Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
For their part, the cold fusion "believers" did a lousy job of selling it.
I agree their public relations efforts have not been good. I think it
is a bad idea to make conference proceedings only available as
copyright books. Biberian recently told me that they have sold only
85 copies of the ICCF-10 and ICCF-11 proceedings.
However, I think many researchers have a good job presenting their
results in well-written, convincing papers. There is enough good
material out there to make a solid case. Goodness knows, there is
also enough bad material to make cold fusion look crazy. But all
endeavors involving large numbers of people are a mixture of
competent and incompetent, brilliant and stupid. You have to judge by
what is best.
The earliest effect that was actually conclusive was heat/helium
correlation, which cut through the replication problem and turned it
into classic proof through correlation (and this makes "failures"
into controls). Somehow the presentation at the 2004 DoE review
managed to sufficiently confuse the reviewers and the DoE so that
the correlation was missed, and totally misrepresented in the summary report.
This is true, but I doubt it was the fault of the presenters. The
paper given to the panel explains the helium results clearly in section 3:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Hagelsteinnewphysica.pdf
Some people feel this paper should have said more about Miles or
Iwamura. I asked the authors, Hagelstein and McKubre, about that.
They said they emphasized their own work because they understood
their own work best, and they could discuss it in depth with the
panel without fear of making a mistake or misrepresenting the work.
That seems sensible to me.
By the way, all those papers listed in the references were given to
the panel members. I gather they were given big goodie boxes crammed
with papers as take-home prizes (homework). So if they didn't get it,
it was because they didn't do their homework. It isn't all that hard
to understand, after all!
The documents they were given are listed here:
http://lenr-canr.org/Collections/DoeReview.htm#Submissions
- Jed