At 10:15 PM 9/24/2012, Eric Walker wrote:
If a reproducible lo-fi protocol could be worked out, someone could write to Nathan Lewis and say, "we took a look at your objections in 1989 to the calorimetry and think we might have found a way around some of the difficulties ..."
None of what has been written recently in this thread addresses calorimetry or any evidence of nuclear reactions, I want to make that clear. That something gets hot sometimes and sometimes not isn't even close to such evidence.
However, a way "around some of the difficulties" was found, before 1994. Miles found that excess heat in the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect, which he was able to reproduce many times, was correlated with excess heat, at roughly the right value for deuterium fusion. Helium is a nuclear product. The correlation is very strong: no heat, no helium, and thus, we may assume, no helium, no FPHE.
Lewis looked for heat and may have looked for helium. MIT certainly did. No heat, no helium (There have been some reanalyses which show that experiments with both Lewis and MIT experiments appear to have had a little anomalous heat, it simply wasn't as much as was expected, and nailing it down wasn't considered important, likely it was not enough heat for the reaction to have generated enough helium to be noteworthy.)
So if you do a PdD experiment and find no XP, it simply means that something was different and the reaction was not set up. This was known and understood even in the 1989 U.S. Department of Energy review. A "negative replication" never negates positive results, not on its own.
Naturally, the pseudoskeptics attempt to use this as an argument against cold fusion. No reliability, the equate with unreality, yet many known phenomena, especially when little understood, appear to be unreliable.
Once it was known that excess heat and helium were correlated, it becomes possible to independently check the calorimetry, by measuring helium. Some of the early "negative replications" measured both heat and helium, finding neither. Those then become part of the complete data set that *confirms* cold fusion, by confirming part of the heat/helium correlation.
Now, the obvious challenge for those who wish to continue to deny cold fusion: reproduce the experiments! Then demonstrate the artifacts involved. That would be real science.
I can imagine the pseudoskeptical wheels turning. What? Reproduce bad measurements?
Yes. Reproduce bad measurements, if that is what is the problem. Use the same methods, and show, then, through controlled experiment, independent calorimetry, etc., how poor technique produces the results that have been considered to establish the reality of cold fusion. I'm warning you, though, it ain't gonna be easy. Have fun trying to explain why phony heat matches phony helium results, with the helium being measured blind. Have fun trying to explain why so many different calorimetric methods come up with the same anomaly.
(Lewis actually attempted what could have been a piece of this, when he found that some cells appeared to show excess heat, which disappeared when they were stirred. If the cells had been similar in design and use to the Pons and Fleischmann cells, this could have been a cold-fusion-killer. But it wasn't, and very clear anomalous heat has been shown with flow calorimetry, impervious to this problem. This was all before the heat/helium correlation was known, most people absolutely did not expect to see helium as the ash. But Huizenga realized the implications of Miles' discovery immediately. He knew what a correlation would mean, and he only remained so seriously skeptical because he was able to stand on Miles not yet having been confirmed. Miles was confirmed, perhaps someone knows how Huizenga responded to that, if he was still capable of response.)
Shanahan was desperate in his last published criticism, he'd obviously lost all shame, asserting Rube Goldberg explanations that couldn't possibly cover the range of evidence. I think the editors published his letter because the skeptical position is truly dead, but some readers may have complained, it is still a common opinion among the ignorant that cold fusion is total bogosity, and the editgors wanted to nail the coffin shut, as was effectively done when most of the major scientists in the field responded. (Journal of Environmental Monitoring, the original review of cold fusion was by Krivit and Marwan, if you want to find this.) (Shanahan later complained that the editors would not allow him to respond again. The tables have been turned. At a certain point, journals stop opening their pages to what they see as a crank.)
