Joshua, I find your arguments not only logically inconsistent but not
even accurate. First of all, you and many other people made such a
fuss about CF being impossible, that the money required to advance
understanding was denied. OK, we all know that some money was
provided. This amount did achieve an increased level of understanding,
which you now deny exists, but it was not enough. Then you use this
failure to make progress as evidence that the effect is not real.
Surely you see the problem with this kind of circular argument. I
won't bore you with all the examples of great discoveries taking a
long time to be accepted, but you get my point.
You say that everyone in conventional science does not believe the
effect is real. This statement is not accurate. Actually, most
scientists have no knowledge about what has been discovered.
Therefore, their opinion is based on ignorance. When I tell people
what has been discovered, they are amazed and become very interested.
The series of ICCF conferences, the latest being at the Univ. of
Missouri, you must conclude were organized by fools and people outside
of conventional science.
You and a few other people have created a myth. I can understand why
people trying to get support for their work on hot fusion would want
CF to die and I can see why people who have a relationship to
conventional energy sources might be worried, but why do you get fun
by advancing the myth? What is your self interest? I assume you have
actually studied what has been discovered. If you have, then you have
spent many hours learning about something that you do not think is
real so that you can convince other people it is not real. This seems
like a strange way to spend your time. Don't you have a life, a wife,
kids, and a job that requires a useful contribution? Your behavior
truly mystifies me. Why would a sane, intelligent person spend time
doing something so worthless to society and himself? If CF is real,
all of civilization would benefit, a benefit your actions would delay.
If it is not real, only a few of us are wasting our time and do not
need you to save us from this waste.
Ed Storms
On May 4, 2013, at 3:06 AM, Joshua Cude wrote:
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.