On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 1:00 AM, Marcello Vitale <mvit...@ucsbalum.net>wrote:
> I remember a graduate student in a group in which I was a postdoc, crying > (crying!) over a series of IR spectra that resulted from her latest series > of experiments, saying "I will never graduate, this system just does not > work, everything just turns to crap". I looked it over and told her to go > show them to the prof. "He's going to hug you for these". It was not crap > at all, the reaction was not stopping where supposed but continuing in an > unexpected and new way forming new species until that point never observed. > In other words, a discovery (published on the Journal of the American > Chemical Society) instead of a third decimal quantification of a known > phenomenon (to be published at most in a small journal). But it was going > to be tossed out as crap. > > > But it wasn't. The value may have been overlooked by a graduate student, but both you and the professor recognized it. And you seemed to think it was obvious enough to be sure the professor would recognize it. Obviously it's true that sometimes real phenomena are missed or dismissed as crap when they are not expected, but H-Ni has not just been looked at by a graduate student. It has been widely and extensively studied by very many people. And fusion, or the claimed heat from nuclear reactions, is not a subtle thing. If something had an energy density a million times higher than could be explained by chemistry, it's not likely to have been missed, especially since H-Ni nuclear reactions have been claimed for almost 2 decades, by people looking for it.
