Robert E Godes: why Cold Fusion is so opposed by physicists

Mary I am skeptical of Rossi but not LENR. It's not bad thing being a skeptic (it's what keeps all of us alive). But what I see happening is that we are getting lost in the arguments. Then like the species that we are, we begin to argue minutia until its not about numeric logic but about belief systems and the lovely words people craft around them that are used for arguments. Once folks are comfortable in there belief systems they come to a "happy spot" where they rest their mindset,and it becomes very hard to move them from it. So be skeptical but remain flexible. Calling anyone out will get your voiced silenced again. Look at it this way if you remain flexible you will find it easier to move them.
Look at what Jed has to offer on the database.

Quote from JedRothwell

As long as the power can be measured with confidence there is no reason to reject the measurement based on a number you pull out of a hat.

To put it in somewhat more technical terms: Most researchers measured excess heat ranging from 0.5 to 5 W. Many at around 3 to 5 W. With any calorimeter made since 1780 (Laviosier and Laplace) you can measure 3 to 5 W with as much confidence as 100 W. The signal to noise ratio is about as good. There is no technical or logical justification for demanding 100 W.

Laviosier measured the metabolism of guinea pigs, which is roughly 1.2 W. * He measured it repeatedly with good reproducibility, and resolution of about ~0.1 W. That's my translation of his units, which were actually the weight of melted ice. Modern thermodynamic theory did not exist, but Laviosier had a good grasp of heat and a superb grasp of instrument ranges, errors and so on.

In the 1840s, J.P. Joule made isoperibolic calorimeters with his own superb thermometers that registered to the nearest 0.05 deg F. That rivals expensive modern instruments. His calorimeters and techniques were as good as modern ones. He could have measured 3 to 5 W in his sleep, with absolute confidence. (In his sleep, or during his honeymoon, when he measured the heat added to a stream from a waterfall.)

Yugo's claim that isoperibolic calorimetery is not reliable is ludicrous.

* Correction: I originally wrote that guinea pig metabolism is 0.5 W. That's for mice or small birds. Adult guinea pigs are around 1.2 W according to J.H. Brown, "Scaling in Biology" p. 88. Note that Laviosier and Laplace also confirmed CO2 production and showed that the mass of CO2 from metabolism was similar to combustion, so the two processes are fundamentally the same. 18th century scientists understood a lot more about physics than people realize. A lot more than Mary Yugo and other modern "skeptics" understand. I am pretty sure Laviosier would have no difficulty understanding that cold fusion is not a chemical reaction.

Quote from Hermes

The sporadic reports of self sustaining devices indicates there might be hope. But if after 27 years of effort nobody has a reproducible recipe, I begin to doubt.

People do have reproducible recipes. See p. 5:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf

It is not easy to follow these recipes. You have to be an expert electrochemist. This is true for any technical discipline. Heart surgeons have reliable recipes for heart-transplants, but you have to be an expert to follow the recipe.

These techniques are manual, and time consuming. You have to devote a year or two to making them work, unless you have millions of dollars of robotic equipment, or a dozen grad students working overtime. It is kind of like building a house by yourself without power tools.

Reproducibility overall is far higher than it was in 1989. You should not make assertions such as "nobody has a reproducible recipe" without first reading the literature carefully. You sound like Mary Yugo claiming that isoperibolic calorimetry does not work, even though it has worked since 1840, or that she has some magical invisible reason for demanding 100 W instead of 5 W. You can't just make stuff up and claim it is true. That is not how science works.

Quote from Mary Yugo

I set it several orders of magnitude below Defkalion and Rossi, whom most believers embraced.

Whether they believed or not is irrelevant. That does not give you any technical, science-based justification to select 100 W.

Quote from Mary Yugo

It's also below or around the claims from Toyota which you recently linked to. So, I'd hardly agree that it's all that arbitrary.

You fail to understand the concept of "arbitrary" in a scientific context. This is arbitrary because it has no relationship to the signal to noise ratio, to the ease of measurement, the confidence level, or any other experimental metric. There is no technical justification for setting this standard. You set it only as a way to exclude most findings. If most researchers had measured 100 W, you would demand 200 W. If most had measured 200 W, you would demand 1000 W. You are moving the goalposts to give yourself a phony reason to dismiss the facts. You have moved the goalposts off the playing field, out of the stadium, and into the next county. There is no end to these absurd evasions of yours.

Your claim that the research institutions are not "legitimate" is the same kind of arbitrary nonsense. For no reason, you declare SRI is not legitimate enough. I point to results from Los Alamos, China Lake or Toyota and suddenly -- for no reason -- you declare they are not legitimate enough. I could list a hundred more, or 180 more, but you would keep moving the goalposts. To your great surprise, you would keep discovering that these places just are not legitimate enough. Gadzooks! Who knew? No institution will ever be good enough for you. No experiment will ever satisfy your exacting standards. Exacting yet undefined, because you have not actually read any papers, you have no idea what the researchers did, and you have never given any reason to doubt the results. You know in your heart they must be wrong, and that faith is enough! You know that isoperibolic calorimetry does not work because . . . you just know! You are practicing a sort of perverse religion. You hope you are right, and that magically makes you right, and to hell with evidence, numbers, temperatures, 180-year-old settled science. For you, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Quote from Mary Yugo

The claim is that isoperibolic calorimetry is not reliable when employed to evaluate claims for low power outputs given appreciable power inputs in complex things like electrolytic cells or involving very reactive constituents such as nickel and hydrogen. I know he won't agree with that either but, hey, it's my view.

Oh and "your view" magically overrides what every professional electrochemist knows to be true. Quite a powerful view you have there. You know that Fleischmann, Bockris, Mizuno, McKubre and hundreds of others with PhDs and decades of experience are wrong, the textbooks are wrong, the calorimetry performed for ordinary electrochistry for the last 180 years is all wrong, and you are right, because . . . because that's your view.

Oh wait, you may agree that the conventional heat of formation numbers in the textbooks for electrochemistry are right. Never mind that Fleischmann and Bockris literally wrote those textbooks. They were right when you agreed with them, but wrong when you disagreed, even though you have not actually read their papers. "Your view" is the ultimate, be-all, indisputable standard by which all claims must be judged. Settled science since 1840? WRONG! Isoperibolic calorimetry applied to electrochemistry? WRONG! (Unless it gives a conventional answer.) Anything Mary Yugo disagrees with? WRONG! The experts are wrong. All of them. Hundreds of them, in thousands of replicated experiments. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. No reason given, and no reason is needed. They are just wrong, because that's your view.

Let me reiterate what is going on here. Imagine that for the past 20 years, Mary Yugo, Shanahan and others were going around posting messages at textbook reviews on Amazon and at the electrochemical society saying: "The heat of formation listed in textbooks for electrochemical reactions are wrong! The techniques don't work. The instruments are unreliable."

Everyone would say these people are crackpots. No one would take them seriously.

What they are actually saying is that the heat from cold fusion is wrong. Yet this heat is measured the same way as chemical heat is. It is measured by the same researchers who wrote the textbooks. People such as Fleischmann, FRS and President of the Electrochemical Society, and Yeager, who they named the institute after:

http://chemistry.case.edu/department/research/yces/

Yeager et al. used the same instruments and techniques to measure cold fusion heat as they have been using for the last 140 years to establish the chemical heat of formation for electrochemical reactions. Yet for various ethereal reasons known only to crackpots with their magical "views," these techniques work for chemistry but not for cold fusion.

This is not scientific, to say the least.

Quote from Mary Yugo

Well, last I looked, most professional electrochemists don't embrace the reality of LENR.

That's because you have not looked. Around 1995, most of the world's top echelon of electrochemists had successfully replicated cold fusion.

I should add that every electrochemist in the world in 1995 knew who Fleischmann, Bockris, Yeager and the others top echelon were. I doubt many of them would categorically reject experiments published by these people. They may have reserved judgement but I doubt they said, "it can't be true!" (There are not many electrochemists. I have probably met a large fraction of them.)

Also, the ones who have not read the literature don't count. They have no basis for believing or not believing.

Quote from Alan Smith

How many have you asked? Data or it never happened.

Here is data proving that many of the crème de la crème electrochemists not only believed, they replicated:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/WillFGgroupsrepo.pdf

That's a large fraction of the Who's Who in electrochemistry in 1990. That list was compiled by Will, who also replicated and who was among the big guns.

Quote from Mary Yugo

If you name electrochemists who have "replicated cold fusion" it will be a list of "the usual suspects".

No, it will be most of the top people in the field. You know, the people who wrote the textbooks, were elected Fellows of the Royal Society, and the people they named laboratories, buildings and academic medals after. Yeager, Arata . . . You call them "suspects." In academic science they are known as the elite, top, most respected, authoritative experts. Crackpots such as you often think you know better than experts when in fact you know nothing. You haven't even read the papers you are pontificating about.

One of the many odd things about cold fusion is that the people who replicated it and proved it are mainstream respected scientists, and the people who denounced it then and now were mainly ignorant crackpots. Yet the mass media and the public perception has it the other way around. This is what happens when people read nothing and know nothing about history or science. They say whatever pops into their heads, and others in the echo chamber believe them and repeat the nonsense. Mary Yugo refers to distinguished scientists she has never heard of as "the usual suspects." Others simply assume she is right. No fact checking or knowledge is needed. Whatever your "view" is, it must be right. That's the Internet! The entire Wikipedia article on cold fusion is a compendium on this kind of fact-free nonsense. When I last checked, no actual information was included in it. The whole thing might have been authored by Mary Yugo. Every substantive assertion was either impossible or contrary to the facts. That's the modern era for you, featuring anti-vaccination crackpots, science denial, and Donald J. Trump.

Quote from Mary Yugo

Well, last I looked, most professional electrochemists don't embrace the reality of LENR. So you've hoisted yourself on your own petard, as the expression goes.

I just noticed Alan Smith said to back off... so I suppose from here on, Jed is the only person entitled to voice his views about these issues.

You must be lucky MY: Nobody is talking with real Pokemons...

Bdw.: Did You at least read the first two sentences of the proposed papers..?

Quote from Mary Yugo

I said low power claims, to my view, are too hard to evaluate.

Since you have not evaluated them, or even read them, how the hell would you know? Where did you get that information from? I'll tell you where: you made it up. You pulled it out of . . . thin air. If you would read textbooks on electrochemistry or calorimetry, or talk to experts in those fields, you would know that measuring 3 to 5 W is no harder to evaluate than 100 W, or 1000 W for that matter.

And yes, I have read textbooks, and yes I have talked to a significant fraction of the world's electrochemists and experts in calorimetry. I know what I am talking about, and you don't. I suggest you stop making a fool of yourself and do some homework. Learn something about the subject before spouting off. You sound like Randy from Boise in Wikipedia:

http://www.wired.com/2006/04/the-wikipedia-faqk/

Quote from Mary Yugo

Then I guess there are no problems with cold fusion and LENR except the silly prejudices of a few cranks and fools like me.

Don't be asinine. I have gone to a lot of trouble to bring you actual scientific information from distinguished scientists about this subject. Do not mock the researchers -- or me -- with this sort of appeal to ridicule logical fallacy. If you are not willing to make an effort to learn about this subject, admit you are lazy and ignorant, stop wasting our time, and shut up.

There is no area of science or technology without problems. I have pointed many of the problems in cold fusion.

It isn't a few cranks like you who oppose the scientific method. It is a large group. The whole darn Republican Party is a war with science and rationality these days. You -- and they -- attack researchers they have never heard of, regarding subjects they know nothing about. You assume that you know more than the experts. Such arrogance! You invent countless unfounded assertions such as how much more difficult it is to evaluate 5 W compared to 100 W. Unfortunately, other ignorant people think you know you are talking about, so you end up spreading nonsense, confusion and misunderstandings. You should be ashamed of yourself. If you know nothing about a subject and you are too lazy to learn, say nothing.

/* In the absence of a plausible alternative hypothesis consistent with the experimental conditions -- and I have seen none -- */

We discussed this theory here recently and many other theories exist