At 09:25 PM 9/15/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
They didn't necessarily create it, "keep it stable." Perhaps it
*stayed* stable. There is, practically speaking, a huge difference.
You are wrong. The paper shows 3 out of 7 runs worked, but they did
it several other times not shown in the paper. Before they they
performed the boil-off experiment hundreds of times reliably. They
ran 32 tests at at time. Every one of them worked.
If they'd been able to do that reliably, I doubt that Toyota would
have given up funding Technova. And this technology would have been
transferred.
The decision to end the program was political. It had nothing to do
with the quality of the results. It was about money, greed and
power. The scion of Toyota who started the program died of old age,
and others who were determined to stop it won out.
Perhaps.
However, while CF experiments are difficult, has that work by Pons
and Fleischmann ever been replicated? If it was so reproducible, why not?
I've seen an experimental series where a design seemed to work
reliably. Then the researcher was later unable to reproduce it.
Something had changed.
What cuts through this kind of problem, as far as deepening
investigation is concerned, is correlation. Heat/helium is not so
much affected by this uncontrolled variability. If *all* experiments
are no-heat, sure. Correlation doesn't help. But as long as some
generate significant heat, heat/helium demonstrates the reality.
To refer to something in another post, sure, we can be pretty good at
engineering, but not necessarily when we don't understand how
something is working. That's what has been missing: an understanding
of the effect. Until we understand it, engineering is hit-and-miss.
The pseudoskeptics deride cold fusion because of the common
unreliability; however, that argument is demolished by correlation,
specifically the correlation of heat with helium.
