At 02:00 PM 3/19/2010, Michel Jullian wrote:
What a jerk. On that page alone, he says one loads palladium into deuterium, and platinum too, and he professes that excess heat is the "bad kind" of cold fusion!
You know, he points out that it is not fraud to be wrong, and I'll point out that it is also not being a jerk to be wrong. That error shows that this wasn't well-considered. I.e., the error about "loading of palladium and platinum into deuterium."
He's also trying to support his friend Scaramuzzi with a comment that the loading (i.e., of deuterium into palladium, it doesn't load into platinum) is respectable, with only a "tangential connection to cold fusion." Yeah, that's right! "Anomalous heat" or "unexpected helium" or whatever. Cold fusion? No. Maybe its a low-energy nuclear reaction, but fusion? No, we don't mention fusion around here, it makes the natives restless. We are researching anomalous heat in the palladium deuteride system, you got a problem with that?
I think you are being a little harsh, Michel. This reads to me like an essay or even a speech or something dictated off-the-cuff, it's certainly not well-edited and researched. But the basic message is actually positive.
What did "bad kind" of cold fusion mean? Read the context and the time. At that point, there was muon-catalyzed fusion on the table, or the possibility that there was a very-low level form of other cold fusion, i.e., what Jones was reporting. That would be the "good kind." Not so horribly controversial. But Fleischmann was reporting levels of heat that could only be from much higher levels of reaction. He's describing his distress at heating that his friend was involved in this nonsense. "Bad kind" is what he thought then.
He then, next page, says that he has looked over the results carefully, and they are "pretty impressive." Go back and read this again! He's complaining that the normal process of science isn't happening. If there are all these positive results, there should be people pouring over them to try to "prove them wrong."
Note the very obvious implication. Cold fusion has not been proven wrong. And in this he is 100% correct. He underreports the positive evidence, that's all. Scaramuzzi is only a small part of it.
