FP's experiments discussion

alainco wrote:

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My point was not to criticize LHC, but to pinpoint the double standards in critics.

This is such a nonsense comparison. It's like comparing the evidence for flight to the evidence of the advance of the perihelion of mercury to support general relativity.

Everyone understands what flight is, even if they don't understand aerodynamics, and it is relevant to everyone. And everyone can understand the evidence for flight.

But in the case of the perihelion of mercury and GR, very few understand either of them, or how to measure them, or what they mean.

Understanding the evidence for the Higgs boson requires a great deal of training and experience, not to mentions study of the experiments themselves. Most people are not qualified to evaluate the evidence, nor is any of it particularly relevant to them.

The claim of an energy source with an energy density a million times higher than petrol that is accessible on a table top at ordinary conditions is every bit as ordinary and relevant as flight, and if it were real, would be provable to anyone. Advocates repeatedly pontificate about how it will power our cars, heat our homes, and replace fossil fuels. And yet, they can't even prove it's real.

An additional difference between cold fusion and any of the above is that it is an extraordinary claim contraindicated by a century of robust experimental evidence.

Anyway, a brief reading of the systematics, blinding, double-checking and so on used for the analysis of the Higgs experiment is all it takes to understand that no experiment in cold fusion has ever taken similar care -- at least not the ones claiming positive results.

For example, thirteen of the 25 values used in Storms' 2010 review of the heat-helium results come from McKubre's gas-loading experiment, reported sketchily in a conference proceeding in 2000. He uses the data from one cell out of 16, and treats the observations as 13 independent measurements. This is grossly misleading for reasons I've outlined here before. Briefly, both heat and helium could be caused by artifact, and since the level of both is a matter of time, the correlation is meaningless. The paper is woefully inadequate as a scientific report. Much is left out, and many questions are unanswered, so it's not surprising that the work was never published in a proper journal, and for the same reason, it is completely unjustified to use the data from a single dubious cell to comprise more than half of the data points contributing to Storms helium ratio in the 2010 review.

Storms' consolidated evidence for the correlation is cherry-picked, and based on his judgement. Comparing it to the scrutiny the LHC evidence was given, is a joke.

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You never have proven any of the artifact in He4/Heat you claim,

Most of the data Storms uses to claim such a correlation have not even passed the modest standard of peer review, and those that have have been challenged in the literature.

It's not possible to prove an artifact based on a written report, especially badly written reports. But it's also not necessary to prove artifacts to maintain skepticism. If the claim is extraordinary, and the claimed observations are more plausibly attributable to artifact than to unprecedented nuclear reactions, then it is reasonable to remain skeptical.

The onus is on the person making the extraordinary claim to exclude the possibility of artifacts, and in the case of heat helium, the most prominent experimentalists (McKubre and Miles) have both admitted the possibility of artifacts, and that better results are needed.

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I propose the theory that all is explained by double standards and irrational desire to be right. This is a theory that match well the evidences.

No way. Scientists are well aware that if cold fusion were real, its vindication would be inevitable, so if they thought it had a reasonable chance, there is no way they would suppress it for fear of being humiliated when proven wrong. That is, the desire to be right would cause them to be very careful before rejecting cold fusion. That's obvious from the way it was treated in 1989.

padam73 wrote:

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me:

Are we talking about the same Steven Koonin, the guy who published articles on high temperature plasma reactions in the 1980's? The same Steven Koonin who decided to invest in the 10s of billions in hot fusion, especially in the gigantic National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory when he was in charge of the research budget of the DOE?

He was a theoretical physicist examining a wide range nuclear reactions with no connection to any hot fusion power project. The possibility of cold fusion would have fit right in with his research. In fact in 1989, he published a paper on the possibly of charge screening in PdD, so the reality of cold fusion in no way threatened his funding or career.

After the event, he became head of the DOE, and the DOE's support of hot fusion was continued. If an after-the-fact affiliation could have an influence on his thinking in 1989, it could only have been in cold fusion's favor.

You see, the way greed works is that people like to keep money, not give it away. Hot fusion *costs* the DOE a lot of money. If they could get the same result without spending billions, that would obviously be preferable, particularly, since it comes with all sorts of other economic, environmental, and strategic benefits for the government that is footing the bill.

You seem to be suggesting that you and I would oppose cold fusion because we prefer to keep on paying money to power our cars and heat our homes, in order to support the fossil fuel industry. Does that make any sense to you?

The liquid core of Pluto, Ceres and many other planets and asteroids show that nuclear energy produced by chemical means is happening in sufficient amounts to keep large volumes of ice and rock liquid for 4.5 billion years. Please argue this point if you can.

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A slide show is always commercial & the words are missing. May be He means measured Alpha, which would make the story water proof.The question about the Holmlid presentation is not if 'Helium' is measured correctly.

In that case we have no disagreement here. I was pointing out that Holmlid's "commercial" summary of the evidence for LENR was dishonest in the comparison with Storm's He cherry-picked data with LHC data.

As for Holmlid's data. I read some of his earlier papers and stopped following them as what looked like an easily provable/disprovable definitely whacko proposition got side-tracked, with subsequent evidence less strong than original and not coherent with it. The classic sign of somone trying to prove something that does not exist. You do need to read the papers, not PP presentations.

Quote from axil

The liquid core of Pluto, Ceres and many other planets and asteroids show that nuclear energy produced by chemical means is happening in sufficient amounts to keep large volumes of ice and rock liquid for 4.5 billion years. Please argue this point if you…

Certainly.

The liquid core of Pluto, Ceres and many other planets and asteroids does not show that nuclear energy produced by chemical means is happening in sufficient amounts to keep large volumes of ice and rock liquid for 4.5 billion years.

Now, we have your assertion and mine. How can that be an argument?

Yours however requires extraordinary physics.

You would have to eliminate ALL other explanations for molten cores:

(1) cooling rate has been underestimated due to higher thermal resistance than assumed through crust
(2) other thermal sources in core are significant: nuclear (by normal fission means), MHD heating

There are probably others - that is just off the top of my head and I'm no expert

You'd need evidence better than some random geophysicist thinking the cores are hotter than he expects. Those doing serious modelling don't seem to agree with you:

Quote from McCord: Ceres Evolution and current state

We modeled several thermal evolution scenarios for Ceres to explore the nature of large, wet protoplanets and to predict current-day evidence that might be found by close inspection, such as by the Dawn mission. The density for Ceres is near 2.1, suggesting a water content between 17% and 27% by mass. Short- and long-lived radioactive nuclide heating is considered. Even if only long-lived radionuclide heating is assumed, the water ice in Ceres melts quickly and a water mantle forms, but an approximately 10-km crust does not melt. The circulating warm water would alter the silicates. As heat is lost by conduction through the frozen crust, water begins to freeze out at the base of the crust. Solid-state convection begins and transports more heat as well as perhaps material dissolved or entrained in the water to or near the surface. Ceres’ water layer eventually (but perhaps not entirely) freezes, forming a layered density structure with perhaps some liquid water remaining today. Our differentiated models are in agreement with the recently measured difference between the equatorial and polar radii. We find that Ceres’ existence and evolution depend critically on it containing water at formation, and this depends strongly on the combination of when it accreted and the amount of 26Al present in the pre-Ceres 1-km-sized objects; slightly more 26Al or earlier accretion produces a dry Vesta-like object. Melting and freezing plus mineralization would lead to several dimensional changes over time, creating topographic features, zones of weakness, and perhaps disruptions in the crust.

And again Joshua provided a long post of flase claims and proves no knowledge of the early history of Cold Fusion.

As I proved in my earlier post, Joshua did not know why cell size mattered in the 40 day tests by the deciding institutes.

And I have to repeat :
"I Wonder what motovation that drives Joshua to use so much of his time and energy on this field of "pathological science" and make so many false claims and falsify history the way he does."

Jushua writes: "The complete absence of progress in cold fusion ..."

Wrong. There has been progress, but of course, the lack of funding means progress have been slow. How much progress have hot fusion promises had since 1989?

Anyhow the International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, ICCF 19 in Padua, was the largest in many years with 564 participants.

So the field of cold fusion lives well with the scientists involved and don't need us, the 'believers'.

Joshua writes: "I suspect that 30 years from now, when the world still thinks cold fusion is bogus....."

May well be, If Rossi is a fake, Broullion is a fake, Piantelli is a fake, F&P heat effect was wrong etc. and funding is not provided in the field, but I doubt it will be the case.

Joshua writes: "I mentioned the events of 1989 to show that the overwhelming inclination of mainstream science was to accept the phenomenon of cold fusion, "

Haha, Yet again Joshua proves no knowledge of cold fusion history.

The truth is, as PROVEN by the literature and interviews from 1989 is:
".....from the outset they [physisists] have expressed profound skepticism of claims by Dr. Fleischmann and Dr. Pons..."

Ref.
http://partners.nytimes.com/li…50399sci-cold-fusion.html

We can find even harder critisism in other newsarticles from interviews with scientists after the F&P press conference.

And again Joshua put forward claims, but no supporting evidence of his claims.

Joshua writes: "And the gushing first reaction from Douglas Morrison shows that even eventual and adamant skeptics were at first excited to accept the claims."

That is a claim, and Joshua provides no reference. While in my reference above from May.3rd 1989 Morrison says "The entire episode, he said, was an example of "pathological science," in which an erroneous experiment initally gained some support, then prompted skepticism and finally led to denunciation."

Joshua writes: "What matters is that in the judgement of most scientists who paid attention, P&F were exposed as incompetent and probably delusional."

Haha, Joshua repeats what Was stated in the APS meeting in Baltimore in 1989. As I stated in my earlier post: "The physisists rushed to their laboratories after the press conference and concluded 40 days (and nights!) later:
"Dr. Steven E. Koonin of Caltech called the Utah report a result of "the incompetence and delusion of Pons and Fleischmann." "

Joshua writes: "The initial enthusiastic response from the world in 1989......"

The enthusiastic response came initially from non scientists. Physisists where sceptic early on of course, since it was two chemists that made claims within the field of Nuclear science.

Of course Physisist could not accept that outsiders (chemists!) had made any discovery within the field owned by physisists.

Joshua writes "Certainly, no one thought scientists of that calibre could get claims of nuclear fusion or measurements of heat wrong...."

WRONG: physicists never believed The claims from the two chemists, and physisists never cared about heat measurements. It was radiation the physisists focused on (or the lack of). Possible Chemists believed F&P, but that didn't matter. It was the physisists that decided the future of CF.

Joshua writes: "Their results did not convince the reviewers for Science or Nature, which had been holding a place for their paper, but rejected it because it did not meet ordinary standards of scientific rigor."

According to literature, Nature where planning to publish reviewed initial papers of both Jones and F&P. It was not "Scientific Rigor" that stopped this happening.

Ref.
https://books.google.no/books?id=bqcQCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA222&lpg=PA222&dq=fleischmann+pons+publish+Nature&source=bl&ots=6Np8A7obNs&sig=QJ9G7KafLbjOCQBzTLbFlPAMkL8&hl=no&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJlq7g2vrLAhUCEiwKHXPzAkwQ6AEILzAG#v=onepage&q=fleischmann pons publish Nature&f=false

I see Joshua also is wrong about events in France.

It's likely that F&P focused on the wrong LENR system. But ironically they did include Nickel in their patent from 1989, which propably would be a better choice.

Towering mountains of water ice rise up to 3500 meters tall on Pluto, above smooth plains covered in veneers of nitrogen and methane ice, NASA’s New Horizons team announced recently. The discovery, along with the finding that parts of the dwarf planet’s surface are crater-free and therefore relatively young, points to a place that has been geologically reworked in the recent past. “It could even be active today,” said John Spencer, a New Horizons team member at Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

That team recently showed off new images of unexpectedly smooth surfaces on Pluto’s moon Charon—which, without an atmosphere, was expected to have an even more battered surface than Pluto. Radioactive elements in both bodies’ interiors could provide some of the heat needed for geological mountain building or ice flows that repave the surface. But Pluto, and especially Charon, are far too small for this heat to persist. The giant impact thought to have formed the two worlds could also provide a source of energy, but that probably happened billions of years ago.

“It’s going to send a lot of scientists back to the drawing boards,” said Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator at SWRI, at the press conference. Scientists outside the team suggest that the puzzlingly youthful surfaces could be explained if the dwarf planet and its moon were formed in a far more recent impact event, or if their reservoirs of water ice were mixed with other compounds that can melt and flow and lower temperatures.

The frigid temperatures on Pluto mean that water ice is hard and doesn’t move or melt easily: It is Pluto’s bedrock. Seeing it protrude in mountains at the surface suggests that layers of other, more volatile ices—methane, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide—might only be a thin veneer of materials. Yet if these layers are too thin, they would be lost completely relatively quickly as they sublimate into the atmosphere and erode into space, Stern says. That means that there must be a way of replenishing these more volatile ices from within Pluto’s interior—perhaps through volcanoes of ice, called cryovolcanoes. “We haven’t found geysers and we haven’t found cryovolcanoes, but this is very strong evidence that will send us looking,” he says.

Smooth surfaces on Pluto's moon Charon imply geological reworking in the recent past.

Just eyeballing it, we think it has to be probably less than 100 million years old," added Spencer, the deputy leader of New Horizons' geology and geophysics investigation (GGI) team. "It might be active right now. With no craters, you just can't put a lower limit on how active it might be."

Indeed, the 1 percent of Pluto captured by the new photo "is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system," fellow GGI team member Jeff Moore, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in a statement.

Signs of recent or ongoing geologic activity have been spotted on other smallish bodies in the solar system, including Saturn's geyser-spewing moon Enceladus and the extremely volcanic Jovian satellite Io. But the interiors of these latter objects are warmed as a result of gravitational tugs from their huge parent planets, in a process known as tidal heating.

"That can't happen on Pluto, because there is no giant body that can deform it on a regular basis," Spencer said. "This is telling us that you do not need tidal heating to power geologic activity on icy moons."

Pluto and Charon aren't tugging hard on each other, either, and haven't for eons.

"Pluto and Charon are in tidal equilibrium," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, also of SwRI. "Charon orbits in the equivalent of geosynchronous orbit, and it is also spinning at the same rate that Pluto spins. So there is no significant exchange of tidal energy anymore."

Furthermore, the heat generated by the mammoth, long-ago collision between a proto-Pluto and a proto-Charon, which is thought to have shaped the system, likely dissipated in the ancient past, mission team members said.

So the evidence of recent activity on Pluto and Charon comes as quite a surprise. Mission scientists aren't sure what has been powering this activity but a couple of possibilities spring to mind.

For example, Pluto and Charon may have held onto their interior radioactive heat for much longer than scientists had thought possible. (Heat from radioactive decay is still a force here on Earth, but our planet is far bigger than Pluto and Charon, which are about 1,470 miles [2,370 kilometers] and 750 miles [1,200 km] wide, respectively.)

"This may be telling us that, even very small bodies, if they're icy — radioactive heat is enough to produce this activity," Spencer said.

It's also possible that Pluto and Charon possessed subsurface oceans that froze very slowly, releasing heat into the bodies' crusts over time, he added.

The discovery that even relatively diminutive Charon was geologically active not too long ago makes Pluto's distant realm, known as the Kuiper Belt, and its many denizens even more intriguing, Spencer said.

Geoffrey Collins, a planetary scientist at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, unaffiliated with the team, is amazed by the images. “Clearly we’re seeing internal activity on the surface of Pluto and Charon,” he says. “Something is pulling apart their ice crusts.” Collins is excited because there is no way to explain the activity with conventional models of heat loss. “If the Charon-Pluto impact happened more recently, all the problems would be solved,” he says.

Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University who is not affiliated with the mission, agrees that the most curious discovery is the youthful surfaces of both bodies. “How do you keep these things warm for so long?” he asks. But he would rather find a mechanism besides a more recent impact event, which he calls “special pleading.” A giant impact is more likely to have occurred near the start of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, when the Kuiper belt—the distant shell of icy bodies in which Pluto resides—harbored more potential impactors than it does today. But Lunine says it could be that the dynamics of the Kuiper belt are different from those in the rest of the solar system. Another mechanism to get water ice to move and flow more readily, he suggests, is to mix it with other compounds, such as ammonia. Ammonia-water mixes have been proposed for other icy bodies in the outer solar system, but they have never been identified directly, he says. “Maybe that’s happening here.”

Nancy Chabot, another planetary scientist at APL who is not affiliated with the mission, says the most important discovery today will end up being the ice mountains. “It’s going to be something people talk about for a while,” she says. The mountains—and their implication of mountain-building activity—runs counter to the expectation that Kuiper belt objects are cold, pristine relics. “We talk about these things as time capsules from the early solar system,” she says. That notion must evolve, she says. “Even though they are primitive bodies, they are also active bodies.”

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For example, Pluto and Charon may have held onto their interior radioactive heat for much longer than scientists had thought possible. (Heat from radioactive decay is still a force here on Earth, but our planet is far bigger than Pluto and Charon, which are about 1,470 miles [2,370 kilometers] and 750 miles [1,200 km] wide, respectively.)

"This may be telling us that, even very small bodies, if they're icy — radioactive heat is enough to produce this activity," Spencer said.It's also possible that Pluto and Charon possessed subsurface oceans that froze very slowly, releasing heat into the bodies' crusts over time, he added.

So Axil you agree with me? There are various mundane answers to these questions - so the "last and weirdest resort" is not needed.

The excess heat at the planet's core could be a one off freak thing. But when many other smaller Kuiper belt objects show the same resurfacing, that will negates one off freakness through averaging. Like so many other mysteries in science, all kinds of wild reasons will be put for to explain them, but in the end the cause is LENR.

Seems like you are going a bit beyond your available data there, Axil. Collisional heating, among KBOs and other bodies, with kinetic deliveries can easily give relatively recent warming. Invocation of LENR at this point is strictly hypothetical. And that would be added to the cautionary points Thomas Clarke makes.

Quote from Longview

Seems like you are going a bit beyond your available data there, Axil. Collisional heating, among KBOs and other bodies, with kinetic deliveries can easily give relatively recent warming. Invocation of LENR at this point is strictly hypothetical. And that would be added to the cautionary points Thomas Clarke makes.

Yes more data is required but as these probes look at more, colder, and smaller objects in the Kuiper and asteroid belt, if active cores and resurfacing is seen, it has got to be LENR that is heating these cores.

oystla wrote:

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As I proved in my earlier post, Joshua did not know why cell size mattered in the 40 day tests by the deciding institutes.

I still don't. Considering I'm nearly certain there never was any cold fusion, how could the size have been critical. But, I also doubt the cells in all the positive claims early on or for the next decades were exactly the same dimensions. Pretty soon it turned out that nothing in the experiment was critical for *claiming* cold fusion. The Pd wasn't needed. Neither was deuterium, or the electrolysis. All that was needed was to shut your eyes and make a wish, and cold fusion was everywhere. Except, it was never definitive, always marginal, and never the same result from different labs.

The executive director at the Office of Naval Research, who had funded experiments by Miles and others said (from a NewScientist article in 2003) put it like this: "For close to two years, we tried to create one definitive experiment that produced a result in one lab that you could reproduce in another,” Saalfeld says. “We never could. What China Lake did, NRL couldn't reproduce. What NRL did, San Diego couldn't reproduce. We took very great care to do everything right. We tried and tried, but it never worked."

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me:

Wrong. There has been progress,

But you don't actually name any.

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but of course, the lack of funding means progress have been slow.

Compared to what was needed for the discovery, P&F had at least 100 times the funding for twice the time, but no progress.

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How much progress have hot fusion promises had since 1989?

A lot. Their highest fusion rate in magnetic confinement was achieved in the late 90s, and the NIF reached Q=1 in 2012. There are lots of plots showing the increase in the triple product with time. It's pretty impressive. Especially compared to zero progress in cold fusion.

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Anyhow the International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, ICCF 19 in Padua, was the largest in many years with 564 participants.

I was talking about *scientific* progress.

Even some astrology conferences attract several hundred attendees, and there are several astrology conferences every year.

Funny how so many participants generate so few peer reviewed papers.

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Joshua writes:

May well be, If Rossi is a fake, Broullion is a fake, Piantelli is a fake, F&P heat effect was wrong etc. and funding is not provided in the field, but I doubt it will be the case.

Of course you do, but things looked a lot brighter for the field in 1989, and here we are almost 30 years later...

oystla wrote:

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Joshua writes:

Haha, Yet again Joshua proves no knowledge of cold fusion history.

The truth is, as PROVEN by the literature and interviews from 1989 is:

".....from the outset they [physisists] have expressed profound skepticism of claims by Dr. Fleischmann and Dr. Pons..."

We can find even harder critisism in other newsarticles from interviews with scientists after the F&P press conference.

And again Joshua put forward claims, but no supporting evidence of his claims.

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Yes, there were some hard skeptics from the outset, but the enthusiasm clearly dominated. And I did cite Storms' book and Morrison's comments as evidence, but I did not quote them explicitly because I've done it so often recently, I thought you would have already seen it. But I'm delighted to cut and paste a few quotes from Storms' book (chapter 2) once again:

"A day after the public announcement, work was under way at LANL … People were quickly organized … with a speed that is no longer possible at LANL. Everyone scurried off to find palladium and heavy-water before the limited supplies were snatched up by someone else…

"Excitement was building as more people heard about the “discovery” and <b>wanted to get in on the action. If real, such an important discovery hardly ever happens during a scientist’s career, …

"During most of April, large and animated meetings were held every week as people tried to understand what Fleischmann and Pons had done and how the claimed effects might be duplicated. ...

"By April 19, multiple programs were underway at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL), ... [10 other national labs]

"In addition, 56 people, involving 8 teams, were working on the problem at LANL. Of course, non-government laboratories as well as groups in other countries were also working hard. […copious details of labs around the world getting busy…] As this list of laboratories demonstrates, interest was widespread and spontaneous, with studies started in at least 50 major laboratories worldwide involving at least 600 scientists. In addition, many articles in the press and onTV spread interest to the general public. All of the major news magazines featured Fleischmann and Pons on their front covers."

"At one point, the director of LANL, Dr. Siegfried Hecker, confided to me that he had not seen so much enthusiasm at the Laboratory since World War II. “Physicists are actually talking to chemists,” he observed with amazement. This attitude was being duplicated all over the world. To be sustained, this huge bubble of enthusiasm needed some very significant confirming results, ..."

"Huge bubble of enthusiasm" among physicists and chemists as cited by Storms himself.

And while I of course won't prove it, I lived through that time, and was in contact with several physics departments. The hard skeptics were outnumbered by optimists (some cautious, some enthusiastic) by at least 4:1. And Pons famous talk at the ACS meeting, I know for a fact, was attended by many physicists, who jumped up along with everyone else to cheer Pons on.

There are also anecdotal stories of extreme enthusiasm, such as Moshe Gai, at Yale, who was so excited, he ate and slept at the lab for a month perfecting a neutron detector to test the claim. Allan Bromley, who became Bush’s science advisor, arranged a collaboration between Gai and Lynn, an electrochemist who had been at Utah, and was inclined to believe the claims. They became skeptical only later, after the evidence did not stand up to scrutiny.

And besides Morrison (see below), other prominent *physicists* like Carlo Rubbia and Teller both were initially sympathetic to the claims.

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Joshua writes:

That is a claim, and Joshua provides no reference.

I have in the past (just recently, in this forum), along with the quote. This is Morrison in his very first newsletter after the cold fusion press conference.

"… I feel this subject will become so important to society that we must consider the broader implications as well as the scientific ones. Looking into a cloudy crystal ball, […] the present big power companies will be running down their oil and coal power stations while they are building deuterium separation plants and new power plants based on cold fusion. No new nuclear power stations will be built except for military needs….The theory, while not fully developed, suggests that the deuterium nuclei inside the lattice of the catalyst, are held so closely together that the probability of fusion(the tunneling effect) is dramatically increased by many orders of magnitude. If there do not turn out to be major practical problems, it may be expected that this will cause major changes in the energy industry and major social, economic and hence political changes."

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While in my reference above from May.3rd 1989 Morrison says "The entire episode, he said, was an example of "pathological science," in which an erroneous experiment initally gained some support, then prompted skepticism and finally led to denunciation."

Yes, the quote I gave is from 31 March 1989, and it can be found, for example, at http://allegedly.petebevin.com/coldfusi.html. The same site has multiple "cold fusion news" items every few days throughout April, and it's interesting to see how he gradually transitions from enthusiastic support to skepticism toward the end of the month.

oystla wrote:

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Joshua writes:

The enthusiastic response came initially from non scientists. Physisists where sceptic early on of course, since it was two chemists that made claims within the field of Nuclear science.

No, you're mistaken. The enthusiastic response came from scientists -- 7000 of them at the ACS meeting alone -- and included physicists, as Storms' account, quoted earlier, clearly shows. Non-scientists wouldn't know the significance of the announcement without guidance. It was because of the response from the scientific mainstream that the public got so excited.

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Of course Physisist could not accept that outsiders (chemists!) had made any discovery within the field owned by physisists.

Of course, you're mistaken, as Morrison's long emails, and Storms' detailed account clearly show. Not to say there was no patronizing from the physicists, but it was drowned out in the early days by that bubble of enthusiasm.

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Joshua writes

WRONG: physicists never believed The claims from the two chemists, and physisists never cared about heat measurements. It was radiation the physisists focused on (or the lack of). Possible Chemists believed F&P, but that didn't matter. It was the physisists that decided the future of CF.

No, you're mistaken. Nature doesn't work that way. Non-scientists were the first to fly too, but it was not possible for scientists to decide that they couldn't fly. Nor could physicists magically prevent P&F from proving to the world (or at least to Toyota) that cold fusion was real with 100 times the resources they needed to discover it.

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Joshua writes:

According to literature, Nature where planning to publish reviewed initial papers of both Jones and F&P. It was not "Scientific Rigor" that stopped this happening.

You can keep telling yourself that, but there is no way Nature would willingly miss out on publishing the biggest science news of the century if they actually thought the science had merit.

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I see Joshua also is wrong about events in France.

It's likely that F&P focused on the wrong LENR system. But ironically they did include Nickel in their patent from 1989, which propably would be a better choice.

P&F focused on the same system with which they claimed the discovery. They were shut down for lack of progress, and that is inconceivable if the phenomenon were real, given the resources they had, whether or not it is the "best" system.

padam73 wrote:

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me:

60 years? What was said 60 years ago about hot fusion:

"It seems reasonable to hope that a full-scale power-producing thermonuclear device may be built within the next decade or two."

Amasa Bishop, Director of Project Sherwood, 1956

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What's your point? The problem with cold fusion is not the failure to anticipate the scale of the practical problems. It's the failure to provide proof of principle. In hot fusion, the principle has never been questioned, but if it had been, it was proven unequivocally in the 60s.

My hypothetical involved failure to prove cold fusion to the world for another 30 years.

Anyway, I seem to remember reading that Pons predicted a product within a year back in 1989. Hot fusion is only late by a factor of 3; cold fusion by a factor of 30.

@oystla, padam73

Cude answers your points with specifics. You combat this by making general statements without evidence - or by saying things that are tangential and do not affect his argument. I just can't see why you do this. Cude's point is a narrow one - about the history and sociology of cold fusion, and its scientific progress now relative to hot fusion.

You can't beat him on the history - it is clear that everyone was massively enthusiastic and this turned sour quite quickly, although there was a lot of continuing checking for six months and then also many people working with real money, including P&F, for many years.

It is also clear that the science record for CF/LENR has gone downhill since then. The current spate of enthusiasm has no grounding in science - it is investment money encouraged by Rossi's repeated claims. Well, if you believe those, you think indeed there has been massive progress. I and many others don't.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

You can't beat him on the history - it is clear that everyone was massively enthusiastic and this turned sour quite quickly, although there was a lot of continuing checking for six months and then also many people working with real money, including P&F, for many years.

As I already mentioned days before, at that time (1991) it was law, that all physics publication had to be DARPA approved. In 1991 1/3 of all physics papers were hold back indefinitely. In the semiconductor field it was far more than 50%. US president Reagan ordered a shut mouth for the whole US science in behalf of the so called star-wars initiative (which was designed & screwed up by a few foolish people..)

Conclusion: The Fleischman&Pons-publication was more than high treason at least in the eyes of the above mentioned fools. I personally (in 1989) was astonished and questioned how they (Fleischman & Pons) managed it to make the story public. They fooled the whole administration!! Which immediatly faught back. Point End!

Now I'M waiting until Cude&Thomas fill the page to make these sentences disappear...

Quote

As I already mentioned days before, at that time (1991) it was law, that all physics publication had to be DARPA approved. In 1991 1/3 of all physics papers were hold back indefinitely. In the semiconductor field it was far more than 50%. US president Reagan ordered a shut mouth for the whole US science in behalf of the so called star-wars initiative (which was designed & screwed up by a few foolish people..)

This is a conspiracy theory and not worth the pixels it displays in. The US has no control over international publications, only over US. One thing LENR enthusiasts bemoaning nasty journals forget is that there are 100s of thousands of journals and even top-slicing the best, only some of them are based in the US.

Also, defence approval for publication in national security interests is not going to be invoked for claimed LENR science which does not work - and if it did work then with US government interest it would have been backed and sorted out within 25 years.

Quote from Wyttenbach

As I already mentioned days before, at that time (1991) it was law, that all physics publication had to be DARPA approved. In 1991 1/3 of all physics papers were hold back indefinitely. In the semiconductor field it was far more than 50%. US president Reagan ordered a shut mouth for the whole US science in behalf of the so called star-wars initiative (which was designed & screwed up by a few foolish people..)

Conclusion: The Fleischman&Pons-publication was more than high treason at least in the eyes of the above mentioned fools. I personally (in 1989) was astonished and questioned how they (Fleischman & Pons) managed it to make the story public. They fooled the whole administration!! Which immediatly faught back. Point End!

Now I'M waiting until Cude&Thomas fill the page to make these sentences disappear...

I'm happy to go on posting this seriously weird statement so no-one forgets you've said it?