Welcome to the 'Lookingforheat' Laboratory.

In 2009 when I was site-banned on Wikipeida for three months and topic banned on cold fusion for a year, I took the opportunity to set up a cold fusion project, selling materials useful for Galileo-class replications. One could buy everything needed for a single basic PdD experiment -- add power supply, supply the SSNTD etching separately -- for $100. With a gold cathode wire, i.e., most likely to generate neutrons. I still have all the materials. I sold some LR-115 SSNTD material to one researcher, and a complete cell, ready to go, with extra materials, to one student, Eric Golab, who is featured in the movie The Believers, having just received it. He did run the cell, and then there was some accident in development, and most of the detector material was ruined. He sent the SNNTDs back to me and I did find on one piece of material a triple-track, which indicates a neutron. But one track could easily be background.

LR-115 is very nice stuff, generating very clear track images, compared to CR-39. The LR-115 has a 6 micron dark red cellulose nitrate detector layer, on top of 100 microns of clear polyester, so images are crisp.

The idea actually was to have a standard kit with many replications by independent people, and then to publish collectively. A long-standing problem with cold fusion has been that almost everyone does something different, looking to "improve results," which isn't science, it is a kind of exploration, not nailing down what is found.

Quote from Alan Smith

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

That is exactly our plan. But -as you may have found, when to go off to our customers we seldom hear a great deal more, just the occasional request for more chemicals and spare parts. The keep progress (in most cases) close to their chest. Our base price including power supply, PID controller, thermocouples and pretty much everything else you need to run basic XSH testing is $250.00

I sold only one kit, and the customer did communicate fully. There was even live video of the experiment while it was running. Watching bubbles form on a wire through a microscope. How exciting! For several weeks....

What is generally missing in the field is full reporting of experimental results. This, then, leads to ready suspicion of the file-drawer effect. Scientifically, all results are interesting. I've encountered surprising resistance to that from surprising sources. There are well-known scientists with lots of publications who have only published a fraction of their experimental work. They think that negative results would be "boring." Sure. But they are still very important, often showing what doesn't work. Or didn't work, for unknown reasons. And then those can be explored, and if experiments are actually replicated, with controlled variation, progress becomes far more possible.

What is often called replication is actually some sort of confirmation, as all NiH results are confirmations of other NiH results.... but not confirmation of the actual experimental protocol. So if someone gets XP with NiH, it does not confirm Lugano, as a commonly claimed example, unless the protocol is the same. MFMP negative replications are very important, in my view. What I hope to see from MFMP is better organization and reporting of results. Last I looked it was difficult to follow. They need someone dedicated to reporting and organizing the material they have generated. If that exists, I'd love to see it!

Quote from Alan Smith

agree - but that potential confirmation of XSH from almost any system together with the publised work of Focardi, Piantelli et al does tend to confirm (for me at least) that Ni/H is worthy of much further study and development.

"Tend to confirm NIH" is correct. However, none of this work has been nailed down. Instead, people keep looking for "tend to confirm," and much work is being done that is never reported, so ... file drawer effect, which looms very large if the reported results are not far above noise. Lots of sloppy work is being reported, much of it "interesting," i.e., worthy of further study. But no cigar, yet.

The situation with Rossi created an impression that anything that wasn't kilowatts wasn't worth study -- or investment. That was having a massive negative effect on the field. Over and over, Peter Gluck praised "LENR+" with NiH and Rossi, and deprecated boring old PdD, with allegedly poor results. PdD could have commercial potential, but will take as much as billions of investment to reach that point. One could scale up PdD just as Rossi allegedly did with NiH. Experiments are kept small for very strong reasons: until there is good control of the reaction, scaling up is very dangerous and makes the work much more difficult. NiH will continue to be investigated, there is no doubt about that, but needs a systematic approach just as does PdD.