On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Joshua Cude wrote: > >> Poor choice of words on my part. Of course I know that skeptics and >> believers disagree about the quality of the evidence . . . >> >> This is not a matter of opinion. The quality of evidence is measured > objectively, based on repeatability and the signal to noise ratio. Anyone > looking at the data from McKubre, Kunimatsu or Fleischmann can see it is > excellent. > To the extent that people disagree, it really is a matter of judgement. The 2004 DOE panel looked at the best evidence advocates had to offer, and they did not find it excellent, so your statement is manifestly false. In fact they found it sufficiently poor that they recommended against allocating funds for the field. That would be unconscionable if they though the research had any merit. > First, it is 19 years old. >> >> No, it was written in 2007. Evidently you are looking at the wrong paper. > Evidently. The paper you listed is a retrospective in a conference proceedings, and the most recent refereed journal paper cited is from 1990. He doesn't even cite his own 1994 paper; has he lost confidence in the results? This makes the absence of progress even more obvious. There is nothing he chose to cite that was sufficiently credible to get published in a refereed journal in 23 years. What's more, he stops short of a definite conclusion that the effect is nuclear, and he admits the evidence is sufficiently weak to allow doubts in the broader community. > I "fall back" on McKubre's earlier paper because it is one of the best > peer-reviewed ones that I have permission to upload to LENR-CANR.org. > Your usual excuse. Maybe you're not familiar with the concept of *journals*. The idea is, that publishing in a journal provides wide access to the material. That's the point of it. This may come as a surprise, but there are libraries other than the ones at Los Alamos and Georgia Tech. So, it's not necessary to actually provide the paper. Just the reference. > However, there is no statute of limitation on scientific facts. > Experiments done in 1650 or 1800 remain as true today as when they were > done. > Right, but if they didn't convince in 1650, and there is no progress since, they won't convince in 2013. Surely the cold fusion world was not satisfied with McKubre's 1994 results. And yet, no one can do better. > > >> 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. >> >> No, it indicates that you have to heat up a cathode to produce a strong > reaction. McKubre's calorimeter prevents you from doing this, > Surely one can do good calorimetry with high temperatures. But McKubre has not succeeded in scaling his results up at all. It remains true that better quality results correspond to lower claims. And no one has published anything close to the P&F 1993 results. > That is why Mizuno's 100 g cathode produced ~100 W of heat after death > for several days, whereas the record for a cathode weighing a few grams was > ~20 W of heat after death for a day. > Presumably that's the anecdotal story of water disappearing at night, that was never reproduced by him or anyone, and never published in a refereed journal. > > >> And the half watt or so that he observed is in the range of artifacts in >> calorimetry experiments. >> >> No, with McKubre's instrument it is a couple of orders of magnitude above > the range of any artifact, as you see in the calibrations. Again, facts are > facts, and waving your hands does not make them go away. > > > And yet in 2001, you said: "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."? You said it was difficult to measure and left room for honest skepticism. The essential problem though is the failure to improve on the experiment. The energy density is a million times higher than chemical, and yet it's always so close to the input. Like you said, it depends on temperature, the particular rods, the surface etc. And yet, he can't improve it. That screams pathological science.
