The comparison to penicillin is instructive. Like most discoveries, this was developed and used extensively long before anyone understood how it worked in theory. Long before they could have understood it.
Penicillin was developed in the 1940s, in a crash project to treat WWII casualties. Doctors soon confirmed that it worked by the simplest, most irrefutable method: they administered it to thousands of sick and wounded patients, and the patients recovered almost immediately, even in hopeless cases when they would have died without the drug. One or two recoveries might have been a coincidence. Ten or twenty, maybe. But not thousands. No sane doctor or scientist would have questioned the efficacy of penicillin after 1945, even though there was not theory to explain it until the 1960s. In exactly the same way, when Storms, Bockris and later Will working independently all detected high levels of tritium in cold fusion experiments, they knew at once that it is a nuclear effect. They proved there is a nuclear effect at room temperature in a hydride. They did not need a theory to prove that, and all the theory in the world cannot "unprove" it. It does not matter how many physicists refuse to believe it. Facts are facts, tritium is tritium, and it can only be produced by a nuclear reaction, by definition. Yes, it is possible for tritium to be contamination. It might be an instrument error, or some other radioactive element. As I said, it is possible that 5 or 10 patients might recover by coincidence after being given penicillin. You can only be absolutely sure the effect is real when you repeat it several times, and when experts rule out other causes. That is what happened with penicillin, and in 1989 with cold fusion. Storms et al. methodically ruled out things like external contamination. Storms showed that such contamination would have to be present at such high levels, the laboratory would be dangerous and the alarms would go off, forcing a permanent evaluation. The experiment was repeated dozens of times, later hundreds of times, with a high rate of success. Fritz Will et al. eventually saw tritium at 50 times background. They did hundreds of blank tests. The wrote: "the probability that the tritium in the latter was due to random spot contamination is computed as 1 in 2,380." Eventually, the people at BARC, Amoco and over 100 other labs confirmed tritium production. The reactor safety group at the BARC power reactor confirmed this. As they said, "if we did not know how to measure tritium, we would be dead." When the evidence piles up this high; when HUNDREDS of researchers confirm something in thousands of tests, and when they detect radioactive materials at levels that would be dangerous or deadly if the material was contamination coming from outside the cell, then you must put aside all doubts, and accept that the result is real. Any other evaluation is not just unscientific. Frankly, it would be lunacy. We know that tritium is the product of a nuclear reaction. Therefore we know that a nuclear reaction takes place in a cold fusion cell. There can be no doubt about it. The fact that we cannot explain this by theory has no bearing on the question. It does not reduce our confidence in the results. Rejecting this finding because there is no theory to explain it would be like withholding millions of doses of penicillin from the wounded soldiers on WWII battlefields because no one understood how penicillin worked. Because there was no theory. That would be criminal. It would be insanity. If the soldiers or civilians in 1945 learned that some doctor had made that decision, withheld the drug and cost the lives of 100,000 or more soldiers, they would be outraged. That doctor and everyone else involved would be tried for treason, and shot. Frankly, in my opinion, cold fusion is as important as penicillin. I am pretty sure that the decades-long delays caused by academic politics have cost far more than 100,000 lives. If people knew this, they would be outraged, justifiably so. - Jed
