Jack Cole <jcol...@gmail.com> wrote: We've seen errors this big before. >
I do not think so. Rossi apparently made errors this big, and much bigger: 1 MW. (I think this was fraud, not error.) But I do not know recall any professional scientist who has published a paper which was later shown to have errors on this scale. Not in absolute power, or in the O/I ratio. If you disagree, which paper do you have in mind? Who made errors this big before? > Best to not get too excited until there is a replication. > I agree. > Based on history, every time there has been an amazing result like this, > it has turned out to be either a huge mistake, unreplicable, or fraudulent > (I don't suspect fraud at all in this case). > I do not think so, as I said. Give some examples. Who made a huge mistake? What was not replicatable? The only fraudulent results in the history of the field were Defkalion and Rossi, as far as I know. There may be others that were fraud, but I thought they were mistakes that could not be replicated. However, all the results I know of that could not be replicated were very small. They were marginal. They look like mistakes. I have never heard of anyone claiming 40 to 250 W that turned out to be a mistake. Very few claims in cold fusion exceeded 10 or 20 W. As far as I know, the only reaction of ~20 W that could not be replicated is Dardik's heat after death: https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DardikIprogressin.pdf The only major large claim, of ~100 W, was Fleischmann and Pons boil-off experiment. As far as I know, only one group tried to replicate, Lonchampt and Biberian. They succeeded. Lonchampt was a nuclear engineer, so he followed instructions, so it worked. There was a molten salt claim of over 100 W, but no one tried to replicate. How many times have people failed to replicate Mizuno and/or shown his > results to be in error in the past? > Never, as far as I know. All of his claims were either replicated, or no one tried to replicate. Mostly the latter. IH tried to replicate one claim but they never got started, as far as I know. There were problems with the equipment. This resembles the situation with the Google researchers in *Nature* for their Pd-D claims. It was not a replication because they never reached high loading. It was an attempt that failed for known reasons. (I cannot judge their Ni claims.) - Jed
