Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
For their part, the cold fusion "believers" did a lousy job of selling it.
I agree their public relations efforts have not been good. I think it is a bad idea to make conference proceedings only available as copyright books. Biberian recently told me that they have sold only 85 copies of the ICCF-10 and ICCF-11 proceedings.
However, I think many researchers have a good job presenting their results in well-written, convincing papers. There is enough good material out there to make a solid case. Goodness knows, there is also enough bad material to make cold fusion look crazy. But all endeavors involving large numbers of people are a mixture of competent and incompetent, brilliant and stupid. You have to judge by what is best.
The earliest effect that was actually conclusive was heat/helium correlation, which cut through the replication problem and turned it into classic proof through correlation (and this makes "failures" into controls). Somehow the presentation at the 2004 DoE review managed to sufficiently confuse the reviewers and the DoE so that the correlation was missed, and totally misrepresented in the summary report.
This is true, but I doubt it was the fault of the presenters. The paper given to the panel explains the helium results clearly in section 3:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Hagelsteinnewphysica.pdf
Some people feel this paper should have said more about Miles or Iwamura. I asked the authors, Hagelstein and McKubre, about that. They said they emphasized their own work because they understood their own work best, and they could discuss it in depth with the panel without fear of making a mistake or misrepresenting the work. That seems sensible to me.
By the way, all those papers listed in the references were given to the panel members. I gather they were given big goodie boxes crammed with papers as take-home prizes (homework). So if they didn't get it, it was because they didn't do their homework. It isn't all that hard to understand, after all!
The documents they were given are listed here:
http://lenr-canr.org/Collections/DoeReview.htm#Submissions
- Jed
Jed, thank you for that list.
Had not seen it before.
How ironic (or not) that the two LANR/CF researchers
who actually had perfomed open demonstrations at ICCF10,
Dr. Dash and myself, did not have a single paper
on that highly selected, therefore censored, list.
BTW, the DOE made quite reasonable
requests/complaints which Dr. Dash and I had
actually done.
Dr. Mitchell Swartz
