At 10:58 AM 5/27/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Joshua Cude wrote:
To the extent they believe cold fusion is real based on existing
measurements, then in the opinion of mainstream science, they are
mistaken. Every last one of them.
That is incorrect. Mainstream scientists have not published papers
showing errors in these experiments. Opinions unsupported by
rigorous, quantitative analysis do not count.
As Rothwell said. Cude is simply repeating a common myth.
Would you say the same thing about polywater? "If even one of the
scientists had been correct about viscosity or the boiling point or
the freezing point, then the effect was real after all." Surely,
most of their measurements were right; they were just caused by
artifacts, and the effect turned out not the real, in spite of many
correct measurements.
Only one group of researchers in one lab thought they saw evidence
of polywater, and they later retracted. Their evidence appeared to
be on margins of detectability. In cold fusion, hundreds of
researchers have observed the phenomenon, none have retracted, and
in many cases the effect is quite easy to detect, for example with
100 W of heat output an no input, in heat after death. So I am quite
comfortable comparing the two.
Polywater and N-rays were not debunked by negative replications.
Negative replication is quite unreliable when one is dealing with a
previously-unobserved phenomenon. What works is positive replication
with, then, additional controls to show the origin of the observations.
With N-rays, an observer surreptitiously removed the aluminum prism
that was supposedly necessary to make N-rays visible. Because the
witnesses continued to report that they could see the -- very weak --
phosphorescent flashes that were supposedly caused by N-rays, this
demonstrated that the flashes were normal optical noise or error in
interpretation of what is visible.
With polywater, the clear refutation appeared, not from failures to
create polywater effects, because there could be a million reasons
for that, but from actual replication, showing the reported
phenomena, then with further analysis showing the prosaic origin.
This was never done with the heat measurements of Pons and
Fleischmann, nor with the helium measurements of Mills and others.
All there has been is armchair criticism, speculation, and assumption
of error. And that's what gets really thin after so many reports, and
no demonstrations of artifact.
The FP Heat Effect is quite clear, frequently, standing well above
noise. It does not go away with more precise measurement, that is
another myth. In the case of heat/helium ratio, that is, the
correlation between excess heat and helium measured, Storms analysis
is based on the work of twelve research groups, and there are no
negative reports. The claim that the helium results from leakage is
contrary to the evidence, reported by many. When there is no excess
heat, there is no helium. Leakage would take place anyway.
World class experts do make mistakes. There were world-class
experts involved with polywater and N-rays.
There was only one experts involved with each of those claims.
Hundreds of other experts attempted to detect polywater, but they
all failed. See the Franks book.
I don't know that I'd agree with Rothwell on this, but it's moot.
They were dismissed once there was unrefuted *positive replication*
that showed the prosaic origin of the reported effects.
It was difficult to get the FPHE to show up, so the nuclear
physicists took a lazy approach, they simply assume that it must have
been error, and they continued to hold on to that assumption even
when it became completely untenable. This was a messy and difficult
experiment, not the kind of work they were used to doing, involving
some very complex chemistry, far less simple than was originally thought.
But electrochemists learned how to do it, and Miles, for example, was
seeing excess heat in 21 out of 33 cells. What knocked the ball out
of the Park was that he also measured helium, and it correlated with
the excess heat. Sorry, but there is no cogent explanation for this
other than deuterium fusion, given the numbers that eventually fell
out of this approach. Huizenga got it, in 1993, he knew the
importance of Miles, but simply believed that it would not be
confirmed, "since there were no gamma rays," as would have been
suspected from d-d fusion -> He-4.
But there was another explanation, that the reaction isn't d+d, that
simply. It's something else, unknown, that starts with deuterium and
ends with helium. Say that happens in a black box. What can we call the box?
A fusion box.
I don't care if the box somehow dismantles the deuterium into quarks
and reassembles them as helium plus energy. It doesn't matter. That's
fusion, and only Krivit thinks that the semantic difference matters,
i.e., if somehow neutrons are formed and accomplish that
rearrangement, so what? The result is fusion, pure and simple --
unless you show other significant products. Indeed, transmutations
are known to take place, but at levels far lower than would be
involved if more than a few reactions don't start with deuterium and
terminate with helium.
This is a tautology, but people who make such mistakes are not
experts. At least, not with regard to that particular type of claim.
They think they are, but they are mistaken. In the case of cold
fusion no errors have been found in the calorimetry, helium
detection, tritium and so on, so these people are -- as claimed -- experts.
Jalbert? According to the web of science, he has published less
than a dozen papers.
I am tempted to ask how many papers about tritium you have
published, and what makes you think you know more than Jalbert . . .
but I shall refrain.
Yeah, more than published by "Joshua Cude." A lot more. Joshua Cude
is an anonymous internet troll. I think I know who he might be,
someone else with the real first name of Joshua, but I have only
reasonable surmise on this. That person has published nothing in this
field. It's not his field, he'd only have experience with plasma
physics, which is irrelevant, in the end. CF is not a plasma
phenomenon, period.
And in any case, whether or not his particular tritium measurements
are right or wrong, they do not explain the observed heat in CF experiments.
They do, however, prove there is a nuclear effect. That's the point.
Joshua is quite accustomed to dividing up the evidence, so that he
can assert one thing while, in another place, denying the same thing.
It's all about creating reasonable sound bites to promote his desired
conclusion. Tritium is not (well) correlated with the heat, so it
doesn't explain the heat. However, tritium being produced would be a
clear sign that, sometimes, something nuclear is taking place in the
cells. That's a stunning result, from the point of view that such
reactions are impossible! It's the same with SPAWAR neutrons. Because
the rates are so incredibly low, they tell us nothing about the
reaction, and I have no idea if they are correlated with heat, those
neutron measurements did not look for heat. Nor, in fact, did they
look for other signs of the reaction, so this evidence is not as
convincing as it might otherwise be, and that also applies to lack of
replication.
But heat/helium has been replicated, by twelve research groups -- all
it takes is to set up the FPHE in an experiment designed to capture
and measure helium -- and there are no negative results by any group.
In the case of correlation analysis, what it would take to disconfirm
this would be, simply, setting up the FPHE, whatever it takes, and
showing that helium does not correlate with heat. Because someone
like Cude believes that excess heat is an error, he thinks this
imposible, but he's overlooked something. If the apparent excess heat
is an error, someone else, replicating, can simply reproduce the error!
If "poor technique" was used, then use the same "poor technique." Of
course, with many of the CF experiments, very good technique was
used. Still, the approach is sound. Replicate, then do better
analysis. That's real science. What Cude does is not science, it is
religion and religious apologetics.
> I am certain you are wrong, and these people are right.
Of course you are, but your certainty is not really persuasive. A
few weeks ago you were certain steam could not be heated above 100C
unless it was under pressure. You ignored perfectly good arguments
that air itself (nitrogen) is heated far above its boiling point at
atmosphere, and stuck stubbornly to your belief, until some CF
scientist (Storms probably) set you straight.
Of course steam can be heated to higher temperatures. Steam being
evolved from water boiling will always be at about 100 degrees,
that's a consequence of the phase change. The water being boiled will
be at 100 degrees at atmospheric pressure. To raise those two
temperatures, yes, it takes pressure. But that doesn't mean that you
cannot coninue to heat steam beyond 100 degrees! I didn't see Cude's
assertions on this, I'll confess that I don't read most of his
writing any more, so malignant has it come to be in my eyes. He's
clever, and he knows the literature, and he scours it for material
that he can use to create a negative impression.
In a word, a troll.
Yes, I make mistakes. But I admit frankly that I have done so, and I
make amends. You have made dozens of mistakes for 20 years and learned nothing.
In 2009, you were pretty certain that Focardi had been proved
wrong, and you argued at length with Krivit about it, and you had
support from Storms.
That I did not do! I have pointed out that there have not been many
replications, and one attempt to replicate failed:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CerronZebainvestigat.pdf
I never, ever hide what I know to be weaknesses in cold fusion research.
Yes. That was partly a replication failure. An experiment like this
raises some doubt, but what is obvious is this: the experiment did
not exactly reproduce the conditions in the Focardi work. It was,
rather, an attempt to reproduce those conditions, and the simplest
conclusion I'd draw from it is that Focardi's description of
conditions was incomplete, something that I've found to be common
when I look at a lot of cold fusion research, though not all. Quite
simply, there are unreported details, and those details can make all
the difference.
The researchers concluded this:
In conclusion, we
have observed all the effects discovered by Focardi et al., but our
results imply
that there is no production of power associated with the absorption
of hydrogen
by nickel
If this is true, this would indicate that the Focardi work is
questionable. However, they seem to have had a lot of trouble getting
the nickel to absorb hydrogen, which would indicate to me that much
of their work might not be expected to show anything. That is, what
they failed to replicate may have been a high level of hydrogen
absorption. I'm fascinated by this:
We cycled this cell for over a year, and tried to trigger loading
cycles that had a large
absorption using the procedure stated above. However we found that
we could not; all cycles had
small absorption or desorption and the temperature of the rod and
coil had the same relationship
to input power as the lower curve in fig. 4. (There may have been
some other anomalous
absorption cycles at the beginning of the experiment when we were
still trying to define what we
called a loading cycle). We have opened the apparatus and examined
the heater coil and nickel
rod. There was a grey deposit on much of the interior due to zinc
extracted from various brass
pieces used to make various electric connections. The surface of the
nickel rod was examined
with an electron microscope and compared to nickel rod that had not
undergone this experiment.
In general, the electron microscope showed that the rod used for the
experiment was smoother
than the virgin rod; this smoothing could be due to the heating cycles.
I think this is good work and the only quarrel I'd have with it is
the conclusion, which is, my view, overstated. What if that "grey
deposit" poisons the reaction? Was this deposit reported by Focardi?
What if the exact history of a piece of nickel matters? "Smoother"
might well mean "doesn't work." Etc.
What if the "trick" is the exact preparation of the nickel? As it
certainly was with the FP Heat Effect (about the palladium), along
with other factors, such as D2O purity, etc.
So, while this experiment raises some level of doubt, it certainly
does not "prove Focardi wrong," as Cude cavalierly claims. But he's
done worse than this, he's claimed that Gozzi, for example, refuted
the heat/helium results, when Gozzi simply made a conservative
statement that his results don't, by themselves, prove some case.
Cude isn't worth the electrons pushed to respond to him.
