Harry Veeder wrote:
To reject cold fusion you must first reject chemistry and
thermodynamics going back to the mid-19th century.
This is a spurious argument.
There is a difference between a measure of change and the "laws" or "theory"
or whatever which is purported to be the best explanation of the change.
Many skeptical arguments boil down to an assertion that calorimeters
do not work. To be specific, skeptics claim that calorimeters cannot
be trusted to with 10% or 30%, or 60% -- or whatever percent of
excess heat is reported, on what you might call a sliding scale (or
moving goalpost). If the experiment lasts a month, they claim that no
calorimeter can be stable that long, even though calibrations show
that the instrument is stable. Then, when an experiment produces heat
after a week they suddenly realize that no calorimeter is stable for
a week. These people sincerely believe this kind of nonsense, and in
doing so they reject the basis of a large part of chemistry and
physics. They might as well claim that no mass spectrometer can
reliably measure the difference between iron and gold.
It is far more important to have an experienced technician who can build
a good apparatus and make decent measurements.
The NHE program had superb technicians and the best equipment money
can buy. Their measurements were correct to more decimal places than
necessary. But the program failed miserably because the people
working there were not electrochemists or materials experts, they did
not read the literature, and they did not know how to interpret their
own results. For example, they did not realize what was coating their
cathodes, or that effect the coating had. As McKubre pointed out,
they kept rediscovering and reporting phenomena that were described
in electrochemistry textbooks decades ago ago. I am no expert, but I
knew more about the cold fusion literature, and what other
researchers had been done previously, than the NHE researchers did.
Experienced technicians can contribute much to a good research
program, but technical ability by itself is not enough. You must also
have deep knowledge of the science, and experience.
- Jed
