Lomax wrote:
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Reviewing the helium evidence, I have come to the conclusion that helium is being produced proportionally to that anomalous heat, and that this indicates a nuclear reaction which, for communicative convenience, I call "cold fusion."
Sure, you've said that many times, but you, as someone who did not finish an undergraduate degree, and have little to no experience in research, are not really qualified to make such an evaluation. A panel of qualified experts considered the same evidence and judge the evidence for nuclear reactions *not* to be conclusive.
If one examines the evidence, it quickly becomes clear that the conclusion you (and some others have reached) is not supported. And that's almost certainly why none of the claims of quantitatively commensurate helium have passed the modest hurdle of peer review, whereas several refereed papers during the same time show negative results. (See below.)
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This is a testable conclusion, so this is not pseudoscience, but the position that cold fusion is pseudoscience is typical of Cude,
It's not called pseudoscience because it's not testable, it's called pseudoscience because in the judgement of most experts, it has not passed tests, and yet a small fringe of people believe it anyway. That's the way pseudoscience works.
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And I published my findings, got them through initially hostile peer review, and they were published in a decent multidisciplinary journal.
You're parroting Storms, who is citing others, so calling them your findings is a little self-aggrandizing, but then, that's true of a large fraction of what you write. What was your score on that exam again? I've forgotten. And who was your professor, and what was the university you dropped out of again. It's hard to remember if you don't remind me every day.
Anyway, in your paper that received an initially hostile review, has it occurred to you that between that and the second review, the editor got on the phone and asked the reviewer to hold his nose and let it through, because the paper was invited, and he couldn't really reject it, and it was only going into a low impact journal, and there was a deadline...? I suggest this because you claimed you revised it completely in between reviews, and yet, it reads pretty much like your usual polemic in these forums since 2011 or so, which is to say, it falls well below the standards of ordinary journals.
Given it's not really a review (like Storms' NW review), but is trying to present an analysis of existing evidence, the fact that the only evidence cited from a peer reviewed journal is more than 20 years old and has been challenged in the literature, by itself makes it sub-standard.
And when you show a figure to illustrate the correlation, it's not from a refereed journal, but from an extremely sketchy conference proceedings:
• The data used to calculate the correlation ratio (in that plot) come from only one cell out of 16 used, even though helium was observed in several other cells. Did the ratio not come out right in those cases?
• What is observed (or claimed) is a steady increase of the helium over a period of 20 days, and a constant excess power of less than 100 mW. Both of these could be caused by artifact -- helium infusion (a leak) to produce the steady increase in helium, and an error in interpreting isolated temperatures to give a small excess power. The result of these two phenomena are that both the total energy and the helium increase together, even if they're caused by two completely independent errors. So the claimed correlation here is meaningless. But more importantly, it's really only one result, but the impression given by the graph is that there are independent measurements. The graph (Fig. 3 in the original proceedings) shows 10 points, but it could have been measured 100 times. That wouldn't make the results more significant because once the observation of a steady increase in both values is established, the number of measurements is arbitrary.
• In Fig 2, it is shown that the helium measurements for that cell actually continue for another 15 days, and the concentration peaks and then decreases, even while the total energy presumably continues to increase. Why were these additional points not used? Presumably, because they would give a different ratio.
• The fact that the level saturates suggests helium infusion. The level (as measured) does exceed the putative background value by something less than a factor of 2, but the problem is *measurement* of the background value is not reported, nor is any calibration of the concentration measurement presented. So, it's possible the levels are off a little, or that the background is elevated. Miles reported earlier that the helium background in their lab was twice the normal background, which is not surprising given the usual presence of helium cryogenics and helium glove-boxes in physics labs.
• The estimate of excess power was not made using any kind of reliable *calorimetry*, but by the measurement of isolated temperatures, and by methods that are not described in any detail. This kind of determination of excess power was shown to be seriously flawed in CERN's replication of the Piantelli work, where CERN attributed the apparent excess power to changes in the thermal properties of the nickel caused by hydrogen absorption. And they were claiming tens of watts. Here, only about 90 mW is claimed, so that result has little credibility. Furthermore, determinations of excess power were not reported for any of the other cells, and in particular the cells that showed no helium.
The document from which these data come is woefully inadequate as a scientific report, and a careful reviewer would not have allowed conclusions like yours to be based on it. Much is left out, and many questions are unanswered. If that's the best McKubre can do, or if he doesn't have good answers to those questions, it's not surprising that the work was never published in a proper journal, and for the same reason, it is completely unjustified to use the data from a single dubious cell to comprise more than half of the data points contributing to Storms helium ratio in the 2010 review.
And then there is the question of the number of reports, and of ignoring negative reports. You refer to Storms' NW paper, which claims a dozen "confirmations" of Miles results. But now you claim there are 30 groups, except that your reader needs access to Storms' newest book (not in many libraries) to see what they are. This kind of second-order citation is little better than hearsay. I'd like to see the list of 30 groups, because even in the original 12, most cannot be considered confirmation of Miles quantitative claims, and half don't even show a positive correlation:
Two of the groups (Chien and Botta) did not even measure heat. How can you get a correlation between heat and helium, if you don't measure heat?
Two groups (Aoki and Takahashi) report results that suggest an anti-correlation; another group (Luch) has continued experiments until recently, but stopped reporting helium; two groups (Arata and DeNinno) do not claim a quantitative correlation, but in one case (Arata) the helium levels seem orders of magnitude too low to account for the heat, although extracting information from his papers is difficult, and in the other (DeNinno) the helium level is an order of magnitude too high.
The only results since Miles that Storms has deemed worthwhile (i.e. cherry-picked) to calculate energy correlation come from unrefereed experiments.
Your paper fails to mention that Gozzi, in a refereed paper admitted that the helium levels were not definitive. Neither you nor Storms cite *refereed* papers by Clarke that failed to detect helium in experiments that showed excess heat. (Actually Storms cites one of Clarke's papers in the context of tritium, but neglects to mention that no helium-4 was found. Hmm)
So, to sum up, after Miles' papers which had ratios that varied by an order of magnitude between analyses, and were challenged in the literature, all the evidence used to generate a heat helium ratio come from unrefereed papers, and *every* refereed paper on helium is negative: Gozzi, who said helium was not definitive, Arata, who showed helium levels a million times too low, and Clarke, who did not detect helium above background.
You're lucky I wasn't reviewing your paper.
