At 07:37 PM 3/26/2010, Michel Jullian wrote:
I am just stating a fact, not judging the validity of anybody's claims.There would be no airplanes today if the Wright brothers hadn't allowed skeptics to judge their claims with their own instruments (=own eyes in their case). Luckily, they were not that stupid.
Jed knows the Wright history very well. It took years before those general "replications" took place. Seeing an airplane fly is pretty easy, if you are there at the time. "Seeing" excess heat is far, far more complex.
What "claim" hasn't been independently tested here? You do know that McKubre at SRI did run the superwave technique with his own calorimeter, right? Is there anything preventing anyone from replicating these results? What? How?
In other words, skeptics *are* "allowed ... to judge their claims with their own instruments." If not, what's preventing them?
I'll tell you. A belief that the results are bogus, a belief that is not based on eyewitness, but attachment to old theory and views. It's difficult and expensive to duplicate the ET work, so skeptics aren't rushing to try it. In 1989, skeptics did rush to try, but too many with a motive to discredit the work, and they clearly didn't wait long enough. Miles, at the ACS conference, pointed out that his work was cited in the 1989 DoE review as a negative replication. I think I've read that when he started getting positive results, he tried to inform them, but it was ignored.
In 1989, it was a set-up, I'm afraid, or, perhaps, there were too many physicists too easily relieved that they didn't have to examine the assumptions they had been making for a good chunk of a century, nor did they have to worry about losing their funding to this upstart claim. And then angry that their sleep had been disturbed.
Here is the real problem. With the ET/Fleschmann cell approach, there is high variability, cell by cell. The exact cause of this variability is elusive, though there are theories that can be explored and tested. So, here, "claim" must be seen as a specific claim for a specific experiment, that they got some high value of excess heat in that experiment. This is inherently not reproducible specifically. You either were there, partly (as Duncan) or completely (buying and installing the equipment, calibrating it, etc.), or you weren't. You can never reproduce *that specific experiment.* You can only run similar experiments, as close as possible to the same conditins -- which might be impossible! -- and see if you get statistically similar results.
Exact replication, for these excess heat results with Fleischmann cells, is a wild goose chase. However, if you measure both excess heat and helium, and you use the same techniques for helium capture and measurement, and for excess heat, and across many cells, you can, in fact, reproduce results on the heat/helium ratio. Pretty closely, my guess. Individual cells will vary in excess heat, but not in the heat/helium ratio, unless a very different process is triggered, which remains possible.
(Suppose the variation is caused by some trace contamination, unidentified. Suppose trace contamination also alters the predominant reaction. You might see variation in the ratio. This cannot be ruled out from what results I've seen. Helium, though, proves fusion if we set aside fusion pathway. (And excepting some fission possibilities that seem like serious stretches to me, and which really involve the same process as fusion, i.e., nuclear *combination*.)
