of Defense wants electrochemists producing nuclear reactions in test tubes? Eh?"

- Martin Fleischmann in Wired

Not very convincing, IMO.

The burden of proof is on the person who claims to have an invention that contravenes established knowledge.

There was a new claim a couple of years ago, something about cavitation in acetone, but I haven't heard anything about CF since then.

[Stavka_lite]

The real conspiracy is being conducted by the entertainment industry. They have subjigated a large portion of the world population, through the use of Micheal Moore films, to beleive in conspiracy theories. They have contrived to have these modern theories in place to coverup the fact, and it is a fact, that there is nothing on TV worth watching. They, and we all know who "they" is (are?),need to ensure that large corporation keep buying airtime to hawk their wares and what better way than to condition the world population into believing everything that is in print, video or MP3 files. I know, I have seen the documents. Did you also know that the average person will eat 8 spiders over the course of their lifetime while they sleep. I know this is the truth because a friend of my daughter read it on a Snapple cap!

[Kurtz]

From: Barrister Bernard Akume

Akume Inneh Law Firm

Legal Practitioners

10, Adelabu Street

Surulere, Lagos

Nigeria

Contact: Barrister Bernard Akume

Confidential Proposal/Investment Assistance for Cold Fusion Energy Device.

Greetings to you in the name of the most high God, from my beloved country Nigeria. I am sorry and I solicit your permission into your privacy. I am Barrister Bernard Akume, lawyer to the late Dr. Koffi Abacha, a brilliant Nigerian physicist.

My former client, late Dr. Koffi Abacha, died in a mysterious plane crash in the year 1994 on the way to a scientific conference to make an announcement of the utmost importance to mankind. He was planning to present a paper regarding his extensive work on cold fusion. It is said the cold fusion device he had developed, produced 10-times more energy than the energy source that fed into it. The device was about the size of a steamer trunk.

Dr. Stanley Pons and Professor Martin Fleischman of Southampton University in the UK consulted the late Dr. Abacha regarding their ongoing cold fusion experiments. While enroute to the Paris scientific conference, the plane carrying Dr. Koffi Abacha mysteriously exploded over the ocean. Without the wise Dr. Abachas guidance, Dr. Pons and Professor Fleischman made no further progress in their cold fusion research.

Upon the death of my former client and unknown to his colleagues, two trunk boxes came into my possession. One trunk box contains some type of energy producing device. The late Doctor called it his cold fusion fuel cell. The second trunk box contains thousands of pages of scientific papers and notes. The trunk boxes had been placed in storage, for safe keeping, at a Lagos security storage firm in 1994 just before the late Dr. Abacha left on his ill fated flight to Paris.

The security storage firm does not know the actual content of the trunk boxes. My client and I told them that the boxes contain old African artifacts to be delivered to a client outside the country via Air Courier Services. For now it is only you and I that is having knowledge of this wonderful invention.

The only assistance I require from you is to help me send these trunks out of Nigeria and receive these trunk boxes in either Sydney, London or New York, depending on your country of agreement. Once these trunk boxes are out of Nigeria, I shall seek your advice in obtaining a local patent in your name and licensing the device to investors.

I need $ 10,000 U.S. dollars to pay past due storage fees, freight charges, and possible bribes to local customs officers.

Once this device is licensed, the resulting funds shall be disbursed accordingly as follows: 25-percent for the recipient (you) from the total sum. 2-percent for the courier officer in the country where you shall receive the trunk boxes. 5-percent set aside from the entire sum for expenses incurred by both parties in due course of executing this transaction (home and abroad). 68-percent for me. If you are not satisfied with the percentage sharing of the fund feel free to let me know. In compliance with this you are to immediately forward to me by mail the following: Your full names and address Confidential telephone and fax numbers.

With this information I will immediately commence all necessary documentation for a successful shipment of the first trunk box to your country of choice as all the modalities have already been worked out by me. I will also give you full details of this whole transaction which I have already perfected in due course.

Please note that you are to treat this with utmost confidentiality willing or not willing to assist me in this transaction as nobody knows about this invention and I am still an active lawyer in this country.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS, IF I WERE YOU I WOULD, BECAUSE IT WILL COST YOU LITTLE OR NOTHING TO ACHIEVE THIS AND THE BENEFIT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER.

Remain blessed in the name of GOD.

Yours faithfully, Barrister Bernard Akume

:eek:

Happy new year, everyone!

[Stavka_lite]

In all seriousness Kurtz is spot on correct. Every new claim must be veiwed with a critical eye. While working on my PhD I have become very accustomed to the questions: "show me the data?" and "describe your methodology?" Expecting people to have faith in your claims is just not realistic. In today's society there very little education in the use of critical thinking. The word 'critical' has taken on negative connotations when it is really just a matter of taking a hard and honest look at the claim and, for the time being, accepting the results whether or not if they are in agreement with the original claim . Critical thought is not logic, logic tries to ignore biases and perceptions that the researcher has. Critical thought recognizes those biases and perceptions and includes them into theory. It does not try to hide them. Critical thinking does attempt to strip away arguments that are incorrect. By this I mean the presentation of the premise. Conspiracy theorists generally use two types of incorrect argument style, The appeal to emotion and ad homonem(sp). Emotional arguments carry no weight than saying " because I said so" and attacking the person who makes the claim is not an argument at all.

If anyone is interested I recommend reading Thinking by Kirby & Goodpaster and Critical Thinking About Research by Meltzoff.

[Battlefront.com]

It would appear that conspiracy theory "hook and sinker" belief systems are very closely related to they systems that allow people to fall victim to "get rich quick" and other scam type presentations. The mind has a problem with critical thinking and evaluating truth from fiction.

A few days ago I saw a long show on people that were taken in by a scam that sold DVD rentals right out of a vending machine. Everybody that invested, and were ripped off by a long time ripoff artist, claimed to be rational people that were always very careful with their money. Yet there they were... with houses mortgaged, retirement savings leveraged, available cash depleted, etc. and not a penny coming back to them. How could this happen to "rational" people who are "careful" with their money?

In one case the guy got a SPAM fax, but most fell for TV commercials that promised the usual massive and quick returns. These people all said that they dilligently "researched" the claims of the scammer and found them the claims to be solid enough to invest upwards of $80,000!!! To them the superficial information they found added up to making the claim of getting rich quick plausible. In doing so they had to have pushed aside any of the contradictory evidence, such as "a fool and his money are easily parted" or "the only way to get rich quick is to trick someone out of their money" or "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is". And that's just common sense counter evidence, not to mention REAL evidence that could have been turned up specific to this scam operation.

Now, I saw these same TV commercials and laughed my ass off. It was so OBVIOUSLY a scam that I stated then that anybody that would fall for it should give me their money instead. I'd at least give them something back. Now a year or two later I'm looking at a room full of people that fell for it. So, how is it that these other people (many of them business types with degrees) fell for the scam while I didn't? Simple...

These people scammed lacked some sort of mental self defense mechanism. Instead of alarm bells, they heard cash register noises. Instead of seeing themselves as fools on a national TV show in two years, they saw themselves sitting in Aruba on their 40' yacht. Instead of seeing themselves in prosecutor's offices, they saw themselves reading about all those suckers that didn't get in on the ground floor of this "amazing chance of a life time". In short, they saw and heard what they wanted to see and hear, not what was actually being demonstrated and said.

Those that believe, almost as a rule instead of as an exception, in conspiracy theories suffer form this same psychological defect. Perhaps it is even a brain defect rather than a learning disorder. Whatever the case may be, it is related to falling victim to scams, of that I am sure. Just like "hording" problems and other psycholgoical problems take many forms, so does this issue. Some will only believe in conspiracy theories and never fall for a scam, some people will only fall for scams and never conspiracy theories. The brain has a strange way of choosing its own poision.

Steve

[ December 31, 2005, 11:01 AM: Message edited by: Battlefront.com ]

[akd]

(6) Why and how does much (but not all) conspiracy theorizing create a tendency for people to depart from rational analysis?

In a famous study back in the 1950s, researcher Leon Festinger wanted to find out how a religious sect would react when its prophecy that the Earth was going to come to an end failed to come true on the predicted date. When the fateful date arrived and nothing happened, did the believers cease to be believers? No. Instead they revised their beliefs to explain away the failed prediction by asserting that God had given humankind one more chance, and they maintained the rest of their belief system intact. One is entitled, of course, to hold whatever beliefs one wants, but beliefs like those of the religious sect are not rational or scientific, for it is a basic requirement of scientific beliefs that they be in principle falsifiable, that there be the possibility of disconfirming evidence. If a scientific hypothesis predicts X, and instead not-X occurs (and recurs repeatedly with no off-setting explanations for the discrepancy), then the hypothesis ought to be doubted. If the hypothesis flouts prior knowledge as well as current evidence, and is accepted nonetheless, then the behavior is often no longer scientific, nor even rational.

Conspiracy theorists tend to develop a similar attitude as Festinger's religious zealots toward counter-evidence. Where God's mysterious ways salvage the religious believers' failed predictions, added layers of conspiracy salvage disconfirmed conspiracy theories. To the conspiratorial mind, if evidence emerges contradicting a claimed conspiracy, it was planted. If further evidence shows that the first evidence was authentic, then that further evidence too was planted. One website, for example, claims that the Palestinian suicide bombers are actually hoaxes by Israeli intelligence organizations wherein bombs are set off by Israeli agents and a Palestinian body is later added to the debris. But what about the family members of the suicide bomber who speak to the media? This seems like pretty strong counter-evidence against the conspiracy claim. But this it poses no problem for the conspiracy theorist. He or she promptly claims that the family member interviews are all also staged by the Israelis. (See http://www.public-action.com/911/toothfairies.html.)

But don't we all ignore evidence that goes counter to long-held beliefs? And aren't we often right to do so? When magician David Copperfield apparently saws a woman in half, most of us don't suddenly give up our belief in physics and biology. We instead stand by past evidence and suspect a hoax and even if we can't figure out how Copperfield did it, we're not likely to walk into a chain saw anytime soon. We sensibly maintain our beliefs because we have an immense body of prior evidence supporting the prevailing view, and only the one televised magical counter-example.

Conspiracy theorists rarely have a vast amount of evidence confirming the conspiracy with only a little detail or two that doesn't quite fit and can reasonably be set aside. Quite the contrary, conspiracy theories are often strung together from the thinnest reeds of evidence and the counter-evidence is often an irrefutable negation of the very piece of evidence that the conspiracy theorist previously claimed was decisive.

Obviously the World Trade Center attack was a U.S. government hoax, declared conspiracy fans within days of 9-11, because most of the hijackers have turned up to be still alive. This claim took advantage of early confusions, but became completely discredited a short time later. The conspiracy theorists didn't miss a beat. The loss of their crucial evidence weakened their belief in a conspiracy not one iota. Likewise, why is the government not letting people listen to the voice recorders for Flight 93, the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, they intoned. To conspiracy theorists, this hid the fact that the official story of the hijacking was bogus. But when the government belatedly allowed the families of the victims to hear the tapes, few if any conspiracy theorists retracted their claims.

Psychological origins

When conspiracy theories combine logical fallacies with lack of evidence, the result is a worldview known as conspiracism. Conspiracism is a worldview that sees major historic events and trends as the result of secret conspiracies. According to many psychologists, a person who believes in one conspiracy theory is often a believer in other conspiracy theories.

Psychologists believe that the search for meaningfulness features largely in conspiracism and the development of conspiracy theories. That desire alone may be powerful enough to lead to the initial formulation of the idea. Once cognized, confirmation bias and avoidance of cognitive dissonance may reinforce the belief. In a context where a conspiracy theory has become popular within a social group, communal reinforcement may equally play a part.

Evolutionary psychology may also play a significant role. Paranoid tendencies are associated with an animal's ability to recognize danger. Higher animals attempt to construct mental models of the thought processes of both rivals and predators in order to read their hidden intentions and to predict their future behavior. Such an ability is extremely valuable in sensing and avoiding danger in an animal community. If this danger-sensing ability should begin making false predictions, or be triggered by benign evidence, or otherwise become pathological, the result is paranoid delusions. A conspiracy theorist sees danger everywhere, and may simply be the victim of a malfunction in a valuable and evolutionarily-old natural ability.

Epistemic bias?

It is possible that certain basic human epistemic biases are projected onto the material under scrutiny. According to one study humans apply a 'rule of thumb' by which we expect a significant event to have a significant cause.[2] The study offered subjects four versions of events, in which a foreign president was (a) successfully assassinated, ( wounded but survived, © survived with wounds but died of a heart attack at a later date, and (d) was unharmed. Subjects were significantly more likely to suspect conspiracy in the case of the 'major events'—in which the president died—than in the other cases, despite all other evidence available to them being equal.

Another epistemic 'rule of thumb' that can be misapplied to a mystery involving other humans is cui bono? (who stands to gain?). This sensitivity to the hidden motives of other people might be either an evolved or an encultured feature of human consciousness, but either way it appears to be universal. If the inquirer lacks access to the relevant facts of the case, or if there are structural interests rather than personal motives involved, this method of inquiry will tend to produce a falsely conspiratorial account of an impersonal event. The direct corollary of this epistemic bias in pre-scientific cultures is the tendency to imagine the world in terms of animism. Inanimate objects or substances of significance to humans are fetishised and supposed to harbor benign or malignant spirits.

Clinical psychology

For relatively rare individuals, an obsessive compulsion to believe, prove or re-tell a conspiracy theory may indicate one or more of several well-understood psychological conditions, and other hypothetical ones: paranoia, denial, schizophrenia, Mean world syndrome[3].

In highlighting conspiracist allegation as a form of scapegoating, it is important to remember the following:

All conspiracist theories start with a grain of truth, which is then transmogrified with hyperbole and filtered through pre-existing myth and prejudice,

People who believe conspiracist allegations sometimes act on those irrational beliefs, which has concrete consequences in the real world,

Conspiracist thinking and scapegoating are symptoms, not causes, of underlying societal frictions, and as such are perilous to ignore,

Scapegoating and conspiracist allegations are tools that can be used by cynical leaders to mobilize a mass following,

Supremacist and fascist organizers use conspiracist theories as a relatively less-threatening entry point in making contact with potential recruits,

Even when conspiracist theories do not center on Jews, people of color, or other scapegoated groups, they create an environment where racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of prejudice and oppression can flourish.

http://www.publiceye.org/top_conspire.html

[ December 31, 2005, 12:26 PM: Message edited by: akd ]

[Battlefront.com]

Thanks for the post AKD. Very informative. The ability for the Human mind to create its own reality, complete with flexible defenses, is simply amazing. I've argued with my fair share of political zealots, religious nutcases, conspiracy believers, and so on and so forth to understand how widespread it is.

Case in point, all those rightwingers during the Clinton Admin talking about how the Dems were plotting to take away our civil rights, increase government spending and regulation, get us involved in fruitless wars of idealism, misuse the military, run the economy into the ground, ruin America's standing in the world, massive corruption, and in general screw things up. Yet how many of these people have been staunch supporters of Bush and how many have been voicing the same concerns they were under Clinton? One would think that they would be anti-Bush to their very core based on what is going on. However, all the rightwingers I knew from the 1990s have been 110% behind Bush, at least up until recently. Any challenges to their belief system that Dem=Evil, Repub=Good illicited such violent responses that most challengers ducked and ran away to avoid the abuse (no debate, just torents of abuse). However, as of late these otherwise vocal and abusive voices have been largely quiet. Perhaps deep down they realize perhaps the world isn't as nicely laid out as they thought?

Steve

[John Kettler]

aka_tom_w,

Thanks for those. Great pics! One of the things which shows clearly in this batch of images and was obscured in the first by the red overlay you or someone else put there is that there is in fact a paved surface going clear across the dry lakebed (in my crummy images, too) and ending at some hard to determine, for me at least, terrain discontinuity. Would love to have a look at that terminus at, say, 1 meter resolution, preferably in stereo and multispectrally.

Kurtz,

While it's interesting and maybe even disturbing that the classic Nigerian Internet scam has now acquired a New Energy twist, this in no way detracts from the New Energy research, discoveries, maybe even scientific breakthroughs occurring in labs and workshops around the world.

As for conspiracies, I find it fascinating that governments charge, convict, and send people to jail all the time on conspiracy charges of all sorts, yet somehow many of you believe that incredibly powerful vested interests would not use every means imaginable to maintain their position in the world, especially since even rudimentary delving will show those same interests have repeatedly engineered or threatened to unleash wars for that and other reasons. Starting in the 1700s, the Rothschild banking interests, for example, working simultaneously from multiple European capitals, seized control of one country's currency after another. How? By telling ruler A that if he didn't give in, the Rothschilds would throw their enormous resources behind nearby hostile ruler B, who meanwhile was being told much the same. Meyer Amstel Rothschild said this of the process: "Give me control of a nation's currency, and I care not who makes the laws!"

Did many of you never hear of cartels, monopolies and trusts? Do you totally not grok how the fortunes of Rockefeller, Carnegie

and more were achieved? Do you know nothing of the dirty tricks used by Edison to protect his DC current system against Westinghouse's (really Tesla's) AC system? If you slept through history and econ, just take a look at how Microsoft operated and still operates. Currently, it's in big trouble with the EU for a series of predatory, anticompetitive patterns and practices which would've warmed the cockles of John D. Rockefeller himself.

Are scientists and tech types somehow magically above the will to power, position, wealth and high reputation? Hardly! Earlier this year one renowned Japanese archaeologist was caught redhanded "salting" a site.

Virginia Steen Macintyre, a USGS geologist, was called to Mexico to date a Clovis site buried by an eruption, which she duly did using four accepted methods, but when she came back with 100,000 years as the age of the site, which flew squarely in the face of the "approved, official" 20,000 year age for such sites, she found herself sans career and selling flowers. Many of her colleagues privately agreed with her, yet no one was willing to buck the system. Michael Cremo's book FORBIDDEN ARCHAEOLOGY is full of this kind of material.

When in the wake of the oil crisis a groundswell of public interest driven by terrible wallet and pocketbook pain suddenly made conventional alternative energy popular and in demand, the first thing that happened is that the oil, nuclear, coal and other such power producing companies systematically went after alternative

energy firms and their tech base. How effectively they stifled emerging competition while it was still in the crib is the subject of the book STEALING THE SUN.

As we used to say in military aerospace, it all comes down to rice bowls (personal, organizational

and economic self-interest). I saw lots of great ideas die stillborn because somebody's rice bowl was threatened by them. And how great would the self-interest be of those who, at a cost of untold millions, wired the globe together with copper, feed those wires from plants they own with energy from oil, coal, and uranium they also own, then bill us mercilessly for what we must have in order to live? Clearly, we're willing to fight wars over far lesser matters; witness the banana wars of the early 1900s on behalf of United Fruit Company! The Congo interventions weren't about protecting people but about maintaining control of the Katanga copper mines. Similarly, the U.S.

destroyed Allende's Chilean government because the copper mining interests were under attack. Likewise Bush Senior actually told the truth for a time before Desert Storm: "It's about the oil."

The history of alternative energy, especially the

zero point type stuff, is one of intimidation, buyouts, lab trashings, beatings, death threats, bombings and worse. Bearden's been visited by agents who pointedly disinvited him to continue discussing scalar weapons and applied antigravity, Moray and his sons (zero-point) have had several labs destroyed and have been severely harassed, Hutchison (antigravity, etc.) has been raided and much of his gear confiscated, Searl (zero point and antigravity) not only went through that but the POed local utility tore out his entire household electrical system. Wilhelm Reich (orgone energy, weather mod, mind control) died in jail and had his books burned by the government. Even the great Tesla (AC,electrical motors, turbines, fluorescent lights, scalar devices, wireless energy transmission, Project Rainbow) was effectively made a nonperson and died in poverty, while Victor Schauberger (implosion energy, environmental cleanup, German saucer program) was first brought to the U.S., looted of his intellectual treasures and then cast aside. So thoroughly was he exploited that on his deathbed he sadly said, "I don't even own myself."

Regards,

John Kettler

[ December 31, 2005, 02:47 PM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[akd]

As for conspiracies, I find it fascinating that governments charge, convict, and send people to jail all the time on conspiracy charges of all sorts, yet somehow many of you believe that incredibly powerful vested interests would not use every means imaginable to maintain their position in the world, especially since even rudimentary delving will show those same interests have repeatedly engineered or threatened to unleash wars for that and other reasons.

Okay, but "conspiracy" and "conspiracy theory/conspiracism" are not the same thing. You are correct, however, that there are many instances of those in power using the same techniques and methodology as conspiracist theorists to gain or hold power, i.e. Adolf Hitler, etc.

[Kurtz]

I'm sorry John, but I don't think a few people's perceived maltreatment is proof of anything. As you said, there are lots of conferences going on and even prizes for those who make a working device. Blaming a government/big business conspiracy for your failures isn't a reasonable explanation when your're trying to violate the laws of physics. If you want to change the laws of physics (which is possible) you need proof. Lots of proof.

But I can see why noone takes Cold Fusion seriously anymore. Pons & Fleischmann is responsible for that when they made astonishing claims and failed to back them up.

I just read about the "100-mile carburateror";

http://www.snopes.com/autos/business/carburetor.asp

Claim: A miraculous car that gets 200 miles to the gallon is reclaimed by the factory and never seen again after its owner calls to congratulate the manufacturers about its fabulous performance.

Status: False.

[snip]

Alas, one can get by on mere smoke and mirrors for only so long. Those with sense enough to not be deafened by the hyperbole were not long kept at bay with tales of wolfhounds, thieves, and mysterious briefcase-toting moneymen. They wanted to see the carburetor.

That, of course, was never permitted.

No one reputable was allowed to see the mechanical miracle in action, let alone have a chance to measure its results. After the initial excitement over Pogue's 1936 announcement had faded, more serious types began to openly doubt that the carburetor would work as described. In the December 1936 issue of Automotive Industries magazine, its engineering editor, P.M. Heldt, said of a sketch of the Pogue carburetor: "The sketch fails to show any features hitherto unknown in carburetor practice, and absolutely gives no warrant for crediting the remarkable results claimed." Other journalists were beginning to voice similar opinions.

In response to calls to put up or shut up, Pogue's miracle carburetor was heard of no more. Faced with the choice of believing someone had made claims his invention couldn't later live up to or that a monied bad guy had bought up a technology to forever keep it off the market, at least some chose to believe the suppression theory. That the carburetor never made it to the public, they said, was proof enough of its existence.

I wonder why Hot fusion is an accepted line of research when cold fusion isn't? There is nothing to prevent the governments from spending their money on CF rather than HF, such as the ITER project.

And why isn't Big Business trying to take over this? Why don't they fund research and get patents (after all, they control the government and shouldn't have any problem in convincing the Patent Office that they should get patents). When they have patents, they can get money everytime a CF device is made.

Anyway, bring me proof of a working device and I'll accept it. But you should also bring along two things:

Reproducability and Peer review

Saying "it won't work 'cuz the stars aren't right" , "the men in black ate my homework" or "it worked fine yesterday" isn't proof of anything.

[John Kettler]

Kurtz,

Here's a novel idea. Instead of "yes butting" everything I say, why not bestir yourself and go look at some of the sources I've cited? Go to the INFINITE ENERGY website and peruse even some of the articles there. What you'll find is deep scientific/technical work and thought, not some schlock. It's so heavy duty that I'm hard pressed to even understand some of what's in the magazine. Rustle up FIRE FROM THE ICE and poke around in there, maybe even read it. If you do, I then invite you to compare and contrast the dirty tricks described there with what was done in 1950 to systematically stifle and punish all attempts at rational, scientific and open inquiry into the then heretical interdisciplinary theories of Velikovsky.

If you go Bearden's site you can see that many things you considerable impossible were patented and put into service as far back as the 1930s, and you can read about one of many New Energy devices available, some of which you can build yourself.

Reams of underlying scientific theory as to what powers such devices and how they work is available there online for free. I'm sure there are other sites galore devoted to nothing but New Energy tech and experimentation.

The P & F statement may stick in your craw, but you are, IMO, using your abreaction to that to throw the baby out with the bath water, while systematically ignoring a wealth of evidence I've presented showing that inventors and researchers in this field have for decades been the subject of everything from pretty harassment to brutal suppression, not to mention that those same interests have sent us to war to protect their banana crops!

It's not fair to keep demanding proof on the one hand while systematically refusing same when presented it. You can obtain, for example, highly detailed descriptions of the theory and design of the Patterson Cell, together with extensive details on the lab set up, the scientific instruments used to measure its performance and their calibration records. Based on what I saw, the level of rigor might satisfy even you.

Regards,

John Kettler

[John Kettler]

Kurtz,

To help you in your quest for the truth, I invite you to check out what about 2 seconds of Google fu

unearthed using "LENR" as the search term

http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&hl=en&q=LENR&btnG=Google+Search

If you go to the first site listed, click the Introduction link, then go to a Student's guide to Cold Fusion, you'll find your Holy Grail, reproducibility, has been attained. A then Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory scientist, working on his own, reports finding tritium in the solution after replicating the P & F experimental set up.

As he notes, there's nothing quite like confirming a discovery for yourself.

The third site http://www.infinite-energy.com/resources/iccf10.html

not only offers a long list of decades of successful LENR type experiments but a searing indictment of the systematic exclusion of this work from the scientific and scientific coverage mainstream. Again, you can't legitimately reject something because it's not peer reviewed while systematically preventing any access for such research to peer review. Once again, established science preaches openmindedness and unhindered inquiry while rigorously shutting out both new ideas and the experimental data supporting them.

This contrasts rather jarringly with what I was taught about both the scientific method and scientific ethics.

Regards,

John Kettler

[ January 01, 2006, 05:43 PM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[aka_tom_w]

This whole LENR / Cold Fusion issue is interesting...

Fraudulent con artists (pseudoscientists) described by Park are usually people without recognized credentials. Cold fusion protoscientists, on the other hand, at least those I met at two conferences, have excellent academic credentials. I suspect that the controversy surrounding cold fusion attracts con artists and charlatans. But such an assertion is difficult to prove. More obvious is the fact that people working in different areas of protoscience tend to attract each other. I do not know, for example, what the so-called ”zero point energy” field (5) has in common with cold fusion. But research reports in that field can often be found in journals and magazines devoted to cold fusion (6,7,8). Likewise, research on hydrinos -- atoms of hydrogen “excited” to presumably-existing states below the ground states -- and on perpetual motion devices, can be seen intermixed with cold fusion papers. My definition of cold fusion, described in (9), focuses on a correlation between a chemical process, such as electrolysis, and a nuclear process, such as emission of alpha particles.

Sometimes people say that experimental validation of cold fusion would inevitably result in “paradigm shifting.” I do not take this for granted. Many investigators try to understand cold fusion in terms of new theoretical models. But, as far as I know, their models are not able to identify conditions under which cold fusion anomalies (chemically induced nuclear reactions) become reproducible. Who said that the existing paradigm (the arsenal of existing models) will not be able to make sense out of reported experimental observations? On the other hand, how can a theory be validated when experimental data are not reproducible? The phrase “theories guide but experiments decide” describes the essence of scientific methodology. It implies that making cold fusion reproducible is a precondition of possible evolution from cold fusion protoscience to cold fusion science.

And here is my last question. How long can an area of research remain protoscientific without becoming pseudoscientific, by default? Yes, I know that asking questions is much easier than answering them. The main point is that the questions I am asking here belong to the sociology of science; they do not belong to science per se. I will end with a quote from wikipedia, an editable encyclopedia of science on the Internet (10). The description of cold fusion one finds there is worth reading. But keep in mind that anybody can change anything in wikipedia at any time. I can not be sure that what you will read there will be the same as I read several weeks ago.

web page

-tom w

[longbore]

This is probably the most convincing evidence I've ever seen when it come's to extra terrestrials. This essentially made me a believer.

www.disclosureproject.org

They're all former military and civil workers.

And this is where you can see the National Press Conference which happened in Washington DC 2001.

http://www.netro.ca/disclosure/npccmenu.htm

From the website:

"The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret."

[Kurtz]

I have Googled and looked at a bunch of sites. But since I'm not familiar with the technical details, there isn't much use in reading them. I don't have enough knowledge in nuclear physics to seperate the wheat from the chaff. I have no idea which of the sites are credible and which are false or just biased. That's why I want peer review. I want some scientist with the appropriate knowledge to follow the instructions and repeat the cold fusion. I glanced at the book "Fire and Ice" and saw it was from 1991. I suppose something must have happened in 15 years?

Looking at the sites, I get the impression this free energy business attracts a lot of loonies, and wouldn't be surprised if the lab trashings etc you mention is performed by some of these people in revenge for something or the other. But of course they blame it all on The Great Conspiracy

If it is so easy to get free energy, why don't we?

Why isn't Big Business filing patents for cold fusionall over the place to prevent us mortals from possibly making a buck?

I think there isn't much interest in energy research at all, because energy is cheap. Sure, the gasoline prices have increased, but it's not expensive. If energy really was expensive, there would be a real interest in saving energy.

People are not willing to pay a higher initial cost in order to save in the long run. It possible to build houses that use excess heat from people and appliances for heating. Good insulation, heat exchangers but still good ventilation. To bad it's a few percent more expensive to build this way. Actually, in Sweden the energy consumtion for new houses have increased something like 10% since 1990. No need to save on something that's cheap.

I'm planning on buying a new fridge and find it's cheaper to buy an older model with high energy consumtion than to buy a newer model with lower consumtion. The higher price of the newer model will take away the saving made by the lower electricity bill. Unless I keep the fridge for 20 years or so, which isn't likely.

[Kurtz]

By the way, I'm sure there are lots of evidence for the geocentric model of the Solar system.

[Yeknodathon]

Originally posted by aka_tom_w:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />THE FUTURE OF ADVANCED RUSSIAN WEAPONS

American Abrams M1A1 tank (serial # L13170) in Baghdad, after being hit by an 8-mm speed-of-light man portable gas plasma weapon. Plasma ball entered through skirt armor covering right track, cut through main hull armor (right side), then grazed rear of gunner's seat and control panel before gouging a 2" deep hole in main hull armor (left side). Just like sliding a hot knife through soft butter. Sadly for America, Los Alamos hasn't got anything even remotely like it.

This is from John's link in the above post...

"hit by an 8-mm speed-of-light man portable gas plasma weapon. Plasma ball entered through skirt armor covering right track, cut through main hull armor (right side), then grazed rear of gunner's seat and control panel before gouging a 2" deep hole in main hull armor (left side). Just like sliding a hot knife through soft butter."

Sounds like science fiction to me

Please tell me more... </font>

[Joe Shaw]

Originally posted by longbore:

This is probably the most convincing evidence I've ever seen when it come's to extra terrestrials. This essentially made me a believer.

www.disclosureproject.org

They're all former military and civil workers.

And this is where you can see the National Press Conference which happened in Washington DC 2001.

http://www.netro.ca/disclosure/npccmenu.htm

From the website:

"The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret."

Each to their own of course, but the following is interesting on the subject:

Steven Greer was at the conference to talk about his Project Disclosure, which three years after its much-ballyhooed launch at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., featuring twenty supposedly credentialed military/intelligence/defense-industry witnesses (reported in this column, March/April 2002) has yet to present any of its supposedly solid evidence of UFO cover-ups to any official government investigations. Greer reportedly acknowledged his disappointment that more progress has not yet been made, but he kept the faith. However, the defrocked psychologist Richard Boylan charged that Greer and others are in fact disinformation agents funded by powerful moneyed interests. Apparently the purpose of the disinformation must be to keep UFOlogists from finding out what Boylan considers the real stuff, like alien-hybrid children and “Walk-in” Star Visitors (a contemporary analog of demonic possession).

Skeptical Inquirer

And why is it that conspiracy theorists are so skeptical of the media and government and, at the same time, so willing to accept ANY half-baked notion that anyone with access to the internet wishes to post?

Joe

[flamingknives]

Originally posted by aka_tom_w:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />THE FUTURE OF ADVANCED RUSSIAN WEAPONS

American Abrams M1A1 tank (serial # L13170) in Baghdad, after being hit by an 8-mm speed-of-light man portable gas plasma weapon. Plasma ball entered through skirt armor covering right track, cut through main hull armor (right side), then grazed rear of gunner's seat and control panel before gouging a 2" deep hole in main hull armor (left side). Just like sliding a hot knife through soft butter. Sadly for America, Los Alamos hasn't got anything even remotely like it.

This is from John's link in the above post...

"hit by an 8-mm speed-of-light man portable gas plasma weapon. Plasma ball entered through skirt armor covering right track, cut through main hull armor (right side), then grazed rear of gunner's seat and control panel before gouging a 2" deep hole in main hull armor (left side). Just like sliding a hot knife through soft butter."

Sounds like science fiction to me

Please tell me more... </font>

[John Kettler]

Kurtz,

I cited FIRE FROM THE ICE as an insider's view on

the dirty tricks employed by the hot fusion community at MIT in order to stifle cold fusion research before it could really take root. I certainly didn't intend it to define the current state of the art for cold fusion. I did give you an example where the P & F results were reproduced by an independent and highly credentialed experimenter.

As for peer review, did you read what Gene Mallove said about the systematic exclusion of cold fusion research from mainstream scientific publications?

This was in the second link I gave on cold fusion and was taken from a paper he gave for the International Cold Fusion Conference 10. From what I've seen in my limited delving, the first link is an absolutely terrific place to start learning about the whole LENR field.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Thomm]

Originally posted by John Kettler:

As for peer review, did you read what Gene Mallove said about the systematic exclusion of cold fusion research from mainstream scientific publications?

Aren't there plenty of publications?

Britz's Cold Nuclear Fusion Bibliography

David J. Nagel reports about 1700 papers on Cold Fusion in 1998 ("The Status of Cold Fusion").

Publications on the recline:

Cold Fusion Papers Publications Status

It seems that the research field is dying.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Wicky]

New Scientist - 14 things that do not make sense

1 The placebo effect

2 The horizon problem

3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays

4 Belfast homeopathy results

5 Dark matter

6 Viking's methane - So why no party?

7 Tetraneutrons

8 The Pioneer anomaly

9 Dark energy

10 The Kuiper cliff

11 The Wow signal

12 Not-so-constant constants

13 Cold fusion

14 Brain in a jar

Plus if this had gone ahead, would have been interesting to simulate in CM SF:

Pentagon reveals rejected chemical weapons

THE Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal.

Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal says.

[aka_tom_w]

Things that do not make sense.

if the speed of light is a constant (the "C" in E=mc2) at about 300,000 km per sec then how is it that if a beam of light enters a body of water its "speed" slow's down, (ok thats easy water is denser and slows the speed of light, down to what speed I don't know, but it is measureable and it does slow down)

NOW here is the question, if the same beam of light exits the body of water it accelerates back to the speed of light in air (about 300,000 km/sec). OK So where does the energy come from to account for this "magical" acceleration??? Why does the speed of light not exit the water at the slower, "in water" degraded speed of light? What magical force makes the light accelerate back up to 300,000 km/sec?

I have been told "Science" has a good answer for this question but it does not really make sense to me. I will dig up the "good answer" from an old e-mail and post it later today for those who care or are curious.

You can just file that under "More Stuff that does not make sense."

-tom w

[aka_tom_w]

Spoiler

.

.

.

.

.

"scientific answer" to the speed of light question above

Just in case you actually care if "they" got it right....

Hi Tom,

First off, light is an odd thing, it has rules of its own, a lot of which physicists are pretty certain about, but some stuff about the nature of light isn’t yet fully understood.

(So "they" admit it "light has rules of its own" and " some stuff about the nature of light isn’t yet fully understood." OK)

Anything with mass has kinetic energy E=½mv2, where m is its mass, and v is its velocity (or speed), so if it slows down it’s losing kinetic energy to some other form of energy (heat, gravitational potential energy, etc.). Similarly it takes an input of energy to speed these things up. (Agreed)

But light has no mass, so none of this applies.

If light has no mass, does that mean it has no energy? Well, it doesn’t have kinetic energy in the classical sense, but it does have energy. The energy of light is related to it’s frequency through the equation E=hv, where h is Planck’s constant (6.626068 × 10-34 Joule-seconds) and v is the frequency of light. Red light has a lower energy than blue light because it is lower in frequency.

Now, when light is refracted in a medium like water it slows down, but at the same time its wavelength decreases (the light waves become compressed), so that the frequency remains the same. That's why we don't see things shift in colour when we look at it through water. Frequency being constant means the energy is also constant. No energy is lost when light enters the water, and similarly no energy is gained when it exits.

Physicists around the world can remain content that energy is always conserved.

Thanks for your questions. Stay tuned for more answers on Speakers Corner.

Kiran, Sara, and David