At 06:43 PM 9/24/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Haven't I been saying that the corner had been reached, and that
the turn had started?
To some extent, yes . . . But it would be more of a change if people
new to the field were writing these reviews, rather than Storms,
Biberian and Li. I do not mean to belittle their contribution, and
of course you do want the leaders of a field to write the main
reviews. But I do not know of any papers in favor of cold fusion
published by people "outside the field." I guess I would define that
as "people I have not heard of." In that sense, we have not turned
the corner yet.
Hey, I wrote that we turned the corner, not that we had parked the
car in the garage!
I can see that I have my work cut out for me!
I think the dearth of papers opposed to cold fusion is mainly
because opponents are unaware that the research continues. (Most
opponents, anyway.) It isn't as if opponents giving up or admitting
they were wrong. Most of them probably just lost interest.
Who are "opponents," Jed? The opponents are dying just like the
"supporters." This is what has been happening: when you get a paper
in the hands of a reviewer, who actually reviews it, the papers are
being accepted. Papers have been appearing in mainstream journals all
along, but I started compiling papers as of 2005, after the DoE
review (December, 2004). I counted 17 reviews of the field, all
positive. No negative reviews. At a certain point, the argument that
"the real experts think this isn't worth responding to" gets old.
Tell me, Jed, when you know something about a topic, and you find a
stupid ignorant comment in mainstream media, what are you tempted to do?
Sure, until Storms (2010), none of these were "reviews" in *major*
journals. (There were papers in major journals, but not reviews.)
However, all of those journals in which those reviews appeared have
subscribers who are scientists, some of whom will raise hell if they
can. What I don't know, because I don't have sufficient access to the
materials, is what kind of responses appeared later, letters to the
editor, brief responses. Major responses, of course, appear in the
indexes I have, such as Shanahan's response to Marwan and Krivit in
JEM this year. Speaking of major responses, the only major responses
to appear in peer-reviewed journals since 2005 have all come from
Shanahan, who has basically shot his wad, it seems.
He's incredibly obtuse, and paranoid. I've been seriously trying to
set up conditions where his critiques can be covered, and he keeps
thinking I'm our to get him, to humiliate him. He doesn't realize
that he's humiliating himself by making totally preposterous arguments!
The sequence in JEM is stunning, and he fully realizes the implications.
I hate to say this, but I think the opponents have a valid point
when they say that most mainstream scientists still reject cold fusion.
It's not a "valid point," because it's meaningless except for certain
political purposes, and that won't last. "Most mainstream scientists"
are not informed experts. A peer reviewer, if he or she does the job,
reads an article, checks the sources, and if this is a review of the
field, makes sure that the material is properly presented and
balanced. Reviewers, of course, may occasionally screw up, but the
publishers, if they have any sense at all -- and they don't stay in
business if they don't have any sense -- won't allow that to
continue. And they won't allow fringe nonsense to stand without
allowing some correction of it.
The shift isn't in what the (how many, millions?) of scientists
think. It is in what those think who become informed. This is where
the 2004 DoE review was so important. Warts and all. Given how poorly
that was organized, how little time there was for presentation, how
amazingly little for back-and-forth, the gross errors in
interpretation in the summary (What, the report claimed that helium
was found in five out of sixteen electrolytic cells showing excess
heat? How can these cold fusioneers have the sheer chutzpah to claim
this as a correlation? It's an *anti-correlation*? What? The
Hagelstein report didn't say that? Not at all? Hah! How can you say
that? It's right there in black and white in the report. Who are you
to claim that it's not in the Hagelstein paper! Sorry. I've been
dealing with Wikipediots again.... I should stop that.) --
... that review showed that if you took 18 experts, in the relevant
fields, handed them a paper and a copy of all the sources and let
them read it, those who were so inclined, and sat them down to hear a
talk, and then asked them about the evidence, *half of them, in 2004,
considered the evidence for excess heat to be "conclusive."* The way
the report has been presented is that one-third of the reviewers
considered the evidence for "nuclear reactions" as the cause to be
"convincing or somewhat convincing."
Now, once you realize that if someone doesn't consider excess heat
conclusive, they are not about to consider the evidence for
non-existent excess heat being of nuclear origin to be convincing,
what we really have is that, of those who considered the excess heat
to be a real anomaly -- conclusively so -- two thirds were "somewhat
convinced" or better that this was of nuclear origin.
And we can add to that: from reading the reviewer papers, there were
some who were utterly unprepared to even consider the evidence,
because they were following the old error: assuming that the
reaction, if it was real, must be d-d fusion, and since d-d fusion at
low temperatures was supposedly impossible -- wait, not impossible
because of muon-catalyzed fusion, but impossible because there could
not possibly be any other catalyst under the sun, our knowledge is
perfect, right? -- but, even more, d-d fusion would almost certainly
have killed the experimenters with the neutrons, and then if somehow
the branching ratio were to helium, the gammas would have fried them
instead -- therefore it's not d-d fusion and therefore it's not fusion.
That argument is so full of holes it makes swiss cheese look
positively impenetrable. But an awful lot of people fell for it, and
continue to fall for it. Raw assumption that an unknown phenomenon
must be an error, because of an assumption that, if it exists, it
would be something known, and since we aren't seeing the blinking
lights that say "This is Our Known Phenomenon," why, the reports must
just be mistaken, having a collective hallucination, wishful
thinking, cherry-picked evidence, whatever cockamamie argument we can
think of. Like, brilliant, eh?
So, once we can see that there were a few reviewers utterly
unprepared to even look at the evidence, 50/50 was quite good!
Especially, again, when you realize that in 1989, the Nobel Prize
winning co-chair had to threaten to resign to get the sensible
language that was the actual report. Probably he had only one
supporter on the panel. In 2004, the recommendation for more
researtch was real and unanimous. Not forced. That still didn't make
it happen, because the enemies of cold fusion manipulated how the
report was framed, and the friends of cold fusion shot themselves in
the foot by failing to appreciate -- and announce, vociferously --
what good news that report was.
I don't blame them, this was very difficult, and most of the
supporters of cold fusion were scientists, researchers, academics,
not political operatives!
I know that most journals still summarily reject papers without review.
Sure. But that is changing, and has already changed, I'm sure. And
what you aren't seeing, Jed, I suspect, is that *negative* papers are
being rejected. Almost certainly by the same journals that are
accepting positive ones.
Now, Naturwissenschaften has been testing the waters since 2005.
Apparently the sky did not fall. Where is the critical response to
the Triple Track paper? Frankly, I could write critical response to
some of their earlier work. (Just some, mind you, I have great
respect for what they have done.) But the Triple Track paper?
Shanahan tries, and falls flat on his face, his arguments are
preposterous. Tiny chemical explosions that cause damage to the
surface of the plastic. Okay, suppose they do? How does this damage
the plastic *on the other side* without causing *more damage* on the
side closest the cathode? Uh, acoustic focusing of the energy? What?
And if we have shock waves of that magnitude, you can't hear anything
or see anything? Uh, ... uh .... I just know there must be something
wrong with this!
Shanahan just presented a calculation of the energy released from a
bubble of combined D2/O2 if it ignites, trying to see if it could
explain the melted craters reported. He really wants those craters to
be real so that he can then put up this explosive damage theory. So
what did he do? He estimated the crater diameter as "5 mm." For what
has usually been a codep cathode formed on a 250 micron wire. He'd
misread the scale on an image from Krivit's paper. So, hey, his
energy calculation was only off by a factor of a billion. What's a
billion among friends? A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon
you are talking about a *real difference.*!
Actually, what would heppen if a 10 micron bubble of D2/O2 were
somehow ignited -- that's a whole issue in itself -- underwater? My
guess, nothing. Too much water to heat, too small an explosion. A 5
mm bubble? Might pop the electrolyte all over the top of the cell. Maybe!
He's postulating an entirely new phenomenon, entirely contrary to the
experience of those working with electrolytic cells, to explain away
those stunning images of triple tracks, which look just like neutron
C-12 breakup tracks, and which could not possibly look like
"explosive damage," which would appear on the other side, anyway.
SPAWAR knocked the ball out of the park with that report. Sorry,
done, over with. There are neutrons, get over it. And if there are
neutrons, what the hell is going on in the cell?
Good question, eh? I think we should find out. I do not believe that
we know, except from heat/helium, we can make a damn good guess that
some mechanism is converting deuterium to helium, with very, very
little radiation. Useful? Maybe. Maybe not, in fact, this effect
might be way too fragile. But maybe ....
Sorry, Dr. Garwin, this has nothing to do with whether you get your
cup of tea or not. You are a physticist, eh? Aren't you more
interested in neutrons than tea? Okay, so maybe it's really good tea.
McKubre says he could have brewed your cups of tea many times over.
That's a bit unfair, I'll agree. There is no Cold Fusion Tea Samovar.
Nor do I expect to see one soon. And what does this have to do with
the price of tea, or cold fusion, in China? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I do get the impression that if you could walk up to 100
scientists chosen at random, most of them would say cold fusion does not exist.
Yup. So we have a job ahead of us, but it is not a job to convince
the experts. They will take care of that themselves. The wheels are
turning, the cogs are meshing, torque is being applied. The NW paper,
quite simply, can't be ignored, but if it is, more and more will
follow. The readers of JEM got some entertainment, at Shanahan's expense.
I really think you need to realize this, Jed. Rothwell got creamed.
As they used to say, screwed, blued, and tatooed. He was used. Now,
maybe someone here knows a True Story behind those publications in
JEM, but this is what it looks like to me. They published Marwan and
Krivit because the editors thought it quite interesting, and the
reviewers passed it as decent science. But some readers complained
about the Blatant Nonsense. Wouldn't you expect that? And here comes
Shanahan with his Critique of the Century. (Really, that's not a bad
description, it may be one of the last.) So they publish it, together
with a response, not merely by Marwan and Krivit, but by "J. Marwan
and M. C. H. McKubre and F. L. Tanzella and P. L. Hagelstein and M.
H. Miles and E. Storms and Y. Iwamura and P. A. Mosier-Boss and L. P.
G. Forsley."
Entertainment for their readers. Sells magazines. They knew that many
of their readers would ask the same questions as Shanahan. (I like
asking Stupid Questions because often there are others with the same
questions.) And the questions were then answered by the experts, end
of topic. Next case?
And then they refused to allow Shanahan to reply again. Done.
Finished. Over with. Case closed. Shanahan 0, Cold fusion 1. Will
this repeat elsewhere? I don't know. But I very much doubt that the
editors of Naturwissenschaften were willing to risk making themselves
look Very Foolish by allowing the Storms review if the review process
wasn't solid and the *publisher* behind this. That's Springer-Verlag.
There is money involved, this is actualy the genius of Wikipedia, if
they had been following their own policies. Supposedly, "reliable
source" depends on publishers with reputations at stake. What you ran
into, Jed, was a set of editors who really didn't give a fig about
those policies. And they had enough clout to get away with it, at
least for a time. As to beyond that, we'll see, eh? I have no crystal ball.
But the corner was turned, somewhere around 2004 or 2005. That means,
not that it was over, but that the decline stopped and the dead began
to stir. And walk. Cold fusion: Undead Science. Simon is great, they
keep quoting him to say that CF is dead, but they don't actually read him!
This is mainly because they get their information from the mass
media, or Wikipedia, like everyone else. Google will demonstrate
that most mass media articles about cold fusion are negative.
They are often internally contradictory, and mostly they are
following simply what they wrote before, pulled from the files. It's
cheaper. We need to understand and accept that this is how the media
works. Watch. We will start doing, some of us, better PR work. Press
releases. Even press conferences, that bete noir that the whole CF
debacle got blamed on. Look, I really need to get off my duff and get
those cells cooking. If I can replicate SPAWAR, do you think I'm
going to sit at home, smug and satisfied? I'm trying to get a
business going! I'll need to ... advertise!
Cold fusion kits! Cold fusion kits! Be the first in your school! Get
'em while they're hot! Er, well not exactly hot. Maybe slightly warm,
but who cares? Neutrons, you idiots! Neutrons!
Just a few neutrons, maybe one per minute detected, if I'm lucky. But
"a few neutrons" is like being a "little bit pregnant."
As I have often said, we don't know the exact percentages of
supporters and opponents because we have not conducted a public
opinion poll. It would be a tricky poll to conduct. You have to
define the questions and characterize and perhaps sort out the
respondents carefully. It might be better to limit respondents to a
group you have given information on the subject, such as the 2004 panel.
Like, Bingo! *It was already done!*
Now, Jed, what was the result of this little experiment in 2004? Did
it show a phalanx of opposition to Cold fusion?
It showed, in fact, the opposite. And that's my point. To imagine
that "scientific consensus" on a scientific topic is to be based on
the uninformed view of all "scientists" is preposterous. It is, as it
has always been, the consensus of those informed on the subject.
It's fascinating to watch the responses on Wikipedia to the Storms
publication. The best complaint seems to be that NW "isn't a physics
journal, and a publication on a physics topic of this importance
would best be in a physics journal."
But, wait, the physicists think that this isn't physics! And this is
what Hoffman, our dear departed friend, called Chemically Induced
Nuclear Reactions. Why isn't it Chemistry? Wait -- so it's both
chemistry and physics. And where would be the best place to publish a
cross-disciplinary article? How about a multidisciplinary journal,
preferring to publish articles that cross fields? How about what
Springer-Verlag calls their "flaship multidisciplinary jouirnal?"
Ideal, I'd say. Next question?
Watch. Some of them are getting really pissed. They don't like their
arguments being totally skewered. I try to balance this by thanking
them, bending over backwards to thank them for asking the questions,
etc. But some of them absolutely detest being wrong, and being shown
conclusively that they are wrong. They will try to retailiate. And
being the fastest gun in the West doesn't always leave you walking
out on your feet....
I'm being very careful to stay right on point, to only advocate what
is thoroughly and clearly what the guidelines and policies require. I
also keep noting that I have a Conflict of Interest, so I'm only
advising them, not demanding or controlling. It's still dangerous,
Wikipedia has a huge problem with the treatment of experts in
general. They tend to get blocked and banned. Don't take it
personally, Jed, it's happened to countless experts!
This is a valid public opinion survey technique, not a way to bias
the results. With this method, you bring people in for a long
interview, and along the way expose them to information: text, a
video, a fake encounter with actors or a gorilla with a tennis
racquet, or what-have-you. It is expensive! It is the sort of thing
they do in sociology studies, rather than, say, political polls.
Yeah, that's not where we would spend our money first. If we had
money to spend.....
