Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> wrote: 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. >
Taubes? I am certain that is what he trying to do. He said that, to Mallove and to Storms. I know why he was trying to do it, too. He said to Storms: "I don't give a damn whether cold fusion is real or not. My goal is to sell books." He was stirring up trouble and destroying people's lives for profit. He made no bones about it. A classic example of a psychopath. The other thing about Taubes that you have to realize is that he really is a stupid as he sounds. When he went on NPR and said that there is "more electricity" on weekends because factories are shut down, and that is why cells have excess heat, he meant it. It never crossed his mind that the power companies reduce output, or that researchers measure the input electric power to a cell, or that they use regulated power supplies. When he said that researchers measure amperage but not voltage, and that electrolyte in a cell might be 50 deg C hotter on one side than the other because of thermal gradients, he meant that too. He said those things time after time, in his book, in interviews and on the radio. The book has hundreds of astounding mistakes like that. He has no grasp of grade-school level science. He has no common sense. > I wonder whether this was triggered in part by Bockris's casual and > consistent dismissal of the spiking hypothesis. > Bockris had good reason to dismiss that. Storms and others actually did spike cells. I mean they introduced tritium from the outside. They showed that the data from this looks nothing like what you see when tritium is generated by cold fusion. > 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 . . . > Hoffman was a nitwit. He also thought that Ontario Hydro sells used moderator water to the public. When I told him Ontario Hydro was upset by his assertion, and they said that would be against the law and the stuff has 100 million times too much contamination, he said something like, "well, they would deny it, wouldn't they?" He stuck to his story. I personally do not know how to measure tritium. I have seen the instruments used to do it, and talked to the people who do it professionally, such as the reactor safety group at BARC. They said it is easy to measure with confidence. They said they are certain the BARC experiments produced tritium and: "if we could not measure tritium, we would be dead." I suppose it is "easy" in the sense that a trained surgeon will tell you it is easy to do an appendectomy. It is something they do all the time, and compared to some of the other tasks in their line of work, it is straightforward. That does not mean you or I could walk into an operating room and do it! Electrochemists such as Mizuno, Fleischmann, McKubre and Oriani have sometimes said to me, "Look here, this is easy to understand . . ." Then they describe some procedure or some textbook law about fugacity, crystallography, purifying with a sacrifice cathode, or what-have-you that I could not begin to understand. Something far over my head. It is easy for them because they spent years getting PhDs in electrochemistry. Or in Fleischmann's case, discovering fundamental facts about electrochemistry. Look at Bockris' textbooks and you will see what I mean: http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Electrochemistry-Ionics-2nd-Edition/dp/0306455552 Anyway, I am confident that Hoffman was wrong, and that the experts who say they measured tritium far above background and they ruled out contamination are right. Read the papers by Bockris or Will and you will see they went to great lengths; they made painstaking measurements; they sent out samples to third party experts to confirm their measurements, and brought in other experts to observe and critique their work. In short, they did everything humanly possible to ensure the results were right. They did the experiments over and over again, hundreds of times, over several years. See, for example: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/PackhamNJCproduction.pdf I doubt Hoffman could have cited any errors in their techniques, any more than Huizenga could point out an actual error in the calorimetry. As I said, the claim that there is some unspecified error is not testable or falsifiable, so it is not a valid assertion. It applies equally well to every experiment in history, from Newton the present. It is like saying an invisible, undetectable unicorn may have caused an error. That is something Mary Yugo never understood. - Jed
