At 04:00 AM 5/29/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 9:35 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<<mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com>a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
Lomax> That work was done before the turn of the century. The source
is the conversion of deuterium to helium. The mechanism for this is
unknown, but the conversion would have a characteristic energy of
23.8 MeV/He-4, regardless of mechanism (i.e., as long as significant
energy does not escape, as with neutrino generation). The work done
does not rule out other possible reactions, as to fuel and product,
and there is evidence for them, but the evidence is strong enough
that believing in the contrary is believing in something highly
unlikely, believing in something not only in the absence of
evidence, but in the presence of contrary evidence.
The evidence for CF and for this heat-helium correlation is
pitifully weak. And the evidence for the quantitative correlation
has not been reproduced under peer-review. That's why a panel of
experts in 2004 said evidence for nuclear reactions was not conclusive.
No, the reports have been summarized and the conclusions accepted by
peer-review. There is no skeptical review with this authority.
"Pitifully weak" is Cude's personal and very subjective opinion, not
confirmed by any review. It's only a loudmouth, spouting off.
> The work I'm referring to is that of Miles. Huizenga, author of
"Cold fusion, scientific fiasco of the century," notice Miles' work
in the second edition of his book, and said that, if confirmed,
this would solve a major mystery of cold fusion: the ash.
And it has not been confirmed.
That's so poor a judgment that I'll call it a lie. It's been
confirmed. Cude sets up artificial standards for confirmation.
Huizenga himself was responding to a conference report! I think the
peer-reviewed paper came later. Storms, again, reports in "Status of
cold fusion (2010)" that Miles successfully defended his results.
That was approved by the peer reviewers.
There is no way around it. The balance of publication in mainstream
scientific journals favors the reality of the effect, favors that
helium is the ash, and the only thing missing is what Cude seems to
desire: convincing theory as to mechanism. And that doesn't exist, as
far as I know.
> That paper (Storms again) represents the state of the field today
Agreed. Unconvincing and published mostly in conference proceedings.
No, convincing and published in a mainstream, peer-reviewed journal,
a multidisciplinary journal of high reputation (where cold fusion
belongs, this is not a pure physics field, it's a cross between
physics and chemistry, studying phenomena not clearly established in
either field.)
"Convincing" to the peer reviewers and editors of the journal. Not to
Cude, who apparently believes himself superior to those. That's his
privilege, but forgive me if I don't fall down and worship his
superior intellect. That, in fact, is what truly does not exist.
> and shows what is currently passing peer review,
Exactly: obituaries instead of new experimental results.
Please show an "obituary" "currently passing peer review." As to new
experimental results, "current" should include the last few years,
and there are quite a few of those. But this field learned, for
years, to stay away from many of the "mainstream journals," because
these journals, particularly Nature and Science, established explicit
editorial policies, it seems, to reject anything on cold fusion
without review. So why should they waste their time? There is new
work being done, though Rossi tosses a monkey wrench into the whole shebang.
Rossi is a damned nuiscance to me, because if he's for real, most
focus will go toward Ni-H, and I'm set up for Pd-D. I won't lose
money, I don't think, I should still be able to sell the materials
(which are wicked expensive) but ... the interest and demand for the
demonstration kits I've designed (and I've sold one) will decline,
Ni-H will be the rage.
Pd-D is nice, relatively well-behaved, in terms of doing something
desktop and manageable for a high school student.
I'll still do my own research. I'm in this for the science, not "free energy."
> it is the latest in about seventeen positive reviews of cold
fusion to appear in mainstream journals, with no negative reviews.
Seventeen reviews and less than a dozen positive experimental papers
since 2004. That's pathetic. And who writes negative reviews of
moribund fields? No one. Why would they?
They do if positive reviews are appearing in mainstream journals and
real print encyclopedias are printing articles that are as stupid as
Cude thinks. They do if the largest scientific publishers in the
world are favoring a "moribund field."
And whether the field is "moribund" or not has nothing to do with the
basic science. How active is research into muon-catalyzed fusion?
This is pure pseudoskepticism, nonscientific arguments marshalled to
make a point, the point is generally a variation on "I'm smart and
you are really stupid and deluded.
> The pseudo-skeptical position is dead, it is unable to pass peer
review, and that is not for lack of submissions or effort.
You keep saying this, but you never identify who you are referring to.
Okay, Shanahan. You guess it. Lucky guess. But I'm sure that's not
all, it's just that there isn't general evidence, but, given the
existence of know-it-alls like Cude, I'm sure that papers are being
written and submitted. I suppose I could ask Storms, since he sees
what is submitted to Naturwissenschaften, as their LENR editor, but
I'm not sure he would tell me. That could be considered confidential.
We all know about the rejection of Shanahan's rebuttal to a rebuttal
to a rebuttal, but you know journals don't want to turn into on-line forums.
To be more accurate, Shanahan's letter was weak to the point of
silly, but the editors printed it do demonstrate the silliness of the
opposition, to nail it. That was a minor journal, and Shanahan's
arguments are nothing more than ad hoc and wild theories,
contradictory to the bulk of experimental evidence, just spinning off
on certain details. I saw, on Wikipedia, just how preposterous
Shanahan got when given free reign. The "back side tracks" that
SPAWAR claims as showing evidence for neutrons, why, those are
spallation caused by mini-explosions on the surface of the palladium
due to deuterium-oxygen recombination, causing shock waves to travel
through the plastic and blow plastic off the other side.
Yeah, right.
That rejection is meaningless.
Individually, yes. However, the silence is deafening. There are
ongoing publications in the field, and two per month or so is
certainly not dead. You can make the point that if this were widely
recognized as real, there would be people crawling all over it. But
I've presonally seen what happened when a close friend, who was a
mathematician with a knowledge of quantum mechanics, found out that I
was interested in cold fusion. It was like I'd sold out to the devil,
and he came seriously unglued, ranting and raving, and that's not my
judgment, that's the judgment of a common friend who saw the correspondence.
It was as if I'd challenged the canons of his religion. And that,
indeed, is what my views had done. He was utterly impervious to
reason, he was convinced that I'd been deluded by a bunch of
charlatans, who had convinced me to spend my money on "cold fusion
kits." He interpreted everything he was told in the most negative
possible way, and I don't know if he ever realized that I'd spent my
money, not on other people's kits, but on buying materials for my
own, that I was selling the kits, not buying them, and I'm selling
them to people who know what they are buying, which is not "cold
fusion" but the opportunity to investigate an effect, relatively
independently (and if they want to do it completely independently, it
simply costs them a little more, depending on how independent they
want to be, either more in terms of money or more in terms of their own time.)
Do you have any other rejections. Because you know an entire
proceedings was rejected by the APS recently.
Sure, I know that, and this is a really obvious exposure of the
political situation. The amazing thing there was that the APS ever
agreed to publish in the first place, this was an ACS-sponsored
forum. Someone in the APS found out and intervened, it's obvious, so
the contract was cancelled *without a reason being given.* The
proceedings will be published anyway, simply by someone else or on-line.
It means nothing about the science, but it tells us a great deal
about the politics. Compare this to the ACS. And which is more
"mainstream," the APS or the ACS?
Consider this: the experimental methods and results in cold fusion
are almost entirely chemistry. There are very knowledgeable
physicists involved, such as Takahashi or Hagelstein, and there is
theoretical work going on -- and being published -- but this is not
the core of the field, it's chemistry and materials science. So who
cares about the physicists? It's their job, if they want to
understand the physics, to study it and apply their techniques, and,
as long as many physicists refuse to even look, as many do, and as
long as they ridicule their colleagues for looking, as some do, cold
fusion theory will remain a backwater, and cold fusion will remain unexplained.
Really, with very rare exceptions, people who submit material on
cold fusion are going to be cold fusion advocates. Why would skeptics bother?
Why did Wood bother with N-rays? I'll tell you why: he was paid, he
was subsidized. He also got a fair measure of glory.
And, again, all this says nothing at all about the reality of cold
fusion, i.e., the reality of the FPHE, and the reality of the
heat/helium correlation. It's all about politics.
However, this is what will happen: increasingly, funding will start
to be diverted from hot fusion to other approaches. The physicists
aren't likely to pay that much attention, outside of people like
Duncan, who was, again, paid to investigate cold fusion, paid to
examine his own assumptions against new evidence, and, I'm sure, old
evidence that he'd never carefully looked at, until it starts to hurt.
Then the debate will return to the journals, where it belonged in the
first place, before it was interrupted by a manufactured, political
"scientific consensus."
I know that the smart money is starting to look at this, and
especially at Rossi. I'd be amazed if there aren't U.S. military
intelligence agents researching Rossi and looking for evidence either
way, just consider the recent DARPA report. This is, if real,
"disruptive technology." They don't want it to sneak up on them, and,
if it's real, it's already much later than they'd like.
> This is the reproducible experiment that was, for so long,
claimed to be missing: set up the F-P effect (hundreds of research
groups have done this; it's difficult, but certainly not
impossible), using careful calorimetry, the state of the art as to
the calorimetry and as to the electrochemistry, and measure helium.
Work has been done with more helium measurement accuracy and
completeness than what was available to Miles, and the results are
closer to the 23.8 MeV value. Storms estimates, reviewing all the
work, correcting for retained helium, a ratio of 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4,
in good agreement with the theoretical value for deuterium fusion.
1. The much better work was not peer-reviewed, and was subject to
biting criticism from a journalist.
Eh? Where work is orignally published is not crucial, because a
reviewer considers all that. "Biting criticism from a journalist?" I
have no clue, Cude. What are you talking about?
2. The results were available at the time of the 2004 DOE review,
and they were not convinced by them.
Some were. However, I've studied that report and the comments on it
in detail. The report, clearly, was not understood, and I'm not sure
*any* of the panelists understood it (friendly or not). It took me
hours of reading and re-reading before I had a grasp of what was
actually being reported, in that Appendix. For some reason, the
review focused on the Appendix instead of the main work, and that
Appendix was obviously not understood, it is erroneously reported,
and if what was reported was what the reviewers understood, a
reasonable surmise, then *of course* they considered the results
inconclusive. In fact, that supposed result showed anti-correlation
of helium and heat. A complete mistake in the report.
A mistake causd, in my view, by political unsophistication on the
part of the authors of the review paper, compounded by inadequate
review process. To really to a review that could penetrate the fog on
cold fusion would require much more sophisticated process than was
used. Much broader testimony would have been required.
Look, Joshua, Cude or whoever you are, surely we could agree that the
existing situation is unsatisfactory. Both DoE reviews suggested
research, and wtih the second one, this was a real unanimous
suggestion, not merely politically forced, as in the first review.
The research is needed to answer unanswered questions. You believe
that the heat results are artifact. Fine. What is it?
Heat/helium correlation has been reported by examining the work of
twelve groups around the world. Is that due to leakage? Fine. Show it.
People in the field have already done this work to their own
satisfaction, but the field will continue to attract new researchers
until the "errors" are exposed. It will continue to attract research
funding, which seems to be amping up, from what I hear. Do the world
a service, if you are actually a scientist, which I doubt.
Investigate, identify the artifacts, publish it, and accomplish the
closure of the matter.
If you can.
What you do instead is to demand that *others* do the work, others
who are already convinced by the existing evidence, and who are
putting their own efforts where they consider them productive, not
into useless efforts to convince pseudoskeptics like you. Put your
money and your time where your mouth is -- since that's what they are
doing -- or ... shut up.
Or rattle on, and be very visible for what you are.
I'm not wasting time reading the rest of Cude's comment, I probably
wasted too much time already. If Cude comes up with some argument
that someone else thinks needs attention, quote it and solicit
response! Cude flooded this list today with posts.
