THE DATA POINT THAT DOESN’T FIT

Jerry Shifman

Discus Presentation

December 11, 2001

And so.

Science!

This afternoon we will talk about science for a little while.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you have at least a basic education in science? Hands?

What about physics? Any physicists?

Any physics PhDs?

Not me. My degree is in electrical engineering. I got a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1959. RPI is a really great school. At the time I was going there it was generally thought that RPI had the best undergraduate engineering curriculum in the country. MIT was considered the best for graduate work. The first two years at RPI were the same for all majors: a thorough grounding in the hard sciences. This was a very dry, academic school. We were taught about science – and we were also taught how to do science. How to do scientific experiments.

I was very impressed with the protocol and ethics associated with doing experiments. And I took it quite seriously. Let me tell you a little about this. Generally three or four students would cooperate on doing an experiment in the laboratory. We would all set up the apparatus and then proceed to run the experiment. Each of us had a role to play. Of course, the experiments were all different, but as a rule each student was responsible for some portion of data collection. One person held the stopwatch, one person kept his eye on the scale, one watched the thermometer, etc. Whatever was involved in the experiment. When the clock watcher said “Read!” each of us would report the current reading on our instrument. One person was responsible for recording data on the data sheet. And one thing we had drummed into us was that the original data sheet was sacrosanct. One always filled out the data sheet in ink. And one never erased or obliterated anything on the original data sheet. If you made a mistake, you drew a neat line through the entry, wrote the correct value adjacent to it, and added an explanatory note about why you made the change. Everyone signed and dated the original data sheet. The whole point was to create an honest and complete record of exactly what happened. The measure of success was that enough information must be provided so that at some later date another person, “skilled in the art” as the expression goes, could set up the same experiment and attempt to replicate your work. It is, in truth, an art form.

There are five main phases in doing experimental science: planning and setup; data collection, data reduction, and data presentation, followed by analysis and discussion. We just talked about data collection. In data reduction you take the data you have collected and manipulate it in ways that help illustrate the point of the experiment. Then you present the results of the data reduction in some sort of table or graph. Very commonly you ended up with a line of some sort on a sheet of graph paper. So you find yourself plotting the results. (Illustrate – a point here, a point here, etc.)

But wait a minute! What’s this doing here? This doesn’t fit at all! So you have a problem. You work your way back through the data reduction process. No error there? What about the original data sheet? Ha! There is an entry that just must be a mistake. Maybe Joe said “fifty” and Ed wrote down “fifteen.” That would explain it. But can you really be sure that’s what happened? No you cannot. So what do you do? You have to deal with that data point some way, write up the analysis and turn in your work. What you do is show the errant data point on your graph. But you put a circle around it, and add an explanatory note stating that you assume this was an error. What you do not do is ignore it or hide it. This is an enormously important point. The reason is that while in the vast majority of cases the errant point is due to a simple error, in some rare cases that bit of “bad” data is not an error at all.

And this is where the game really begins to get interesting. Let’s look at this graph again. This point up here clearly doesn’t fit. Surely it is due to an error. Almost always that is the case. Ah, but not in every case. That’s the fascinating part. It may be that if you went back and repeated the experiment that same odd point would crop up again. And if you focused intently on that region you might find details that had completely escaped you before. The curve may actually look like this. (Illustrate) What you thought was an error, and were sorely tempted to ignore, was actually a clue to something totally surprising. Some sort of resonance, or singularity that no one had expected. Something new!

Can you imagine the excitement of that? The sudden realization that you have uncovered something not anticipated is an intense intellectual thrill. The original intent of the experiment fades into the background and all your attention now goes into understanding the significance of that “bad” data point. What you assumed was a mistake now appears to be valid, but anomalous, information. And there is one of my most favorite words: anomalous. There is magic there. Anomalous! My interest is immediately aroused. [Reva says that’s why my favorite breakfast is anomalett!]

There is a popular story that has Archimedes running down the street naked shouting, “Eureka, I have found it!” Another stereotypical image is the scientist discovering something and exclaiming, “Ah ha!” or something like that. But that is not what really happens at the moment of a new discovery. In real life when a scientist is in the middle of a discovery what he actually says is, “Now that’s odd . . . “

Let’s pursue for a moment the idea of anomalous data. By this, I mean data (or information) that is at odds with expectations. Anomalous data always seems, at first glance, to be wrong – this cannot be! But if it proves to be solid, repeatable data, then we face the daunting process of adjusting our expectations to include this new phenomenon. Sometimes this adjustment takes place fairly quickly. But for profoundly anomalous information to finally become “common sense” may take many years. Serious shifts in our understanding of the most basic aspects of reality generally take at least a generation to be completed. Those who “know” that something is impossible must literally die off in order to make way for the new understanding. And life is usually difficult for those who are early adopters of the new vision.

There are many examples of this. The idea that the earth moves and the sun is still, instead of vice-versa. How ridiculous! Just look – anyone with eyes can see that we are standing still and the sun is moving. This had been known to be true from ancient times. Ptolemy codified in the second century. Then 1300 years later Copernicus proposed, against all common sense, that the opposite was actually the case. Galileo grabbed that ball and ran with it. Look at all the trouble he got into!

And the idea that a rock can fall from the sky. Nonsense! There is air up there – and beyond that lies emptiness. How could a rock come from there? In 1807 two New England astronomers stated that a stony object found in Connecticut was of extraterrestrial origin. One highly intelligent skeptic, the President of The American Philosophical Society, wrote, “I could more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than stones would fall from heaven.” Guess who. Our very own Thomas Jefferson.

And consider this example. A man sets up an experiment on a laboratory bench. And he sets up another part of the experiment in the next laboratory down the hall. Totally separate rooms. He finds, to his amazement, that when he does this in one room, over in the other room that happens. But there is nothing connecting the two parts of the experiment! So he calls in his colleagues and shows them. “Look, I do this here, and over there that happens! But the doors are all closed. There must be some invisible force that comes out of this and goes over there. You can’t see it or smell it or feel it. It goes right through solid walls. It goes right through people!” And his colleagues raise their eyebrows and start looking for the hidden strings. They know this is impossible. They figure old man Hertz here must be having them on a bit! This was Heinrich Hertz. – back around 1880. The anomalous action he uncovered was due to what we now call radio waves. But he had a hell of a time convincing anybody. Much later it was decided to call these Hertzian waves.

Looking back on a major discovery of this sort one is tempted to wonder why it wasn’t found earlier. The answer is easy; Nobody looks for something that they already know cannot exist. It simply doesn’t occur to them. It literally cannot occur to them – they have no concept for it. It lies outside their universe, so of course they have never seen it. Even when confronted with direct physical evidence they still will not see it. To them, it is clear that the experiment must be flawed – or more likely the experimenter is a charlatan. But an impossible result? Not a chance!

This was put succinctly by Arthur Schopenhauer. "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

Looking at the practice of science as a whole, there are always two grand processes in dynamic equilibrium. On the one hand science provides the stable structure within which our lives and our work can operate. This stability is absolutely essential. And on the other hand we have the constant effort to extend and deepen our understanding of the processes of the world. This work tends to undermine the existing picture by focusing on the anomalous information that cannot be understood within the present framework. This process of change is also absolutely essential. The uneasy interface between these deeply conflicting sets of forces is where we live all the time. In our life and work it is easy to see that we have the advantage of a great store of knowledge. What is rarely appreciated is that we also labor under the disadvantage of profound ignorance. The body of what is known is a tiny fraction of what can be known – will someday be known. However advanced we may think we are, in truth we are always just making do the best we can with what we have at the moment.

Scientific change is always triggered by the need to confront and account for anomalous data. Looking back at our graph we can see that this one point that doesn’t fit may actually be vastly more important than all the other conforming points on the page. In his book Cybernetics Norbert Wiener put this idea into mathematical form. He stated that the information content of a message (or datapoint, in our example) is inversely proportional to the probability of the message. (The logarithm of the probability, actually.) That is just saying what is intuitively obvious: that stuff we hear all the time is not very interesting, but something new, never before heard, is where the surprises lie.

Another way of expressing this same notion is the White Crow argument. This is attributed to William James. Suppose your hypothesis is, “All Crows are Black.” In many thousands of observations every crow you examine turns out to be black. But no matter how many confirming cases you find it only takes one white crow to demolish your hypothesis.

One little bit of anomalous data can change everything! Perhaps you are beginning to understand. Valid anomalous data is very rare – but incredibly powerful.

Over the past several decades I have earned my living through knowledge and practical application of conventional science and technology. And over the same decades I gradually realized that what really fascinated me was the occasional anomaly that seemed to be outside the bounds of conventional science. The study and application of conventional science is very valuable. But the study of anomalous science, the stuff that may or may not be true depending on whom you ask, ah, in that direction we find magic and mystery. Anyone can understand what everyone else understands. The challenge is to understand something that others do not understand. And the supreme challenge is to understand something that others not only don’t understand but regard as utter nonsense!

Example. At a conference of theoretical physicists Wolfgang Pauli had presented a paper. Niels Bohr was speaking for the review panel that was critiquing Pauli’s work. “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy,” began Bohr. “The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

And Freeman Dyson: “For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!”

And here’s a somewhat more oblique statement from Alfred North Whitehead. “Those doctrines which best reward critical examination are those doctrines which have for the longest period remained unquestioned.”

One more: “The resistance to an idea is proportional to the square of its importance.” I believe Einstein must have smiled as he said that.

And my contribution to the genre: “The fact that your idea seems crazy does not necessarily mean that it’s correct, although it is certainly a positive indicator.”

But to pursue the anomalous one must be prepared to wade through a lot of crap. Because what appears to be impossible is, almost always, illusory – not really happening – a mistake – a misunderstanding. And yes, on rare occasions, it may be a deliberate hoax. So one resigns oneself to sifting through heaps of dross. But the reward! The possibility of spotting the gleam of pure gold amidst the clutter. To be among the first to see the shining gem of a new idea! Now there, my friends, is a worthy quest. It may be exhausting, expensive and thankless. But you just might have a hand in changing the world.

Oh my, my. Such a romantic! Such a dreamer! Yup. To quote the contemporary American philosopher Neil Young, “I’m a dreaming man, guess that’s my problem.”

So. Where shall one look for these troubling, intriguing anomalous data points? Ha. Anywhere. Everywhere. Scientific knowledge is a very tall building, but it rests on an absurdly narrow base. Conventional scientists spend all their time within the bounds of that narrow base, going up and down, along short hallways, into smaller and smaller rooms, examining with minute care every nook and crevice. Never a thought to the wide world outside. But like Jim Carey in The Truman Show, it is only necessary to set one’s shoulders and march determinedly in one direction. In only a few steps you will find yourself outside the box, facing a far broader realm where the possibilities are, quite literally, boundless.

Earlier I mentioned historical examples of radical new ideas that were resisted by established science. Now let’s look closer to home. In our own generation we have the saga of Doctors Pons and Fleishman, and so-called cold fusion. Let me run down briefly what happened. They were working at the University of Utah doing bench top experiments in electro-chemistry. Stated in grossly simplified terms, their experiments worked like this. They put some liquid in a beaker, put two metal electrodes down in it, and run an electric current through the liquid. The liquid heats up, bubbles of gas form, etc. But they began to notice that something was not quite right. Sometimes the liquid got much hotter than they were expecting. If you know the amount of electrical energy you are putting in, and you know the amount of liquid in the beaker, then there is a definite limit on how hot that amount of electricity can make that amount of liquid. Simple problem. And the heat they were seeing was sometimes way beyond what that amount of electricity could produce.

So what was going on? If the excess heat was not coming from the electrical input, perhaps there was a chemical reaction taking place that was giving off heat. Of course, during experiments of this type certain chemical reactions are known to be taking place. One or another gas is formed, changes occur on the surfaces of the electrodes, etc. These chemical changes are all known and understood; they could not account for the excess heat. Perhaps some unsuspected chemical reaction was present. Ok, they tested for that. When a chemical reaction takes place it always produces a new chemical that wasn’t there before. And search as they might, they couldn’t find any products of an unexpected chemical reaction.

So: not electrical and not chemical. What is left? Here is a datapoint that doesn’t fit, Big Time. Gradually, over a period of about five years, they realized that the only process that they could imagine would be some sort of nuclear process. They began to suspect that they were seeing something totally new and unexpected – a quiet little nuclear fusion process happening in a small beaker of liquid on a laboratory bench. They also knew that this was utter heresy. Any fusion process should be spewing out deadly radiation – and this was not happening. But in their excitement (and because they feared that colleagues over at Brigham Young University might beat them to it) they decided to make their findings public – even though it did not seem to make sense. Oh, boy – were they in for trouble! This public announcement was unwise for several reasons. They did not have a paper ready for publication in a peer reviewed journal. They did not reveal details of their experiment. This was due to the fact that (a) they were trying to get a patent application written and it was not ready, and (b) they were not getting consistent results. The experiment would work one day and not the next, and they didn’t know why. In truth, they just didn’t understand exactly what was going on in that beaker.

This is a perfect example of a phenomenon that may or may not be real, depending on whom you ask. I expect that many of you, probably most of you, understand that cold fusion has been completely discredited. Proven to be nonsense. Yes? How many think that? After all, scientists at MIT tried to replicate the experiments and failed. They declared cold fusion to be non-existent and advised the scientific community not to waste time and money pursuing it. And that was the end of that. This is, indeed, the prevailing view to this day.

But guess what! The dream of discovering a new, unexpected source of energy is so powerful that numerous scientists, all over the world, often at their own expense, continued running experiments based on the ideas of Pons and Fleishman. And extending these ideas, developing other experimental approaches. Gradually, over the past ten years, it has become evident that something quite odd is going on. Anomalous energy does keep showing up. (There’s that word again!) Where is it coming from? What process is a work? To avoid the discredited term cold fusion, other terms have been invented – New Energy, Hydrogen Energy (Japan), Catalyzed Electrolysis, (LENR) for Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, (CANR) for Chemically-Assisted Nuclear Reactions, and so on.

We now have a large body of experimental evidence that supports the contention that energy is being obtained from some unexplained source. But a huge problem remains to be solved: repeatability. Essentially all experimenters are having the same difficulty. Although an experiment may yield exciting results one day, it is not at all certain that the same experiment, however carefully set up, will give the same results the next day. Something is happening, but what? How do we tame it? And that is where the attention is being focused. We have moved beyond the basic question of whether the effect is real.

It is only a matter of time before someone gets a firm grip on this. One of these days – and it could be any time now – someone is going to get this reaction going in a stable way. They will take the excess energy output, and use a portion of it to generate the electrical energy needed to drive the input. That little puppy will just sit there, connected to no external source of power, and pump out energy. And when that happens my friends it will change everything. Radically. What we are talking about here is the prospect of energy being limitless and essentially free. Think about that for a moment!

I want to take just a second to answer the most obvious question. How can one get energy from nowhere? Isn’t that a sort of perpetual motion? Not at all. The energy is clearly coming from the process bubbling away in that beaker. The energy is being extracted from matter in a way that has heretofore not been suspected. And ordinary matter, as is well known, is made up of a vast amount of energy in very compressed form. So the energy is not exactly free – it is gradually depleting the matter in the beaker. But the rate of depletion is so ridiculously slow that the cost is essentially zero.

Now you may wonder why the scientists at MIT were so positive that cold fusion was nonsense. And why, to this day, that institution has not admitted its error. The answer is not that hard to discover – and it is an ugly scandal. MIT gets megabucks every year from the government to fund their endless attempts to harness “hot” fusion; things like the Tokamak Reactor and other massive projects. The scientists working on those projects feared that the far simpler and safer approach suggested by cold fusion would mark the end of funding for their current work. So they set up a quick attempt to replicate the Pons/Flieshman work – fully expecting to obtain no interesting results. And now I will tell you something that you almost certainly do not know. That experiment yielded positive results – a measurable amount of anomalous energy. The amount of excess energy was quite small – but even a small amount of unexplained energy was just too painful to confront. They knew this was impossible! So these scientists, at one of the most prestigious schools in the world, did the unforgivable: they fudged their results. They manipulated the data to blur out the positive results, and then reported that they had proved the effect did not exist. True story.

The man who was head of the MIT News Office at that time was Eugene Mallove, who had his own Doctor of Science degree from MIT. Scientists there routinely forwarded their results to his office for possible publication. He soon realized that the results they had sent him from their “failed” cold fusion experiment did not match the results that the scientists were making public elsewhere. They had sent Eugene the first plots of their results – showing the anomalous energy. So he was able to see how they had fudged these results to hide the positive result. When he brought this to the attention of the scientists and their superiors in the Administration at MIT, he was squelched and told not to publish what he had uncovered. He promptly quit in protest. Gene Mallove is now the editor of Infinite Energy Magazine. I have encountered Gene at a couple of conferences. We have discussed this matter at some length. He is utterly convincing. After all, it was his job to know what was going on in the various labs at MIT.

This whole sad story is laid out in the March/April 1999 issue of his magazine. A true tale of scientific fraud and betrayal, right here in the U.S. of A. By stigmatizing cold fusion they severely set back research in the field. Since MIT had declared cold fusion to be at best illusory – and perhaps even a fraud – grant money disappeared. Anyone who wanted to work on cold fusion was faced with derision from colleagues and college administrators. In the long run the damage that was done to science, and to the whole world, is incalculable.

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So. You have been very patient with me so far – I thank you for that. Let’s move on to something more fun. I’m going to tell you the story of this machine on the table behind me.

But before I get into that I want to call your attention to the handout I have for you. If you find yourself intrigued with the ideas in this presentation I have provided a list of organizations and publications that you might wish to look into. Let me mention some of these briefly.

Infinite Energy Magazine – Cold Fusion, New Energy Technology and heretical science in general.

Society for Scientific Exploration -- Serious academics on the fringe.

Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena – William Corliss’s Sourcebook Project

Science Frontiers – Odd and intriguing phenomena. Related to the Sourcebook Project

Natural Philosophy Alliance – John Chappell, Jr. and the Anti-relativity movement

Mutual UFO Network – Largest group of trained UFO field investigators

Research Institute on Anomalous Phenomena (RIAP) – Russian academics on the fringe.

Common Sense Science – David Bergman and colleagues.

These are just a few. And I haven’t even mentioned the web. The handout gives detailed information on each of these and a bunch of other information for those of you who might be interested. Now to finish up quickly. I want to leave plenty of time for the Q&A session – which I expect to be lively, to say the least. Perhaps even heated! Excuse me for just a moment. (Start Selin Device.)

Here is the grand puzzle of our age. Watch closely (demonstrate). Did you see that!? Mind boggling! Why does that happen? How does it work? We are in the midst of this mystery every moment of every day. We struggle against it with every move we make. And no one has a clue. Not a clue! (During the question period I trust someone will ask me about that statement.)

Many years ago I made public my own attempt to explain the process at work behind gravitation. There’s nowhere near enough time to even begin to explain my approach to this. Perhaps at my next Discus presentation. For the moment I’ll just say that the effect we see happening is due to a constant flow of ether straight down into the earth. This downward flow passes through, and momentarily becomes, all the material bodies of our world. Of course I know that sounds crazy. Great! Over the years I have attended conferences and presented my ideas to numerous groups both in this country and in Russia. In general the response has been supportive – in a few cases dramatically so. I have gradually become less hesitant to discuss this. Do a web search on Neoetherics – you will find links into my site from all over the place.

Now when you have a new theory there are two main things it must do. First, it must explain the observed phenomena at least a well as the old theory. And second, the new theory should predict some new phenomenon that the old one does not. To be convincing, one would like to find an experiment that demonstrates this new phenomenon. I felt I had a fighting chance of meeting the first requirement – explaining the observed manifestations of gravitation. But I couldn’t think of a new phenomenon not predicted by Newtonian or Einsteinian theories. So I had no idea how to confirm my theory experimentally.

Enter Alexey Selin. Last November I got email from Alexey. He lives in Dnepropetrovs, Ukraine and he had performed experiments at the Engineering Mechanics Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He had read my Neoetherics essay and was very excited to realize that I had reached the same insights that he had come to independently. That, in itself, is not particularly unusual. On average I am contacted about once a month by someone with a similar story. But Alexey was different. He wrote, in part, “To date, I have built three mechanical anti-gravity set-ups which decrease weight of stable bodies without decreasing their mass. The most indicative result – 50 gram weight loss for the body weighing 2 kilograms.”

He enclosed a brief exposition of his ideas about gravitation. It was clear to me that he was a serious investigator. His reasoning was indeed very similar to mine. He even cited the same earlier work that appears to support his (that is, our!) theory. And (here’s the kicker) he had built a device that (if he was reporting accurately) demonstrated a phenomenon that was outside the bounds of Newtonian mechanics, but which was consistent with the principles of Neoetherics. Now that really got my attention!

We began a long exchange of emails. He sent me a rough sketch of one of his experimental devices and described how it worked. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I just could not not try to build one. I have done mechanical design for a living, and I figured I had access to all the resources I needed. I realized that the odds were very long against getting any positive (i.e. anomalous) results. But the potential reward was enormous: my very own white crow! Here is a simplified drawing of the heart of the machine. Alexey refers to this as a centrifugal ether pump. (Discuss sketch)

Finally, in early April, it was ready to test. But first I had to dig the pit. In my back yard. You see, the problem is that a rotor this heavy spinning that fast stores up an horrendous amount of kinetic energy. In terms of heat energy it is roughly equivalent to one or two ounces of TNT. If it ever got loose everything in the room would look like it had gone through a Mixmaster. So in order to test the thing it had to be in a safe enclosure. My solution was to dig a pit about four feet deep, and pour a concrete floor in it. And since the thing weighs around 150 pounds I need help moving it from my work bench into the test pit. That’s ok though, because I always need at least one witness when I run a test.

I want to take a moment and acknowledge the serious amount of help I have gotten from people here at the Ranch. Roy Austin suggested using a router motor controlled by a Variac. Glen Hubbard turned the rotor and shaft on the lathe in his garage – a labor to which he devoted many weeks of spare time. Several people have helped me set up the tests and served as witnesses: Glenn Hubbard, Gary Chilton, Ro y Austin, Bob Welch, Francine Shapiro, George Bush, Robert Innes, Robert Evans and, standing a considerable distance away, Reva Basch.

So far I have run only four tests. The results have been inconclusive. But at least not negative. I am having practical problems with running a repeatable test. Vibration might possibly be affecting the scale. Other mechanical difficulties have come up. So, I repeat, the results are inconclusive – not defensible in a scientific sense.

But look at this. Here is the curve of scale reading vs. rpm for the test run on April 10^th. We got it almost up to 19,000 rpm that day. George Bush and Roy Austin were witnesses. (Discuss curve.) Now clearly this portion of the results, as speed was increasing, is exactly what we were looking for. I don’t have any mundane explanation for why the weight should go down like this. When we started slowing down the weight loss started to diminish – also in line with what we were hoping for. But during slowdown the weight loss did not fully retrace – go back to near zero. That means that something got stuck, or some other mechanical problem is clouding the results. As I say – the matter is unresolved.

But nevertheless, here is a machine that may demonstrate a non-Newtonian aspect of gravitation. And today, at this meeting, is the first time a machine of this type has been presented in public outside Ukraine.

Are there any questions?

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[Coda.]

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

- Albert Einstein

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