On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote:
I should credit Eric Walker's persistence, as well, in this mini "tritium > revival" - especially in digging up old papers from the early nineties > where > the isotope is mentioned. > I failed to give Ed Storms credit for the references -- they're all from a single table in his "Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction." He and Jed and the original investigators did all the legwork for this thread. John Bockris almost lost his position at Texas A&M on account of skepticism of tritium results that he and a graduate student reported (not in an Ni-H system, if I recall). That suggests that tritium is indeed a threatening result to people in the know. Gary Taubes wrote a piece for Science on the A&M affair that strongly hinted at fraud. At one point Bockris had what he felt was ironclad evidence that tritium was evolving in a similar experiment that he wanted to show to some of his colleagues, but by then he had become a pariah of sorts, and nobody would take up his offer. I'm hardly an expert here, but tritium seems like a great demonstration that something weird is going on for the reasons you mention. The extent to which a person takes note of it is perhaps a measure of how interested he or she is in setting aside prior assumptions about nuclear physics and considering the possibility that something new might be happening. But when you bring together all of the weirdnesses -- the tritium, the helium, the transmutations, the excess heat, etc. -- there must be a cloying effect. No doubt there's some conditional probability for LENR given these things that can be provided by Bayesian statistics that is pretty high, such that it would be unscientific to discount its possibility. The main alternative explanation, that the people making the fuss are altogether delusional and are engaged in something akin to astrology appears to be easier for most scientists to start out with. Kuhn understood that scientists are emotional creatures, given to biases and fads of various kinds, and that this makes even the hard sciences an eminently social endeavor. Eric
