At 09:48 PM 9/25/2012, Eric Walker wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 6:16 PM, Abd ul-Rahman
Lomax <<mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com>a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
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.
Appreciated.
thanks.
The thought was that if you could find a way to
demonstrate LENR above the error threshold of a
mercury thermometer, there could be someÂ
mischievous fun to be had in presenting the toy
experiment to Lewis, who, it seems to me, made
the fairly straightforward job of measuringÂ
the flux of heat in a cell into somethingÂ
inordinately complex.  Which is not to say
there are no subtleties in calorimetry; only
that it should have been clear that one of the
best electrochemists in his day would be able to
work out the power emitted from a P&F cell above
the error threshold, strongly suggesting that
there was something going on besides
experimental artifact. Â Instead, Lewis chose to
attack the 1989 paper on methodological grounds.
It should have been clear, but we should also
understand that Lewis was not standing alone. He
voiced, at that famous APS conference, what many
were thinking. That's why his speech was wildly popular among physicists.
They weren't thinking about Pons and Fleischman
as expert electrochemists. They were thinking of
them as incompetent physicists. P & F were not
physicists at all, though they certainly knew
enough physics to know that what they had found
was supposed to be impossible. What they had set
out to do was test the physics, with an
electrochemistry experiment. Apparently
physicists did not like their theories being tested by outsiders.
Humanly, it's not surprising.
Pons and Fleischmann had made some mistakes, but
those were rather easily found and corrected, it
didn't take long. Lewis et al, on the other hand,
had *institutionalized* some serious errors, and
that did damage that still continues in popular
opinion among many scientists, who never gave the
matter the attention it truly deserved.
That's shifting, as was inevitable, given that
*not everone* gave up. Anyone who seriously
followed the field would have realized that
something was awry by late 1989, as confirmation
of the resports of XP from PdD started to come
in. But it's also understandable why this might be dismissed.
See, almost immediately, after the announcement,
a huge number of groups started to attempt
replication. It is *not* that the finding was
ignored, as some of us make out to be the case.
It was far from ignored. But the exact details of
what Pons and Fleishcmann had done were not easy
to come by. If it is possible to make "some
mistake" with calorimetry -- and it is, we see
experts debunk results from calorimetry all the
time, including experts like Dr. Storms -- then
some percentage of replication efforts would
include errors. And if there is reporting bias,
and there is, there might be an appearance of confirmation purely by chance.
Now, a careful analysis would show something
different, but most scientists, not intimately
involved with some subfield, aren't going to take
the time to do that careful analysis. I'm just
saying that the general reaction was understandable.
However, some scientists should have known
better. Anyone who wrote a book about the field,
like Park, should have been far more careful.
Huizenga wasn't careful, he laced every page with
notes that what was being claimed was impossible,
and the argument was always the same: what was
being reported wasn't like hot fusion. He just
made the leap to "therefore it wasn't fusion." A
lot of people did that, it wasn't just him. To
his credit, he noticed and commented on Miles,
the heat/helium findings, which were still at a
level of conference paper. He knew the significance.
All the other skeptics, as far as I know,
studiously ignored those findings, except for
Jones, who attemped to refute the work on totally
spurious grounds. Jones' comments were enough to
allow many to think that the results were
questionable. The power of correlation was
ignored, and we've seen that ignorance even
recently, with Shanahan, who asks, if the
calorimetry is garbage, how can heat/helium mean
anything? Must be some mistake.
Precisely! How could a correlation appear in
garbage results? That's the whole point! Shanahan
did not actually show that the calorimetry was
garbage, only that, he claims, a certain possible
error had not been ruled out....
Shanahan is the last gasp of the pseudoskeptics.
That position is, I'll keep repeating, dead in
the journals. Dead as a doornail. But many
physicists, totally ignorant of what has been
published since the mid-1990s (and largely, as
well, of what was actually published before
then), still believe that it's healthy and powerful and just plain right.
I'm not looking up Lewis' paper at this point.
What I know is that Lewis tried to replicate, not
knowing what to do. He failed to replicate,
that's obvious. Reporting that failure was
appropriate. Making it mean that Pons and
Fleischmann were totally incompetent was
completely beyond the pale. Really, it would be
fantastic if Lewis would apologize to the memory
of Fleischmann, and to Pons, who is still alive.
