At 05:55 AM 3/27/2010, Francis X Roarty wrote:
Just so I understand what all the fuss is about.. Is it because he is pushing neutron capture when he is supposed to be unbiased? I watched the Youtube presentation and frankly I liked it. How often does neutron capture occur normally? Does neutron capture get accelerated by catalytic action?
No, you don't understand. I know it's a lot of material, but read the material about Krivit above, since the ACS press conference, say, and there is much more recently about Krivit, including his documents on the heat/helium issue. Then consider what's been said.
The problem is only a little that he is aggressively pushing a single theory, though that does compromise his objectivity as a reporter. It is that, to do this, he attacks practically the entire cold fusion research community, and he criticizes the work in ways that show that he hasn't understood it.
The issue is not Widom-Larsen theory, per se. It's how Krivit "supports" it by attacking differing theories using polemic and gross oversimplifications of the experimental evidence, its implications, and what others say about it.
Neutron capture is apparently very rare normally, because of the shortage of slow neutrons, which are very readily captured by many nuclei. In other words, the issue would be the generation of slow neutrons, not acceleration of capture. Where are they coming from? I don't know how Larsen explains this, but if slow neutrons are available, we'd expect lots of reactions to be taking place that are not seen. Perhaps Larsen has an answer for this. I'd suggest that if he favors W-L theory, he has a lot of work to do to educate the rest of it as to why it's so explanatory in power, because, so far, what I know, and I've looked more than just a little, doesn't do that for me. As a journalist, it's fine for him to explain things, collect the information, and present it in a way that makes it understandable.
But he's not a scientist, and he seems to be more interested in the politics, and creates political stories where there may be none. His very noisy claim that LENR is not "fusion" is little more than a linguistic quibble; as far as I can see, he accepts that helium is being produced, and if helium is being produced by neutron capture, it is a type of fusion, just not deuterium fusion, and probably the reaction isn't simple two-deuteron fusion anyway, though some possibilities have not been ruled out. By aggressively challenging "fusion" as being the product of a belief, rather than of serious experimental evidence, he is justifying the doubts of the skeptics. "See, look, even Steve Krivit now admits that it isn't fusion," which is actually being said, and, mostly, his parallel message that it is, anyway, a nuclear reaction, is lost. His screeds cast doubt upon the honesty and competence of nearly every major cold fusion researcher, without any necessity.
It's pretty bad.
