On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 9:35 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]>wrote:
Lomax> 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. The evidence for CF and for this heat-helium correlation is pitifully weak. And the evidence for the quantitative correlation has not been reproduced under peer-review. That's why a panel of experts in 2004 said evidence for nuclear reactions was not conclusive. > 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. And it has not been confirmed. > That paper (Storms again) represents the state of the field today Agreed. Unconvincing and published mostly in conference proceedings. > and shows what is currently passing peer review, Exactly: obituaries instead of new experimental results. > it is the latest in about seventeen positive reviews of cold fusion to appear in mainstream journals, with no negative reviews. Seventeen reviews and less than a dozen positive experimental papers since 2004. That's pathetic. And who writes negative reviews of moribund fields? No one. Why would they? > The pseudo-skeptical position is dead, it is unable to pass peer review, and that is not for lack of submissions or effort. You keep saying this, but you never identify who you are referring to. We all know about the rejection of Shanahan's rebuttal to a rebuttal to a rebuttal, but you know journals don't want to turn into on-line forums. That rejection is meaningless. Do you have any other rejections. Because you know an entire proceedings was rejected by the APS recently. Really, with very rare exceptions, people who submit material on cold fusion are going to be cold fusion advocates. Why would skeptics bother? > 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. 1. The much better work was not peer-reviewed, and was subject to biting criticism from a journalist. 2. The results were available at the time of the 2004 DOE review, and they were not convinced by them. 3. Given that the quality of the results has not convinced the DOE or the mainstream, why is there no subsequent work? Scientists are obsessive about nailing down errors. And yet, the most recent results Storms used for this pivotal experiment are from 2000, and the most recent peer-reviewed results from the early 90s. 4. If the later results (unrefereed) are so much better, why did Storms still use some of Miles' results in calculating the ratio, if not to make the ratio better; i.e to cherry pick? Normally, when experiments get better, data from old and crude experiments is replaced. 5. Isn't it a remarkable coincidence that of all the possible products of nuclear reactions -- neutrons, tritium, gamma rays, helium, transmutations e.g. -- the only one that shows up commensurate with the observed heat is the one that exists in the background at similar or higher levels? Nature is such a tease. > 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. Well, then Huizenga must be a believer in CF, right? Wrong! Because the improved results have not been subject to peer-review, and because there has been no peer-reviewed replication at all, and because Storms' 20% is the result of cherry-picking and cognitive bias. > (NiH is clearly a different effect, though there may be some common type of mechanism.) Right. Cognitive bias. > This kind of work [repeating Miles heat-helium results] 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. In the first place, it was not established, it was a crude, preliminary experiment. In the second place, I don't think even your fans will buy the idea that this important work does not get done because of a lack of graduate students. You say there are 12 groups that have reproduced the work, so they must have done it without graduate students. The problem is the work sucked too much to get past peer-review. In the third place, confirming cold fusion most certainly would lead to economic rewards. Miles' results obviously did not convince the granting agencies, so better proof would bring the respect they sorely needed. In the fourth place, most senior academics are quite certain their work will not lead to a Nobel prize, but they do it anyway, if they are interested in it. And CF could save the world. How could that not be enough to motivate them. And finally, confirming and improving work, especially confirming revolutionary work, can lead to a Nobel prize. Thompson and Townsend tried to find the charge on the electron using water droplets, and got a value about half of the currently accepted value (better than Miles result). They knew the results were not accurate because of evaporation. Millikan did fundamentally the same experiment, but improved on it by using oil drops, and he got the Nobel prize. > 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." I didn't ridicule the claim that a thesis was rejected. Cold fusion work is difficult to publish, and it's pretty difficult to argue that any of it makes a significant contribution to the body of knowledge. Since those are both criteria for accepting a PhD thesis, it would not be surprising that a thesis on cold fusion was rejected. I ridiculed the idea that this would prevent Miles from being reproduced. At most it might delay it a little, but it's been decades. And like you say, many groups have reported replications at conferences, so you're contradicting yourself. It's not usually the graduate students that submit papers to journals.
