Let me clear up some potential confusion about the Britz bibliography.
Steve Krivt wrote here:
". . . I am also surprised that you did not see Britz's review of the
Focardi-Piantelli response."
And here:
http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2008/NET29-8dd54geg.shtml
"Dieter Britz, a longtime independent observer of LENR research,
summarized the paper: 'A Ni rod, 5 mm diameter and 90 mm long, was
placed in a cylindrical chamber, surrounded by a Pt heater coil. . . .
. . . Britz wrote the follow summary of the 1998 Piantelli-Focardi
group's paper: "In addition to a cell used by this team earlier,
consisting of a tubular vacuum chamber with a heating mantle around a
Ni rod . . .
Hydrogen gas was admitted to the chambers, which were heated, and
temperatures measured. Transient lowering of the input power
produced, upon restoring the power, temperatures higher than before
the transients. This showed the presence of nuclear phenomena, and
calibrations performed calculated roughly 20 Watts of excess power
generated by the hydrided Ni rods. The effect, once started, lasted
for 278 days, the duration of the experiment."
People reading the Britz bibliography (and Krivit's paper) might get
the impression that Britz actually believes this experiment produced
heat for 278 days. I doubt he does. He does not think cold fusion is
real; he thinks that all reported results are errors or fraud. In the
past he said this forcefully, although lately he moderated it:
"[I am not] among those who totally deny that may be a new
phenomenon. I do believe there may well be."
"There are enough quality positives for the original F&P system
(tritium, some XS [excess] heat) to force me to give it a (small) chance."
Britz made it clear to me that he is only reporting what the author
says, and he does not agree with or believe the assertions in many of
the reviews. He said that many of the papers with strong
positive-sounding reviews are "sloppy" or "somewhat ridiculous."
I discussed this here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf
All of the quotes in this message are in this paper.
Britz assigns "grades" to the papers such as "res+" "res-". He made
it clear to me that these are the evaluations he thinks the authors
would give the paper, not his own. Just because he assigns a "res+"
-- a positive result -- that does not mean he thinks this is actually
a credible positive experiment.
In his reviews, Britz tries to describe exactly what the author
reported, without bias or judgement. I think he largely succeeds in
doing this. As I said in my review of Britz, I agree with 95% of his
reviews. He is biased against the subject, but in most cases he
overcomes that bias to report what the author said, not what Britz
thinks about it. In a few cases, his review sounds positive and
accurate to me, but he graded the paper negative anyway. For example,
Granada et al.:
". . . Results show modest neutron fluxes above the background, but
statistical analysis shows that it is about 95% certain that the
results are not simply noise.
The authors do not commit themselves to a neutron rate emission because of
experimental uncertainties but they do seem 95% certain that neutrons were
emitted whenever current flowed."
I do not know what Britz thinks of Focardi, but I doubt he actually
believes this experiment produced hundreds of megajoules for 278
days, because anyone who accepts that would be forced to admit cold
fusion is real. In the past when I have tried to pin him down on this
sort of thing, for widely replicated experiments (not this one), he
has always made excuses or refused to respond.
(As I said, I myself rather doubt this experiment produced hundreds
of megajoules, or any megajoules, but I am sure that other experiments did.)
I think Britz is biased against cold fusion. I have no doubt that I
am biased in favor of it. Some of his reviews and the "grades" he
assigned the papers are clearly wrong in my opinion. I avoid this
bias problem in the LENR-CANR.org indexes by simple means: I quote
the author's own abstract, verbatim. (Except in a few cases such as
where there is no abstract.) I let the reader decide the author's
intent. Frankly, I do not understand why Britz did not simply quote
the abstracts instead of rephrasing them. Some of his descriptions
are helpful so I am glad he did it. But why not do both? It isn't
like we are running out of room on the Internet.
- Jed
