At 10:47 AM 4/1/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
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.
Yeah, you've said this many times. I'd say it's dangerous
mind-reading, but you might know directly. To me, what the man left
behind when he died was his work, which includes the book, which is
excellent (except for a certain conjecture which you have considered
stupid or worse, mean). What Hoffman reports was reported as a blind
test, as I recall, and I've seen some independent confirmation of
that, I think. All this should really be nailed down, because
heat/helium is very, very important, though, eventually, the older
work will become moot, when we have newer and more accurate and more
widely replicated results. My guess is that this thing is going to
be, eventually, studied to death.
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.
Yes. And that was important. The test was, in some ways,
double-blind, because Miles, measuring the heat, did not know what
the helium results would be. But I don't think I said "double-blind," did I?
(That's an expectation bias, not an expectation value. Our friend S.
K. confuses the two.)
Yeah, I think. Though I'm not sure that's relevant here.
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.
Well, until you know better, it was important for skeptics (real
skeptics!) to assert alternate hypotheses to explain anomalies, and
contamination of the heavy water was an obvious one, even if, with
full knowledge and our 20-20 hindsight, it was preposterous. For the
historical record, Jed, how do you knew that he had possession and
knowledge of the heat/helium data "when he wrote his book," which
would generally be well in advance of the publication date, which is
legally the date on which the work became available to the public
from the publisher. That was some time in 1995. The forward was
written in April, 1995. Depending on what travails a manuscript must
go through, and this was an EPRI publication, there might have been
quite some delay, it seems quite possible some of the book was
written in 1993. The Preface is dated April, 1995, but that may have,
again, been written at the last minute.
Blowing this all to hell, I find that the latest citation in the book
is a paper published in Nature, January 27, 1995. But Hoffman may
have had a preprint or manuscript copy and the reference was
corrected at the last minute. The critical chapters would be:
Chapter 5: Charged-Particle, Photon, Tritium, and Helium Measurements
and Possible Artifacts. The 1995 reference is in that chapter and is
about helium in ocean island lavas, so it does not bear on excess
heat/helium, at all (probably.) Before that, the latest reference is 1992.
Appendix D: Helium Measurements Conductd to Clarify Worldwide "Cold
Fusion" Experiments. The latest reference there is 1990. The
introduction to the appendix, though, at least the part authored by
B. M. Oliver, explicitly states that "Between July 1989 and September
1992, a total of 227 "cold fusion" related helium analyses were
conducted at Rocketdyne under funding from EPRI. Hoffman has a
footnote which says, as I read it, that it is a "private
communication ... based on analyses performed from April 1989 through
January 1993."
And now I find Chapter 10, which was explicitly written to be current
as of December, 1994. (He says "1995" in the preface, so there might
have been some last-minute revisions.) Hoffman, whom we may presume
speaks neutrally through OM (Old Metallurgist), and skeptically
through YS (Young Scientist), is very clear.
page 131:
YS: [...] Do you believe that heat is indeed being generated by "cold fusion"?
OM: The original hypothesis about heat from "cold fusion" involved
room-temperature D-D fusion occuring within a palladium solid
lattice with consequent nuclear ash of neutrons, 3He, tritium, and
protons accompanying the heat. We know now that classical D-D fusion
is not the source of the heat, because ash products of deuterium
atoms fusing are not present in the required amounts. [...] If a
nuclear reaction is producing the heat, we do not understand what
the reaction is and what the nuclear ash could be. One possibility
may be changes in the isotopic composition of the metal matrix.
[...(gives some evidence for isotopic shifts) ...] Thus, the
question as to whether isotope shifts are the nuclear ash is still open.
YS: I guess the real question has to be this: Is the heat real?
OM: The simple facts are as follows. Scientists experienced in the
area of calorimetric measurements are performing these experiments.
Long periods occur with no heat production, then, occasionally,
periods suddenly occur with apparent heat production. These
scientists become irate when so-called experts call them charlatans.
The occasions when apparent heat appears seem to be highly sensitive
to the surface conditions of the palladium and are not reproducible at will.
YS: Any phenomenon that is not reproducible at will is most likely not real.
OM: People in the San Fernando valley, Japanese, Columbians, et al.,
will be glad to hear that earthquakes are not real.
YS: Ouch. I deserved that. My comment was stupid.
OM: A large number of people who should know better have parroted
that inane statement. There are, however, many artifacts that can
indicate a false period of heat production, as we have discussed.
The question of whether heat is being produced is still open, though
any such heat is not from deuterium atoms fusing with deuterium
atoms to produce equal amounts of 3He + neutron and triton + proton.
If the heat is real, it must be from a different nuclear reaction or
some totally non-nuclear source of reactions with energies far above
the electron-volt levels of chemical reactions.
YS: Well, that is part of the answer. Is the heat from any nuclear reactions?
OM: Experiments have indicated that 4He may be generated and that
tritium has been produced, but neither of these ash products has
been linked with measured heat generation.
Again and again in the book, Hoffman thoroughly skewers the
pseudoskeptical arguments. Just the page before the dialog quoted
above, he tells YS,
You are seeing the experimental evidence through your model of
reality and thus rejecting experimental results that don't conform
to your comfortable version of absolute scientific truth,"
which he then has YS reject, dismissively, as a "bit of philosophy."
Sound like any skeptics you know?
Just before the quoted section, he says that
"Scientists working in this area have been pilloried unfairly. There
is careful work being done by extremely competent scientists."
Hoffman covers Taubes with a caustic realism. Likewise Huizenga.
Hoffman, writing chapter 10, shows no awareness of the heat/helium
correlation, and he clearly understood that it would be very
significant. He explicitly denies that it has been found, which would
have held true, pretty much, before 1993 (except for truly sporadic
reports, to my knowledge). The rest of his comments are reasonable
for the state of the science in 1993.
To me, his rigorously cautious approach is exactly what was needed at
that time, so his rejection by the cold fusion community, hinted at
by Jones in his blurb for the back cover, was quite unfortunate. He
doesn't appear to be any kind of enemy to the importance of
experiment over theory. The opposite. So I've asked, at times, if
anyone knows where Hoffman went with the topic of cold fusion later,
before his passing.
Rothwell:
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:
My book, which I bought used, did not have that inserted note, but
this means nothing, Jed, about Hoffman's motives, and I'll say below
what the effect of the book was on me.
"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."
There is no admission of any wrong-doing or error in that addendum,
and, in fact, if that addendum was acceptable to SRI, the addendum
confirms Hoffman's report, and simply notes that the data is now
"partially" available. Tempest in a teapot, Jed.
I will grant there is useful information in this book.
Indeed. What the book showed me, and Hoffman quite clearly intended
this, was that there was no "impossibility" involved in cold fusion.
He maintained the position of a thoughtful skeptic. His great sin, it
seems you are asserting, was that he didn't yell Stop the Presses! if
and when the heat/helium data became available. And then he'd have
had to do serious analysis of that work, and probably wouldn't have
been paid for it. Judging heat/helium does not actually involve
serious judgment of the calorimetry, but he considered himself not
competent to do that, so I can easily imagine him, if he became aware
of this correlation, deciding to let it go, the book was doing its
job, about which we can speculate, but obfuscation is not a necessary
assumption. The job, as I see it, and it worked with me, was to keep
the question open, not to close it. That was his job, and the EPRI
Forward, to me, hints at some frustration on the part of Thomas
Schneider that he wrote the book the way he did. But that's a rough
intutition, not an accusation.
Writing the Foreword in April, 1995, Schneider, of EPRI, clearly says
it about heat/helium:
"In my personal opinion, the overall finding is negative; that is,
no verifiable evidence exists for nuclear effects consistent with
the claimed "excess heat" measurements."
And then Schneider proceeds to adopt the naive skeptical arguments of
YS in the book, the very ones that Hoffman is cautioning against. I
suspect Hoffman was amused. But EPRI was interested in power
generation, not basic science, and had concluded by this time, as did
other institutions, that this wasn't going to be easy at best. So
EPRI was dropping it, I believe. That's the overall "negative"
finding in his mind, and he simply got it confused with a scientific
judgment, as have many. That was the "negative" conclusion of the DoE
panel in 2004 that has so widely been cited as if it had a bearing on
the science.
Rothwell again:
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.
It's quite different from Taubes, Jed. I highly recommend that you
reconsider it, or at least allow yourself to defer judgment. I
haven't found any "confused" technical assertions yet, except for
ones that become clear with the benefit of hindsight. We know now
that helium was indeed correlated with excess heat, published in
1993. When this work would reasonably have reached a level as being
considered confirmed, I don't know, but Hoffman does report single
studies that seem significant. so the omission of the correlation is
puzzling, unless, indeed, he was under political pressure to keep it
out. Alternate explanation is that by the time chapter 10 was
written, he wasn't following the latest work, he was just wrapping up
the book. It would be a flaw, to be sure, but not enough of a flaw to
undo the good he did by thoroughly deconstructing the knee-jerk
skeptical position, and by his sober and even analysis of the issues.
He really helped me to find my way through the mess. Did you know
that I first learned of the early Chinese work with CR-39 from his book?
