Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
They are two different facts, and we have a fair amount of helium
data that is not correlated with heat. Hoffman reports a lot of
helium data in his book, based on EPRI reports, without heat data.
It's explicitly missing, and it seems that the helium measurements
were made deliberately independent from the heat, to avoid the
obvious accusation of expectation bias.
That was not a blind test as far as I know. Hoffman knew perfectly
well that the samples produced heat, but he did not want to talk
about for political reasons. He was allied with Jones and Schneider
of the anti-heat brigades.
The tests done by U.S. Bureau of Mines and others, on the samples
sent out by Miles, were single-blind tests, not double blind. That is
to say, the people measuring helium did not know whether the sample
produced heat at the time they made the measurement. Miles knew, but
he did not tell them until they finished. As Lomax says, this was to
avoid introducing an expectation bias caused by wishful thinking.
(That's an expectation bias, not an expectation value. Our friend S.
K. confuses the two.)
Hoffman was well aware of the correlation of heat and helium when he
wrote his book. The entire purpose of book was to distract people
from the heat and cast doubt on the tritium, with his preposterous
used CANDU moderator water hypothesis. The book was so outrageous,
SRI threatened a lawsuit, and forced the publisher to insert the
loose leaf sheet of paper into the book, which says:
"ADDENDUM
Comments were made in this text that the work performed by SRI
INTERNATIONAL was difficult to examine in detail because that lab was
reticent to share experimental details of a potentially profitable
field of research. This experimental secrecy was partially lifted by
the following Report to EPRI:
McKubre, M. C. H., et al., 'Development of Advanced Concepts for
Nuclear Processes in Deuterated Metals,' TR-104195, Research Project
3170-01, Final Report, August 1994."
I will grant there is useful information in this book. However, if
you want to make a clean separation of truth from the anti-cold
fusion propaganda I recommend you keep the one-page Addendum and toss
the book into the trash. It is a bit like the Taubes book. There is a
lot of true information in that book too. Gene Mallove said it was an
accurate description of Steve Jones' shenanigans. But the technical
assertions are so confused they are hazardous to read. As they say in
Japan, the stupidity rubs off on you.
- Jed
