At 03:31 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
I've seen what they write. Practically every review is preoccupied
with defending the reality of the field. I know you've read Storms'
abstract to his latest review, because you are acknowledged in the
paper. It's 2010, and most of it reiterates the reality of the
evidence for the effect. That's desperately trying to prove it's
real. Try to find another 22-year old field that adopts that sort of
defensive tone in the abstract.
Thanks, Joshua. I'm seeing better critique here than I've seen from
any ordinary pseudoskeptic.
First of all, reviews cover a field. If they cover a field, and if
the reviewer concludes that the field is investigating a real
phenomenon, the review is going to be "proccupied with defending the
reality of the field."
Further, people who believe that a field is bogus are going to read
any review that accepts it as real as "preoccupied with defending."
Storms' 2010 Review, however, is concerned with presenting the
overall "status" of the field. That's what he does. The abstract is a
sober presentation of the state of research. No review of cold fusion
could present it as being "uncontroversial," because, obviously,
there is still some controversy among people. Storms focus in that
paper, though, is in presenting the breadth of the evidence. He puts
a lot of attention into the heat/helium evidence.
Any review of an effect that is not trivial to observe will
"reiterate the evidence for the effect." You state this as
reiterating "the reality." You are writing polemic, you know that,
right? You are *advocating* a position. I'm asking you why.
Storms and 18 other reviews have been published in mainstream
journals. I didn't decide that these were mainstream, Britz, a skeptic, did.
You've missed something huge. Cold fusion is now routinely
accepted as a reality by the peer reviewers at mainstream
publications, and it is the purely skeptical view that is being rejected.
On which planet? Cold fusion papers appear in a tiny subset of the
peer-reviewed literature, mostly second-rate, non-physics journals.
They do not appear in APS journals, and certainly not in the
prestigious journals like Phys Rev, PRL, Science or Nature, where
discoveries of this magnitude would automatically appear if they
were "accepted as a reality"
Any field is going to publish in journals that consider work in the
field relevant to their readership. "Second-rate" journals are not
interested in trashing their own reputation by publishing fringe
nonsense. Presumably you know the history behind the effective
blackout in certain journals. However, Naturwissenschaften is not a
"second-rate, non-physics" journal. It's Springer-Verlags "flagship
multdisciplinary journal." Cold fusion is not a physics field, it's
more chemistry, but is cross-disciplinary.
This is not the place to go into the shameful history of what became
the automatic, non-reviewed rejection of cold fusion research papers
in certain journals. It's a well-known scientific scandal, covered in
sociological sources.
There is a law called Moulton's Law: when a bureaucracy makes a
mistake, it is impossible to fix. That's because bureaucracies defend
what decisions they made in the past, and I've seen this operate even
when the decision is utterly preposterous. Editors reject a paper
becauseof A and B. When it's pointed out that A and B are errors,
they then reject it because of C and D. And, "besides, our readers
aren't interested in this nonsense."
This is what is really happening: the two largest scientific
publishers in the world, Springer-Verlag and Elsevier, are now
publishing substantial material on cold fusion. The largest
scientific society in the world is now regularly hosting seminars on
cold fusion, and publishing, with Oxford University Press, the Low
Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook. The "prestigious journals" you
mention are *holdouts.*
The "discovery" is old news, and current work is not designed to
"prove" that cold fusion is real. Hagelstein's review, also published
in Naturwissenschaften last year, covers a detail, setting an upper
limit on routine charged particle emission from the reaction (which
is of high interest for theoretical work, it kills a whole pile of
theories). The work that was recommended by both DoE reviews, but
which the DoE never funded, is being done, slowly. And it's being
published, because the "blackout journals" can't control the world.
But some people, living in their own peculiar dream, think those
journals are the world. Especially U.S. physicists.
Cold fusion is just a small field, though there is "potential" for
something big. It's not nuclear physics, in how the research is done.
It's chemistry and materials science. It has implications for physics
only in a certain detail: it is a demonstration of how the
approximations of two-body quantum mechanics break down in condensed
matter, which really should have been no surprise, I learned from
Feynman, personally, that we didn't know how to do the math in those
complex environments. We have severe difficulty with anything other
than the simplest three-body problems.
We could toss in the 18 experts of the 2004 U.S. DoE panel, though
that was a review far shallower than the normal peer-review process
at a mainstream publication.
You have no idea what you're talking about. 18 reviewers met for a
day; CF advocates gave live presentations, 9 reviewers had the
literature for a month; Each of them wrote reviews longer than most
reviews of published papers. It was a review, by any measure, at
least 10 times deeper than the normal peer-review process at a
mainstream publication.
Well, I'd gotten an impression, somehow, that only nine of the
reviewers attended the presentation. I've done some looking, now, and
have not confirmed my impression, nor have I found contradiction. So,
at this point, I'll have to sit with "if you say so."
What was missing was interaction, where errors in expression and
interpretation are resolved. That is normal in the peer-reviewed
publication process. Look, this is simple.
Until the ash was known, skepticism that the excess heat was the
result of a nuclear reaction was very reasonable. Even if one accepts
that there is anomalous heat, "nuclear reaction" was only a
circumstantial conclusion, and I can certainly understand considering
"undiscovered artifact" as an operationally reasonable assumption. In
other words, you don't have to drop your hot-fusion project, just
from that! You don't have to revise your career plans. And nobody is
obligated to investigate every anomaly reported.
However, the ash was found and confirmed, and the neat thing about
this is that it finesses the debate over excess heat. The DoE panel
experts mostly missed the heat/helium issue, and one that did
consider it certainly misread the review paper. And the bureaucrat
summarizing then completely bollixed it up, misrepresenting the
review paper in a way that, if true, would *not* show correlation,
but the opposite.
Because of the central importance of the ash question, how this
happened, how this was allowed to happen, is a question of historical
importance. Hagelstein's paper, in my opinion, presented the evidence
clumsily. It was buried in details of lesser consequence, and
critical information was presented, almost off-hand, without analysis
of significance. The Case results were presented in an Appendix. One
might think that this would have deprecated it, one would think,
then, of this as a detail. But, in fact, it became the whole story
for a reviewer and for the summarizer who followed the reviewer's
error and compounded it. The story was misread because of how the
information was presented.
Hagelstein et al wrote the review paper more like an ordinary
scientific paper, when what the situation required was skillful
polemic. (Still within what is consistent with scientific norms, but
if you hedge every statement in polemic, if you cover every
exception, you dilute the message, and when there is entrenched
opinion, what is required is far different from ordinary, cautious,
academic style. That review paper was presented as part of two-decade
debate, a rare opportunity, and it was largely missed. Not entirely
missed. Some of the message got through. McKubre has done a huge
amount of work in the field, careful and thorough work. Hagelstein
has been plugging away at CF theory for two decades. He's thoughtful
and cautious, in person and in print. Academic. Almost classic "ivory
tower" academic. Which is a good thing, by the way, if you want
caution. I have the feeling that if I asked Hagelstein the time of
day, he'd look at his watch, check his cell phone, look at the
daylight or sun position, think a little, and then say, very quietly,
"I think it's about three o'clock."
Of course, the pseudoskeptics think that Hagelstein is a wild-eyed dreamer.
McKubre is a professional, hired by SRI to consult for clients who
are, indeed, interested in WTF is going on in CF cells, such as the
U.S. government, the Electric Power Research Institute, etc. He's
sober and careful, as well. And as thorough as his client's money
will allow! McKubre had no interest in misleading his clients. If he
"promoted" cold fusion, he'd be violating the basic standards of his
profession and his occupation.
Back to the 2004 DoE report, and Hagelstein's paper, there were
sixteen cells described in the Appendix. They got that right! But
what were the sixteen cells? If you read the paper carefully, half of
them were hydrogen controls, the cells were in pairs, hydrogen and
deuterium. Only part of the collected data is presented. Large
amounts of largely irrelevant data, experimental detail, or data that
is difficult to understand as to relevance, are presented.
In academic publication, I see this, fairly often. The researcher is
intimately involved. The researcher thinks it's all important, and,
indeed, it is. But only a specialist can read these papers easily,
often. If that!
I've seen so many charts of "excess heat," and it takes hours of
reading and rereading, sometimes, to figure out why the researcher
thinks this chart is important. The SRI P13/P14 chart, showing a
single episode of excess heat, seen in isolation, will simply leave a
reader scratching his head. The researcher knows the context, and in
that context of experience, this chart is amazing. Conclusive. Excess
heat, this would be one of McKubre's examples of "clear excess heat."
But someone else comes along without that background, like Barry
Kort, sees the chart, and says, "Aha! the heat is correlated with
input current, this is obviously unmeasured input heat, probably
caused by bubble noise creating AC noise in the power supply that is
then not measured."
To understand this chart, one needs much background, made immediately
accessible. You need to know that the current excursion shown was
repeated, this was the third repetion. The other occurrences, the
same excursion, no excess heat in either the deuterium or hydrogen cell.
And lots of cold fusion evidence is like that. It's a wall of fact,
difficult to penetrate and understand.
In the search to amplify the effect and make it more "reliable,"
rsearchers kept varying the experiment. That was understandable, but
as long as clear and clean reliability was not obtained, what was
needed to obtain quantitative results was not variation, but control.
It's been claimed that CF researchers were desperate to prove that CF
was real. If that were true, they would have proceeded differently.
They would have been quite content with modest reliability and modest
heat -- all that is needed is enough to be clearly elevated above
noise, often enough for it to be significant. Instead, they were
going for the gold: trying to find the magic ingredients that would
make for possible commercial application -- or otherwise develop new
information, not solidify and confirm old information.
The massive rejection of cold fusion, which extended to rejection of
a graduate student thesis solely because it involved cold fusion
research, and once the news of that got around, cut off the normal
supply of labor for replication work. Nobody gets a Nobel Prize for
boring replication, running the same experiment that others have run,
over and over, and nobody gets rich from it. As I investigated cold
fusion, I saw this, and I'm working, myself, subject to my own rather
severe limitations, to fix this, I'm designing and constructing a
single, very specific experiment, that anyone could replicate with
about $100 and a power supply. But this work is not designed to
"prove cold fusion." All it will do, if the replication succeeds, is
show a few neutrons per hour. (The design is, I hope, insensitive to
normal charged particle radiation, and will effectively exclude background.)
As I've written: there is a single, easily-described (but difficult
to do, which is common in much science, isn't it?) experiment. It's
been done about a dozen times or more, but only a few times has it
been done with high accuracy or extensive repetition.
Because of the power of the results of this experiment, because of
wide replication, and because of the lack of contrary work, the
default position now, once this is recognized, is that the
Fleischmann-Pons effect is deuterium fusion to helium, without (much)
radiation.
As with excess heat, it is always possible to come up with armchair
objections, something allegedly "not ruled out." At some point,
though, Occam's Razor takes over. If deuterium fusion were truly
impossible, if there were sound theoretical reasons for rejecting the
very possibility, then it would be far down the road before we'd meet
Mr. Occam. However, as I'm sure you know, a number of Nobel
Prize-winning physicists did not think it was impossible, and tried
to develop theories of how it might work. They failed. This is
absolutely not a simple problem in theoretical physics. Lots of very
bright people have worked on it, and that abstract you dismiss,
Joshua, is correct, there are "plausible theories," by which Storms
means that we don't immediately fall down, rolling on the floor
laughing. None of them are complete, none of them can yet be used to
reliably predict reaction rates (AFAIK), all of them involve
remaining mysteries.
My favorite theory is Takahashi's Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate
theory, but it's obviously incomplete and probably is only a clue to
the real reaction.
This is important. If Takahashi -- or something like that -- is
right, there is no "revolution" in quantum mechanics. The existing
theories regarding d-d fusion, the many years of work describing the
behavior of that reaction, none of that is tossed out. This is simply
something different, a complex situation that was never before
anticipated or analyzed. What TSC theory shows is that fusion is not
only possible, under certain circumstances, if that circumstance
arises, fusion is immediate, predicted, within about a femtosecond.
That's *calculation*, not imagination, from known quantum field
theory. The TSC condition happens to be relatively easily calculated
(still difficult!) because of the symmetry.
But does the tetrahedral configuration arise? Storms thinks not, he
thinks it would take too much energy to get there. I don't know how
he knows that, but certainly it would take energy, TSC requires that
two molecules of deuterium -- with the electrons -- find themselves
simultaneously confined in a single lattice position. It's very easy
to think this impossible: there would be forces tending to break the
lattice, deuterium is dissocated by palladium, etc. But, then again,
the condition only has to exist for a very, very short time. I don't
know that anyone has done the math. Takahashi hasn't gone there yet,
himself, which is why I consider the theory quite incomplete. I think
that other theories involving larger clusters are more likely to be
the real mechanism, but that is, again, even more complex, more
difficult to calculate.
Having taken about two years to become familiar with the evidence,
I'm no longer questioning the reality of cold fusion. Statistically,
we are looking at about one chance in a million that the heat/helium
results are not coming from a true connection between excess heat and
helium. And that's just from Miles' results, not considering the more
accurate work of McKubre at SRI. This is an effect that gets more
clear and precise with increased accuracy, and it does not depend on
the "reliability" of individual cells. The variability helps, in fact.
Thought experiment: suppose we toss two coins a hundred times. We
look at the distribution of results, seems normal. However, now,
suppose someone is betting on the outcomes. Approximately 25 times,
the outcome is HH. We have a record of the bets, and we notice that
the bettor only bet on HH when HH was the result. Otherwise the
bettor didn't bet. From the distribution, we might think it was a
fair set of coins, no influence. But from the bets, we might suspect
the opposite, right? Correlation can show things that are invisible otherwise.
That it was difficult to set up and demonstrate the FP Heat Effect
was an obvious source of suspicion. But there is no intrinsic reason
why a physical phenomenon must be readily replicable. In the original
FP work, if I'm correct, they only saw excess heat in about a sixth
of cells. (They were not ready to publish!). Over the years, contrary
to claims that no progress has been made, it is up to the point where
even the electrolytic method shows excess heat more often than not,
though the levels of heat are still quite variable. He Jing-Tang
(2007) claims that some groups are reporting 100%, but he doesn't
seem to document that.)
That kind of unreliability is very good reason to avoid a major crash
program of research. That effect isn't reliably controllable yet
(still!) and thus there is no evidence that commercial application is
possible. But from the point of view of pure science, erratic results
like this are extremely interesting. What's the difference between
the cells that show heat and those that show no heat?
The difficulty of replication was an excuse that led to abandonment
of many replication attempts, before loading ratios were reached that
would allow the effect to start to appear. With the original
approach, it took months. Not every batch of palladium would allow
the high loading to be reached. The necessary level of loading was
not known at first. The effect of contamination of heavy water by
light water was not known, I think it was assumed that a little light
water would not be harmful. It turns out that even 1% of light water
*mostly* poisons the reaction. Heavy water is hygroscopic, if it's
not protected from contact with the atmosphere, it will gradually
increase in light water content. There were hosts of difficulties not
initially recognized.
But, in later analysis, erratic replication actually helps prove the
reality and nature of the effect. That's because dead cells, showing
no excess heat, become controls in a series of experiments seeking to
determine of helium is correlated with excess heat. They also become
controls, by the way, for the calorimetry, eliminating hosts of
possible prosaic explanations like "power supply AC noise."
In many experimental designs, the cell is maintained at constant
temperature, elevated from room temperature, and what is measured by
calorimetry is the power necessary to maintain that temperature. If
the cell produces heat, less power is needed. The point, here, is
that the dead cells, and the ones showing excess heat, are running at
about the same temperature, so explanations like "the heat -- with
prosaic cause -- drives helium out of the cathode or out of the
electrolyte" become very shaky. Or, one attempt by Shanahan, if the
cell is hotter, seals will supposedly leak helium from ambient.
Joshua, you are perfectly welcome to sit in your belief that there is
no anomalous heat here (i.e, I assume, your belief that the heat has
an unidentified prosaic cause). But I will point out that this is a
belief, it is not a demonstrated scientific fact, for sure.
If someone could identify, clearly, the prosaic causes of CF results,
or even a major fraction of them, they could easily get this
published. It would, in fact, be major news.
A minor objection by Kowalski to the SPAWAR charged particle claims
was published. If I try to replicate SPAWAR neutron findings and
fail, I'll write it up. I will not conclude, from replication
failure, that the original work was flawed, because, as I've noted,
there are many, many ways to fail to replicate, to fail to set up the
necessary conditions. I will publish my results on-line, immediately,
from the first run. I'm using an independent method of identifying
neutrons, but otherwise the experimental conditions are very close to
the SPAWAR work. If I fail, I will then attempt to find the reason.
If I succeed, I will have a different kind of information about the
radiation, and I'll have demonstrated a new (and cheap) technique.
This is what was never done: replication with demonstration of
artifact. The closest to it would be the Lewis (Cal Tech) report that
they found excess heat from failure to stir. Nice try! The
speculation was quite reasonable. That's the kind of work that, with
more depth and replication accuracy, would have been conclusive.
What we know is that electrochemists who continued working and did
not give up immediately were able to demonstrate the effect. It was
replicable. Miles, by around 1992, was seeing excess heat in most of
his cells. So, then, what is *associated* with excess heat that is
absent when there is no excess heat? We know a number of things, from
other work: high loading ratio. Certain batches of palladium. High
current density.
But as to effect, what? Helium. Tritium is apparently not correlated
or poorly correlated. Neutrons, very, very low level, bursts,
difficult to distinguish from cosmic ray background. Transmutations?
Still not correlated with excess heat, unless we want to consider
helium the product of transmutation.
Once Miles was replicated, it was really over as far as the science
was concerned. The rest was, and remains, politics.
This is a fascinating study in scientific process. Heat/helium has
been known and confirmed for well over a decade. Yet I find no
mention of it in published skeptical literature, except for Huizenga,
in 1993. Who found the work amazing, but simply considered it
unlikely that it would be confirmed, chalking it up to mystery. I
find it strangely not emphasized in positive literature, and that was
one reason why I encouraged Dr. Storms to write what was eventually
published as a review of the field, which started and was first
submitted as a paper that only reviewed heat/helium. The editor of NW
suggested that it become a review of the field, overall. Since that was needed.
Joshua, there is no way to just toss the NW paper in the trash. You
can toss your personal copy there if you like. That means nothing.
Those experts *unanimously* favored further research and
publication, which is entirely contradictory to your confident
assertion that it is only "fringe 'scientists'" who are "desperately
tryingto prove it's real."
No, they did not. They rejected, unanimously, special funding for
the program. That would be ridiculous if any of them held out hope
for a real effect.
You are contradicting the review document and you are making an
unwarranted assumption. It's a polemic reframe. If none of them held
out hope for a real effect, they would not have unanimously
recommended research to resolve specific questions. Indeed, they
would have written that it was time to close the books on this. Or
they would be derelict in their duties.
What's fascinating to me is that the 1989 review really was massively
negative. The "recommendations" and neutral language in the report
were only there because the co-chair threatened to noisly resign if
they didn't incorporate that. But, it appears, the language of the
2004 paper was a real consensus, as shallow as it was.
The statement you refer to:
"The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding
agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for
experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the
question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in
Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at
energies on the order of a few eV."
appears first to be a sop to the presenters egos, after the
devastatingly critical review, but also a simple restatement of the
mandate of funding agencies. They are not recommending more
research, only that well-designed proposals deserve to be considered.
Right. And they were not. The review covers areas of research. That
recommendation, though, is obsolete, because nobody in the field is
likely to waste their time trying to resolve "the question of whether
or not there is anomalous energy production in PdD systems," because
they know there is, and the evidence, if examined carefully, already
shows that. This question, however, could be resolved rather easily,
if someone wants to fund it. My guess is that this work will, indeed,
be done, with or without much funding, probably by grad students at,
say, a university in India, where the field is much more favorably
regarded. Or China. Or Japan. Or Italy. Not the U.S., yet, the
personal risks involved are still too great.
As to "whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the
order of a few eV," that's a silly research question, given that the
answer is probably No! That question assumes that if there is a
nuclear reaction, it would be "D-D fusion," which is unlikely for
tons of reasons. Rather, the proper question would refer only to
"nuclear reactions," not "D-D reactions," and, in fact, the evidence
is also overwhelming that they do occur. If the existing research
isn't convincing, what new results would be expected to be?
Now, the SPAWAR neutron results got a lot of publicity because they
seem to be conclusive on neutrons. Of course, some people have
challenged them, and there is some cogency to some of the challenge.
However, most criticisms I've seen don't consider the controls, they
just assert some prosaic explanation that neglects the actual
experimental conditions. If I had to bet, based on the SPAWAR neutron
results, I'd bet that, yes, they found neutrons. And neutrons almost
certainly prove "nuclear reactions." But ... they find what may be
something like a few neutrons per hour. The experimental conditions
rule out cosmic ray background. Given that any kind of fusion can
make high energies available, given that neutrons are produced
preferentially under conditions that seem to have no relationship to
excess heat, per se, given the very, very low levels, this tells us
almost nothing about the primary reaction. But it does say, rather
loudly, "nuclear."
The problem with SPAWAR is the lack of independent confirmation. That
will be remedied, one way or another.
