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

  • He is not worth making an exception over.

    It is no big deal. My policy is like the pirates' code, "more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules."


    The part about not accepting submissions from internet gab-groups is to protect me from getting sued by crazy scientists. That ain't going to change.

    BTW, your library has been around for decades now. Why don't you open up your own discussion board?

    Because I want to avoid controversy. If I allowed comments or if I publish anything other than anodyne announcements of upcoming conferences, some scientists will take offense and withdraw their papers. They already threaten to do that from time to time. Prof. A will say: "Prof. B is a charlatan and if you upload Prof. B's work, I will withdraw my papers in high dudgeon." In response, I say "that would be a shame but I cannot play favorites, so let me know if you want me to remove your paper."


    It is like herding cats.

  • Quote

    When you pass the bar of having your pink yet invisible flying unicorns replicated by the top hundred electrochemists of the day and there are NO papers generated to disprove it, then I shall admit that your scientific finding is proven, even though there would be no theory to explain it.


    You missed the point entirely. It's not about being able to prove that the unicorns are real. It's about the inability to prove that they are not real. Absence of proof that they are real is not proof that they are not real. The point, of course, is that it makes no sense to ask skeptics to prove that LENR is not real or give up their skepticism. That's what believers often do.

  • Quote

    From what I can see, CCS/ATERH is disproven.

    Link please.

  • OK. How could LENR be disproved?


    It couldn't. The only thing you can do is prove it exists.


    If you run an experiment that tries to find LENRs and fails, the 'skeptics' (usually known as the 'believers') would just say you did something wrong, especially since they claim others have proven it.


    The debate always centers around what you can do. What you can't do only lasts as long as someone doesn't figure out how to do it.

  • @Jed - for the last time


    Go to Google Scholar and type in "KL Shanahan" "cold fusion", then hit <return>.


    This doesn't list the JEM article, so go to the JEM homepage (Google it) and search for 'shanahan' (no caps needed). I got two hits:

    No Can Do. Nope, nope, nope. You must contact me by e-mail giving explicit permission.


    I have been dealing with people like you for a long time. I know your little tricks. You refuse to contact me by e-mail now. You will not take two minutes to do that. Why not? What are you up to? I don't know, but with people like you it is usually some stupid trick. Such as Dr. Herr Dr. Professor who keeps baiting me to upload his papers, after he threatened to file a lawsuit for copyright infringement when I did upload one. He threatened me not once, not twice, but three times! (I pulled it immediately.)


    I don't mind uploading your papers, but I sure as hell will not buy trouble from you. If you did not have a stupid trick up your sleeve, you would do what all other authors do without a second thought, and you would send me an e-mail. Your refusal tells me all I need to know.

  • OK. How could LENR be disproved?

    Let's take a historical example. The skeptics said that P&F weren't mixing their cells enough. That would have proven P&F's findings were in error. P&F put dye in their cell to show that it mixed properly, and did the skeptics withdraw, saying that they were wrong? Nope.


    The skeptics said that recombination could account for the supposed excess heat. But they've been proven wrong time and again. Perhaps in the most egregious of cases, Heat After Death, they could have proven that every single instance was utterly fraud.


    Or one of those replications could have shown why & how it was a chemical phenomena. I know that Shanahan likes to claim this is what he's done but he's almost completely full of bullshit. Surely by now all those top electrochemists must have been doing something wrong in their electrochemistry cells?


    Those kinds of things seem to be what has happened since P&F came out with their results. It's almost as if the folks who regularly use calorimetry in their electrochemistry cells were competent, while those who don't regularly use calorimetry nor electrochemistry were incompetent. Gosh, whoda thunk?

  • I am beginning to think that LENR supporters have a specific brain anomaly. They must be the only people in the world who don't understand that it is impossible to disprove the existence of something. Incredible!


    On the other hand, these people are the keepers of amazing detailed information about who the top 100 electrochemists in the world are. How does one get on this list and who compiles it? Like I said, there are 8,000 members of the Electrochemical Society. Did only the card-carrying top 100 replicate LENR? Were the other 7,800 forbidden to try? Or did they fail? Or are they all morons and only the official top-100 count?


    LENR has a rotten reputation because the people who speak on behalf of it make preposterous statements like this over and over again. Jed is always lecturing us on how science works and he seems to not have a clue. There is no other field in which such ludicrous claims are routinely made in an attempt to argue for results that should stand on their own if they are valid. In any other field, people might say that many renowned researchers have seen similar results, or perhaps that some of the top people in the discipline have replicated an experiment. That would be fine. All this top-100 talk is bullshit.


    The excuse is that LENR researchers are mistreated, prevented from doing their work, crucified or dead. But somehow there is proof positive from the top 100 electrochemists in the world at major institutions despite the fact that they are mistreated, prevented from doing their work, crucified, or dead. Quite a trick!


    There are no doubt some top-flight scientists who have done and may still be doing LENR research. Perhaps some of them have observed physical phenomena that cannot be explained by any conventional mechanisms. That might well be. On the other hand, the people who inhabit websites and battle the world on behalf of LENR seem to all be crackpots.

  • You missed the point entirely. It's not about being able to prove that the unicorns are real. It's about the inability to prove that they are not real. Absence of proof that they are real is not proof that they are not real. The point, of course, is that it makes no sense to ask skeptics to prove that LENR is not real or give up their skepticism. That's what believers often do.

    I don't miss the point. What you're doing is almost pure bullshit. So go ahead and have your unicorns generate some real findings in real scientific journals with real replications, and I can spend some time on your bullshit.


    Hot fusion skeptics who rarely if ever use calorimetry in their physics profession failed to replicate P&F. They proceeded from that to say that it was proof that LENR wasn't real. You seem to miss the point entirely yourself, that you have lumped yourself in with these incompetent souls due to your irrational dislike of LENR. You like to walk around a huge pile of bullshit to point to a small pile of sparrow poop and say that it's somehow the big issue. Now THAT's missing the point entirely,

  • OK. How could LENR be disproved?


    The skeptics said that recombination could account for the supposed excess heat. But they've been proven wrong time and again. Perhaps in the most egregious of cases, Heat After Death, they could have proven that every single instance was utterly fraud.


    Or one of those replications could have shown why & how it was a chemical phenomena. I know that Shanahan likes to claim this is what he's done but he's almost completely full of bullshit. Surely by now all those top electrochemists must have been doing something wrong in their electrochemistry cells?


    Those kinds of things seem to be what has happened since P&F came out with their results. It's almost as if the folks who regularly use calorimetry in their electrochemistry cells were competent, while those who don't regularly use calorimetry nor electrochemistry were incompetent. Gosh, whoda thunk?


    Jed will note 100s of experiments apparently showing LENR. And we know it is an effect that is not always present. So, if some of F&Ps results prove to be erroneous how does that disprove LENR? I can hear what you would say already...


    LENR makes no hard predictions that can be refuted - therefore it cannot be disproved. That is (the proper reason) why it requires stronger evidence to be held as plausible than any hypothesis coupled to a quantitative theory that can therefore be disproved.


    In fact your arguments above are logically incomplete. Consider - there are maybe 5 possible ways that occur to an informed critic why given results may be erroneous. And likely a few more that would surprise the critic - the real world is a bitch and comes up with wierd things.


    You are holding up as evidence for LENR that some of the possible errors suggested for key experiments prove wrong. Yet we need every single possible error to be proven wrong before we have a genuine LENR-capable anomaly. In any case your proofs here are assertion. Let us take a very simple case. Morrison suggested the high boil-off phase COP from the classic F&P paper from simplicity through complications.... might be due to liquid entrainment. You will have read MF's answer and think that this disproves that possibility. Yet it does not. Do you know why? It is always the things not said in research papers that are most revealing...

  • The debate always centers around what you can do. What you can't do only lasts as long as someone doesn't figure out how to do it.

    Science moves forward when a scientist tries to prove something was wrong and fails. Then another scientist tries something else to prove it wrong and he fails as well. It's important to post those failures as well as successes so that other scientists can build on the work. But anti-LENR activists have simply failed and then hand-waved, saying that "surely there is something wrong with this replicated finding".

  • OK. How could LENR be disproved?

    That's obvious! You just show there is a mistake in an experiment, and out it goes. The way I did here, with my own work:


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


    Do that for every major study and hey-presto, cold fusion is gone. Dead as Polywater.


    You yourself gave it a shot the other day by trying to prove that the boil-off phase of Fleischmann's experiment here can be explained as entrainment:


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


    In my opinion, you were wrong for a variety of reasons, and even if you had been right that would still not explain the excess heat in the first few weeks before the boil-off, or the heat after death after the boil-off. So it would not kill off this experiment. As I explained in the comments here:


    http://coldfusioncommunity.net…-blew-up-it-must-be-lenr/


    I think you failed (the reader can judge) but anyway, that is how it is done. Finding errors and showing that the author's conclusions are mistaken is the one and only way to disprove an experimental discovery. You have to do that for every single major study. Even if 49 are wrong and 1 is right, the cold fusion effect is still real.


    That is the only way a widely replicated effect can be proven wrong. Theory cannot touch it. You have to show that every single test in every replication study is a mistake. The likelihood of that is astronomically small. Because it would only happen if hundreds of world-class experts in electrochemistry, tritium detection, mass spectroscopy, and various other disciplines made serious blunders, over many years, doing things they had done for 30 to 50 years. For people such as Bockris, Fritz Will, Yeager, or Mel Miles, they were doing things they were world-famous for doing. By "famous," I mean they were made Fellows of The Royal Society or the AAAS, they wrote the leading textbooks, they had buildings, institutes, international prizes and so on named for them. How likely is it that such people would make elementary blunders such as not measuring recombination, or not looking for entrainment? Or that despite extensive peer-review, not a single one of their colleagues realized these people were making mistakes. How likely? Well, it is roughly as likely as if you picked 200 experienced drivers at random, and on the morning of August 1, 2017, in clear weather for no apparent reason every single one of them accidentally drove off the road into a telephone pole.


    Actually, you don't have to wonder whether they made these blunders. You can read their papers and see for yourself they did not.


    Disproving one experiment out of many does nothing to disprove a claim. It is like proving that Hiram Maxim did not technically fly in 1894 even though his airplane left the ground. That is true. But it does not prove that Orville Wright did not fly in December 1903. The fact that Orville was not able to fly for many weeks in the summer of 1904, and the overall success rate for the first year of aviation was something like 20 flights out of 120 attempts, also proves nothing. Low reproducibility does not mean the effect does not exist. It doesn't mean anything like that. It means flying is harder than you might think. Cold fusion is also harder than you might think.

  • On the other hand, the people who inhabit websites and battle the world on behalf of LENR seem to all be crackpots.

    The people who inhabit websites and battle the world on behalf of anti-LENR advocates seem to all be missing that gene that tells you what real science is all about. They see 153 peer reviewed replications by the top hundred or so electrochemists and seem to think somehow that they're smarter than those electrochemists. It's like they've developed a huge appetite for the stuff that comes out of the back end of a bull.

  • The people who inhabit websites and battle the world on behalf of anti-LENR advocates seem to all be missing that gene that tells you what real science is all about. They see 153 peer reviewed replications by the top hundred or so electrochemists and seem to think somehow that they're smarter than those electrochemists. It's like they've developed a huge appetite for bullshit.

    That comment does not advance the debate.

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