Re: solution to the world's energy needs

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Hugh Haskell wrote:

> On Monday, 13 Sept 1999, William Beatty wrote:
>
> I rather think that you overstate your case about the conditions
> regarding research into flight in 1900. Almost any biography of the
> Wright brothers will leave you hanging on your seat, wondering if
> they will really get there first. From the point of view of the
> informed observer in 1900-1903, it was not obvious that the Wright
> brothers were on the inside track. Langley was working hard to build
> a flying machine, and had he been a better engineer, he might have
> succeeded. After all, he had the full resources of the Smithsonian
> Institution behind him as well as the not inconsiderable prestige of
> Alexander Graham Bell. Had not Chanute been killed in a glider
> accident, he might have been a contender, or an ally of the Wrights
> and helped them to make it even earlier than they did. Had someone
> else redone Cayley's  wind tunnel experiments before the Wrights
> realized that those results were flawed, they might have gotten there
> first.

I agree that we have a vast difference of opinion.  I cannot see any way
around it.  I see that if the Wrights had not breached the wall of
disbelief, than all of the examples you state above would also have
failed.  The Wrights today would be regarded as crackpots who chased after
impossible things, not as professionals who would have succeeded but for a
slight amount of bad luck.  Note that in all of your examples, they all
either failed in fact, or they would have failed if not for riding on the
findings (or on the publicity) of the Wrights.  In hindsight, history
looks sensible if the Wrights succeed, yet the same hindsight would reveal
a very different story if the Wright's had not.  (I suspect that, had they
failed, today we would regard the Wrights *exactly* the same way we regard
Pons and Fleichman: as deluded failures, and paranoid to boot, since they
complain that everyone was against them.)

If we re-run history and remove the Wrights, here's what would happen.
All of the other crackpots will fail to achive a blatent demonstration of
a flying machine.  Gradually the participants will give up, or will be
killed in crashes.  The mainstream of scientists will continue to follow
Newcomb and Lord Kelvin in proclaiming powered flight to be a pipe dream.
Then many decades later (even a century later), after a few generations
have passed and after the virulent airplane-haters have gone away, the
whole process will begin again, but this time there will be far more
advanced materials and power supplies available.  Flight will be quickly
achived.  Historians will marvel at the fact that flight *could* have been
achived as early as 1900, but bad luck kept any experimenter from major
successes, and only a major success would have burst the "bubble of
disbelief" which prevented the rest of science from putting serious work
into striving for a flying machine.

Humans suffer under a fallacy that the way things are is the way they are
"spozed to be."  When operating under this fallacy, we seethe most
horrible things perfectly justified and acceptable.  When NOT operating
under this fallacy, we tend to scream IT NEED NOT BE LIKE THIS!!!!!



The same thing MIGHT happen to Cold Fusion.  Researchers a couple of
hundred years in the future might come up with a satisfactory theory, and
realize that Pons and Fleichman were right all along.  The large
collection of anti-CF books and articles will become fodder for
generations of Sociologists.  However, I doubt that an event such as this
would teach "Science" a thing.  Similar events in the past have not
penetrated our thick heads: erroneous ridicule of the airplane didn't
penetrate the consciousnesses of scientists.  Erroneous ridicule of space
flight didn't do it either.  We justify our thoughtless acts of
suppression by saying "well, the suppression didn't work now, did it?"

Suppose "antigravity" is discovered in a few years?  Scientists will
suddenly claim that antigravity was never ridiculed!  If this occurs, it
will be an outright lie, since at present any researcher who wishes to
pursue "antigravity" will become the target of deresion, and will find
him/herself out on the curb as occurred with Podkletnov, and as ALMOST
occured with Ning Li at Huntsville.

(Are people aware that Li arrived one morning to find her entire
"Antigravity"  laboratory empty, and all of the equipment moved out into
the hall?  This drew some publicity.  Oops, it was an oversight says the
administration.  Yeah, and what if it *hadn't* drawn any publicity?  You
aren't paranoid if "they" really are out to get you.  And no, there are no
conspiracies, there are simply the acts of individuals who think they are
preventing "waste of funding", or preventing "embarassment to our
organization."  See my page about Heretical Antigravity experimentation.
The opening paragraph is not meant to be funny in the least.

 http://www.amasci.com/freenrg/antigrav.html)

I see that history is open to interpretation and re-writing.  If the world
condemns the Wrights as obvious hoaxers and liars, and then they are
proved right, then all of the "condemners" go silent, and everyone who is
embarassed about the sneering will hope that history will not notice them.
And so it does not.  If the same thing occurs with Goddard and rocketry,
then the abuse Goddard received will be whitewashed, and everyone will
falsely pat themselves upon the back while imagining that they supported
Goddard during his bad times (or imagining that they would have, had they
lived at that time.)

If historians and scientists fiercely believe that Science progresses
boldly forwards, then they will become blind to the fact that Kuhnian
Paradigm Shifts are occurring.  If they believe that Science always
supports new ideas, and that good ideas are never crushed by disbelief on
the part of scientists, then they will not see any ideas being crushed no
matter how closely they examine the details of history.

Hey, if historians and scientists are so self-perceptive, why were Kuhn's
ideas such a shock?  Why were they the least little bit controversial?  If
Scientists are so unflawed, then Kuhn's concepts should have been seen as
inherently obvious centuries ago.

The "losers" in a paradigm shift sometimes are the authors of history
books.  They will not admit that they supported the older ideas and
attacked the correct ones.  They will not write about the derision that a
new idea received, especially if they themselves participated in the
sneering. They will pretend that they saw the merit of the idea early on.
Think about it: if the majority of scientists and historians do this, then
a book like Kuhn's STRUCTURES OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS will be a
bombshell, and the controversy it triggers will not die off for decades.



> > Yes, members of the public certainly saw their aircraft.  The public even
> > wrote numbers of letters to the local Dayton newspapers, and the
> > newspapers' response was to complain about all of the time that their
> > people had to waste in opening all these letters from crazy people who
> > were seeing impossible things.  Those newspapers refused to send a
> > reporter to check out the Wright's claims.  After this experience, the
> > Wrights packed up and moved to Paris.
>
> This isn't too surprising. Although they didn't try to keep their
> efforts in Dayton a secret, they didn't make a huge effort to create
> a public sensation, either.

What?  Flying in plain sight for an entire year next to a railroad line,
next to a city, while sending letters to the press and to scientists,
isn't a "huge effort"?!!!!  Well, I suppose that since their effort
failed, in hindsight we can decide that it must not have been "huge", and
that is why nobody in authority came to see the demonstrations.  Yet I am
stunned by your reasoning.  The Wrights efforts were sufficient, if we
suppose that there are no near-infinite barriers of disbelief.  Suppose
you invent a flying machine, then in order to set the world on fire, you
just fly it in an open field for a week.  Oooops, that didn't work, so fly
it for a month.  Huh, nobody noticed.  Fly it for nearly a year.  Nope,
not a single reporter showed up.  Write lots of letters to industry,
government, the military.  Nobody believes you.  OK, give up and take the
whole shebang to Paris, where people are not insanely disbeliving, and
don't say "if this was real, the press would have told us!", and where
people will actually accept what is right before their eyes.


> And the people who they kept inviting to
> visit them were probably the least likely to do so. Few people in the
> army at the time could have envisioned any practical use for one of
> these "flying machines," and there were very few scientists who had
> any particular interest in what they were doing, and if they did,
> such as Langley, they were interested in doing their own flying
> projects. Why should the give free publicity to the Wrights?

Are you say that everyone *believed* that the Wrights were flying, but
they didn't think it was important?

Really?

Here's an analogy.  What if somebody today claimed to have built an
antigravity device, and were giving daily demonstrations of a "UFO" in a
field near a city.  Would the scientific/technical/press communities
BELIEVE them, and simply dismiss the event as unimportant?  Or would they
declare it to be a scam, and wouldn't even be moved to go out and debunk
such an obvious hoax?

> Business
> people would not be interested if they couldn't see a potential
> profit in it, and the press is notorious for ignoring important
> stories until they are forced to by events.

Business people ignoring claims of a FLYING MACHINE?  Accepting it, yet
not having the least bit of curiosity?

This is insane.

It's clear to me that you are wrong.  The people of 1905 were not
"believing yet incurious."  In truth nobody believed the Wrights' claims,
and so they could not see any reason to go to the Huffman field in Dayton
and watch a genuine flying machine in action.  It would be a waste of time
to even bother debunking such an obvious hoax.


> >   Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin,
> >   president, Royal Society, 1895.
> >
> >  "The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances,
> >   known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a
> >   practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through
> >   the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the
> >   demonstration of any physical fact to be."  - astronomer S. Newcomb,
> >   1906



> The history of science is replete with silly quotations by experts
> and others about various phenomena that the speaker didn't think was
> possible or had happened.

True, but it makes a difference when the quotes come from the major
scientists of their time.  Look who is doing the speaking. These are not
small-time reporters who don't understand physics.  These are the leading
lights of their times.  Newcomb has a modern equivalent:  James Randi.  Or
even better: Carl Sagan.  Newcomb was a top astronomer in the US, and also
debunker of pseudoscience.  He declared powered flight to be impossible.
This put powered flight in just the same spot that "Yeti hunting" or
"Telepathy experiments" is today.


> Going back further, Jefferson is said to have remarked scornfully
> about the reports of "rocks falling from the sky," shortly before
> they were finally verified by reports that were considered more
> reliable than any previous ones.

Actually, this is a good one, because scientists of the early 1800s almost
universally condemned the idea of "meteorites" as being disgusting peasant
superstition.  Your quote is a perfect example, because Jefferson wasn't a
crazy outlier, he was quoting the mainstream opinion.  It wasn't until
Ernst Chladni became a "meteorite believer" and tracked down some
irrefutable evidence that finally the rest of the scientific community
changed opinion.  How does this event support your position?  It certainly
seems to support my own.  Concensus-disbelief is a disease which is just
as irrational and just as powerful as concensus-belief.


> I can't remember the quotation but
> it had to do with what he would be willing to believe before he would
> believe in the rocks from the sky.

  "I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors had lied, than
   to believe that rocks could fall from the sky"

In other words, once the scientific community decides that meteors do not
exist, then any evidence presented by their colleagues simply indicates
that the "yankee professors" are hoaxers, or are deluded.  In this way the
evidence is deflected, and the disbelief maintains its hold.

> And the alternative was something
> we still think to be pretty unlikely. But the fact is that, once
> reports were received that the relevant people considered reliable,
> the phenomenon was quickly accepted and hypotheses developed and
> tested to account for it.

No.  Reports were ignored and ridiculed for decades.  Scientists were
convinced that there WERE no rocks in space, and therefor any evidence to
the contrary could be dismissed as peasant supersition (as today we igore
reports of masses of fish falling from the clear sky.)  We mostly have
Chladni to thank for changing the situation.  Chladni pulled a "Wright
Brothers" and burst the bubble of disbelief.  And so today we all pretend
that science quickly accepted meteors as soon as solid evidence was seen.
The truth is far more embarassing, and it points out a disease in science
that Kuhn's work also illuminates:  "Pathological skepticism", the
counterpart to "pathological science," causes clear evidence to be
ignored.  "Pathological Skepticism" is irrational, emotion-based
disbelief, the counterpart to irrational, emotion-based beliefs that
plague the non-scientist portion of mankind.


> And what about cold fusion? Is that dismissed by most scientists out
> of pathological disbelief?

Sure.  Either it is real and is being suppressed by pathological
disbelief, or it is a mistake, and is being suppressed by completely
PROPER disbelief.  Take your pick.  Review all of the CF papers, then
decide if all of those researchers are deluded, or if all of the rest of
science is in the grip of a, ahem, "disbelief-system."  Evidence is
supposed to determine the decision, no?  But what if we start throwing out
evidence on the grounds that the researchers who provide it *must* be
deluded?  Then we have subverted the process of science.  How do we decide
which researchers are deluded and which are not?  Well, anyone who studies
Cold Fusion and finds nothing, that is a competent researcher.  And anyone
who finds that Cold Fusion does have valid existance, that is a deluded
researcher.  Soon we have an entire "underground community" of
professionals who study Cold Fusion, and the above-ground scientific
community is convinced that they are all deluded fools.  Yet it's a
self-fulfilling prophecy.

> I seriously doubt it. The potential for
> this technology, should it be true, it simply too great to dismiss it
> out of hand, and, if you recall, it wasn't. In fact many people tried
> to replicate Pons & Fleishman's experiments.

This claim is arguable.  Certainly the P&F experiment was non-trivial, and
was guaranteed to fail if the researchers didn't know what they were
doing.  In that case, is it "replication"?  If I recall those times, the
general assumption was that the P&F experiment *was* trivial.  Under such
an assumption, lack of results are dammning.  But if the P&F experiment
was extremely flakey, and if it could be quenched by a large variety of
unknown variables, then only a very serious attempt to exactly reproduce
the original P&F experiment would be a genuine replication.


> It was only after it
> became clear that they couldn't be reproduced, and P&F became more
> and more secretive about their methods, that skepticism overtook
> optimism, and the idea was dismissed.

P&F became more and more secretive?  Says who?

P&F were initially secretive it is true, but then within months gradually
revealed more and more, and also began to work with others in refining
their replications.  (Oh, but these replications don't count, since anyone
who comes up with positive evidence is by definition suspect.)  Thus we
can ignore the EPRI findings.  (Is there any other reason why the EPRI
report was ignored?  I can't think of one.)  "Don't show me any evidence,"
because the concensual-groupmind of science has already made its decision
back in 1989, and anyone who objects, and anyone who finds supportive
evidence for CF, is defined as a biased person who is trying to weasle out
from under the decision.

> This, moreover, is typical when
> some major new claim is made about nature. If the experiments are
> easily reproduced, as were P&F's, the initial reports are positive,
> but as time goes on the positive reports become fewer and farther
> between and negative reports become more common, eventually becoming
> nearly universal. Provided the inital reports are a false alarm. If
> the phenomenon is real, then positive reports keep coming in, as well
> as reports of new related phenomena.

The experiments were not easily reproduced.  Yet positive reports keep
coming in.  The CF literature is full of them.  They are rejected on the
grounds that they are positive.  If CF does not exist, then positive
reports indicate the presence of mistakes.  (Yet skeptics claim that the
number of positive reports fell and fell.  This is wrong.  It rose and
rose.)

We cannot easily see the truth, because whenever numerous scientists do
support an "acceptable" discovery, we see this as evidence that the
discovery must be real.  When numerous scientists support an
"unacceptable" discover, we see this is evidence that Pathological Science
is powerful, and can seduce anyone who isn't careful.  (It can even seduce
Schwinger, and Arthur C. Clark!)

See, we can twist things in either direction.  What then is the truth?
Simple:  make no pre-judgements, and do not trust any majority opinions.
Reality is not determined by voting, and "groupthink" decisions made by
the scientific community are a hidden cancer in the organism.  Our only
option is to take the difficult path of thinking for ourselves.  Review
evidence on our own, go read those horrible disgusting "cold fusion"
journals, and don't care a whit if they turn us into "believers", and we
end up going against the majority opinion of the scientific community.



> This was the case with high
> temperature superconductivity, which has now become mainstream
> science, although its original discoverers were reportedly told by
> their superiors to stop this line of research because it was proving
> fruitless. They continued clandestinely, and the rest is history.

Very interesting.  I had not heard that HTSC encountered the disbelievers.
Wow.  What if their superiors had insisted that the research was wasting
funding?  Jeeze, HTSC could never have been born!


> I don't believe that most scientists fall into the category of
> "pathologically skeptical," although I hope that they can be counted
> as "rationally skeptical."

Anyone who has made a decision regarding "Cold Fusion" based on what the
rest of the scientific community has decided... has fallen into
pathological skepticism.

To make a proper decision, each of us must inspect the evidence presented
by both sides of the controversy.  Read both the Taubes book and the
Mallove book.  Ignore what other colleagues think, and instead show
courage and take a stand.  If we all depend on the concensus decisions of
the scientific community, and all follow the lead of what "everybody
knows", then we are a heard of sheep with no leader.  If the heard should
suddenly stop, or suddenly go rocketing off in a particular direction,
then that is a stampede, not a rational act.  To eliminate the "herd of
sheep" effect, simply ignore the motions of the neighboring sheep, and
think independantly, and refuse to be biased by what the rest of the
community thinks.


> It is important to remember that when new
> and amazing things are reported, that the burden of proof rests on
> the reporter and that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary
> evidence." It may take a while, as it did with Wegener's hypothesis
> of continental drift, but if it is valid, it will eventually be shown
> to be true.


I disagree.  Because disbelief is so powerful, some discoveries might be
inhibited for all time.  If it is valid, disbelief yet might present an
insurmountable barrier.  Perhaps in the long run (centuries) the disbelief
might erode.  Still, I wouldn't use that fact to justify the disbelief.
Science requires rational skepticism, not 100% disbelief which causes us
to dismiss evidence on the grounds that the evidence indicates delusion on
the part of its presenters.



> There are areas of science that are so well developed that it is not
> unreasonable to reject challenges to them out of hand; for example,
> the laws of thermodynamics.

One genuine perpetual motion machine of the 2nd kind will destroy modern
thermodynamics, correct?  (Well, Thermo will probably quickly rebuild
itself again to encompass the new discovery.) It is highly unlikely that
such an event will ever occur.  But if we become CERTAIN that it will
never ocurr, and if as a result we start refusing to ever inspect the
"crackpot"  evidence, then perhaps many crackpots will build genuine PPMs,
and the walls of disbelief will not admit a particle of evidence that this
has occurred.  What if the crackpots start companies and sell PPM heaters?
The FTC will jail them, since they know that PPMs are impossible, and they
know that "perpetual motion" scams are common.


> During several hundred years of
> searching, no violations have been discovered. Similarly, in the case
> of the so-called "paranormal phenomena," in a similar time scale no
> credible evidence for their existence has been found. It is not
> "pathological skepticism" to reject such claims in the absence of
> convincing evidence.

There is plenty of evidence for paranormal phenomena.  The trouble is, the
evidence is not convincing, and therefor we say that it is not evidence.
"Not convincing" is the issue here, and as soon as we agree to this, we
see that perhaps the evidence is strong, yet the walls of disbelief are
impenetrable, or perhaps the evidence truely is weak, and it truely is
"not convincing" in an absolute sense.

My point?  If evidence is "not convincing", and if we accept that
"disbelief systems" can exist in science, then any number of discredited
discoveries might in fact be valid.   Random thought... what if
Blondlot's N-rays actually were real?  What if he was seeing real but
borderline phenomena, and the "aluminum prism" event was an unfortunate
mistake in an otherwise valid research topic?  ROTFL!!!!  No, I don't
believe it.  But still...

:)


> Sorry for running on. This is a favorite topic of mine.

Heh.   Don't get me started.   :)




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