Thomas, Wrt your statements;
"That is a precise analogy for LENR. Scientists accept the evidence - for example anomalous heat from open cell calorimetry that goes away for closed cells."
Goes away? F&P used (early on at least) open cells. Mckubre at SRI replicated experiments using closed cells, and confirmed the F&P results. They also identifed the requirement for high D/Pd loading.
"What will help is taking individual items of evidence and looking honestly to see what they prove."
Yes of course, but you also need a level of Scientific understanding to be able to "honestly" interpret the results.
Like using CR39, which have been used since late 70's by mainstream science, and when used in LENR research it is suddenly no longer trustable? - but can be "affected by anything" as you once said.
Or understanding the fundamentals of calorimetry, which we seemed not to agree upon. I trust the formulas: If you know the data and parameters of the external border of a "black box" you don't need to worry what happens inside the box to calculate the heat flow. Really not!
"It is easy for me to say the results are unsafe, because of possible errors which I can list."
And as I have noted earlier The problems with your list of possible errors are:
- they are just not possible and/ or
- they would If true have no Significant impact on result and/or
- they have no relevance to the experiment in question and / or
- indicates a misunderstanding of what the experiment are doing and /or
Etc.
Time for a part of a story from Dr. Francesco Scaramuzzi, an Italian mathematician and physicist, that was involved in Cold Fusion research at ENEA since the start in 1989
".....A well known physicist was asked what he thought of CF. His answer was that it was not good science, because of the lack of reproducible experiments. I wrote to him, presenting the following arguments:
a) I agree that reproducibility is a "must" in experimental research;
b) however, a new field, at its beginning, is often characterized by lack of reproducibility, and it is the task of the scientists operating in that field to understand what is going on, in order to pursue reproducibility;
c) this has been done in the case of CF, making meaningful, even though slow, progress (I sent him a paper of mine2 in which I had discussed this problem).
My letter did not produce any effect, in the sense that he did not change his mind, and went on demanding reproducibility, as if it were an intrinsic characteristics of research and not something that has to be pursued.
In order to clarify the issue, let me try to propose a few statements about reproducibility. First, what does it mean? Consider a simple desk-top experiment. When you perform it, you choose your sample, you work out a procedure (a protocol), and you get your results. It is reproducible if you obtain the same results with the same kind of sample and the same protocol every time you perform your experiment. A further stage of reproducibility consists in describing your experiment in a scientific publication, with the consequence that any other scientist who performs the same experiment, on the basis of that paper, obtains the same results. Now imagine that you perform your experiment, take note as accurately as you can of its parameters (sample and protocol) and when you repeat it you do not get the same results: the experiment is not reproducible! There are two possible explanations: either the first experiment was wrong, or you did not have the same kind of sample, or follow the same protocol. If, by examining your first experiment, you reach the conclusion that the measurement itself was correct and reliable, you have to accept the second explanation. At this point you start a further stage of your research: you try to understand which features were hidden in the choice of the sample and in the protocol, that could have influenced your results without your being aware, and thus you begin what may be a difficult march towards reproducibility. It is not correct to state, as many have done for CF, that non-reproducibility necessarily means a wrong experiment.
An episode that I will now describe will help to illustrate my previous statements: it occurred in 1992 to the ENEA Group of Frascati, which I was leading. We had been working on CF experiments based on gas loading of deuterium in titanium, looking for neutrons and tritium, and eventually we had reached the conclusion that we should move to a different type of experiment: the measurement of excess heat in palladium charged with deuterium in an electrolytic cell with heavy water (substantially the Fleischmann-Pons experiment). In order to build the cathodes, we took the only palladium sheet that was at hand in the laboratory, constructed the electrolytic cell and put it in an accurate calorimeter, and performed the experiment: the first three runs, with three different cathodes taken from the same sheet, and with the same protocol, gave very clear evidence of excess heat production: a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the experimental errors.3 At this point, we had used all the palladium existing in the laboratory, and thus we ordered more of it from the same firm that had provided the previous sample, asking for the same commercial characteristics. When the new palladium arrived, we started another series of experiments, none of which gave any sign of excess heat production. So, there we were: we had no doubt about the correctness of the first measurements, but it had been sufficient to change the sample of palladium for the excess heat to disappear, even though, from a commercial point of view, it was the same kind of palladium. This was the beginning of the project that brought the Group to results quite close to total reproducibility in 1996. I will come back to this subject later.
...."
from: http://www.enea.it/en/publicat…pdf/Cold_Fusion_Italy.pdf
