While I'm sympathetic to some of the preceding analyses, they overlook a legitimate exploratory phase that precedes some major discoveries, where there are indications that there is some new phenomenon to be understood, but the problem is still barely tractable. If you include pre-science, this is even easier to see:
- Alchemy eventually matures into chemistry. (I.e., there really was something interesting there, just not what the alchemists were looking for.)
- Photographic film is known as early as 1858 to become exposed when placed near pitchblend, as reported by Abel Niepce de St. Victor to the French Academy of Science, decades before Roentgen and Becquerel. (Again, there was something there.)
If there is a progression from pre-scientific exploration to full-on normal science, in Kuhn's terms, LENR seems to fall somewhere in the middle, with wide variation in the rigor of the exploration.
When we write history in the manner of a mathematical proof, going back and arranging things so that there is a nice, tidy progression of one concept to another, we lose sight of the messiness, exploration and hiatuses that preceded the discovery and prepared the way. The scientific establishment did not home in on radioactivity until well after relevant findings were reported. There was even a connection from Niepce de St. Victor to Becquerel.
Photographic film would no doubt reliably become exposed with pitchblend, providing a lab rat for anyone who wanted to look into the matter further, while there are no lab rat experiments in LENR that I am aware of at this time, so that is an important difference. But hopefully people will agree that sometimes there is a kind of messy investigation that precedes the more systematic one, possibly for years or decades.