I posted a comment wondering why Krivit hasn't mentioned the Storms
review, published in Naturwissenschaften last October, "Status of
cold fusion (2010)," and hasn't listed the paper on his Recent papers
page, in spite of it being, arguably, the most significant paper
published in the field in recent years, as to demonstrating the
progress of the field, and its present status among experts,
specifically, peer reviewers at mainstream publications. This was, in
fact, only the latest in a series of reviews, I've counted about
nineteen in mainstream peer-reviewed publications, per the Britz
database, published since 2005. No negative reviews, beyond the
Shanahan crank letter published in Journal of Environmental
Monitoring, apparently so that the knee-jerk skeptical position could
be demolished.
Well, here is his explanation:
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/02/07/missing-cold-fusion-from-new-energy-times/
He's not covering "cold fusion" any more. If it's called "cold
fusion," it's to be excluded from NET. He's only covering LENR,
specifically, things that might be explained by Widom-Larsen theory.
Krivit writes:
In the last few years, we have figured out that there really is
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2010/35/SR35902coldfusionisneither.shtml>no
evidence for cold fusion and that the best so-called evidence for it
was
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2010/35/SR35903tangledtale.shtml>fabricated.
In the course of our investigations, however, the evidence for
low-energy nuclear reactions,
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml>perhaps
understood, perhaps not, has been clear and consistent. If it's
science you want, you'll find it here. But "cold fusion"? You'll
only find that in our history section.
I've been following Krivit since before his shift became obvious. He
wrote, in explaining his history, that be believed in "cold fusion"
because experts told him it was real. PhDs. Krivit is not a
scientist, but a reporter, and has clearly shown that he often
doesn't understand experimental reports, much less complex theories
like Widom-Larsen theory. He now believes W-L theory because PhDs told him so.
How does Krivit pick which PhDs to believe? I think it's obvious. He
is constitutionally disposed to fight for the underdog, the minority,
the "rejected." Not understanding the evidence, when he saw that W-L
theory wasn't being given what he thought was due attention, he began
to investigate the basis for the common "fusion theory." The fact is
that there is no common "fusion theory" except as to what is very
simple, deuterium in, helium out, with commensurate energy. That's
not a mechanism, and it matters not if the mechanism resembles W-L
theory or something else, the laws of thermodynamics predict the 24
MeV figure no matter what the mechanism is. Krivit has never understood this.
Krivit, his suspicions now aroused, began to investigate the details
of the research underlying the "helium ash" theory, and found some
details that he did not understand. He is now clearly presenting
these details as "fabrications." I've looked at his charges. I've
seen no evidence at all for fabrication, but plenty of evidence that
Krivit isn't capable of sound scientific analysis. At one point, he
charged an Italian researcher with scientific misconduct for
"changing his results" without explanation, when what the researcher
had done was to move a decimal point in a figure, and change the
exponent, the power of ten, commensurately. I.e., no change. Krivit
also misunderstood and misrepresented what the paper of that
researcher was saying and claiming. They were *using* 24 MeV as a
method of plotting helium and excess energy on the same
chart, readily comparing results with that correlation value, which
is useful; the work was not intended to prove 24 MeV, the data was
too thin. (It supported 24 MeV and the correlation between heat and
helium, though, reasonably, as has *all work* that has measured heat
and helium, *including the original negative replications*).
Similarly, a change that McKubre made in a calculation, many years
ago, in a direction that *weakened* his helium correlation at the
deuterium fusion value, was reported as if it were fraud, and claims
of misconduct were made. Nobody has confirmed Krivit on this, he's an
isolated crank.
With a web site. And able to get real reporters to interview him,
with his comments being reported as if he were an expert.
Krivit is presenting, as if it were proven fact, a position totally
at variance with what is being published in mainstream journals, more
totally at variance than ever was cold fusion itself, which always
had a significant level of positive publication, with the positive,
after the first two years, greatly outweighing the negative. Krivit,
initially, was reporting on and supporting, and being supported by, a
large field of researchers, outnumbered only by knee-jerk skeptics in
the "scientific establishment." That was a very proper and fertile
field for investigation of the "underdog," and Krivit did good work.
However, his habits have apparently caused him to leave that basic
mission and, instead, to hitch himself to a new star, a falling one.
He was warned by many people.
He took it all as an effort to "represss" the truth. I'm not sure how
he took my criticism, since I have nothing invested in any particular
theory. I find Takahashi's TSC theory interesting, because, far more
cogently than W-L theory, it does predict, if the mechanism is
something like this, helium and energy at the right value, and no
gammas. It has other problems and, like all cold fusion theories at
this point, it's not complete, and even trying to figure out how to
test it is difficult. The only visible sign of this reaction -- which
is predicted from standard quantum field theory, analyzed by a hot
fusion physicist, Takahashi -- might be helium and energy, if there
is some explanation for the suppression of the hot alphas that might
otherwise be expected. How do we investigate a reaction, a conjugal
visit, that takes place in the privacy of a palladium lattice cell,
surrounded by curtains of palladium metal?
Regardless, I confronted, more than a year ago, Krivit's "yellow
journalism," his tendency to focus on scandal, his making of himself
and his personal experiences of low general significance into the
news in the field. Turned away at chez Fleischmann because Martin was
ill? Big story! If Martin has the flu, as he apparently did, then it
must be that Dardik's "LifeWave" therapy isn't working! Did we
mention that Dardik lost his license to practice medicine in New York?
I read the book on Dardik, it's quite a story. Dardik definitely has
some unusual ideas, but he's a very unusual person, and has been
trusted by some very wealthy people, because LifeWave changed their
lives, that's where the Energetics Technologies investment originally
came from. He was a real cardiologist, of high reputation, famous
already, long before cold fusion and long before the problems in New
York -- which appear to have been nothing more than proposing
therapies not accepted as conventional yet, without fraud.
Dardik developed a general concept of how the universe works that
isn't "scientific," in the sense of being clearly verifiable, I'd
call it an intuitive approach. If one takes Dardik's theories as
"science," it could be considered pseudoscience. (I'll note that
Dardik has not been interested in "proving" LifeWave, he is more
interested in, apparently, his clinical practice, relying upon
anecdotal evidence, which is a legitimate approach, in itself, simply
one that is not "scientifically" convincing.) But ... intuitive
approaches do work, sometimes.
Dardik's story is a very interesting one. Instead of fully
investigating and reporting (Did he read *Making Waves*, the book on
Dardik? One wouldn't know it from his reporting), Krivit turns it
into a yellow-journalism story of a "quack," just as he's turned the
entire establishment of cold fusion, the entire body of research,
into a story of fraud and error. Sad. the opposite of what is needed.
