At 11:10 AM 12/31/2012, James Bowery wrote:
On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 5:25 PM, Jed Rothwell
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
What irks me is when skeptics do not even bother to read the papers
by Bockris, Gerischer or McKubre
The barrier I ran into with one of the founders of the DoE was a
demand that I filter your bibliograpny down to only papers that
appeared in journals of Science Citation Index.
That's no small task and I had to write a few perl scripts to come close.
I believe I posted the results of that to vortex-l when I first
started participating in hopes that I could get some help
penetrating this barrier. I mean, its not every day you get someone
that was hired by Carter to found the DoE's EIA and one of the few
Carter appointees retained by Reagan to offer any conditions
whatsoever under which he would consider a paper reporting
replication of the P&F phenomenon worth his time to read.
Yes, yes, yes... I know, it was my responsibility to disabuse him
of his demand for such a filter, wasn't it? Too bad. Not gonna happen.
Ah, Mr. Bowery, you are jogging my memory....
The fellow would really only need to read three papers, and the first
two are the DoE reviews, both of which recommended research to
resolve open issues, and the third is the Storms paper in
Naturwissenschaften, "Status of cold fusion (2010)". That's a
peer-reviewed review of the field, and, sure, it cites much material
that is not in the Science Citation index, but we are dealing here
with a field where for twenty years most research, no matter how
solid, had great difficulty getting published in the standard journals.
But, of course, there *are* many papers so published. Too many, in
fact, unless someone really wants to dive in fully.
Rather, what someone in the DoE would need to know is that there is
basic research that has not been done because it really isn't needed
any more, for those working on making the effect more reliable.
"Reliable" is a practical question and has *nothing* to do with the science.
The most obvious of these would be research to nail down the reported
heat/helium ratio from the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect. It's quite
well enough established that researchers in the field routinely
assume that helium is generated from palladium deuteride when heat is
being generated, but verifying the correlation happens to be a useful
activity that could serve both skeptics and "believers."
The claim is often made that cold fusion is pathological science, and
that it's like other pathological science, when measurements are made
more accurately and carefully, the anomalous results disappear. Okay,
what happens if the heat/helium ratio is measured more carefully?
(It's a difficult measurement, fairly expensive to do, but it's been
done by a dozen or so research groups around the world, and not only
is there no contrary evidence, some of the original negative
replications that found no heat, also checked for helium, and did not
find it. That is a *confirmation* of the heat/helium ratio. No heat,
no helium.)
(Heat/helium is a *reliable experiment*. To measure the ratio
requires running a series of FP cells and not only doing the standard
calorimetry on them, looking for anomalous heat, but also capturing
the helium, which is actually the hard part. Heat is routinely
measured with accuracy far beyond noise, but helium takes special
care. Nevertheless, correlation uses the "dead cells" as controls.
That is why heat/helium actually cuts through the reliability
problem, because it confirms *both* the heat and helium measurements.
And that the work done so far has approached the deuterium fusion to
helium value doesn't hurt!
John Huizenga was the co-chair of the 1989 DoE review, and he wrote
in about 1993, in the second edition of his book on cold fusion about
the Miles finding of heat/helium correlation that, if confirmed, it
would solve a major mystery of cold fusion, the ash.
Well? Was Miles confirmed? Storms certainly claims so, and that is a
reasonable claim, but ... if it's not true, then confirming Miles
would be long, long overdue. And if it is true, getting a more
accurate measure could help discriminate between alternate theories
as to mechanism.
It is time that the DoE follow its own recommendations. They were
unanimous in 2004. So why is anyone second-guessing them?
*If* your friend, Mr. Bowery, is in doubt about the reality of cold
fusion, and because of the vast possible implications from the
reality of cold fusion, and if he now represents private interests,
funding careful research with this could be crucial as a matter of
due diligence. This work should be bypassed only by those already
convinced that cold fusion is real.
Most cold fusion approaches are famously unreliable, and making them
reliable is probably going to take a lot more research; without
understanding the mechanism ("fusion" does not tell us nearly
enough), engineering the effect will be hit-or-miss. Just testing
this or that approach can give very misleading results. Unless helium
is measured.
This work should first be done with a protocol known to be reasonably
successful. It doesn't have to be "reliable," and heat results can
vary greatly.
