Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> wrote: The safest course is to take Garwin and Lewis and the others at their word > and to limit consideration to what was said and written. >
If I take them at their word, I am forced to conclude they are incompetent fools. > Remember that Pons's lawyer sent a stiff letter to Michael Salamon > demanding a retraction of a paper by him and others at the University of > Utah when they got a null result. > He did. It wasn't his finest moment. He was under a lot of pressure. Pons and Fleischmann had used a health dosimeter to measure neutrons > despite having had access, should they have wanted it, to faculty in the > physics department who could have carried out the difficult measurements > and determine whether there was artifact or not; Jones offered similar > help, which they did not follow up on. > That was before publication, when they were still working informally on a shoestring. They were not expecting any results. They did not want to embarrass themselves or others. Presumably Fleischmann and Pons were so concerned not to give away some > important secret . . . > They did not want people to know about the research for a variety of reasons. I do not think they considered it an important secret until a short time before publication. > For the first few weeks, most people had to rely on faxes of the paper and > on news clippings, because Pons and Fleischmann were intentionally hard to > get information out of. > They were overwhelmed. This was before the Internet as we know it. It was difficult to communicate technical information except on paper. Clean copies of the paper soon circulated. It wasn't a very good paper because they did not know much. Fleischmann, an electrochemist, suggested that the reason they were seeing > the excess heat was that deuterium nuclei were being squeezed together due > to the close spacing in the palladium lattice. > I think that is an over-simplification. Deutrons in the lattice are farther apart than they are in water. Everyone knew that. I think the hypothesis was that two or more were occupying the same lattice position. Also, as Fleischmann pointed out, it is easier to satisfy the Lawson criteria because the deuterons are held together indefinitely. With plasma fusion they come together very briefly. Duration is one the criteria: density, confinement time, and plasma temperature. Pons and Fleischmann tried to go directly to congress and get funding > instead of going through the normal grant-making agencies . . . > No, they did not. That was Magaziner's idea, not theirs. You are also incorrect in saying they did not pass peer-review before announcing. The paper did pass peer-review and it was in print. Nowadays it would be available instantly but back then it took a week to circulate by snail-mail. (Remember that?) I agree with Ed that they were brave to believe their own calorimetry, given the deficit of neutrons. Martin later said, "it is the easiest thing in the world to dismiss your own results; to say 'that must be a mistake' and to ignore it." - Jed
