At 01:51 AM 2/21/2011, Horace Heffner wrote:
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/02/21/rothwell-makes-pre-emptive-strike-against-new-lenr-textbook/
http://tinyurl.com/4s3xhjt
Right there, in a nutshell, is perfect evidence
as to Krivit's effective demise as a reporter on LENR.
This leads me, at the end, to specific situations
as to how to proceed. But to start:
Rothwell wrote a letter based on his impressions.
Looks like Jed made a mistake, an assumption,
connecting Wiley, the publisher of the
encyclopedia, with the proposed textbook. So?
People make mistakes all the time, especially
when it's based on a verbal announcement.
Rothwell is *not* a professional reporter. And
for all we know, what Krivit did and said in
Chennai might have been susceptible to that explanation.
Or not.
The Rothwell mail was more of a mild warning that
there are experts concerned about Krivit, re the
field, than a "pre-emptive strike." Rothwell
believed that Wiley had already agreed. Krivit
then takes his own knowledge and frames
Rothwell's action as if Rothwell knew
differently, thus "pre-emptive," i.e, before the fact.
Krivit writes:
Rothwell also e-mailed additional lies to one of
the Wiley editors and then posted them in the Vortex-l chat room.
Thus Rothwell's belief as to what Krivit has
announced becomes, not an error, but a "lie."
This is the comment of someone who has become
very highly involved, very personally. What
Krivit then presents is then the highly involved,
highly reactive view of someone taking things very, very personally.
The people who wrote one of the Encyclopedia
articles Srinivasan and Storms and others
were at the conference, Rothwell wrote. They
assumed he would ask them to contribute to the
new textbook, as well. So they approached him
and asked about his plans. They were
disconcerted when he told them to shut up and go away. Literally.
Rothwell is presenting a loose summary of an
event. Did he witness the event? Is his
understanding of what happened based instead on
comments made by others? Rothwell is writing
about, not just Storms, but "others." Specificity
is lost in Rothwell's comment, then about the
"approach." It could have been someone else, for
example. Presenting the state of mind of a whole group of people is dicey.
I have extensive correspondence with Jed. I've
found him to be highly knowledgeable, truthful,
I'd be astonished to catch him in an actual lie.
However, he's not a skilled "objective observer
and reporter." Sometimes he presents his personal
conclusions and opinions as if they were
objective fact. Lots of people do this, but we
expect something different from professional
reporters, who are trained -- and paid -- to
carefully separate their own opinions from what they know to be fact.
A reporter might still cherry-pick facts, because
reporters still have biases and also find it
necessary to present what is "important" -- they
aren't robots, nor should they be -- but they
don't present opinion (such as "lie") as if it
were fact (in this case, a declarative statement
of an opinion or conclusion without expressing
the source, such as "according to Steve Krivit, Rothwell was lying.")
And, normally, backing up and regulating
professional reporters are editors and
publishers, who ensure that work is checked and
that the biases of reporters don't overwhelm what is published.
What we've linked to is a blog, Krivit's opinion.
The concern of LENR experts is that Krivit's
opinions have become so strong that they may
badly warp his professional work, the reporting.
And we can see that, with one clear example. To
my mind, the biggest event in cold fusion history
this last year -- let's set aside Rossi! -- was
the publication of the Storms review in
Naturwissenschaften. If Wikipedia were following
its own guidelines, this would have radically
reformed the Cold fusion article there. As far as
I can see, Krivit has not mentioned it. It's not
listed in his page showing recent and significant
papers. It is as if it did not happen.
Why? I think it's obvious. In the abstract for
that paper, Storms states, "The evidence supports
the claim that a nuclear reaction between
deuterons to produce helium can occur in special
materials without application of high energy."
The title of the paper is "Status of Cold-Fusion (2010)"
"Cold fusion" has come out of the closet.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEstatusofcoa.pdf
(I believe I suggested different language for
that abstract, but whether or not I did, it would
have been more accurate or more neutral to state
something like "the claim that an unknown nuclear
reaction is fusing deuterium to helium, occurring
in special materials...." Using the term
"deuterons" implies bare deuterons, thus leading
some readers into the old error of assuming d-d
fusion, which makes the theoretical problem far
more difficult. It might be "deuterons" and it
might even be some neutron process, though that
seems thin to me. But the result that is known is
that helium is produced, and the observed energy
supports the conclusion that the primary fuel is
deuterium. "unknown nuclear reaction" would bring
us full circle. That is what Pons and Fleischmann
actually claimed, not "fusion.")
Krivit has hitched himself to the star of
Widom-Larsen theory, but he's not competent to
evaluate it. It would have been fine for him to
notice that W-L theory is "deprecated," shall we
say? It would have been fine for him to report on
it in increased detail. I'd eagerly read a report
from him on W-L theory that explains it, and, I'd
hope, he'd ask Larsen the pointed questions that
are in the minds of the experts about W-L theory.
Instead, Krivit promotes W-L theory as if it were
practically proven, such that everyone else is
simply a diehard "believer" in "cold fusion."
Ironically, Krivit has ended up assuming the
position of the pseudoskeptics, attributing the
very strong evidence for heat/helium at the
expected Q value for deuterium fusion to
artifact, error, and wishful thinking. It is as
if Krivit was attracted, not to cold fusion,
because of the scientific facts, but because it
was the underdog, that the intrepid investigative
reporter was going to demonstrate was unfairly rejected.
And when cold fusion started to be accepted,
turning the corner sometime around 2004, with the
second DoE review, and as that acceptance
accelerated, Krivit needed a new underdog to
defend. Widom-Larsen. He doesn't understand the
problems with W-L theory, I've never seen him
examine them. He doesn't investigate those
problems. Instead he has spent major effort
trying to poke holes in "23.8 MeV/He-4."
Of course, "23.8" is the theoretical value. It's
difficult to capture and measure all the helium,
Storms's estimate is 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4, and one
could quibble with that. But, it's important to
realize, in 1994, Huizenga was amazed by Miles'
early findings that merely placed the figure
within an order of magnitude of the theoretical value.
As Storms notes in his paper, this is the
strongest evidence that the Fleischmann-Pons
effect results from deuterium fusion. Mechanism unknown.
I say something more, that the experimental work
that leads to the 25 Mev figure is a "repeatable
experiment." It's been repeated by at least a
dozen research groups. It's not easy work. But
every group that has investigated heat/helium has
found the same result: heat and helium are
correlated. This includes all the early negative
replications that found no helium, because they
also found no (or very little) heat.
The repeatable experiment is this: set up
conditions to observe the F-P effect, that is, to
create highly loaded (>90%) palladium deuteride.
Follow the state of the art. Repeat with the same
sample of palladium, and with different samples.
Measure heat not explained by the normal prosaic
processes involved. Collect and report helium,
either as a pure finding (which requires great
care to exclude atmospheric helium), or as
elevation over ambient (easier, but then low-heat
results will give helium down in the noise.)
Obviously, to be useful for this experimental
purpose, one must, at least once, but preferably
more than once, observe excess heat. Compare,
experiment by experiment, the excess heat and the
helium measured. Are they correlated?
This experiment cuts through the problem that
excess heat only appeared chaotically or
unpredictably. This kind of statistical approach
is not, apparently, normal for physicists, who
like to set up clean experiments where the same
conditions produce the same results, which they
may then measure to high accuracy. They are, in
fact, often dealing with quantum phenomena, but
the chaotic variation of quantum results averages
out rapidly, and experiments average the results
of many instances. Cold fusion has been chaotic
(in the F-P approach) on a macro scale.
Physicists were not accustomed to this, and it made them very suspicious.
But the surface conditions of highly loaded
palladium deuteride are extraordinarily complex
under electrolytic loading. Oxygen probably is
playing a major role. The history of the
palladium sample is important. Exact replication
''of a particular experiment'' is probably impossible, with this approach.
Bottom line: there is a reproducible experiment,
and it was reproduced. It simply was not
described that way. With this approach, the exact
experimental details may vary. However, a single
experimenter may find an approach that produces
excess heat some reasonable percentage of the
time, and then initiate a series of experiments
that are as identical as possible, eliminating
most variables. Obviously, there are still some
uncontrolled variables with the electrolytic
approach. Those surface conditions are chaotic. But ...
if there is excess heat, there is helium. this
validates both the excess heat measurements and
the helium measurements, contrary to the
arguments of some pseudoskeptics that if both
measurements are questionable, the combination
must be even more questionable. They don't understand correlation, obviously.
To complete this, let's look at what Krivit reports to counter Rothwell:
I called Srinivasan today and read him Rothwells statement.
I will state on the record that we had no
conversation about the textbook, Srinivasan said.
Notice that this is not inconsistent with what
Rothwell wrote! In fact, Rothwell is also
claiming that there was no "conversation."
Rothwell described a rejection of an approach, rather vaguely.
Then I called Storms and read him Rothwells
statement. I told him that I did not recall
speaking with him at all during the conference.
I did not speak to you, Storms said.
The question is not what did not happen, but what
happened. Again, Storms' statement does not
contradict the report of Rothwell, and only a
very careless reading of it would make us think
so. Rothwell reports a rejection of a group, some
members not named, and might be an
overgeneralization from a single rejection, for
example. Rothwell's report is close to gossip,
where impressions readily become "fact."
For example, suppose that one of the experts --
the "group" -- tried to approach Krivit and
Krivit turned away (intentionally or otherwise).
That person may conclude that they were being
rejected, that Krivit was refusing to talk. So
this person tells Rothwell -- or someone else who
tells Rothwell -- that Krivit refused to talk to
him. Rothwell then turns this, in his mind, into
some more specific report, "Shut up and go away."
Notice that Rothwell doesn't actually quote that.
But he implies it with "literally." Which was polemic.
Rothwell is telling a dramatic story. As is Krivit.
In interviewing Srinivasan and Storms, Krivit is
not seeking to find out what happened. He's
seeking to confirm his own view. A keen editor
would notice this and ask Krivit to see the raw
notes or to hear the tapes. What else was said? A
keen editor would also ask, "Is this of real
interest to our readers?" "Do our readers need to
know about every personal spat between cold
fusion researchers and others involved in the field, such as Steve Krivit?"
Maybe. Maybe there is a place for this kind of
personal reporting. It's entertainment, of a
kind. But it's certainly not science. And Krivit,
then, is not a neutral reporter, he's one of the actors in the Drama.
I do conclude that we need an independent
publication, and that's not easy to set up,
necessarily. However, I believe we can do it,
collectively. So I'll be proposing structure to
Rothwell, Dr. Storms, and others. Maybe it's not
a publication, itself, that we need, but a news
agency, that collects, edits, and issues reports
on topics, releasing them for publication by
others. Perhaps we can harness the energy of Cold
Fusion Now, who would surely support such an endeavor.
And newspapers love press releases. They save them buckets of money.
To form this agency, we need a review board. I'll
be collecting suggestions for membership. The
review board will appoint a managing editor, I
assume, with operational control over what is
routinely released under the agency name. Other
editors will then work under the supervision of
the managing editor, and authors may submit work
for editorial review. The agency may issue press
credentials to authors considered reliable enough
to not damage the reputation of the agency.
If money becomes involved, a legal structure will
be necessary, but that's not the first step. If
money does become involved, then payment for
reportage and editorial work, or at least expenses, becomes possible.
