QuoteMay be You should read the papers more carefully.
I did already:
Cs or Sr was deposited on the surface of the thin Pd layer.
Mercury is the only cathode where you could get elementary Cs and Sr.
In my opinion Iwamura's claim is the most preposterous in the whole cold fusion incredible history. Don't you agree? Look for his work in this Japanese data bank:
http://www.jcprg.org/exfor/
wow such hate
do you have a closet manga addiction or something
Forums favoring LENR and particularly Defkalion and Rossi are populated by believers with little or no science and scientific method education, much less physicists and chemists with experience in the relevant areas. How anyone with a science background can accept the early ecat experiments by Kullander, Essen, Levi and Lewan is incomprehensible. Same with the tests conducted with the help of the Swedish professors. Also the forums are limited or censored to one degree or another or, like Lewan, who does not like censorship, comments are simple "closed'. Vortex expels people based on complaints of ridiculing or sneering (whatever that is). Dissent is hated in religion and also in LENR. And proponents don't fix the problems, they ban the critics and skeptics or they insult and stalk them.
Wow, it seems to me that this forum is mainly made of believers than of experts. Where are physicists and chemists? How many can effectively do a query on a nuclear data bank?
I have done many such queries a while back, but I don't remember seeing any muon based reactions listed. Have they upgraded to include that info recently? LENR may involve muon based reactions?
Mary
Vortex expels people based on complaints of ridiculing or sneering (whatever that is).
No surprises there then.
Best regards
Frank
<a href="https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/User/1686-Ascoli65/">@Ascoli65</a>
Quote: “this forum, which presently is the most important on LENR”
Wow, it seems to me that this forum is mainly made of believers than of experts. Where are physicists and chemists? How many can effectively do a query on a nuclear data bank?
Wow. I thought I was a Software Engineer but apparently I'm a physicist or chemist! I do queries all day!
Wow, it seems to me that this forum is mainly made of believers than of experts. Where are physicists and chemists? How many can effectively do a query on a nuclear data bank?
Please, analyze the meaning of my phrase: "this forum, which presently is the most important on LENR". It would be wrong only if you can cite the name of a forum which presently is more important than this on the LENR subject. Can you cite one?
After all, this is the place you chose to show how smart you are in inquiring the nuclear data banks. Didn't you know in advance that here you couldn't have found any physicist or chemist at your unusual level?
And in any case, we all believe in something. You believe in the generally accepted science. Many people here believe in what has been declared by some scientists working in public and qualified Institutes. Both behaviors are legit, even if, in this specific case, I share only yours.
From my own, I simply believe that CF/LENR is not real science, and that to understand its appearance and development we should take into consideration other categories of the human being, story and relationships, whose details are not archived in the nuclear data banks.
CAM,
You misunderstand the process of Scientific discovery and progress of new knowledge.
If experimental results does not fit present accepted theory, it should be exlained, either by identifying the error in measurements or by identifying a new theory that explains the phenomenon.
Therefore, when mainstream science allow Publishing anomalous results from experimental research, like the Japanese, the rest of the Scientific environment should pick up the ball and investigate the phenomenon. Not, as you state, just ignore the results.
You may ignore what nature show you, but it won't get you anywhere!
Science have to rise to the challenge that started with Fleishmann and Pons. Enough resources must be spent to fully understand the cause of excess heat phenomenon that where discovered by F&P.
The worst is that there is a claim that Iwamura was wrong, by Kidwell, and not only he tried to replicate unsuccessfully, but he never moaned on the fact it was impossible... He pushed a theory of contamination that was not so credible, but did not take advantage of what you say.
Note that unlike you he is working on electrochemistry regularly in NRL.
I suspect what you say about that experiment is simply uninformed. about at the same ratio as I suspect the Rossi test to be manipulated. not 100%, but not far.
We are not making good progress in LENR development because the current reaction detection technique is not sensitive enough. If sub atomic particle emissions were used to detect LENR instead of excess heat, the R&D process would be more productive. R&D research progress is proportionately based on the sensitivity of the tools used to provide experimental feedback.
This is why Holmlid is making so much progress in his research. He uses sub atomic particle detection to look at the LENR reaction. Even though he is a excellent scientist and experimentalist his results are so far out of the main steam expectations, that few take him or his work seriously.
On Wednesday, 7/13/16, 8:42pm, in thread Jed Rothwell on an Unpublished E-Cat Test Report that “Looks Like it Worked”, IH Fanboy wrote:
“To the contrary, cold fusion lost its acclaim when certain hot fusion scientists from MIT altered experimental evidence…” and linked to an Infinite Energy ‘report’ written by Eugene Mallove in 1999 that purportedly describes how MIT scientists ‘fraudulently altered’ their data to be more supportive of the ‘no such thing as cold fusion’ position.
Unfortunately, the analysis by Gene, which is based in large part on comments by Mitchell Swartz, doesn’t hold up to examination. In the Mallove report, he shows data figures showing the excess power curves that MIT used and some preliminary versions of them he obtained as the MIT Science Press Officer. Of particular note are the applied power curves for the H2O and D2O cells. The MIT researchers used two matched calls, one with H2O, one with D2O, for their experiments. The cells were open, so water was lost through release of electrolysis gases to the atmosphere. Since the chemistry is different for the two materials, different results were expected with regards to rate of electrolysis.
The calorimetry was the power compensation type. The cells were held at some slightly elevated temperature with a heater, and any power appearing in the cell from any other source would cause a lowering of the heater power needed to maintain that temperature. So the applied power curves would show a drop if any excess energy was present. But, they also showed a drop due to water electrolysis, so the data MUST be corrected for that before any excess signal can be detected. Also, when the electrolyte is ‘topped off’, the power had to go up to heat up and maintain the now larger volume of water. This would induce baseline shifts in the applied power time plots.
The preliminary data supplied to Mallove showed both the H2O and D2O cell power traces for a timespan indicated as 0 to 80 hours for the H2O cell, and 0 to 120 hours for the D2O cell. The plots looked like continuous, noisy lines. The H2O trace had a baseline shift at about 62 hours, and the D2O had two, one at about 16 hours and one at ~100 hours (with a big noise spike going both positive and negative at ~22 hours). But the plots appear to be basically level, i.e. the dropping from water loss is not seen. Obviously the plots were corrected for this. And further, the correction is obviously not the same for the two cells, since the rate is isotope dependent.
The Y scale on both is -.2W to +.3W. The zero watt line seems to be drawn through the average value of the H2O data prior to the baseline shift. The D2O zero on the other hand seems to me to be drawn a little lower than the average of the values between the two shifts. It seems more to be drawn through the average of the ~16 hr to ~50 hr section. The ~50 hr to ~100 hr data seems to average slightly higher, perhaps at ~0.02W or so.
The final, published data uses unconnected dots instead of continuous lines. The places where the baselines shift are not shown, and the part of the D2O plot prior to the first baseline shift that was centered about ~+0.25 W is also not shown. In other words, the presented data is clipped a little in the time axis.
The Y axes now go from -0.2 to +0.2W. The Y axis zero for the H2O cell is about the same, but the Y zero for the D2O data is now shifted up a little such that it is more in line with the overall average for the whole region. I recall reading somewhere that the dots are local averages computed from the raw data, i.e. they are smoothed a little, but I am not sure that is correct. I can’t see much effect on peak heights due to the smoothing, and normally I would expect a little peak height reduction if smoothing was used.
Instead the Y axis labels may indicate what is going on. The preliminary data used “POWER (WATTS)” and the published used “P-CAL (WATTS)”. This says to me that the heater calibration curve has been used to subtract off the heater input power. In the preliminary data, excess power would be indicated by negative values (since we are looking at the applied power, not the excess), but one could not be sure it was not due to a shift in heater power. That is fixed in the published data; now any rises would indicate ‘true’ excess power. A key point is that there are no positive excursions in the D2O data larger than the ones in the H2O data. Recall that H2O was not supposed to show excess power, This means that no excess power is observed in the D2O cell. This all seems pretty reasonable to me. But apparently the shift from raw applied power to the power difference coupled with the flattening of the curves to take out the mass loss effect sent Mallove over the edge. He resigned his post because the University wouldn’t ‘investigate’ the issue. I don’t see anything to investigate myself.
But Mallove wrote: “The Phase-II Calorimetry curves were later investigated in the outstanding analysis by my cold fusion colleague and fellow MIT graduate Dr. Mitchell R. Swartz. There can be no doubt now that these curves were the end result of a serious lapse in scientific standards in this affair that happened at MIT.”
Mallove also quotes a letter from Dr. Swartz:
“The light water curve was published by the PFC essentially intact after the first baseline shift, whereas the heavy water curve was shifted a second time. The cells were matched,12 and solvent loss would be expected to be greater for H2O.
The Phase-II methodology is flawed because it masks a constant [steady-state] excess heat. Furthermore this paradigm fails to use either the true baseline drift, and may avoid the first 15% of the D2O curve in Types 3, 3B, 4, and 5 curves. What constitutes “data reduction” is sometimes but not always open to scientific debate.
The application of a low pass filter to an electrical signal or the cutting in half of a hologram properly constitute “data reduction,” but the asymmetric shifting of one curve of a paired set is probably not. The removal of the entire steady state signal is also not classical “data reduction.” “
So the first ‘shift’ is the sloping baseline correction, and the second shift is the different zero point in the D2O curves I guess. But both of those are fine. Fleischmann and Pons' calorimetric method also accounts for the baseline shift, albeit in a different manner. And the zero shift would seem to be the result of the heater power subtraction. Note that the subtracted power was probably an ‘ideal’ power, i.e. with no noise. So what’s wrong with that? Not a thing, it’s SOP in most cases.
The ‘masking’ claim could be real, but it requires that the excess power production be constant and unchanging over the span shown, which is unlikely. Most excess power curves show considerable variation. There was one paper by some Italians that showed a baseline shift when the electrolysis power was turned on that was claimed as excess heat, but I publicly criticized that because baseline shifts are notorious and can arise from many sources. In their work, they varied experimental parameters a lot and didn’t get any change in their amount of supposed excess power, another indication the baseline shift arose from a different source.
As well, the Storms data I reanalyzed for my first CF-related publication was his second set of data. He posted a first set in January 2000. I immediately noted a strong negative feedback signal in the excess power curve that tracked the input power and told him so. This was also noted independently by Scott Little and he reported it to Ed as well. To his credit Ed figured out he had some ground loop problems, reconfigured his electronics, and removed about 95+% of the feeedback in the second set (you could still detect a very small signal, which was unimportant).
Furthermore, I haven’t actually read the MIT paper because they only ran for 10 days. This was before anyone used codeposition, and it usually took hundreds of hours of running to form the ‘special active state’ that gives the effect (if they even could get it after that long!). So the expectation, even after the fact now, was that no excess power signal was likely to be observed. However Swartz claims a 62 mW signal. How he gets that I don’t know but I don’t believe it.
Swartz is known for some shaky math. He once got into an argument with Scott Little about data Scott had collected. Swartz claimed he could pick out an 80 nW (as I recall) signal from typical calorimetric data that had a baseline noise of 50-80 mW. When it’s in the noise, it’s in the noise…
The expectation was for zero. The MIT guys did what anyone would do with their data, no faking or falsification, and they found zero, which in the end proved nothing since they hadn’t run long enough. To conclude that the MIT folks removed a constant amount of apparent excess power from the curves, especially just so they could reject cold fusion claims, in unsupported speculation based on the data shown in the Mallove report. If the data covered a longer period and if it showed excess power signals, it would be worth getting the original data and a full description of data workup protocols, but they didn’t do that or get that.
So IHFanboy, the MIT work is sound.
Now the hoopla with press conferences, interviews, press releases, yada, yada, was a zoo and didn’t enhance anyone’s standing…
Ascoli wrote:
Quoteme:
So what? Do you assume that once somebody says something you don't believe, all he said or will say is also unbelievable?
Of course not. It does mean that what he says should not be taken as automatically true. Especially when it appears inconsistent with my own observations of reports of substantial funding from the likes of Toyota, Utah, Kimmel, EPRI, the governments of Japan, India, Italy, China, and Russia, and the complaints of demotion and shoestring budgets and shut downs from people working with DOD funding.
QuoteIt's a nonsense, and not applicable to JR. He admires Machiavelli, not Pinocchio!
Apart from the fact that this was not my point, what he said was not just something I don't believe. It is something he himself no longer believes. To his credit, he admitted he was wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that his absolute certainty, let alone run of the mill speculation, should not be regarded as infallible. Whether his stated support of Rossi represented some Machiavellian purpose or poor judgement doesn't change this.
QuoteAnd in any case if you analyze carefully the phrase you have reported, you should admit that it is also believable, in some way.
You do like to split hairs. The quotation was just an example (shortened for brevity) to illustrate that Rothwell expressed certainty that Rossi had the goods, in spite of what you agree are obvious reasons that this certainty was not warranted, and he now admits Rossi probably does not have the goods.
Sure, for skeptics of LENR, one could make the argument that Rossi's evidence was better than P&F's or McKubre's. But Rothwell is not a skeptic of LENR, so contradictions exist anyway.
But, Rothwell's following sentences removes this hair-splitting objection: "There are videos and data from the Oct. 6 test. That test is irrefutable by first principles."
Quoteme:
I was talking about the different attitude toward the CF of DoE vs. DoD, two US Departments.
Yes, I know. But saying the "DoD has been [cold fusion's] major funder throughout a quarter of century" without restricting it to the US supports this difference more effectively than if you said it was the major *US* funder. After all, P&F left the US for greener cold fusion pastures.
Quoteme:
He is the CF/LENR librarian, and, as he explained himself, he has analyzed the acknowledgements of thousands of documents he has catalogued.
"Analyzed" is a bit of an exaggeration. He says himself " ... I do not keep track carefully. I am sure there is a lot I do not know about this."
Basically, you're relying on Rothwell's impression from his exposure to the literature. But his impression from the same exposure is that LENR is undoubtedly real. You reject the second. I'm surprised you accept the first without question.
QuoteYou are a US citizen,
You seem a little like the believers making assumptions not in evidence...
Quoteme:
Also in this case, you should ask JR for more convincing details. I can only report you a couple of phrases I found on internet. [...]"
The two quotes you provided indicated previous associations not connected to cold fusion. The self-funding I referred to was for their cold fusion research. This is a matter of record. And after the 1989 press conference, they worked briefly at the Utah funded cold fusion center and then went to France with Toyota funding.
Quoteme:
For what I read in his Brief History of ICCF Conferences (4), the (partial?) support of EPRI ceased with the ICCF4 in 1993,
Well, the final report to EPRI was published in 1998.
Quotebut McKubre did work on CF/LENR until recently. Who funded him?
After around 1994, however, he mostly collaborated with other projects, and published very little in the refereed literature. And not knowing who funded him is hardly a basis to assume it was the DOD.
Quote"Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised to see the DoD at the top of the hit-parade of all the CF/LENR funders, on a world scale."
I have no objection to your speculations or guesses, if framed that way. My objection was to your apparently certain assertion that the "DoD has been [cold fusion's] major funder throughout a quarter of century", in which, moreover, the singular (its major funder) sounds to me like a more significant role than being the largest funder.
As for speculation, I'd be surprised if the DOD spent as much as Toyota.
Rothwell wrote:
Quoteme:
You are wrong about that. I was working for one of the minicomputer companies in the late 1970s. They fired many people who were in favor of shifting over to microcomputers, including people high in management. Within the mini- and mainframe companies those people were pariahs. Fortunately, they soon got jobs with the growing microcomputer industry.
That doesn't show I'm wrong. If a minicomputer company that is not interested in making microcomputers fires someone who wants to make a microcomputer, then it's hardly surprising that other minicomputer companies (who also aren't interested in making microcomputers) would not be interested in hiring him.
What I would find implausible is if the minicomputer community would carefully construct a reputation trap in concert with non-minicomputer engineers or scientists, so that anyone interested in microcomputers would become scientific or engineering pariahs in all of mainstream electronics or engineering. That clearly didn't happen, which is why the microcomputer industry was such a dramatic success.
Likewise, it is certainly plausible that the hot fusion community would be uninterested in hiring people interested in doing cold fusion research. But mainstream science, and even nuclear physics, is much bigger than the hot fusion community. What I claim is implausible is that the hot fusion community could carefully construct a reputation trap in concert with members outside the hot fusion community, so that anyone interested in cold fusion would become scientific pariahs in all of mainstream science.
Dewey Weaver wrote:
QuoteCam - until recently, Iwamura was the lead LENR investigator for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. He moved over to assist the Tohoku University LENR transmutation project. His work at MHI was replicated by a Toyota-funded research company.
I wonder why anyone looks to car companies for nuclear physics breakthroughs, especially after Toyota's big bust in the 90s with P&F. Toyota may be selling new cars, but they're peddling used science.
1. Toyota did not replicated Iwamura's work. Just read the abstract to see that Toyota claims transmutation at a rate 100 times lower than Iwamura claimed, which kind of undermines one's confidence. Only in cold fusion (and perhaps astronomy) would a measurement that differs by a factor of 100 be considered a replication. In any other branch of science, the reasonable conclusion is that one or both are likely wrong.
2. According to the ICCF-17 report, Toyota only tested the Cs->Pr results, and that involves only naturally occurring isotopes of both. They only used mass spec for the measurements, and so a mis-assignment of the peak at 141 can account for results. They do not show any mass spectra, so it's impossible to get any confidence on the assignment. In the Iwamura results, the mass spectra show an unassigned peak at 142 with the same mass defect as the peak at 141, giving some doubt as to the correctness of the assignment. (One possible assignment for the 141 peak that would correlate with the Cs, and with permeation could be Cs2O++.)
3. All of Iwamura's transmutation claims start and stop on stable isotopes, leaving zero trace of any intermediate radioactive isotopes. Considering the tiny fraction of isotopes that are stable, that seems like a convenient coincidence. If they could transmute a stable isotope into a radioactive one (or vice-versa), it could be detected with orders of magnitude better sensitivity and specificity. Never happens though. (It's much like the only product of electrolysis cold fusion commensurate with heat is -- you guessed it -- a stable isotope (He-4), which just happens to exist in the atmosphere at a high enough level to produce artifacts.) The absence of any conversion of radioactive isotopes, though, doesn't stop them from talking about using their method to remediate nuclear waste. What a joke!
4. Iwamura's results were published more than 15 years ago, and he himself has scarcely followed up on these revolutionary results with simple checks. Some of the claims have such obvious checks, that failure to perform them saps any benefit of the doubt one might be otherwise inclined to give them. For example, they claim they are producing high energy alphas for some of the reactions, but that should be trivial to detect. Rutherford could have done it for them a century ago, but they don't even try. Or they could take the same layered sample and bombard it with alphas of a wide range of energies and see if it produces what they claim to observe. It's like so many of the cold fusion claims. It's not that an explanation for the observations is necessarily obvious. It's that if the claims were true, they could be demonstrated in less ambiguous, nay completely unequivocal ways.
5. The results are so implausible that even McKubre and Hagelstein ignored them in their presentation to the DOE panel in 2004.
There are many other gaping holes in these claims which I have elaborated in some detail before. These claims are far less plausible than ordinary cold fusion, should be far easier to detect, and still in the more than 15 years since the claims, Iwamura still can't identify a single reaction pathway with any confidence. These claims, to a nuclear physicist, rob the field of credibility; they do not add it.
Oystla wrote:
QuoteIf experimental results does not fit present accepted theory, it should be exlained, either by identifying the error in measurements or by identifying a new theory that explains the phenomenon.
Therefore, when mainstream science allow Publishing anomalous results from experimental research, like the Japanese, the rest of the Scientific environment should pick up the ball and investigate the phenomenon. Not, as you state, just ignore the results.
Science is driven by curiosity, selfishness and ambition. There is no set of rules scientists must follow.
But curiosity, selfishness, and ambition are most satisfied by making discoveries that are revolutionary and produce benefits to the planet and our species. These are the sort of criteria that are used to determine awards, hiring, and funding, and also influence the ability to commercialize and make money. So, they don't need you to tell them what to investigate.
And there is no board of directors that decides which scientists should investigate what. When claims are made, whether anomalous or otherwise, it is up to the scientists in academia, or their employers in industry, to decide whether it is worthy of pursuit. They use their background, experience, and wit to help guide their research. They can't pursue everything, after all. Sometimes claims are simply too far out, or so obviously the result of bad science, that it does not merit their attention, beyond a brief glance. Iwamura's work falls into this category. And it is not helped by the fact that Iwamura himself has scarcely followed up on some very obvious checks in more than 15 years.
Cold fusion, if it were real, would be the most revolutionary and beneficial phenomenon of the last century, and the reaction of mainstream science (and the rest of the world) in 1989 reflects that. As Storms said of the time, "many of us were lured into believing that the Pons-Fleischmann effect would solve the world's energy problems and make us all rich. ... If real, such an important discovery hardly ever happens during a scientist’s career, … To be sustained, this huge bubble of enthusiasm needed some very significant confirming results..."
I doubt that there was a physics department on the planet that did not in some way kick the tires of cold fusion. And then, when they applied their background, experience, and wit to the subject, the judgement of most scientists was that the claims were the result of artifacts, bad science, wishful thinking, and confirmation bias.
Those who thought there was or might be something to it -- and there were dozens -- were free to pursue it, and many did. But to recapture the attention of the mainstream would require better evidence, which has not been forthcoming -- at least in their judgement.
You are free to pursue Iwamura's experiment if you think it has merit. Or if you do not consider yourself qualified, then I wonder why you think the judgement of those who are qualified is inferior to yours.
Cs and Sr cannot be electrodeposited on a "thin Pd layer" from an aqueous solution. No Cs and Sr electrodeposited, no transmutations. The paper is trash, weird science.
Some more detail on this assertion, please? Asserting something "cannot be" done requires some quantitative argument, no? As in "bumblebees cannot fly".
Other alkali and alkaline earth metals can be reduced electrolytically, as has been known since the early 1800s. I take it you are saying this can only be into or on or off of mercury as an electrode? What are the limitations? Why only mercury? What about hafnium, tantalum, tungsten, osmium, rhenium, iridium that also have 4f146S2 orbital structure differing by successive electron additions to their 5d orbitals reaching 5d10, at mercury which shares this trait with gold, thallium, lead and bismuth. And what about zirconium, yttrium, cadmium, indium, tin and antimony with analogous transition status from 4d105S2?
And what about a graphite electrodes-- often used by Humphrey Davy, if I recall correctly.
Is that exclusive property you claim due to mercury's ability to self renew its surface? If so, I suspect there are other ways to accomplish that in non liquid metallic electrodes.
Even if there are fundamental constraints that prevent "electrodeposition" from an aqueous solution, that would only cast some doubt on the author's description or its translation. Electrodeposition could actually have been accomplished in other ways using ion implantation / vacuum deposition. It might even still be described as "electrodeposition" particularly in translation.
This forum of "believers" actually has a lot of folks who are interested in reality. You can help yourself and others here by contributing knowledge rather than dogma.
Alain wrote:
"The worst is that there is a claim that Iwamura was wrong, by Kidwell, and not only he tried to replicate unsuccessfully, but he never moaned on the fact it was impossible... He pushed a theory of contamination that was not so credible, ..."
Hmmm...what about my comments in J. Envir. Mon., 2010? I have a couple of columns devoted to heavy metal transmutation and why the appearance of heavy metals is not necessarily indicative of transmutation... I do reference Kidwell and others too.
Of course, the 10 Famous Authors contest my comments as expected, but if you read them, they are full of assertions of what I know and don't know or could show or can't show, etc. But they are *assertions*, meaning no proof is given. In fact they claim a whole host of other elements were detected in Iwamura's work. You ought to read it. I at least, point to direct possibilities that can be checked.
Oh, and Kidwell's claims are very credible. In fact, the finding of 'wild' Pr in Iwamura's lab invalidates the claimed Pr transmutation for any competent chemist...don't know about those physicists...they're a crazy bunch...
The other thing you should try to look into is what the contaminants are in CaO. Way back I found a sample Certificate of Analysis for some purity of CaO, don't recall what grade, that listed ppm level contaminants. Cs was one of the bigger ones... Unfortunately when I went back much later to retrieve it, it was gone, so you'll just have to take what I say as good advice...
IH Fanboy wrote:
Quoteme:
Which is why they (and others) double down with every LENR advancement.
Still doesn't make sense. No scientist would imagine that cold fusion could be kept down if it were real. In fact, I submit scientists would expect vindication far sooner than you might, if it were real.
Therefore, if they thought it was real, they would know that doubling down makes their fate worse. The only plausible explanation for their opposition is near certainty that cold fusion claims lack merit. And if that's their view, they should be free to express it.
QuoteWhy else would you be here?
Duty calls. https://xkcd.com/386/
What? Do you think comments in internet forums prevented P&F from developing something with generous Toyota funding. Or prevented Rossi (or anyone else) from coming out with a product? Or is preventing the MFMP from identifying an experiment anyone (qualified) can perform with expected positive results.
Do you also think that if the internet had existed in 1908, comments could have kept the Wrights from proving they could fly? Or if we had had internet forums in the 40s, we could have prevented nuclear weapons from being developed.
QuoteStill destined to become the greatest scandal in scientific history, as predicted by Arthur C. Clarke.
Well, cold fusion does provide fertile soil for scams. If it continues to attract the likes of Rossi and Dardik, who have histories connected to fraud instead of physics, he may well be right.
Quoteme:
If you benefit from big government, then yes, you are more likely to be pro big government and taxes.
Again, the beneficiaries of this money (the hot fusion scientists) are not the ones who disburse the funding. Politicians have to be elected, and they hire the bureaucrats, and using tax money for a billion dollar project with promise of results decades in the future is not nearly as popular as reducing energy costs and spending less taxpayer money, while cleaning up the environment to boot. The only plausible bias among politicians and the DOE in the matter of cold fusion is strongly in its favor, and that was reflected by the initial reaction of the world to the P&F press conference.
