At 09:49 AM 5/26/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
The things Krivit accuses researchers of doing can only be lies, not mistakes. They are too simple to be mistakes. And too blatant. For example, he claimed the Italians were repeatedly misrepresenting their numbers by a factor of 10, and that McKubre was publishing hugely different numbers in different places without telling anyone at EPRI, or without explaining. These are not subtle experimental errors or mistakes; they are not experimental errors at all.
The basic problem was that Krivit, particularly with the Italians, didn't understand what he was being told, saw major discrepancies where there was none or on the tiniest of inaccuracy in a plot, and accused the researchers of dishonesty.
It's still up, uncorrected, in NET34: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2010/34/343inexplicableclaims.shtml
I reviewed this in detail on Vortex-l. It was appalling, and his claims are still there, including his claim that they altered their results by an order of magnitude, i.e., a factor of ten. If you haven't read my critique, see if you can spot the problems. This whole sequence should have been a sign to Krivit that he'd gone down a dangerous road. He made the magnitude of ten error, because, it's quite apparent, he was looking for something to be wrong with the work! He completely misunderstood the paper and the significance of "24 MeV" in it, which was merely a conversion constant, and definitely not a "conclusion" as he presents it. The result he fusses over so much appears to exactly confirm 24 MeV, until you realize that this is a serious *outlier*, with the largest possible error, the helium is only slightly above background. Krivit, in his analysis, had a great deal of difficulty figuring out what the paper was saying.
I did too, by the way. But Krivit and I were interested in the heat/helium ratio, when that was not the main interest of the researchers.
It turned out the Italians were not changing their numbers by a factor of ten. That was Krivit's mistake. But that is not the kind of mistake the Italians could make. If they had actually done that, it could only have been a deliberate deception, because professional scientists understand exponents, and because these papers are checked carefully at multiple stages and that kind of mistake would be caught. Seriously, however careless and slapdash you may be by nature, when you work with numbers every day for decades you just don't make a mistake like this slide all the way into a publication.
The "mistake" was made in a communication with Krivit. The Italian researcher stated a result, and stated it with a different exponent than had been used in the paper. Krivit jumped on it. Read it for yourself!
See his Laser-3 caption, tacked on to the chart published by Violante (I think I said De Ninno in another comment today.... Violante):
Laser 3: Misleading appearance of close agreement between theory and experiment.
In fact, Krivit shows no signs of *every* having figured out the meaning of that chart. 24 MeV was used as a correlation factor, because it's an obvious candidate. I do, in fact, prefer this kind of chart to the dual scales sometimes used, because you stil have to choose a scaling factor to make them fit on the same chart. In this, the scaling factor was explicit. The caption is not what Krivit's complaint would imply, though:
The expected amount of increasing 4He is in accordance with the energy gain by assuming a D+D = 4He plus 24 MeV. And it is. But that is a summary of *three measurements,* not just the one that Krivit points to, which is actually a serious outlier, if we don't discount it because of how close it is to background. That experiment only produced a little energy and a little helium, it's really down in the noise.
But Krivit obviously beleives that the whole point of this chart was to create an impression of some kind of accurate measurement of 24 MeV. It was far from that. The two much more significant experiments were Laser-2 and Laser-4. Laser-2 produced almost 8 times as much energy as Laser-3, and Laser-4 almost ten times. That makes those values much stronger. And you can see all this from the chart. They show an energy/helium ratio larger than 24 MeV/He-4, which is *consistent* with that value being the value for the overall reaction, which is exactly what almost all researchers have been finding and saying. There is lots of room for error. If the true ration is 24 MeV, though, almost never would you measure it, because it is easier to lose helium than to lose heat! So the measured ratio is almost always higher than 24 MeV.
In McKubre's case, the discrepancy comes from a re-evaluation of the data. If no one at EPRI took note of it, I assume that is because EPRI had stopped funding the project long before and they were no longer paying much attention to what McKubre was telling them. I suppose there was no one left there for him to tell. I tried to discuss the work with them and I had trouble finding someone familiar with the project. I don't recall when Tom Passell retired from EPRI. He is one of these Energizer Bunny people who never stops working.
My analysis exactly. You'd have to ask the manager to whom McKubre reported, and it's entirely possible that there wasn't enough interest left for even that person to remember it. It was a largely moot detail, an error in a paper provided privately, and not really of great significance. As I've mentioned, if McKubre was trying to show 24 MeV by fudging numbers, he'd have fudged them in the other direction.
