QuoteYou are missing the point. First of all the historic experiments were already/usually done "properly". By pretending they were not, without evidence, simply casts inappropriate doubt on the pioneers. I have explained in detail why many are not convinced by Heat/4He.
You are making two assertions here that may be untrue (seem untrue to me at the moment).
I've documented above why the He/excess heat evidence from historic experiments mostly has holes, and you have not yet addressed my two points. Abd pointed me towards Apicella which on inspection is not "done properly" for He, nor does it claim to be that saying the results are preliminary.
as for why people are not convinced by the evidence my default position, based on what I've seen, is that for evidence to be convincing it must be strong. The nature of LENR is that you would expect strong evidence from:
- transmutation
- excess heat
- (I leave out radiation though much could be said about it)
The quoted evidence in these three categories is weak. If the noted marginal phenomena are LENR, a slightly different experiment would provide strong evidence. For a good example He evidence reported from low excess heat setups would, given the documented much higher excess heat setups that LENR research claims, be much easier to detect with no ambiguity. He higher than ambient is very difficult to explain (as long as you are careful about what is ambient, given potential large spatial and temporal variations in labs).
If the evidence were intrinsically difficult to obtain this would not be the case. But, for He, it must be quite easy to obtain if the LENR hypothesis holds, with the added benefit of clear theoretical tie-in. If, however, there is no such transmutation and the claimed correlations are artifactual, a better experiment will not produce the expected clear-cut results, maybe it will produce different marginal anomalies, but not what would prove the He hypothesis.
So I find this phenomenon attractive because better experimentation can resolve the matter both ways. We have, unusually for LENR, a tentative hypothesis which can be proved or disproved by further experiment. That makes it science rather than pseudo-science. I welcome all such framing of hypotheses into testable form.
Quote from HermesIf people "outside the LENR field" find the production helium unconvincing then please explain how repetition would help? It will cost millions to repeat, yet still remain unconvincing. We already know that the Q/4He ratio is about 30-40 MeV. If that is not convincing why would exactly 23.8 MeV be more so? No theory predicts 23.8 MeV. Nobody expects it (except a few non scientists).
The issue is not the precision of the ratio. It is whether the evidence for transmutation (production of He) is bomb-proof. If the historic results are real, as some LENR people who have studies them believe, a better experiment now will be able to produce incontrovertible evidence. If a better experiment produces null He results that also is informative, it shows that this claimed LENR reaction is not happening.
Regards, THH