Chemical Engineer <[email protected]> wrote > > On one hand you want to be technical and on the other hand you do not. > Which is It? >
There is no confusion. A discussion as to whether cold fusion produces heat and helium is technical. A discussion about the name -- cold fusion -- is semantic nitpicking. There are countless words in English, Japanese and all other languages which are technically inaccurate, obsolete, confusing, obscure or in some other way not a good one-for-one logical description. Language is not a good description of reality. Words are arbitrary symbols. The word is not itself the thing it represents. The word taken literally may well be absurd. "Folder" meaning for a collection of computer files is a good example. It is not even a little like a manila folder. For that matter, manila folders have little to do with the Philippines. Word definitions wander around and are forever in flux. "Cold fusion" or "LENR" or the "F-P effect" all refer to the same thing. They refer to the phenomenon characterized by heat without a chemical reaction that far exceeds the limits of chemical reaction; helium; sporadic tritium, and so on. The experimental results define what the phenomenon is. The name is merely a tag or placeholder used to indicate the phenomenon. A person who would argue which of these various designations is best, based on the word root (the literal meaning), does not understand how language works. - Jed
