At 10:33 AM 12/15/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
The AIP published a textbook by Marwan and Krivit. Some researchers feel they should not tell Dylla this, because he might take steps to cancel the next AIP session on cold fusion, or prevent publication of the book. I wrote to them:
No, Jed, that was the American Chemical Society, not the AIP. Unless there is a book by the same authors published by the AIP, which would indeed be big news. I rather doubt it.
The ACS publication was big enough news, it is part of the strong evidence for the turn. I consider it now reasonable to claim a scientific majority in favor of cold fusion. Not "majority of all scientists," who put on their pants one leg at a time and get their news from the media like everyone else, but "majority of those informed," that would include the peer reviewers at publications like Naturwissenschaften and other journals; those who become familiar with the literature in the field, with the evidence. You know the 2004 DoE panel. It was 50-50 on the crucial excess heat question. And given how many people have an "over my dead body" attitude about cold fusion, having seriously committed themselves on cold fusion, and how common these might be among, say, particle physicists on a DoE review panel, that 50-50 included people who didn't even look at the evidence, and who even more or less acknowledged that in their reviews. Why bother reading fraudulent evidence?
With the increased rate of peer-reviewed publication (remember, Jed, the number of such publications in 2008 must include the 16 papers in the ACS Handbook), not only the regular journals), with the increased featuring of LENR seminars by the ACS, with the media response to the SPAWAR neutron findings presented at the 2009 ACS National Conference in Salt Lake City, with Robert Duncan and all that, it has to become a matter of notice that the skeptical response is highly lacking, there are just little wiggles like that of the AIP President, an off-hand comment that simply shows his ignorance.
Really, his response to Krivit's brief note:
I suppose I should have picked another example or carefully noted that most cold fusion studies that claimed to be directed as new energy source were "mistaken" and not intentionally fraudulent.
He actually picked a very good example of research that displayed the wishful thinking of the researchers, he simply got it backwards!
"Most cold fusion studies that claimed to be [what does he mean by "new energy source", must be "excess heat"] were mistaken."
I'd say he has no clue about the 153 peer-reviewed publications that confirmed excess heat from palladium deuteride. What's the number in the opposite direction, and the publication history? The rejected science is the negative conclusion! Nobody ever presented more than speculation about the source of the alleged excess heat artifacts, but apparently those speculations were enough, even when they were preposterous.
Quite simply, and contrary to what most thought from the first press conference, this was one difficult experiment to reproduce, nobody understood the exact necessary conditions, not even Pons and Fleischmann, as you know. So of course there were a lot of initial "failures." As I wrote elsewhere today, all those negative replications actually confirmed the science, by being controls, as shown by the recent Bayesian analysis of all that work; the negative results can be predicted from characteristics of the reports on the experiments, such as inadequate deuterium/palladium ratio. That was brilliant, actually. That's the kind of meta-analysis that can create scientific certainty, or at least approach it.
