At 03:46 PM 2/9/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Your paper on this, also based on the Britz bibliography, is at
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf, and, reading
numbers (approx) from your chart,
year totals cumulative totals
pos neg neutral pos neg neutral
1989 43 92 22 42 92 22
1990 75 76 41 117 168 63
1991 47 28 18 164 196 81
1992 22 13 11 186 209 94
There is a huge difference between Huizenga's numbers and yours.
What happened? Pretty obviously, the Britz database was not
complete at that time, assuming that it wasn't cherry-picked, and
the claim was that it wasn't.
Those are not my numbers. They are the totals from the Britz
database, tallied by a Pascal program I wrote.
Yes. I knew that, and that's pretty much what I said. But your paper
doesn't have the numbers broken down by year so I read them off the chart.
(The program may have produced minor discrepancies but I checked
it manually with a subset of the data and it is pretty good.) Britz
said that these were the authors' own evaluations, and for the most
part I agree with him. (as I said on p. 33). Here is the spreadsheet:
Year Total Res+ Res- Res0 Undecided
1989 205 46 83 22 54
1990 248 75 76 41 56
1991 130 46 29 18 37
1992 65 22 13 11 19
1993 66 31 10 8 17
1994 42 20 3 3 16
1995 29 19 3 6 1
1996 48 24 10 7 7
1997 32 19 2 4 7
1998 33 19 2 3 9
1999 23 18 0 1 4
2000 15 10 0 1 4
2001 17 11 2 0 4
2002 18 9 2 0 7
2003 7 2 1 0 4
2004 6 4 0 0 2
2005 6 2 2 2 0
2006 6 4 0 1 1
2007 5 5 0 0 0
2008 6 2 0 0 4
2009 0 0 0 0 0
1007 388 238 128 253
I do not know what order the papers were added to the database, or
how to explain the difference between Huizenga's totals and Britz.
There are discrepancies above that are larger than I think I'd have
seen from misreading the chart. I'll take a closer look later. They
may not be important.
Huizenga tries to show that positive publications had almost ceased
by 1992. In fact, they continued, though certainly at reduced
levels. They did decline over time, later, but never to zero, and,
in fact, since roughly 2003 or 2004, they began to increase . . .
Surely the overall conclusion is correct. Cold fusion publication
dwindled almost to zero and so did the research. It is moribund even
now. There is no funding and few young researchers, and the field
will surely die sooner or later as things now stand.
I've disagreed with you on this. First of all, consider the numbers
for 2008. The LENR Sourcebook was published in that year. That's 16
papers, peer-reviewed. Mainstream publisher, too. What does that do
to the number of "2" for 2008?
2009, of course, saw many publications.
However, you have to look as the causes. Huizenga, Morrison and
Britz said the total is asymptotically approaching zero for the
same reason polywater research and publications are: because the
results were proved wrong. There is nothing left to discuss.
Schwinger and I say that the research was crushed by academic
politics, "venomous criticism" and "censorship."
Sure. But the similarity with polywater breaks down. After about 2004
or so, publication rates increased. The negative publications almost
completely disappeared. Now, if this were, say, conference papers,
the Huizenga/Morrison/Britz argument might make sense. But it's
peer-reviewed publications, including some very prestigious
publications where the claim that the peer-reviewers don't know an
atomic nucleus from a cell nucleus doesn't make any sense. You would
think that cogent skeptics would be submitting cogent criticism. Where is it?
(As to atomic vs. cell, it was actually argued on Wikipedia that
Naturwissenschaften was a "life sciences journal" and would therefore
not have competent reviewers for Pamela Mosier-Boss's paper on triple
tracks. Let's say that this argument did not stand up to examination.
It was just ignorant blather and assumption.)
. . . and the numbers for 2007 and 2008 in the Britz database are
quite certainly not complete. For example, there were many
peer-reviewed papers published in 2008 in the ACS Sourcebook,
enough to practically dwarf the number shown on the chart for 2008.
The numbers are close to complete. He will never add the ACS
sourcebook for the same reason he never added the peer-reviewed
version of the ICCF-4 papers: it is too positive for his taste.
That's nice and circular! Again, this has been a big part of the
problem on Wikipedia. Sources are rejected because they are "fringe."
What's "fringe"? Science without basis in reliable sources. There are
no reliable sources. But .... "reliable source" means "independently
published," it's not about the content, per se. Supposedly. The best
sources for scientific topics are peer-reviewed secondary sources.
There are plenty of them now. Unfortunately, they appear to support
the reality of low-energy nuclear reactions, which we all know is
just a coverup name for "cold fusion," so those are all "fringe
sources." There are no reliable sources except, of course, for those
hastily-done and misrepresented hit jobs in 1989 called "negative
replications." Now, there's some solid science for you!
Too many solid affirmations. You have to realize that Britz is a
diehard skeptic. He holds that cold fusion does not exist and that
every single positive paper is mistaken or fraud. (He seldom
accuses the researchers of fraud, but he claimed that some Japanese
researchers and I committed fraud, at ICCF-3, so he is not shy
about making accusations.) He agrees with Huizenga. The detailed
tally hardly matters in a sense. When I wrote the paper last year
he retreated somewhat, but as far as I know he still thinks every
paper is a mistake.
Cool. "Paranoid."
Quoting my paper:
[Britz] says he is: "[not] among those who totally deny that may be
a new phenomenon. I do believe there may well be." In the past he
said: "There are enough quality positives for the original F&P
system (tritium, some XS [excess] heat) to force me to give it a
(small) chance."
Maybe not *totally* paranoid?
Look, it's utterly obvious there is a new phenomenon. What is it?
That isn't nearly so obvious! It has just gotten nearly impossible,
as far as my own imagination is concerned, to explain it without
*some kind* of nuclear reactions. Hydrino theory isn't nuclear, but,
then, doesn't explain more than half the data, it really just could
possibly explain heat.
Huizenga claims that "all marginal papers" were included, i.e.,
papers with inadequate controls, etc.
Huizenga, of course, claims any finding of no neutrons as "negative." . . .
That's right. It's part of the insanity. It is thinking about science
as some kind of war between the forces of "Truth" (i.e., my opinions)
and "Darkness" or "Error," (i.e., what I don't understand or believe
is Heresy). No neutrons means ... no neutrons!
It does not mean "no fusion," because not all fusion reactions will
produce neutrons. Just the ones that Huizenga thinks might be
happening. Except he doesn't think that any might be happening, so
what in the world does this mean? If we were saying that itty bitty
cracks in the palladium were producing electrostatic fields that were
accelerating deuterons to smash into each other, yup, the absence of
neutrons would be falsifying that theory, unless some really weird
other effect were simultaneously involved, which would seem pretty
unlikely with high-energy collisions.
But "unknown nuclear reaction"? What does the absence of neutrons say
about that? And, of course, we know that neutrons are not entirely
absent. Previously, it was possible to claim that the levels of
neutrons were close enough to background, that the neutron bursts
observed were just caused by cosmic rays, and to say it with a straight face.
However, that can't be said any more. Barrages of irrelevancies are
still raised. "Must be chemical damage," which ignores that the
SPAWAR neutron evidence (apparent proton tracks and triple-track from
apparent C-12 breakup) is mostly on the *back side* of the CR-39, not
the side exposed to the caustic environment of the cathode. If it
were chemical damage simply from the electrolyte, why would it be so
closely associated with the cathode, spatially?
And, of course, "The levels of neutrons are too low to explain the
heat." That's one of the great originals. Of course they are too low
to explain the heat! Whatever is producing the heat isn't producing
neutrons, or, if it is, it is producing them in very, very low levels.
Huizenga's criticism boils down to assuming that if there are nuclear
reactions, they must be the reactions he's familiar with, and if the
reactions he's familiar with were occurring, there would be neutrons
(and much more tritium), and if, by some fantastic amazing miracle,
the branching ratio were warped to give mostly helium, why, then
there would be gammas, because there *must* be two products due to
conservation of momentum.
Nope. That is, he's right, within the confines of his highly limited
assumptions. But where was it written that all nuclear reactions must
be the ones that can be imagined by Huizenga?
Takahashi has done the math, but the experimental work to verify his
Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate theory is probably difficult and has
not been done. The theory does not explain, as far as I've seen, how
it could come to be that four deutrons would occupy a single lattice
position in the palladium, it would surely -- and, apparently,
fortunately -- be very rare. But his math predicts that if this
configuration forms, it will collapse and then fuse, 100%, within a
femtosecond to a single highly excited Be-8 nucleus. Which will then
lose energy through photon emission at various energies, a series of
emissions he has described, they are not in the gamma region, and it
will itself, very quickly, fission into two alpha particles that have
the remaining fusion energy, as little as about 90 keV each.
Look, I certainly don't know if this theory is true. But it's a
mechanism that explains the "miracles." And four deuterons is not as
crazy as it sounds. A current thread considers the surface of the
metal, what is special about it? One factor not mentioned is that the
surface is where D2 gas is present, molecules of deuterium, with
their electrons. Inside the metal, that gas is not found, it has been
dissociated into deuterium nuclei and the electrons are shared. Four
deuterons is simply two deuterium molecules. So what is the frequency
of a single molecule of deuterium gas in a lattice position at or
very close to the surface, and then how often would another impinge
on that space? I don't see that Takahashi has approached this
problem. And the numbers might be very difficult to measure; if he's
right, the double-confinement would be extremely rare.
If I'm correct, though, the "Condensate" assumes deuterium with its
electrons....
You should not take his claims too seriously. If he were discussing
some other area of science, his assertions would be in line with
conventional thinking. People like Huizenga and Britz are good
scientists, and solid professionals. Normally they would not make up
new rules or bend over backwards to skew the data in their favor (by
rejecting the ICCF-4 and ACS book, for example). It is only with
regard to this one subject that they throw away objectivity and
reason. The reason they do this has nothing to do with science or
mental incapacity. It is politics. Pure primate power politics --
the behavior that plays the dominant rule in both human interactions
and the behavior of our simian cousins. It dominates our thinking as
much as sex dominates literature and movies. In Huizenga's case
funding also played a major role.
Yeah, sure.
I assume that Hizenga and Britz are sincere and they believe what
they say. But that does not rule out the likelihood that their
beliefs are based on self-interest and politics rather than
objective facts. Most people in most professions believe things that
make no sense because it is in their best interests to believe them,
especially when they will get in trouble if they believe anything
else. If someone like Britz or Prof. Dylla of the AIP were to come
out and declare unequivocally and publicly they think cold fusion is
real, they would land in a world of trouble. They know that!
Maybe. Or they imagine that. Certainly they'd get some flak. Some
people can't handle flak. Except, in the end, Huizenga is getting
serious flak from the future. Where is Britz in this?
Not one in a hundred professional scientists have the guts to do
that. Even Rob Duncan took a lot of heat, and he is powerful,
well-established guy. As for the likelihood that a high energy
particle physicist or plasma fusion researcher will say one word in
support of cold fusion . . . you might as well expect the Pope to
come out in favor of atheism.
Well, there is some hope for that. He's come out for Islam, after
all. I.e., has acknowledged some validity to the path....
I like to point out that the early Romans thought of the Christians
as "atheists," because they rejected the gods....
