At 12:40 PM 5/3/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Pam Boss pointed out the the choice of words in this letter is very
insulting and unprofessional. "Even if your contrived attempt..." I
am so used to that tone I hardly noticed. Lindley is famous for
calling for "unrestrained mockery, even a little unqualified
vituperation" to destroy cold fusion. See:
<http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LindleyDtheembarra.pdf>http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LindleyDtheembarra.pdf
Lindley is the second dumbest person associated with cold fusion.
The late Nate Hoffman was the stupidest, in my opinion.
Yeah, Jed, we discussed the late Nate when we first started
corresponding. I very much disagree with you about Mr. Hoffman. He
made some mistakes, no question about that, but there is nobody on
the planet who has not done that.
Hoffman's basic approach was sound, given the time and context, and
his book, A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects,
definitely leaves the cold fusion story open; it was issued before
the heat/helium thing had become confirmed. To associate a sober
commentator like Hoffman, who very much approached the matter
neutrally and thoughfully, with someone like Lindley, is thoughtless.
Jed, please give it up.
As a reasonably typical example, from Hoffman's book, talking about
Pons and Fleischmann's famous error in reporting a certain kind of
gamma radiation from their cells (and without validating everything he wrote):
...In this case, these top electrochemists had ventured into using
one of the most important and familiar tools of the hot fusion
physicists and had stumbled over an artifact most familiar to this
clan. Adding to the feud, hot fusion physicists function through
peer review and open publication in scientific journals, while
electrochemists function through patents, secrecy, and commercial ventures.
(What's important here isn't the specific difference between "hot
fusion physicists" and "electrochemists," which certainly is not
precise, nor even correct -- it's a gross generalization -- but
rather the concept that the physicists and chemists do operate in
different environments, with different expectations. Hoffman really
helped me, as I was starting out to learn about cold fusion, to
recognize the situation as a turf war, with the chemists saying "this
isn't chemistry," and the physicists saying, "this isn't nuclear
physics." I.e., both groups were really saying, "we don't recognize
this alleged phenomenon as being what we know.") And he continued:
Well, the hot fusion physicists thought they had delivered a
head-removing saber slash to cold fusion when they got the most
prestigious scientific journal, Nature, to react at this faux pas by
rejecting any article that was not highly critical of cold fusion,
while accepting very preliminary, messy experiments that were
anti-cold fusion. Of course, the hot fusion physicists were outraged
when Pons and Fleischmann proceeded on, without a trace of a limp
from their stumble, to get serious commercial backing for their
secret techniques from Japanese sources.
Hoffman reproduces some early reports about helium, all stuff that
was highly misleading because there was no correlation with anomalous
heat. That kind of error was repeated over and over in the literature
and work of the time.
It was assumed that if you did X, and if cold fusion was real, you
would see fusion products. Indeed, you might, but X was
uncharacterized, and the only way you could know that you actually
reproduced the conditions of the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect was if
you saw the heat. Many of these reports didn't even look for heat.
They'd just make some palladium deuteride and poke radiation
detectors at it, or the like.
So we saw large numbers of reports, hundreds of papers, about people
doing X, they thought, i.e., what Pons and Fleischmann had supposedly
done, and looking for nuclear products, such as tritium, neutrons,
radiation, or helium, as examples. Since even the best workers
attempting X only saw heat a certain percentage of the time, under
the best of conditions, and since many of these "replication
attempts" weren't even reaching what became the known best
conditions, that the nuclear products were not usually observed is,
in hindsight, simply to be expected. In hindsight, it was colossally
stupid, trying to investigate X without actually verifying that you
were studying X, rather than something else.
Suppose a certain person is a safe cracker, a bank robber. Leave this
person alone in a bank, money disappears from the vault. So someone
reports the disappearance of money from a bank vault, and claims that
a bank robber must have been there, there is no other explanation. To
test the theory that a bank robber took the money, they leave various
criminal types alone in a bank, but no money disappears. And then
this is cited as proof that the "bank robber theory" must be false.
But a critical condition, unrecognized, was not set up: the bank
robber must be a skilled safe cracker. The makers of the safe are
convinced that it is impossible to open it without the combination,
and they support to the theory that the one who reported the loss
must have actually embezzled the money....
Hoffman explicitly does not examine the calorimetric data in detail.
He's looking for evidence of "nuclear," and doesn't accept heat
evidence, alone, as such evidence. (But he does note that the
calorimetry was being done by experts, and he does not *reject* the
heat evidence.) He does seem to recognize the issue of correlation,
but is strangely unaware of work that had been published on it by his
time. I've been discussing some of the evidence re tritium, as well
as helium, with Dr. Storms, and Dr. Storms still, at this late date,
does not seem to recognize how important the correlation of effects
can be for cutting through the noise about "artifact." It was a
massive error, a community failure, of the time, and was not just the
skeptics who succumbed to it. And it's not just Dr. Storms. Most
reviews on cold fusion hardly mention heat/helium, spending a lot of
time on calorimetry alone, or various other claimed effects, each
reported in isolation, for the most part.
Before the heat/helium correlation was known, what was present was a
pile of seemingly disjointed or disconnected data, a farrago of
reports, with conditions being varied all over the place as
researchers attempted to find the way to make the effect "reliable."
It's quite possible that it will never be reliable in anything other
than a statistical way, but it appears that the *correlation* between
anomalous heat and helium is reliable.
Huizenga noted Miles' work, he was apparently writing just a little
later. Huizenga saw the importance, and merely expected that Miles
would not be confirmed. His comment on that shows the massive mistake
being made, an assumption that if there is a low-energy nuclear
reaction taking place in PdD experiments, it would necessarily be
some variety of known reaction: Huizenga simply notes that Miles is
probably wrong "because there is no gamma."
Hoffman, on the other hand, knows and explicitly mentions multibody
fusion (page 53), the potential reaction of four deuterons to form
Be-8. He assumes that this would produce two hot alphas, which, if
this is the reaction, it apparently does not. But it would explain
the absence of gammas.
Hoffman was clearly open-minded and willing to think about many, many
possibilities. He appears to have been unconvinced, either way. He
saw that there was a mystery that would require exploration, which,
by the way, was the unanimous conclusion of both DoE reviews, and
explicitly of all reviewers in the second DoE review (2004). We may
easily see that the 2004 reviewers, in particular, or some of them,
were not being careful, they misinterpreted the evidence, but they
also saw enough to recognize that there was an open mystery.
And they were right about that. Some of them were wrong abou the
exact demarcation of the mystery, that's all. The unanimous
recommendation was for more research, and if the scientific community
had followed such recommendations, we'd probably be twenty years
ahead of where we are, as to understanding cold fusion. There is so
much we don't know, characteristics of the experiments that were
sometimes even available from the raw data collected, but that formed
no part of the analyses presented. For example, Miles was measuring
excess heat and helium, and that's what he reported. However, he also
measured tritium, but did not report the actual values, apparently
because they were too low "to explain the heat." But tritum
production, and especially if the H/D ratio in the heavy water is
known, could tell us much about the nature of the reaction. Bockris,
apparently, didn't even bother to look for heat, as with many of
those looking preferentially for a "nuclear effect."
Often, in fact, we don't know the H/D ratio. Now, if you are a simple
researcher with limited resources, you might not have access to this
parameter *which is crucial to excess heat and other results,
apparently*, but other labs could have checked. Did they? You cannot
assume the ratio from the quality of the heavy water produced,
because heavy water is hygroscopic, it increases in hydrogen content
when exposed to humid air.
We have only a little work, I think it was done by Storms, showing
how a small amount of hydrogen effectively poisons the excess heat
effect, and he only went up to about 1%, as I recall. But what
happens to tritium? And, for that matter, helium? There are reports
of some level of heat with light water, there is Fleischmann's famous
comment that light water was not the "expected blank." So ... what
products and *how much heat*?
Instead of experiment to discover parameters and correlations, most
work was aimed at trying to find the magic key to more heat. "More!"
instead of "What the Ef is Happening?" What wasn't aimed at the God
of Increase was aimed at Proving We Are Right, Cold Fusion is Real,
or with a few, Cold Fusion is Not Real. Neither of these approaches
is efficient for expanding scientific knowledge.
The physicists, generally, were happy to get rid of a challenge to
their hegemony over all things nuclear, but forgot the basic approach
of the scientific method. By two years after the orignal announcement
in 1989, there were many confirmations of excess heat in similar
experiments to those of Pons and Fleischmann. So what was happening?
There was a ready hypothesis to be tossed at all this, but it was one
that sanity would have rejected as inadequate: "there is some mistake
in the calorimetry." That's not sane in science where those making
the measurements are expert. Sure, it might be right, but we expect
to *verify* such a hypothesis by controlled experiment, that
identifies the artifact creating the apparent anomaly, and
demonstrates that removing it leads to null results.
Jed, Hoffman was on the side of science, and that's obvious from
reading his book. He was not apparently convinced, as of the date of
the book, but saw the question as very much open, and he deftly
skewers many of the common pseudo-skeptical arguments.
Hoffman's book is presented as a dialog between OM, the Old
Metallurgist, and YS, the Young Scientist.
YS: ... Do you believe that heat is indeed being generated by "cold fusion?"
OM: The original hypothesis about heat from "cold fusion" involved
room-temperature D-D fusion occurring wtihin a palladium sold lattic
with consequent nuclear ash of neutrons, 3He, tritium, and protons
accompanying the heat. We know now that classical D-D fusion is not
the source of the heat, because ash products of deuterium atons
fusing are not present in the required amounts.
He's basically correct, still, though there are some theories that
haven't been entirely ruled out, or are even being actively
considered, that do involve d-d fusion, but through a very different
"mechanism" than classical fusion, that purportedly explains the
difference in branching ratio and the puzzle of helium formation
without gamma radiation, the gammas being one of the missing
"products" for the helium-producing branch. Gammas appear to be
necessary for conservation of momentum, this is a major issue. But at
this point, we have no fully satisfactory theory of the mechanism.
YS: Well, that is part of the answer. Is the heat from any nuclear reactions?
OM: Experiments have indicated that 4He may be generated and that
tritum has been produced, but neither of these ash products has been
linked with measured heat generation. [...]
He errs here. Miles et al published work with exactly that linkage
(heat/helium), in a 1991 Conference paper, and it was published in J.
Electroanal. Chem., 1993. 346: p. 99 ,
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MilesMcorrelatio.pdf. The title of the
paper says it:
Correlation of excess power and helium production during D2O and H2O
electrolysis using palladium cathodes.
Given Hoffman's general attitude, the omission is striking and
puzzling. Hoffman is referring most solidly in his comment, about
helium, to Bush, Lagowski, Miles, and Ostrom.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BushBFheliumprod.pdf
From that paper, 1991:
The results tabulated in Table 2 indicate that the effluent gases
contained He when electrolysis of D2O produced significant excess
heat and power.
He was correct about tritium as far as I can tell, not because,
necessarily, there was (is) no linkage, but because apparently
*nobody looked for it,* given that the tritium results were too low
to generate measurable heat *from the expected reactions.* I find
this absolutely amazing, with my wonderful hindsight. But the helium
linkage had been sought and was reported, starting in 1991. Earlier
reports of helium were without correlation to heat.
Hoffman goes on.
YS: I guess the real question has to be this: Is the heat real?
OM: The simple facts are as follows. Scientists experienced in the
area of calorimetric measurements are performing these experiments.
Long periods occur with no heat production, then, occasionally,
periods suddenly occur with apparent heat production. These
scientists become irate when so-called experts call them charlatans.
The occasions when apparent heat appears seem to be highly sensitive
to the surface conditions of the palladium and are not reproducible at will.
YS: Any phenomenon that is not reproducible at will is most likely not real.
OM: People in the San Fernando valley, Japanese, Colombians, et al,
will be glad to hear that earthquakes are not real.
YS: Ouch. I deserved that. My comment was stupid.
OM: A large number of people who should know better have parroted
that inane statement. There are, however, many artifacts that can
indicate a false period of heat production, as we have discussed.
The question of whether heat is being produced is still open, though
any such heat is not from deuterium atoms fusing with deuterium
atoms to produce equal amounts of 3He + neutron and triton + proton.
If the heat is real, it must be from a different nuclear reaction or
some totally unknown non-nuclear sources of reactions with energies
far above the electron-volt levels of chemical reactions.
YS: You were supposed to summarize "cold fusion" for me. Your
summary has no punch ending! You agree that it was not the normal
D-D fusion that was originally postulated.
Hoffman doesn't seem to have realized that Fleischmann didn't claim
D-D fusion as his main discovery. He had to postulate some level of
D-D fusion because of his (erroneous) neutron (gamma) findings. But
the heat, he claimed, was being produced by an unknown nuclear
reaction. The same as Hoffman has concluded as necessary if the heat is real.
How Hoffman missed Miles et al's report of correlated heat and
helium, I don't know. He refers to Huizenga's first edition (1992)
and Huizenga doesn't pick up on Miles' report until the 1993 edition.
Much of Hoffman's book can easily now be seen as off the point. In
any recent review, all those early reports about neutrons or tritium
or other products not being present in levels that would be needed to
explain the heat as being from fusion, are easily recognized as being
blind alleys, based on unwarranted -- but easy to make -- assumptions.
Any serious skeptical approach now must deal with heat/helium, and,
in spite of discussing this with skeptics and pseudoskeptics for
years, I've never seen anything more than feeble attempts.
