Which ICCF24 presentation is most likely to sway a skeptic?

    Quote from Bruce__H

    What are you thinking of here? I was heavily involved in neural network research in the late 1980's. It was a completely normal instance of a new field springing to life in an academic milieu. At least that is how it looked from the inside. By the 1990's it was completely mainstream. I do recall an early story of someone having trouble getting a PhD because a member of his examination committee thought that his results had minimal importance. But these things happen.


    What do you want people to do? Not object to things that they think are low-impact and or possibly wrong? When everyone (academic research) is spending public money?

    Back Bruce up here.


    Jed - I published in that field at that time (late 1980s) and was not harrassed. I had friends who did the same with equally no detriment to their careers (some still in the same field).


    EDIT - I see Jed has retracted timescale and he no longer claims this

    Quote from Bruce__H

    I remember your retailing some remark about academics only caring about their parking spots. That struck me then as so weirdly absurd that it could only be pushed by someone who has no insight or experience of academic science. I mean who cares about parking spots?

    A bigwig college dean said that! At Cornell or someplace. He was kidding, but only partly kidding. His point was there is a great deal of petty disputation in academia. Every academic I have quoted that to wryly agrees. Woodrow Wilson, who was a long time academic and President of Princeton University before becoming U.S. President said, "academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low."


    Fleishmann was a cynical person, because of his experiences in life. Especially the Gestapo beating his father so badly he died a few weeks later. He said he knew that he and Pons would be kicked out academia and vilified. He said that always happens. That is the main theme of Beaudette's book, "Excess Heat." Beaudette quoted him, in his conversation with Prof. Karin Caldwell, the granddaughter of Arrhenius, one of history's greatest electrochemists. He was booted out for some years for saying things the establishment disagreed with. Quote:


    After the press conference, Dr. Caldwell came up to us and said, “Well, when my grandfather proposed electrolytic disassociation, he was dismissed from the University. At least that won’t happen to you.” I said to her, “But you are entirely mistaken. We shall be dismissed as well.”

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Minsky first put the kibosh on neural networks in 1969. See:

    Minsky was right about single-layer networks. He showed rigorously that the problems they could solve were not the sort that people felt were needed for important AI tasks. So the field went into the weeds for several years until others had some bright ideas to avoid these limitations. I don't see how this is a corrupt and unethical mainstream barring the door. What do you want Minsky to do. Not publish his opinions.


    And how do you want people to act? Do you want to give major public money to just any and every idea even if it seems barren at the time?

    I have little sympathy for academics whinging about being persecuted. I've never known it.


    What I have known is this. As an academic, you need to publish, and bring in grants. Both follow fashion to some extent, grants more than publishing. If you publish in an area that no-one likes it will be more difficult to get high-impact publications. I can list many LENR "real" publications well-written and published in journals because they are interesting. Not high impact because not fashionable and also the sequence does not go anywhere much (I'm thinking about the Rydberg matter guy and his student). Difficult to get grants for that stuff.


    This is not persecution - there is hot competition for grants and publication - if no-one agrees with you that your work is worth anything no-one is going to give you money.


    You may (occasionally) be right. More often, as with AI, you may just be doing stuff at the wrong time. I knew that AI would eventually become interesting - just from brute force computer power - as it did. I think most knew that. However that long-term hope did not make it very interesting when we did not have such power.


    LENR may become interesting - it will if any work showing LENR anomalies is enough replicable to be fully characterised and investigated (I've commented about the tritium stuff). Without such ability to longitudinally reproduce and characterise with different parameters a given effect there is no way experimental work can advance the field. The longer LENR argues about F&P and McK, without stronger newer results to point to, the less it seems likely to ever become interesting. Which is why I'd expect people here to point to new work that does not depend on FPHE, and shows clearly anomalies that can best be explained by nuclear reactions.


    Generally, when effects are too elusive to characterise them it is because they are not real. Certainly if they are real there must be some way to make them repeatable and characterise them - perhaps in a different form from the one originally (and non-replicably) seen. The characterisation will both exclude experimental artifacts and give much insight into mechanisms. My beef about 95% of the experimental LENR work done is that the effects claimed are not comprehensively characterised over a wide range of parameters and therefore we are left with little information. And that was entirely predictable. "I got some excess heat" does not advance the field.


    A great example the @gi06 tritium production. Characterise that quantitatively in terms of experiment length, other experiment characteristics, and you have real progress. You can optimise it and also rule out or in a whole load of putative mechanisms. If looks random and uncharacterisable there is no progress and probably it is some exceptional error none of us have thought of.

    I don't understand why you consider me an advocate of hot fusion. Can you find just one comment of mine in which I support hot fusion?


    Anyway, if you are interest to know which ICCF24 presentation is most likely to sway a skeptic, you should also consider the opinion of those L-F members you hope to sway.


    My pick coincides with yours. But are you really interested in solving the mystery of the LENR or are you just hoping that this field continues to be funded regardless of the reality of the claimed results?


    If NAVSEA and DARPA are really interested in giving a solution to the LENR field issues, they just need to implement the program reported on the third slide of Barham presentation at ICCF24, and provide a definitive answer to the question posed by McKubre: "what is the state of proof of Fleischmann and Pons' claims? "


    To do this they only have to submit the papers and videos of the experiments performed by F&P in 1992 to a number of "academics from top research universities", and ask for their independent assessment of these evidences.


    If, on the contrary, they are more interested in being present at ICCFs for the next decades, as happened since 1989, then it's better for them that they keep citing Fleischmann and Pons, without looking too closely at the results of their experiments.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    A bigwig college dean said that! At Cornell or someplace. He was kidding, but only partly kidding. His point was there is a great deal of petty disputation in academia. Every academic I have quoted that to wryly agrees.

    Of course there is petty disputation. Here is a joke told to me by a departmental chair ...


    "Q: How do you tell a professor outside the door from a dog outside the door?

    A: When you open the door the dog stops whining."


    But all of this business about corruption and low standards is not something I see around me. It's bosh.

    Quote from Bruce__H

    Minsky was right about single-layer networks. He showed rigorously that the problems they could solve were not the sort that people felt were needed for important AI tasks.

    Read the article. It is short. Minsky and the others knew about multi-layer networks. Minsky said they would not work. Quote:


    All this came to an end in 1969 with the publication of a book “Perceptrons” by Marvin Minsky, founder of the MIT AI Lab, and Seymour Papert, director of the lab. The book conclusively argued that the Rosenblatt’s single perception approach to neural networks could not be translated effectively into multi-layered neural networks.


    Conclusive but wrong.

    Quote from Bruce__H

    But all of this business about corruption and low standards is not something I see around me. It's bosh.

    Read Miles and Beaudette and you will see it. Talk to any cold fusion researcher and they will tell you about it. Perhaps you have not seen corruption because you have not been involved in something controversial such as cold fusion, or masers and lasers.

    Quote from Bruce__H

    Alan Smith is number one. Then Jed, who has a whole closetful of stories about how the inability of LENR to make its case is totally expected because, you know -- Wright brothers! -- and how mainstream science rather than remarking on this lack of progress, should be admiring it.


    I can go back and collect instances if you want. It might take a couple of weeks.

    Everyone can speak for themselves, but I consider it pretty much an established fact that LENR was relegated to pseudoscience status, and stigmatized since a few months after the FP's news conference. Once that was established, it became a mere afterthought that those following the science would have to pay a reputational price, and there should be no doubt they did!


    There is hardly a presentation (including ICCF24) that does not lead off without addressing how they suffered from their decision/passion to pursue the science, and how they then dealt with the backlash. One of Team Google's goals was to lower those barriers erected by mainstream, making it "cool" to enter and study the science. By that, they were not implying all of mainstream is corrupt as you think, because like JR said, they ARE from the mainstream.


    I think the moral of the story from us believer's standpoint, is that mainstream has it's flaws, but overall they do much good. But, they screwed up when it comes to LENR.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    This is not persecution - there is hot competition for grants and publication -

    Where "hot competition" is defined as what the MIT plasma fusion researchers did: calling the Boston newspapers the day after the announcement and denouncing Fleischmann and Pons as criminals, and demanding they be arrested. And then publishing blatantly fake data. Hot competition is threatening people with deportation on trumped up charges; breaking up experiments and dumping horse manure on them; destroying documents. Destroying peoples reputations in the mass media. Firing them. Destroying their careers and marriages.


    Yes, the plasma fusion researchers did this to protect their grants. You are right about that. If this is your idea of acceptable "hot competition" your view of ethics is very different from mine. But we knew that already, because you repeatedly claim that I said one thing when I said the very opposite. "Jed looks at a whole set of experiments, a few of which are well-conducted . . ." when you know damn well that I look at dozens of sets of experiments at many different places, all of them well conducted. I don't look at poorly conducted ones. Apparently your idea of hot competition is to lie about me, evade the issues, make idiotic statements about heavy water versus light water when heat is measured outside the cell, and assert that someone somewhere may have made some sort of mistake and you don't know what it is but we can ignore the results because you suppose they might be wrong.

    Quote from Shane D.

    I think the moral of the story from us believer's standpoint, is that mainstream has flaws, but overall they do much good. But, they screwed up when it comes to LENR.

    Yup. But it is even worse than mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Mainstream scientists compound their mistakes by attacking the people who make the discoveries. By refusing to look at peer-reviewed data, and never reconsidering. By offering preposterous arguments such as THH's claims about light and heavy water -- claims that anyone who has read the literature knows are wrong. Mainstream scientists use their power with decision makers and funding agencies to destroy their enemies. That is what powerful people do in any institution. They often fight against their own best interests. The dairy industry in New York fought tooth and nail from the 1880s to 1917 to prevent pasteurization. They killed off hundreds of thousands of babies, including my great-grandmother's. They were killing their own best customers, and frightening away parents.


    Anyone can see that science usually works. Discoveries are made. Great progress is made. Yet we pay a terrible cost for the politics, stupidity, greed and out-of-control egoism of many top scientists. It is a betrayal of science.

    Bruce__H


    I spent 10 years as a university lecturer, plus 3 years working in academic science (bio-research) so I do know a little about academic life, in the UK at least..


    My view of the way things work (or fail to) is therefore based on observation and experience. A few years back I was invited to make a presentation at Cambridge University on the 'Reputation Trap' in LENR research. Nobody at this well-attended meeting (with a very distinguished audience) disputed that the problem existed, in fact, one of them, a US Nobel Prize-winner told me about his own experiences of the problem.


    If you think the LENR-stigma doesn't exist then you have led a very sheltered life. The bitchiness always just under the surface in academia is, in my opinion, deeply rooted in intellectual insecurity, whatever the topic there is always somebody afraid that you know more than they do, and because of that, hostile.

    Scientists are humans, academic institutions have politics like anywhere else. The difference is this: if you can publish, and get grant money, that trumps any politics.


    Both depend on fashion, but they do not much depend on bitchiness unless your work is so narrow that there are only two people competent to peer review it (and, for example, both don't like you).


    Some academics have that problem. Those who are more able and flexible don't - they can publish in an area of interest to more people.


    The question is this: if you maintain a good publication and funding record (which inevitably will not be LENR) does that publication and funding suffer if you also do some LENR research. It seems highly unlikely to me because of the way that grant apps and publishing papers works.


    Otherwise, if your only work is LENR, that will be an issue because nowadays (and for a long time) academics have needed to publish and bring in money.


    THH

    Quote from Alan Smith

    A few years back I was invited to make a presentation at Cambridge University on the 'Reputation Trap' in LENR research.

    Was it on the occasion of the publication of an essay (1) in which the author substantially parifies Rossi&Focardi's claims with F&P's, wondering why "Rossi gets little serious attention"?

    Quote

    Nobody at this well-attended meeting (with a very distinguished audience) disputed that the problem existed, in fact, one of them, a US Nobel Prize-winner told me about his own experiences of the problem.

    Was it the Nobel laureate who supported the reality of Rossi's claims for many years? And who published a video (2) in which he denounces "the deafening silence of scientific and other media, in regard to what may well be the most important technological advance of the century", referring to the "generators based on the Rossi reactor, first demonstrated in January 2011, [which] are already under construction"?


    Well, in case I agree with you. The scientific community should have paid much more attention in analyzing the claims of F&P and those of Rossi and Focardi, and should have given them all the prominence they deserve. But there is still time to do so.


    (1) https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-…ossibility-of-cold-fusion

    (2) https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1150242

    Quote from Ascoli65

    I wonder why you and so many others here at L-F are so surprised and disappointed by the stigma LENR has earned in academia.

    Surprised, not a bit. Disappointed, yes. But this kind of thing is not restricted to LENR research, around 50 years ago I was a technician responsible for maintaining human and murine cell lines 'in vitro'. I noticed that the murine cultures often contained extra-cellular bodies (vesicles) which appeared to be capable of budding off daughter vesicles, despite the fact that they appeared to consist of not much more than a membrane - no nucleus or other readily detectable structures. My attempts to generate interest in these strange bodies was met with scorn, they were dismissed as culture artifacts. Now I notice they have become a new area of research interest. It only took 50 years.

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