On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 2:30 PM, Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > To be concrete, I think the issue is primarily one about attention to > detail and to questions of burden of evidence. It's fine to be skeptical > of the tritium evidence, for example. But if one is going to argue against > it, one is going to have a lot of work to do. One will have to show how > each tritium result in each experiment was wrong or questionable, in > specific detail; i.e., the burden of evidence (on this list, at any rate) > will be on the person arguing against tritium having been found in some > LENR experiments. > Again, I think that's nonsense. It's not possible to find errors in experiments, just by reading reports, especially when they are incomplete conference proceedings, as is the case for most of the tritium results. It would be a lot of guessing and would not advance the discussion. But the absence of glaring errors does not make a claim credible. What's needed is credible replications and some kind of visible progress. In the case of the tritium results, they vary by *ten* orders of magnitude, and no two labs get the same results or even consistent results themselves. I already argued why the LANL results are not persuasive. Likewise, BARC claimed high tritium results within weeks of the 1989 press conference using Pd-D, and then 2 years later they were claiming levels 5 orders of magnitude lower using H-Ni. What happened to Pd? Then you have Bockris's results were also very high, but were challenged as fraudulent. He was cleared in a hearing, but there was a *hearing*, rather than having the question settled in the lab. Can you imagine if someone had accused Mueller and Bednorz of fraud when they claimed high temperature superconductivity? They would have simply invited the accuser, or adjudicator, or his charge, to the lab, and they would have said, OK, Yup, it works. Or they could have called up *anyone* else in the field on the planet, and they could have said: Yup, it works, they're OK. Tritium results are supposed to be so obvious, but they had to have a hearing to determine if someone contaminated the experiment. You also have McKubre in 1988 confidently stating that tritium is not observed in electrolysis experiments. As with heat (or neutrons), the situation is no clearer with tritium now than it was 20 years ago. The levels have largely decreased over time, and in the last decade, there has been very little activity on the tritium front, which again, fits pathological science, and puts those early results -- some already under suspicion -- in serious doubt. To my mind, if they can't resolve the tritium question in some kind of definitive and quantitative way, there is no hope for heat. > It's simply that one can't get away with a facile statement to the > effect that "there is no reliable evidence that the tritium findings are > not contamination, etc." and expect it to advance anyone's understanding. > It's just a dogmatic assertion, since there are specific reasons to think > it's wrong. > > See above. That's not what I've done. I've said that if there were reliable evidence, the tritium saga would have played out differently, and not just slowly disappeared from the scene.
