On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 10:21 AM, Edmund Storms <stor...@ix.netcom.com>wrote:
> > First of all, all data requires interpretation. > Of course, but review papers generally report interpretations of the authors, rather than perform primary interpretation, especially on data communicated privately, at which point it ceases to be a review. Your review is highly selective, and therefore, depends on your judgement, rather than on the strength of the original evidence as reported, and hopefully screened by reviewers. > Either a knowledgeable scientists does this and explains the reasons > behind the interpretations, as I did in the quoted paper, or you do the job > and distort what has been observed to fit your conclusions. > I think you're guilty of distorting the results to fit your conclusions, and that was what I argued, by showing that many of the papers you cited as support, did not in fact support your case. I was only pointing out why your interpretation and the reasons are not persuasive to me. I submit the evidence is too weak to draw conclusions, and that leads back to the default position. Claims like cold fusion require robust evidence, and the evidence cited there is anything but. > Unless you show what is wrong, your comment is just your opinion, > I did show some things that were wrong, but it's not necessary to identify errors to maintain skepticism. All that's needed is plausible alternative explanations, since the explanation involving nuclear reactions is so extremely implausible. > As for taking Rossi seriously, I do not. I have explained what I accept > and what I do not, and why. I take him no more seriously than I take you. > Whatever you want to call it, one of your early analyses of an ecat demo posted here, concluded "Significant excess power is being made regardless of how dry the steam may be", and "None of the plausible assumptions are consistent with the claim for excess energy being wrong." Most of the technical analyses of the Rossi demos agree that those conclusions are nonsense, and from my point of view show you to be gullible and extremely susceptible to wishful thinking. I'm not interested in reviving that debate, but my rebuttal to your analysis is in the archives. Rossi has not been proved fraudulent, or even mistaken, but it should be eminently clear that he has so far failed to prove excess heat from nuclear reactions. Which says it all. There are of course still many people who continue to believe in Rossi, and for whom my distrust of your judgement based on this would not be shared. But to my mind, anyone who still thinks Rossi has something is a lost cause. > Again, you distort the data to fit your attitude. Miles published two sets > of results. You quote only the first and least accurate. The results were > confirmed by Bush and later by McKubre. > > But you cite both sets of results to support your argument, and Miles continued to cite the earlier results long after the later results were published, because they show a much better positive correlation, over a much wider range. If they are used as evidence, they're fair game for criticism. Moreover, while the paragraph you referenced refers to the earlier results, the next paragraph refers to Jones' critique which is about all their results collectively. In any case, the later results with the metal flasks do not show the range of values observed with the earlier results and they are not positively correlated (except for the binary correlation). The average excess power is only 60 mW, and the average helium level is only 2.8 ppb above background (of 5.1 ppb), 3 orders of magnitude below atmospheric levels. (By the way, in his 2003 heat-He review, Miles only reports 7 credible results, and the average is 25% lower than what you claim.) Both the heat and helium levels in that experiment are near the detection limits, and miraculously, measurements near the detection limit give something close to the expected ratio of heat to helium. So, a little confirmation bias is all that's needed. As I said, the results (all of them) were the subject of considerable controversy in the literature, so it is clear that better results are needed. Even without the controversy, in a field where excess power levels in the range of watts or tens of watts (and higher) have been claimed, it doesn't make sense that the only peer-reviewed heat-helium ratios come from experiments with 60 mW of excess power, and ppb levels of helium. One becomes suspicious that maybe the results with higher excess powers don't fit the expectations, and are ignored. Miles himself admitted the weakness in 1996, when he said "The production of helium-4 in these experiments is a very difficult concept to prove since there is always the possibility of atmospheric helium contamination. More studies reporting helium-4 production will likely be required before our helium results become convincing to most scientists." You mention confirmations by Bush and McKubre, but those were not peer-reviewed, and McKubre was at first quite cautious with his interpretation, and his results are the subject of some controversy. In another post you wrote that a report can have high quality without peer review, and that's true, but it's also true that low quality reports that would be rejected by prominent journals can nevertheless easily get published in conference proceedings. Scientists know that publication in refereed journals is used to judge quality for hiring, promotion, funding, awards, and so on, and so failure to publish in refereed journals, especially for important experiments like this, really does justify doubts about the credibility. > Yes, like all data about any subject, errors and objections can be > proposed by a determined skeptic. I have written and reviewed hundreds of > papers, and not single one can be accepted as absolute proof of anything. > We humans are limited by our current knowledge, logic ability, and our > wish to believe. > Absolute proof may not be possible for anything, but it is not the case that errors and objections can be plausibly raised to the claim that massive objects are attracted by gravity, that superconductivity is real, that heavier-than-air flight is possible etc. The results you cite are marginal, any way you shake them. They have nowhere near the level of credibility necessary to accept something so implausible as cold fusion.
