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168 • Weber’s (1988) paper is included here because the consensus of the physics community is that the experimental result reported is wrong.1 It is, however, interesting to compare the structure of Weber’s paper with that of the papers that attempted to replicate his results and failed to do so. The latter experiments were, and are, regarded as showing that Weber’s results were incorrect. One might very well ask if there was some difference between Weber’s paper and the others, in either methodology or in the strategies employed, that would argue that the later results were correct. Weber’s Previous Work In order to understand Weber’s paper from 1988, one needs to examine the history of his earlier attempts to detect gravitation radiation, a subject seemingly unrelated to the subject of this paper, and to look at Weber’s subsequent work on that subject. This history is not presented in his 1988 paper. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Weber claimed that he had detected gravity waves (Weber 1969, 1970; Weber et al. 1973). One problem with those results was that the rate of detection was far in excess, by a factor of 1,000, of what was expected by calculations based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Nevertheless, Weber’s results were sufficiently credible that several experimental groups attempted to replicate his findings. None were successful. Serious questions were also raised concerning Weber’s apparatus and his analysis procedures. By 1975 a consensus had been reached that Weber’ claim was unsubstantiated.2 In 1976 Weber and his collaborators (Lee et al. 1976) published a detailed answer to some of the criticisms offered of his earlier work. Weber had previously offered a rather unusual explanation of why gravitational wave detectors might be more sensitive than others believed and thus might explain the high flux of gravity waves that he had detected. He noted CHAPTER 15 The Coherent Scattering of Neutrinos The Coherent Scattering of Neutrinos • 169 that “expressions for the antenna cross-section [sensitivity] require very reasonable assumptions and approximations that have not been tested by experiment. It is also possible that the antenna is operating in a more sensitive mode than ordinarily assumed. Frozen-in metastable configurations within each detector might decay to equilibrium as a result of collective excitation by gravitational radiation, releasing far more energy than implied by the gravitational radiation flux” (Weber 1970, 183–84). This speculation was, in fact, explicitly tested by Ronald Drever et al. (1973) and found wanting. Weber continued his defense against possible experimenter bias, one of the criticisms made of his earlier work, in a 1977 letter to Nature in which he outlined the steps he had taken to do so (Weber 1977). No one in the physics community made any substantive answers to either of Weber ’s 1976 and 1977 papers. As Harry Collins remarked, “in terms of their impact they [Weber’s 1976 and 1977 papers] might just as well not have been written” (Collins 2004, 201). In 1981 Weber suggested another possibility for enhancing the sensitivity of a gravity-wave antenna. This was the possibility of preparing the antenna in a correlated initial state. Weber admitted, however, that “it is by no means obvious that an antenna can be prepared in such states, and that the unwanted interactions can be kept sufficiently small to result in major improvements in signal to noise ratio . The possibilities of such improvements are now being studied” (Weber 1981, 544). Weber (1984) continued his defense of his gravity wave results, this time by invoking a theory of the coherent scattering of gravity waves. Weber’s 1984 paper also contained a startling new theoretical suggestion concerning neutrino detection, as well as experimental results that supported that hypothesis. Weber assumed an infinitely stiff crystal and calculated that the coherent scattering of neutrinos from such a crystal would vary with N2, where N was the number of scatterers. For a macroscopic crystal N would be a very large number, and this would increase the very small neutrino scattering cross section by many orders of magnitude.3 This would mean that instead of using a tank containing 100,000 gallons of cleaning fluid,4 one could use a sapphire crystal that one could hold in one’s hand as a neutrino detector. Weber also presented experimental results in support of his coherent scattering hypothesis using antineutrinos from a tritium source. Weber continued both his experimental and theoretical work in a...

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