94 Comments

The biggest problem with CF: they've had 25 years and have yet to produce a generator that could power my desktop lava lamp.

If I had that kind of job performance as an engineer, I would've been shown the door a long time ago. And I'd be lucky if the boss didn't bounce my framed diploma off the back of my head on the way out.

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I like that last paragraph and I've definitely seen it in action in my career. I'm no expert on cold fusion, either, but here's my $0.02: the best way to shut the critics up is to produce something useful. Isn't that what it's really all about? We're 25 years down the road and all we have are scientific papers to argue about. If cold fusion were a viable technology, it would be in use in industry.

25 years down the road and nothing is working, so the cold fusion folks are reduced to whining about how people are biased and the scientific community won't give them a fair shot. That's all a lot of crap. If you have a good product, it will sell itself. Valid science doesn't need some quasi-religious awakening in order for people to believe in it. If cold fusion is such a great thing, why hasn't anybody built a building and used a cold-fusion reactor to completely power it off-the-grid. That would shut up the skeptics, why don't they go do that?!?! Instead, I have to read a bunch of whining about how I'm so bad, mean, and ignorant for not believing in it like some cosmic Billy Burke.

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Producing something useful would do a lot to turn opinion around. What have you people been doing for the last 25 years?

I admit, I haven't read a lot of papers on this but I read this one: http://www.e-catworld.com/w...

If you haven't already, you should take a look at chapter 5.0 Conclusions. All it is is a summary of previous publications and presentations on the subject. In other words, it's total garbage. Chapter 5 is supposed to tell me what it is I'm supposed to get out of the previous 4 chapters of this paper. Instead, I'm treated to "Look at the cornucopia of other media we've produced" as if sheer volume is going to win people over. Whoever put their name on this paper should be embarrassed.

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The best way to overcome bias is to actually produce something of value that is using the technology. You've had 25 years to work and perfect this technology, what exactly have you come up with? Something of scientific value shouldn't require a person to have some sort of quasi-religious awakening to believe in it. You might also have better luck with reasoned discussion than name-calling and whining about bias.

Want to shut up the skeptics and get the doubting scientific community off your back? Then PRODUCE SOMETHING USEFUL.

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InTrades sudden and puzzled interest in alchemy!!!

Dr Aratas experiment on cold fusion to be replicated in peer-reviewed scientific journal on/before 31 Dec 2009This contract will settle (expire) at 100 ($10.00) if Dr Yoshiaki Aratas Cold Fusion experiment is replicated in a peer-reviewe...

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Kirk Shanahan wrote:

"Just let me summarize by saying again, Jed doesn't understand my technical publications . . ."

Storms and I feel that Shanahan is the one who does not understand. Let the reader decide! As I said, see:

http://lenr-canr.org/acroba...

http://lenr-canr.org/acroba...

Shanahan also wrote:

"Reading another paper in this particular field has almost zero benefit."

Again, we are on opposite sides! I encourage people to read many papers, especially new ones. There is extreme hostility toward this field, so only a superlative pro-cold fusion paper will survive peer-review. (Anti-cold fusion papers such as Shanahan's own pass through peer-review with barely a nod.) It is especially important to read anything you can find from people such as Szpak, McKubre or Iwamura. You always learn something new, even when you re-read a good paper the tenth time through.

It is telling that people such as Shanahan who oppose cold fusion often say: "Don't bother reading papers. There's zero benefit. Take my word for it: there is nothing there. Don't look behind that curtain!" I, on the other hand, have spent years preparing, translating, editing and distributing papers, and I want people to read LOTS of papers. I am not saying that Shanahan wants to censor the field, but I do get the sense that he and many other opponents want me to shut up, and he wants you -- the reader -- to skip original sources, stop thinking for yourself, and buy into his views. He seems miffed that anyone would question his expertise. He does not see the value of letting anyone anywhere in the world read his own papers, and I do not think he grasps why I am keen to reprint all points of view, including his or Huizenga's.

"Lots of human frailty is displayed in the CF arena."

On this we agree. Especially you find lots of egomania, such as exhibited by people who think that they know better than 3,000 experts, and people who claim they have discovered errors in calorimetric techniques that have been used successfully for 200 years.

- Jed Rothwell

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Albatross wrote:

>I know nothing about cold fusion, but there are a couple of phenomena that >may be happening here:

>a. A new field or subfield or whatever often spawns its own journals, >conferences, and ultimately, its own literature. Once that separation >happens, it's easy to not read the literature in field X because you're in >closely related field Y.

This is true in normal situations. There the body of knowledge continues to grow and become more specialized, making it less interesting to those 'outside' the field. In the cold fusion case however, there is an additional reason. They routinly bemoan the suppression they supposedly experience from 'the establishment', so they 'circle the wagons' and shootanyone who approaches who clearly isn't one of them.

>b. Once you're in a field, the marginal work to get through one more paper >is much lower than it is when you're not in the field. By contrast, if you >think the field may be nonsense, there's a much lower benefit to reading >one more paper.

Definitely the last one. Reading another paper in this particualr field has almost zero benefit. However, that doesn't mean that I haven't gleaned some interesting ideas from the field. I have. I just disagree with their end state.

>Along with this, I suspect that the drives that make you willing to be a >scientist aren't rational at an individual level. I think you have to be a >bit obsessive, a bit consumed by your field, so you don't give up and find >something easier to do. That probably plays into allowing scientific >disputes to develop into these intense rifts.

Yes, personality types who stick to it are dominant. But the irrational ones are the ones who quit with insufficeint information and jump to a conclusion, acting as if that conclusion is 'golden', when it is just wishful thinking. Note that I am describing those who do NOT stick to it.

>And finally, there's the psychological phenomenon by which, the more >you've paid for something, the more you value it. If you know you've >likely sacrificed a big chunk of your career for some position, you're >going to have a hard time evaluating that position rationally.

I think this is particularly true for the CFers. The polarization in thefield that happened early on, due to bad actor on both sides, wasextremely detrimental. For the record, the majority of non-involvedscientist took a wait-and-see attitude in the beginning. It was the subsequent circus that turned the common opinion against CF, but note thatthat is not 'scientific' either. Lots of human frailty is displayed in the CF arena.

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I know nothing about cold fusion, but there are a couple of phenomena that may be happening here:

a. A new field or subfield or whatever often spawns its own journals, conferences, and ultimately, its own literature. Once that separation happens, it's easy to not read the literature in field X because you're in closely related field Y.

b. Once you're in a field, the marginal work to get through one more paper is much lower than it is when you're not in the field. By contrast, if you think the field may be nonsense, there's a much lower benefit to reading one more paper.

Along with this, I suspect that the drives that make you willing to be a scientist aren't rational at an individual level. I think you have to be a bit obsessive, a bit consumed by your field, so you don't give up and find something easier to do. That probably plays into allowing scientific disputes to develop into these intense rifts.

And finally, there's the psychological phenomenon by which, the more you've paid for something, the more you value it. If you know you've likely sacrificed a big chunk of your career for some position, you're going to have a hard time evaluating that position rationally.

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Kirk, I gave a link to a post with a list of questions to ask in a disagreement case study.

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I agree, this would situation would make an excellent case study (probably several!). Do you have any specific questions you'd like addressed?

You readers of this blog have been treated to the full Jed! You can see lots more of this type of behavior on spf. I'm sure you note the tactics in use. Just let me summarize by saying again, Jed doesn't understand my technical publications, and I expect most of the CFers haven't bothered to read them either (with the exception of E. Storms), as none of them have commented on it. Since I am claiming they are completely mislead in their interpretations, one would think they would comment if they knew I was making that claim. (So yes, I do claim they 'haven"t read the literature', but I base this on lack of evidence they have, and I admit I could be wrong, and I note E. Storms _has_ read and studied my work.)

Ed Storms is an interesting case. My first publication in the field was one where I reanalyzed data he presented as 'proving' excess heat (i.e. cold fusion, which he has called 'CANR' and now 'they' call LENR). I dealt with Ed by email on my analysis for ~8 months before I wrote my manuscript and submitted it to a journal (not the one it was published in). Subsequently, we had a couple more years of discussion. Some of this spilled over into spf. In the end I was convinced Ed knew what I was saying as he repeated it back correctly. However, he just wouldn't accept what I said. He couldn't present a technical reason why my approach was wrong, he just wouldn't accept it. As a man who wrote a paper called "My life with cold fusion as a reluctant mistress" (see papers listed at http://pw1.netcom.com/~stor... ), I think the reason is more emotional than technical. He is committed to the 'nuclear' solution, in the face of all opposition. I essentially gave up trying to convince him once I realized that. And then there is a technical detail that allows the others to ignore me. They normally claim CF occurs with palladium, and Ed's work was on platinum, ergo it "isn't relevant". It actually is, but it's convenient for them to claim not.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:

"In persistent scientific disagreements, one side almost always insists the other side is Not Reading the Literature."

In this case, both sides agree that the skeptics are not reading the literature. The skeptics at the Scientific American brag about that! They say they not need to read any papers. Other skeptics write books attacking cold fusion which do not discuss or even list any papers.

"I don't see anything suspicious about this . . .

Well, it seems like bad form to me. Introductory textbooks about science agree that you are supposed to read about an experiment before critiquing it. But apparently that is old fashioned. Nowadays it is okay to claim that an experiment produced "a few percent" when the author says 300%, or that an effect was "close to the noise" when the author says the result was measured at sigma 90. That's the standard applied at Scientific American, Nature and the New Scientist. Maybe they only do that with cold fusion. I do not know, but I wouldn't trust them.

". . . (apart from the basic rationalist anomaly of the disagreement itself). How else would you justify a persistent scientific disagreement?"

I believe that scientific disagreements are supposed to be settled on the basis of replicated experimental evidence. Once an effect has been observed by many laboratories, at very high signal to noise ratios, the disagreement is supposed to stop, and everyone is supposed to agree the effect is real. That often does happen, although the old scientists usually have to die before everyone agrees. In the early stages, there is room for opinion. For example, you might agree that an effect is real after 5 laboratories replicate, whereas I might hold out for 10. You might want to see 5 sigma data; I might hold out for 10 sigma. However, in the case of cold fusion, hundreds of laboratories have reported excess heat beyond the limits of chemistry, and tritium, and other nuclear effects. Never, in the history of modern science, has any effect been so widely confirmed yet still disputed.

People sometimes claim that "polywater" or "N-rays" were like that, but that is wrong. Polywater was only claimed by one lab, with one other publishing tentative results that were soon retracted. There were never hundreds of unequivocal statements such as the ones published by researchers SRI, AMOCO, Los Alamos, BARC and others, such as:

"The calorimetry conclusively shows excess energy was produced within the electrolytic cell over the period of the experiment. This amount, 50 kilojoules, is such that any chemical reaction would have had to been in near molar amounts to have produced the energy. Chemical analysis shows clearly that no such chemical reactions occurred. The tritium results show that some form of nuclear reactions occurred during the experiment. . . . The main point of the tritium in this experiment is then that there are some nuclear processes involved. . . "

Or:

"In spite of my earlier conclusion, - and that of the majority of scientists, - that the phenomena reported by Fleischmann and Pons in 1989 depended either on measurement errors or were of chemical origin, there is now undoubtedly overwhelming indications that nuclear processes take place in the metal alloys." (Gerischer)

In my opinion, this is no longer "a persistent scientific disagreement." After 1990, when the first solid replications were published, it was no longer scientific in any sense. Our side does research and publishes peer-reviewed experiments. We follow the rules. As Martin Fleischmann says, we are "painfully conventional" people. Their side spews out ad hominem attacks, inaccurate nonsense about the experiments, and Napoleonic delusions that they have overturned the laws of physics and calorimetry going back two centuries. The skeptics have never even tried to publish a serious book or paper challenging the experimental results. The closest thing to a technical debate was when Fleischmann crushed Morrison:

http://lenr-canr.org/acroba...

- Jed Rothwell

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Eliezer, other persistent disagreements elsewhere in society are not typically justified this way, so it is worth noting this pattern about science.

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In persistent scientific disagreements, one side almost always insists the other side is Not Reading the Literature. I don't see anything suspicious about this (apart from the basic rationalist anomaly of the disagreement itself). How else would you justify a persistent scientific disagreement?

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Robin Hanson wrote:

"Kirk and Jed, we are not particular interested in here rehashing the details of your disagreement."

Yes, as I said, this is somewhat technical and beyond the scope of the discussion. But I am somewhat mystified by your next comments:

"We are, however, interested in using this as a case study, to learn what we can from this particular disagreement about the nature of disagreement in general."

Well, the disagreement is not general or overarching in nature. It is a debate about specific facts and experiments, and what these facts signify.

There is only one philosophical issue in the debate: When theory and replicated experiments conflict, do you assume the theory is right, or do you assume the experiments overrule theory? The textbooks all say the scientific method calls for the latter, but Huizenga disagrees. (Actually, I think this is moot question, because I do not agree that theory predicts cold fusion cannot exist.)

"Yes, each side thinks that many on the other side have neglected important details. But each side must know that the other side makes this complaint about them. What makes each side so sure that their side has neglected less than the other side?"

That determination can only be made by compiling a list of facts & arguments on both sides, and tallying up who has neglected what. I am sure that their side has neglected many facts because I have read 500 papers, I have written or co-authored about a dozen papers and one book, and I have edited and translated fifty or other papers and four books. So I have hundreds of facts at my fingertips, as it were. (Naturally I often forget small details or get things wrong.)

In every case, this debate boils down to comparing specific, concrete assertions about experiments, such as whether the excess heat is "a few percent" as claimed by Scientific American, or whether it is 300% as claimed by SRI. This is not an abstract or theoretical debate. There are very few matters of opinion involved. It is about thermocouples, gamma ray detectors, autoradiographs, and thousands upon thousands of pages of data, from hundreds of different labs. One small detail after another!

Of course we cannot carefully examine all of that data here. That task takes years. Edmund Storms recently compiled a list of important "neglected complaints" and important aspects of this research in a book. (http://lenr-canr.org/Introd... It is 335 pages long and it includes 69 pages of references.

Even though it is impossible to list the points at issue in this forum, making such a list is the only basis for determining who is right and who is mistaken. You are not going to pull the answer out of the air by thinking upon it, as you might with mathematics, for example.

"Making lists of specific complaints doesn't get very far into this issue . . ."

On the contrary. As I said, this is experimental science, and making lists of specifics is all one can do. We have only specifics to work with, and nothing general. When a theory is developed, we can then "reduce to practice" all that mass of detail.

". . . as you should be aware that the details you are aware of will come to mind more easily than the ones you are neglecting."

Believe me, I have not neglected or overlooked any important aspect of this field. Details are what I do. Many of the papers are over my head, but I have read and reviewed them all. I have attended 10 conferences in English and Japanese, and spent weeks in laboratories. I went over every sentence in the books by Mallove, Storms, Beaudette and Mizuno. I know the skeptical arguments in detail, because I have discussed them with the editors of the Scientific American, Robert Park, Huizenga and others, and I have carefully read every book and most of the papers published by skeptics. (There are only 5 or 10 skeptical papers.) I may be wrong, and I am not a PhD scientist, but I have not "neglected" or overlooked anything.

- Jed Rothwell

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Kirk Shanahan wrote:

"No, my hypothesis applies to _ANY_ calibrated method. That includes ANYTHING that is calibrated!"

Ah. Well, Fleischmann and others have used absolute methods that do not depend on calibrations, and of course the flow calorimeter lends itself to the absolute method, as pointed out by Hagelstein and others. And there is no calibration involved when the device melts. So your critique still does not cover all experiments.

However, most authors do recommend calibration, and it is widely considered a basis -- if not the exclusive basis -- for measurements. So in essence you are saying that calorimetry itself does not work. That is quite a bold claim! You are saying that hundreds of thousands of results going back to the 1780s are wrong, or at least not trustworthy.

If you are correct, and people come to believe you, you will win the Nobel prize in chemistry and physics, and you will overturn seminal work by Lavoisier, J. P. Joule and countless modern experts in calorimetry. It is surprising that so many people could be so wrong for 227 years, and they never noticed that their experiments give the wrong results. It is as if you had discovered that Ohm's law is incorrect and yet nobody noticed. I admire your gumption. And people say that cold fusion researchers are bold & iconoclastic! They are timid compared to you. Cold fusion researchers claim they have discovered something new in an unexplored material (saturated deuterides). They never say that previous discoveries are wrong, or that plasma fusion experiments and physics are incorrect, or that that they have found a major flaw in chemistry and physics going back 227 years.

But, frankly, I agree with the analysis by Storms and others, and I think you are mistaken. As always, I invite readers to review the papers and decide for themselves:

http://lenr-canr.org/acroba...

http://lenr-canr.org/acroba...

"That also includes all type of calorimeters. My hypothesis casts doubt on ALL apparent excess heat claims (which is why they try so desperately to ignore it). . ."

That would be ALL claims in cold fusion and in conventional chemistry and nuclear physics going back to 1780. Heat is heat, and the heat from cold fusion is no different than from any other chemical or nuclear reaction.

"I have expressed this to Jed multiple times, and he simply refuses to process the information (bias maybe?)."

Sorry. You did mention that, but I forgot that your claim applies to all types because the paper I have discusses only flow calorimeters. Please forgive me for forgetting that you consider yourself Madam Curie reincarnated. I am not "desperately" trying to forget that, but I confess it does make me squirm when someone comes out of the woodwork saying he can prove J. P. Joule was wrong, calorimeters do not work, or he has invented a perpetual motion machine, or he can prove Einstein was wrong. (It is always a "he" never "she.") This field does seem to attract such people, and they give me the creeps.

- Jed Rothwell

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To respond to Jed's corrections:

No, my hypothesis applies to _ANY_ calibrated method. That includes ANYTHING that is calibrated! That also includes all type of calorimeters. My hypothesis casts doubt on ALL apparent excess heat claims (which is why they try so desparately to ignore it). I have expressed this to Jed multiple times, and he simply refuses to process the information (bias maybe?).

Yes, it does not impact nuclear ash claims (tritium, helium, etc.) However it does challenge the idea that there are correlations between nuclear ash and excess heat, since the latter is unlikely. My other postings in sci.physics.fusion go into a lot of detail on what I think is wrong with the nuclear ash claims in most cases, but I have not published those (yet). The BARC claims are dealt with in my spf posts in general. Their claims are not supportable, as again, 'mundane' explanations exist.

And I agree, we are way outside the scope here. I will begin limiting my postings.

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