Clearance Items

Quote from AlainCo

MHI have convincing experimental results with thin films.

No, they don't.

When the first report of heavy metal transmutation came out using the Pd-oxide sandwiches, I looked up a Certificate of Analysis for high purity oxide of the type they used (can't say if it was the exact type). What I found was that one of the major contaminants at the ~200 ppm level was the very element they claim to have formed by LENR, which was detected on the external, downstream sandwich surface. (Unfortunately, I didn't save that tidbit of info, and now they seem to not put those CoAs up anymore, so you'll have to buy a little high purity stuff or maybe just call the vendor and ask if you want to confirm what I say here.) IOW, they were moving the contaminant from *all* of the oxide in their sandwich to the surface, which is called 'contamination concentration', which made it easily detectable with surface science techniques like EDX or XPS. Then came the Kidwell revelation that another of the 'transmuted' elements had been found 'wild' in their lab (which negates claims of transmutation for sensible scientists).

End result...no proof of anything but a lack of understanding of contamination problems.

There's potentially a little more to that story, if you believe the writings of noted provocateur* Stephen Krivit.

It is insinuated by Krivit that Kidwell had ulterior motives: Essentially spiking Iwamura/Mitsubishi's work and patent application, whilst surreptitiously patenting a very similar technology himself, just after an NDA with Iwamura expired.

I'm not really a fan of Krivit, and advise people to treat his work the same as reading The Sun or The National Enquirer... There could be a kernel of truth in there, maybe...

Long article: http://news.newenergytimes.net…estment-and-new-conflict/

Follow up: http://news.newenergytimes.net…mitsubishi-lenr-research/

* I'm being nice

Quote from Sherlock Holmes

I've seen repeated over and over that Mitsubishi has achieved LENR. What is preventing them from showing it to the world, winning the Nobel Prize, and making billions?

They published many times, including papers in Japan's most prestigious journal, the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics. The work was also described from time to time in Japan's mass media. The papers attracted little attention. Publishing is what academic scientists do. If they do not attract attention and win a Nobel by publishing, they seldom do anything more to attract attention. They can't think of anything else to do, and frankly, neither can I, because the people who award Nobel prizes do not look anywhere else.

The Nobel committees are nothing special. They have no special insight. The other day, on Japanese TV I saw an interview with Donald Keene. (In Japanese -- and I must say he has a strong American accent!) Anyway, he described how the Nobel committee consulted with him and ended up awarding Kawabata the Prize for literature. It was parochial. An inside job. It was what the Japanese call "Kawabata's turn to win." Keene read some of his remarks to the committee. The committee more or less took his word for the evaluation. They apparently knew little about Japanese literature. I, or any other American undergrad studying Japanese about that time probably knew more, and we could have made the same recommendations Keene did. Obviously the committee did not read the works in Japanese, whereas I did. (I did not work with Keene or meet with him, but my profs were his contemporaries who knew him well. He is a nice fellow, and Kawabata was a good choice.)

Doing revolutionary experiments and publishing them in the most prestigious journals does not bring you a Nobel when academic politics and the zeitgeist are aligned against you.

You might as well ask why Martin Fleischmann was given the frozen boot instead of winning a Nobel. After all, he published in the most prestigious journal there is, Nature, and he was subsequently replicated thousands of times in 200 major labs, at high signal to noise ratio. By all of the rules of experimental science, cold fusion has been verified beyond any rational doubt. Yet he knew he would be attacked and then kicked him out of the academic establishment. He predicted that would happen, on the day of the March 1989 announcement. He understood history and human nature quite well. He also understood the dark side of human nature. He saw his father die from wounds after being beaten by the Gestapo.

If you want to know why people do not accept cold fusion, look at statements by Robert Park or Mary Yugo. Yugo whines, moans and complains: "Show me some decent clearly written work and I will be delighted to examine it." You can show her a hundred clearly written papers. She will not understand them. The problem is her, not the authors. She will not see that they are as clearly written as any the best scientific papers in any other field. People such as Fleischmann, Storms, Miles and McKubre are superb writers.

If I do say so myself, I have 40 years experience as a tech writer. I have written, translated and edited clearly expressed technical papers for myself and others. My editorial standards are as high as Nature's or Scientific American. This paper, for example, is as clear as anything published in the last 50 years, and that's partly thanks to me:

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

I believe Yugo when she says does not understand it. Either she is technically incompetent or she so hates the idea it might be true, this clouds her ability to understand. This is similar to the Upton Sinclair effect, only in her case, she is protecting her own ego, rather than her salary:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Along the same lines, people such as Axil who refuse to read the Penon report, and people who read it but fail to see it proves Rossi is a fraud, are blind to reality. No amount of proof can sway them. If Penon doesn't convince you that Rossi is a fraud, nothing will. If 200 replications of Fleischmann's claims do not convince you, nothing will.

Quote from JedRothwell

After all, he published in the most prestigious journal there is, Nature,

So what, so do thousands of others who also don't get Nobels. He got published in Nature because a) people gave him the benefit of the doubt at the time, and b.) the implications of CF made it a "hot topic", which is what Nature (and Science) focus on. Once it became clear they had jumped the gun and claimed reproducibility (which is the default claim when you hold a press conference) when they didn't have it, the topic got a lot less hot (even 'cold'...) and the 'hot topic' journals moved on. Standard operating procedure.

Quote from JedRothwell

and he was subsequently replicated thousands of times in 200 major labs, at high signal to noise ratio.

Only if you mistakenly think baseline noise is the dominant error term. Thousands of times? Is that like the 'thousands' of runs you claim for the McK figure that really is just the thousands of points from the data logger for 1 run? 200 labs? Really? Seems unlikely to me....

Quote from JedRothwell

cold fusion has been verified beyond any rational doubt.

No. it hasn't.

Quote from Eric Walker

@Zephir_AWT's account has been suspended for two weeks.

And this will do nothing to quieten the accusations stating that you are a social engineer whose goal has been to slowly take hold of this forum, and let problematic individuals such as maryyugo and dewey weaver spread their disinfo and character assassination daily, while banning pro-LENR pro-Rossi members.
I mean, it's only been nearly a year since we've been able to witness you peddle your trade. Don't get angry though, you're really not the only one here being a shill/social engineer. There are many others, but they're not in a moderator position... yet?

I have to commend you, though, for not using AI software to write your posts, which you write yourself. Old-school shilling has that friendly human touch we've all grown to know and love!

Never heard the story about Icarus, Roger?

Quote from kirkshanahan

Once it became clear they had jumped the gun and claimed reproducibility

It was reproducible. It was reproduced by 92 groups within a year:

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

Facts are facts. You ignore them while you casually rewrite the history of cold fusion with your fantasy version.

Quote from JedRothwell

It was reproducible. It was reproduced by 92 groups within a year:

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

Facts are facts. You ignore them while you casually rewrite the history of cold fusion with your fantasy version.

It is a classic tactic that fanatics for a cause will redefine common words to mean something different in order to cover their abuse of the word. In this case the word is reproducibility. In classic CFer style, *any* claim to have observed a particular response in a CF experiment is lumped together as 'evidence of reproducibility'. The listing you referenced are, as you noted, from the first year of the CF saga. The results from that time frame met the idea of 'partial reproduction', which means groups trying to do the same experiment came up with widely differing results, and there was no indication of how to get them to converge on the single (or even a select few) methodology that demonstrated the effect was understood and controllable. The 'controllable' criterion is the prime definition of reproducible. Today, 28 years later, the same situation persists, i.e. true understanding has not been achieved and therefore there is no control of the effect, just the partial replication that I noted in 1995 that in turn convinced me there might be something there, which turned out to be ATER/CCS IMO.

Examining the list is worthwhile as it is a typical example of CFer shenanigans as well. The claim is for 92 groups reporting CF results. But this is broken up in several types of reports, i.e., heat, helium, tritium, etc. Note that to 'replicate' F&P only heat would be counted at that point in time, as that's all F&P were claiming then. That's only 34 "X's". Then you have to examine each one to see if what they report is consistent with what F&P reported to get full reproduction, and not the partial I suspect is true in almost all of the 34 cases. So a real scientific breakdown of the list would give 34 possible heat effect replications, with 58 'other' claims.

Then we look at the reporting method, and see more fun and games. The key at the bottom of the list gives 7 categories of report: 1 = Refereed Journal Publication; 2 = Conference Proceedings; 3 = Nonrefereed Report; 4 = Conference Presentation; 5 = Newspaper Article; 6 = Personal Communication; 7 = Submitted to Journal. Counting them up I see 82 entries with 5 double entries meaning there are actually only 78 groups whose source has been identified (several entries are 'unsourced'). The 82 entries breakdown as follows: 21 1's, 20 2's, 10 3's, 21 4's, 3 5's, 6 6's, and 1 7. Most scientists severely discount the value of types 3, 5, 6, and 7. Types 2 and 4 are also discounted, since conferences are where you go to present initial findings before the publications are done, usually to 'test the waters' in a semi-friendly environment. That means a higher chance of error, which is why these are discounted. The first 4 I mentioned are essentially hearsay. That leaves category 1 as the only truly recognized source out there in the real science world (which is why Dieter Britz would only include those kind of reports in his index). So from 82, we drop down to only 21 truly valid sources. Of those, only 3 (F&P, Miles, and Bockris) involve excess heat reports. To summarize, by using the normal criteria, we drop the 92 down to 3. Not all that impressive (except with regards to 'grade inflation').

You can argue and complain about my 'pathoskeptic' tactics here, but my point is that CFers do the opposite. They take anything, up to and including a slight smile in response to the "did you see anything?" question, as a positive for the existence of CF. IOW, there is little to no quality control on claims and reports within the CF community. It's not surprising that the 'mainstream' ignores the CF field. Everyone knows that anomalies pop up all the time, and everyone knows they are usually explainable. When the 'experts' in the field jump to the conclusion anomalies are true indicators of something, with no QC on that (peer review is the lowest form of QC we have on reports like this), they ruin the credibility of the field. The 'list of 92' is a prime example. Storms' book is another.

Fair point about Rudolph, but perhaps gorillas don't like to show their hand too early, to avoid starting an arms race with their competitors.

Why assume they already have a fully-formed solution, Watson?

Quote from Sherlock Holmes

Right. Let's look at a different scenario. Mitsubishi reveals to the world that they have the solution to the world's problems (energy, global warming, whatever).

Read the papers from Mitsubishi and you will see their cold fusion findings are nothing like that.

Quote from Sherlock Holmes

what I read was that Mitsubishi had reproduced Pons & Fleishmann

link please.