On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 7:14 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com>wrote:
This is a thoroughly embarrassing event in the history of science. It's a > huge story, in fact. I've thought of asking Taubes to look at it again. > I would not attempt to resuscitate Gary Taubes. He was a card carrying member of the original gang that sought to beat up Fleischmann and Pons and others -- his book makes it clear that he was on their cc lists and computer network exchanges, and he thanks many of them in the acknowledgments. I believe he said as late as 2009 something to the effect that suggested that his position hadn't changed. An interesting note about his book is how worked up he gets about Bockcris and Wolf the tritium. He himself seems to be aware of the implications of tritium, and he goes to pains to try to establish that either the tritium results are completely new science or they're due to (intentional) contamination. I believe he was trying to convince the world that there was clear fraud. I wonder whether this was triggered in part by Bockris's casual and consistent dismissal of the spiking hypothesis. I don't imagine that Taubes intended to do so, but to a reader twenty years later he ends up making Bockris look quite reasonable and likable. Hoffman suggests that measuring tritium is very problematic -- his transition into the discussion: "If the problems of neutron artifacts seem somewhat dark, then the problem of tritium artifacts is the stygian blackness at the end of a very dark tunnel." He seems to be saying that, contrary to popular belief that tritium is very easy to measure, it is in fact very difficult to separate a tritium signal from artifact. This seems like a stretch. Perhaps I have read him incorrectly, here. Eric
