On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com>wrote:
> > Any review of an effect that is not trivial to observe will "reiterate the > evidence for the effect." I checked the abstract for a review of high temp superconductivity (which incidentally has 100,000 publications in the last 20 years), and it mentions progress in developing applications and theories, it does not say supporting evidence has accumulated, or evidence supports the claims... > > However, Naturwissenschaften is not a "second-rate, non-physics" journal. > It's Springer-Verlags "flagship multdisciplinary journal. > Impact factor is 2.something, and it certainly is non-physics. At least, I couldn't find any physics luminaries who have published there in the last 30 or 40 years. (It was different in the 20s and 30s.) It's not an insignificant journal, it's just that publishing there is not an indication of general acceptance, but rather an indication that the paper couldn't get published in a more appropriate journal. And considering the importance of a real cold fusion effect, that means it's being largely dismissed by the mainstream. > Cold fusion is not a physics field, it's more chemistry, but is > cross-disciplinary. > Cold fusion would revolutionize the field of fusion if it were valid. Physics journals would fight to publish the results, if they felt they were credible. It is a physics field, whether you > > There is a law called Moulton's Law: when a bureaucracy makes a mistake, it > is impossible to fix. If cold fusion were to turn out to be real, it would of course be huge, and very embarrassing to all the skeptics. They would not take the chance unless they believed sincerely, and with high degree of certainty, that it is bogus, Moulton's law or not. > 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. Big deal. Publishers get paid to publish. It is the editorial boards of journals that must answer to content. Elsevier publishes on the paranormal, homeopathy, and astrology too. > > 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. That sounds like a pretty big detail in *physics*. But quantum mechanics is used to analyze condensed matter with more than 3 bodies. The 3-body problem in nuclear physics is more difficult, but nuclear forces are short-range; it's pretty implausible that the hugely spaced lattice has much effect on nuclear forces. But, whatever, it is definitely physics. > > However, the ash was found and confirmed, and the neat thing about this is > that it finesses the debate over excess heat. Not sufficiently convincingly to the DOE panel, or to the physics community in general. > And lots of cold fusion evidence is like that. It's a wall of fact, > difficult to penetrate and understand. > > And yet heat is dead simple to penetrate and understand. That's my problem. > > > The massive rejection of cold fusion, which extended to rejection of a > graduate student thesis solely because it involved cold fusion research, Well, a usual criterion for a PhD is that it contributes to scientific knowledge, and is publishable. I don't know if was published or not, but one can argue that the entire field has not contributed to scientific knowledge. > 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. But many new avenues begin with replication. And scientists know that. That's why so many physicists from the modern physics revolution became famous. They accepted new results eagerly, replicated and extended. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit. If CF were real, the same would be true. > 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. One tried to develop theories, but Schwinger was in his twilight years by then, and not many physicists took him seriously. "One" is a number I guess. Josephson has expressed support for cold fusion, and for the paranormal. Hmmm. Who else? And if we're going to decide the matter by lining up the opinions of prestigious scientists, there are a lot more on the skeptical side. > > 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. > > The problem is that it is so contrived to avoid radiation. Nature doesn't mind radiation, so why would it pick a 4-body reaction instead of a 2-body. I don't buy it. No matter what theory you pick, Widom Larsen, or TSC, or anything, there is a huge energy barrier you have to overcome. You can write complicated equations to try to snow your audience, but somehow, you have to get hundreds of MeV into a single atom or lattice site. If you can do that to produce electron capture (W-L) or a symmetric 4-body fusion, then why wouldn't ordinary D-D fusion happen at a much higher rate? It's just not a plausible coincidence to me. Heat is hard to prove, and there is some exotic nuclear reaction that produces no radiation. And not just one reaction, but multiple reactions, all radiationless. > 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. > The thing about these exotic theories is that they can be easily checked by theoretical physicists, without the expense, time, and risk of failure and derision that accompanies checking experimental CF results. And if they turned out to have merit, those physicists would want to get a piece of the action. They would support and extend the theory. But the only thing I hear is crickets. > > 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. Statistically, given the failure to prove the excess heat in 22 years, we are looking at a chance of 1 in a million that nuclear reactions are producing measurable heat in cold fusion experiments. That may be high. But how will we find out who is right. If definitive results in CF come along, then we will know I was the fool. But the absence of same, if in another 20 years, people are still doing electrolysis experiments with a little excess heat now and then and maybe a little helium salted in, advocates will still claim it's real. I predict there will be only a few left by that time though. > > > 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. > It's difficult to prove a negative. But in the judgement of most, the belief that there is excess heat is a belief, and not a demonstrated scientific fact. > 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. > Only in the CF community. The rest of the world would say, duh, and ask why you wasted time on it. > This is what was never done: replication with demonstration of artifact. It's a mug's game. Artifacts by their nature are hard to find, and when it's someone else's artifact, even more so. The best approach when results look fishy is not always to try to find the fish, but to ask, if the suspected result is real, what else should happen. If CF produces more heat out than it gets in, then you should be able to use the output to power the input, and make an isolated heat producing device. If a device can produce 10 kernels of wheat from one kernel, you only need one kernel to feed the world. Once it gets going, there is no input required. > > 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. > Oh. Come on. Storms uses 25 data points from 4 experiments in his Table 3, most from conference proceedings, and the rest from 1994, and they vary by almost a factor of 2. So since Miles 1994, the only results he uses to establish a correlation, the only results he uses that "replicated" Miles did not pass independent peer review. So that's an average of one result per year for the most definitive experiment in the field. In any other field, this would be regarded as preliminary in the extreme, and all participants would scramble to improve the results, to get the error down below 1 MeV, to get credit for having the most consistent reproducible data. This, as you have argued, should not be difficult. Reproducibility of the Pd is removed, heat can be measured accurately, helium is 1000 times above detection limit. It should be easy to get a per cent or two error, every time. But what has been published in the last decade? Basically nothing. It is difficult to believe people have not been trying to improve the sorry data in Storms' paper, and so the absence of new and better results on this, the field's flagship experiment, suggests that the correlation is absent; that people have tried and failed, and are keeping the results to themselves. > > Joshua, there is no way to just toss the NW paper in the trash. There is no way to take such weak data on a straightforward experiment seriously, especially since there has been ample time to improve them. > >> 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. I don't believe it. Proving it's real is necessary to get the big funding, and everyone wants that. And I'm pretty sure if someone knew of a way to do it without doubt (from anyone), they would not hesitate.
