At 01:11 PM 5/31/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I agree with this analysis.
Some of Abd's fond hopes will not be realized. Trying to get cold
fusion researchers to cooperate is like herding cats.
That's been said. It's what I'll call a story, and stories are
neither true nor false. Rather, some are useful and some are not. The
story of herding cats isn't particularly useful, except as a caution.
I.e., don't be surprised if there is some hissing and a few bared claws.
I think Abd exaggerates the extent to which helium correlated with
heat gave a firm foundation to the claims.
Well, that depends on how much evidence one needs. I'll agree that
excess heat evidence was conclusive by the time that Miles did his
helium work, but that didn't establish "nuclear."
I think the claims were conclusively established before helium
results emerged. I think tritium is actually better proof of a
nuclear reaction because it is so easy to measure. It does not seem
to correlate with anything else.
And that is precisely the problem. The levels of tritium were way too
low, so those measurements were suspicious. In hindsight, yes. Absolutely.
But until the helium work was done, the ash was not known. Look,
Huizenga got it when he saw Miles. He simply held on to his cold
fusion as hot fusion concept, so he expected gammas, and thus he
expected that Miles would not be confirmed.
I'll agree that the criticism of XP was ultimately overblown and went
beyond reason, and likewise tritium. The existence of correlated
effects, though, is far more conclusive than single effects in
isolation. This is standard science.
Expert such as Gerischer who looked at the data carefully in 1991
had no doubt whatever that the effect is real. Gerischer noted that
helium had recently been reported but he had no firm data yet, and
he did not say his belief was conditional upon helium results.
Right. Had helium not been found to be correlated, though, a serious
theoretical problem would have remained. Fusion without a product?
That's an oxymoron.
There were a few very unlikely LENR possibilities besides helium.
Tritium didn't work, there was way too little of it, same with He-3
and neutrons.
One of the biggest errors that the physics community made was in not
being curious as to the source of that damned heat. If it wasn't
fusion, it was something even weirder!
Instead they just fell in line behind "artifact," with practically no
evidence that it was artifact, and frequently asserting
characteristics of the work, as if fact, that were totally bogus,
like the idea that the effect disappeared with more careful
measurement, implying that it was close to the noise.
I'm working on a standard lecture based on SRI P13/P14, which blows
that idea out of the water, entirely, with data obtained long before
helium was known.
See:
<http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GerischerHiscoldfusi.pdf>http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GerischerHiscoldfusi.pdf
- Jed
I'm just leaving the link in for future generations. I didn't read it
this time. The point is not denied.
