At 11:20 AM 11/9/2012, Jeff Berkowitz wrote:
I have a friend, very smart guy, who I've been working on over time
with occasional CF/LENR tidbits and arguments. Lately he wrote this,
and gave me permission to send it along.
Perhaps this response will help your friend.
So, let's identify all the groups involved here, from the seekers to
the suckers. :-)
It's not necessarily easy to do. But, if one knows the science, i.e.,
what is scientifically know about CF/LENR, it's possible to tell who
knows it and who does not. There are few people who know the science
who reject it. The obvious examples that might come up, say Richard
Garwin, while smart physicists, don't seem to be familiar with the
breadth of evidence, and I've never seen them answer the fundamental
research that demonstrates the reality of cold fusion, except with
the kind of objections that one can come up with *without knowing the
real evidence, confirmations, etc.*
We have the seekers, people like Jeff who think this just might be
real, more likely than not that LENR can be used for some good, but
are aware of all the hucksters out there.
There are two questions which must be kept separate, or the whole
issue becomes confused. The first is the reality of cold fusion/LENR.
As long as we don't imagine that "fusion" tells us what the mechanism
is, cold fusion is confirmed. It's real. However, what has been most
widely confirmed is palladium deuteride fusion, and it seems to be
highly sensitive to difficult-to-control materials issues, and may
not be sustainable; i.e., it's possible that the effect destroys the
specific narrow environment that catalyzes it.
So cold fusion is real, but *commercial applications of cold fusion*
might not be real, and might never be real.
But we don't have scientific evidence either way. The major research
problem -- hardly anyone is doing research any more to prove that
cold fusion is real, it's a waste of time -- is the mechanism. It is
unknown. There are theories people are working on, and none are
complete, and none can yet be used to make the kind of predictions
necessary to engineer practical applications. So practical
applications, at this point, will be hit-or-miss, and mostly miss.
The commercial investigations are, partly because of some really bad
decisions by the U.S. Patent Office, secret, and there is some
motivation for entrepreneurs to make themselves look crazy, to put
others off the trail while at the same time attracting enough
interest to raise needed capital. How one tells the difference
between a con artist and a shrewed entrepreneur who makes himself
look like a con artist is ...
How? Got any magic method?
We have the hopefuls, like me, that hope it can be found but don't
have a whole lot of faith, will be tickled to death (by a large
neutron beam) if it is found to be possible.
Cold fusion, it's well-known, doesn't produce neutrons. If it did, it
would be very dangerous, being around a cold fusion reactor, unless
heavily shielded, would be fatal. This was, in fact, one of the
reasons for rejection of cold fusion in 1989, because ordinary, known
fusion, produces copious neutrons.
"Did you hear about Fleischmann's graduate student? He's not dead."
No, it's an unknown reaction, still, but what is known about the
Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect is that it produces helium, commensurate
with expected ratio from heat if the reaction is the conversion of
deuterium to helium, by any means, and without any significant
radiation, not neutrons, and not gamma rays either (which classically
would have been expected from two solitary deuterons fusing to a
single helium nucleus).
We have the sloppy scientists who want it to be true but are so
sloppy in their work they can't tell, but claim they have actually
done it and are open about how. Some want investors, some
don't. Some scientists can't reproduce the results, other sloppy
scientists can sort of on occasion tend to kinda verify the results.
All scientists who followed the original protocol, and who dealt with
problems as they arose, and who persisted as needed, eventually found
the effect. There was quite ample confirmation of the heat effect, on
its own, above noise, carefully measured. Some of the research was
far from sloppy.
But the stake was driven through the heart of pure skepticism in cold
fusion when Miles found, in 1991-94 or so, that helium was being
produced with the heat. Once Miles was confirmed -- and the finding
is matched by the results of a dozen research groups -- this totally
blows the "error in measuring heat" hypothesis out of the water. The
effect is real.
Specific methods are difficult to replicate. That's an engineering
problem, not a scientific one. It does make confirmation more
difficult, by we deal with erratic results all the time, for example
with medicine. We can still determine if a medicine is effective,
through statistics. In the case of cold fusion, the statistical
evidence is overwhelming. If this were a cure for cancer, it would
have been into clinical research immediately, and cancer would have a
cure, very often. Suppose that there is a medicine that cures cancer,
40% of the time, if taken for six months. Suppose that you could tell
by a blood test if the medicine was working, 100% accuracy, so you
only would have to take the medicine for more than a trial, unless it
was working.
That is more or less the situation with cold fusion palladium
deuteride techniques. Unreliable, but real, and the reality is shown
by the test (and the cures that the test was based on.)
We have the hucksters (used to sell water powered cars) who claim to
be able to do it, but always leave out some details so no one can
actually try to reproduce their results. They want investors! They
almost exclusively have something they are putting energy into and
claim to be getting more out (says the math).
That's the commercial side. Really, blame the USPTO. They can't
patent these things, not if "cold fusion" is involved. So secrecy is
what they *must* do, and this situation is known, so then, if there
are hucksters, they would be attracted.
There are four major players at this point with NiH fusion. Rossi,
DGT, Brouillon, and Celani. The first three are commercial. Celani is
working as a scientist, but his work is, as yet, unconfirmed. That
leaves three, who are claiming more robust results than Celani.
Brouillon is working with Michael McKubre on confirmation, but the
jury is out on that. DGT looks like a sane business enterprise,
working under non-disclosure arrangements with some scientists, but
unconfirmed for most of us. Rossi is unique, a showman, charlatan,
clown, con artist, or brilliant but eccentric inventor.
(The claims of "public demonstrations" by Rossi are *all* marred, so
far, by possible error or fraud modes that were overlooked at the
time, and Rossi has consistently refused support by people like Jed
Rothwell, who would design accurate tests. However, see above. Con
artist or shrewd entrepreneur. See, lots of people are uncomfortable
with not knowing things, so often will make up a story, "aha! *This*
is what is happening," when they don't have enough evidence to do
more than guess.)
We have the naysayer scientists who just know it isn't possible, and
dismiss anything without such inspection, just as I wouldn't spend
too much time looking over a new perpetual motion machine. Can't be
done, don't waste anyone's time.
Right. However, there is a teeny problem. To know that "cold fusion"
is impossible, through calculation from what is known (very well
known, in fact) about quantum mechanics, you need to have a reaction
mechanism to analyze. Pons and Fleischmann announced, in fact, an
"unknown nuclear reaction," but it was rejected based on "d-d fusion
at low temperatures is impossible." Even that was theoretically
flawed, it might be possible, *under unanticipated conditions.* There
is a lost referent for "it," which is then applied to *all unknown
reactions,* it's a classic error.
Perpetual motion is not actually impossible, but *useful perpetual
motion* is. That's another matter. Cold fusion is often presented by
pseudoskeptics as "Free Energy," but it is not. The reaction involved
in the FP Heat Effect releases energy from the ordinary conversion of
mass to energy when deuterium is fused to helium, and that is
confirmed (at least the energy released matches the helium formed,
within experimental error). There is nothing "free" here. There is a
fuel and there is an ash. It happens that this reaction is, gram for
gram, one of the most (the most?) energetic reaction known. But
palladium is rare and deuterium is also expensive. The palladium is
probably the big problem, there is not enough palladium available for
much energy production, unless the effect can be made much more efficient.
Most people in the field aren't terribly hopeful that palladium
deuteride can be made practical. But ... until we know what the
actual reaction mechanism is, we may not be able to tell. Both U.S.
Department of Energy reviews called for modest funding of research
under existing programs, the idea that they rejected cold fusion is a
pseudoskeptical myth. In 1989, the judgment was heavily "not proven."
In 2004, it was mixed, with half of the 18 experts from various
fields thinking that the evidence for anomalous heat was conclusive,
and about a third thinking that evidence for "nuclear" as a source of
that energy was convincing or somewhat convincing.
And we have the individual reports. It's clear that some experts
thought cold fusion was totally impossible, therefore why bother
reading all those pesky papers, and it's clear from the final report
that the crucial heat/helium evidence was misinterpreted. I don't
mean that they didn't believe, what they wrote *was not even wrong.*
We may have the evil forces of the current energy cartel that want
us to buy their gasoline and coal, the same guys that bought and
buried the 150 MPG carburetor. They want no discussion
I've seen no sign of this.
And last, we may have the good scientists that really have found how
to do this, and are fighting their way through all the "bad press"
the sloppies and the hucksters create. Can't speak in public forums
because they have been tarred with the same brush used on the hucksters.
The problem is that the "bad press" was created based on a rejection
of solid, confirmed research, back in 1989-1990, this has been called
the "scientific fiasco of the century," by Huizenga, who co-chaired
the 1989 DoE review, and he didn't know the half of it. The rejection
*created* the situations that led to weak research, later. Jed
Rothwell, in another post, listed the things that happened to
researchers. All of them happened, this is quite well-known, see Bart
Simon, Undead Science, Rutgers University Press, 2002, he's a
sociologist of science.
This was a *huge* mess, and the effects still linger, even though the
strongly skeptical position disappeared from the scientific journals
in about 2004, whereas positive publication has quadrupled in that
period. That "bad press" doesn't notice the absence of what it relied
upon twenty years ago. In fact, there never was a review of cold
fusion that killed it. There were experimental findings that were
*assumed* to be highly negative, but that were just the reality: cold
fusion, for example, doesn't produce significant neutrons, so a major
paper setting a limit on the maximum neutron levels being produced
was interesting, but *irrelevant* to the question of reality.
There were attempts to criticize this or that approach to
calorimetry, but none actually made a significant difference when
applied to the real research. Lewis at Caltech found anomalous heat
when he failed to stir his cell, and then claimed that this was the
cause of the FP Heat Effect, but... Pons and Fleischmann's cells were
designed to be rapidly stirred by the bubbling, and were a different
shape and size. And other approaches, such as the flow calorimetry
used by SRI in their work under contract to the Electric Power
Research Institute, were not vulnerable to that kind of possible error.
And helium killed this entire line of inquiry, though the possibility
of calorimetry error is a hazard that all researchers using
calorimetry must watch for and test for.
I think that's it? Who do you think shuts down discussions -- the
naysayers or the evil forces? Do you think they even go so far as
to spawn hucksters to help discredit the whole field?
I doubt it. Too expensive, too cumbersome. There are trolls who bring
the same discredited arguments to forum after forum, but they are
mostly crazy, believers in their own rightness, for the most part. (A
few seem sane, and they have been learning, their positions become
more nuanced.)
They are almost certainly volunteers. There are, however,
pseudoskeptical organizations that make it their business to debunk "quackery."
Standing for science is one thing, but making all that is not science
into "wrong" is not scientific. It's a belief in "scientism," or
"mainstream science," as if this is authoritative. It is what it is.
Most "mainstream science" is probably correct, as far as it goes.
However, mistakes can be made, and they can be doozies.
