At 11:27 AM 6/3/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Jed Rothwell
<<mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com>jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The data clearly shows that some cells
produce heat after death, and other do not.
What does not make sense here is your demand that all cells do this.
It's not a demand. It's an identification of an inconsistency.
So? The implication is that consistency of
results is a requirement for an effect to be
considered real. That's not a scientific proposition.
This can point us to the nature of the
controversy here, it is about the difference
between physics, which views itself as a hard
science, and "softer" sciences, where absolute
and accurate predictability are often lacking.
Yet unpredictability can be found within physics
as well; in particular, any chaotic phenomenon may be unpredictable.
In this case, though, the unpredictability of
cold fusion results, with FPHE-type experiments,
is probably due to the extreme difficult of
controlling all the exact conditions. SRI P13/P14
shows that there is a clearly distinguishable
phenomenon, anomalous heat, standing well above
the noise (about ten times the error bars, it's
very clear), with unknown conditions causing it,
since in the three runs, with all known specific
conditions, except for specific history, being
identical. (If this experiment was re-run, with
the *same history*, would it show the same
results? Probably not, because it would not,
then, be *the same cathode.* The cathode is
altered by the history, that's part of the problem.)
"Inconsistency" of results is a known
characteristic of the FPHE. So no single
experiment establishes the conditions that set it
up. You might, sometimes, get spectacular
results, then you try what seems to be the same
thing, and nothing unusual happens. *This
condition is not contradictory to the reality of
the effect, it merely shows lack of control of
conditions, and the chemistry of the surface of a
palladium cathode is more complex than I care to describe.*
Physicists intensely dislike messy conditions,
they design experiments to avoid them. But the
FPHE, as initially known, arises in very messy
conditions, simplifying the conditions did cause
the effect to disappear. Later work found other
conditions that also produce a heat effect with
palladium deuteride, with, apparently, more
reliable reproducibility. My own opinion is that
these other conditions show the same phenomenon,
but what's happened is that the experiment has
been broken down, in effect, into a very large
number of very tiny experiments run at the same
time. Nanoparticle palladium can be thought of as
one experiment per nanoparticle. So the overall
experiment is averaging many, many individual "runs."
But I have not analyzed nanoparticle results,
personally. I'm just pointing out what is a
possibility. I'll note that nanoparticle,
gas-loading, results have tended to be low,
quantitatively, meaning to me that most of the
"individual experiments" -- each nanoparticle --
is doing nothing. I.e., most experiments are
"failing." But, then, the overall experiment
averages together all the results, showing, if
there are consistent results, a significant
effect that *sometimes* arises. And then the
engineering effort attempts to find ways to
enhance that effect, to make it more reliable, which will raise energy yield.
Lomax referred to a specific experiment, and
even a specific slide from a presentation. This
was held up as particularly good evidence for
CF. I examined that slide and was puzzled by one aspect. Here's what I wrote:
It's held up as an example of what stands in the
way of recognition. If you see that slide, what
do you think? If you knew, seeing the slide, that
the same current excursion took place three
times, that the cathode was already, before any
of these excursions, heavily loaded (about 90%),
would this shift your understanding of what it means?
"One problem I have with those results. When the
current shuts off, the heat dies immediately. It
seems implausible that the deuterium would
diffuse out of the Pd that quickly. I would
expect a more gradual decline. Especially with
all the reports of heat after death. That points to artifact to me."
heat after death occurs with some techniques. I
do see, by the way, some HAD in that experiment.
Just not a lot. Look at how the heat falls, it
"bounces." The effect, first of all, is not much
seen under equilibrium conditions. When you have
high current, you have continual activity of
deuterium at the surface, and it's a surface
effect, apparently. What is going on inside the
lattice, deeper, doesn't appear to matter, except
that if there is low loading deeper in, the
deuterium will rapidly migrate there. So to have
very high loading at the surface -- 90% is very
high, it used to be thought that 70% was the most
you could get -- you have to have high loading
throughout, that's all. When the current is
rapidly shut down, the deuterium will immediately
begin to migrate out, the surface loading, right
at the surface, will drop drastically, that would
happen in a flash (right at the surface). My
suspicion is that the FPHE effect occurs when
sites are *overloaded*, that the surface, itself,
is *fully loaded* and then when a site becomes,
just for a flash, *overloaded*, the effect shows
up. I'll also note that the environment in which
the heat effect actually appears is unknown. It
may involve, for example, oxides, some
researchers think that. My point is that turning
off the current *can* result in an immediate
change in deuterium "pressure" in the first layer
of palladium, that which is immediately exposed.
What you are doing is seeing a mystery, and
concluding "artifact." But what artifact? That's
the question, isn't it? I've seen people come up
with possible artifacts for this work. Really
lousy, weak explanations, that conflict with the
rest of the experimental data *for these
experiments,* and with what's generally known to
electrochemists as to the techniques. You are
welcome to try. From what I can see, you have
better knowledge of physics than some of those
who have tried, maybe you will do a better job.
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cold_fusion, and
take a look at the subpages, there are some
debates there that should be refactored,
eventually, so that the conclusions can be easily
seen, right now they are just long debates.
So, given that some cells show heat after death,
meaning the deuterium does not diffuse out of the Pd right away,
No, there is an assumption here. Suppose that the
effect appears at, say, 90%, and that the SRI
cells are *just above that, a smidgen." So you
turn off the electrolytic pressure, and the
effect immediately disappears, as the loading
goes quickly below the required level. Suppose
that in another experiment, the necessary loading
is the same, but the cell reaches 92%. Turn off
the juice, the loading starts to go down, but it
takes time to pass the turn-off threshold.
And the actual explanation may be completely
different. Basically, the issue with almost all
the CF research is the ability of experts to use
calorimetry, a very old and well-understood
technique. There are aspects of it that are
difficult, and newbie mistakes to be made, but
there are also experts, and among them were Pons
and Fleischmann. McKubre, as well, was highly
skilled, and used a different technique, and
that's a whole topic of its own. What has been
missed in a lot of review of the field is that
SRI was retained as a consultant to investigate
cold fusion on behalf of EPRI, which had urgent
and important reasons to know the truth. And
McKubre was a professional, charged with
providing evidence and analysis to them, which is
what he did. The SRI work was, thus, *a neutral examination.*
But in the mythology that grew up, positive
results were ascribed to "believers," to
expectation bias, etc. Expectation bias would not
explain P13/P14, nor only the most marginal of cold fusion experiments.
how could it be that in this particularly good
experiment, the deuterium could diffuse out seemingly in a matter of seconds.
That chart has a scale of hours, the horizontal
scaling is 24 hours per division. "Seconds?"
Joshua made that up. This is flow calorimetry,
practically nothing would be seen in "seconds,"
unless the effect were huge, which this was not.
As I recall, this may have been 5% excess heat.
The "deuterium" does not need to "diffuse out,"
which would take a long time. It only needs to
drop below a critical value, which is a level of
loading that is extremely difficult to get and maintain.
If you look at the excess heat with the highest
current level, it is already, slowly, declinging.
That could mean that it is at very close to the
critical level. If you look at other experiments,
you will see that often the level of heat varies
wildly, even with constant current, this
particular experiment was unusual in the
relatively stable level of heat. So, how fast did
the heat decline. Look closely at the chart. At
the top of the falling heat plot, the dots, the
measured values, are to the left of the dotted
line that is the input current drop, and toward
the bottom, they are to the right. I estimate the
fall time as greater than one hour. Now, is it
plausible that the surface conditions in a loaded
palladium rod could alter greatly in one hour of
the loss of excess loading pressure?
This, again, demonstrates my point. To understand
a chart like that of P13/P14, to really "get" the
implications, is quite unlikely for someone who
just glances at it. If you are ready to believe,
you might look at this chart and go "Wow! That's
incredible." And if you are ready to discount and
reject, you can look at it and quickly make up
all kinds of reasons to reject it. As Joshua just
did. And if nobody walks you through this, you
will then believe that you had "good reasons" to
be unimpressed. It's how the mind works, it's like clockwork.
Hence my suspicion that the biggest problem with
DoE 2004 was that there was no extended
back-and-forth, no discussion, questions and
answers and more questions and more answers, so
that the reviewers thoroughly understood the
claims. It's very clear that they did not,
whether or not the claims are real, or the
objections of the reviewers are real. Some of
them, at least, we can see, didn't understand the
claims themselves, and the evidence presented.
The process was flawed, not what I'd expect to
allow a sea change in opinion to appear. In fact,
if we compare the events of 1989 to those of
2004, the review panel was *drastically*
different from 1989. The report states that the
conclusions were "much the same," but the only
way that statement makes sense is to interpret
"conclusions" to mean the *funding* conclusions.
But in 1989, the conclusions were a political
compromise, forced by Ramsey's threatened
resignation if the report were made more gentle.
In 2004, they seem to have been a genuine
consensus. In 1989, what the panel came to on
excess heat, in 2004, would have been
unthinkable. Half the 2004 panel thought that the
existence of a heat anomaly was "conclusive" or
"somewhat conclusive." Really? Half? That is
completely inconsistent with an opinion that
there is no evidence for the heat effect!
So we'd need, then, to look at the individual
reviewer comments, and we only have some of them.
Some reviewers, it's clear, were not willing to
look at the evidence, they had already-existing
opinions, and they acknowledged this, pretty explicitly.
This is not science, this is politics. The
science will be worked out in peer-reviewed
journals, just as the DoE panel recommended. But
some journals still, apparently, reject anything
about cold fusion..... but some are eating their
lunch, and that will not continue. They will wake
up, even if only to print a negative review. But
they'll have to have one in hand first. Want to
write it, Joshua? Think you could handle the
reality of a review for a major scientific
journal? Ready to look like an idiot? Or a genius, for that matter?
It suggests that the explanation being used to
explain it is wrong. That there's an artifact.
What explanation? There is an *anomaly.* An
anomaly can be caused by an artifact. Okay, *what artifact*?
Your evidence doesn't actually suggest that, but
I can understand why you would thinks so.
> Nature does work the way you demand it
should. This is experimental science. You have
to take the results as they are, and not
dictate what they should be according to your theories.
Yes. Obviously. But one picks theories that are
consistent with results and rejects those that aren't.
Sure. However, the theory of "unknown artifact,"
which is what your hypothesis amounts to, is not
satisfying, because it is not falsifiable. There
can be an "unknown artifact" with any
experimental result whatever, no matter how careful the work. It's lazy.
What artifact? What possible error could explain
the results? Be aware that it's easy to come up
with some explanations that seem possible, but
that conflict with the rest of the data. You
would have to actually study the whole set of
data about this experiment and this class of experiments. It's work.
The situation when P13/P14 was done was that
there had been only preliminary reports of helium
associated with the heat. What P13/P14 and the
published data shows is that there is an FPHE,
but nowhere near enough was known to give any
clear explanation for it. The SRI data eventually
showed that heat was critically depending on
loading ratio, and that it was, statistically,
correlated with current density. Great. But none
of that bears critically on mechanism or cause.
Later, SRI work was an important part of the body
of evidence showing heat/helium correlation, and
nailing it down to close to the expected value
for deuterium fusion, and the heat/helium work in
general establishes a strong presumption, that
PdD work, FPHE, is caused by the conversion of
deuterium to helium. That can be called fusion
regardless of mechanism, and the mechanism remains unknown.
>> We were discussing a particular experiment
in a particular report. Is there a graph in
that report of that 1994 experiment that reports heat after death?
> No, because that experiment did not produce
heat after death, as I noted previously. You
need to stop demanding what is not there.
There is what may be HAD in the graph, but it's
close to the noise, if not down in it. Basically,
HAD, like the rest of the FPHE, isn't crisply
predictable. Often, when we see HAD, the heat
generation *starts* with the shutdown.
Not a demand. An observation. If deuterium in Pd
produces heat, why does the heat vanish
instantly when the current is shut off? In this experiment.
Because what produces the heat is not deuterium
alone, it is deuterium at a certain loading,
under other conditions that are not well-known.
Notice that Joshua has translated an hour to
"instantly." He's absolutely not being careful.
He looks at the chart, invents objections based
on his prejudices, then holds on to them as if
they were facts. He's confused his stories about
the facts as if they were facts, what actually happened.
> You need to stop pointing to black birds as
proof that red ones do not exist.
That's not even close to what I said. I am not
saying heat after death has not been observed
because it was not observed in this experiment.
First of all, there is some HAD in this experiment, maybe. Just a little.
I'm saying if heat after death occurs, and is
attributed to the deuterium in the Pd, then it
would seem implausible that the heat would
vanish in seconds in another experiment. So, I'm
questioning the attribution of the observation, not the observation itself.
"Seconds." How about an hour? The heat is indeed
attributed to "deuterium," but the presence of
deuterium may be a necessary but insufficient
condition, and that's obvious, since in many
other runs, the same deuterium, the same rod, the
same apparently loading, the same current, no
excess heat appears. And no excess heat appears
with the hydrogen control, the heat just gets a
bit noisier with higher current.
The observation is one of an *episode* of
anomalous heat. What is the "attribution"? By
never being clear, a pseudoskeptic like Joshua
simply maintains the state of argument.
The line of argument, itself, is mere assumption.
While it did not do so, there is nothing
intrinsic that allows us to predict the behavior
of the FPHE in such a way as to determine, in
advance, what behavior is "plausible."
Experimental results are experimental results,
"plausible" or not, and, indeed, the really
interesting ones may be those which are
considered "implausible." "Implausible" is a
judgment, reasoning from existing knowledge and
theory, and can easily incorporate unwarranted
assumptions and errors. Such as assuming a drop
in "seconds" when that is not at all what the
chart shows. Joshua probably thought that the
scale was in minutes, not hours. He might have
wondered, had he been more careful, why they
would have divisions of 24 minutes! (and it still
would have been a minute to drop, not "seconds"
Further, now that we can understand that this
chart shows that the excess heat effect lasted
for three and a half days, does this change the perception?
It's more like you pointing to flying red birds
and claiming that it proves they are lighter
than air, and me pointing out that I caught some
black birds, and weighed them, and they are
heavier than air, and they can fly too.
Eh?
>> The DOE panel would have heard about it, but they were not convinced.
> Some of panel members were convinced, and
some are not. The ones who are not convinced
made logical and factual errors similar to the ones you are making.
Only one said the evidence for nuclear reactions
was conclusive, but *some* not being convinced is all I need for my argument.
Sure. A total of one-third were thought it was
"convincing" or "somewhat convincing," as I
recall. But the report juggles "convincing" and
"conclusive." Now, it's very obvious, gather a
collection of "experts" in related fields, who
are *not* familiar with the evidence, hand them a
pile of it, and talk to some of them for a day,
many, many are going to remain "unconvinced," and
it doesn't really matter what the evidence is, as
long as it is not a total killer demonstration,
which doesn't exist for PdD LENR. The evidence is
complex and takes a long time to absorb and
understand, and, in the process, anyone will
encounter hosts of interpretation errors, and it takes time to clear those up.
Again, this is how the mind works.
You said:
"I do not think any scientist will dispute this.
...An object that remains palpably warmer than
the surroundings is as convincing as anything can be
"
It was hypothetical, and written after the DOE
panel, so you could not have said that if you
thought such a demo had been available.
You can squirm all you want. You effectively
admitted that an isolated device palpably warmer
than the surroundings would be a good demo, and that it has not yet been done.
There is one approach that can do this, because a
difference of 4 degrees C can be palpable. It's
really expensive, turns out. I've thought of
offering it, but I'd probably need some kind of
subsidy or investment to do it. The original
work, Arata, used 7 g of nanoparticle palladium
alloy, to produce a 4 degree temperature
differential, which, from his published work, is
maintained for the length of the experiment,
after loading, about 3000 minutes. I don't know
what happens after that (he supposedly sends the
contents out for helium analysis, no reported
results that I know of, and, yes, all this sucks
compared to what I'd want to see.... but that's
Arata, the Grand Old Man of Japanese physics.) To
do this as a demo, I'd probably need to use more
material, to get a higher temperature
differential. This would be an expensive little
puppy. Who is going to pay for it?
Instead we have calorimetry, but Joshua wants
something he can hold. ("Palpably.") And suppose
that this were not possible? Suppose that the
effect is, by its nature, not reliable like that.
Suppose that I could make a hundred of these
cells, and only a third of them showed "palpable
heat"? This is what Jed has been saying: nature
does not arrange itself for our convenience.
Sometimes we have to use sophisticated techniques
to tease out what's happening. It's done with
medicine all the time, that's a "soft" science,
even though we care very much about solid results!
> It is not possible for you to see what is
connect to what inside of a Tokamak reactor, or in a robot explorer on Mars.
Quite right. I said as much. Many experiments
require indirect observations, and second hand
observations, and in those cases,
reproducibility, theoretical consistency and
predictability, scientific unanimity or at least
consensus all work together to build credibility.
"Reproducibility" can be understood in a way to
make it impossible, with a whole class of results
that are routinely accepted being, then, cast
into doubt, or it can be understood in a way that
recognizes that control of conditions, enough to
make results very stable, may not be possible. In
that case, statistical analysis is used.
Cart before the horse, here. If there is
"scientific unanimity," is credibility then
built? No, scientific unanimity requires careful
process, where each element in a chain of logic
is examined carefully. You know, I can't predict
which way a coin toss will come down. Does that
mean that I could not detect, with a bit of work, a biased coin?
Suppose, to give a CF example, I run a hundred
cells. Suppose that (this isn't generally done,
unfortunately, for separate reasons from its
desirability) each cell is identical, and the
cells were previously designed to follow an
approach known to produce, at least sometimes,
the effect, and they are all treated the same,
with the same current profile. Suppose that
two-thirds of these cells produce some clear
level of anomalous heat, and the rest produce none (above noise).
Is this a reproducible experiment? With these
facts, you could try to reproduce it, in a narrow
way: you'd run a cell, and you might easily see
nothing, and then you'd easily say, "replication
failure." In fact, your report would be just one more instance in the series.
Now, let's add something to the experiment. We
take samples of the effluent gases and measure
helium in them. We send those to an independent
lab for analysis, and our excess heat results are
determined before we know the helium results, and
the lab does not know the heat history of the
cells, these are simply numbered samples.
Suppose we find something. All the cells with no
heat show no helium above background (which is
well below ambient, by the way). The cells that
show excess heat show helium correlated with the
heat, i.e., generally, the more heat, the more helium.
Okay, you, in your single cell, saw no heat. So
suppose you also measured helium, in the same
way. You find no helium. This supposed "negative
replication" is actually a confirmation, once we
have an independent result to compare.
This thought-experiment has been performed, in
reality, though not with those numbers and exact
conditions. What the thought-experiment shows is
that an effect can be "unreliable," and specific
results "not predictable," but the effect can
still be seen as real and the evidence for that as conclusive.
And, frosting on this cake, if the heat/helium
ratio is consistent with prediction from
deuterium fusion to form helium -- as it is --
then we have, in addition to some independent
confirmation of the excess heat and helium
results, evidence for a nuclear reaction "between
deuterons to form helium," as Storms put it in the Naturwissenschaften review.
Now, Joshua does not believe that the heat/helium
evidence is conclusive. He'd like to see (or
would he hate to see, in reality?) more careful
work done. I'd love to see that, too, but that
work is difficult and expensive. Who, again, is going to pay for it?
The 2004 panel recommended research under
existing programs to resolve unanswered
questions, and this would certainly be one of
them, that is, it's "unanswered" from the point
of view of those unconvinced skeptics. So what
happened? What happened is that scientists did
submit proposals, the proposals were rejected,
because the skeptics still have political power
and absolutely don't want to fund something that
competes with what they want: more funding for
hot fusion and high-energy nuclear research.
Politics. But this situation is shifting.
But some claims, if real, can be demonstrated in
a simple and obvious way. CF and heavier than
air flight are two examples. When such
demonstrations should be possible but are
absent, and there is no reproducibility,
theoretical consistency, or scientific
consensus, then it is reasonable to reject the
claims until better evidence comes along.
No. I've shown why such rejection, while it might
make sense from a practical point of view, makes
no sense as to the science of the thing. It may
be, forever, impossible to create practical
demonstrations regarding cold fusion (let's set
Rossi aside!), yet the science could be
completely valid and could contribute to our
scientific understanding. The question is not the
"rejection of claims." The problem is the
rejection of experimental evidence, giving
preference to standing theory that is alleged --
falsely -- to predict otherwise. That freezes
theory into a condition that does not allow its careful examination.
> It is true that a few researchers do lie, and
some are incompetent, but in a group of
professional researcher as large as the cold
fusion cohort it is statistically impossible for them all to be incompetent.
It's only about twice the size of the polywater
cohort, and probably smaller than the homeopathy
cohort, and certainly smaller than the UFO
cohort, so I'm not buying it. There are many
examples of large groups of scientists being
wrong. And to repeat, if CF is right, then a
much larger group of scientists would have to be incompetent.
No, not incompetent, but perhaps holding some
opinions outside their competence. CF does not
take place under plasma conditions. It takes
place in very unusual and rare conditions, which
rather obviously are not common in nature. Any
highly loaded palladium deuteride out there in some rocks?
The real experts, as far as I can tell, in 1989,
said that it was possible. Not "probable," they
were not believers, but they simply understood
what Cook noted: there were unsolved problems in the solid state.
Of course you're not. And I'm not obligated to
believe Dardik's tiny electrode produces .5 W
for 4 days without any power input, if he can't
take it out and prove it in a thermos of water.
Eh? In other words, radically change the
experimental conditions, something else happens?
This would prove what? That a piece of palladium
deuteride, sitting in a thermos of water, doesn't
do anything? Didn't we already know that?
(There was a ton of work with loaded palladium
deuteride from before, it wasn't a terribly
uncommon substance, it was a convenient way to
present a high density of deuterium for
bombardment experiments. And mostly it didn't do
anything unusual. But, apparently, once people
realize what might be happened, some looked back
and then what had simply seemed to be
unexplainable occurrences made sense. Mizuno had
a couple of these incidents he wrote about. From
later understanding, somehow these samples loaded
to higher ratios than normal, we can guess.)
No, back to basics: is there an FPHE? Remember, a
pile of experts, in 2004, some of whom were
clearly not going to agree to anything that might
make CF look possible, were half agreed that,
yes, the evidence was conclusive, there is an anomaly.
So we have an anomaly, an unexplained appearance
of heat, under some known conditions (in this
case, highly loaded palladium deuteride). So the
scientific question then becomes what is causing
this, and that question starts by controlling
conditions and increasing what is observed.
People looked for tritium. Tritium has been
found, but it's an anomaly of its own, it is not
well-correlated with excess heat. They looked for
neutrons. They found none or very, very few. And,
though it wasn't expected to be a major product,
they looked for helium. They found it, correlated with the heat.
The skeptical panelists in 2004 did *not*
understand the evidence, at least those who
discussed it didn't, and that's clear. Joshua is
unconvinced. Fine. What explains the experimental
results that we have? There are experimental
results showing heat/helium correlation. What artifact could explain this?
Whoever could find the artifact and, more,
demonstrate it, would become famous. Consider Wood and N-rays!
But this is very unlikely, because lots of people
have tried and failed. It's never been done.
Nobody has shown the "FPHE artifact". RAther,
there has been speculation and assertion, but no
controlled experiment. The objections to P&F's
approach have been met by using alternative
methods. Differing controls have been used.
Nobody has shown the artifact, but twenty years
later, Joshua is still claiming what *nobody* has
shown, as if it were a scientific consensus.
Where is this consensus documented, where is it
covered in a peer-reviewed review that actually
examines the issues, rather than what can be
found, some tertiary sources that mention this
alleged consensus as if it were a known fact, based on real scientific process?
>> But heat can be demonstrated simply and visually. . .
> It can, and it has been.
Not as simply and visually as you have described
and wished for. Not simply and visually enough to persuade a panel of experts.
In one day. Take those same experts and expose
them to a week of process of review, where each
detail would be covered in a report that they
would sign, as to their personal conclusions, for
which they'd take professional responsibility,
and there would be a very different conclusion.
And, frankly, that's what the DoE should do, if
they want to find a true scientific consensus.
What they found in 2004 was no more than a toe in
the water to find out what almost-knee-jerk impressions of experts would be.
I saw that P13/P14 graph a hundred times before
it dawned on me what it was showing, it took
being involved in a debate where it was alleged
to be some kind of proof of "bubble noise" as the
source of the heat anomaly (i.e., mismeasurement
of the input power due to unconsidered current
noise), requiring me to examine the original
report in great detail, before I got it.
Someone like McKubre knows what I'm saying,
because he lived with this for years. But someone
who has no experience with the work is not going
to notice this unless they are led by the nose,
carefully, through the whole process. Only a few will see it quickly.
And, again, that's just how the mind works.
There is an important point here: why did McKubre
not emphasize the extreme variability that
P13/P14 shows. Why did he not provide the
experimental data, in his summary presentations,
showing the other two runs with no heat?
I can guess. Because, for years, the political
claim, the complaint, about cold fusion was the
alleged lack of reproducibility or reliability.
By pointing to the other runs, the unreliability
would be made very, very clear. I don't know if
it was deliberate -- I should ask him!, and I'd
guess not -- but there may have been some kind of
protective instinct operating, to de-emphasize
what, he knew, was evidence that could support a bogus argument.
In fact, making the unreliability clear is
*essential*, because this, then, makes all the
"negative replications" into confirmations of
what is reported, which, more completely
understood, is that PdD *sometimes* shows heat
and helium correlated, that it *sometimes* shows
evidence of fusion taking place at room temperature.
The "unreliability" -- which is obvious from most
PdD work -- becomes part of the claim or report,
not something *contradictory* to it!
(There are other approaches where this doesn't
necessarily apply, there are some approaches that
may -- I'm not making a claim here -- be more "reliable.")
