At 04:24 PM 6/9/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Skeptics conflate many different issues under the heading of
"reproducibility." They cannot keep these questions apart in their
minds, poor dears.
Yeah, if you think we are disorganized, you should take a look at
today's skeptics.
So here is an FAQ:
Has anyone replicated? Obviously, yes. Hundreds of labs have replicated.
Uh, Jed, replicated what? This is a serious part of the problem, and
is a place where the skeptics have a field day. I agree -- obviously,
and you know that -- that the weight of publication, even though
experiments varied a great deal, is a "replication" of the basic
effect, excess heat in the palladium deuteride system. But that is
not exactly the same as "replication," in the usual meaning.
Can I replicate? Probably not, unless you are an electrochemist.
Nor can you replicate lots of science unless you have the expertise
and the materials and the equipment. This isn't really an issue. Kits
for replication by non-experts will be valuable, but are just a kind
of "backup plan" that I hatched. Hopefully, the corner has already
been turned and this will merely help spread the news.
Can you replicate on demand? That is to say, can I go an see a
replication? Maybe. But maybe not on your demand. Who are you?
This is not a fully satisfactory kind of replication, for obvious
reasons. While the ability for some to see other labs doing the work,
to inspect it, is important, and has been important, this isn't the
central issue.
Can one lab produce the same results with same materials as another.
Yes, more or less the same results. See McKubre's ICCF-15
presentation, p. 18 and 21:
<http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCcoldfusion.pdf>http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCcoldfusion.pdf
(This is an important presentation, by the way. Everyone should see it.)
McKubre also wrote about his work replicating ET's Superwave results,
in the ACS LENR Sourcebook, and, indeed it's important. He and his
colleagues have been plugging away for years and are the best
counterexample to my claim of lack of "exact replication." They've
done it. But when we talk about 153 peer-reviewed papers confirming
excess heat, most of these papers are *general*, i.e., follow
different methods in some aspect or other, making it more difficult
to compare them. And, of course, there are the known negative
replications and others that have not been reported.
Even McKubre's work, sometimes, seems inadequately reported to me.
The *best* results are shown, which is a kind of reporting bias.
Can I produce the effect independently, without getting help or
materials from the ENEA or some other proven source? Probably not,
but if you are skilled and willing to spend a few years at it after
reading the literature carefully, maybe you can.
Well, I'm putting together some work to refute this, if possible. But
if we are only talking about running a P-F cell, sure. Very difficult.
Can you produce the exact same level of heat every time? No, but
they couldn't make transistor performance uniform in 1955, either.
No one claimed that transistors did not exist for that reason.
We've been working on cold fusion for twenty years. But this is
beside the point. The trick we need to pull off is simply to get
those who are sufficiently knowledgeable to look again. They looked
-- inadequately -- twenty years ago and made up their minds. They
made a mistake. That's hard to admit, sometimes. Scientists are
human. At this point, all the work that we do putting together clear
presentations of solid evidence will build a kind of pressure. There
is a point where the crotchety old man complaining stops being believed.
I've been saying that the corner has actually been turned, and that
this can be seen in the 2004 DoE review, particularly when it is
compared with the 1989 review history. It's time to stop apologizing
for cold fusion, it is time to start behaving as if this is cutting
edge science, and to be proud of it. But part of this involves
becoming more internally critical, and not in a personal way, as has
too often become the case. I don't blame people for reporting
cherry-picked results, it's human. I'm just standing up for and
proposing more complete reporting, so that we actually know what,
say, the excess power distribution is over an entire set of attempted
repetitions.
If I'm interested, for example, in pursuing some line of inquiry that
has been established, say a series of ecperiments using some kind of
doped cathode, a single episode of high heat may be interesting, I'd
want to know about it, but what I'd really want to see is a series of
experiments with that doped cathode, and the results from each
experiment, compared with a series that is otherwise identical with no doping.
I also recognize that this is difficult. Varying cathode composition,
for solid palladium, isn't something one just decides to do, going
into the lab and adding a pinch of this or a pinch of that. But with
codeposition, it could be easier. What would be the effect if I add a
little, say, beryllium chloride to the electrolyte for codeposition?
What if I run codeposition in *layers*, where I add a little of this
to the electrolyte, plate it out, then a little of that?
In experiments like this, a single episode of high heat, if I can't
replicate it, is a distraction!
(But I'm not doing calorimetry, myself, not at this point. Maybe
later. Right now I'm setting up something much simpler, looking for
neutron radiation using LR-115 SSNTDs, with a so-called codep
experiment on the Galileo model, but a bit smaller and using a gold
cathode (as in later SPAWAR reports showing copious probable
neutrons. Made my first sale last week of a sheet of LR-115, to a
researcher in California. Little by little....)
Can you make every single device work? Only with some techniques.
With most other techniques the success rate is higher than it was
for most transistor types in 1955.
There is no particular problem with not having every cell work, if
there are series of cells and there are statistically significant
results. With some of the experiments, the correlation of two results
is far more powerful than any single result or even any single series
of one kind of measurement, i.e., excess heat. I'm referring most
strongly to, of course, the finding of helium correlated with excess heat.
If someone is still skeptical, this is where they should be looking,
not at the pile of simple excess heat data and the anecdotes of
meltdowns, etc. Once one knows that this is a nuclear reaction, all
the rest falls into place, which doesn't mean it's all valid, that
every experimental result that seems nuclear actually is. Some might
not be. But the attitude changes, and skepticism becomes functional
again, simply protecting us from jumping to conclusions too quickly.
As I've often pointed out, the skeptics in 1989-1990 forgot to be
skeptical of their own conclusions. That, my friend Jed, is what our
late friend Nate Hoffman didn't forget about. Cut him some slack,
he's passed on, and we should think kindly of the dead. His book was
a great help to me, last year. His evidence and thinking is part of
what, put together with the heat/helium work and certain other more
recent findings, put me completely over the top.
Does a low replication success rate, or extreme difficulty in
replicating, mean the effect does not exist? No. Countless
experiments are difficult to reproduce. Cloning, building a Tokamak
reactor, and sending robots to Mars are good examples. Prior to the
discovery of cold fusion no one in the history of technology ever
suggested that things which are difficult to make do not exist.
Can you make produce neutrons in the same ratio to the heat as
plasma fusion does? No.
Can you make a cup of tea? Richard, please just shut up.
Yeah. That cup of tea "argument" is pretty stupid. It has nothing to
do with the science, and plenty of science cannot be "replicated" on
demand. But ... there is still such a thing as "confirmed."
To reach the skeptics, we do need to have some sympathy for how they
think. What they are doing is quite human, we all do it to some
degree. We make assumptions about where to put our attention, and we
can't keep revisiting every decision. At some point, though, our
denial can start to stink up the place. We trip over things that
shouldn't be there. We become puzzled, why are those people so gullible?
What I saw last year when the neutron results made a big splash, was
that particle physicists were starting to say, "Well, maybe something
is happening here that we don't understand." That's serious progress, Jed!
And we can say to them, "We don't understand it either, but we do
know it's happening."
"Something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr.
Jones?" --Bob Dylan.
It's not the end of the world not to know; in fact, it is a door
opening to a new world.
