@ Eric Walker,
I will continue to answer you on this subject, telling you frankly why I do not believe in the reality of CF, until you tell me it's too annoying for the public here. As already mentioned, I am not trying to change anyone's opinion on this point.
Cold fusion/LENR is above all an experimental phenomenon.
I agree with the experimental nature of CF/LENR, but IMO after a year from the first F&P press conference it ceased to be a chemical-physical phenomenon and became a socio-psychological one.
QuoteOne can safely conclude that protons are not fusing with nickel nuclei and still have the problem of explaining the results of palladium deuteride experiments of the kind Fleischmann and Pons and Miles investigated. One can go even further and say that, in one's own assessment, it seems unlikely that there is any fusion at all and still face that challenge — what is the source of the significant excess heat and other findings in the experimental phenomenon of LENR?
For the stories I followed more closely, the Ecat devices and the Celani cells provide a large set of examples of what is the source of this alleged excess heat. Going back to the initial Pd-D experiments, I can pick up a paper (1) that has been pointed out to me last week (2) as one of the most representative of the functioning of the Patterson cells, which in turn was presented to me as one of the most promising CF device.
Well, you can see at a glance, just looking at the Figure 3, that the absolute value of the excess heat comes out from miscalibration of the experimental set-up. The Figure 4 is even worse because it clearly shows that the relative value of the excess heat derives from a wrong offset. The best conclusion I can draw from that paper is that the authors didn't know what they were doing. The worst one is that they were well aware of what they were doing. The same applies IMO to all the people who accepted that paper at the ICCF, praised it, spread it, and so on.
QuoteThis is the heart of empiricism — you go where the experiments lead you rather than relying solely on theoretical arguments.
Speaking of "going", it reminds me of what McKubre has told in his ICCF history:
QuoteFrom: http://www.iccf19.com/history1.html
It was Debra who proposed the continental rotation, the idea that the conference should rotate from the Americas to Europe to Asia in a cycle.
IMO this decision helped the LENR community a lot in overcoming the theoretical arguments, pointing to the more manageable experimental ones. In this case, their experimental results led the CF/LENR researchers all over the world.
(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LonchamptGexcessheat.pdf