On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Their method is assertion rather than trying to advance > mutual understanding of the basic facts to be understood: there are no > convincing experiments, there is zero credible evidence, every experimental > result lies beneath the threshold of detection, and, by implication, there > are no cold fusion researchers who can carry out a credible experiment. > Here there has been little to no attempt to understand the history or the > details of actual experiments. It's all over-broad generalization. > You do seem to like arguing about arguing. But if you read the arguments, they do go beyond the simple assertion that the experiments are all wrong. I really think rehashing the details of all the experiments over 20 years would be a pointless exercise that would serve no purpose. This has been done -- with DOE panels and reviews of grants and journals etc -- and most scientists don't buy it. For casual observers, which I think includes most of the participants, it is possible to get a sense of the credibility of the evidence by making some general observations. So, for example, when Jones Benes argued that the tritium evidence was the bee's knees, he made no argument about specific results, but rather, based the argument on LANL's reputation. My reply was not mere assertion but a 5 point argument that dismantled his claim, and used LANL's reputation against cold fusion. In brief, it was that (1) the papers were all conference proceedings, (2) the same authors retracted neutron results, (3) Menlove jumped ship, (4) at the end the claimed levels were low, mostly near background, and (5) LANL abandoned the experiment in 1998 without a single respectable publication, and not a hint of the work on their web site. Similar arguments can be made about the tritium results in general. In particular, why is no one doing them anymore, considering nothing interesting about them has been settled.
