Posts by joshua cude

Rothwell wrote:

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Dash and Oriani are dead. The others are all retired, except Duncan. Even when they were working, they had hardly any funding at all. In some cases I paid for the instruments, so I know exactly how much they had.

Their current state, retired or deceased, was not the issue I challenged. Nor was funding. The point is none of them were fired.

Anyway, Hagelstein is still listed as active at MIT, and the academics involved with SKINR are not retired. And not all the academics in Italy and Japan are retired either.

There are and have been quite a few academics who work or worked on cold fusion who were not fired. Indeed, I don't know of any tenured professors who were fired. Even Pons left on his own for more funding in France.

Rothwell wrote:

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... Most academics who wish to study cold fusion cannot get funded at all. Even if they could get funded, it would be career suicide. They would soon be fired. Even a tenured professor would probably be fired for a trumped-up charge unrelated to the research, the way Rusi Taleyarkhan was when he tried to do sono-fusion research.

And yet, Duncan, Hagelstein, Kim, Dash, Nagel, Miley, Oriani, and the academics involved with SKINR have not been fired. And that's just in the US. There are academics in Italy, Japan, India, and other countries working on cold fusion who have not been fired.

Taleyarkhan was censured for research misconduct, but not fired -- he still holds his position at Purdue. Whether the charge was trumped up or not, I wouldn't know, but academics are not all pure as the driven snow, so he may be guilty, and as you say, it wasn't even cold fusion, and the charge was most certainly related to the research. People working on pyroelectric fusion, which is somewhat similar, have not been fired or censured. Indeed, one of the leaders, Gimzewski, was recently elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and earlier won the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology.

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(This is not cold fusion, but the modern physics establishment has a low tolerance for new or unproven ideas.)

Only if by low tolerance you mean high praise. Bednorz and Muller won the Nobel prize for the very new HTSC the year after its discovery. Perlmutter (and two others) won it for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe, contrary to expectations. In his Nobel address, he said:

"Perhaps the only thing better for a scientist than finding the crucial piece of a puzzle that completes a picture is finding a piece that doesn't fit at all, and tells us that there is a whole new part of the puzzle that we haven't even imagined yet and the scene in the puzzle is bigger, richer than we ever thought."

That doesn't sound like low tolerance for new ideas to me.

Now, you said "new or unproven" ideas, and my examples were *new*. Maybe you mean new *and* unproven. Nobel prizes are not usually given for new *and* unproven ideas. But they are certainly tolerated. One could say that dark matter and dark energy are not proven, as such, but largely accepted. All kinds of new and unproven ideas in physics, like string theory and various quantum gravity theories are tolerated, even if they're not necessarily celebrated.

What the modern science establishment has little tolerance for are highly implausible *and* unproven claims, particularly after a great deal of protracted effort to prove them. Examples include, but are not limited to, perpetual motion machines, homeopathy, dowsing, astrology, all manner of paranormal claims, and yes, cold fusion.

Mats002 wrote:

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I better repeat my post again, since the latest post scripters seams to ignore it perfectly:

Kaku one month ago: "Cold Fusion - I'm open about it",

I'm not sure how that changes anything. I'm open about it too. Show the right evidence and I'll embrace cold fusion in a heart beat. It's only the believers who have closed their minds to the possibility that they could be wrong... talking about facts and done deals and proof and so on.

But one can be open about it, and still be skeptical if the reported observations are far more plausibly attributed to ordinary artifacts, experimental errors, and confirmation bias than to unprecedented and inconceivable nuclear processes.

Lomax wrote:

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Well, I was an undergrad at Cal Tech, where I once saw the Scholastic Achievement tests of applications, the computer printout. On the Math test, 800 was a common score. That was my score. Perfect.

Congratulations. But as Edison said, genius is 99 % perspiration, and evidently, you didn't perspire enough to finish your degree.

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However, his [Kaku's] originally expressed views remain very common among physicists. Those views change when the physicist involved has an opportunity to examine the evidence.

Considering both DOE panels had an opportunity to examine the evidence, and both were unanimous, or nearly unanimous that evidence for nuclear processes was not conclusive, I don't think that can be said as a general statement. Besides the panels, there is Morrison, who followed the field closely for more than a decade, and wrote skeptical newsletters about it, there is Frank Close, who wrote a book on the subject, and remained skeptical, there are recent critics like Pomp, Erickson, Thieberger, Ugo Bardi, Motl, Siegel, Faccinni et al, Ciuchi et al., Tennfors, and our own Ekstrom, who have all had an opportunity to examine the evidence, and all remain skeptics.

Other than Darden, do you have some examples of recent physicists who changed their views after examining the evidence?

Lomax wrote (addressing Shanahan):

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You do address the neutron claims. (Confirming that you are the only published fully-skeptical recent critic of cold fusion claims).

Shanahan is a prominent critic, for sure, but he's not the only one.

An Italian group published a rebuttal to neutron emission claims, and offered some plausible CR-39 artifacts that may have caused spurious effects (Faccini et al., Eur Phys J. C 74 (2014) 1).

Tennfors (Eur Phys J Plus 128 (2013) 1 ) and Ciuchi et al. (Euro Phys J C 72 (2012)1) published rebuttals to the WL theory.

And Dmitriyeva et al. (Thermochim. Acta 543 (2012) 260) debunked the Arata gas-loading claims, which are just about the only excess heat claims in the last decade in refereed literature.

You might argue Dmitriyeva is not fully-skeptical, and that may be the case. But she has only published negative papers, and I have not seen her claim to be a full believer either. Anyway, sometimes the criticism is more effective coming from a team-mate. The other authors mentioned are definitely fully skeptical.

Lomax wrote:

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... but the neutron claims are quite different from the general charged particle radiation claims, and they have been published rather widely, and there is no confirmation and not critique in print.

That's not true. I have cited Faccini et al, Eur Phys J C 74 (2014) 2894 here several times already. The title is

"Search for neutron flux generation in a plasma discharge electrolytic cell".

Here's part of the introduction:

"Here we report on a measurement performed at much smaller voltages than Ref. [1] in plasma discharges of an electrolytic cell that are claimed in the experiment [8] and in patents [9] to produce neutrons. "

Ref 8 is Cirillo, Widom, Srivastava et al. in Ket Eng Mater., and reference 8 is the patent of Pam Boss et al.

The paper continues:

"With respect to the existing claims, we perform here a rigorous scrutiny of the detectors and the possible backgrounds to the measurement using a similar experimental setup. As neutron detectors we used the CR-39 detectors, also used in the experiment on atmospheric discharges [1], and indium activation, commonly used in neutron flux measurements. A dedicated effort was made to gain understanding of the behavior of the CR-39 detectors."

The conclusions of the paper include:

"In particular, we verified that the boron layer on the CR- 39 detectors needs to be ≈50 μm thick to avoid loss of sensitivity to thermal neutrons, and that CR-39 detectors, regardless of the presence of boron, integrate dD/dt = 3.8 tracks cm−2 day−1, likely due to cosmic radiation and radon contamination. It is therefore critical to pay attention to the treatment of the background, since a delay in analyzing the irradiated detectors with respect to the background ones could lead to false positives. Furthermore, we confirmed that non-irradiated CR-39 detectors show long tails in the track density distribution [11], and we noted a small spurious signal in detectors wrapped in aluminum. Therefore, especially when very low neutron fluxes are expected, the use of CR-39 detectors should be accompanied by careful consideration of disturbing effects.

"After taking all these effects in account, from the absence of signals in the indium disks, which are the most sensitive device, we conclude that the produced neutron flux is smaller than 1.5 (64) neutrons cm−2 s−1 at 95% C.L. assuming a thermal (PM) neutron spectrum. From the measurements with CR-39 detectors in Run2 and Run3, when the back- ground was treated properly, we can exclude fluxes larger than 105 neutrons cm−2 s−1 at 95% C.L. Such limits are at least two orders of magnitude smaller than the measured fluxes in Ref. [8] [the Boss patent] where the detector sensitivity is smaller and the background fluctuations are ignored."

Lomax wrote:

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Cold fusion turned a corner, sometime around 2004-2005.

You would have a difficult time justifying this based on publication rates in mainstream refereed journals.

I've taken quick look at the Britz database for the decade before 2004 (1994 - 2003) and the decade after (2005 - 2014). Now, in the decade before, I did not examine the entries individually because there are so many, so I don't know if there is an equivalent of the LENR Sourcebook in those years or not, but I don't think there is. In the decade after, I have excluded Sourcebook entries, because that is not a mainstream journal.

Also, in the prior decade, I used Britz's keyword res- to identify negative papers, and I think he was quite careful in this assignment up to then. In the later decade, his assignment of res- and res+ has largely lapsed, with many of the years having zero of each, when both highly critical and positive papers were present. So, of the later decade, I assigned the 9 negative papers based on the abstracts. I've cited them all here recently, so it's easy to check if you really think they are negative. If I'm motivated, I may try to examine the individual entires from the earlier decade as well at some stage.

With these qualifications, I found:

The average number of papers per year in the decade before 2004 is 40, and about 10% are negative.

The average number of papers per year in the decade after 2004 is 6.7, and about 13% are negative.

Every single year in the prior decade has more papers than the highest number in the later decade.

So, the rate dropped by a factor of 6 or so, and the fraction of negative papers is about the same, if not a little higher.

Now, as before, this goes through 2014, and so the 35 papers in 2015 are not considered. That's because the purpose is to show that nothing in particular happened (no corner was turned) in 2004, based on refereed literature.

Something *did* happen in 2015, based on the literature, and that something is that Current Science ran a special issue of invited papers in the field. The significance of that can be debated, but it doesn't bear on the question of whether 2004 or 2005 was a turning point. And keep in mind that in the 15 months since, only one rather peripheral paper has been published.

Now, including one more year before and after, changes the averages to 45 and 9, so even in that case, the average rate is still down a factor of 5.

Quote from axil

joshua cude: Quote: “Certainly, it is not conceivable that cold fusion itself will ever be proved impossible, so you are likely to go your grave clinging to the belief that it's real, but with most of the world ignoring it as it does other pseudosciences"

You are lazy. You don't keep up with current research. When will you discredit the work of Holmlid? I continue to wait.

You are right. I *am* lazy.

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Lomax: This was classic Joshua Cude. In the Playground here, he brought up something I wrote about Rossi in 2011. I responded, showing that he'd quoted me out of context, creating a distorted appearance.

You can keep on sputtering about context, but the only thing context is needed for to understand Rothwell's above statement, or your statement ("I'm willing to bet a significant chunk of my net worth on Rossi being real...") is to know what the nature of Rossi's claims are or were, and there is no uncertainty with respect to that.

What both statements mean is that, when you made them, you were nearly certain Rossi's ecat worked as claimed. And from the copious discussions on-line, the esowatch web site, and a little later, Krivit's detailed compendium, it has been clear from immediately after the Jan 2011 demonstration, that Rossi has never delivered evidence for nuclear reactions -- that the reported observations could be explained and understood without invoking nuclear reactions. And now you and Rothwell have joined the skeptics in making this argument.

At least Rothwell is man enough to admit he was wrong. In contrast, you desperately try to make excuses by claiming the lack of context, but it doesn't wash.

The Rossi episode is severely damaging to the credibility of cold fusion. Most advocates demonstrated sympathy for Rossi's claims, and many were adamantly certain he was legit. Rothwell's statement is not isolated. And similar certainty was expressed by the likes of Roberson on vortex, and alainco, and others. And it wasn't just internet participants, but McKubre and Storms, and to a lesser extent Hagelstein were also sympathetic. Only a few advocates (like Krivit, who took 5 months to see the light, and Ahern, and you (Lomax) some of the time) expressed skepticism of Rossi's claims.

It shows that most cold fusion believers are willing to accept claims of cold fusion with what they now admit was inadequate evidence. It demonstrates a gullibility, and a vulnerability to wishful thinking. The fall of Defkalion already showed this, and Rossi's recent troubles show it even more. Rossi still has his supporters of course, and whether he will fall as far as Defkalion has remains to be seen. If Brillouin falls, that will damage the field even more, but I suspect they will be able to carry on indefinitely in the manner of BLP. Certainly, it is not conceivable that cold fusion itself will ever be proved impossible, so you are likely to go your grave clinging to the belief that it's real, but with most of the world ignoring it as it does other pseudosciences.

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Jed wasn't being careful in it, something that I argued with him about at the time.

... even while you yourself were not always cautious, as the above quotation shows...

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Nothing from Rossi was "proof" because it was not verifiable. It was all managed demonstration. This got more and more obvious as time went on.

Of course verifiability is important, but in Rossi's case, especially the 2011 demonstrations, the reported and photographed evidence itself failed to constitute evidence, because it could all be plausibly explained without invoking nuclear reactions.

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Pure ad hominem.

You appear to be unclear on the concept of ad hominem. Ad hominem is when you call me a troll, or an enemy of humanity, or a lying sack of shit. That sort of thing. Pointing out that Rothwell and you were at some earlier time certain (or nearly certain) of Rossi's legitimacy says something about your judgement, which is relevant to those who evaluate your judgement about other aspects of the same field.

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Cude trots out the statement, insisting that "according to your statement, skepticism of the whole field is justified."

This is simple logic. It's a conditional statement, but you omitted part of the condition (the context, don't you know). "If skepticism of Rossi is justified, then according to your statement [that Rossi has given out *far* more proof than any previous cold fusion researcher], then skepticism of the whole field is justified."

So, now that skepticism of Rossi is justified according to you and Rothwell, the only way skepticism of the field is not justified, is to recant the statement, which is what Rothwell has done.

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So, after Jed admits his error, Cude comes back:

Ah yes, thanks for catching that error. Should be "your". See, Rothwell. Like you, I admit when I'm wrong.

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The position here is obvious: if a real person ever makes a mistake, they are to be nailed to it for the rest of their life, they will never again be credible.

You're exaggerating. It's always possible to earn back credibility. But you have to admit that if Rossi or Brillouin or any other claimant of cold fusion were proven beyond doubt to be right, that the credibility of every skeptic would take a hit. I'm nearly certain that won't happen, but if it were to, I'd be delighted to admit my folly and benefit from a new clean and abundant source of energy. The same is true of perpetual motion machines. I nearly certain they will not be proven, but I'd celebrate if they were, and humbly admit my mistaken skepticism.

Lomax wrote:

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So it could be asserted to fit the pattern. Which is actually irrelevant to the science, since, I'll repeat, the anomalous heat effect found by Pons and Fleischmann was never shown to be rooted in artifact. This has been pointed out many, many times. It's ignored by Cude and many others.

How do you know, Lomax? You said you don't read all my posts. In fact, I have responded to that statement several times. Many plausible artifacts have been suggested to explain observations in cold fusion, but it is true that there is no proof of artifacts, just as there is no proof that homeopathy doesn't work. But then no nuclear effect has been identified either. So, it is a competition between the plausibility of utterly common calorimetry artifacts and unprecedented and inconceivable nuclear reactions. The scientific community voted with their interest 25 years ago, and nothing has changed in the mean time.

And as McKubre says, it would be all but impossible to prove cold fusion is impossible: "To proceed case-by-case and demonstrate that every instance where anomalous nuclear-products or nuclear-level excess heat were observed resulted from an identified experimental error or misunderstanding would be exceedingly arduous undertaking and nothing like this has been attempted or ever will be. The effort of finding a mistake in all of the thousands of published reports would be far too great an undertaking even to begin, thus proving a negative is difficult if not impossible."

But it's not enough for an extraordinary claim like cold fusion that artifacts cannot be definitively identified. The onus is on the advocates to exclude the possibility of artifacts, and that has never been done. That's why there still is no experiment identified that someone skilled in the art can perform with expected positive results, even on a statistical basis.

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* Carbon nanotube publication rates are irrelevant to this issue.

I disagree. You are using the publication rate to establish legitimacy in the journals. If a field of far less (potential) importance publishes at a rate hundreds of times higher, then the argument fails.

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This is an example of the "how come" argument favored by many believers of various kinds. If cold fusion were real, "how come" there are not thousands of papers per year? There is a variation on this, I encountered on moletrap. If cold fusion is real, how come I haven't read about it in Nature? Well, if you want to know the answer to that, study the field! This is all very well, known, studied by sociologists of science and published in mainstream sources.

In this case, the argument is "If the reality debate were over in the journals, how come there are not more papers in the journals -- particularly new experimental claims of positive evidence for the phenomenon?"

That's very different from the argument you address above. You've tried to change the argument into something you think you have an answer for, but you can't argue that it's being suppressed unfairly in the journals (for sociological reasons) if you're trying to argue that it is now accepted in the journals. That makes no sense.

Rothwell wrote:

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See? Unlike you, I admit my mistakes.

That's not unlike me. I also admit my mistakes, when I make them. But I'm pretty careful about expressing absolute certainty.

Admitting you're wrong when you are wrong is admirable, but *being wrong*, especially when you are so adamant about it, insisting that Rossi had provided first principles proof better than any in the field still damages your credibility.

And after that, your certainty about cold fusion doesn't say nearly as much for the field.

Edited to replace "you're" with "your".

StephenC wrote:

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I was initially overwhelmed by your comments ... I wish they weren't so long though so that I could understand them more, but I guess that's it's difficult with so much archive material at hand?

I also wish they weren't so long. If I had more time, I'd make them shorter.

My posts are all direct responses to other posts, and mainly with the purpose of correcting misleading errors.

For the most part, all the necessary context is provided in the post, and I don't think they ever rely on previous exchanges, even if previous exchanges are sometimes mentioned.

This last set of responses to Lomax, though, are all responses to one post, and for several of them (more to come) the context is established by this paragraph of mine, which was quoted by Lomax:

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Me: In spite of that, there are negative papers being published, as I have cited here several times. In particular, the Arata-type excess power claims, the SPAWAR neutron claims, and the WL theory papers, have been challenged in refereed literature, which pretty well sews up new claims in the field. And there are two analyses of the publication pattern that show the similarity to those of pathological fields and the profound difference from those of accepted fields. Even a field like carbon nanotubes, which has far less potential relevance to science or practical life, generates thousands of refereed publications per year.

Lomax then made several bulleted responses to the different items in this paragraph. I responded to each of the bullets in separate posts (to keep them shorter) but only reproduced the above paragraph in the first post (though I considered reproducing it in each post). Those posts may look orphaned without this context, so sorry about that.

Rothwell wrote:

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Rossi has provided no proof of what he claims. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence that what he claims cannot be true.

In 2011, you wrote:

"Rossi has given out *far* more proof than any previous cold fusion researcher."

So, do you therefore concede that no previous cold fusion researcher has provided proof of cold fusion?

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Eric Walker: I've taken a look at Krivit's expose of the alleged falsification of data by McKubre relating to the M4 run. I thought the story told by Krivit's exhibits was very interesting. The conclusion that McKubre was doing something inappropriate or shady was absurd. It seemed like a harmless combination of reinterpreting the data over the years along with a repackaging of it. Do you disagree?

Well, Krivit has the true believer mentality, so when he latches on to something, he can be selective and very persistent with his arguments. And I didn't have the patience to read through that expose in detail. But it did seem to me (as I remember it, without re-acquainting myself with the case) that there was very clear migration of some data points, and when confronted, McKubre did little more than wave his hands and say he re-analyzed.

I don't know if there's a smoking gun, and that's why I was careful to call the falsification "alleged".

But what seems suspicious to me is that in the most detailed account of those experiments, McKubre is negative, saying heat-commensurable reaction products were *not* found. The correlation claims came later, but after a direct confrontation from Krivit, McKubre has (to my knowledge) stopped making claims of correlations. Even in his 2015 Current Science paper on "Cold fusion: comments on the state of scientific proof", he does not mention the heat-helium correlation work at all. If it were valid, it would surely represent the best evidence for the phenomenon, so excluding it from a paper on the state of proof suggests he's not prepared to endorse the validity.

Lomax wrote:

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At the time of the 2005 and 2006 papers (which are listed on the sources page I cited), publication rates had fallen to a nadir, perhaps six papers per year.

First, there is also a 2009 paper on the publication pattern (Bettencourt), and second, 2005/2006 was not a nadir. As your own wiki page shows, there was only one paper in 2011, and only 4 or 5 in 2010, not counting negative, peripheral (helium in volcanos), and Sourcebook papers.

According to the Britz bibliography, the number of papers in 2004 was 8 (and 7 and 8 in 2005 and 2006). The numbers per year (excluding papers in the LENR Sourcebook, which is not a mainstream journal, and excluding presumably inadvertent duplicates) for the 10 years after 2004 are:

7,8,9,8,8,3,1,5,10,4

for an average of 6.3 per year, *lower* than in 2004 or 2005 or 2006.

Even if you include 2015, with the 34 papers in a special issue, where review papers were invited, and could not have been rejected, the average is still only 8.8 per year. And then of course, the increase started in 2015, not 2005.

But if you examine the content of the papers, the situation for cold fusion looks even worse. If negative papers and peripheral papers are excluded, where by peripheral I mean papers about helium in volcanoes and Mills' hydrino type papers, then 2004 had 7 papers, and the following ten years had"

4,5,5,5,6,2,1,5,10,4

for an average of 4.7 per year.

Finally, if you only consider experimental positive claims, 2004 had 2 papers, and the following 10 years had

2,0,2,1,3,0,1,2,1,0

for an average of 1.2 per year, and many of those are the dubious CR-39 papers from Boss et al.

In the past decade, there have been only 2 or 3 new claims of excess heat in the refereed literature, no claims of excess heat in electrolysis experiments, and you have to go back 2 decades for the last claim of a quantitative heat-helium correlation in the refereed literature.

Pretty hard to deny an asymptotic approach to zero there, and the 34 reviews and status reports invited for a special issue in a journal with an impact factor less than 1 is not going to change that image for anyone.

Again, those numbers do not include the 35 papers in 2015 because the purpose is to show that 2004 (or 2005/2006) was not a nadir, as you have so often claimed. The trend continued for a decade. If you include 2015, then the increase happenened *then*, not a decade earlier. The Current Science special issue consists of invited papers -- mostly review or status reports or polemics. So, while they are peer reviewed, the question of rejection was never really on the table. No journal would invite a paper and then turn around and reject it. Therefore, it is the result of probably one or two sympathetic editors of a 3rd rate journal with an impact factor less than 1. That issue came out in February of 2015, and only one other paper in 2015 is listed in the Britz bibliography (also in February), and it is a theory paper with rather peripheral connection to cold fusion. In the 15 months since, only one paper is listed, and that is a claim of piezonuclear reactions.

The only experimental paper in 2014 is negative, and the only experimental paper in 2013 is an evaluation of a technique (no positive claims are made). You have to go back to 2012 for a positive CR-39 claim of neutrons, and to 2009 for a claim of excess heat. That reviews so outnumber actual experimental claims in the literature is not the sign of healthy field.

Lomax wrote:

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* WL theory was criticized by Hagelstein. This would be far from an extreme skeptical position on cold fusion, given that Hagelstein is a major cold fusion theorist. (I just saw another critique. W-L theory is easy to deprecate, it's full of holes.)

I did not cite Hagelstein, but thanks for pointing that out. What it means is that most of the celebrated cold fusion works in the refereed literature in the last decade (Arata, SPAWAR, WL) have been challenged by cold fusion advocates. It leaves hardly anything for skeptics to do. But in spite of that, all three have been challenged by skeptics as well.

I cited two papers by skeptics that challenged the WLT: Tennfors (Eur Phys J Plus 128 (2013) 1 ) and Ciuchi et al. (Euro Phys J C 72 (2012)1). Yes, the theory is easy to criticize, but that's hardly the point. Skeptical papers on cold fusion are being written and accepted for publication in the refereed literature.

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• There were old papers on the publication pattern, from 2005 and 2006. Cold fusion was often compared to other examples of alleged "pathological science," specifically N-rays and polywater. Those who wrote those papers assumed pathological science, they were not critiquing the actual research.

There is also one from 2009 (Bettencourt et al, Journal of Informetrics 3 (2009) 210–221). Your criticism was specifically about the publication pattern, so scholarly research on the publication pattern is entirely relevant. They show the similarity of the pattern to other pathological sciences, and the profound difference in the pattern from legitimate accepted fields. The analysis of the patterns show that your claim that cold fusion is accepted in the journals is unsupported.

And of course, they are papers skeptical of cold fusion, and they are being accepted for publication, which was the point.

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N-rays and polywater suffered deprecation through controlled research, puliing the rug out from under the original claims, but some publication persisted. This was allegedly so for cold fusion, though there were two crucial differences: there never was that controlled experimental finding of artifact on the central claim, and cold fusion publication was far more persistent.

Cold fusion is also a far more significant claim than either N-rays or polywater, and was greeted in 1989 with far greater enthusiasm and excitement, and that led to far greater activity, and far more and different configurations involving calorimetry and other types of measurement. In this sense it is more like homeopathy or perpetual motion (the Papp engine, Steorn etc), for which artifacts have not been identified to explain away all the claims, and yet these fields are rejected by the mainstream. And cold fusion's immense potential importance also explains the more persistent publication rate, but it nevertheless is on an asymptote to zero.

Lomax wrote:

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* SPAWAR neutron claims. Kowalski questioned a particular interpretation of the CR-39 results, but not the neutron claims. They stand as neither confirmed nor dismissed, AFAIK. Kowalski knows that cold fusion is real.

I was referring more to an Italian group that published a rebuttal to neutron emission claims, and offered some plausible CR-39 artifacts that may have caused spurious effects (Faccini et al., Eur Phys J. C 74 (2014) 1). This was quite recent, in 2014. If you read my replies, you would have seen that. These authors certainly appear to be extreme skeptics.

As for Kowalsaki, the abstract states: "A recent claim [Eur. Phys. J. Appl. Phys. 40, 293 (2007)] demonstrating a nuclear process triggered by electrolysis is challenged. An analysis, based on relative diameters, is used to demonstrate that predominant pits could not possibly be attributed to alpha particles, or to less massive nuclear projectiles." That excludes neutrons as well.

But the main point is it is a negative paper, arguing that certain LENR claims are not supported by the evidence. And yes, Kowalski does seem to be sympathetic to cold fusion, but he is more cautious than to claim he *knows* it's real. And in spite of his sympathy, another of his papers (in JCMNS) is negative, where he reports failure to reproduce Oriani's "highly reproducible emissions":

"Unexplained emission of charged nuclear projectiles due to electrolysis has been reported by Richard Oriani. Experimental results were said to be highly reproducible. Working independently, we were not able to observe emission of charged nuclear particles (in a chemical process similar to Oriani’s) and therefore are unable to provide supporting evidence that the effect is reproducible."

He also admits "We are still waiting for at least one reproducible-on-demand demonstration of a nuclear effect resulting from a chemical (atomic) process." It's difficult to understand how one can be sympathetic to a field in the absence of such a demonstration, particularly when the claimed phenomenon represents an energy density a million times higher than gasoline under easily accessible conditions, after 17 years of trying and $500M spent.

And yes, the kindest thing that can be said of the SPAWAR work is that it not confirmed, which is presumably why SPAWAR shut the project down. And yet, it accounts for an appreciable fraction of the positive experimental claims of cold fusion since 2005. Take them out, and take out the challenged Arata-type claims, and pretty much all that's left in mainstream refereed literature is theory and reviews.

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Lomax:

* Arata-type excess power claims. I'm not sure what that refers to.

It refers to just about the only two excess power claims in refereed literature in the past decade (excluding retrospective references in the 3rd rate journal that published a special issue of invited papers): Arata's 2008 paper (J High Temp Soc 1) on D2 gas loading of Pd/ZrO2, and Kitamura's claimed replication in 2009 (Phys Lett A373, 3109).

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What I was writing about is the extreme skeptical position, not the existence of critique of some particular experiment or conclusion or theory. If there is a peer-reviewed critique of Arata's work, I'd love to see it.

That's a cop out. I could say there are no extreme positive reviews, and then call anything you cite not extreme enough.

Dmitriyeva et al. (Thermochim. Acta 543 (2012) 260, and several other non-journal papers) have reproduced the excess heat observed by Arata and Kitamura, and showed that it can be explained by chemical (not nuclear) effects. Dmitriyeva et al. (the coolescence group) claim to be cold fusion advocates, but have tried a half dozen different experimental configurations and found negative results for each of them. I suspect they are wolves in sheep's clothing. Anyway, a negative result is a negative result.

Lomax wrote:

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Excluding academic books and encyclopedia articles, as Cude wants to do, on he bogus argument that are not reviewed, there are nine bolded reviews. I.e., this excludes some reviews from the peer-reviewed LENR Sourcebook, published by the American Chemical Society with Oxford University Press, both volumes,, a book by Hideo Kozima published by Elsevier, and a book by Edmund Storms published by World Scientific, and two articles by Steve Krivit in an Elsevier encyclopedia. Britz included all those, or I would not have listed them.

Thank you. So, that is an admission that you were wrong when you said

"Reviews are being published, 20 since 2005 in mainstream peer-reviewed journals, and not counting the reviews in the February 2015 issue of Current Science..."

and elsewhere when you said

"Peer-reviewed reviews are bolded. I count 20 of them through 2010."

So it wasn't me that specified peer-reviewed journals, which books and encyclopedia articles and the Sourcebook definitely are not.

And Britz lists only 9 of the references in your bolded list, and only 6 are classified as reviews. One is very clearly a theory paper by Hagelstein, one is a "comment", and one (in the Sourcebook) is confined to one group's early work in the 90s.

You might claim you made a simple mistake, but I'd be skeptical. It's your own list, and I've corrected you on this several times already in previous exchanges, so that suggests dishonesty.

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And then a cursory glance at 2013, two more journal reviews and another that is a chapter in a book. 2014, one possible review. 2015, excluding self-reviews, I count 16 reviews.

So even if we only look at peer-reviewed publications, there are about 27 reviews.

Right. So, when you said your response was straightforward, you meant devious. If you had said there were 27 reviews in refereed literature between 2005 and 2015, I would not have called it dishonest. But you didn't. You said there were 20 reviews *excluding Current Science* and elsewhere "through 2010", but now you're *including* Current Science, and going through 2015. This new claim represents a review rate considerably smaller, and includes a special issue in Current Science consisting of invited papers -- mostly review or status reports or polemics. So, while they are peer reviewed, the question of rejection was never really on the table. No journal would invite a paper and then turn around and reject it. Therefore, it is the result of probably one or two sympathetic editors of a 3rd rate journal with an impact factor less than 1. So, I would have responded to that effect. But what you did say was manifestly wrong, and just above, you admit it.

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Dishonest? Who is dishonest here? An anonymous troll, with no reputation at stake, who has just lied in the presence of clear contradictory evidence, which he could already see and has presumably looked at, or a published author in the field, with a reputation that matters, that affects his funding, etc?

You seem to be unclear on the concept of dishonesty. Anonymity and publication record are irrelevant. What matters is that someone says something that he knows is wrong. You have not even identified anything I've said that is wrong.

When I wrote: "As for those reviews, I have addressed them elsewhere, but it is simply dishonest to claim 20 reviews in peer-reviewed literature.", "those reviews" is a reference to your statement in which you say explicitly "not counting the reviews in the February 2015 issue of Current Science...", which I quoted directly above my statement. Here you *include* those reviews to try to claim dishonesty. That's dishonest in itself.

I, on the other hand, did identify a statement of yours that you have here admitted was wrong, and that you could not plausibly have been mistaken about.

So who is dishonest? Do the math.

Lomax wrote:

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The reality debate is over in the journals, unless, say, Nature or Science decide to break their embargo.

The reality debate was essentially over 25 years ago. Things have not changed appreciably since.

What embargo are you talking about? If someone actually produced unequivocal evidence for cold fusion, you would not be able to keep it out of Science or Nature.

I've read the David Lindley commentary that is often held up as evidence for suppression, but it certainly doesn't promise not to publish on cold fusion, nor could it. No associate editor, or editorial board for than matter, could make such a promise that is binding to future editors.

And anyway, there's a lot of space between Nature and Science (with impact factors north of 20) and the journals that have published positive cold fusion results (lower than 3). If cold fusion were accepted as real "in the journals", you'd see some papers in PRL, Physical Review, JACS, and a long list of other prestigious journals with impact factors above 3.

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Then we might see some back-and-forth. I am hoping to see the Texas Tech work in Nature.

As they say, hope springs eternal...

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Now, what does Cude think about that research proposal? Any suggestions for possible artifact to be checked? Does Cude care about science or about winning arguments? I'm not holding my breath. I asked him this question before an he didn't answer, I think, but ... hope springs eternal.

You're funny, Lomax, you know that? You claim you're hoping for my replies, and then you boast about not reading them. I did reply to this question. Here's what I said verbatim:

"Personally, I would recommend against funding such work if asked, because in my judgement the chance of success is close to nil, based on the work that's been done, and the failure of any followups to even reach the modest standard of peer review. At some point one has to say enough is enough. But if the investigators want to waste their time, and can find sponsors, more power to them. But I'm betting that in 10 years you and I will be on our 5th or 6th version of this identical debate about lame results from Miles and McKubre and maybe Violante and Duncan by then."

In another exchange I also suggested looking for the helium in the palladium instead of the gas, and only when you've got enough excess power to make the measurement of helium unequivocal. I still think that's good advice.

But it's too bad McKubre is involved. I don't trust his judgement at all. What kind of scientist says he's tired of trying to science something? And then sells his credibility to the Papp people, speaks positively about Rossi's results, and then sits on the board of the only slightly less obvious Brillouin scam? And then there's that alleged data fudging question...

My guess is you'll (or they'll) get some marginal results (with low excess power and helium levels plausibly explainable from the atmosphere) which they will claim are definitive, and they'll get published somewhere. But with that group of believers, it won't be taken seriously until another group, preferably of skeptics, replicates the results. And I'm all but certain that will never happen.