Rossi vs. Darden aftermath discussions

Quote from JedRothwell

That was a tally by Britz, not me. It was made in the mid to late 1980s.

What on earth are you talking about? You can't tally replications before the experiment being replicated has been performed.

I was referring to a paper dated 2009, entitled "Tally of Cold Fusion Papers", for which you (Jed Rothwell) are listed as the only author. Britz's database is one of the sources, but so is your lenr-canr database. In that paper, there is a topic "Positive, peer-reviewed excess heat papers culled from both databases", which is presumably a superset of refereed replications of P&F. The description says "The titles are culled from both [databases]", so it was you doing the tallying, not Britz, even if you used his database. And the complete list of 153 papers is given in an appendix, and it includes a paper by Arata in 2008, so it clearly post-dates Storms' table 2, published in 2004, which you claimed represents 180 "highly reputable university and government labs" that replicated P&F.

Furthermore, according to your own paper, the list of 153 refereed papers represents only 51 different affiliations, and not all of those are universities or government labs, since they include e.g. BlackLight Power, Toyota's IMRA, and Swartz's JET Energy.

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Not all of the 180 institutions published papers in the peer-reviewed literature.

Yes, that's what I argued, and that's what doesn't make sense. A highly reputable university or government lab that claims replication of cold fusion would not be reputable if it didn't publish.

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There were 180 institutions in Table 2. I counted them long ago.

You may have counted them, but I don't believe you got to 180:

1. There are only about 180 entries, and Miles accounts for 9 of them, Zhang and Arata another 9, Eagleton and Bush for 7. There are at least 7 other authors (or author groups) with 5 or more entries, and 28 others with 2 to 5. Now some entries may represent more than one affiliation, but there is no way to make up for the multiple entries from many institutions. This is obvious when you consider the following...

2. All but about 45 of the authors listed in Storms table are accounted for in your list of principal authors responsible for the excess heat papers you tallied. The overlap is probably even stronger since Storms lists first author (and 2nd if there are only 2), and not necessarily principal author. And your list corresponds to 51 affiliations. So, that means the remaining 45 authors would have to account for 129 additional affiliations.

So, it's clear from your own writing that 180 affiliations is not justifiable, let alone 180 highly reputable university and government institutions.

Such a cavalier misrepresentation of the contents of your own paper kind of destroys your credibility with respect to the rest of the cold fusion literature. Of course, in the Trump era, dishonesty seems to win a loyal following.

Oh, well.

Anyone expecting dispassionate accuracy and open-mindedness on an internet forum is destined to join the legions of the massively disappointed.

"Anyone expecting dispassionate accuracy and open-mindedness on an internet forum is destined to join the legions of the massively disappointed."

Obvious

I wrote: Instead, the number of groups actively investigating cold fusion now is a small fraction of 180, which means most of those labs have abandoned the field, many without publishing, and for a phenomenon with the importance of cold fusion, that is inconceivable unless the scientists came to realize the effect was not real.No, the funding dried up and scientists moved on to other projects where they could get paid.

Quote from [email protected]

No, the funding dried up and scientists moved on to other projects where they could get paid.

Funding from respectable sources (like DOE) dried up because the claims did not withstand scrutiny. The claims did not fail to persuade the world because funding dried up.

Indeed, funding did not dry up. Storms estimates $500M has been spent on the field. P&F got something like $50M from Toyota, about 500 times what they claimed was needed to make the claim in the first place. EPRI funded McKubre, and governments in India, Italy, and Japan continued to fund cold fusion for a long time. Moreover, the incredible potential of cold fusion, were it real, has attracted private funding from the likes of Sidney Kimmel, and lately Bill Gates (allegedly), Karl Page, and Darden and co. The truth is, it is far easier to attract funds in cold fusion (or hydrinos) than in most fields considered legitimate in mainstream science. The likes of Godes, Dardik, Mills, and Rossi would have no chance with peer reviewed funding agencies, and all have attracted millions from private investment.

No, the statement stands: It is inconceivable that reputable institutes would abandon a field like cold fusion unless the scientists believed the likelihood that the phenomenon was real was vanishingly small.

I wrote: Surely, if this claim of 180 (or 90) reputable university labs having replicated cold fusion held water, there would have been no need for the formation of the MFMP whose first aim is to identify an experiment that can be replicated by university labs.

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Kevmo: MFMP is aiming to identify an experiment that almost anyone can replicate, not just university labs.

According to their web site, their "goal is to facilitate the wide-spread replication and validation of New Fire experiments, such as Francesco Celani's, at reputable research institutions around the world."

So, I repeat, if 180 reputable institutes had replicated in a credible way, MFMP would be superfluous.

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Kevmo: Because people like you don't think that the top hundred electrochemists in the world are acceptable.

I don't even know who the top 100 electrochemists are, but if you provide a list, and they all claim cold fusion is real, I'll consider it.

But you're probably right. I base my evaluation of the field on the quality of the published claims, and they fail to persuade.

But if I were to base my view of the field on authority, I would put more weight on the thousands of top nuclear physicists who are all but certain it's bunk, than on 100 unnamed electrochemists.

Quote from [email protected]

LENR is the only science subjected to such high and exacting standards.

No, you have it upside down. The scientific mainstream bent over backwards to accommodate LENR.

Science and Nature were prepared to accept almost anything from P&F after their dramatic press conference, but they could not meet even the lowered standards, and ended up publishing a paper in J Electroanal. Chem. that was so sloppy, it needed several pages of corrections, and the withdrawal of a central claim in the paper. It took that journal a decade to realize their folly, and then they stopped publishing in the field too.

If it weren't for the huge upside to cold fusion, were it real, P&F probably couldn't have published in a respectable journal, or if they had, it would have been ignored, and soon forgotten.

There has not been any progress in the field to speak of, in spite of significant effort and spending. Even marginally credible claims have become more modest and far more scarce in the refereed literature. There is still no credible evidence for reaction products, no reliable recipe, and no observations that are not much more plausibly attributable to artifact, experimental error, and wishful thinking.

No self-respecting field of science would need a bunch of amateurs in the form of MFMP to come riding in to save them, only to end up 5 years later making the same lame, marginal claims that have characterized the field from the beginning.

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Kevmo: If those standards were applied to High Temperature Superconductors we'd only be 2 degrees above absolute zero.

Oh please. The first claim was above 30 K, and soon after it was being demonstrated unequivocally in classrooms.

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Kevmo: If it were applied to Dolly the sheep, all you guys would be calling for those clone claimants to be in jail.

Cloning has low statistical probability (like the probability an alpha is deflected 180 degrees by gold foil), but the statistics are reproducible, and the success is unequivocal. Not so for cold fusion.

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Kevmo: And applying such standards to semiconductors would have pushed us back to the days where we could only fit a hundred onto a square inch.

All these fields easily met standard scientific standards that cold fusion has never met. Transistors were finicky, but when one worked, anyone could make it work, and the demonstration of amplification was unequivocal.

Maybe preparing the Pd or Ni is finicky, but when an electrode (or whatever) works, it should be similarly unequivocal. But there are no remotely credible experiments that generate enough power to power themselves. If there were, a demonstration would be undeniable.

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Kevmo: When the top hundred electrochemists replicated the PF Anomalous Heat Event, it became established science but skeptopaths simply don't like it.

This makes no sense. Established science is recognized by the establishment. Cold fusion is not. And if you read up on the world's reaction to P&F in 1989, you will see that nearly everyone really *liked* it, when they thought it might be real. And what's not to like about cheap and clean and abundant energy? So, if what one likes influences one's belief, then the influence is strongly in cold fusion's favor.

It's far more plausible that believers believe cold fusion because they simply like it, than that skeptics are skeptical because they don't like it.

Quote from Louis Reed

No self-respecting field of science would need a bunch of amateurs......

All of your historical or more precisely "quasi historical" examples have substantial and quite well known counter examples and/or convincing rejoinders. The notion of "self respect" here, even if a "figure of speech" is definitive in its error-- that is, it is completely wrong:

You cannot be referring to the LENR researcher community itself. Many of the often courageous leading LENR researchers must surely have immense SELF respect. And in fact it appears that many, if not all, LENR researchers are capable of conducting falsifiable hypothesis testing.

The science, or if you wish "science", of LENR (and related other CF acronyms) clearly also has SELF respect, that is it has its own literature, it has experts and "peers", it has international meetings, it has developed a substantial body of peer-reviewed research, and in spite of sustained efforts against it, and the continuing efforts in popular media against it, it refuses to die.

LENR is strongly driven by empirical evidence. A necessary (that is a sine qua non) for science and scientific inquiry. Unifying principles are still awaiting more widespread understanding (among scientists and lay public) of the complexities of condensed matter theory, molecular physics and even catalysis.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves"

Quote from Louis Reed

Of course, in the Trump era, dishonesty seems to win a loyal following.

He's been at it long before Trump.

Quote from Louis Reed

but when an electrode (or whatever) works, it should be similarly unequivocal.

Actually that is true. Ed Storms demonstrated it with his Pt cathode that produced the data I reanalyzed in 2000. He did two blocks of runs (a run being an upwards input power sweep followed by a downward sweep back to zero, 10 runs per block) but the first block had a negative feedback ground loop in it. So he redid the first block a second time after redoing his grounding scheme, That data set clearly showed systematic effects (as I argued here long and hard) but his first block did too if you subtract the feedback problem. Very reproducible and controllable. So of course once that was clear all work on Pt was abandoned...

Kev quoted Louis: "No, you have it upside down. The scientific mainstream bent over backwards to accommodate LENR. "

Kev replied: " Bullshit. They had the Cold Fusion is Dead party even before they were done testing their cells."

Louis Reed wrote:

Science and Nature were prepared to accept almost anything from P&F after their dramatic press conference, but they could not meet even the lowered standards, and ended up publishing a paper in J Electroanal. Chem. that was so sloppy, it needed several pages of corrections, and the withdrawal of a central claim in the paper. It took that journal a decade to realize their folly, and then they stopped publishing in the field too.

Kev replied: "This stuff is news to me. My understanding was that Nature in particular got spooked."

The scientific ‘establishment’, i.e. the scientific journals, suspended normal publication rules duiring the 1990-1992 timeframe. Numerous negative articles were published in that time, negative meaning ‘no results or replication’. They did so because of the great potential impact of CF is real, and the world-wide scientific interest in reproducing the phenomenon. Normally, one doesn’t publish null results. Normal publication rules require that _something_ be demonstrated, and that the publication be novel and have value to ‘science’ at large.

Yes, the ‘establishment’ did bend over backwards to try to see if LENR (or CF) was real.

After two years of that with no visible progress, the 'hot topic' journals like Nature and Science dropped publishing on the subject, leaving it to other journals to continue on, which a few did, such as Fusion Technology (later Fusion Science and Technology) and J. Electroanalytical Chemistry for example.

And as Jed loves to point out. The chief editor at nature, Maddox, then expressed a highly negative opinion on the subject in an editorial.

Kev wrote:

• They were very well known electrochemists in their field.    They jumped the gun because they were convinced someone was trying to steal their thunder, and also they were told to do so.

Yes, this is perhaps the most important lesson to us scientists - Don’t let the University presidents and lawyers push you into something that violates standard scientific protocol. They held their press conference because Steven Jones was making a ‘similar’ presentation at an upcoming APS meeting in a few days, and they were all worried about IP rights. Jed has said that Fleishmann said that if he’d been allowed to, he wouldn’t have publicized his work for another 18 months. (Jed, please correct my paraphrasing and memory if needed.) Their biggest problem is one that still haunts the field. They mistakenly believed they had ‘the recipe’ for Pd/D anomalous heat effects on demand. Turned out they didn’t. And to make things worse, when everybody in the world tried to replicate their claims, failed, and came back at F&P for ‘all the info’, F&P clammed up (or were forced to) to protect that supposed IP. That really killed their rep in the science community.

Kev wrote: “153 peer reviewed replications”

Are you a sock puppet of Jed? What is it about the fact that 148 of those were published _before_ my 2002 paper came out and thus can’t have dealt with the CCS/ATER issue that you can’t grasp? What is it about my pointing out that the remaining 5 likewise don’t deal with it, even though they might have, that you can’t grasp? Those ‘153 replications’ mean next to nothing Kev.

Quote from kirkshanahan

They mistakenly believed they had ‘the recipe’ for Pd/D anomalous heat effects on demand. Turned out they didn’t. And to make things worse, when everybody in the world tried to replicate their claims, failed, and came back at F&P for ‘all the info’, F&P clammed up (or were forced to) to protect that supposed IP. That really killed their rep in the science community.

kirkshanahan : Luckily it was not everybody! The lucky ones with the right Pd-Alloy were successful as P&F later were again with a better batch of Pd!

But, you being a member of military research, we can apologize your comments, as acting along the orders...

Quote from Wyttenbach

kirkshanahan: Luckily it was not everybody! The lucky ones with the right Pd-Alloy were successful as P&F later were again with a better batch of Pd!

But, you being a member of military research, we can apologize your comments, as acting along the orders...

Point of Interest...Did anyone who obtained positive results with F&P cells in the first, oh, let's say 6 months, NOT contact F&P for more info on how to do it? I actually don't know if there was such a group, but I admit maybe not 'everybody' failed in the attempts.

'Military' - technically that means under DOD control. I work for a subcontracter to DOE, but what we make is delivered to DOD, after being assembled elsewhere. The contact with DOD however happens way above my pay grade...