The perpetual “is LENR even real” argument thread.

... "an interdisciplinary team of >40 scientists and engineers who design and build electrochemical reactors to power the planet. We are seeking highly motivated, self-driven individuals to join a sub-group that studies nuclear fusion at low energy in solid-state materials."

Quote from Ahlfors

... "an interdisciplinary team of >40 scientists and engineers who design and build electrochemical reactors to power the planet. We are seeking highly motivated, self-driven individuals to join a sub-group that studies nuclear fusion at low energy in solid-state materials."

Nice find. Too important for this thread. I have been searching for the old: Team Google...post Nature thread, but cannot find it to move to. The search function here sucks.

Quote from Shane D.

Nice find. Too important for this thread. I have been searching for the old: Team Google...post Nature thread, but cannot find it to move to. The search function here sucks.

I don’t know why but that thread is is the Russian languaje forum.

Found it using google and copied Ahlfors post there.

There are so many separate issues here. Getting press attention, getting the attention of funders, publicizing various results. I think the way science is taught may be an issue; what is taught as science is the relatively stable views of reality that have earned a consensus based on complicated analyses that can then be boiled down to a layperson-suitable page in a textbook. Those views, I believe, are stable for good reasons. No one wants to pull support columns out of a massive structure if there are alternative approaches. Perhaps, as an outsider, I have a naive view of things, but I think scientific review is one of the few things that still functions in our society. That is, when papers are rejected by peer review, I tend to assume that there are valid reasons for rejection.

Science, I believe, is grounded on replication. It excites me when people offer recipes for reliable replication, and I continue to find it hard to believe that "impossible" results that are replicated by multiple groups under properly controlled conditions will not be treated fairly by scientific journals. And I think most science journalists are well advised to show appropriate deference to that peer review process. For that reason, I find it discouraging that some in this community seem to feel that they need an end run around that process in order to publicize their results.

I'm someone who truly wants to believe in the results being reported. But I don't think any sensible journalist would be moved by a letter to the editor, when they know that people invest a decade of their lives or more to learning enough about a narrow field just to reach the point at which they can offer an informed opinion. I'd listen to the folks who've put in that time, knowing full well that they're imperfect. And I'd be highly suspicious of anyone who told me there was a conspiracy among such people to suppress the truth. I'd ask why, and on an existential issue, I'd find competition to be an unlikely answer.

Quote from mjtrac

Perhaps, as an outsider, I have a naive view of things, but I think scientific review is one of the few things that still functions in our society. That is, when papers are rejected by peer review, I tend to assume that there are valid reasons for rejection.

Since 1995, cold fusion papers have all been rejected out of hand, with no peer review. Perhaps peer-review would work, but it is never allowed.

I think you are wrong about peer-review in other subjects. Scientists tell me it is riddled with corruption. For example, I know of two cases in which senior scientists rejected papers and then plagiarized them and published the results as their own. Scientists tell me things like that often happen.

In my experience, scientists are bunch of conniving low-lifes. Academic science is shot through with politics, corruption, and behavior that would get you arrested in any other line of work. Other fields that I know about, such as engineering, banking and farming have much higher ethical standards. That is partly because academic scientists are not held to account when they publish fake data, or when they plagiarize, or publish sloppy, unverified results. Most of their work is ignored. It is never replicated, so people never find out it didn't work. When a programmer writes a program that does not work, everyone knows that an hour later. You never get away with it.

Jed, thanks for your reply. It would be silly of me to argue that corruption cannot exist in science. But wouldn't the sort of thing you describe just lead to people plagiarizing the potentially world changing results regularly discussed here, or fighting over priority. It's been decades since I left school, but when I was there it seemed like it was curiosity, not greed, that brought people into research. I'm sad that no readers have chosen to challenge your comment. This is a field in which some obvious charlatans and conspiracy types operate, but I remain interested precisely because of my respect for researchers who assert that there is fire behind the smoke, and say they've seen it with their own calorimeters.

Quote from mjtrac

This is a field in which some obvious charlatans and conspiracy types operate

Do you mean cold fusion? On the contrary, there are fewer charlatans than more mainstream fields such as cancer research and plasma fusion. Because there is no money in cold fusion, and because you get fired for proposing a research project. Only sincerely interested scientists will risk doing cold fusion. When cold fusion was announced, MIT plasma fusion researchers called the Boston newspapers and denounced F&P as frauds. They said F&P should be arrested. They later published blatantly fake data. No cold fusion researcher would ever do that -- except Rossi. The others would never stoop so low. Also because it wouldn't work in the other direction. You cannot denounce plasma fusion in the Boston Globe. They won't print your accusation.

The New York Times published a long article about fake data in academic papers, and the tremendous waste of money it causes. NHI spent $588 million on one fake line of research. Here is a "gift" version of it, with no paywall.

Opinion | Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem

Scientists need to toughen up about preventing fabricated scientific results from being published.

www.nytimes.com

Quote from mjtrac

Jed, thanks for your reply. It would be silly of me to argue that corruption cannot exist in science. But wouldn't the sort of thing you describe just lead to people plagiarizing the potentially world changing results regularly discussed here, or fighting over priority. It's been decades since I left school, but when I was there it seemed like it was curiosity, not greed, that brought people into research. I'm sad that no readers have chosen to challenge your comment. This is a field in which some obvious charlatans and conspiracy types operate, but I remain interested precisely because of my respect for researchers who assert that there is fire behind the smoke, and say they've seen it with their own calorimeters.

My experience in the research world, in general, not even in a controversial topic, is that people is faced with the constant need to remain on “top of the heap” or risk replacement or loosing the dominant position to channel funding.

Even in a small country like Chile with very low budget for research, that mostly comes from government, the fight for those resources may look polite and organized from the outside, but is fierce and treacherous from the inside. Everyone devoted to research is really scrambling for their slice of the cake, and science takes a secondary place, you only need to focus on keeping publishing to remain visible and as close to the top of the heap as you can.

Getting private research funding in Chile is rare, it happens, but also comes with a non written “this is the result we want” told in advance. So, is mostly white washing.

On the Useful Papers thread, within the past month, a link was provided to a paper which asserts reliable replication of Fleischmann Pons. Ignoring the paper's discussion of theoretical issues, the paper also lays out a series of steps that ought to lead to replication in any competent lab. It also indicates that such replications can be performed with a far less expensive material.

As a lay but "informable" outside observer, I find myself examining how I would respond to a letter to the editor signed by a bunch of respected people, versus how I would respond to two or three labs achieving and reporting the same results from the same experiment. My response to a letter to the editor would be to recall Rossi, to wonder how Brillouin can claim a COP of 3 yet apparently lose SRI backup, and to recall my amazement at how many years Brilliant Light and Power has been able to suck money out of Wall Street by repeatedly creating videos proving AFAICT that molten metal can boil water. My response to replication of the Staker results would be to go to the local office of my representative in Congress to describe what I'd been shown and to ask everyone I know to do the same. I can only assume that others outside the field would react similarly.

I often wonder how much television dramas have altered our perception of reality such that we have totally lost faith in anyone with any power or money. Do such people often behave badly? Of course they do. But do they care about the future of their own children, and perhaps even about the future of humanity? I believe they do, and it saddens me that so many people -- not just here -- have become so convinced that they or their community are the sole holders of any decency. To disagree with a consensus is absolutely not to be wrong. But when you find yourself in disagreement with the consensus, perhaps the most important skill is the empathy to understand why skeptics are skeptical of what you say, to put yourself in the shoes of others who don't know what you believe you know.

Some in the field seem to be grounding their opinions on the idea that there is a global conspiracy, or something effectively the same, to prevent humanity from accessing an available form of energy that would be a response to the climate crisis, and that this has been successful for thirty years. Anyone who makes that sort of assertion loses me immediately. I realize I might be wrong, as I realize we might all might be living in The Matrix, but I don't really care -- I comfortably put such assertions in the category of too unlikely to gain the slightest bit of my attention.

Quote from mjtrac

On the Useful Papers thread, within the past month, a link was provided to a paper which asserts reliable replication of Fleischmann Pons. Ignoring the paper's discussion of theoretical issues, the paper also lays out a series of steps that ought to lead to replication in any competent lab. It also indicates that such replications can be performed with a far less expensive material.

I get you are referring to the more recent of M. Staker's paper? or perhaps to Ed Storms's? Nevertheless, I think it has been well stablished that the FP effect has been replicated many times, so for most of us is great to see another replication being published (Staker's paper was in a peer revewed journal), but the collection is ever increasing and has been for the last 33 years, and most people keep ignoring it.

The issue of the reality of the phenomena is no longer in discussion, and hasn't been seriously for a while.

What We need is to increase the awareness of it to channel more funding to get the phenomena to achieve a level of everyday usefulness.

Quote from mjtrac

Some in the field seem to be grounding their opinions on the idea that there is a global conspiracy, or something effectively the same, to prevent humanity from accessing an available form of energy that would be a response to the climate crisis, and that this has been successful for thirty years. Anyone who makes that sort of assertion loses me immediately. I realize I might be wrong, as I realize we might all might be living in The Matrix, but I don't really care -- I comfortably put such assertions in the category of too unlikely to gain the slightest bit of my attention.

It was not a global conspiracy at all, it was initially a purely US-centered one that later spread around the world. It began not as a way of depriving the world of cheap and clean energy, but of ensuring that the available money for fusion research went to the hot fusion crowd. This involved serious scientists perjuring themselves in front of at least one congressional committee, the alteration of positive results to negative ones and more.

So it was just a case of a group of people protecting their source of There have been many examples of this, but few so destructive. As shown below.

Academics ‘regularly lie to get research grants’

Scholars in the UK and Australia contemptuous of impact statements and often exaggerate them, study suggests

www.timeshighereducation.com

Academics ‘regularly lie to get research grants’

Scholars in the UK and Australia contemptuous of impact statements and often exaggerate them, study suggests

Academics routinely lie and exaggerate when telling funding agencies what impact their research will have, a series of candid interviews with scholars in the UK and Australia has suggested. Their dismissive comments about the “charade” of impact statements brings to light what appears to be an open secret in academia – that academics simply do not take such projections seriously.

A new study anonymously interviewed 50 senior academics from two research-intensive universities – one in the UK and one in Australia – who had experience writing "pathways to impact" (PIS) statements, as they are called in the UK, and in some cases had also reviewed such statements.

It was normal to sensationalise and embellish impact claims, the study published in Studies in Higher Education found.

In the UK and Australia, academics are asked for evidence of what impact their research might have when applying for grants. Research Councils UK introduced the need to write a PIS in 2009. Respondents said that future projections of impact were “charades” or “made-up stories”. As one UK professor put it: “would I believe it? No, would it help me get the money – yes.” Academics felt pushed into lying on their impact statements by the logic of ferocious academic competition, the paper found.

“If you can find me a single academic who hasn’t had to bullshit or bluff or lie or embellish in order to get grants, then I will find you an academic who is in trouble with [their] head of department,” said one professor in Australia. Another Australia-based academic said that embellishment was about “survival” in the research grant game.

Academics did not take the statements seriously because they felt predicting future impact was simply impossible. They “appeared to lampoon PIS by intimating that authors would require skills of clairvoyance in order to accurately convey the future”, the paper found. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to say, something like ‘I’m Columbus, I’m going to discover the West Indies?!'” said one professor in Australia.

Another respondent, a UK professor, described the whole process as “dishonest” because the idea of confidently predicting impact “flies in the face of scientific practice”.

Continues...

Yes, I am referring to the Staker paper. You are saying that the reality of the phenomenon is no longer in dispute. Perhaps I am just thick, but what that would mean to me is that the subject would be taught in particle physics and/or other classes, and there would be no difficulty in getting peer review.

Perhaps you mean that those in the LENR community have collectively agreed that the phenomenon has been observed enough that there is no longer controversy as to the phenomenon's existence within the LENR community.

As an outside but informable observer, it is quite literally impossible for me to believe simultaneously that the reality of the phenomenon is no longer in dispute in the wider scientific community, and that there is trouble obtaining funding. I can believe one or the other, but not both simultaneously. As I said, perhaps it's just that I'm thick, but this is where empathy must come into play. All I can offer is that no letter to the editor would sway me, while reports of the same experiment performed in multiple labs with similar outcomes would get my attention. Science is replicable.

Quote from mjtrac

All I can offer is that no letter to the editor would sway me, while reports of the same experiment performed in multiple labs with similar outcomes would get my attention. Science is replicable.

Already done. JedRothwell keeps the score on how many.

Quote from Alan Smith

Already done. JedRothwell keeps the score on how many.

You took the words out of my fingertips .

The collection has become so vast that is quite a full time job to get acquainted with it. It has taken years of my keen interest in it just to explore a sizeable fraction of it.

Alan Smith> It began not as a way of depriving the world of cheap and clean energy, but of ensuring that the available money for fusion research went to the hot fusion crowd.

OK. Let's hypothesize that US fusion researchers collectively put their grant applications ahead of their childrens' future. Why have electrochemists not found funding? Is the electrochemist community similarly obscene?

Google provided funds to come up with replication and asserted they could not. Are they in on the plot?

ARPA-E is now providing funding; a credentialed name has an experiment that lays out a recipe for replication. Where is the one person on the planet with the skills to replicate the Staker experimental conditions who is publicly announcing that their lab is working on that precise thing? Perhaps it strikes the folks here as pointless.

I am offering you a layperson's attitude -- show me the same experiment done by two or more independent groups with the same results -- results widely considered "impossible" under what we think of as current theory -- and I will wake up. Show me a wide variety of experimental results that are all intriguing and I will continue to wait for what it sounds like ARPA-E and Google have both been asking for: a single experiment that any competent lab worker can conduct in order to demonstrate the phenomenon to themselves and others.

You can point to corruption within science and I'll agree you've found it; that will not change my mind. You can explain at a layperson's level the way in which evidence has accumulated and I will find it intriguing. What you would need to do to get me passionately involved is show me two or more independent labs doing the same experiment with the same "impossible" results. That's the way I think, and I suspect others think similarly, which is why Google and ARPA-E are asking for a reference experiment. The absence of one tells me there's no need (yet) to get particularly excited, and it's an easily remedied issue that no one seems to remedy.

Please point me to the link at which Jed Rothwell maintains his collection of replicated experimental results. I apologize in advance for requesting the hand-holding.

And surely you've offered this collection to every science journalist, so either all science journalists are part of the conspiracy to suppress this research or none wish to risk their reputations against the conspirators. I have no reputation to worry about and I'm f*cking bored at my job, so if I'm convinced I'll happily start on a course to learn more and if I remained satisfied I'd be happy to try to do a report on the replications. While I don't have the math or physics background to understand the theory, I'm not interested in theory but in observations far enough out of error ranges that, were I to take them to university professors, could not be explained away as experimental error.

A writing sample, showing a willingness to disbelieve official explanations: https://truthout.org/articles/…udden-acceleration-cases/

mjtrac , Alan Smith , JedRothwell , I had to move all these posts to this thread as they were derailing the "adding glamour to LENR thread" by going back again and again to an issue that is appropiate for this thread.

I don't think you are being thick mjtrac , but we are at LENR-forum.com, way beyond your informable person level of skepticism. Feel free to keep the discussion going here, this thread was meant for that, but is also "on the shadow and off the spotlight".

I will view this, as an "informable person," not as evidence of your superior understanding but as something quite different.

Folks at the "informable person" level simply have to rely on consensus, for we have no way to analyze things except by going on behavior of participants. The way to inform such persons is straightforward:

"Smith, A., at the peer reviewed journal X, presented results Z. The results have been replicated by Jones, B. (see article in peer reviewed journal Y) and Johannson, C. (see article in peer reviewed journal X, Y, or Z). The experiments were identical, with the following unfortunate variation, and the results were consistent, as follows..."

It's very straightforward, no matter how annoying it might seem, or how many times its been done in the past. It could be assigned to a single control key on a keyboard. Or you can just send disagreements off to purgatory, which is also straightforward and interpreted by the informable as revealing what they needed to come to a tentative conclusion.

Quote from mjtrac

I will view this, as an "informable person," not as evidence of your superior understanding but as something quite different.

Sorry but I am quite OCD about keeping things on topic. This thread is for skepticism on LENR's very existence, and your comments are of this tenor. That's all.

About the collection of papers, you can spend months reading at https://www.LENR-CANR.org , and you will find some also mentioned along this thread, where we have been discussing the issue for a while.