The Search for Evidence of Cold Fusion - Rick Cantwell (2012) [Coolescence SPAWAR replication attempt]

Quote from Curbina

I reviewed Coolesence claims of lack of replication a couple of days ago. I think they attempted several approaches and claimed not so much as failure to replicate as they did claim conventional explanations for what they found to be small effects at best. In many ways they started their work with the same ideas and focus that Team Google. They claim that the CR39 marks in the acrylic are a chemical reaction and that a millimeter air gap prevents the marks to happen.

In hindsight, and this is just a personal opinion by looking at what they claim today through the website of what Coolesence was (it was closed in 2017) they never really seemed to think LENR is real, and to their satisfaction they proved that to be the case for themselves.

This meme - that professional and well-disposed replicators "never really believed LENR to be real" is not relevant to science, and disregarding work based on such an idea is poisonous to any sense that LENR might be a genuine scientific area of research.

You did not get the FTL neutrino guys slating replicators because "they did not really believe the result". I don't think the FTL neutrino team really believed the result. That is not the point, as my namesake says, you follow what is revealed to its conclusion with a best effort at honesty, acknowledging that as a human you will have biases and prejudices.

The idea that somone who "really believed" an effect was real would be best able to replicate it is not correct. In fact, such a person might well skip necessary checking and generate positive results that no-one else would believe - rightly. Conversely, somone who was profoundly skeptical would follow anomalies like a feret and either find they were something extraordinary and inexplicable without LENR or something like it, or discover the artifacts/mistakes that led to false positives.

What I see in too much LENR work is a lack of openness to the possibility that positive results are not in fact real, and a lack of effort to test and cross-check positive results. LENR, as a hypothesis, is so malleable it does not provide much of a check (again Ed's views about NAEs are a partial exception to this, inasfar as they make testable predictions like Arrhenius plot reaction rates).

if well motivated and documented effortful but negative attempted replications are dismissed then we have a collection of beliefs that can never be changed, and a true cult.

THH

please acknowledge that I never used the word “belief” and I expressed that they did not thought LENR is real from the beginning, but I also said that it was my personal opinion.

I consider myself a true skeptic, not a pseudo skeptic. I have an unquenchable curiosity, and I am skeptic of currently mainstream accepted “knowledge” as much as of potential new knowledge, but in the case of what is “known” is worse because it fails to account for plenty of observed phenomena but most people working with those models prefer to keep using them because they have been “good enough” and fail to realize this is science stagnation rather than advance. In that sense, if you start a new research thinking there is nothing new and that you can explain everything away with the little we think we know, chances are you are not going to find anything new for sure.

I acknowledge you did not use the word belief. However, "really think LENR is real" is just as bad. The word belief connotates something held true, definitely, so that you need very strong evidence to overturn it, as would be the case if you "really think something is real".

A true skeptic would not have any predefined position as to what could or could not be explained. They would, however, acknowledge the vast amount of Physics that has been explained by existing science, while being interested in the many things clearly still not explained (dark matter/energy one good example) and open to the possibility of more unexplained things.

But, that skepticism cuts both ways. To be open to the possibility of unexplained things is not the same as an assumption that there are unexplained things.

Also, a true skeptic would bear in mind that just as not all crimes are explained, so not all things reported in experiments will necessarily be explained. That is why for good reason science require new phenomena to be reproducible before having much interest in them.

It's precisely because I don't think it should be dismissed that I posted it. Rather, I think it should be examined closely. As I said, I have reservations about their work. Was the Coolescence work done at a high standard and documented to your satisfaction? Are you satisfied that the people who did the work were qualified to do so? I don't have solid answers to these questions, but I was hoping to start a conversation.

To me, the SPAWAR work is the most compelling body of work that suggests LENR is real. Consequently, any failure to replicate the work should be looked at closely. As I said, this talk was just published, so I wanted to bring it to the attention of the forum for the above reasons.

That is fair enough. I remember reading it and the replications a long time ago:

https://earthtech.org/cold-fusion/spawar/

https://www.coolescence.com/2009-10-co-deposition.html

The SPAWAR stuff is strong when read alone but also the type of evidence that I am suspicious of. It relies on experts claiming the only explanation for something is one thing, when even if that is all that a given expert can conceive of, other possibilities remain. The cross checks never panned out, or were never done. Thus if there really were alphas emitted they would be detectable in other ways. Comparing the SPAWAR evidence and the Earthtech investigation I did not find alphas a convincing explanation for those pits. More importantly, if alphas are emmitted from an experiment they can be detected in multiple ways, and this was not found.

THH

Quote from orsova

But it wasn't just pits on CR-39. It was also heat, x-rays, tritium and transmutation.

None of the other evidence was strong. And as for the excess heat, well that is what I've been arguing google should check carefully, but then everyone here tells me it is not reproducible. Those pits were reproducibel.

So: are you telling me that in your judgement the pits were not caused by radiation, or they were?

If they were, then this is a reproducible LENR experiment, no quibble, because pits were always found.

If they were not, this element of the SPAWAR evidence that was thought strong vanishes.

THH