What climate change and fusion tell us about orthodoxies versus dissent in sceince and religion

Over at Climate Audit they are discussing “Miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis”.

Let me relate this to my current field of study - Nuclear Fusion.

The big money is going into projects like ITER (the US is spending something like $200 to $400 mil a year on this project). All the scientists involved say we are at least 30 years away from a net power reactor delivering watts to the grid. When that net power device is built it will be too big 17GW (most power plants built today are under 100MW and the largest are in the 1 GW range), too expensive (at 20X to 30X the current cost of electricity), and too late. All this is inherent in trying to get fusion by heating things up. And yet funding rolls on. Grant money is relatively easy if there is an ITER angle.

Contrast this with IEC fusion. In the US there are 5 to 10 projects going on at a funding rate that is probably on the order of $20 million or less total. The thing about IEC Fusion is that instead of heating up a mass of gas to get fusion in the high energy tail, particles are accelerated directly to fusion speeds. This makes the devices much smaller, less costly, and quicker to develop. So who is doing IEC Fusion? Basically a bunch of old cranks who see ITER and the Tokamaks as useless except as science fair projects. Let me quote Plasma Physicist Dr. Nicholas Krall who said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

And yet the money rolls on.

If I was in charge of science I would see that in any discipline 70% went to mainstream and 30% to dissenters. That would tend to keep everyone honest. Does it mean some money would go for stupidity? Sure. As Murray Gell-Mann says - there is a reason most new stuff ought not get funded, most of it is flat wrong. However, if we do not encourage dissent from orthodoxy we will never learn anything new.

Our current ratios are out of balance.

Let me add that a significant part of the 30% should go towards replication by dissenters.

If we are really going to do good science we must encourage a climate of dissent and replication.

Let me add that we see this in Cold Fusion. The mainstream derided it because at first replication was difficult. Now at least the laboratory aspects are better under control and replication is the norm. We still do not understand what is happening or why. However, finally progress is being made. So far it seems to be a low energy process. Heat is created. Just not enough to even boil the water (actually D2O) in the experimental apparatus. It is being researched. We will find out why. We lost 10 years of useful work because of clinging to orthodoxy.

In many ways the institutional science world is like the institutional religious world: Woe be unto him who strays from the canon.

Interestingly enough the US Navy is funding IEC Fusion and Cold Fusion. Why? They don't look at it from a right/wrong basis. It is all about risk vs reward. They are not crazy. They do require at least a minimum of results before funding. They come at it from: "we don't know everything" and "mathematics can be helpful but is not definitive. Only real world results count".

Why not more dependence on math? Because with math - if you pick the right assumptions - you can prove anything.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values