At 05:26 PM 10/21/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
This one has mistaken claims by David Williams which were tired back
in 1994 and which are repeated today ad nauseam by skeptics at
Wikipedia and elsewhere:
Mallove, E., Cold Fusion: Still a Hot Topic? Phys. Today, 1994. March: p. 93.
<http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MalloveEcoldfusion.pdf>http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MalloveEcoldfusion.pdf
Fascinating to read that letter to Physics Today. Mallove about
nuclear products not being found commensurate with the excess heat.
Huizenga, the same year, commented on Miles' announcement at ICCF 2
(1991) and refers to the 1993 Miles paper. It was known, but Mallove
writes as if that evidence did not exist. It is a strange lacuna.
In general, going over reviews of the field by "believers," I've
found that heat/helium has been given short shrift, for the most part. Why?
The correlation cuts through all the BS about calorimetry error,
helium leakage, and it presents a problem that appears not to be
soluble without a nuclear reaction, and, when quantitative data
solidified, it looks very, very strong that the reaction is some kind
of dueterium fusion, because of the ration that Storms estimates as
25 +/- 5 MeV. That would have to be much further off than 5 MeV to be
anything but strong evidence for deuterium fusion.
And it goes way back. There has been additional confirmation in the
last decade, but the basic work was all done before 2000, and the
evidence was already strong when Huizenga commented on it. In a
perhaps not-so-strange oversight, he neglected to notice what was
already obvious in his book: Miles was confirming, in spades, Bush
and Lagowski, who confirmed Fleischmann.
Huizenga's only refrain? There were no gamma rays, therefore there
could not be any helium. When it came time for him to comment on Bush
and Lagowski, he repeated the same canard: no gamma rays, therefore
no helium. And, expecting that Miles would not be confirmed -- he saw
that the result was "spectacular," he based this on branching ratio
and no gamma rays.
In what must remain as a strange additional oversight, something
repeated by others as well, Huizenga, on helium, notes that MIT et al
didn't find helium. Of course, because they didn't find heat -- or
only found a little heat, if the later analyses were correct -- that
was to be expected!
Underneath this all was a very obvious assumption: that if there was
a nuclear reaction -- Fleischmann had claimed, in his paper, not
"fusion," but an "unknown nuclear reaction" -- it must be d-d fusion,
because, again and again, he and other skeptics raised the known
behavior of d-d fusion as if it were an argument against any "unknown
nuclear reaction." This was all an argument from ignorance, taking
the position that there could not possibly be any unknown nuclear
reactions, but without actually stating that.
So Fleischmann's claim of an unknown reaction, that he had
incautiously -- but correctly! -- called "fusion" at the press
conference, was to be rejected, not because it was intrinsically
impossible, but because it did not have the characteristics of a
known reaction.
And if there is an unknown reaction, and if we reject the evidence
showing it on the basis that it isn't a known reaction, we will never
know about it.
The real question should have been, from the beginning, "What the
hell is going on?" Mallove does approach this, but he leans on
ridiculing the idea of it being a chemical reaction. Instead, a more
sophisticated approach would have been to ask, if this is a chemical
reaction, isn't it fascinating? We really should find out about a
chemical reaction that behaves like this! Fine. Suppose it's not
nuclear. What is it?
There was a strange parochialism in the physics community's response.
"We are sure it's not nuclear physics, it's theoretically impossible,
so ... it's bogus, and we don't care what it is, not our problem
unless it's fusion, which it can't be, end of question." Yet,
Fleischmann would have discovered, at the least, a truly remarkable
energy storage mechanism, if that's what was going on.
The physicists gave up replication attempts before finding this
"energy storage phenomenon," so they never did replicate, truly, and
that should have been obvious, at least once there were other reports
of excess heat.
