At 06:46 AM 12/10/2012, Alain Sepeda wrote:
. how can you be scientist and say that you will refuse a fact if
there is no theory to explain it (said so). how can other scientist
around let that stupidity be said without shouting like a priest in
a whorehouse.
Well, what happened is what is called a "cascade." The conditions of
announcement of cold fusion led to an almost-hysterical attempt to
confirm, and it did not help that the U.S. administration wanted the
matter answered *immediately*, i.e., within weeks. Physicists with
influence with the administration almost certainly said that it was
very unlikely that the announcement was real. So the ERAB panel was
quickly convenened, and the Dperatment of Energy funding a lot of
hasty replications.
Several factors contribued to the cascade. First of all, the hasty
replications utterly failed. But along the way, some made premature
announcements of findings, like findings of neutrons. And then
quickly retracted when they realized these were artifact. Pons and
Fleischmann, themselves, in their first paper, reported neutrons.
That these were low level was noticed -- they explicitly said that --
but when these were found to be artifact, the tendendcy was to throw
out the baby with the bathwater. If they had erred so badly with
neutrons, didn't that indicate that their heat measurements might also be poor?
The idea grew up very rapidly that the orignal work was shoddy,
"pathological science." The myth began that "nobody could replicate"
their finding, and that is still repeated in print sometimes, today.
I even saw it in a report, a couple of years ago, in major media, on
the SPAWAR neutron findings. Stuff on the order of "Pons and
Fleischmann reported cold fusion in 1989, but nobody could replicate
their work. Now, the U.S. Navy is reporting neutron radiation...."
The ERAB Panel report actually recommended further research. Positive
replications started to appear before they were finished, they
largely ignored them. The real issue before the ERAB panel was not
the reality of cold fusion, and their conclusion about that was "no
conclusion." The real issue was whether or not there should be a
massive, specially funded federal program. Their answer was "not
yet." Some of the panel, though, and probably a large majority, was
highly skeptical.
And the scientific community knew that.
Cold fusion did really threaten some major programs, entire
institutions that were dependent upon massive funding for a long-term
project to develop hot fusion, and that's still going on. So what was
seen as "rejection" by the ERAB panel was quite convenient.
Self-interest aligned with what might seem to be sound public policy:
why allow public funds to be "wasted" pursuing this impossible dream.
The violations of scientific protocol were truly shocking. That has
been well documented by Simon, in Undead Science (Simon is a
sociologist of science. It's funny that Wikipedia quotes him when
they want to establish that the "scientific consensus" rejected cold
fusion, but consistently refused, in my experience, when he'd written
something about *how* that happened. That is because the cabal
sitting on the article on Wikipedia has a point of view, that cold
fusion is bogus, pseudoscience, and they don't want their readers to
be misled into thinking it might be real. They are actually violating
Wikipedia policy, and some of them have, in turn, been banned because
they went to far in this pseudoskepticism. They also apply the same
practices to other areas of interest to the "skeptical community,"
i.e., they oppose balanced coverage of homeopathy, they want the
coverage to "explain" how it's pseudoscientific BS, they take the
same position on psychic phenomena, instead of the deeper skepticism
of someone like Truzzi, who believed in the scientific method and in
keeping an open mind. Truzzi, one of the founders of CSISOP,
regretted how skeptics too often became advocates of "bogosity."
And I've still seen that with regard to cold fusion in the skeptical
(and mostly atheist) community. They have strong, quasi-religious
positions that they espouse with fervor, every fact that might be
adduced in support of cold fusion is heavily interpreted to explain
away anything that might seem real, while the most preposterous
"explanations" are accepted. The real situation in the scientific
journals flipped, sometime around 2004. Since something like 1991,
positive publications on cold fusion, as classified by the
neutral/skeptic Britz, have exceeded negative ones, but total
publication rate declined to something like six per year by 2005,
with at most one of those being "negative." That is fit, then, into
the nice neat picture of cold fusion as "pathological science,"
because one of the traits would be that, after an initial burst of
enthusiasm for some "false discovery," publication dies off over
time. This doesn't really match the history of, say, N-rays or
polywater, those ideas didn't survive with substantial publication
and ongoing research for twenty years and counting.... And those
"findings" were discredited, not by some "impossibility argument,"
which was known to be defective, not conclusive, but by actual
controlled experiment that pulled out the reason to even think the
findings were real.
This never happened with cold fusion. And at around 2005, positive
publication rate started to increase, and it's up to something like
two dozen papers a year in the mainstream journals. But there is
more. In 2009, Naturwissenschaften, Springer-Verlag's "flagship
multidisciplinary journal," was getting so many papers submitted that
they needed a LENR editor, so they engaged Edmund Storms. And I know
that Storms wrote a paper, in 2010, that covered the heat/helium
evidence, which is truly conclusive on cold fusion. I know because I
worked on it. He did submit the paper to NW. Now, he was LENR editor.
Was he able to approve his own paper? Highly unlikely, this would be
Springer-Verlag, the world's second largest scientific publisher,
risking the very considerable reputation of their journal on
something that would be a gross violation of scientific tradition,
that of independent peer review.
In any case, the editor of NW asked him to instead submit a review of
the field, which he did. And they published it. The review was titled
"Review of cold fusion (2010), and it's remarkable expecially because
the less explicit name of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions -- Storms had
used that in the title of his book -- wasn't used. They came right
out and said "Cold fusion." And the conclusion in the abstract is
very clear: evidence is strong that a reaction between deuterons to
form helium is taking place.
(I didn't like that phrase, and argued against it. I would have
written, "a reaction is converting deuterium to helium." "Deuterons"
will imply single deuterons are reacting with each other, the
infamous "d-d fusion" that was considered to be impossible. Well, it
might be impossible. Dr. Storms does think that the reaction is some
kind of d-d fusion, his recently proposed mechanism could be called
d-e-d fusion, it's a form of "electron-catalyzed fusion." But the
bottom line is that we don't know what is happening.)
So, when it is pointed out to pseudoskeptics that all overall reviews
of cold fusion, for a very long time, have been positive, and this
specific one, the most comprehensive and published in the journal of
the highest reputation, they uniformly point out what they can assert
to satisfy themselves that they don't have to accept this nonsense --
since, after all, it's impossible. They will mention, of course, that
Storms is an editor there. They will also call the journal a "biology
journal." It isn't. However it is managed through the Life Sciences
division of Springer-Verlag. They don't have a multidisciplinary
division. The pseudoskeptics are trying to make it seem that
Naturwissenschaften would not have access to decent peer review
resources, adequate to review cold fusion, which is preposterous.
It's all obvious, but once people have been convinced that what they
believe is a "scientific consensus," it can be very difficult to
dislodge. This doesn't just happen with cold fusion!
Once the cascade took place, and once "prominent physicists"
pronounced cold fusion "dead," the appearance was strong that the
original claims had been seriously discredited -- even though the
1989 review did not conclude that. Scientists did not, then, pay
careful attention to what ensued. The finding of helium, whenever it
was mentioned, was easily dispatched as "probable leakage," and this
trope continued in the 2004 DoE report.
And what happened in 2004? Again, this was
misunderstood/misrepresented by pseudoskeptics. The report says, in
describing itself as an overall result, says that the "conclusion was
much the same as in 1989." However, anyone who actually reads the
1989 report and the 2004 report, with an open mind, should be struck
by some huge differences. By 2004, *half* the reviewers thought that
the evidence for anomalous heat was "conclusive." If half think it is
conclusive, what do the other half think? We know that many of the
reviewers maintained a knee-jerk rejection of cold fusion, it's
apparent from some of the reviewer reports. We can also tell that
some reviewers misunderstood the critical heat/helium evidence. It is
the correlation between heat and helium that validates both the heat
and helium results. Coincidence of artifacts would not explain that
correlation, it's strong. Leakage would not explain the behavior of
the Case experiments, which were described in an appendix to the
review paper in 2004. However, that paper was written as an attempt
to maintain a neutral style, assuming readers who will dig and take
great care to understand. The appendix was difficult to understand.
Probably out of familiarity, certain things were not clearly
explained. What were really hydrogen controls were easily interpreted
by reviewers as being experimental cells, and the negative helium
results, then amalgamated with the positive ones, made it look like
most cells *contradicted* the heat/helium correlation. It's a blatant
error in interpretation, that was made.
And, still, with that, one-third of the reviewers though that the
evidence for the origin of the anomalous heat was "convincing or
somewhat convincing." Now, given the difficulties in this field, and
given the ready misunderstanding of that evidence in what was
actually a shallow, quick review, with no serious and extended
back-and-forth to make sure that communication had been effective,
that as many reviewers as did felt the evidenc was at least "somewhat
convincing" is remarkable. This was in almost no way like 1989. In
1989, the recommendation for modest research under existing programs
was forced, by the threatened resignation of the Nobelist co-chair.
In 2004, it was reported as "unanimous."
Yet it is still happening that funding is being denied because of
intervention by the enemies of cold fusion research. Grants have been
awarded and cancelled recently. The Department of Energy has never
followed its own panel's recommendations. Governmental funding for
this research has been sparse, and always through other agencies, and
sometimes with direct hostility coming from the DoE, apparently.
The history is coming out. Truth will out, it can only be suppressed
for so long. The "truth" I'm speaking about here is the history of
this field. It's been well-documented, and you can see it as well in
the "skeptical publications." Huizenga's book is scientifically embarassing.
The recommendations of both DoE panels were appropriate for their
time. There is still no solid evidence that cold fusion would benefit
from a large-scale, massive federal program. Before such a decision
would properly be made, there are basic research issues to be
addressed. What is the mechanism for the Fleischmann-Pons heat
effect? There are now other LENR possibilities. Are NiH reactions
possible? What is the ash from NiH reactions? And, again, what is the
mechanism?
Pseudoskeptics have long claimed two things: that heat/helium is just
a big mistake, and that results disappear when measurement accuracy
is increased. That isn't true, in fact, increased measurement
accuracy simply shows the effects more clearly, but what if it were
true? Heat/helium evidence was probative enough to warrant that
review in Naturwissenschaften. So how about funding for research to
measure heat/helium more accurately? Heat/helium is actually the
clearest, reproducible experiment claimed. The FPHE is notoriously
erratic, but heat/helium is not erratic. No heat, no helium.
The problem with measuring heat/helium is not the measurement of
heat, there are methods that are practically bulletproof. The problem
is capturing and measuring all the helium. It's only been done, with
some attempted completeness, a few times. Those times allow Storms to
estimate 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4, compared with the theoretical value for
deuterium fusion of 23.8 MeV/He-4. The single best measurement,
apparently, was done at SRI. I don't recall the actual numbers, but
the error bar was on the order of an MeV, and it was consistent with
the 23.8 MeV figure. That work has been criticized, but the criticism
doesn't cut to the heart of this. Regardless of possible error, the
correlation is certainly close to the deuterium fusion value, and
heat and helium are clearly correlated (it could be much looser than
it is and this would still stand).
If what has been implied from this is error, the way to find out is
to measure it more accurately. That's expensive. McKubre has poihted
out to me that it's not just a matter of running the experiment. To
keep the helium from leaking requires vessels and seals that are
helium leak-tight. That makes every step in the process more
difficult. An electrode lead fails. Everything must be disassembled
to fix it, and then the whole thing must be purged and cleared of
ambient helium. And then there is the problem that as much as half
the helium seems to implant in the cathode, which would be expected
if the helium is born with some energy, even if it is small, as long
as the energy is substantially higher than thermal energy at the
temperatures involved. Helium doesn't like to move through palladium.
So extraordinary measures will need to be taken to measure this
helium, it is not just a matter, to get an accurate figure, to
measure helium in the gases (which was fine for establishing
correlation, that's what Miles did). Those materials will need to be
treated to release all the helium.
Now if the skeptics are real skeptics, interested in science and not
just their own existing beliefs, surely they will support this
research, which, if heat/helium is artifact, would surely expose it.
If they oppose it, history will judge them even more harshly, as
die-hards who opposed the advancement of science for personal
reasons. We have already lost much of twenty years, we have put off
the day when cold fusion *might* vastly shift the ways in which we
generate energy, might resolve the issues of global warming, and
twenty years is a long time. What is the cost per year of delay? It
could be, from a very rough estimate, a trillion dollars. If we
discount this, perhaps assuming a 50% chance that, for some reason,
cold fusion can never be practical (possible but unlikely), that's
over a billion dollars per day of delay. Perhaps we should take that
out of the paycheck of those who have unreasonably opposed cold
fusion research, or will the humiliation of history be adequate as a
consequence?
(I'll say that nobody should be punished, of course, for mere
opinion, but those who have acted outside of duty to obstruct this
research should be exposed and, where appropriate, sanctioned, i.e.,
lose their jobs or the like, if they continue in this way.) There are
scientists still active who played shameful roles in this affair, and
they should be confronted, but this is not the job of cold fusion
researchers, this is a task for political activists.)
It is time that the basic research that is needed, to elucidate the
operating parameters of cold fusion, and to provide the necessary
detailed evidence to allow the development of sound tehroy, is
appropriately funded. It wouldn't hurt to spend a little too much, if
that's possible. So long was way too little spent, so long was this
research buffeted by ridicule and sometimes deliberate damage to the
careers of scientist.
Enough.
