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Originally Posted by Logic
Ok; so where would you recommend I find Peer reviewed, published papers?
And how would one go about deciding on the trustworthiness of the people and institution who published the paper?
Also; who funded the research? As it seems to me that with a big enough grant anyone will say anything and people will believe it.
Then there's also the issue of:
one man's gobbeldygook being another man's 'simple and logical'
depending on intelligence and education.
For eg: It's simple for anyone to simply declare a paper gobbledegook without any argument as to why they deem it so...
There are also a number of reasons why the above may not have worked for everyone.
For example the shielding effect ferrous metals on magnetic fields.
ie: You arrange a magnetic field on a steel fuel pipe correctly, but said pipe shields the fuel within from it.
Don't get me wrong; I nave no idea if the paper has merit or not.
All I know is that there are a good number of similar papers and I find it difficult to imagine all these people to be lying for no particular reason.
Can you think of one?
It's not anyone has a sole distributorship on magnets.
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Unfortunately I am not aware of any central authority on trustworthiness. To go about this, I would probably contact a university or research institution, and ask the advice of several senior researchers in the field to see if there is any consensus.
You're also right - money often buys science. And, that science may not even be wrong in the specifics, but can be deceptive in that it's an incomplete picture, or simply in the amount of focus in one area, compared with a relative lack in another.
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The honest truth about the basis of my views comes from my fairly strong general science background, and my observation that magnets are one of the areas where scammers and con artists most often prey upon people, using scientific language to describe pseudoscientific concepts. Electromagnetism is not something easily intuited, so it's difficult to apply the sniff test effectively. I don't completely dismiss magnetism's potential usefulness, but given the overwhelming amount of BS I've encountered, and the sheer amount of money that has been conned away, there needs to be pretty strong evidence in favor - such as a single example of a working device.
So far, there has yet to be a single device that works, in practice, in any measurable way, despite a century or so of such products being sold. Perhaps one day there will be, but I'm inclined to believe it's largely out of the reach of backyard tinkerers.