FP's experiments discussion

Abd wrote:

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(me:)

I did not say that, not without much more qualification.

You most certainly did, and I quoted you when I called you out on it. If only you'd read my posts before you reply to them. On Wednesday, Feb 17, 2016 at 3:29 am you wrote:

"In 2004, with a relatively casual review, the DoE review was evenly split between evidence for anomalous heat being conclusive, and not conclusive."

It's still there on page 16.

You'll claim an oversight, but I won't buy it, because I've called you on the same error several times in the past. It was before I came here, and you no doubt expected to get away with it.

Abd wrote:

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The actual word used by the summary was "compelling," which was paralleled with "not convincing," so, given that the opposite of "not convincing" is "convincing," I remembered it that way. But the substance is the same here. It was half and half, not "they found evidence ... conclusive." Never said that.

You have said it several times, although only once here. I can find other quotations from moletrap if you want.

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Again, I have not said that.

You know, I'm just listing the various inaccuracies that I have addressed in one sentence, as pointers, so it's done in a kind of shorthand. Why are you defending yourself against these 5 word compressions, instead of the actual detailed rebuttals where I quoted what you said, and showed why it was not accurate. You're taking the easy way out.

But you have said "But LENR is real, and that’s been the position in mainstream scientific journals for quite some time" "It’s over in the journals...", "it was proven, by a preponderance of the evidence,", "There is no rejection of LENR, of any quality, in the journals, since 2004".

All of these are consistent with your declaring that LENR is proven and widely accepted, which is the sort of statement I consider grossly inaccurate, and have corrected several times. If the reality of LENR were the position in mainstream journals, there would be thousands of papers per year on the subject.

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Again, never said that.

You have said (on ECN) "The extreme skeptical position has almost entirely disappeared." But again, this was a shorthand pointer to a rebuttal in which you are quoted fully. Read the detailed rebuttal and respond to that, rather to this 5 word shorthand.

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The extreme skeptical position is, in the journals, dead.

There are certainly skeptical papers being published, and skeptics are skeptics.

An Italian group published a rebuttal to neutron emission claims, and offered some plausible CR-39 artifacts that may have caused spurious effects (Faccini et al., Eur Phys J. C 74 (2014) 1).

Tennfors (Eur Phys J Plus 128 (2013) 1 ) and Ciuchi et al. (Euro Phys J C 72 (2012)1) published rebuttals to the WL theory. <i></i>

Dmitriyeva et al. (Thermochim. Acta 543 (2012) 260) debunked the Arata gas-loading claims, which are just about the only excess heat claims in the last decade in refereed literature.

And there are at least two analyses of the publication record, which show that the cold fusion publication record is distinctly different from real fields, and closely resembles that of other pathological sciences: Bettencourt et al, Journal of Informetrics 3 (2009) 210–221, and Ackermann, Scientometrics 66 (2006) 451.

And there's a comparison of cold fusion with phlogiston in an essay about trying to prove a negative (Labinger & Weininger, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 44 (2005) 1916.

And all these are in spite of the fact that most skeptics simply ignore the field. It hardly seems worth the trouble to refute claims that no one of any stature takes seriously anyway.

Scientific literature reflects the view of scientists. Any subject that is not fringe science appears in refereed journals. A subject like cold fusion would appear thousands of times a year if it were viewed as anything but pseudoscience.

And yet, not counting the special issue, there have been *zero* claims of excess heat in the literature in the last 6 years (according to the Britz bibliography 2010 - 2015), and *zero* papers on the helium correlation in more than 15 years. Even if you include the special issue, it mainly represents reviews of work from before 2010.

Abd wrote:

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It's obviously walking around, personified by internet trolls and some bloggers, but McKubre has it right. Those who actually investigate the field, particularly those who do so professionally, drop the extreme skepticism.

Editors of Nature, Science, PRL, Physical Review, Garwin, and just about everyone else is still extremely skeptical. That's why there are no claims of excess heat in the refereed literature in the last 6 years.

Robert Park investigated the field professionally and wrote a book about it, and he remains (or remained) extremely skeptical. I'm pretty sure Koonin and Lewis who investigated it professionally are also extremely skeptical.

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One of them was the claim that the "vote" in the 2004 DoE review was 17 rejections and 1 acceptance of cold fusion. No. Not true.

Perhaps it's not true. The rejection of special funding was *unanimous*, and anyone who rejected funding for cold fusion without rejecting cold fusion would have to be psychotic.

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And after this was pointed out, Joshua again repeated it.

Pointing out is not enough. You need to justify it. But if you read the reports, only one reviewer said the evidence for nuclear reactions was conclusive.

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No. I could, however, state this more clearly. A genuine skeptic, writing about a field, would not ony present evidence designed and selected to push one point of view.

I doubt that Feynman ever raised any points of view in support of the Papp engine, but then maybe your hero was not a genuine skeptic.

Abd wrote:

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Am I actually putting my judgment ahead of experts? What experts? Considering what evidence? I'm published under peer review. He's not. I'm known as a writer with knowledge in this field, and, within the field, I'm known as a skeptic. I'm responsible for what I write. Joshua is only an internet troll, with nothing at stake, nothing other than the reputation of a person who might be the same, but anyone could register an account with a site as 'Joshua Cude" and claim identity.

Again, my credentials are irrelevant. My message stands on its own. And yes, you are putting your own judgement ahead of experts, such as those enlisted by the DOE, and others I've mentioned before. You toot your own horn, and think that since you're published in a special LENR issue where rejections were essentially not possible, your view is infallible. But Garwin and Park have published too, and they don't buy your preponderance of evidence. Neither do the reviewers for high impact journals that continue to reject cold fusion papers.

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Genuine scientific consensus is a living thing, and is distinct from the assessment of non-experts. Who are experts on cold fuison? Read the McKubre Current Science paper on the state of the evidence, and I think I quoted it. "Scientific consensus" is determined how?

If you think only cold fusion researchers are qualified experts, then you have a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like saying only Scientology members are experts on scientology, and so the expert consensus is that Xenu exists.

All scientists became sufficiently familiar with the claims and the quality of the evidence for cold fusion back in 1989, and voted with their interest. The quality of the evidence has not improved, and if it did, *some* scientists would notice, and then interest would spread like wildfire. Instead, even though scientists are exposed to the research at Missouri or Bologna or Uppsala, the interest fizzles, because most scientists judge the evidence to be wanting. That represents the consensus view.

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By the opinions of anonymous trolls on the Internet? By, say, a newspaper reporter calling up a random physicist and asking for his opinion about a topic he has not studied?

You are misrepresenting the skeptical view. I have not suggested the consensus view is determined by my opinion or that of a random physicist called by a reporter.

The consensus view is represented by that of an independent panel enlisted by the DOE, and by the *absence* of the subject in the high impact journals that would fight over the privilege to publish the material if it were considered legitimate.

Abd wrote:

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No, scientific consensus is assessed by the corpus of work in peer-reviewed journals and academic publications.

In a way, but one has to do some filtering, and accounting for rates and trends.

The highest impact journals have published only negative papers, and negative editorials. The positive work is published in low impact journals, and the rate is now so low as to indicate a moribund field.

Simply counting recent papers and checking whether positive or not would make hydrinos part of the consensus view, since most articles on the subject are positive. And you could not derive the consensus view of perpetual motion from a survey of the literature of the past 10 years.

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That work is entirely positive on cold fusion for the last decade.

That's not accurate.

An Italian group published a rebuttal to neutron emission claims, and offered some plausible CR-39 artifacts that may have caused spurious effects (Faccini et al., Eur Phys J. C 74 (2014) 1).

Tennfors (Eur Phys J Plus 128 (2013) 1 ) and Ciuchi et al. (Euro Phys J C 72 (2012)1) published rebuttals to the WL theory.

Dmitriyeva et al. (Thermochim. Acta 543 (2012) 260) debunked the Arata gas-loading claims, which are just about the only excess heat claims in the last decade in refereed literature.

A little further back, Kowalski published a negative article about CR-39 (Eur Phys J Appl Phys 44 (2008) 287).

And there are at least two analyses of the publication record, which show that the cold fusion publication record is distinctly different from real fields, and closely resembles that of other pathological sciences: Bettencourt et al, Journal of Informetrics 3 (2009) 210–221, and Ackermann, Scientometrics 66 (2006) 451.

And there's a comparison of cold fusion with phlogiston in an essay about trying to prove a negative (Labinger & Weininger, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 44 (2005) 1916.

And all these are in spite of the fact that most skeptics simply ignore the field. It hardly seems worth the trouble to refute claims that no one of any stature takes seriously anyway.

Any subject that is not fringe science appears in refereed journals. A subject like cold fusion would appear thousands of times a year if it were accepted by the consensus.

And yet, not counting the special issue, there have been *zero* claims of excess heat in the refereed literature in the last 6 years (according to the Britz bibliography 2010 - 2015), and *zero* papers on the helium correlation in more than 15 years. Even if you include the special issue, it mainly represents reviews of work from before 2010.

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Joshua will then look for ways at presenting fact that will create some opposite impression, and he's been doing this for years, he's good at it.

Just stating facts. Nothing to be good at.

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"No major new results." If a new result is shown, he would say, "That's not really new, and besides, how come there is no available commercial product."

That's a gross misrepresentation. I have simply identified the dearth of new results in the refereed literature. *A* new result would not change that argument. In the 90s (even at the end) there were dozens of papers per year, including many claims of excess heat. Now experimental papers are as rare as hen's teeth, excess heat rarer still, and helium correlation completely absent.

And I don't use the absence of a commercial product as an argument that the phenomenon is not real.

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All the cases I have seen where a scientist took a more careful look at cold fusion, and Duncan is a prime case, the scientist revised their prior view, a view that had been based on a rejection cascade.

What about scientists like Ekstrom and Thieberger and Motl and Eriksson and Pomp? What about the scientists who referee submissions to PRL and Nature that Hagelstein and Boss complain about? What about Garwin and Park?

Abd wrote:

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[...] He is correct. The number of electrons apparently does not change. However, in muon-catalyzed fusion, the number of muons don't change, either.

Exactly, and that supports my wording, because in muon catalyzed fusion deuterons join to form helium, even though other particles participate.

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I've been pointing out that nobody with the requisite chops has critiqued Takahashi (either way).

Which suggests that anyone qualified regards it as not worth their time. If cold fusion is accepted in the journals, surely if he submitted it to a good journal, the theory would have to be critiques by qualified referees. So, why hasn't it happened?

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So this is not at all "deuterons fusing," it is deuterium fusing.

Well, it's both. If you start with 4 deuterons and 4 electrons and you end up with two helium nuclei and 4 electrons, then the deuterons have fused to form helium nuclei.

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Pons and Fleischmann were looking for a fusion effect, and would have expected neutrons and tritium (and protons and 3He). And some heat. The thought the effect would be very small, if it was observable at all.

According to the press release, Fleischmann said "The stakes were so high with this one, we decided to try it." They may not have been optimistic that it would work, but they seem to have expected a large result if it did.

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That they found something has to be one of the most astonishing pieces of luck in the 20th century.

Bad luck! After that, neither of them produced a lick of useful science. Pons abandoned research entirely. But it was an utterly common case of seeing what they were hoping to see in an experiment prone to artifacts. It's the same phenomenon that gave rise to N-rays and polywater, and still keeps homeopathy and astrology and creationism alive.

Abd wrote:

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[...] Joshua says " this is not accurate, 2004 was not the nadir. But I did not say that it was. I was writing from memory, and haven't looked at that page for quite some time. I wrote "by about 2004 or 2005." It was 2005, with six papers, I had.

You clearly know it was not the +/- 1 I was talking about, because I cited 2011 as having only 1 paper, and your own list shows 2 years after 2010 with fewer papers than in 2005. So, neither 2004 nor 2005 were the nadir.

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So, Britz actually has, for 2005 to 2015

7, 8, 9, 8, 24, 16, 1, 9, 11, 5, 35.

Cold fusion researchers publish in the best venues available to them, and the LENR Sourcebook opened up, so the limited number of active authors focused on the LENR Sourcebook. This was announced as peer-reviewed, and it says so in the Foreword, and the reputation of the ACS is behind that.

The LENR Sourcebooks were published as part of the ACS symposium series, corresponding to the symposia sponsored by the ACS. There were two volumes of strictly LENR papers, edited by LENR advocates, so acceptance was essentially pre-determined. There is no way such a publication can be considered a refereed *journal*. And the spike in your publication rate in 2009 and 2010 correlates exactly the sourcebook years, so it's fair to say it had relaxed acceptance criteria.

The 9 you list for 2012 include one paper listed 3 times (clerical error presumably), and 2 negative papers. I think it's legitimate not to count negative papers in support of increased acceptance of cold fusion.

Likewise the 11 in 2013 and 5 in 2014 each include a negative paper.

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So Joshua is comparing Britz database figures from 2004 with his own figures for later years. Once again, Joshua cherry-picks evidence, applying whatever standards will generate the results he is seeking, which is always "I'm right, they are wrong."

I excluded the LENR Sourcebook which is not a journal, and negative papers, which do not support its acceptance. I don't see how anyone can consider that cherry-picking. It is perfectly objective.

But in any case, even your list shows 2 years lower than your "nadir", and both after 2010.

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Only if the ACS Sourcebook papers are excluded, a subjective judgment.

Britz is not sacred, you know. His list is a useful starting point, because it's unlikely he will miss papers in refereed journals, but it's certainly plausible that he might allow some non-journal papers. And it's not subjective to consider two special volumes as non-journals. I could not find anyone who has calculated an impact factor for the LENR Sourcebook, for example.

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Now, I was dealing with data collected in 2010 that has changed, it was 6 for 2005 and is now 7. 7 is still a "local nadir." We could now say that it was 2011, but 2011 was a local anomaly.

But 2014 is also below 2005. Looking at your list (especially with a correction for 2012 due to a clerical error), the anomalies appear to be 2009, 2010, and 2015, the three years that have special volumes devoted to the subject. Special volumes mean relaxed acceptance criteria.

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However, then things happened. The loss of the Sourcebook series had a big impact, apparently. SPAWAR stopped supporting cold fusion research, so a stream of experimental papers coming out of there shut down. The field shifted to JCMNS, which won't show up in the Britz database, unless he changes his policies.

Again, Britz is not sacred. Whether he lists them or not, it cannot be used to indicate greater acceptance, because a journal specifically created to publish cold fusion papers will likely use other cold fusion researchers as referees, so whatever else it may be, it does not show an increased acceptance of the field in the broader scientific mainstream.

Your comment about SPAWAR is also telling. Many of the publications in the database came from there, and that work has scarce replication, and peripheral significance, if any, to the field.

So, the publication rate is clearly small compared to any field considered accepted, particularly any with the importance cold fusion would have if real. And absent special issues, it is clearly on the decline.

I find all this Josh / Abd to and fro not very helpful. They have two points of view which are apparent, and neither rates the other.

Josh: makes specific factual points, deals with Abd's points, but could (I've no idea) be ignoring aspects of the evidence that are not convenient as Josh claims.

Abd: Makes gradiose rhetorical claims obviously untrue, insults others, claims there is compelling evidence, when I ask for it (for real, I'm interested):

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So find out for yourself. If you want to learn about this field, compile that list. If you wan t to help others, put it up on Wikiversity, under the cold fusion resource, perhaps as part of the heat/helium study hierarchy.I started a database, thinking I would analyze the data, as part of writing my published paper. It was, quite simply, too much work for the time I had. So what I wrote was simpler. But if you put that data together, you will learn a great deal, and it's better than learning from me. And you'll be able to have intelligent discussions in the field. You might even notice things that nobody has ever noticed before.It took me a couple of years studying the field, writing about what I was finding, before I started to come up with much of anything original. I wrote as my learning process, I've been doing that for many years. Write in a forum where people know something and can critique it. A few will be so kind as to do it. Mistakes are the fastest way to learn, if you aren't attached to being right. People like Joshua are noise in the system, but ... you can still learn from them. I've certainly learned a lot by researching what Joshua claims.Just don't believe him!

Be very careful about believing anyone. Legal principle: testimony is presumed true unless controverted. That "presumed true" doesn't mean "believed." It means start with accepting what people say as reports of their experience and what they think, as informed by their experience.

So Abd's claim that Josh is missing important evidence that proves results is not substantiated. If Josh misses out evidence Abd could quite easily list the missed evidence, each bit, together with its status (confirmed, replicated, whatever) and the discussion could proceed on a factual basis. I like these summary lists.

But no, it is not my job to generate them because I am not the one saying cold fusion evidence is clear and therefore $1000000 funding should be spent on a new experiment. (I would be happy for this to happen, it would be interesting, and perhaps generate clarity though from Abd's reply to how his views would change on negative evidence from it maybe not).

And as for believing anyone Abd is the one (I think) believing an F&P reply to Wilson et al's critique of an F&P paper when close reading shows that it avoids answering the points in the critique (and partially confirms them).

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If the Texas Tech/ENEA collaboration publishes definitive heat/helium correlation in a mainstream journal, Joshua Cude disappears.

I think I've got it. Abd is saying there is current research to establish He/heat correlation and causation (correlation on its own means squat for obvious reasons). Not difficult if real because He levels consistently higher than local lab levels would be a very strong indicator never (to my knowledge) found so far.

He is saying that Josh is ignoring this new work. I'm a bit confused. Is this what the $1000000 is being spent on? Or is it some preliminary work and the $1000000 is needed to do it for real?

And while I welcome new research Cf advocates can always point out the "next big thing" as being the proof needed. Surely, after 25 years, the wise thing is to look at past published work, not current rumours, which always inflate work's importance.

Wait 3 years and maybe current He/heat work will be added to this past published list. it seems there is at least one Indian journal that will publish it...

Spoiler alert - Abd views that low impact Indian Journal as "mainstream". Well that is fine, but by that definition "one paper published in a Journal somewhere" is not "proof the paper's claims are correct" or even "enough evidence the claims are correct to ignite a moribund research area".

It all depends on the quality of the evidence. If even non-specialists like me can look at it and pick holes that is not great.

We are agreed that good He / heat evidence would be significant. I doubt we will agree over good since Abd seems to think much old evidence is good that has been clearly refuted with reasons (P&F). But maybe I'm incorrect, I find it difficult (see above) to get specifics from Abd of what he thinks is good, except for ongoing research not yet published...

Abd wrote:

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If the field is in the "same place" as it is now, that will mean, almost certainly, that the effort to confirm heat/helium with increased precision failed. I do think it likely I'll still be alive in 10 years, I'm 71. But will Joshua Cude still be around? How would we know? This is what I expect. If the Texas Tech/ENEA collaboration publishes definitive heat/helium correlation in a mainstream journal, Joshua Cude disappears.

I would be quite surprised if it did not publish something, and that you and others will consider it definitive. But I predict it will not be definitive, and will make little impact outside the cold fusion community. But of course, I hope I'm wrong, and if I am, I'll be here (or in ECN) admitting it.

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What would complete the process would be identification of artifact by controlled experiment for, at least, major claims. That is what happened with N-rays and polywater, which are often compared with cold fusion.

Yes, but not all fields are the same. Cold fusion has so many manifestations that a single sabotage could not explain all the artifacts. There are many phenomena which like cold fusion could not be easily debunked. Any of the paranormal phenomena, for example, or homeopathy, or dowsing, or the many claims of various kinds of perpetual motion machines.

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Piantelli has not been confirmed.

Well that puts me in a pickle. Obviously, I don't regard any of the claims as having been confirmed, because if I did, then I would regard the phenomenon as real.

This was an example to illustrate *what* it would take for me to regard the claim as confirmed. And it does not involve massive heat, as you said.

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Classifying unconfirmed results with confirmed ones is one of the tricks that pseudoskeptics use.

You're not making sense. Skeptics do not classify any results as confirmed. That's why we're skeptical.

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One never gets a Nobel prize for doing the plodding work to confirm someone else's research.

Actually, Millikan did. He confirmed and improved upon, of course.

Abd wrote:

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A normal response might be to scale up, this is often suggested. The problem is that sometimes much more heat is generated. So the work must, in fact, until it is under good control, be kept small-scale.

That's just an excuse to scale down so that artifacts can be more plausibly mistaken for a real effect. It's a common trick in pseudoscience. Scaling up can be done gradually, and it can be done with safeguards. But everyone seems to avoid scaling up, for fear it will reveal the absence of an effect.

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It is possible that someone will discover how to generate substantial heat, under control. There is no doubt that this could be convincing. So the question is, instead, what evidence would convince Joshua, as a skeptic, of the reality of the effect, short of already demonstrating that it might be practical.

The phenomenon was born with claims of heat, and yes, a convincing demonstration of heat would be easy to make practical. Conversely, a claim of heat that cannot be easily made practical is not convincing.

In the absence of unequivocal heat, unequivocal nuclear reaction products would be convincing, as I already explained.

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Once again, misleading. HAD is an observed effect in some experiments. It is not reliable. How one would "isolate" an electrode in HAD without shutting it down is a puzzle to me.

A puzzle? Heat after death means it's already shut down. cut all the wires and put the entire apparatus into a big insulated box, and watch the temperature climb, or cool it with plumbing.

Or remove the electrode with a suitable vessel that keeps it immersed in the fluid. With Energetics' Pd foil that they claimed produced heat without input for several days, that would have been easy.

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Damned straight. Gotta leave a back door!

Well, I could define unequivocal as say 5 or ten times above ambient, but it depends a little on the way the experiment is done.

But a back door has limited value. Sure, I can always say it's not good enough, but I'm just one person. If it really is good enough, then Nature will want to publish it and Stockholm will want to recognize it, and it won't be possible for individuals to claim skepticism in the face of that.

So, while 10 times ambient helium would be convincing (with suitable controls), so would the acceptance of the claims by the mainstream.

Abd wrote:

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Helium evidence by itself is not at all convincing, for exactly the reasons that are commonly given.

The reasons commonly given are that the levels are too low. High levels of helium, by themselves, would be pretty convincing. As long as they can be reproduced by skeptics. (Sorry, I don't trust McKubre.)

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The 2004 DoE reviewers obviously missed the correlation, presenting a false interpretation of the Case data that convered what was actually a stunning correlation into an appearance of anticorrelation. With that error, of course they weren't convinced!

As I said before, if the error is so blatant, simple argument should be enough to convince them. And that's what you were proposing to do a few years ago. But now you want better data, which is basically a concession that the existing data is not good enough.

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Actually, tritium is detected at quite significant levels, but it is a million times down from helium.

Well, there have been claims of quite significant levels, but none believable. The beauty of measuring radioactive products, like tritium, is that they can be detected with sensitivity and specificity orders of magnitude better than heat. Isn't it an amazing coincidence that the levels also just happen to appear at orders of magnitude below that of the heat, so that the confidence in the measurements is no better.

The most credible organization that claimed tritium was LANL, but their latest paper on it seems to be in 1998, even though they hadn't answered any interesting questions about it, and hadn't gotten a single prestigious publication out of it. That 1998 paper explains that "due to the subtle and weak nature of the signals observed, we have taken many precautions and checks to prevent contamination and to confirm the tritium is not due to an artifact". So, a measure of nuclear reactions some million times more sensitive than heat, is *still* "subtle and weak".

McKubre was even more negative in 1998, when he wrote "we may nevertheless state with some confidence that tritium is not a routinely produced product of the electrochemical loading of deuterium into palladium"

And that's why Storms' comments about tritium in his 2010 review are so vague. Not a single specific detail about tritium from cold fusion has been resolved.

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So, while 10 times ambient helium would be convincing (with suitable controls), so would the acceptance of the claims by the mainstream.

You need to add that this must also be at levels well beyond possible outgassing from experimental materials, not easily controllable, but one that can no doubt be addressed. I don't think it would be a problem with reasonably long experiments.

I glossed this over above with the word "consistent"

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Instead of Mary Yugo you got joshua cude.Out of the ashes into the (old) fire.

If the new shiny censorship policy bins Josh then I'm out of here too! (Though Josh used shill once, this has definition not just "paid" but "accomplice of confidence trickster" and therefore I think is verbotem). He should apologise for this.

Arguably it should bin Abd, who has been at least as insulting as MY, and not apologised, indeed he has repeated the insults (calling Josh a "fundamenally dishonest" liar) and has no possible factual backing for them. Remember, being mistaken or having erroneous judgement is not the same as being a liar.

But I did not want MY banned, so equally I don't want Abd banned.