At 04:31 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<<mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com>a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
If you examine what's being published, you don't find an attempt to
prove it's real, not lately, anyway. You find, in primary research,
reports of phenomena that imply reality, discussion of possible
explanations that assume CF is possible, etc. In secondary reviews,
and there have been nineteen published since 2005, you find
acceptance of the phenomenon as a reality.
The 19 reviews outnumber the primary research, an indication of a
moribund field. The reviews do read like they're trying to convince,
and not like the field is already accepted.
What's important about the reviwers is their acceptance by peer
reviewers. Many of the reviewers themselves are trying to convince,
that's true. You are arguing with a straw man, Joshua. It's obvious
that "many scientists" do not "accept" cold fusion. So people write
to explain it. That's somehow unusual or suspicious?
The reviews do not outnumber the primary research publications. If we
look at recent publications, they are anomalously high, that's true,
but the reviews are covering a vast body of literature, not just
peer-reviewed work, they cover, as well, conference papers. I don't
have a count for the primary papers, but mainstream peer-reviewed
publication for the period of the 19 reviews is about 50 papers,
using the Britz database.
The latest is Storms (2010) published in Naturwissenschaften,
"Status of cld fusion (2010)." That review now represents what
mainstream reviewers will accept.
It represents what reviewers at Naturwissenschaften will accept ...
in a review. The dearth of primary research in peer-reviewed
journals, and the fact that Storms references, especially later
ones, are mostly to conference proceesings, represents how little
mainstream reviewers accept.
So you can present a negative side. Science moves on, Joshua, and we
are seeing what science does when a political faction in the
scientific community manages to bypass the scientific process and
sits on research. It starts to leak out.
There were many negative replications published. Later work shows
that those replication attemps could be expected to fail to find
anything, because they did not, in fact, replicate, they did not
reach the apparently necessary 90% loading. At that time, 70% was
considered to be about the maximum attainable. To go above that took
special techniques that the replicators did not know and understand.
Well, good. But this loading requirement has been known since the
very early 90s, and still, in reviews as late as 2007,
reproducibility of 1/3 is reported. And still they can't make enough
power to power itself.
1/3 is plenty for correlation studies. You, and others like you, have
invented an non-existent standard that scientific research should
meet. If there is a drug that will cure a disease one-third of the
time, there will be great excitement! You are now stating the low end
of reproduction (without specific reference) and neglecting the high
end. I don't have much data on the Energetics Techologies primary
work, but it was replicated by McKubre and ENEA, reported in the
American Chemical Society Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, 2008.
23 cells were run and reported by McKubre. Excess power as a
percentage of input power was given. They only gave specific excess
power results if they reacjed 5% of input power, though their
calorimetry has, I think, substantially better resolution than that.
Of the 23 cells, 14 showed excess power at or above 5%. Two were at
5%, two were above 100% (200% and 300%), and the rest were intermediate.
Only six cells were reported from ENEA, in a common but frustrating
practice of only reporting "successful" cells. We do not understand
the "success" of a technique unless we understand *how often* it's
"successful." One of those cells, it's claimed, showed 7000% of input power.
I can look at reports like this and find many deficiencies in what is
reported, as I've hinted above with ENEA. This is very complex work,
and I understand that the relatively brief publications in work like
the Sourcebook must be abridged. But the lack of detail leaves me
unable to assess the statistical significance of the ENEA results.
They ran hydrogen controls (how many? "several" What's wrong with
stating numbers?)
I look at Table 1 in this paper and wish that it had simply presented
the actual results, instead of filtering it and summarizing part. I'd
want, for every cell, the actual measured or estimated "excess
energy." The chart presents excess power, but filters out *most* data
below 5% of input power (presumably steady state input power at the
times of the appearance of excess power). Filtering out the low end
disallows understanding how the phenomenon operates under marginal conditions.
In some work, helium is now routinely being measured, because this
provides an independent measure of reaction rate. It would not be
necessary to take special steps to capture all the helium, and that's
difficult and time-consuming. Rather, all that would be needed would
be to measure helium in samples from the cells, periodically, because
this should be correlated with accumulated excess energy, providing a
confirmation that this is not a calorimetric artifact.
Was McKubre restrained by economic constraints? Perhaps.
I know that Storms is routinely measuring helium in his gas-loading
work, as well as heat and radiation, with equipment built into his
apparatus. I'm looking forward to seeing results from his most recent work.
If you want to know the opinion of "mainstream science," there are
generally, two ways. You can look at the results of a review panel,
or you can look at what is being published in the way of secondary
sources under peer review or under independent academic supervision.
The 2004 DoE panel results completely contradict the impression you
are giving, here, Joshua. Are you aware of that? If you want to know
the truth, read the whole damn review, not just cherry-picked
excerpts quoted from it by people who have an axe to grind! Read it,
come back, and tell us.
OK. I've read them. They are more critical than I expected. Only one
of the reviewers (maybe a token believer, for all I know), found the
evidence for nuclear reactions conclusive. Several, as we've
discussed, found the excess heat results compelling, but most were
pretty ambivalent about it. None found them sufficiently compelling
to recommend special funding. The report criticized poor technique,
poor documentation, poor identification of goals, poor calorimetry,
poor experimental techniques. They concluded it is all more of the
same since 1989. No progress to speak of. Not a ringing endorsement.
"more of the same since 1989" does not recognize how negative the
1989 report actually was. It looks like only one other reviewer of
about fifteen was able to see any support at all, besides the
co-chair. We don't have individual reports from 1989.
I intend to study the reports themselves at the Cold fusion resource
at Wikiversity.
Generally, any scientist who accepts the evidence for cold fusion as
substantial is called a "believer." Like, Duh! It's a perjorative
term, here, implying that belief comes first and not evidence. That,
in fact, cuts both ways. From your understanding of existing,
entrenched opinion, Joshua, what percentage of the reviewers, ab
initio, would be "believers" on one side or another? Do you think
that there would be experts in the fields involved who were, before
this, unaware of cold fusion research or had no opinion about it.
Indeed, your whole thesis here has been that there is a solid
scientific consensus, in place for twenty years, that cold fusion is
bogus. Now comes a review that clearly backs off from that, as to
some substantial fraction of experts, and you manage to reframe it as
"all more of the same since 1989."
You are becoming quite visible, Joshua. Just so you realize that.
Rothwell writes polemic. I would not claim that you are not a
scientist because you don't "believe" anything. However, if you
have become familiar with the evidence, which, to assume good
faith, I'll assume you are not, and you cling to a *belief* that
cold fusion is impossible and that therefore the levels of heat
reported are impossible, I'd say -- then and only then -- that,
within this field and this issue, you are not functioning as a
scientist, you are functioning as a "believer."
I don't believe it's impossible, just highly unlikely. And none of
the evidence I've seen is in the least persuasive. To repeat, after
22 years, if it were real, they could do better.
*What is highly unlikely?"
And do you realize that Pons and Fleischmann, per Fleischmann's
account published something like 2003, was expecting to find nothing?
Do you know what he was researching?
Hint: it wasn't a technique for generating energy. He was doing pure
science, attempting to falisfy a theory that he thought was correct,
but that he also thought was incomplete. Indeed, it was necessarily
incomplete, because it was an approximation.
But let's look at scientific progress in the last 22 years. In the
field of cold fusion: score zero. In fields outside cold fusion:
too much to list of course, but perhaps the sequencing of the human
genome by what you call non-scientists tops the list.
Eh? Cold fusion is probably the most difficult theoretical question
to have been presented to physicists in the 20th century.
Obviously. How do you come up with a theory for something that
doesn't work. Nothing is more difficult than impossible.
You are assuming it doesn't work. However, your assumption still
leaves in place the question of what is actually happening. You have
presented no theory, no alternative explanation other than one that
is radically contradicted by the experimental evidence, overall:
"something is wrong."
I would assume that you'd have solid theoretical grounds for that
assumption, some theory that is well-established, with excellent
predictive power, that would be overturned if the experimental
results are valid. Okay, what is that theory? How does it predict the
results of cold fusion experiments. Please be specific!
The fact remains, progress, experimental or theoretical, has been
completely consistent with pathological science. None to speak of.
You have now denied facts that you are aware of. That does not bode
well. Replication percentage has improved. New techniques are known
and are being tested. The necessary conditions for the F-P effect are
far better known. Helium was identified as the ash and demonstrated
conclusively. The characteristics of pathological science are almost
entirely absent. And we could go over those, one by one. It's been
done by others, many times.
Here is why fusion: in some experiments, helium has been collected
and measured. Notice, one can run a series of identical cells, and
only in some cells is excess heat seen. Miles, who was an original
negative replicator covered in the 1989 DoE report, began to see
results. In his ultimate series as reported by Storms (2007 and
2010), he found heat in 21 out of 33 cells. In 12 cells, he found no
excess heat. Helium samples were measured by an independent lab that
did not know which samples were from which cells, they did not know
if the samples had shown excess heat or not.
Of the 12 cells that showed no excess heat, no helium beyond
measurement background was found. (This is far below atmospheric
ambient, by the way). Of the 21 cells showing excess heat, 18 showed
significant helium. (Storms notes some anomalies about the three
exceptions, but set that aside for the moment.)
This is very strong correlation, and Huizenga noticed this in 1993,
considered it an amazing result, but then dismissed it as probably
something that would not be confirmed, and, of course, impossible,
since no gamma rays were seen.
Do you understand, Joshua, the significance of Huizenga's "gamma
ray" comment. Huizenga was *assuming* that if there were a nuclear
reaction, it would have to be d-d fusion. His argument depends on
that assumption. And, in fact, the entire facade of theoretical
rejection of "cold fusion" depends on that assumption. It was
assumed that what Fleischmann called an "unknown nuclear reaction"
was, if real, a *known* nuclear reaction. A very basic error, and
one easy to see in hindsight.
If the helium-heat correlation is so significant, why is there so
little work on it.
Because the work that has been done is conclusive. Helium is still
being measured, work continues, because helium has become the
corroborating confirmation of excess heat.
The researchers now assume, generally, that helium is the product.
What more work do they need to do? Knowing that the ash is helium
does not tell us what the reaction is, though it constrains it severely.
I've explained why it is significant, the significance was recognized
by Huizenga, immediately, in 1994, when he first saw it. But, I'm
getting, Joshua, you don't like this work, and, I can now see, you
are rejecting, a priori, not examining evidence neutrally. You are
searching for reasons and excuses to reject and deprecate and
criticize. You are debating and trying to win a debate. For what
purpose? You have not disclosed your beliefs, and you have not
disclosed your purpose.
And why is the work that has been reported, (since Miles 1993 work)
not been published in peer-reviewed journals?
Aoki (1994), Miles (1994, two papers), Miles (2000), Arata (1997,
1999), Gozzi (1998), De Ninno (2008, ACS Sourcebook), McKubre (2000)
All those were peer-reviewed. The ACS Sourcebook is peer-reviewed,
but isn't an ordinary journal.
Joshua, I think you are showing that you are deluded. You are trying
to prove a point and are stretching the facts to fit your point. Bad
practice, certainly has nothing to do with science.
You seem to regard peer review as essential to the field.
No. I don't. It's a measure of the opinion of scientists in the field.
And why is the reported work so flimsy that a non-scientist
(Krivit) can tear it to pieces?
Well, for starters, Krivit, using Cal Tech technical language, is a
"warm body." More commonly, now people call such "idiots>" I've gone
over his criticisms, they are flimsy and fall apart when examined
closely. At one point, he noisily protested that a scientist had
supposedly changed his results because the scientist had written in
one place 5 x 10^N but had then written somewhere else 0.5 x
10^(N+1). Krivit is not a scientist, at all, and he's trying to tell
a story of bias and suppression. He's a fringe theorist, Joshua. You
want to lean on his work, be my guest, don't complain about me if you
fall on your face.
You are welcome to show how he has torn *anything* to pieces.
Helium is the only nuclear reaction product from fusion that is
present in the background at levels *above* that required to explain
the heat. Is it a coincidence that it is also the only one that is
found to be correlated to the heat.
No, that's a gross oversimplification. Take a look at the review
paper for 2004. Look at the levels of helium shown in Appendix 1. For
three cells, helium rises above ambient like ambient is completely
irrelevant, which it was. Consider the hydrogen controls in that
series. Why would helium leak in only for deuterium cells, not
hydrogen? If anything, I'd expect the reverse.
Look at Miles' results. If helium were produced by leakage, why would
it correlate strongly with the heat.
The level of fusion in CF cells is very low, at best. Only with cells
producing substantial excess heat would the helium be expected to
rise above ambient. But that does not at all prevent showing
correlation. Leakage would be expected to affect all cells equally,
or, if caused by isolated cell defects, to not be correlated with
excess heat, since it is highly unlikely that a cell defect would
also be the cause of the excess heat.
The possibility of coincidence was analyzed by Miles. He found that,
with his experimental series, the probability of chance correlation
was 1:750,000. Care to challenge that? Remember, Miles has been
confirmed, by much more accurate measurements of helium, by McKubre.
And there are many other confirmations of heat/helium.
Notice the argument used here. It's finding some kind of "dirt" to
toss. It's asking a rhetorical question designed to introduce doubt,
but not to actually show artifact or true error. And it's not true.
When there is enough heat, the helium expected -- and found -- is
above background. But helium can be measured at, what, a thousand
times below background? When measures are taken to exlude background,
it's possible to measure the helium with much lower levels of excess
heat. And that's been done.
De Ninno, though, did not exclude helium, and simply measured total
helium, looking for increase over background. And that's what was found.
I'm getting a good picture here of your position, Joshua. Not good.
You think that cold fusion researchers and authors are working hard
to prove the reality of CF, and you match that idea in yourself,
working hard to cast doubt and suspicion. It's your privilege, for
sure, but that doesn't mean that we cannot observe it and call it what it is.
Given that the experiments are working close to detection limits for
helium, a little cognitive bias could explain the correlation.
That is simply not true, again. They are not working close to
detection limits, what made you think that? They are, if I'm correct,
three orders of magnitude above detection limit. They are working
around or sometimes below ambient, a very different issue.
And you are now asserting "cognitive bias," neglecting that the Miles
work was blind. Miles was using a lab which did not know which cells
showed excess heat and which did not. Other workers may not have
taken that precaution, but as long as what they are doing is simply
recording numbers from the mass spectrometer, that should be okay.
If the levels are too high, the scientists will immediately suspect
a leak, which is probably what it is, and they will patch it, and
then ignore those results. If the levels are too low, nothing is
observed, and the experiments are ignored. If they are just right,
they get written up.
No. Miles reported all the reesults. You are making a common
assertion. You are correct that there is reporting bias in CF work.
However, this work has clearly transcended that. Just on the basis of
Miles, 750,000 to 1? How many CF experiments do you think have been run?
The careful researchers, like McKubre, report all their results.
Miles reported all his results, apparently, including anomalies.
In any case, the quality of the results -- in some cases a kind of
binary decision of present or absent -- are simply not convincing.
If helium-heat is real, as with the heat itself, it seems more
people would pursue it, it could be scaled up to produce
unmistakeable amounts, and it would be accepted for publication in
peer-reviewed journals. (And by itself, publication in something
like Naturwissenschaft wouldn't add much to the credibility.)
These are armchair assumptions. "Something like Naturwissenschaft"
betrays a certain severe bias. The problem with NW? Let's see just
how far you will go with this!
Unmistakeable amounts of helium have been observed. Producing more
helium is the same problem as producing more heat: it's not easy. So?
I think that I know a way to make a lot more heat. Try to replicate
the Pons-Fleischmann 1985 meltdown. Problem is, how far would this
puppy go? Or blow?
Until the mechanism is understood and results are more consistent
with better design, trying to scale up is quite dangerous. If there
is an explosion, it's like to convince nobody, after all, you've got
highly loaded palladium deuteride there, getting a hydrogen or
deuterium explosion isn't easily ruled out. People working with
large-scale experiments now do tend to set things up so that if it
blows, nobody gets killed. You do know that an SRI researcher died,
right? That was apparently recombiner failure, a chemical explosion.
Gas-loading techniques seem to be much simpler in structure than
electrochemical experiments, and to produce relatively steady heat.
However, it's only a little heat, with designs so far.
But Storms is working with a gas-tight reaction chamber, with
built-in calorimeter and two built-in mass spectrometers, one of
which will only measure up to about mass four or five. I.e., the
low-end one is designed to discriminate between He-4 and D2. That's
been the big problem with helium measurement, not atmospheric helium.
His other mass spectrometer measures up to higher AMU, and can only
see Helium as a bump on the D2 peak. He can still see it, but this
does whack the accuracy, I'm sure.
The idea that work with helium is not going on is just ignorance.
Storms, though, is not trying to "prove cold fusion." That's just a
myth, a pseudoskeptical fantasy. He's trying to design the structure
of nanoparticles with a oxide substrate and islands of palladium,
investigating various materials. So he is interested in what designs
are more effective at producing heat and helium. He's said he's seeing results.
Scientists in the field are *so over* proving the reality. I've been
looking at the famous P13/P14 image from SRI, it's on page 2 of the
Hagelstein review presented to the DoE. Looking at this, and knowing
the *rest of the experimental conditions*, I see why McKubre was
completely convinced by this that CF was real. He'd captured an
event, he had a photo of the fabulous beast.
But reading the paper, I don't see why anyone should be convinced by
that picture, because ... the details are missing, not explained.
What is being seen? How often did this kind of result appear? What
was the normal response to a current excursion that is shown? What
kinds of controls are involved?
The caption is partly accurate and partly misleading. And, for sure,
any skeptic is going to pick up on the misleading part!
"Figure 1. Excess power in Fleischmann-Pons experiments as a function
of time in twin cells and calorimeters, driven with
a common current, one with heavy water and one with light water.
This figure is not a review of "experiments," it is a single
experimental result from a single cell. It is being presented as
typical, but it is not typical, it's quite unusual. It's clear as
hell, what it is, once you know what is usual. But ... McKubre has
not presented, anywhere, as far as I can find, the usual response to
that current excursion. He certainly knows, and he's stated it:
nothing happens, usually. The excursion presented in the chart was
the third. The first two, supposedly the same conditions, same cell,
did nothing. But "nothing" is not an experimental result, it's a
conclusion. I very much wish that McKubre had published the *same
chart* for the first two excursions. I think he might still have the
original data, so maybe this could be done.
So, to put the reader into McKubre's mind, for the reader to
understand why McKubre was knocked-out convinced, the reader should
be able to follow McKubre's experience. He's been running all these
damn cells, and nothing is happening. (I'm guessing now, perhaps
writing a screenplay, he may have seen Other Stuff before). He's
about to conclude that this is all a Big Mistake. He's run this
current profile twice. He's got high loading. Something should
happen, dammit! He needs to make a report to his client. "Nothing" is
an acceptable answer, though disappointing. And then he says, "What
the hell, let's try this again, run it for another few weeks. Do you
realize the expense of "a few weeks"?
And the third time is a charm. From seeing "nothing," which means
that the deuterium calorimetry looks like that for hydrogen, i.e., it
gets a little noisy at maximum current, maybe, but clearly stays
within the error bars of zero, the excess heat goes up with the
current. The reaction, when it happens, is well correlated with
current density. If that were all that were involved, if it always
showed up, we'd be thinking that there was some systmatic calorimetry
error. But a systematic calorimetry error would have shown up the other times.
So would "AC power noise."
Having seen this beast personally, knowing the context and the
history and the rest, McKubre was convinced about excess heat. He
later did the best work on helium, so far. So he knows this is
fusion, and you can wiggle and waggle and chatter all you like, and,
unless you can do some actual work, you aren't going to convince him.
Barry Kort has recently been waving big flags saying "mist" and "AC
power noise." If these had been the artifacts, they would have been
extremely easy to idenfity, never mind that they are also completely
inconsistent with the actual experimental results. Barry points to
this very chart as evidence for AC power noise. His theory is that
with increased current there is increased bubbling (true) and
therefore increased resistance noise (true) and therefore AC power
noise increases (again true). However, even though Barry was an
electronics engineer, some screw came loose and he doesn't seem to
realize that with a constan-current power supply of adequate design,
and with the noise being low-frequency (I've been unable to find
measurements of the bubble noise, but it's highly unlikely to extend
above 10 KHz, and the power supply involved should be able to
maintain current regulation below 100 KHz). Thus, as McKubre states
in his work, the current becomes a scalar and input power may be
accurately estimated by multiplying, for a period, average voltage by
set current. And, in fact, the flat calorimetry with dead cells
confirms this. As does the almost-flat calorimetry for the hydrogen
cell in the image. Those cells are in series. Same current.
Kort is an example of how a fixed conclusion (bogus!) then leads an
analyst into serious personal error.
If I have a fixed conclusion (real!), I'd do the same thing. And
indeed, because I have made a conclusion, I can hold on to false
arguments longer than otherwise. It happens to everyone.
Don't hold your breath. You will think more clearly if you breathe.
The absence of a reason to doubt is certainly not, logically, a
reason to believe. But those who doubt the reports of others when
they have no reason to doubt are essentially sick. That's
pathological doubt, what's called pseudo-skepticism.
Call it what you want. Doubt is what science is about. Those who
can't describe their experiments so that others can reproduce them
are called incompetent.
Sure. Watch out, Joshua. Doubt is not, however, "what science is
about." Doubt is part of the scientific process, but when doubt
becomes the core, the shining feature, science stops dead in its
tracks. Science is first of all about observation and report.
Doubt as to report is quite dicey. The basic standard in science as
in common law is simple: testimony is presumed true unless controverted.
Nobody has controverted *any* of the testimony from Pons and
Fleischmann, to my knowledge. There was an artifact regarding their
conclusion that neutrons had been seen. They reported it. Others
analyzed it and showed that their conclusions were false, not
justified, inconstistent. That's how science and doubt work. Nobody
-- nobody sane, anyway -- claimed that they were lying or that their
reports were inaccurate. The neutron report was a matter of drawing
conclusions from data, when the matter was outside their professional
competence.
The early reports from Pons and Fleischmann were sketchy, complicated
by legal issues, forced by the U. of Utah. However, people did, in
fact, reproduce their work, in ways that are pretty routine. What
I've seen, reading cold fusion papers, is that frequently
experimental details, necessary for actual replication, are missing.
Probably this is intrinsic! There is a "state of the art" involved.
Frequently direct communication with primary researchers is necessary
to set up a successful replication. In my view, all this should be
documented, so that future work does become a matter of record, but I
don't see all this as appearing in journals.
I'm running with a detailed description of the Galileo protocol, but
when one actually tries to do an experiment, with even that much
detail, Questions Come Up.
Pons and Fleischmann's work was replicated, many reports within the
first year. Who are the "others" who "could not reproduce them"?
Mostly, I suspect, physicists. Working outside their expertise,
believing that it would be easy. And working with inadeqate
information and inadequate understanding, prematurely, and imagining
that they would see results quickly. So ... they failed! But those
who persisted eventually saw results, and that story was told over and over.
One of the biggest errors on the P/F side was in allowing the
experiment to be seen as a simple one. It looked simple and it
sounded simple, but, obviously!, it was not simple. They had been
working on it for five years with still quite limited success and a
low rate of occurrence of excess heat.
Don't mistake that for heat down in the noise. See the McKubre
experiment described above. That heat effect is not small, it is far
above the noise. But.... that heat effect did not happen often. It
was rare. McKubre did a huge amount of work before he saw that.
Now, what is this beast? This heat that shows up, that has some very
clear characteristics, but is normally shy? That's the question, isn't it?
Science normally assumes good faith, assumes that the reports of
those who do and publish experimental work are sound, that is, not
fraudulent and not entirely stupid, either.
True, but failure to reproduce trumps good faith.
Okay, for what has there been "failure to reproduce"? What is the
difference between failure and success? N-rays and polywater were
debunked by *successful replication.* What stopped the skeptics from
*successfully replicating* and then showing that the effect had a
prosaic cause?
Barry Kort claims that the difference is that the negative
replicators used the "correct technique" and the "believers" all made
the same stupid mistakes. But that, in normal scientific process,
would have been found quickly.
Misting, for example, would have cause the replicators, as well, if
they were using similar design, to also report excess heat, and then
they'd have noticed, say, deposits of cell electrolytes around the
cell vent, would have realized that they were losing electrolyte as
mist, and therefore when correcting for the heat of vaporization of
electrolyte, would have created excess heat as an artifact. It would
have been over quickly, certainly within a year or two.
When negative replicators found that they were measuring input power
differently from the "believers," they would then have measured input
power by the method of the believers, shown that it came up with
excess power, and then would have noted the nature of the problem,
the source of the artifact.
All that never happened. The rejection of cold fusion was a political
event, not one of the normal action and operation of doubt in science.
The real role of doubt, the most important one, is that one doubts
one's own ideas and beliefs and hypotheses, and attempt, "like the
dickens" to prove them wrong. Anyone who fails to do this isn't
practicing the scientific method, which is why, Joshua, I'll claim
you are not practicing the scientific method. You are simply trying
to prove your own beliefs to be correct.
But you have not disclosed your beliefs, your operating assumptions.
The evidence for cold fusion is stronger than a great deal that is
accepted routinely in science. That must be coming from some belief
that cold fusion is contrary to what is well-known. What is
well-known? What established theory would be overturned if cold fusion is real?
Frankly, I don't see one. I do see that some careers might be turned
upside-down. I see that if CF does gain political support and
attention, and funding shifts toward CF research, and away from the
hot fusion boondoggle -- as almost happened in 1989 -- there will be
a lot of particle physicists out of work, which will impact the whole
job market for physicists. I have no clear idea about how much of an
effect this has on opinions, but ... I've seen plenty of
pseudoskeptics claim that CF researchers are just out for money.
So.... maybe they are talking about themselves? People do that, you know.
And McKubre himself has said quantitative reproducibility has not
been demonstrated in the field, and interlab reproducibility has
not been successful without exchange of personnel.
People make mistakes. In the normal process of science, if someone
publishes an experimental result that is rooted in some unidentified
artifact, the artifact is then identified and shown by controlled
experiment, or better analysis of already-available data.
Not necessarily. Not if the claim is too outlandish. Then it is
simply ignored, until a better experiment, more difficult to dispute
comes along. That's the situation with perpetual claims of perpetual
motion. Scientists feel no obligation to find the artifact in every
new claim. They are content to wait until a car can driven
indefinitely without fuel.
Of course. Look, then, what should have happened in 1989 is that
physicists didn't drop everyting and try to replicate what they were
incompetent to replicate! Rather, they should -- with our 20-20
hindsight -- have waited for clearer evidence. Those inadequate
negative replications vastly complicated the issues. They were hasty,
didn't reach the required loading ratio, and made, perhaps, a host of errors.
This never happened with cold fusion. Instead, experimental evidence
was rejected because it was *believed* that it *must* be artifact.
Maybe, but the answer to that is a better experiment for which
artifacts can be excluded. Like Rothwell's palpably warm beaker. Bring it on.
Sure. And that was done. And "artifact" was never shown with the
original P-F heat work. Quite the opposite. That basic finding was
confrimed, by many. You are, again, demanding that nature fit into
your model of science. I.e., if it's not big enough to bang you in
the nose, it doesn't exist. Cool. I wonder how this impacts the rest
of your life.
That was turning science on its head, abandoning the scientific
method. Theory was treated as controlling, which, in effect, made
the theory not falsifiable, thus the theory was, for these people,
made into pseudoscience.
The theory was in control because the experimental data is so weak.
You need good data to overthrow a theory. There is no good data.
Because you say so. Data is data. It's all good, in fact. Error in
reporting it is not good. The data from the negative replications is
good. My regret is that not all the experimental data has been
reported. There is no such thing as bad data, unless true data error is shown.
Sometimes an artifact is discovered that means all the data has to be
thrown out. Like Fleischmann's neutron findings. And, very simple,
nobody replicated those neutron findings. The U Texas at Austin, was
it?, had some equipmment failure and held a press conference to
announce neutrons. And withdrew that within days. And that story is
still being told as if it were typical of all cold fusion results.....
This is a political situation, Joshua. It's not science. You would
never say, "there is no good data" if you were interested in science.
You would be interested in finding out how to predict data, by
analyzing what already exists. You'd be looking for patterns.
Explanations that can then be tested. And you'd be interested in testing them.
You are not. Much of what you have written can be tested against data
that has already been collected and reported, so it's not necessary to test it.
"There is no good data" demonstrates your bankruptcy, in the end. I'm
sorry, I regret it. I thought I might have found a genuine skeptic.
Such are very important. My introduction to cold fusion was through
one, Nate Hoffman, God rest his soul. He was quite aware of the
weakness of CF evidence, on the "nuclear" side, but somehow missed
Miles; i.e., he knew about Miles work, but apparently didn't have the
integrated results, the correlation with excess heat. Hoffman in
general avoided the calorimetry, because he saw it as a very complex
issue, and knew that high competence was needed to judge it.
With hindsight, this was the problem. The basic reaction is one which
produces, from dueterum, heat and helium, no major radiation. That
means that all the classic, experimental marks of nuclear reactions
are missing. Helium is, in fact, a nuclear, but, as you know, helium
is ubiquitous. In order to show helium, it took a major experimental
series, this was not work that could have been done quickly.
But because of the high levels of heat -- as compared to the
possibilities of chemical storage -- "nuclear" was immediately on the
table, so everyone began looking for classic signs, and when they did
not find them, and when it was realized that if d-d fusion were the
reaction, there would have been some dead researchers, the assumption
was quick: there must be some mistake. It was quickly pointed out
that there must be an ash, and so the early negative replicators
looked for tritum and He-3, in addition to neutrons, normal ash for
d-d fusion. Since it was not seen, the leap to "bogus" was obvious.
And wrong. This was all based on assuming that what Pons and
Fleischmann actually reported ("unknown nuclear reaction") would
resemble a known one.
There are theorized pathways that do what CF does. Deuterium fuel,
helium ash, no gamma rays. So ... Occam's Razor. The reaction is one
of these pathways. The most obvious and simple is TSC fusion, 2 D2 ->
Be-8 -> 2 He-4 + 47.6 MeV. No gammas would be expected. Alpha
radiation would be expected, but predicting the levels is difficult
if the fusion takes place inside a Bose Einstein Condensate, which is
the theory. Difficulties with that lead me to think that the real
reaction is more complex. There is some evidence for 3 D2, for example.
But theory is, at this point, as I've said, hazardous. We simply
don't know enough. For example, to assess reaction rate with TSC
theory, one would need to know the incidence of D2 in the lattice.
It's very low, except possibly in lattice defects. Those defects
might be the reaction site. It's very difficult to measure things
like this, this is *inside a metal.* You can't see it. You can't take
a spectrum. It's quite possible that the only observable effect is
fusion and helium!
I think that at this point, there are a lot of physicists missing the
boat. Takahashi has written and has published under peer review, his
Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate theory, coming up with a fusion
cross-section. Has anyone checked his math? I certainly haven't, and
I won't! I don't have the background. By assuming that CF is bogus,
an opportunity to develop new theory is being passed up. That's a
choice that any physicist can make, of course, and perhaps they
should, indeed, be discouraged by noticing that a lot of highly
competent physicists have tried before them. Takahashi is a hot
fusion physcist. He came up with his multiobody fusion concepts based
on *experimental evidence* that he developed that 3D fusion in PdD
under deutron bombardment was elevated over naive expectation by
10^26. Something happens in the lattice that doesn't happen in a
plasma. Like, Duh!
In fact, that was just shallow theory. There was no theoretical
reason to reject the possibility of *any nuclear reaction* at low
temperatures, and known counterexamples existed. What if the F-P
effect was simply a new exception, not previously noticed?
No one said no nuclear reaction was possible. In fact some people
calculated the rate of nuclear fusion. It can happen at room
temperature, but it's really really rare. There was and is sound
theoretical reason to be very skeptical of observable heat produced
from such reactions.
The reaction is, my opinion, almost certainly not d-d fusion, so
calculations regarding it are a huge red herring. You are correct,
Joshua, there are, indeed, sound theoretical reasons to be highly
skeptical that d-d fusion is taking place. I could give a long list of reasons!
It's still not completely impossible, but it requires some rather
unlikely conditions, as I assume you know.
What I expect, if you care about science, is that you will explore
this, openly, and that you will first disclose any fixed,
non-negotiable beliefs that you have.
Nothing is non-negotiable. A palpably warm Rothwell beaker will
bring me around. Excess heat experiments, not so much.
Suppose this: a series of experiments, palladium deuteride cells, are
run, looking for excess heat, using the calorimetry, in the hands of
an expert. At the same time, when the experimental run is over,
helium is sampled from the cells, which have operated at positive
pressure, i.e., gas flow is maintained out of the cell for the whole
run. The samples are sent out to an independent laboratory, which
reports the results without knowing anything about the heat history
of the cells.
Would you predict correlation between the excess heat and the helium
measurements? Let's assume there are 33 cells, and that 21 show
excess heat, the other 12 showed no excess heat.
If excess heat is artifact, what would you predict about the helium
results? What kind of analysis would you apply?
To give you a leg up, the 12 cells with no excess heat show no
helium; the levels of helium are in measurement noise, which is a
thousand times below ambient helium.
So, how many excess heat cells, showing how much helium, would it
take before you would consider this a convincing result, as to fusion?
