I do not think it is clear yet what has been discovered. The story so far: At ICCF17, McKubre called into question Celani's calorimetry. Celani said he would try to put these doubts to rest by making the cell self sustain. He tried, but he could not. That's bad news.
Celani himself said the calorimetry was kind of primitive "thermometry" measuring the temperature at one point only. That is not how to do it well. If the temperature rise is large enough that can be definitive. But it is better to improve the calorimetry, I think. The MFM people set up a configuration similar to his. They got much more stable heat. As far as I am concerned, that's bad too. It is much too stable. Real anomalous heat does not look like that. Even Arata's ultra-stable heat declined gradually over time. The MFM found that one of the temperature sensors does not agree with the others, and it is stuck at the level it should be with no anomalous heat. That's really bad news! If it were malfunctioning it would not be at that temperature. It would be at some random temperature. All in all, things are not looking good for this wire experiment, but I would not draw any conclusions yet. We may never be able to draw conclusions. One conclusion I would reach, that I reached 20 years ago in fact, is that you really have to understand calorimetry to do these experiments. A lot of people don't understand it. I wish they would read Ed's paper on the subject, and books. They are learning. They can do it again. It will not take long, and it will not take a lot of effort to improve the calorimeter and try again. When you do research, you do things over and over and OVER again. It is like programming, or cooking, or -- as Martin used to say -- like riding a beat-up old bicycle. You do it until it is second-nature. You develop a deep "feel" for the instrument and its quirks. - Jed
