On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote:
Cude>> 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. Lomax> No, the reports have been summarized and the conclusions accepted by peer-review. The summary was accepted by peer review, not the conclusions. And certainly not the conference proceedings they were originally published in. Citation lends some credibility, sure, but no, it is not the same as peer-review. I'm sure granting committees would not allow you to list cited conference proceedings in the peer-reviewed publications section. The referees of a review do not referee the source material. If they did, it would be like refereeing dozens of papers; no one would accept the work. In fact, reviews are treated with less rigor than original papers, not more, so none of the cited work could possibly be subject to significant critique. In particular, the referee of a review cannot ask for revision, or additional measurements in the source material. > There is no skeptical review with this authority. There is no confirming experiment in peer-review yet. And Miles' results have been challenged. Only people with a preconceived idea will waste time analyzing a single, 15-year old, controversial experiment, before it has been reproduced under peer-review. > "Pitifully weak" is Cude's personal and very subjective opinion, not confirmed by any review. It is confirmed by the DOE panel, since all the evidence was available to them and 17 of 18 said it 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's so poor a judgment that I'll call it a lie. It's been confirmed. Cude sets up artificial standards for confirmation. Huizenga himself was responding to a conference report! I think the peer-reviewed paper came later. But he was waiting for the results in a conference report to be confirmed. No confirmations have been reported in peer-reviewed literature (except in second order), and no confirmations convinced the DOE panel. Huizenga remains a skeptic, as do most other nuclear experts. It's a critical experiment. How could all those confirmations that Storms used for his calculations, evidently the most important confirming results for CF in your opinion, not have been published under peer review? > There is no way around it. The balance of publication in mainstream scientific journals favors the reality of the effect, favors that helium is the ash, If you mean more papers support the idea than reject it, that's true. Skeptics essentially stopped publishing a long time age. The issue is no longer relevant. If you mean the published evidence has convinced the mainstream, that's wrong, as demonstrated e.g. by the 2004 DOE panel. > and the only thing missing is what Cude seems to desire: convincing theory as to mechanism. No. Convincing evidence is what is missing. Not published papers by people who think they have evidence, but evidence that would convince, e.g. the DOE panel that the effect is real. >>> and shows what is currently passing peer review, >> Exactly: obituaries instead of new experimental results. > Please show an "obituary" "currently passing peer review." Storms' review, and about 16 others. >>> 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. > Okay, Shanahan. You guess it. Lucky guess. But I'm sure that's not all, it's just that there isn't general evidence, So, based on one submission of a response to a response being rejected you conclude that the skeptical position is unable to pass peer review? That's the kind of fuzzy reasoning that's got you to fall for the field in the first place. >> That rejection is meaningless. > Individually, yes. However, the silence is deafening. The silence indicates CF is being ignored. Nothing more. > There are ongoing publications in the field, and two per month or so is certainly not dead. I've already considered this in detail in another post. According to Britz, in 2010, 8 papers were published in refereed journals, 2 were negative, 2 theory, 1 review, 1 comment, 1 peripheral speculation (CF in the earth), and get this: 1 new experimental paper by the CR-39 group, still the only group to publish these claims. That's pretty close to dead. > You can make the point that if this were widely recognized as real, there would be people crawling all over it. Yes. > But I've presonally seen what happened when a close friend, who was a mathematician with a knowledge of quantum mechanics, found out that I was interested in cold fusion. It was like I'd sold out to the devil, and he came seriously unglued, ranting and raving, and that's not my judgment, that's the judgment of a common friend who saw the correspondence. So, what's your point? Now you're admitting that the mainstream has not accepted cold fusion evidence. That the mainstream is so skeptical of CF that they condescend to people who work in the field. Before you said skepticism was dead. It seems to me from this account that it is anything but. >> Because you know an entire proceedings was rejected by the APS recently. > Sure, I know that, and this is a really obvious exposure of the political situation. A conspiracy theorist can never be dissuaded because the lack of evidence of a conspiracy is just taken as evidence of a coverup. >> Really, with very rare exceptions, people who submit material on cold fusion are going to be cold fusion advocates. Why would skeptics bother? > Why did Wood bother with N-rays? I'll tell you why: he was paid, he was subsidized. He also got a fair measure of glory. Wood bothered because at the time N-rays were being taken seriously. Steve Koonin and Nathan Lewis and many others bothered with CF in 1989 because for a time CF was taken seriously. But that time has passed. It's true that CF was not as definitively debunked as N-rays, and it's not obvious it ever could be. But it was discredited to the satisfaction of most scientists, so that skeptical scientists no longer bother with it. > However, this is what will happen: increasingly, funding will start to be diverted from hot fusion to other approaches. Maybe, but not to cold fusion. > Then the debate will return to the journals, where it belonged in the first place, I thought you said that's where it already was. > before it was interrupted by a manufactured, political "scientific consensus." What possible political sentiment opposes cheap, clean, abundant energy. This repeated conspiracy theory is exceeded in implausibility only by CF itself. >>> 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. > Eh? Where work is orignally published is not crucial, Peer review is a pretty small barrier to legitimacy, considering much that is not legitimate passes it. But it is a minimum, especially for a pivotal experiment like this. When not a single quantitative confirmation of Miles correlation is peer-reviewed, that is a crucial weakness. > because a reviewer considers all that. The reviewer is an advocate. And his reviewers could not possibly review the source material. This argument doesn't wash. > "Biting criticism from a journalist?" I have no clue, Cude. What are you talking about? Yes you do, because we've been through this before. Krivit, that guy you praised for being solicited by the world's biggest scientific publisher to write an encyclopedia article, criticized the heat-helium results. >> 2. The results were available at the time of the 2004 DOE review, and they were not convinced by them. > Some were. However, I've studied that report and the comments on it in detail. The report, clearly, was not understood, and I'm not sure *any* of the panelists understood it (friendly or not). It took me hours of reading and re-reading before I had a grasp of what was actually being reported, in that Appendix. […] > A mistake causd, in my view, by political unsophistication on the part of the authors of the review paper, This field is not more sophisticated than most other scientific fields, and it was given a more thorough hearing than most. If the CF researchers are incapable, or too unsophisticated to get the expert panel to understand them, then that alone suggests incompetence. And you didn't respond to points 3, 4, and 5: 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, 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. > Both DoE reviews suggested research, and wtih the second one, this was a real unanimous suggestion, Again, no. They suggested proposals should be entertained. > You believe that the heat results are artifact. Fine. What is it? Hunting artifacts, especially someone else's, is not interesting or productive. The attitude is that if the effect is real, make it more obvious. > People in the field have already done this work to their own satisfaction, but the field will continue to attract new researchers until the "errors" are exposed. It will continue to attract research funding, which seems to be amping up, from what I hear. Do the world a service, if you are actually a scientist, which I doubt. Investigate, identify the artifacts, publish it, and accomplish the closure of the matter. I really don't think it's possible in CF. Advocates will always reject a contrary experiment as erroneous in some way. Focardi was replicated and his results were shown to be attainable and explainable without nuclear effects. It was even enough to get Rothwell and Storms to argue that Focardi had been disproved. But others continued to support Focardi, and now of course, he's the man. So, even reproduction with explanation would not be enough. The only quick and widespread agreement on CF would come from a clear and obvious demonstration of the effect. An isolated device that produces energy more or less indefinitely. What will likely happen is that it will continue its slow and asymptotic decline into oblivion.
