At 12:33 PM 10/15/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
See:
<http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/10/14/the-believers-cold-fusion-at-the-chicago-international-film-festival/>http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/10/14/the-believers-cold-fusion-at-the-chicago-international-film-festival/
I get a bad feeling about this documentary. I don't like the trailer.
While the title could be spun this way or that, the promo material
indicated it was about "believers" vs. scientists. Which, if so,
would be quite disappointing. The real story is about science vs.
non-science. "Scientists" can engage in collective delusion just as
can nonscientists, they are human.
Jed, right now the strongest way to pass on the message that cold
fusion is real is not to point to a pile of thousands of papers.
That's not going to budge anyone. Rather, point to Storms' "Review of
cold fusion (2010)" in Naturwissenschaften.
Most stories on cold fusion, even sympathetic ones, ignore this
evidence that the issue, scientifically, has been settled.
They make it all depend on what interpretations one believes, instead
of reporting the core findings, the confirmed experimental facts. So
Garwin's "they must be making some mistake" gets equal ink -- or more
ink -- with experimental fact and multiply-confirmed findings. "They
must be making some mistake" is a clear statement of belief in
"established theory," yet there is no "established theory" that makes
cold fusion, in the general case, impossible. There is not even a way
to apply established theory to predict the fusion rate under all the
complex conditions that exist in a Pons-Fleischman palladium
deuteride cell, but only with a specific theory of mechanism, and the
whole point of the Pons Fleischmann announcement was that evidence of
an "unknown nuclear reaction" had been found.
Traditionally, when some unexpected effect is found, the evidence is
examined, and there is a search for artifacts, and possible artifacts
are tested with the tools of controlled experiment, until the effect
is confirmed or the artifact is identified. This was only done with
cold fusion with regard to the "postive nuclear evidence" of
neutrons. It was identified as a problem with the neutron detection
equipment and assumptions, and that claim was retracted. Yet because
physicists expected copious neutrons from "cold fusion," assuming it
would be "d-d fusion", they looked at this as a total debunking of
the Pons and Fleischmann results. They forgot about the heat. "There
must be some mistake." And they did the same with the tritium and
helium findings, which were not confirmed until substantially later.
"There must be some mistake."
When it was announced, Huizenga immediately recognized the importance.
Miles found that helium production was correlated with excess heat,
at a value experimentally consistent with deuterium fusing to helium.
Huizenga knew that if this work was confirmed, it was basically all
over. Cold fusion was real, and was probably fusion, i.e., some form
of fusion of deuterium to helium. Huizenga then stated his
expectation that it would not be confirmed, "because there are no
gamma rays." That, again, betrayed, clearly, his expectation that if
cold fusion was real, the reaction would have to be the same reaction
that is a rare branch in hot fusion, d+d -> helium-4, which always
produces a gamma.
"Unknown nuclear reaction" never penetrated the skulls of the
skeptics. They were rejecting cold fusion because it obviously wasn't
the known reaction.
Miles was confirmed. We can wish for more accurate confirmation, but
the bare fact of heat/helium correlation simply can't be
scientifically denied any more. They continue to deny it, claiming
that "it must be leakage from ambient helium," which is blatantly in
contradiction to experimental fact, but it continues to be asserted
with straight faces, as if it was perfectly reasonable. No, it's not
ambient helium, because of a series of observations: when adequate
heat has been generated, the helium levels rise above ambient; when
there is no heat, there is no helium (which is actually confirmed by
the findings of two of the most notable early "negative
replications," which found no heat and no helium); and in some work,
ambient helium is not excluded; what is found is rise above ambient.
Cold fusion is obviously still "controversial," but the extreme
skeptical position disappeared from the scientific journals sometime
around or before the 2004 United States Department of Energy repeated
review of the field.
One of the signs that the skepticism is pseudoskepticism, a
maintained belief that something doesn't exist, is that the
"skeptical" explanations become more and more contorted and/or repeat
myths from the past, asserted over and over, when those were never,
themselves, published under peer review or other reliable source.
It is *so* irritating to see the speculative implications of Pons and
Fleischmann's work -- which remain possible -- reported as if those
were the scientific claims. Pons and Fleishmann did not claim "cold
fusion." They claimed a series of things:
1. anomalous heat, at levels that, in their judgment as chemists,
could not be chemistry, therefore must be nuclear
2. neutron and gamma radiation at low levels, inadequate for fusion
producing the radiation to explain the heat
3. tritium, again at low levels
4. helium
The core claim, and their original discovery, was the heat. Their
neutron findings were artifact. Their tritium and helium findings
were questioned. (Whether or not they actually found tritium and
helium has never been resolved. Tritium and helium have been reliably
found by others. Only the helium has been correlated with the heat.)
However, their calorimetry was superb, and their excess heat findings
were amply confirmed; that this took months instead of weeks allowed
an appearance of irreproducibility to arise, and "not reproducible"
has persisted in news accounts. It wasn't true, and hasn't been true
since 1989. What was true was that the effect was *difficult* to reproduce.
Speculation that cold fusion will solve our energy problems remains,
to some degree, speculation. Since it *hasn't* solved our energy
problems, this is obviously not a "scientific fact." It's an
interpretation, and people can, if they wish, continue to argue about
it, until something happens like a Rossi or DGT "reactor" shows up at
Home Depot. If one ever does. Mary Yugo and Joshua Cude are armchair
critics, they have never touched a cold fusion experiment, they
merely search for ways to assert something negative. And once they
find something that sounds sane, they repeat it over and over, and
connection with reality does not matter, all that matters is the
written equivalent of sound bite. They do not have definitive
research to point to that confirms what they claim. They are really
hold-outs, clinging to old ideas in spite of accumulated evidence,
they are true cranks.
These cranks interpret every new development in a way to dismiss the
obvious implications. For example, the 2004 U.S. DoE review should
have been a sign to the cranks that "there must be some mistake."
Because, however, the bureaucrat who summarized the review wrong that
the conclusions were similar to the 1989 ERAB Panel review, and
because that 1989 review was widely framed as a total rejection of
cold fusion -- it wasn't -- they insist that "nothing has changed."
Yet the 2004 review was evenly divided (9/18) on the crucial question
of excess heat, half the reviewers thought that evidence for excess
heat was strong. That's a vast change from 1989. I'll point out that
not strong is not a synonym for bogus. It merely means that half of
the reviewers were not convinced. And what did these reviewers
actually do? Did they engage in an extensive inquiry with experts in
the field, did they check all the research? From the reviewer
reports, no, they did not. Some of these opinions were not
well-considered. "Hey, I'm an expert, and I think *this*"
This is a clear fact: there has never appeared a definitive debunking
of cold fusion, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Cold
fusion papers and articles are now published by journals published by
the largest scientific publishers in the world. We still see the
American Physical Society holding out, we see certain publications
that heavily committed themselves, in 1989-1990, to "no more articles
on this junk," holding out, though that has been cracking a bit. But
Springer-Verlag and Elsevier are publishing in the field, and those
are the two largest. The American Chemical Society has returned to
what should have been it's practical duty in 1989-1990: defending the
integrity of chemists. They published the Low Energy Nuclear Reaction
sourcebook series with Oxford University Press.
There is no question that some of what is published in the field is
of low quality. That's what happens when a major scientific fiasco
has taken place, and the debate is largely shut out of mainstream
journals, as took place in the 1990s. Those who want to work in the
field circle the wagons and provide comfort to each other, and become
quite reluctant to openly criticize low-quality work and even fairly
obvious errors.
Pseudoskeptics often point to Langmuir's criteria for "pathological
science" as if it were obvious that cold fusion fits them. It
doesn't. The effect does not disappear with increased accuracy of
measurement. The effect is not close to noise. Correlation of heat
with helium is the kind of evidence that would, under normal
conditions, totally resolve the experimental mystery, but it is
ignored because such a heavy assumption of "there must be some
mistake" continues, for some, to allow rejection of *any* evidence.
Unlike two other well-known examples of "pathological science,"
N-rays and polywater, the alleged artifact was never shown for cold
fusion heat.
However, because Lewis experienced an artifact himself, apparent
excess heat from failure to stir, he announced that this must be the
problem with the Pons-Fleischmann work, which was a reasonable
speculation, the only problem being that it did not apply to the
Pons-Fleischmann protocol. Lewis can be somewhat forgiven for his
error, because his rushed attempt wasn't blessed with real knowledge
of the real protocol, and all that is history. Lewis' speculation was
not confirmed, except it stands as a general warning: isoperibolic
calorimetry can be vulnerable to this kind of error. This objection
does not apply, for example, to the careful work of Michael McKubre at SRI.
Whenever individual experts have been retained to study cold fusion,
and were allowed resources that could make this possible, the experts
have confirmed the experimental results indicating the reality of the
effect. Notable examples are McKubre, originally retained by the
Electric Power Research Institute, and Robert Duncan, retained by CBS News.
Cold fusion is a scientific reality, and we need to continually
hammer this point. At one time, the skeptics ridiculed those who
accepted cold fusion (or LENR, which is a term that sidesteps the
question of "fusion") because of lack of publication of definitive
results in the journals they expected to be definitive, their
journals, essentially, and they list them. However, no significant
skeptical paper has been published in this field for the better part
of a decade, in spite of significantly increased positive
publication. They ascribe this to what they believe: that any
sensible scientist long ago concluded that cold fusion was bogus. Yet
if some "bogus" idea is continually being published in mainstream
journals, and cold fusion papers, both on experimental results and on
theory, continue to be published, eventually, one would think, there
would be some answer.
Where is it? All we see are some dedicated cranks who respond on
blogs and in commentaries on articles, repeating the same discredited
arguments, over and over. There is no science there, only opinion.
