At 06:03 AM 5/26/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
You find it so hard to believe that a few hundred cold fusion
researchers can all be wrong, but if cold fusion is real, then far
far more researchers would have to be wrong.
This is the core of Cude's religious position: he believes that
researchers have demonstrated that cold fusion is not real. It's a fantasy.
The calorimetry of Fleischmann and Pons was never shown to be
inaccurate, reviews confirmed it. There is a F-P Heat Effect. The
scientific issue should have been, from the beginning, to identify
the source of it.
That work was done before the turn of the century. The source is the
conversion of deuterium to helium. The mechanism for this is unknown,
but the conversion would have a characteristic energy of 23.8
MeV/He-4, regardless of mechanism (i.e., as long as significant
energy does not escape, as with neutrino generation). The work done
does not rule out other possible reactions, as to fuel and product,
and there is evidence for them, but the evidence is strong enough
that believing in the contrary is believing in something highly
unlikely, believing in something not only in the absence of evidence,
but in the presence of contrary evidence.
Cude just waves his hand. The work I'm referring to is that of Miles.
Huizenga, author of "Cold fusion, scientific fiasco of the century,"
notice Miles' work in the second edition of his book, and said that,
if confirmed, this would solve a major mystery of cold fusion: the
ash. Huizenga did not seem to notice that Miles was, himself,
confirming Fleischmann and Bush & Lagowski, with, for the first time,
approaching the crucial heat/helium ratio.
Miles' technique did not attempt to capture and measure all the
helium. Rather, he simply compared the excess heat from a series of
cells, and the helium found in samples of the evolved gases. The
samples were provided to an independent lab, which did not know the
history, so the measurements were blind.
This is not the place to review Miles' work in detail; Storms has
done so at length, in his book (2007) and in his review paper,
"Status of cold fusion (2010)." That paper represents the state of
the field today -- pre-Rossi! -- and shows what is currently passing
peer review, it is the latest in about seventeen positive reviews of
cold fusion to appear in mainstream journals, with no negative
reviews. The pseudo-skeptical position is dead, it is unable to pass
peer review, and that is not for lack of submissions or effort.
This is the reproducible experiment that was, for so long, claimed to
be missing: set up the F-P effect (hundreds of research groups have
done this; it's difficult, but certainly not impossible), using
careful calorimetry, the state of the art as to the calorimetry and
as to the electrochemistry, and measure helium. Work has been done
with more helium measurement accuracy and completeness than what was
available to Miles, and the results are closer to the 23.8 MeV value.
Storms estimates, reviewing all the work, correcting for retained
helium, a ratio of 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4, in good agreement with the
theoretical value for deuterium fusion. It is certainly possible to
assert that his analysis was biased, but Cude has ridiculed this as
having a +/- 20% error bar, whereas, in fact, that ratio existing
within an order of magnitude of the expected value was considered a
stunning result by Huizenga, and Huizenga was correct about this.
Miles' work remains unique in that a large series of cells were
studied. My own view is that the field went entirely toward
attempting to amplify and solidify heat results, which makes sense in
a search for a practical method of generating power, but not for
confirming and solidifying the science of the matter. Actually
repeating Miles, exact replication, hasn't been done, but once we
understand this as a general result from the F-P effect, it is not
necessary that the replication be exact, various techniques may be
used, as long as it is understood that seriously differing
conditions, like changing the reactant(s) or catalyst(s), may result
in a different effect and a different value. As this field opens up,
there will be experiments designed specifically to measure the
heat/helium ratio for PdD work.
(NiH is clearly a different effect, though there may be some common
type of mechanism.)
This kind of work is normally done by graduate students, not by
senior researchers, because you will never get a Nobel prize, or
economic rewards, by confirming the established work of others. It's
done for academic credit, and is a valuable service that graduate
students perform. That supply of labor was cut off because of the
efforts of people who believed as does Cude, by a belief that a few
"negative replications," which were simply that, replication
failures, were conclusive, the whole field was discredited, and a PhD
thesis was rejected solely because it was on cold fusion research,
the student had to do a new thesis on something else. And that was
the end of grad student work, except for a little. Cude ridicules
this claim, but it's substantiated in Simon, "Undead Science."
Cude is the die-hard here. He's holding on to old ideas, past any
reasonable time, all the while pretending that his view is solidly
mainstream. The mainstream started shifting sometime around 2005, it
had never been monolithic, with at least three Nobel laureates in
physics supporting the possibility of cold fusion. Cude has asserted
that "far more researchers would have to be wrong." That is so
defective a claim that we might as well call it a lie. Researchers
present two things: experimental results and opinions about them.
Researchers have lots of opinions about lots of things, including
things where they have done no experimental research. It's possible
that "more researchers" have negative opinions about cold fusion than
have positive opinions, but "researchers" in what? In something
unrelated, such as the behavior of plasmas? Cude was responding to
Rothwell pointing out that hundreds of researchers would have to be
wrong, and by that, he meant that their *experimental results* would
have to be wrong, artifact, error, or worse. There is no large body
of contrary research in opposition to this, and it is not necessary,
at all, to claim that the "negative replications" were wrong, as to
results. There have been some possibly important quibbles about some
of the negative replications, but that's beside the point. They were
looking for excess heat, neutrons, helium, etc., and they found
either none (as they analyzed their work) or what they found was well
below what they expected to see from the early reports from Pons and
Fleischmann (as later analysis shows, at best). But what's important
to notice here is that they also found no helium increase.
That is, the "negative replications" confirm the ratio: no heat, no
helium. Obviously, you can't get an accurate measure of the ratio
from this, but it stands as a *confirmation* of the hypothesis that
the heat and the helium have a common cause.
This is classic in experimental work investigating new phenomena, one
looks for independent measures, instead of relying on just one
measure. With medicines, one looks for a variation in effect with
dosage, for example, and will attempt to find independent measures of effect.
Cold fusion research long ago moved out of the pseudoscience or
pathological science region, by finding experimental conditions that
correlated with the effect. For example, with the F-P effect,
anomalous heat was correlated with current density, with H/D ratio in
the heavy water, and with loading percentage (i.e., D/Pd ratio), but,
as to the effect, there was no independent measure other than helium
produced. This wasn't expected. It was expected that if fusion were
taking place, there would be energetic radiation, especially
neutrons, and there would be tritium, and He-3.
Tritium, in particular, easy to measure, was found, but at levels far
below expectations. Neutrons were almost entirely absent. Not
entirely, there were tantalizing results, but it was only with the
published work of SPAWAR that it was proven that neutron radiation is
above background, and that work has not been replicated. It's
irrelevant on the issue of mechanism, probably. Helium may be,
besides heat, the only other observable signature of the reaction.
Given the low reaction rates involved in the F-P effect, more direct
measures of the reaction, such as detecting Be-8, if it is formed as
an intermediary, may never be possible.
Miles did not run all identical cells. Would that he had! (He did two
cells with a palladium-cerium alloy, which, together with one cell
where the calorimetry may have been suspect, were the only three
cells out of 33 which produced some heat and no helium.) Work
attempting to measure the heat/helium ratio more accurately and more
conclusively will be done, I predict (it's already, by the power of
correlation study, up to a million to one that there is a
correlation), will run a long series of identical cells, and it will
use exhaustive techniques for the helium analysis. The problem is not
measurement accuracy, helium can be measured accurately enough, in a
sample, the problem is "representative sample." It's estimated, with
some evidence, that about half the helium is retained by the
palladium matrix, and, according to Storms, it is necessary to raise
the temperature of the metal to close to the melting point to drive
out all of the helium. That will be done, I predict. There will be
measurements of total helium, and it's possible that this will be
accurate enough to confirm or rule out the existence of significant
secondary or other reactions.
There is little funding for such research. It would be pure science,
not necessary for engineering LENR effects, because it is already
accepted that the basic reaction in the F-P effect. It is possible
that, with a focus on a single cell design, that a body of work will
be built up that will allow deeper study of the effect, by more
rigorously controlling experimental conditions. However, the P-F
effect is intrinsically "messy." The chemical environment at the
surface of a palladium cathode is extraordinarily complex. That
cathode attracts every cation in the electrolyte, substances from the
anode, and from the cell materials, deposit and concentrate there.
Oxide layers may form. The process of loading deuterium can disrupt
the matrix, and the palladium cracks and swells and deforms.
The P-F effect is famously depending on the palladium batch, how the
palladium metal is treated. I prefer codeposition, because this
builds up the palladium in situ, but it is still complicated as hell.
(It's called codeposition, but may not always be so, because, at
least with the Galileo protocol, the voltage is initially too low to
generate deuterium, I'm told. Other protocols, such as that followed
by Swartz, use a higher resistance electrolyte, so initial voltage is
higher, and would truly co-deposit palladium with deuterium.)
However, as far as I can tell, the variations in palladium batch only
affect the attainable loading ratio, and a lot of work uses various
methods of estimating loading, and there is good correlation between
loading ratio and heat.
Real researchers have moved on, they are no longer looking to prove
that the F-P effect is fusion. If Cude wants to see the work, perhaps
he'll do it himself? But why should he bother? His mind is made up.
People who already know everything have no motivation to do difficult
and expensive research. It is much easier to sit at one's computer
and make up objection after objection, generating sound bites that
may even seem cogent to the ignorant, and especially to their
inventor, enamored with his own cleverness. Cude has come up with
deception after deception, such as claiming that Storms reviewed his
own paper for Naturwissenschaften. Nope. The news there has been,
indeed, that Storms was named LENR editor for Naturwissenschaften,
and it ought to give pause to the pseudo-skeptics that NW found it
necessary to name such an editor, because of the growing levels of
submissions, and they needed an expert, and they chose him. Surely,
if Cude were right, they'd have chosen someone more like Joshua Cude.
Those stupid publishers!
Springer-Verlag, the second largest publisher of scientific journals
in the world. The largest is Elsevier, I think, which didn't name
Storms, but it's used Steve Krivit for some of their work, such as
the Encyclopedia of Electrochemical Power Sources. Cold fusion is
accepted by the mainstream, if by "mainstream" we mean the mainstream
scientific press.
Not all of it. There are major journals that are conspicuously
silent. Could it have something to do with categorically and
explicitly and publicly rejecting cold fusion twenty years ago, as an
editorial policy? Naw, that would mean that they are human.
Oh! They are human! Never mind!
This has been quite a ride, but it is settling down. Rossi has thrown
a monkey wrench in the whole thing, with his Energy Catalyzer,
apparently using Ni-H. Pd-D might remain a scientific curiosity, the
effect may be too fragile for power generation. What Pd-D showed was
that LENR was possible, which is why those who know have not
knee-jerk rejected Rossi, for his work, contrary to what is claimed
sometimes even in sympathetic sources, does not contradict known
principles of physics, though some of his proposed explanations
might. It is not completely unexpected that heat could be generated
by Ni-H. That was a previously reported effect, it was simply not
pursued by many, as was the much more widely reported Pd-D effect. I
do know that, in conversations with cold fusion researchers, it
frequently came up that the future might lie with Ni-H, because the
materials are so much more available, so cheap. And that was before
Rossi's work was widely known.
What is new with Rossi is that we are clearly down to two
possibilities: sophisticated and deliberate fraud, or a real and very
powerful -- and useful -- effect. Tea can now be brewed, I'm hoping
for Rossi to donate an E-Cat to be used to brew tea, it will satisfy
a certain longing from a certain skeptic. I hope he enjoys the tea.
What's his favorite kind?
(Fraud remains a possibility only because the human capacity to
invent fraudulent appearance is limitless, bounded only by
practicality, and if a trillion dollars of value is at stake,
"practicality" can stretch pretty far; for example, buying off
observers must not be considered impossible, as it would normally be
where lesser value is involved. I consider "fraud" at this point,
with all the observers involved, to be quite a remote possibility,
and, my easy guess, U.S. military intelligence has people checking
this out, this is classic "disruptive technology," and miltary
intelligence, we know, has already been looking carefully at cold
fusion, with reports supporting the possibility of eventual
commercial applications. If this is fraud, it would be in the U.S.
interest to expose it as soon as possible, because, I have
information, advisory resources are already moving toward support for
Ni-H investigation, in the U.S. and elsewhere. The fraud hypothesis
only has support, so far, from speculation and inference from claims
that Rossi was previously involved in fraud, which is, shall we say,
speculative itself, it is merely something that can be asserted with
a straight face. Most of the characteristics of the Rossi
demonstrations that have attracted skeptical comment are easily
explainable. As to the science, it's all premature, guesswork,
scouring sketchy reports, looking for flaws, and, no surprise, flaws
and inconsistencies can be found, proving nothing. So far.)
