At 05:55 PM 9/29/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd, who never learns, is making waves at Wikipedia again. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cold_fusion
I predict they will throw him out again within 2 weeks. It will be
permanent this time.
"Abd, who never learns"? Come on, Jed, that's exactly what they are
saying about me on Wikipedia. A year and a half ago I was a skeptic.
I bought and read the literature, including Huizenga, who was quite a
piece of work, eh?, and Taubes, but the source that got me going that
this might be real was ... Hoffman. Jed, it's you who never learn.
Hoffman opened the door and pointed at what was inside. He left it up
to me to come to my own conclusions.
And then, of course, I also bought and read Storms and Mizuno. Later,
I bought a copy of Beaudette, which is really, really well-written,
and for Wikipedia purposes, it's a shame it was self-published, i.e.,
not published by someone not affiliated with a field regarded as fringe.
I took a quick look at the Wikipedia article. It is even worse than I recall.
It's truly awful. And very difficult to change. Because I now have a
Conflict of Interest -- that happened to Pcarbon before me, becoming
sufficiently interested in the field to actually become involved in
research, which is far more fun than slogging through the crap at
Wikipedia -- I don't make controversial edits to the article, except
as self-reverted edits, to show a proposal. I made one to the lede,
about the Naturwissenschaften review just published. Your old friend,
Enric Naval put it back in, but not in the lede -- that was fine with
me, even though this source could be claimed, by Wikipedia policy, to
supersede everything that came before as to the science -- but he
also attributed it to a "supporter," and not to the journal. I
suggested the journal, he wrote that "we aren't citing journals
elsewhere," but in the same paragraph or just above, a claim that
cold fusion was still fringe and rejected, I forget the exact
language, was attributed to Physics Today, instead of to "skeptic Feder."
ScienceApologist, another of the local reptilians, previously banned
from cold fusion -- and it takes amazingly bad behavior for a skeptic
to be banned from the article -- showed up, in the trail of
Hipocrite, who himself had created such a disturbance on the article,
revert warring everything that might seem to be supportive out of the
article, and then requesting the page to be protected for revert
warring, claiming he was revert warring with me, when, in fact, it
had been other editors, and then immediately, before the protection
came down (it's almost always granted, and they really don't look
carefully), stuffing total POV nonsense in the article based on
proposals by Kirk Shanahan, a blatant mess that even he didn't
support in the later polling on revisions, setting up conditions and
cover for WMC to ban me....
Basically, it's long been complete mess, with policy ignored by a
faction of editors who imagine that they are protecting "science" or
something like that.
Science Apologist showed up and took out the reference to the Storms
review, pointing out that Storms is on the editorial board at
Naturwissenschaften. He's just created an entirely new standard for
reliable source. Instead, he put in a different reference.
The article mentioned that Naturwissenschaften had been publishing
papers on cold fusion. SA added that they had a cold fusion supporter
on their board, implying bias in their editorial decisions. However,
they'd been publishing the papers since 2005, and Storms was just
added to the board, according to Krivit, in December, 2009. This is
the kind of "true fact" that is used by blatant pushers of various
points of view, the skilled ones, to lie with the truth, to create a
false impression.
Now I know exactly how to counter this, but, one problem. I don't
care enough. It's way too much work. Wikipedia is designed to waste
enormous amounts of time with little result. I could probably get
both Science Apologist and Hipocrite banned. But why? What would I
gain? Now, the project would gain, and quite a lot. These people have
done enormous damage, what you see with Cold fusion is a tiny part of
it. So ... maybe. But the fact is that I personally have a lot of
much better stuff to do. I paid my dues on Wikipedia, the admin who
topic banned me got removed as an admin. But the faction that he
represented still retains a lot of its power. It's been again
confronted before the arbitration committee, which has done almost
nothing about it, throwing the book at a series of small-time editors
for minor indiscretions, and allowing blatant misbehavior to stand
with no sanction at all.
In other words, it's not worth it.
There is a new statement I find hilarious:
"Cold fusion research sometimes is referred to as low energy nuclear
reaction (LENR) studies or condensed matter nuclear science, in
order to avoid negative connotations. [14][15]
The part about "negative connotations" is sourced to:
14. The BBC (2009) in an article which does not say anything
remotely like that:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7959183.stm
This is a tempest in a teapot. Yeah, it's imbalanced. This is typical
of what they've done, assemble a pile of factoids that create a
desired impression. There are obviously other reasons for the name.
On the other hand, folks, it's fusion. I was quite gratified to see
that the Storms review comes right out and calls it cold fusion. The
objections of Larsen, through Krivit, are silly semantics. If Larsen
is right, which I very much doubt, fusion is going on through yet
another process. Deuterium is being converted to neutrons which are
then being assembled with other nuclei to form.... helium, among
other products. Fusion. Helium being produced from deuterium.
15. Bart Simon, the proverbial man who has only a hammer and sees
all problems as a nail. (His hammer is sociology, which seldom
drives nails straight in my experience but it can be thought provoking.
Bart is quite good as a source, but they only cite half of Bart.
Enric Naval, I'm sure, hasn't read the book, he just picks up
snippets from Google Books.
In the introduction to the upcoming ICCF-14 Proceedings, Nagel and
Melich have a Table with 11 "names given to the study of 'cold
fusion' since 1989." They discuss at some of the reasons these names
have been introduced:
". . . In the minds of some workers in the field, they suffer from
various shortcomings. For example, 'cold' and 'low' are relative
terms without precise meanings. The variety, and indeed confusion,
over terminology is also promoted by the lack of a clear
understanding of the basic mechanism (or mechanisms) active in this
field. . . . In 2002, a new and broader name was introduced, namely
"Condensed Matter Nuclear Science" (CMNS). 'Condensed matter' is a
term that has been employed by the American Physical Society for a
few decades to embrace both solids and liquids. . . ."
Nowhere in this discussion do they mention "negative connotations"
as a reason to replace the term "cold fusion." I am pretty sure they
know as well as I do it would not work, in any case.
I suppose some people hope that a new name for cold fusion will act
as a euphemism, but anyone who knows about language knows that
euphemisms never work for long, you have to continually replace them
with new ones.
By the way, the ICCF-14 proceedings are actually being printed,
finally. Thank goodness.
Don't confuse them with reliably-sourced facts. I pointed out to them
that the DoE reviewer completely screwed up in reporting that the
review paper (Hagelstein) claimed that helium was found in five out
of sixteen cells producing excess heat. That claim isn't in
Hagelstein, what is there is way different and far more interesting.
So what's cited in the article, still, more than a year after I
pointed this out? The blatant error is the only mention of the
connection between heat and helium, which is the crucial proof of
cold fusion. I pointed to multiple peer-reviewed reliable sources on
this. My identification of the error, which is easily verified, was
called "original research." I wasn't trying to put notice of the
error into the article, I know the sourcing policies. I was just
trying to shift to what would be, in theory, more reliable sources
than a mention by an anonymous bureaucrat, reviewed by nobody, to
what are supposedly the gold standard for sourcing, peer-reviewed
secondary sources, which are abundant.
Anyway, one good thing came out of my recent activities on Wikipedia.
It was claimed by EdChem that all that was needed was one repeatable
experiment that couldn't be explained without a nuclear reaction,
and, of course, scientists would fall all overthemselves to replicate
it and publishers would be wanting to print the papers, etc.
Well, that experiment was done, and replicated. It just hasn't been
skillfully presented. The experimental design is quite simple,
actually, though that doesn't make it easy. But many experiments are
like that, they take knowledge of the "state of the art" to
reproduce, and replicators often communicate with original reporters
to figure out how to make it work.
Set up cold fusion conditions, well-known and massively confirmed to
produce anomalous heat of unknown origin, we might say, from highly
loaded palladium deuteride. For each experimental cell, measure
excess heat, and measure helium produced.
It's been done many times, and the results are 100% consistent. If
you don't get heat for a cell, you don't find helium. Period.
If you get heat, in almost every case, very few exceptions, enough to
set aside as unexplained anomalies, perhaps, you get helium
commensurate with the heat, in an amount consistent with the reaction
being deuterium fusing to 4He.
There is no serious refutation of this that has appeared in the
literature; Shanahan is claiming that he did it in his recent paper
in JEM, but I can't find my copy of that paper. In any case, Storms
has reported extensively on heat/helium in the review this month.
What I've found, looking around, is that, in spite of Huizenga noting
Miles heat/helium work in *1993*, and suggesting how significant this
would be if confirmed, it hasn't been played up in the reviews and
apologetics. Instead, for example, in Hagelstein (2004), we have
piles of details about calorimetry, the original research, etc., and
then heat/helium is covered, all right, but buried.
Cold Fusion Experiments Produce Helium at the rate expected from
fusion, based on the excess heat measured.
That should be the headline, it should be in the abstract, if anyone
wants to write polemic on this, they should be sure that this point
gets across, for heat/helium validates both the calorimetry and the
helium measurements. It pulls the rug out from under speculative
criticisms of the calorimetry, or claims of "leakage" as being
responsible for the helium. It makes all that moot, really.
And it is a 100% reproducible experiment, very reliable. Just do it!
Do it with one cell or with many cells. With many cells, if you
manage to get a few showing excess heat with any accuracy, enough to
generate measurable helium, you will find that helium, it is
practically guaranteed.
What they did was confuse individual cell reliability with what is
needed to show causal connections. It isn't necessary for every cell
to show excess heat to confirm that this is fusion, when it works! To
get a more accurate measure of the exact heat/helium ratio, yes,
that's quite difficult, and has only been done a little, and the best
work is based on only one single cell. But that could be remedied, if
anyone thought it necessary. I wouldn't. I would operate, at this
point, on the assumption that helium is being produced as the main
product, until there is evidence to the contrary.
Given that the old canards about gammas being necessary for helium to
be formed were seriously stupid in the first place -- this is only
true if the reaction is d+d fusion! -- there isn't any theoretical
reason to reject the results. You cannot reject an unknown
phenomenon, when there are multiple reports confirming it, based on
mere theory, because there isn't anything to apply the theory to.
