How many times has the Pons-Fleischmann Anomalous Heating Event been replicated in peer reviewed journals?

The concept of a pathological skeptic has some utility. It is well-suited to Holocaust deniers, moon landing deniers, flatearthers, and the like. Of course, in websites of fringe beliefs (and sorry guys, LENR is still a fringe belief), the term simply means anybody who doesn't agree with your view of the world. Another perfectly good term turned into a meaningless epithet.

The relationship between loading percentage of hydrogen into the palladium lattice is the probability that metallic hydrogen will be produced by the compressive action of the palladium chemical bonds on hydrogen and the subsequent ejection from the palladium lattice. This probability will increase greatly if lithium is also present on the surface of the palladium. The pressure required to produce metallic hydrogen is reduced by 400% when lithium is present over pure metal.

Quote from interested observer

Of course, in websites of fringe beliefs (and sorry guys, LENR is still a fringe belief), the term simply means anybody who doesn't agree with your view of the world. Another perfectly good term turned into a meaningless epithet.

I do not use the term to mean that. In the case of Shanahan, I mean someone who proposes theories or hypotheses that violate elementary laws of physics, are physically impossible & absurd, and that experiments have shown are completely wrong. As you see from the rebuttal to Shanahan, his claims fit all of these categories.

Another thing that makes him a crackpot is the fact that he does not realize his claims have no basis in theory or experiment. A non-crackpot person might make a wild claim that violates the textbook laws, but he will point out that his claim violates these laws. Fleischmann and Pons, for example, claimed that they saw nuclear fusion at ~1 W that did not produce a fatal level of neutron radiation. They understood this violates the known laws of physics. They agreed with that, but they showed experimental evidence that supports their claims and appears to violate the textbook. Obviously, they were old-fashioned scientists who feel that when theory and experiment conflict, the experiment must be right, and the theory must be revised. Younger, modern scientists treat the textbooks as holy writ that cannot be questioned and cannot be wrong, so they throw out experiments instead. Fleischmann, Pons and I regard this as the extreme opposite of science. It is a weird form of religion instead. What Shanahan practices is neither old-fashioned experiment-based science nor the modern textbook based holy writ version, because his claims violate both. I don't know what to call it, but I think crackpot is a good description.

Quote from JedRothwell

For people unaware of the context of this discussion, let me point out that Shananan is a crackpot and his claims were disproved years ago. See:

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

Jed. I ignore the personal comment about Shanahan - except to note that it does not in my book constitute any argument for disbelief. Just as somone saying the same of an LENR proponent would be no argument.

You refer to Marwan et al's contribution to the debate, without comparing that with Shanahan's response (his white paper published here). you may feel the fact that has never been published ensures it is of bad quality. I've read it, compared it with marwan, and the earlier stuff. Shanahan makes valid points which are not answered by Marwan et al. Both, in that some of Marwan et al's arguments are shown logically wrong, and because some of the points Shanahan has made are not fully addressed by those arguments. That comment, which I make, is a fact, not a judgement. Notice the qualifying some.

That does not mean Shanahan is correct. It does mean that excluding his carefully writtem and substantive points from proper discussion, as Marwan et al do here, is improper.

What M et al do is to say that in their judgement Shanahan's ideas are wrong. That is fair enough. Just as it is fair for me to say that in my jusgement LENR is wrong. What is not fair (and would not be fair if I did it) is to close down debate, nor refuse to deal with cogent contrary arguments in private or public while continuing to hold the position that these F&P style closed cell experimental results must indicate LENR.

LENR has no clearly understoof mechanism, so the bar here for an alternative explanation is low. Shanahan's proposal is no way proven, but remains possible until comprehensively disproved. That has not been done and no fair-minded person reading Marwan et al, and Shanahan's white paer, would say that is has been done. They might reckon that in their judgement Shanahan was wrong. That is a very different statement, and not sound unless a proper reply is made to Shanahan's white paper.

Quote from maryyugo

Actually, there is a lot on the Internet to prove that Jed was bamboozled by Rossi and that the flavor of his responses to Rossi critics, now proven correct, who questioned him, was the same as his remarks to Shanahan.

That is true, and worth reflection. Jed is rightly popular here as somone who honestly states his views. The difference between him and me, both on IH vs Rossi and on Marwan et al versus Shanahan, is that I am much slower to state something as proven than Jed. I know that assumptions can be wrong, that judgement is often biassed (including my own).

That does not stop me from making judgements, or having biasses, just the same as Jed. But, when pressed especially, I am much less ready to defend a statement that I believe strongly is true but cannot actually substantiate. For me "I think that but if you disagree I cannot prove you wrong - even though I expect you are" is a usual state.

I don't see any problem with these two positions. Some people (IHFB is a great example) are quick to reach judgement. IHFB's mild hypocrisy is that he claims to be slower to reach judgement than others here, when in reality his views about IH represent a fixed judgement that he represents as purely factual but is in fact based on his assumptions.

Others are slower to reach judgement. That is sort of boring, and also sort of timid. But it is perfectly proper and I myself will defend it to the last keystroke.

THH

(Thomas Henry Huxley - Darwin's Bulldog but also the person who coined the word agnostic because he strongly affirmed that he could not reach any judgement over the matter of whether God did or did not exist. At the time that was a big deal)

Quote from THHuxleynew

[1] LENR has no clearly understoof mechanism, so the bar here for an alternative explanation is low. Shanahan's proposal is no way proven, but remains possible until comprehensively disproved. [2] That has not been done and no fair-minded person reading Marwan et al, and Shanahan's white paer, would say that is has been done.

I've inserted numbers in brackets into your quote. With regard to point (1), let's go with it for the sake of argument. We allow, then, that Kirk's CCS might be a thing that might be demonstrated empirically somehow at some time in the future. Your point (2) does not follow as a consequence if you intended for the two to be connected. We will surely agree that the burden falls upon LENR researchers to show that LENR claims, which are varied and defy important expectations, are real in part, and not upon outside skeptics to show that LENR is not real. I cannot report something that I witnessed in my lab that seems to be LENR, and have you raise a good and standard objection, and then say that you must prove that what I said is wrong, or else my report stands. I must answer your objection with a tighter experiment that takes the objection into account or show that there is a logical flaw. Here the burden remains on me to show that some small LENR phenomenon is real, and not on you to set up an experiment to disprove it. This is because your objection was a standard one, and the claimant always carries the burden of evidence in science. By contrast, if your objection was that a whole new category of matter with different qualities was messing up my result, you would need to show that and not me.

Kirk's CCS hypothesis suggests a novel and ambitious result that is not at all expected. It is similarly something that Kirk must do in making his CCS claim to show that it is real, and not something that LENR researchers must take active steps to show that it is not real. Kirk must prove his hypothesis with a series of experiments of his own, because the claim is his claim. For practical reasons, this is a subtle but important distinction. It can be expensive and time consuming to go on a wild goose chase by incorporating various controls that one suspects are not needed. This is not all or nothing, and there is an element of judgment involved here. But until Kirk establishes that his phenomenon exists and can under certain circumstances impeach mundane calorimetry, his CCS does not really cast further doubt on the mundane calorimetry seen in LENR experiments. There may be other objections that the researchers must attend to, but this objection is one that Kirk himself must move forward, or possibly someone who takes a special interest in it.

Quote from Eric Walker

I've inserted numbers in brackets into your quote. With regard to point (1), let's go with it for the sake of argument. We allow, then, that Kirk's CCS might be a thing that might be demonstrated empirically somehow at some time in the future. Your point (2) does not follow as a consequence if you intended for the two to be connected. We will surely agree that the burden falls upon LENR researchers to show that LENR claims, which are varied and defy important expectations, are real in part, and not upon outside skeptics to show that LENR is not real. I cannot report something that I witnessed in my lab that seems to be LENR, and have you raise a good and standard objection, and then say that you must prove that what I said is wrong, or else my report stands. I must answer your objection with a tighter experiment that takes the objection into account or show that there is a logical flaw. Here the burden remains on me to show that some small LENR phenomenon is real, and not on you to set up an experiment to disprove it. This is because your objection was a standard one, and the claimant always carries the burden of evidence in science. By contrast, if your objection was that a whole new category of matter with different qualities was messing up my result, you would need to show that and not me.

Kirk's CCS hypothesis suggests a novel and ambitious result that is not at all expected. It is similarly something that Kirk must do in making his CCS claim to show that it is real, and not something that LENR researchers must take active steps to show that it is not real. Kirk must prove his hypothesis with a series of experiments of his own, because the claim is his claim. For practical reasons, this is a subtle but important distinction. It can be expensive and time consuming to go on a wild goose chase by incorporating various controls that one suspects are not needed. This is not all or nothing, and there is an element of judgment involved here. But until Kirk establishes that his phenomenon exists and can under certain circumstances impeach mundane calorimetry, his CCS does not really cast further doubt on the mundane calorimetry seen in LENR experiments. There may be other objections that the researchers must attend to, but this objection is one that Kirk himself must move forward, or possibly someone who takes a special interest in it.

Kirk's work is in two parts. the first one - that cal changes (due most likely, but not exclusively, to conditions changing temp distribution in cell between control and active) can result in significant errors is uncontentious. It is a catch-all that should make such results without an explicit check for cal changes somewhat uncertain.

The second part, a proposed mechanism, is as you say novel and ambitious but not nearly as much so as LENR. It is veryy comparable. In both cases a specially prepared surface, loaded with D, is needed to cause the thing to happen. In the ATER case that thing is a plausible chemical reaction that clearly could in principle be catalysed by some surface condition. In the LENR case that is a nuclear reaction, catalysed by some surface condition.

The difference here is that Kirk proposes a specific (but maybe unlikely) mechanism that fits the data. There is no such specific mechanism relating to LENR that fits the data. You need somehow to deal with the lack of alternate reaction paths as well as the Coulomb barrier. Both these issues can be dealt with, but both are highly unexpected.

the difference between us is one of judgment, not fact. How do you way these various unlikelihoods? So I don't expect it to be resolved. But, the judgement of people who think LENR is likley (or at least plausible) will be different from those who think the reverse and Shanahan's proposal will stay on the table for everyone without such a view that something else extraordinary (LENR) is in fact likely.

That is then slightly circular because for some (though by no means all) the best evidence for thinking LENR likely comes from things that are possibly invalidated by Shanahan's idea.

Quote from Alan Smith

So what we are balancing here is one person's thought experiments against many hundreds of data points from real experiments. I agree with Eric that Kirk should maybe think about providing some experimental evidence for his ideas.

What data from real experinents distinguishes between LENR and CCS? Both are hypothetical explanations for something that otherwise does not make sense. Why do you not have this same criteria for LENR (e.g. - prove it is nuclear)?

Quote from THHuxleynew

The difference here is that Kirk proposes a specific (but maybe unlikely) mechanism that fits the data. There is no such specific mechanism relating to LENR that fits the data. You need somehow to deal with the lack of alternate reaction paths as well as the Coulomb barrier. Both these issues can be dealt with, but both are highly unexpected.

When considering LENR, LENR experiments and LENR theories, it is pretty important (as you know) to distinguish between broad experimental findings, on one hand, and more tentative conclusions, on the other. In the former category is the finding of a correlation of heat with helium in several PdD experiments, and, more generally, a finding that the amount of heat seen in excess of input is sometimes greater than can be accounted for by known chemistry. In the latter category of more tentative conclusions are such things as the notion that in PdD electrochemical experiments there is seen a fusion of deuterium to produce helium, the notion that palladium is somehow involved, and the notion that deuterium is a precursor to a fusion reaction. All of these more tentative conclusions are the proponents' best guesses as to what is going on, gleaned from incomplete and often contradictory evidence. The latter category of tentative conclusions include all of the conclusions based upon a "preponderance of evidence," as some people argue tirelessly for. Once LENR claims are stripped of the more tentative findings (ones that are obviously more tentative, despite advocates' best efforts to argue otherwise), your objections about the lack of alternative reaction pathways and about the Coulomb barrier become premature, and, in that regard, no longer objections. I personally think the mixing of tentative, specific conclusions, with general, and more solid conclusions, has been to the field's great detriment, as it seems to have locked in a whole generation of researchers into a certain set of assumptions that have been hard to step out of.

What is left when one excludes the more specific conclusions drawn on the basis of incomplete and contradictory evidence? A set of experimental findings that are more general, easier to defend, and, in my opinion, more interesting. It is no doubt in the spirit of the more general findings that Robert Duncan coined the phrase "anomalous heat effect." It is with these experimental results that the likelihood of Kirk's constant calibration shift hypothesis must be compared.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Jed. I ignore the personal comment about Shanahan - except to note that it does not in my book constitute any argument for disbelief.

This is not a personal comment. Shanahan made various claims. Scientists responded to his claims in the paper I pointed to, and in various other papers. They showed that his arguments violate theory and there is no experimental evidence for them. That, to me, constitutes a crackpot view. This is not about him; it is about his theories and claims.

That's all there is to it. The authors of that paper and I have said nothing about his personality or any other aspect of his person. I know nothing about him.

Quote from THHuxleynew

What data from real experinents distinguishes between LENR and CCS?

There is excess heat. It is a calorimetric result. It can either be explained as LENR or as the CCS effect. The data set of evidence is exactly the same for both. * The question is, which explanation fits conventional textbook calorimetry better. The answer is LENR. It fulfills every expectation for calorimetry, albeit NOT for nuclear physics. In the 1990s, hundreds of leading experts on calorimetry -- including many people from outside the field and outside of electrochemistry and nuclear physics -- reviewed the calorimetry. They found no errors in the major experiments. In contrast, if the CCS theory were true, calorimetry would not work. It would be meaningless. All discoveries based on it going back to around 1840 would have to be thrown out, including the laws of thermodynamics. The CCS is equivalent to discovering that Ohm's law does not work.

* That is to say, the data sets pointed to by Shanahan are exactly the same. However, there are many cold fusion experiments that flat out prove he is wrong. He will not discuss these or acknowledge that they exist. The CCS theory would only apply to a narrow range of experiments with one particular type of calorimeter. It cannot apply to Miles' calorimeter with the copper sheath, or a Seebeck calorimeter because even if you could move the source of heat within the cell that would not affect the result. Shanahan may claim that it would, but that goes beyond his other claims.

In other words, in a closed cell where heat is measured in the cell, the CCS is at least plausible. The source of heat might move, affecting the calorimetry. Actual experiments prove that never happens, but it is conceivable that it might. However, when you measure the heat with a copper sheath, or in a location far outside the cell, the hypothesis is no longer plausible.

Wow, this thread really took off over the weekend...

Before I read too far, I note the following comments and graphs:

Quote from Alan Fletcher

Short summary : I see nothing in McKubre Ref 10 fig 7 to indicate a sudden onset of Calorometric Callibration Shift Errors.

Quote from Alan Fletcher

Likewise Kunimatsu http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KunimatsuKdeuteriuml.pdf Fig 13

Back up a minute… Didn’t we already agree that, in the Pd/D F&P system, high loading enhances the probability of developing the Special Active State that fosters the appearance of the Fleischmann-Pons-Hawkins Effect (FPHE, believed to be non-nuclear ATER)? So why would these figures be interpreted in any other way? The question you need to ask is: Are the excess power values correct or are they derived from a CCS? You can’t answer that from these plots. You have to do an error evaluation on the calibration equation and its use.

Also, the time element is missing from these graphs. At one point many years back now I looked into this. I did not have the data McKubre used to make the plot. And to be honest, I don’t recall what data I used to do this at this point. But I will *assert* here today that if you can get the time information associated with each point, and you color code the various excess power peaks based on contiguous time segments, you will find the given plots show clear clustering of the data, that indicated to me at the time that there definitely was a CCS active and it was changing over time. If I get the time I may try to recreate this, if I can remember what data I used to do it. Until then, it is my *assertion* that these plots show nothing that disproves the ATER/CCS hypothesis.

I will read the subsequent posts as I can and respond if and when I feel the need.

Quote from [email protected]

Scientists don't know how to do inductive reasoning

ROFL. My detection of the CCS problem was from one experimental sequence involving 10 current sweeps. From that I inductively pointed out the the CCS observed there can occur in any type of calibrated experiment (not just calorimetry).

Quote from Alan Fletcher

Ummm ... those ARE the results (each DOT is one run by SRI and INRA respectively) published in the proceedings of the peer-reviewed ICCF3.

So ..... ALL OF THEM.

No. They are individual points from a data log of an extended run lasting many days. But this was on 1 experiment.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Please do longer discuss old style Pd-D-D fusion experiments.These may be interesting as demos or as a theory test-bed. Nobodyintends to burn down (transmute) Palladium any more, if there arecheaper material around. Mixed fuels containing PdZrOCuNiAlLi workeven with hydrogen. See newest Asti papers.

Since they are the newest, I probably haven't read them yet. But with regards to Pd/ZrOx, I suggest you look at the manuscript appended to mu whitepaper. It is a manuscript of a paper submitted to Phys. Lett. A and rejected by the editor because he didn't want to publish cold fusion papers. In it, I illustrate why the Pd/ZrO claims made are likely incorrect. I doubt throwing more pixie dust into the mix will help solve that.

Quote from JedRothwell

For people unaware of the context of this discussion, let me point out that Shananan is a crackpot and his claims were disproved years ago. See:

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

What is really 'crackpotish' is Jed's refusal to recognize that paper uses a fallaciuios strawman argument (the "random Shanahan CCSH") to draw the conclusions he values so much. I've only pointed this out 3 or 4 times...

Quote from JedRothwell

I do not use the term to mean that. In the case of Shanahan, I mean someone who proposes theories or hypotheses that violate elementary laws of physics, are physically impossible & absurd, and that experiments have shown are completely wrong. As you see from the rebuttal to Shanahan, his claims fit all of these categories.

My 'theories or hypotheses' don't violate physics. Those of Marwan, McKubre, Tanzella, Hagelstein, Miles, Swartz, Storms, Iwamura, Mosier-Boss, and Forsley do, as they so clearly pointed out in the paper you continuously reference. Let me remind you, *I* did not propose the "random Shanahan CSSH", they did.

Quote from JedRothwell

Another thing that makes him a crackpot is the fact that he does not realize his claims have no basis in theory or experiment. A non-crackpot person might make a wild claim that violates the textbook laws, but he will point out that his claim violates these laws. Fleischmann and Pons, for example, claimed that they saw nuclear fusion at ~1 W that did not produce a fatal level of neutron radiation. They understood this violates the known laws of physics. They agreed with that, but they showed experimental evidence that supports their claims and appears to violate the textbook. Obviously, they were old-fashioned scientists who feel that when theory and experiment conflict, the experiment must be right, and the theory must be revised. Younger, modern scientists treat the textbooks as holy writ that cannot be questioned and cannot be wrong, so they throw out experiments instead. Fleischmann, Pons and I regard this as the extreme opposite of science. It is a weird form of religion instead. What Shanahan practices is neither old-fashioned experiment-based science nor the modern textbook based holy writ version, because his claims violate both. I don't know what to call it, but I think crackpot is a good description.

F&P took their claims on the road after their famous press conference. They had two basic claims, excess heat and spectroscopic evidence of nuclear reactions. When they got to Harwell, someone pointed out their spectroscopic evidence was flawed, and they agreed, and stopped using it. Unfortunately, at the time there was no one who noted the problems with their calorimetry. I have now done so. Part was in my 2002 publication, and part is in the whitepaper I put out. I wonder what F&P would have done if I had been around and able to do this during their road trip....

And Jed, before you can categorize something accurately, you have to understand it. You fail on that one.