On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote:
> The work is being published in mainstream journals, about two papers per month. Oh boy. Talk about exaggeration! You really shouldn't write things that induce people to look into your claims, because invariably the field comes out looking worse. Britz lists 21 entries for 2010, so that's almost 2 *entries* per month. But what are the entries? Well 13 are from the LENR sourcebook, a volume about CF by and for CF advocates. Sorry, that's not a mainstream journal, no matter how you slice it. So that leaves 8, one every 1.5 months in real journals. What about these 8? Two are comments, one negative, in the relatively minor J Environ Monit. Another is a negative paper in Phys Lett A. Two are on theory, and Haglestein's in NW on very old and tired theory. One is on speculation that CF happens in the earth (NW), and one is a review (NW). Reviews and theory and comments and peripheral speculations aren't necessarily a bad thing, but when that's all there is, it is pretty sad for the field. If you're keeping count, we're up to 20 of 21. So in all of 2010 there was exactly ONE (1) positive experimental paper in a mainstream journal, and that was yet another dubious paper on CR-39 in NW from the same group. Still no other group has replicated. So a closer look indicates that in fact the work is not being published in mainstream journals. > The decline in publication, which certainly took place, reached a nadir around 2004 or 2005, with only about a paper every two months. You often crow about the renaissance of the field since 2004 based on increased publication rate, so let's look at it. You're counting entries in Britz's bibliography without any discrimination, but let's start there. Here's the complete year-by-year list 1989 - 249 1990 - 320 1991 - 188 1992 - 100 1993 - 94 1994 - 66 1995 - 52 1996 - 67 1997 - 43 1998 - 51 1999 - 32 2000 - 34 2001 - 21 2002 - 20 2003 - 11 2004 - 9 2005 - 7 2006 - 9 2007 - 10 2008 - 27 2009 - 25 2010 - 21 Your four-fold increase presumably comes from 27 in 2008 and 7 in 2005, but of course these are small numbers which fluctuate. Still, a factor of more than two is evident even from smoothed data. But two things make the data much less favorable to your case. 1. The gradient you are touting doesn't seem to be holding up. The rate seems to be dropping again in the last 2 years. And the rate, even taken at face value, is still considerably below than that of the late 90s, and even then CF was a fringe subject. 2. The last 3 years coincide with special issues devoted to CF. I already mentioned that 13 of the 21 in 2010 were in the LENR Sourcebook. That was volume 2. Volume 1 was in 2008, when fully 16 of the 27 entries are from the Sourcebook. In 2009, the J Sci Explor published a special issue on CF, accounting for 19 of the 25 entries. The J Sci Explor is, to put it kindly, a pseudo-science journal with publications on things like UFOs, alternative medicine, and the like. Most scientists would regard being published there as negative credit; worse than not being published at all. If these entries are removed from the list, evidence for a renaissance vanishes: 2002 - 20 2003 - 11 2004 - 9 2005 - 7 2006 - 9 2007 - 10 2008 - 11 2009 - 6 (or minus 13) 2010 - 8 The appearance of special issues on a subject means something, I suppose. But the appearance in the J Sci Explor is negative, and regardless, neither indicate an increased rate of publication in peer-reviewed mainstream journals. > The presenters to the 2004 U.S. DoE review were not politically sophisticated, No more or less than presenters to any other scientific funding agency. > they were scientists, and they expected, more or less, to be treated as scientists, and for those who read the review report to read beyond the conservative language used. What? They wrote in code, and expected the panel to decode it? > Instead, it's obvious from the final report, many of the reviewers clearly did not understand the evidence presented, they got it flat-out wrong in their reports, and there were blatant errors in the final review summary. This was an important opportunity for the CF crowd, and they had plenty of time to put the best case forward. The fact that they were unable explain it adequately to the panel suggests incompetence on their part. The experimental claims in CF are pretty simple. Far more complicated fields are evaluated less thoroughly than CF was, and understood and funded all the time. > Yet that review showed a drastic difference from 1989, when the panel was almost unanimous with a very negative conclusion, only modified and mollified by the intervention of a Nobel laureate. Cold fusion was clearly treated as emerging science, still controversial, but *unanimously* considered as being worth of modest funding under existing programs. The 2004 report was framed in kinder language, but that's probably because there was no reason to be mean. In 1989, the fear of a very expensive wild goose chase probably influenced the language. But still the 2004 report was almost unanimous (17/18) that evidence for nuclear reactions was not conclusive. And they did not consider the field worthy of funding. They felt "that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments…" That's just a restatement of the mandate of funding agencies. They said that well-designed proposals were absent in the submissions to the panel, and so their statement was a polite way of saying that they saw nothing worth funding. > That did not happen, not yet. As with 1989, the DoE did not follow their own panel's recommendations. Sure they did. It's just that no one submitted a well-designed proposal. >> After all, new discoveries in science typically auger in progress at breakneck speed. That's the best time for a new field. Lots of low-hanging fruit to pick. > Yup. If that fruit isn't nipped in the bud, as it was. Yes. By the absence of a real nuclear effect. >> Instead, CF people kept doing the same experiment with the same results over and over. > This is actually completely false. The problem is the opposite, they did *not* do the same experiment over and over. The vast majority of experiments were electrolysis/calorimetry experiments. Not identical, but still the same. >> Electrolysis experiments with input power, chemical reactions, differential equations, and finally after much data reduction, a claim of excess heat. Nothing obvious, and it never got more obvious. In fact as the experiments improved, the effect got smaller. (And as they got worse (as with Rossi) the effect got bigger.) > This is pure claim, contrary to the evidence. Where is the peer-reviewed review of the field that shows this oft-claimed disappearance of results with increased precision? I didn't say disappeared. I said they got smaller.The table published by Storms in his Science of LENR book shows the excess power for dozens of experiments, and in the 90s there are 4 years where it exceeds 100W, and up to 1 kW in one experiment. Since 2000, there are none, and only 2 years where it exceeds 12 W. It doesn't go beyond 2005, but I'm not aware of any higher power results than the Dardik 2004 results since then (Rossi notwithstanding). Within Dardik's own results, the excess power has decreased over time. That the experiments get better in time is an assumption, which if false, is even more damning for the experimenters. > And notice an assumption here. We don't know the story with Rossi, because Rossi hasn't been scientifically confirmed -- or rejected. What Cude is assuming is simple: if there is a bigger effect, there must be "worse experiments." No. His experiments are so bad that even if you accept the measurements claimed, evidence for excess heat is absent (with the exception of the mythical 18-hour experiment, which shouldn't impress anyone). >> Some people did try variations on the experiment, using gas loading, glow discharge, sonic, superwave, and so on, but in every case the results were and are unconvincing. > Again, "to whom"? To almost everyone. > Superwave results are convincing, to neutral, skeptical observers, like Duncan. Any other examples? > They've been published under peer review, they meet ordinary scientific standards. Where? According to Rothwell's database, Dardik has not published it in a peer-reviewed journal, and the only person I know who has claimed to repeat it is McKubre, and he has not published it under peer-review. I guess you mean the Sourcebook, a collection of papers about CF, edited by CF advocates. They're not likely to reject papers on CF are they. It does not meet ordinary scientific standards by any stretch. > The finding of correlation between excess heat and helium almost certainly rules out artifact in either, that's the power of correlation. Cude simply dismisses this. Peer-reviewers accept it. Only the preliminary crude experiments by Miles in the early 90s were accepted by peer review. Nothing repeating it quantitatively has survived peer review. So artifact is not ruled out. >> I think mainstream science's attitude toward the field has become like it is to other fringe areas that never seem to get anywhere. > Dying fringes don't show a quadrupling of publication rate. See above. That's a figment of your imagination. Peer-reviewed publication continues to languish at a few papers a year, and only one or two new reports of positive experimental results per year. > Rather, they may occasionally get something through. That's the situation with CF.
