This writer called "Kemosabe" has been posting the standard skeptical
arguments as comments to
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/oct/09/cold-science-heats-up/#c202969.
He has now shown familiarity with some rather obscure arguments that
someone who had not followed Wikipedia process wouldn't be likely to
come up with.
I'm ceasing response there, because this guy will clearly go on and
on. He's well-informed, he knows the literature, but is heavily
cherry-picking it. I find it appalling. I have little difficulty with
people being ignorant and assuming that cold fusion is bogus, but the
level of self-deception involved in this, in argument for the sake of
argument, all aimed at ridiculing Duncan and the newspaper editors
for being gullible, is beyond the pale. He's interpreted positive
evidence, over and over, finding a way to present it so that it will
sound negative. This is someone with experience doing that, I'm
suspecting ScienceApologist.
These people don't care about truth, they only care about winning.
So I wrote this, then decided to send it here. I'll link it from
there, once it is in the archive.
Kemosabe wrote:
This is a review of the field, by an editor of the journal, who
happens to be a CF advocate, which refers mainly to conference proceedings.
Fascinating. These are arguments known only to a few, even though
anyone can verify them.
Yes, Storms is an editor. New Energy Times reported in December of
last year that Naturwissenschaften had appointed Storms as their LENR
editor. He's a CF "scientist." "Advocate" is a political designation,
and has nothing to do with publication in peer-reviewed journals, it
is the publisher and reviewer that count.
I was sent a draft of a paper by Storms on heat/helium, for review,
which I did. He then told me that the publisher -- he did not
disclose who it was -- had requested a review of the whole field, and
he sent me a copy for review, again. This was a solicited paper. Who
would they ask to write such a thing? Someone who has no experience
or knowledge? Or someone already widely published?
Lucky guess!
Standards are different for reviews. Except for miles from the early
90s, none of the *original research* claiming helium-heat
correlation has appeared in a peer-review paper. On the other hand
Gozzi tried very hard to find helium, and in a refereed paper in
1998, he admitted the evidence was too weak to be definitive. He
seems to have gotten out of the field after that.
Cherry-picked sound bites and speculation, this is an "advocate"
speaking for the negative position. There are few who know as much
about this field as kemosabe, unless someone is feeding him this information.
Researchers in the field appear to have decided that rapid sharing of
information was more important than wasting time with peer-reviewed
publication; for years, most publications would reject the papers
out-of-hand, quality work or not. Kemosabe attempts to impeach the
Storms review based on some idea that his being an editor would mean
that he'd review his own paper. I doubt that very much,
Springer-Verlag would have too much on the line. This is their
"flagship multidisciplinary journal," published since 1913.
Instead of using that editorship to impeach the article, Kemosabe
might instead notice the significance of the appointment itself!
abd: "Publication rate in the field, in peer-reviewed mainstream
journals, has tripled or quadrupled since the nadir in 2004-2005, "
Three times zero is... OK, it wasn't zero, but perhaps you could
provide the statistics you're using here.
Britz, all papers, I followed his classification. Take a look at
Britz's last chart, lnked from his summary at
http://www.dieterbritz.dk/coldfusion/stats.html. When you factor for
2010 being only three-quarters of a year so far, 2010 is right in
line with 2008-2009.
From my brief look at Britz's bibliography, the publication rate
for refereed, positive experimental results is less than 2 per year.
Notice the qualification. He's seeking a way to analyze the data to
make it look weak. It's also totally incorrect, there are plenty of
publications in 2008 and 2010, from the ACS LENR Sourcebook alone.
That's basically insignificant considering the number of people
working on it, whether it's 3 times the previous rate or not.
It's more than three, it is up to about 2 per month, but this is only
a small part of the work being done. The researchers don't need
peer-reviewed journals to advance the field, they report their work
in conference papers. Further, the Britz bibliography is weak on
papers published other than in English, and there is a lot in
Japanese, for example. What's truly remarkable, I didn't expect this,
is that there have been, since 2005, about sixteen or seventeen
peer-reviewed *reviews* of the field published in mainstream
journals. Storms (2010) is merely the latest and in the most
prestigious journal.
You can see the reviews bolded at
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cold_fusion/Recent_sources .... Anyone
who'd like to help out at Wikiversity, the more the merrier!
DARPA is worried that the U.S. is missing an opportunity in this
field. There is that DARPA review as well, of course. But not
published under peer-review, rather under DARPA supervision....
And as I said, half the papers that have appeared are on weak
neutron evidence, which even if it were valid, doesn't explain the heat.
He got that right. But it's widely been considered important because
a "few neutrons" is like being a "little pregnant." There shouldn't
be any, beyond cosmic ray background. What the neutrons show is that
something is generating nuclear energies in the experiment. They
don't explain the heat, they are a symptom of the same thing that
causes the heat.
>The other half are on gas-loading experiments claiming some
fraction of a watt output. Not impressive stuff.
This, again, is the argument from impracticality. "Cold fusion is not
real because it's only a little energy." A little energy from a tiny
amount of material! And definitely far more than expected from
chemistry. Gas-loading is important because there is only a certain
fixed energy "input," the initial heat generated by deuterium being
absorbed by hungry palladium. Yet the heat from deuterium goes on and
on, for a long time, whereas within a few minutes, with hydrogen,
cell temperature has settled down to ambient.
