User:Abd/Essay

working title: Essay:Skeptical or pseudoskeptical?

Marcello Truzzi, one of the founders of CSICOP, coined the term Pseudoskeptic to refer to those who claim to be skeptics, but who actually are believers in a point of view contrary to what they purport to debunk. This essay is an examination of an example from The Skeptic's Dictionary, The Liars at CBS's "60 Minutes".

"Liars" refers to a claim made by CBS, in a 2009 broadcast, to have selected Robert Duncan based on having consulted the American Physical Society. The Society itself, as a formal entity, claimed not to have been consulted; rather a member of the society apparently provided a list of physicists, on request. The claim in the broadcast was mildly sloppy, yet our "skeptic" makes a very big deal out of this -- "Liars" -- and it's obvious why.

Apparently CBS did pull the video as a result of a complaint from the APS, but replaced it with an edited version at. Did CBS actually consult the Society? They probably thought so! Perhaps they called up a contact in the APS and got the recommendation. The point was to find a reputable physicist, and they were not soliciting the endorsement of the APS. They found Robert Duncan, who was indeed reputable and who apparently was initially skeptical about cold fusion.

And then, having established CBS News as a bunch of liars, SkepDic goes on:


 * 'Scott Pelley practically handed over his "60 Minutes" segment on cold fusion last Sunday to Michael McKubre, an electro-chemist with a vivid imagination and a colorful cartoon illustration of his vision of what's happening at the molecular level when he sometimes gets small but measurable amounts of heat from his experiments. (He doesn't know why it doesn't always work, though.) "At the atomic level, palladium looks like a lattice and the electricity drives the deuterium to the palladium. They sit on the surface and they pop inside the lattice," said McKubre with a straight face and no evidence.


 * Michael McKubre is an electrochemist, that's true. McKubre was retained, through SRI International, by the Electric Power Research Institute, to investigate cold fusion, in the early 1990s, and McKubre did some of the critical fundamental research. McKubre is a reserved and cautious commentator, but he's also seen the clear evidence for low energy nuclear reactions. The cartoon was fanciful. We don't know what the actual reaction mechanism is, and it's likely (my opinion) that it is not the two-deuteron concept that was portrayed. But what McKubre said "with a straight face" is straight, standard electrochemistry. It's not controversial, but, not understanding anything about either electrochemistry or cold fusion, SkepDic considers it unestablished, preposterous woo.


 * McKubre does know why the "heat effect" often doesn't show, he did much of the experimental work that made it clear. It's the metal. To get the heat effect, very particular conditions are required, specifically loading of the metal so thoroughly with deuterium that the atomic ratio of deuterium to palladium is over 90%. At the time that Pons and Fleischmann first announced, it was widely thought that over 70% loading was impossible; perhaps for this reason, many of the early replication failures did not attempt to get loading that high, and assumed that if the effect were real, it would show up at lower loading. There are other easy ways to fail to see the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect, such as using heavy water that has absorbed light water from the air, heavy water rapidly interchanges itself with light water in atmospheric humidity, and 1% light water apparently poisons the effect.


 * 'But the clincher for many viewers, I'm sure, was the interview with Rob Duncan, who is portrayed as having started out a skeptic but was converted to being a true believer once he saw what was going on in some labs where cold fusion work is being done. After all, Duncan represented the APS, the most prestigious physics organization in America. If that group of hard-nosed scientists sent their best man to investigate and he came back a believer, then how could the armchair skeptic have the hubris to question the reality of the work of such geniuses as Pons and Fleishmann?


 * Apparently anyone who accepts the evidence for cold fusion as being of interest, as possibly indicating a true anomaly, is a "true believer." Duncan was not retained by CBS to "represent" the APS, surely that would have taken specific authorization. What SkepDic is doing is trying to create a story based on what they believe -- that no "hard-nosed scientist" would be taken in by cold fusion. Apparently the species of "hard-nosed scientist" has vanished from the reviewers at mainstream journals.


 * What is being defended here? The armchair skeptic. The skeptic who doesn't understand a field, but who wants to express "skeptical opinion" that is based on ... that is based on ....


 * Nothing but held belief.


 * Cold fusion is not established based on the work of Pons and Fleischmann. It's based, like all established science, on the work of many, many researchers. Pons and Fleischmann discovered their eponymous effect, which was called "cold fusion" in the media, but they actually claimed that the large bulk of the heat they had found appeared to be from an "unknown nuclear reaction." They made an error in measuring neutrons, so they thought they were seeing a low level of neutron radiation, far lower than would be expected from ordinary deuterium fusion, hence their claim of an "unknown" reaction. In fact, the reaction they found, whatever it is, is aneutronic. It doesn't produce, by itself, any neutrons at all.


 * It was difficult to replicate the heat effect (and it's still not easy). The early attempts failed. However, successes did start coming in within a few months. For about a year, the number of failed replications exceeded the confirmations. However, after that, the tide shifted, and more confirmations of the effect have ultimately been published in peer-reviewed journals than failures.


 * The RationalWiki article, Cold fusion, still prominently repeats the claim that cold fusion was "irreproducible," even though that is contradicted by other text in the article and in sources cited.


 * 'Bob Park notes:
 * 'Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri, went to Israel with 60 Minutes to visit Energetics Technologies, which claims SuperWave Fusion will solve the energy problem. It shouldn’t be necessary to remind scientists that neither visiting a laboratory, nor peer reviewing a manuscript, is enough. There must be independent replication of the ET claims. Without replication, the claims are nothing. The genius behind ET is the CVO, Chief Visionary Officer, Irving Dardik, MD. Dardik got into cold fusion after losing his license to practice medicine in New York. It puts us in mind of Randy Mills of BlackLight Power, another MD who says he can solve the energy problem. Is SuperWave Fusion another scam?


 * The ET claims for "SuperWave Fusion" were successfully replicated by McKubre et al, published in the American Chemical Society Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, Oxford University Press, 2008. Bob Park is a physicist with a long history of opposition to cold fusion, and he's a classic pseudoskeptic. His book, Voodoo Science, with substantial space devoted to cold fusion, but with little real information about it, is promoted by SkepDic.


 * The story of Dardik is narrated in a way to create a standard pseudoskeptical story. It's a classic device, to raise a point calculated to create the impression of tinfoil hats. Dardik does not actually direct research at Energetics Technologies, he provided certain ideas and funding, and, of course, the replications (by McKubre at SRI and by ENEA, the Italian nuclear energy agency) have nothing to do with the "doctor" question.


 * Just to add to this, Irving Dardik doesn't live in New York, and apparently continues to practice medicine, not that this is relevant. SkepDic is speaking to an audience of believers -- believers in the popular "skeptical" positions.


 * Park assumes that there was no replication. That assumption is common in pseudoskeptical discussion of cold fusion.


 * 'Pelley did interview one skeptic, however. Richard Garwin helped design the most successful fusion experiment of all time: the hydrogen bomb. He told Pelley the reason McKubre and others don't get measurable heat all the time is that they're deluding themselves. Their results are due to their equipment, not cold fusion (or to low energy nuclear reaction, as defenders call it these days). In short, the cold fusion work isn't more than junk science (the title of the segment), despite the efforts of "60 Minutes" to make it so. Revising their work promotes their error and lack of integrity.


 * Once again, SkepDic thinks he's really got them on this APS claim. When I saw this video, when it first came out (it was anticipated and widely viewed), I had no idea that APS was endorsing "cold fusion," and I'd have been astonished if they had, precisely because of the extensive influence of Park in the APS. The idea that somehow APS had recommended Robert Duncan was only mildly interesting, and I certainly did not take it as any kind of endorsement. SkepDic thinks he can win on this, that's why he promotes it so much. It's all about debate and trying to make his position look solid.


 * Now, Garwin. Richard Garwin is a famous skeptic on cold fusion. His work on hot fusion would be completely irrelevant. Physicists somehow think that any knowledge in any area of nuclear physics would make one an expert on cold fusion, but cold fusion is an "unknown nuclear reaction," and those who actually know condensed matter physics know how little we know about it; hot fusion takes place in a highly simplified environment, where one can calculate reaction rates, and the calculations become wicked complicated in condensed matter, the solid state. Mostly in the solid state, atoms can't move about, but palladium deuteride (and other metal hydrides) are, in fact, different, because the deuterium is mobile within the metal lattice. There is a lot we don't know about it; for example, a hot fusion physicist recently noted that we don't know the velocity distributions for deuterium nuclei in palladium deuteride.


 * Garwin says, to his credit, what many skeptics think: "Something must be wrong." But postulating that "something is wrong" is not science. It's a belief in theory believed to be established, otherwise we would routinely assume that experimental results are correct unless they are controverted. All that Garwin has said here is that he doesn't believe the results. He does not actually criticize the results, he points to no specific possible error.


 * SkepDic doesn't really understand what Garwin wrote, and thinks that it's a refutation of the low-energy nuclear reaction claims. No, all Garwin says is "I don't believe it." He doesn't say why. I'll guess. He thinks that "cold fusion" is "d-d" fusion, i.e., two deuterons being mashed together, which takes a huge amount of energy, plus it produces well-known effects that are not seen with cold fusion, hence Garwin thinks that whatever is happening it could not possibly be "cold fusion." But Garwin has missed something, as did many people: what if it actually is what Pons and Fleischmann claimed, an "unknown nuclear reaction." Not "d-d fusion," which is, after all, well-known?


 * 'Pelley and "60 Minutes" have lost a lot of credibility by this sloppy piece of propaganda. Rather than publicly admit that they misled their viewers by claiming to have the endorsement of the APS and converted a hard-nosed skeptic into a true believer, they tried to erase the evidence. How stupid is that in an era of TiVo? Are they banking on the fact that most people don't know that they've been duped and are unlikely to find out?


 * I'm surprised that SkepDic didn't revise this. The video was only yanked for a very short time, while CBS edited it to remove the reference to the APS, since APS had complained. The original video did not claim "the endorsement" of the APS, and the video did not claim that a "hard-nosed skeptic" had been turned "into a true believer." That's purely a SkepDic fantasy. "True believer" is pseudoskeptical rant and cant.


 * 'Listen to Pelley defend cold fusion. He sounds like Dean Radin defending psi: top scientists have shown in hundreds of experiments around the world ... even in the Pentagon! ... that something interesting is going on!


 * Once again, appeal to classic pseudoskeptical positions, an attempt to link all the "believers" together. Of course, the U.S. Department of Defense has lately been funding certain cold fusion work, mostly through DARPA, and a position paper was issued pointing to cold fusion research matters that certainly are of defense significance. To the pseudoskeptic, this is all a horrific example of gullibility, and it is not necessary for the "armchair skeptic" to actually read scientific papers and understand them.


 * All that is necessary is to remember that cold fusion was debunked years ago, that anyone who says otherwise is, by definition, a crank, and the truth about this is not found in scientific journals, it's found on skeptical websites.

Debating with a reader, SkepDic continued:


 * 'Like 99.99% of the viewers of 60 Minutes I have no idea what it means for electricity to drive deuterium to palladium or how this supports cold fusion. McKubre used a cartoon to illustrate his point. I found this quite amusing, as if a few colored graphics is all one needs to defend a controversial claim (about cold fusion, not about what electricity can do).


 * Actually, "electricity" doesn't drive deuterium into palladium, not by itself. SkepDic is showing that he doesn't understand why palladium deuteride would be of interest. PdD absorbs deuterium readily, to the point where the deuterium is so dense that it is equivalent to an extraordinarily high pressure. This density is not adequate to cause fusion, not by itself, and Pons and Fleischmann didn't think that it would, beyond possibly increasing the rate at which tunneling would occur (classical fusion does occur at room temperature, in theory, except the rate is silly-silly low). They knew that the issue had never been investigated, and what they were doing was primary research, attempting to confirm their view that any possible increase would still be below detection. When their experiment melted down, apparently generating more heat than would have been available from chemistry, they got, shall we say, seriously interested. They also scaled the thing down.


 * The graphic was not intended to "defend a claim," but to explain it, and, my opinion, it was an error, an oversimplification, because we don't actually know what the real reaction is. From very substantial evidence, though, deuterium is indeed being fused to helium, but quite possibly -- or probably -- not the picture presented in the cartoon of two at a time. "Fusion" is known by the production of a fusion product, namely helium, at the right ratio of energy-released to helium-produced for the reaction to be some kind of fusion of deuterium.


 * 'cold fusion itself is not a free-energy scheme, but it is being promoted as one by an Israeli lab.


 * Cold fusion does release energy, but the approach being used by Energetics Technologies, the whole Fleischmann-Pons Effect, is not necessarily practical. However, we don't know, for sure, if research isn't done, and especially research to determine the actual reaction mechanism. This is not "free-energy," any more than hot fusion, consuming hundreds of millions of dollars a year in research costs, with no payback expected before 2050, would be "free energy." This is research attempting to find a way to make a known physical effect more reliable. Some of the ET results, if they could be made to happen reliably, might be robust enough for some applications. But, so far, most cells following the ET design produce only modest amounts of power.


 * The pseudoskeptical position denies the actual science, and does so with a host of irrelevant arguments.

The "liars" page ends with a comment from a retired professor:


 * '2 Oct 2009
 * 'The electrochemical uptake of deuterium into palladium is standard electrochemistry. Pons and Fleischmann claimed that if this is carried out at a sufficiently high overvoltage, the effective concentration of deuterium is increased to the point at which fusion occurs. They were taken very seriously for a few days, until Argonne Natl Lab showed that the excess heat attributed to fusion actually arose from some ordinary chemical side-reactions that had not been taken into account.


 * 'So Cold Fusion is not unscientific; it is refuted science, which is rather different. Fusion, of course, is the process that powers the Sun, and I believe that hot fusion has been achieved albeit briefly and messily in high temperature plasmas in the laboratory (see Wikipedia Fusion Power; I am very sceptical as to whether this will ever be any use)


 * 'Paul Braterman,
 * 'Professor Emeritus, University of North Texas Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Chemistry, University of Glasgow


 * The professor's memory was flawed. The heat in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment was never successfully shown to be from "chemical side-reactions," and certainly not within a "few days." Many of the successful replications used approaches that ruled this out, plus there aren't enough chemical reactants available in the cell to produce the levels of heat shown, for the periods of time involved. (The reaction would presumably be unexpected hydrogen-oxygen recombination. That's been shown to be no more than a minor effect, at most, inadequate to explain the results, and in closed cells recombination is insured (or the pressure would explode the thing!); in open cells, because potential energy escapes with the unrecombined gases, there must be a compensation for this, the skeptical argument would be that the compensation was too large.). Pons and Fleischmann did not make specific claims about the general mechanism. Their calorimetry was confirmed by independent review.


 * The core claim is excess heat not explainable by chemical reactions. The "nuclear" claim was really a version of "it's not chemistry," and ... Fleischmann was perhaps the world's foremost electrochemist. If this wasn't chemistry, according to a chemist, what was it? The physicists totally dropped the ball. There is no paper published that showed that Pons and Fleischmann's calorimetry was actually in error, several papers suggested ideas, that's about it. (Lewis suggested an error from failure to stir -- resulting in uneven heating and thus mis-estimation of the cell temperature from a poorly placed temperature sensor --, others suggested unexpected recombination, Garwin thinks there was a failure to measure all the input energy, but none of these have held up under scrutiny and certainly none have been verified with controlled experiment. And they would not apply to all the various forms of calorimetry used in replications.)

Given that there is plenty of work confirming that excess heat can be produced in palladium deuteride under certain conditions, and, even more, we now know, that helium is being produced commensurately with the heat, the knee-jerk rejection of cold fusion isn't appropriate, and hasn't been so for easily a decade.

Duncan investigated the situation with cold fusion, and, to his surprise, saw evidence. It's not really surprising. The extreme skeptical position has disappeared from mainstream scientific journals for almost a decade, while substantial publication continues that effectively assumes the reality of the "Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect," and the most recent comprehensive review, Status of cold fusion (2010) (preprint) comes out and says it:


 * The evidence supports the claim that a nuclear reaction between deuterons to produce helium can occur in special materials without application of high energy.

But many skeptics and skeptical organizations have heavily committed themselves to the idea that this was all pseudoscience, or pathological science, or junk science. What's on SkepDic about this?

http://www.skepdic.com/news/newsletter50.html#2 http://www.skepdic.com/refuge/altscience.html http://www.skepdic.com/voodooscience.html http://www.skepdic.com/pseudosymmetry.html http://www.skepdic.com/refuge/funk36.html http://www.skepdic.com/philwebinterview.html http://www.skepdic.com/pathosc.html