I cannot vouch for the tally of positive replications counted by the people at the Chinese Institute of High Energy Physics. It may be that there are fewer than 14,720 positive runs reported in the literature. But here is the salient point about all those replications. This simple fact is sometimes overlooked in these debates:
If even *one* of these observations of excess heat or tritium is correct, that proves cold fusion is a real nuclear effect. Even if we postulate that every other observation is a mistake, that would not call in to question the veracity of that single certain result. To say that a mistake invalidates another correct claim is illogical. It would be like saying that dozens of people tried to fly before December 1903, but they all failed, therefore on average people could not fly, so the Wrights did not fly. There is no causality that would allow a mistake by Prof. A in one lab to affect the outcome or reliability of a test in another lab done by Prof. B. That is why it is highly illogical -- crazy really -- to say that McKubre, Storms, or Fleischmann lack credibility because of Rossi's antics. If only one observation is real, then the effect is real, and there can be no doubt it is tremendously important to physics and probably technology as well. As a practical matter the experimental method works. There is no possibility that every single researcher has made a mistake in every single high signal-to-noise ratio result. That would not happen in the life of the universe. As I've often said, if that could happen we would still be living in caves. Technology would not exist, never mind science. Individual scientists are often wrong, and individual instruments can fail. But in the aggregate they are reliable. The reliability of things like thermocouples, computers, tritium detectors and the other instruments used in these studies, in the hands of skilled experts, is high. - Jed
