At 11:16 AM 9/30/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
In some ways you have to draw an arbitrary line, for the convenience of the reader. We have nothing about Mills claims, even though I suppose they are cold fusion.
Most of Mill's "claims" are only peripheral to cold fusion or low-energy nuclear reactions. If hydrinos exist, and if there is some mechanism for hydrino formation in the experiments, the reduced-orbit electrons might more effectively shield the Coulomb repulsion and thus catalyze fusion, but that doesn't make articles on hydrinos, themselves, relevant, nor are the BlackLight Power "reactors" relevant, that's definitely not cold fusion, but hydrino chemistry. New kind of chemistry, but not nuclear.
This is not because I have anything thing against Mills' work. It is because people come to LENR-CANR to learn about metal-lattice based cold fusion -- the Fleischmann Pons effect, or whatever you want to call it. It would annoy the readers to find many papers about other subjects. If they want to learn about Mills they will go to his site.
It could be argued that some of Mills' papers are relevant to cold fusion. On the other hand, the political implications are problematic. Mills is working out his own karma, so to speak; if he manages to pull the rabbit out of the hat, and then someone else making a hat from the specifications likewise pulls out a rabbit, the whole issue might bear revisiting; we are likely to know within a few years. Meanwhile mentioning hydrinos simply confirms for critics how nutty these cold fusion people are. While we can't run our lives based on those opinions, we also might wisely avoid unnecessarily feeding the beast with tasty tidbits.
Really, did Storms (2007) actually have to mention spontaneous human combustion? It was speculation upon speculation. (p. 142.) He does have much more reason to discuss Mills, and he does it in quite some depth. For some unknown reason, the more extensive discussion (p. 184-186) is missing from the index; he actually gives much more ink to Mills than to any other proposed explanations.
