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

    Quote from JedRothwell

    What does it matter? If this were treated rationally, like any other experiment, five replications at places like Los Alamos, China Lake and BARC would convince everyone. There would be no argument. Debating whether it has been replicated at 180 labs or only 90 is absurd. Either number is far greater than any rational scientist would demand for proof. It is like arguing whether you should spend $100 million repairing your Toyota Corolla transmission, or only $52 million.

    I agree, but when I go on elsewhere and quote 53 peer reviewed replications, 180 labs, 14,700 replication experiments I want it to be a relatively hardened figure. Yes I know it means repairing the Toyota for $52M but if you settle on $52M and reasonable skeptics settle on $52M then I don't have to go through this again and again. This is my third time trying to get at a secure number.


    keV @mods


    As one example of behavior that is troll-like I note this argument. It is a rhetorical device with no information content (other than the death of Mallove) and no relevance to the issue. To see its absurdity pick any dead physicist holding ideas now considered wrong - or equally a dead devil-worshipper holding objectionable ideas now thought to be wrong. Holding to this argument, all these people would equally deserve to be believed because they have no ability to reply, and ones belief system must therefore be hopelessly overloaded.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    keV @mods


    As one example of behavior that is troll-like I note this argument. It is a rhetorical device with no information content (other than the death of Mallove) and no relevance to the issue. To see its absurdity pick any dead physicist holding ideas now considered wrong - or equally a dead devil-worshipper holding objectionable ideas now thought to be wrong. Holding to this argument, all these people would equally deserve to be believed because they have no ability to reply, and ones belief system must therefore be hopelessly overloaded.

    That's troll like, but arguing against the "who's who of electrochemistry" in their replications is not considered troll like? Alice has truly stepped through the looking glass.

    Quote from [email protected]

    Uhh, what we have here is that you posted your rebuttal and Mallove is dead

    Quote from [email protected]

    so he can no longer answer your nonsense. But it's good to know where you posted your stuff so that anyone interested in what you have to say can go over there and be fascinated by it.


    I am well aware that Mallove was murdered. What I am commenting on is the fact that people think he outlined some kind of real problem. maybe so w.r.t. the personalities of the time, but technically? No, nothing there.


    I had some indirect interaction with Mallove way back. I wouldn't debate him if he was here today because he was another 'true believer'.

    Quote from [email protected]

    That's troll like, but arguing against the "who's who of electrochemistry" in their replications is not considered troll like? Alice has truly stepped through the looking glass.


    Listing a "who's who" *without* judging the quality and relevance of their relevant work is the logical tactic known as 'call to authority'. When you look at their papers w.r.t. CF excess heat a) the fact they're electrochemists is irrelevant since we are talking calorimetry, and b) you see they all made the same calorimetric assumption ( that the lumped parameter approach is adequate) which is the root systematic error made by them.


    There continues to be a definition of terms problem as well in your postings. The kind of 'replication' a scientist shoots for is a 'replication in detail', meaning that a method or protocol has been specified that allows those skilled in the art to repeat the same experiment and obtain substantially the same result without consulting anyone else to make it work. 'Substantially' means 'very much similar'. That condition has not been achieved to date, even though many _claim_ it has. The best example of this I've seen is when Hagelstein tried to reproduce the 'Letts effect' and was unable to do so, and had to call Letts in to help. They then tweaked the experiment to get it to 'work' (by their definition). (This event is detailed in a progress report written by Hagelstein and posted on his Web site. It's a little dated now, but I've seen none better.) But that's not full, independent replication, and it remains an open question if the tweaked protocol was transferable to others or not.


    For completeness I will try to locate the link to this report. If and when I find it, I'll edit it in here: ADDITION: The document I was referring to is Hagelstein's progress report 48_PR152.pdf. (http://www.rle.mit.edu/media/pr152/48_PR152.pdf) It has 17 pages and the incident I was thinking of is on page 6 (2-year effort for the DTRA). However, I was getting the story a little wrong. But what is written does illustrate my point about reproducibility. Please read it to get the details correct. It is 3 paragraphs long.


    Your use of 'replication' however seems to mean 'someone tried to repeat an experiment and got what they called a positive result'. But the actual result obtained was a) obtained with modifications to the protocol, and b) had substantial differences from the original. That's actually 'partial replication' and indicates that a) there may be something there but b) the controlling factors have not really been identified yet. That's the status today w.r.t. excess heat, and it offers hope to those who want to believe in LENR, but not proof of it.

    Edited once, last by kirkshanahan: Add ref to Hagelstein progress Report ().

    Quote

    If you want me to answer and have confidence it will stay up, you can post it on the Cold Fusion DISQUS site.

    It was essentially rhetorical, Kev. In point of fact, based on your unpleasant style and your previous writing, I don't give a _ _ _ _ what you think.


    Quote

    arguing against the "who's who of electrochemistry" in their replications is not considered troll like?


    Of course not. Arguing points of view and supporting one's views is what forums should be about. Are we at the "appeal to authority" fallacy yet, Jed?

    Quote from [email protected]

    . . . I don't have to go through this again and again. This is my third time trying to get at a secure number.

    Gee, golly, gosh. Again and again, is it? Well, you could try doing it yourself. What's stopping you? Most of the data is at LENR-CANR.org and in Ed's book. You should read the book if you are seriously interested in this subject. If you are so anxious to pin down the number, do your own homework.


    It is almost as if you expect me to spoon feed you the information.


    I myself find this whole discussion silly, and inconsequential. Once the number of replications exceeds 5 or 10, it makes no difference how many there are. 90, 180, or 20,000 would be the same. I wrote the Tally paper at the request of a researcher. I do not know why he wanted the information, but it wasn't hard for me to assemble the report using my EndNote relational database, so I did it. It is not important.

    Quote from maryyugo

    Are we at the "appeal to authority" fallacy yet, Jed?

    Nope. Not as long as the people we are talking about really are experts in a discipline relevant to the problem. If you cite experts in plasma physics and say that their cold fusion experiments prove the effect does not exist, that would be a fallacious appeal to authority, because they do not know how to do electrochemistry, as you see from their papers. Or, if you were to cite the opinions of electrochemists regarding the ITER project, that would be a fallacious appeal to authority.


    It is not complicated. Is the person you cite a recognized authority in a field relevant to the discussion? In cold fusion that would be an expert in electrochemistry, calorimetry, tritium or helium detection, for example. If so, you have not made a logical fallacy.


    Arguing against the who's who of electrochemistry is as troll-like as a troll can be. To take some similar hot-button examples, it is like claiming that climatologists have no business expressing opinions on global warming, or doctors know nothing about obesity and we should defer to the latest fad diet advocate instead.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Or, if you were to cite the opinions of electrochemists regarding the ITER project, that would be a fallacious appeal to authority.

    That is not to suggest electrochemists should express no opinions about ITER. It just means their opinions are not privileged. Electrochemists do not deserve extra respect or deference when it comes to ITER. They may deserve somewhat more respect than, say, people who have no scientific or engineering background. But I don't suppose they know more about ITER than biologists, civil engineers, or semiconductor experts.


    Of course all arguments must be considered on their own merits. But, if you are not an expert, and you have difficulty understanding a technical subject, I think you should defer to experts until you have a good reason to think they are mistaken. For example, it it is clear that Mary Yugo does not understand the boil-off calorimetry in this paper by Fleischmann:


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


    Fleischmann did understand this, in great detail, and he was an expert in calorimetry. So, it would not be a fallacious appeal for Yugo to say, "even though I personally don't understand this, I am going to assume it is correct because Fleischmann was an expert in this field, and there are no published papers by other experts citing errors in this work."


    Of course, Yugo would never say that. On the contrary, the gist of her argument is often: "anything I do not understand or I have not bothered to read must be wrong." That is kind of a reverse appeal to authority. It is an appeal to ignorance. It is saying that people who know nothing and who cannot be bothered to learn anything are inherently more believable than world-class experts and Fellows of the Royal Society.

    Quote from kirkshanahan

    Listing a "who's who" *without* judging the quality and relevance of their relevant work is the logical tactic known as 'call to authority'.

    When it's the top hundred or so experts in some particular field, it is not a logical fallacy to rely on their authority, because they have some authority in their field.


    Now, if it were the top 100 experts in a field saying that it's bogus IN THEIR FIELD, that's different. The situation we had was a few experts in nuclear hot fusion who were dependent upon guvmint grants for their living, they were saying that those top hundred experts in the OTHER FIELD had got it wrong. It is not a stretch to suggest that people who regularly use electrochemistry and calorimetry in their line of work have more authority than people who rarely if EVER use calorimetry in their line of work.

    Quote from maryyugo

    It was essentially rhetorical, Kev. In point of fact, based on your unpleasant style and your previous writing, I don't give a _ _ _ _ what you think.



    Of course not. Arguing points of view and supporting one's views is what forums should be about. Are we at the "appeal to authority" fallacy yet, Jed?

    In point of fact, you are one of the most unpleasant trolls on the internet, you've been banned from Vortex and probably other sites so I don't care what you think for the most part. But you serve as a good pasquinade. And sure enough, you jump right over the line of rationality in your next sentence where your own supposed authority is lined up against the top hundred experts in electrochemistry. You are not among those top hundred experts in electrochemistry, even if you know a thing or two about calorimetry, but your stuff doesn't even come remotely close. Go on and keep arguing that irrational point of view, it works for me.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Gee, golly, gosh. Again and again, is it? Well, you could try doing it yourself. What's stopping you? Most of the data is at LENR-CANR.org and in Ed's book. You should read the book if you are seriously interested in this subject. If you are so anxious to pin down the number, do your own homework.


    It is almost as if you expect me to spoon feed you the information.


    I myself find this whole discussion silly, and inconsequential. Once the number of replications exceeds 5 or 10, it makes no difference how many there are. 90, 180, or 20,000 would be the same. I wrote the Tally paper at the request of a researcher. I do not know why he wanted the information, but it wasn't hard for me to assemble the report using my EndNote relational database, so I did it. It is not important.

    I have read Ed's book, etc. So calm down. I don't expect you to spoonfeed me. You wrote the tally and it got untied by a skeptopath so I would like to know your response. Where does the rational line get drawn? You say it makes no difference, but it does... to a skeptopath. If we ever get a skeptopath to accept that there are dozens of replications, that is a rational line drawn. I have seen it done before, and the skeptopath went back into hiding as a result.


    You fed us the information, so now that skeptopaths are refusing to eat I would like to know where that line gets drawn for true and rational skeptics. For me personally, I have read enough papers to know that this effect has been replicated far more than 153 times. But I'm no authority on this subject. Your tally of peer reviewed replications is the closest thing we have to an authority on the subject. Asking you for your response when someone questions your tally isn't even remotely asking to be spoonfed. Maybe you should add some more bran to your diet.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Arguing against the who's who of electrochemistry is as troll-like as a troll can be.

    I suppose now it's time for the supposed experts on this particular forum to weigh in on whether or not this is as troll-like as a troll can be -- those supposed experts would be the moderators on this forum. My prediction is the sound of crickets or maybe a post about me saying they're not at my beck and call, something like that, but not directly addressing the issue at hand.

    The real problem with appeal to authority arguments is that people only listen to authorities that hold the position they are arguing for. Conveniently, equally qualified authorities who hold opposing views are either ignored or disqualified as being biased or tools of some evil conspiracy. So are "100 top electrochemists" the list from Forbes Hottest Electrochemists of the Year or are they a cherry-picked set out of the 8,000 members of the Electrochemical Society?

    Quote from interested observer

    So are "100 top electrochemists" the list from Forbes Hottest Electrochemists of the Year or are they a cherry-picked set out of the 8,000 members of the Electrochemical Society?

    You can read some of their bios and decide for yourself. They were people such as Bockris who wrote the most widely used textbook; Fleischmann, FRS and president of the Electrochem. Society; Yeager, who they named the institute for (http://chemistry.case.edu/research/yces/); Arata, who has an international prize and a building on the campus at a National U. named after him; the Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission; a Fellow of China Lake; the main designer of India's atomic bomb; a top commissioner on the French AEC; the person who designed the tritium labs at Los Alamos and the PPPL; etc.


    Looking at it the other way, the number of leading electrochemists who were not able to replicate is: one (1). Lewis. However, in my opinion, and in the opinion of Fleischmann and others, he did replicate, but his analysis was flawed. See:


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

    Quote from interested observer

    The real problem with appeal to authority arguments is that people only listen to authorities that hold the position they are arguing for. Conveniently, equally qualified authorities who hold opposing views are either ignored or disqualified as being biased or tools of some evil conspiracy.

    Do you have any examples of this taking place in some other area? I'm thinking of economics, but the models are so flawed that the inexactitude lends itself to warring "experts". A similar thing is taking place with Anthropomorphic Global Warming. So is there an example of a bunch of appealing to authority in some area where the data is nailed down? We saw some of it in tobacco, where there were paid tobacco scientists holding to the party line.

    There is the old saying that an expert is someone with credentials who says what you want to hear. This sort of thing is pretty ubiquitous.


    The examples of AGW denial and tobacco industry doubt spreaders are classic cases where the science is settled but a fringe group is trying to assert that the science is not settled on the basis that the majority is corrupt, is using faulty data, or is part of some agenda-driven conspiracy. So they trot out some experts who hold the view they want to hear and work hard to marginalize everyone else.


    The LENR world has some interesting parallels. The way I see it, the science is not settled, but a fringe group is trying to assert that it is on the basis that the majority is corrupt, part of some agenda-driven conspiracy, or simply has no opinion at all. By limiting the sample to only those they deem qualified to hold an opinion, they declare victory.


    I don't know if CF/LENR is a real thing or not. I do know that it is not settled science. Settled science is when the preponderance of experts in a field accept a common view. This has not happened with LENR. Sure, you can try to declare that the opinions of anyone except researchers who have gotten positive results do not count, but that is bogus.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Gee, golly, gosh. Again and again, is it? Well, you could try doing it yourself. What's stopping you? Most of the data is at LENR-CANR.org and in Ed's book. You should read the book if you are seriously interested in this subject. If you are so anxious to pin down the number, do your own homework.


    It is almost as if you expect me to spoon feed you the information.


    I myself find this whole discussion silly, and inconsequential. Once the number of replications exceeds 5 or 10, it makes no difference how many there are. 90, 180, or 20,000 would be the same. I wrote the Tally paper at the request of a researcher. I do not know why he wanted the information, but it wasn't hard for me to assemble the report using my EndNote relational database, so I did it. It is not important.


    The issue is not the number of replications. 2 or 3 would be enough if they has strong data and methodology, and were true replications.


    It is what do these broadly similar experiments with broadly similar results represent.


    Some sophistication is needed, because of the issues of experiment selection, experiment type selection, and possible systematic errors duplicated by those getting positive results (many attempted replications showed negative results, so this is very possible).

Subscribe to our newsletter

It's sent once a month, you can unsubscribe at anytime!

View archive of previous newsletters

* indicates required

Your email address will be used to send you email newsletters only. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Our Partners

Supporting researchers for over 20 years
Want to Advertise or Sponsor LENR Forum?
CLICK HERE to contact us.