On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 7:59 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Joshua Cude wrote: > > >> That's cold fusion's problem: the quality of the evidence is abysmal -- >> not better than the evidence for bigfoot, alien visits, dowsing, >> homeopathy. . . >> >> > Incorrect. The quality of evidence is excellent. > Poor choice of words on my part. Of course I know that skeptics and believers disagree about the quality of the evidence, so using that statement as a premise is as pointless as Hagelstein using "Cold fusion is real." as a premise. What I should have said is that the quality of the evidence is perceived as abysmal in the mainstream. That's all that was necessary for the point I was making. Namely, that if Hagelstein does not confront, or at least acknowledge that perception, he loses the confidence of all but the true believers. Anyway, if you think the evidence is excellent, why did you write: "Why haven’t researchers learned to make the results stand out? After twelve years of painstaking replication attempts, most experiments produce a fraction of a watt of heat, when they work at all. Such low heat is difficult to measure. It leaves room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real." That was in 2001, but your favorite high-quality paper (referred to below) was 7 years before that. > See: > > http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionb.pdf > > This example illustrates the problem. First, it is 19 years old. That you invariably fall back to this paper when quality is challenged shows the lack of progress. The paper identified 3 criteria to achieve high reproducibility, but a few years later the Toyota IMRA lab in Japan reported negative results in 27 of 27 electrolysis cells. Evidently, they could not satisfy McKubre's criteria. That's not surprising since in 1998, McKubre himself questioned the quality of that 1994 paper when he wrote: "With hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat production was premature…". He was only getting excess heat from 20% of his cells. And in 2008, McKubre wrote: "… we do not yet have quantitative reproducibility in any case of which I am aware.", and " in essentially every instance, written instructions alone have been insufficient to allow us to reproduce the experiments of others." To most scientists, this means there is no reproducibility in the field. And that represents low quality evidence. Second, the paper is an excellent example showing how improved experimental techniques reduce the alleged effect. The year before P&F had claimed 160 W output with 40 W input. That paper was challenged for its poor calorimetry. With McKubre's much improved calorimetry, the claimed output was about 10.5 W with 10 W input (give or take). That suggests that P&F's claim could have all been artifact. And the half watt or so that he observed is in the range of artifacts in calorimetry experiments. As you have said, "calorimetric errors and artifacts are more common that researchers realize". And then 4 years later, with a presumably improved experiment, McKubre gets about the same power level, but in a smaller fraction of the cells. And that seems to be the end of his efforts at improving the experiments, or attempting to scale them up to make the results "stand out". Since then, he has become a kind of validator for hire, working with Dardik or Brillouin, or defending Rossi, and even lending his credibility to the Papp engine. Third, (as Jay2013 (who has done LENR experiments) has emphasized, along with much other criticism at wavewatching.net/fringe/lenr-call-for-the-best-papers/#comments see 7:18 pm) the heat monotonically and suspiciously tracks the input current, which is not what one would expect from a nuclear reaction, but what one would expect from an artifact. In particular, the heat drops off much more quickly when the current is stopped than could be explained by diffusion of the deuterium. Especially considering the many claims of heat lasting for days after the current is stopped. (Jay also wrote: "If I read this paper in 1994 I might be thinking “OK, you have my attention. Why don’t you see if you can trace some of the parametric dependencies for the effect, improve your cathode to get higher signal, show me more complete data with more statistics and hopefully return in a couple of years with some more ironclad results?” Sadly, it’s now nearly twenty years later and while McKubre did come up with a few additional parametric dependencies in later papers, I don’t recall if he was ever able to improve much on the signal." I couldn't have said it better.) Fourth, this paper was available to the 2004 DOE panel, which in fact noted many deficiencies in the techniques, methods, and interpretation of the data presented, and were not convinced by the evidence that nuclear reactions were occurring. Sixth, the very journal that published that paper (and many other cold fusion papers in the early days) stopped publishing cold fusion papers in 2000. They seem to have lost confidence in the field, suggesting that, in their judgement, the evidence is weak. > As Ed pointed out, Cude has not found any error in any paper, and he has > not pointed out errors here. > That's true. My post was a response to Hagelstein's rationalization of the mainstream opposition, which is seen all over the internet forums. In any case, it is not necessary for there to be blatant errors that can be recognized from reading papers, for the evidence to be unconvincing. Especially when, as cold fusion advocate David Nagel wrote in 2009, "there is a significant need for better documentation of experiments. Al Katrib reviewed over 300 experimental papers, most of which presented what was done and found in electrochemical heat measurements. The number of papers that provide all relevant information is disappointingly small. Factors that are needed include the time history of excess power production, the total output and input ener- gies (and, by difference, the excess energy), the cell volumes, the material, size and shape of the electrodes, loading ratios, and the temperatures in and around the cells." The weakness in the evidence stems from the absence of quantitative or inter-lab replication, from the inability to scale the effect up, from the inability to design an experiment claiming energy density a million times that of dynamite, that can power itself by heating an isolated device in a credible demo. Reproducibility does not have to mean the experiment works every time. Examples of (early) transistors or cloning are often cited as experiments that only have a statistical reproducibility. But cold fusion does not even have this. If the transistor or cloning recipes are followed, the success rates are the same within experimental error. But with cold fusion, they aren't in the same ballpark. If you made a transistor that worked, anyone could make it work, but if you get a LENR cathode that works, it only works in one lab, with one experimenter. The reality is that there is not a single experiment in the field that a qualified scientist can perform with expected results (other than null results), even on a statistical basis, and there is not a single nuclear reaction that people in the field can agree is occurring. The weakness also stems from inconsistent observations. First, they needed heavy water, and light water was used as a control; now light water is just fine thank-you. First, the loading had to be > 90%; now gas loading barely above 50% works. From an article in NewScientist: "When Imam examined the [failed] sample he found that unlike the others, which all had a flawless surface, this one had minute cracks that had appeared when it formed. A correlation between cracks and null results has been noted by many researchers, before and since." Nowadays, if you're keeping up, cold fusion *success* is all about minute cracks and imperfections. Here's what Storms said in 1996: "crack-free palladium is rare and difficult to obtain with consistent properties. Failure to use appropriate palladium appears to be the most likely reason for not producing excess energy." And here he is in 2012: "The common environment in which LENR occurs is proposed to be cracks of a critical size," The best illustration of weak evidence is provided by Rossi, and it is not necessary to identify errors in the measurements to show their weakness. Simple analysis shows that the observations can be explained without invoking nuclear reactions, and in this I have been detailed and explicit both in this forum (more than a year ago) and in others. Yet in spite of nearly unequivocal arguments that nuclear reactions are not needed, believers like you and surprisingly Storms, are not swayed. In fact, you have said Rossi has provided the very best evidence for cold fusion ever. If that's true, to debunk his proof is to debunk the field. > > > In 1991, Heinz Gerischer wrote: "there are now undoubtedly overwhelming > indications that nuclear processes take place in the metal alloys." He was > the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin, > and one of the best electrochemists of the 20th century. He examined the > experiments carefully and wrote detailed technical critiques of them. > He spent a week at a cold fusion conference and wrote a short memorandum on his observations. The statement you quote sounds really positive at first glance, but I could make the same statement about the Loch Ness Monster or alien visitations, even while remaining skeptical of both. He was optimistic, to be sure, but he also said in the same document: "It demands confirmation and further experimental evaluation." and "The overwhelming problem is the lack of reproducibility in the results." He died shortly after this document, so we'll never know how he would have regarded the field after 20 more years without improvement in the reproducibility. > > So, who are we going to believe here? Cude who offers no evidence? Or > Gerisher and several hundred other world class experts? > Cold fusion has had a few world class experts involved. Fleischmann, Bockris, Schwinger, and Arata come to mind. But there are very few if any now, and there were never hundreds. But there are world class scientists who were and are skeptical, including Nobel laureates Gell-Mann, Lederman, Glashow, Weinberg, Seaborg, and also distinguished scientists like Close, Lewis, Koonin, Garwin, and Park. And of course several that followed it far more closely than Gerischer like Huizenga and Morrison, and all the members of the 1989 DOE panel, and to a lesser extent the 2004 DOE panel. So, I would say believe them rather that Gerischer's equivocal view. > > Skeptics have never looked carefully or published papers showing errors in > cold fusion. Morrison tried, but his paper was a farce. This is the best > that any skeptic has managed to publish in 25 years. It is here: > > What do you mean "tried"? Morrison attended nearly all the cold fusion conferences until his death, and wrote a regular newsletter about them -- all far more detailed than anything Gerischer did. And he published a paper (Physics Letters A 185 (1994) 498) questioning P&F calorimetry, among other things. It's true that P&F vigorously defended their work, but they were never able to publish such claims again, in spite of 5 years in their own lab with tens of millions in funding. And those results were sufficiently dubious that they were not mentioned by advocates in the submission to the 2004 DOE panel, except as an unquantified example of heat after death. So, regardless of how you read that exchange, Morrison has been vindicated by history. And that is hardly the only skeptical paper. For the first few years, negative publications outnumbered positive, and that together with the poor quality of the positive claims convinced most scientists that the phenomenon was almost certainly bogus. Surely you're aware of the Jones' challenge to Miles' results in Jones & Hansen, "Examination of Claims of Miles…", J. Phys. Chem. 95 (1995) 6966. He writes in the abstract: "The juxtaposition of several poor techniques and inconsistent data does not make a compelling case for cold fusion. We conclude that the evidence for cold fusion from these efforts is far from compelling." And CERN published a paper contradicting Piantelli's Ni-H claims in 1996, and I seem to remember Kowalski published a challenge to the SPAWAR results. The earthtech.org group certainly has some detailed challenges to cold fusion results, but they are not peer-reviewed. There is a recent paper by Dmitriyeva which challenges claims of nuclear excess heat in deuterium hydride by showing it is chemical in origin. (Thermochim. Acta 543 (2012) 260). There are others as well, but it's not surprising that skeptics are not motivated to write critiques of moribund fields, already rejected by anyone who matters. What would be the point of preaching to the choir. And everyone knows there is no hope of persuading the true believers. I just mention the few *refereed* papers above to show how little stock one should put in your absolute declarations ("skeptics have never..."). And since I have cited the Jones paper before in exchanges with you, it is as likely to be attributed to dishonesty as ignorance.
