At 02:23 PM 8/20/2012, Peter Gluck wrote:
I am looking this paper with very mixed feelinga.
Admiration for a great effort, however 5% success rate
due to palladiumphilia can be described by two nasty Latin sayings- too:
Errare humanum est, persverare diabolicum
Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus
I am very sorry but Pd is not good despite...everything..
Don't make the skeptics happy!
Eff the skeptics. Whether "5% success rate" is good news or bad news
depends entirely on the details of those experiments.
They ran 300 experiments. Suppose they were investigating the
parameter space, that they varied lots of stuff. Depending on the
specific results, 5% could be great news! If the results are close to
noise, with the 5% being only slight elevated, this could be serious
failure. *It all depends.*
Only when we imagine that the goal of experimentation is immediate
big results with reliability, do we fall into the trap of considering
a "5% success rate" as something shameful, to be hidden.
Suppose that they also measured helium. (They probably did not, a
shame). Suppose that they only found helium in that 5% of attempts
with excess heat. Suppose that the amount of the helium correlated
with the excess heat.
That would be major finding, in fact. News. Even though it would
simply be replicating what was found almost twenty years ago.
Scientifically, even a single event of heat producing helium is
important. 15 such findings in an experimental series, clearly not
only above noise but confirmed with helium, the ash?
Folks, science first. Once we understand the science, we'll have a
much better idea if engineering this effect for commercial
application is possible.
Peter, palladium is neither good nor bad. It's palladium. It is known
to work for cold fusion, under the right conditions. PdD is therefore
useful for investigating the phenomenon. If nickel works, NiH is
obviously more practical, so confirming NiH nuclear reactions is
therefore relatively urgent. Once again, the focus on HEAT, HEAT,
HEAT distracts from the first step. What is the ash with NiH?
Reactors that produce a lot of heat will certainly help identify the
NiH ash. If the primary ash is deuterium, as Storms thinks, it's
going to take substantial accumulated product to make it detectable
above noise. Before then, comprehensive analysis of reaction products
is important, with controls and association with heat. If copper is
the ash, it should be detectable, particularly in experiments where
copper is not an ingredient.
The push for CHEAP ENERGY! actually is retarding the science, in some
ways. Researchers in the field have incentives to keep their work
secret. That is one reason why this field needs some substantial
public funding, as has long been recommended by the DoE's own panels.
That this recommendation has never been carried out is a travesty,
and we should pin the tail on this donkey.
It's been the hot fusion lobby, protecting a billion-dollar
boondoggle that may never pay off. Hot fusion is real, but
controlling it is still a fantasy. If not for serious misbehavior on
the part of the American Physical Society, and the physics community
in general -- excepting certain physicists who maintained real
skepticism, and who changed their minds when they saw the evidence --
we might have practical cold fusion already. Only be questioning the
reality of the effect were the physicists able to maintain the
drastic disparity in research funding, toward an approach that
inherently needs to employ many more physicists than cold fusion will.
Cold fusion will require, to develop our understanding of the
mechanism(s), the best physicists we have. It's new science. But that
will not create a lot of jobs for physicists, compared to hot fusion
research. Hot fusion research will collapse, it is practically
inevitable. There are too many less dangerous ways to generate or
collect power. Cold fusion is only one.
If you are starting out a career in physics, don't go for hot fusion
research, it's a dead end.
Cold fusion will create jobs for chemists and materials scientists.
I've been suggesting that creating the necessary structures, that set
up what appear to be resonances that foster the reaction, might best
be accomplished with bioengineering. Biophysics, specifically
developing biological structures with nuclear effects, might be a
field to investigate. And if you are a grad student, and have
adventurous advisers, you might look at Vysotskii's work, just crying
to be replicated. Check it out. Be a leader.
And by the way. You don't have to be a "believer" in cold fusion to
do important work. Negative papers on cold fusion have not been
published for many years. Lots of positive work has been done. If you
can identity the artifact or set of artifacts that could be fooling
hundreds of scientists around the world into accepting cold fusion,
you'd be doing a fantastic service.
*This was never done.* Cold fusion was rejected on theoretical
grounds, the positive evidence -- and there is plenty of it -- was
rejected because it was supposedly impossible, and there was no
"theory" to "explain" it, other than the non-theory of "there must be
some mistake."
N-rays and polywater faded into obscurity because the original
experimental findings were shown to be artifact by controlled
experiment. That never happened with cold fusion.
"Replication failure" proves nothing except the possibility of
failure, which can come for many reasons. Artifact in the original
reports is only one of many possibilities.
What proves something is replication *success,* which includes
success, the experiment shows the original results, and which might
go on to then demonstrate that these results are artifact. The famous
replication failures, used by the DoE in 1989 to allow a claim of non
erat demonstrandum, and used by the USPTO as a basis for rejecting
all attempted cold fusion patents, out of hand, were hasty,
inadequate, even shoddy, though some use can be made of the results.
For example, they claimed to see no heat (that's been challenged),
but they also found no helium. That is a confirmation of later work
with PdD. No heat, no helium. Toss that in the "control" bucket.
If you are a physicist, interested in the frontiers of science, cold
fusion has an absolutely amazing history. Huizenga called it the
"Scientific Fiasco of the Century," and he didn't know the half of it.
