Jed, I wrote the response below for the Vortex list, but have decided
instead to send it only to you, because it's actually a personal
appeal and invitation to you.
At 08:58 AM 5/4/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
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.
Yeah, well, I'll stick to my review of his book. He devoted chapter
3 of the book to the hypothesis that Ontario Hydro sold used CANDU
moderator water to the public. First, that is preposterous. Second,
he never bothered to check with Ontario Hydro. I did check with
them, and as I expected, and they told me used moderator water is
100 million times too radioactive to sell to the public. They were
astounded that he said this, and that EPRI and the ANS let him publish it.
Jed, this boils down to his making a mistake, *at worst.* You are
very clearly exaggerating. He does not "devote chapter 3" to that
hypothesis. Chapter 3 is about *possible* radioactivity artifacts,
and is over ten pages long. The discussion asserting possible
contamination of heavy water with tritium is about one page, and it
isn't just about CANDU water, but is a general point of possible
artifact, which would easily be addressed by the use of controls,
i.e., by measurements of tritium in the heavy water before running
the PdD or other experiment. It was presented as a speculation,
though with a comment, "there are strong indications that
commercially sold heavy water may contain variable contents of used
moderator water from either CANDU-type nuclear reactors or Savannah
River-type weapons production reactors."
He does not assert that Ontario Hydro sold used CANDU water to the
public, he was merely addressing a skeptical assertion of possible
artifact, with some possible pathways that might explain tritium
contamination of heavy water.
The whole book is chatty, it's presented as a "dialog." YS presents
another possible source of elevated tritium levels, elevation through
enrichment that occurs in the normal process of separating light
water from heavy water. OM actually discredits that. And then the
discussion proceeds to the point where Hoffman generally dismisses
the objections of artifact from heavy water contamination. Jed, you
appear to have been confused by his style, which allows the critical
objections plenty of space before shooting them down.
In communicating with skeptics, that space is essential, a skeptic
must be satisfied that the skeptical objections have been fully heard
and understood. Hoffman was able to do that. He presents many
skeptical arguments that he then shoots down. Including this one.
I would assume that he did not ask Ontario Hydro about this because
it wasn't necessary. He wasn't accusing Ontario Hydro of anything,
nor does he believe or attempt to establish that such contamination
explains the tritium results.
I do wonder, though, what is done with moderator water. I'd think
that the primary use for it would be as ... moderator water. However,
if some ended up as surplus because a reactor is being shut down, and
there aren't more of the type being built?
Now, my question for you, Jed, is whether or not you could ever
acknowledge an error that you have asserted for years? Some people
can do that, some can't. It's up to you, and you are the one who will
benefit the most from dropping that old story.
Of course, maybe somehow my own view of Hoffman is warped, and I'm
the one who can't see the forest for the trees. I have the book in
front of me, though, and that book did, in fact, lead me to a
stronger understanding that cold fusion was real, because I did have
the benefit of consciousness of the Miles results and what followed
afterwards from that.
When I arrived in this field, I was skeptical. Perhaps you remember
that I bought $10,000 worth of palladium metal (through a Credit
Suisse metal account) in 1989, knowing that it was a long shot. When
the Pons and Fleischmann results seemed to remain unconfirmed, the
palladium was sold. It was a fairly safe investment. If I'd bought
futures, I'd have lost my shirt, because palladium had already risen
in price a bit before I bought in, and it lost that rise. Later, from
demand from the auto industry, it went way up. And then that fell
from the economy.... Palladium is not the future of cold fusion for
energy generation, my strong suspicion....
I had not stayed current with the field at all, so I was unaware of
Miles and the rest until about 2009. When I became interested,
because of a certain abusive blacklisting of a certain cold fusion
web site on Wikipedia, I bought a pile of books, including Hoffman,
and Hoffman stood in the middle, attached to neither side of the
controversy, and his thoughtful openness really helped. I first
learned about CR-39 results, for example, from Hoffman, and Hoffman
lays out and thoroughly skewers the pseudoskeptical reaction to Pons
and Fleischmann. You have tossed all that out with an obsession over
his errors or shortcomings.
Seven E Jones' review of Hoffman:
Dr. Hoffman's treatise on anomalous nculear effects in deuterided
materials has been looked at as pro-cold-fusion and paradoxically as
anti-cold-fusion. It is neither. Rather, I see Dr. Hoffman's book as
a significant effort to scrutinize relevant observations with care,
and to underline the need for state-of-the-art detectors and methods
in determining whether any anomalous effects exist.
Jones, of course, followed a similar blind alley that distracted many
in the field. Jones was working with and reporting alleged nuclear
effects at levels well below those in which calorimetry would reveal
anything. Jones dismissed XP in the FPHE, but he was still correct.
He just didn't get and follow the importance of heat/helium. And,
Jed, that whole line of evidence, which is what is truly conclusive
as to "nuclear," rather than merely "convincing or somewhat
convincing," has been poorly presented by reviews of cold fusion from
*"proponents,"* and I'm not sure why.
There is a problem, well known and often asserted by skeptics, with a
pile of somewhat-conclusive results. You may say, until you are blue
in the face, that so many researchers could not be wrong, but a
skeptic, unless faced with something stronger, will remain skeptical,
because those positive reports could be cherry-picked from a larger
body of data. I know that the cherry-picking takes place, it's a real
problem in the field, that negative results have often not been
reported as carefully as positive ones, or are not reported at all.
I know that a very prominent cold fusion researcher, for example,
tried codep and found nothing. Okay, where is his experimental
report? And where is the followup work that would either identify the
problem, the hidden variable, or would identify the artifact in the
original work?
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.
That is incorrect. It was confirmed long before he wrote the book.
Not adequately, and I suspect that the book was written quite a bit
before it was published by EPRI. He does have some publications as
late as 1995 mentioned, but those could have been very late
insertions. However, the way he refers to the possibility of helium
correlation with heat shows that, when he wrote that section, he
didn't have Miles et al in mind. I see no reason to suspect him of
lying, which is about what it would take.
SRI threatened to file suit against the publisher of this book,
because it is so full of lies and outrageous distortions. That is
why the publisher inserted a slip of paper with a correction, which said:
"ADDENDUM
Comments were made in this text that the work performed by SRI
INTERNATIONAL was difficult to examine in detail because that lab
was reticent to share experimental details of a potentially
profitable field of research. This experimental secrecy was
partially lifted by the following Report to EPRI:
McKubre, M. C. H., et al., 'Development of Advanced Concepts for
Nuclear Processes in Deuterated Metals,' TR 104195, Research Project
3170 01, Final Report, August 1994."
That is one of the few technically accurate non-trivial statements
in the book. The part about secrecy is a lie, needless to say. And
although there were hundreds of other non-secret reports of excess
heat, Hoffman did not mention a single one of them in the book.
Hoffman explicitly does not go into detail on calorimetry. Jed, you
discredit yourself by calling what Hoffman wrote a "lie," and that is
not a "correction," it is an addendum that admits no error, and that
even confirms the original account in its summary.
What did Hoffman actually write, if this is an example of a "lie." He
has been discussing possible artifact in heat measurements. To place
this in context, he closes the chapter with
OM:Well, that is a quick rundown on possible heat artifacts. In
general, these heat measurements are being done by very
knowledgeable experimenters who know how to avoid artifacts.
So, page 75:
YS; [asks a question about a cathode surface coatings, after Hoffman
has speculated about a possibility with, in fact, a very important
point about varying results from different labs as not indicating
contradiction.]
OM: The general public, including myself, doesn't know, because the
laboratories that claim major excess heat production, such as the
Stanford Rsearch Institute or the Pons-Fleischmann group, are not
allowing such information out of their laboratories for patent reasons.
Was that a lie, Jed? Or was it an opinion, not unreasonable at the time?
Hoffman was paid ~$120,000 to write that book. It is a piece of
trash. It is propaganda written by people opposed to cold fusion.
Hoffman and his editor Schneider are so biased, and the book is so
distorted, I consider it a pack of lies. I will grant that apart
from statements about moderator water it does not have as many
technical errors as the books by Taubes or Close.
Yet you've called him the stupidest person on the planet. Looks to me
like he did nicely for himself, and I'll testify that his book helped
me. You have not identified one single lie. I found an error, his
comment about correlation between heat and helium did not show an
up-to-date knowledge of the field.
However, this is remarkable, anyway: he knew that such a correlation
would be very important. Huizenga also knew that, and acknowledged
Miles precisely because of that.
Jed, you are shooting yourself in your foot. That you continue to
defend your position on Hoffman, without evidence, reveals a great
deal about you.
By the way, Hoffman was sincere about the moderator water. I am sure
Schneider and the other editors know this is crazy nonsense, along
with much else in the book. They work at EPRI and the ANS; obviously
they know something about nuclear reactors. They let this go hoping
to dupe the readers. They let Hoffman make a fool of himself.
Hoffman himself was sincere. I spoke with him about this and other
issues in the book. He was one of the stupidest individuals I have
ever encountered. He had a great deal of technical knowledge but not
a lick of common sense. It never occurred to him to call Ontario
Hydro, and even after I told him what they said, he maintained that
they might be selling moderator water.
That's right. They might be, and management might not even know about
it. Not raw moderator water, for obvious reasons, but perhaps
processed moderator water, purified, as feed stock, with the tritium
content lowered through the same kind of process that increases
deuterium content. It might be possible to cut the heavy water
production cost by half or more. That would be big money. It would
not necessarily be illegal, even, if the radioactivity is lowered
sufficiently, as it would be by any sane scheme.
And I strongly suspect that you remember your conversation with
Hoffman based more on your impression of stupidity, since, in his
book, he actually shoots down the heavy water contamination
hypothesis. Your fervently-believed story of his stupidity has
apparently made that invisible for you.
I could make the same defense of his statements, that they "*might*
be selling moderator water," with the gloss that it would not be
simple moderator water, which would be illegal for obvious reasons,
and totally stupid, but what Hoffman actually reports as a skeptical
argument, possible contamination *from* moderator-water-sourced
tritium. Hoffman was merely asserting the contamination argument as
*not as totally stupid as you might think*. You are essentially
objecting to his giving a fair hearing to ultimately bogus skeptical arguments.
And he, in that context, defended it as worthy of presentation.
No, Jed, you were, here, being stupid. What you accuse him of. You
are capable of far better than that, how about it?
Morrison was also incredibly stupid. He was sincere when he said
that if palladium exhibits nuclear effects, it stands to reason that
heavy water ice might also. I was there when said that. The audience
let out a collective gasp. It wasn't because they were awed by his brilliance.
Yup. When people become attached to conclusions, they can say some
incredibly stupid things. I know I can, under those conditions. How about you?
It's not that *they* are actually stupid, it's that the mind doesn't
function well in the presence of attachment. For any of us.
Hoffman also apparently "fooled" Miley, if his purpose was as you
claim. Miley also wrote a supportive blurb for the book jacket.
If Hoffman's book discredited cold fusion, the fact would be that
cold fusion was actually discredited by reasonable skeptical
argument, because Hoffman dismantles many of the unreasonable
skeptical arguments. Someone reading superficially might pick up the
unreasonable arguments and not read on and see that Hoffman
deconstructs them. In fact, isn't that what you have done?
