Rich Murray: Lomax: " I pointed out that.we won't know *absolutely for sure* until there are multiple fully independent replications or verifications.....My view is that "fraud" can't be completely ruled out..... It has been pointed out that a fraud could use different mechanisms in different demonstrations, and, in my view, there is no end of this possibility, until and unless fully independent verification is possible.....And it is not necessary to reveal the contents of Rossi’s black box. Just allow critics any critics to measure in arbitrary detail the incoming and outgoing fluids and electrical power....."
Lomax is actually agreeing that after over 4 busy months since January 15, the reality of massive excess heat from Rossi reactors is still not beyond reasonable dispute. This is prudent, thoughtful, informed skepticism. I agree, and add that apparent deliberate fraud can also result from individual illness, coupled with group think. I agree also with Cude's evaluation that there is no replicable evidence for any form of cold fusion since 1989: Joshua Cude says: May 22, 2011 at 8:21 am > “because the measured helium correlates very well, at the expected value for > deuterium -> helium; this was known by the mid-1990s. It’s a reproducible and > reproduced experiment, see Storms, Status of cold fusion (2010), > Naturwissenschaften.” This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. A correlation between heat and helium is clearly an important and definitive experiment for cold fusion. And yet, in the referenced paper, the most recent peer-reviewed results used to demonstrate such a correlation come from a set of experiments by Miles in the early 90s. These were very crude experiments in which peaks were eyeballed as small, medium, and large, the small taken as equal to the detection limit (which seemed to change by orders of magnitude over the years). Even in the best of Miles results, the energy per helium varies by more than a factor of 3. Miles’ results were severely criticized by Jones in peer-reviewed literature. And although there was considerable back and forth on the results, and in Storms view (of course) Miles successfully defended his claims, that kind of disagreement and large variation simply cries out for new and better experiments. So what have we got since? A very careful set of experiments looking for helium by Gozzi, which was published in peer-reviewed literature in 1998, concludes that the evidence for helium is not definitive. The only results since Miles that Storms has deemed worthwhile to calculate energy correlation come from conference proceedings, and the most recent of those from year 2000. Nothing that Storms considers adequate quality in this critically important experiment has met the standard of peer review. And they’re not good enough to allow Miles results to be replaced; Storms still uses some of Miles results, one assumes because it improves the average. The error in the result, even if you accept Storms’ cherry-picked, dubious analysis is still 20%. On an experiment that removes the dependence on material quality. Heat, it is claimed, can be measured to mW, the helium, it is claimed, is orders of magnitude above the detection limit, and yet the errors are huge. This is what passes for conclusive in the field of cold fusion. This is good enough that no measurements of helium-heat in the last decade entered Storms’ calculations. An objective look at the heat/helium results does not provide even weak evidence for cold fusion. Reply Joshua Cude says: May 22, 2011 at 8:36 am >The original report of neutrons was artifact. The recent reports are at levels >vastly lower, but well above background. Presumably you are referring to the CR-39 results, but these have been observed by one group only, and the results have been challenged as to whether they are in fact above background, and/or caused by artifacts. A project led by Krivit with a number of groups involved, and pretentiously named the Galileo project, failed to confirm the CR-39 results. So even these results, which in any case cannot explain the claimed heat, are far from convincing. Cold fusion experiments simply never get past marginal, controversial, and dubious. There is not a single convincing experiment in cold fusion, period. And Rossi has not changed that picture at all. [ End of Cude quotes ]
