Display MoreI couldn't do it. You probably couldn't do it. But someone with a PhD in electrochemistry finds it easy because they spend year after year doing stuff like that, and other stuff way more difficult. (I have spent a month or so looking over their shoulders, and I have read electrochem. textbooks, which is how I know this.) It takes 5 or 10 years to a PdD in electrochem., for good reason.
This is like saying that surgery is hard, or that understanding the intricate details of Japanese grammar is hard. Yes, it is. I have Martin's Reference Grammar of Japanese which is 1198 pages long, crammed full of details. So there is a lot to learn. But you know what? I studied that subject for years, and read and translated many books and saw hundreds of hours of TV in Japanese, so it is not so hard for me. It just takes practice.
The point is, just because something is difficult for ordinary folks, that does not mean we should assume that several hundred world-class experts in electrochemistry did several thousand experiments from 1989 to 2000, using many different instrument types, and every single one of them botched it. That is not a rational assumption. That is not how the world works.
The calorimetry is actually the easy part of cold fusion. Other aspects of it are more challenging, as you see from papers by Storms and Fritz Will. Richard Oriani, who was one the best in the world by any measure, said that in his 50-year career this was one of the most difficult experiments he did. There is a long list of mistakes that a person not trained in electrochemistry will make, which will preclude any chance of success. As I wrote, experiments done by people with no experience in electrochemistry resembled "people trying to tune a piano with a sledgehammer." I published a fairly hilarious description of one such experiment. It would be a laff riot except that it cost a ton of money and skeptics always point to it as proof that cold fusion does not exist:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf
As I said, any path other than electrolysis or evaporation would change the amount of salt left in the cell. This is common knowledge, and it has been proved many times in cold fusion and other electrochemistry with blank experiments. Evaporation is estimated from first principles and also measured accurately with a joule heater only (no electrolysis).
Jed, the problem is that the different experiments all have different potential issues. You are saying that in this case if enough people come up with positives we should trust them, because they are experts. That is not good enough, because there can be systematic errors, and because of selective reporting at different levels. I'm happy, for example, that you quote one high quality paper such as, you say, McKubre. But this is a summary paper - appropriate for when a phenomena is generally accepted. Much more care with details is required when a new phenomena is not accepted - particularly when we do not seem to have contemporary high quality replications.
On the specifics I take your point about salt but that has errors. The issue is when you carefully add all these errors what are they. I'd expect all this work to be done in a high quality paper making the case for an extraordinary new effect. It would convince other people to replicate. But without such work mentioned there are loopholes and people will reckon loopholes are more likely than an extraordinary new effect. Rightly so - even if in fact the extraordinary phenomena does exist.
Is there material from McKubre which covers these experiments in a more detailed form? I find it difficult to reach a conclusion with only the summary data.