Posts by Louis Reed

Quote from JedRothwell

I don't have any published threats, but Pons, Bockris and others told me this. Take it or leave it.

They told you they were threatened with jail the day after the press conference??

Quote

There were countless accusations of fraud, such as the one you cite below.

Right. The one I cited was published 5 weeks later, not the day after.

Quote

so the accusation itself implies that is what the opponents were demanding.

If that's the case, why did you have to say explicitly they were threatened with jail? And on the day after?

When what happened was they were accused of fraud *after* they published, weeks later.

So, you have not contradicted my point that cold fusion was initially welcomed with enthusiasm, in spite of making things up.

Quote

There were many other similar accusations, not just about the neutron peak. For example, Park accused them of fraud in the Washington Post.

But not before they published, and definitely not the day after the press conference.

Quote

Chapter 11, quoting Fleischmann:

After the press conference, Dr. Caldwell came up to us and said, “Well, when my grandfather proposed electrolytic disassociation, he was dismissed from the University. At least that won’t happen to you.” I said to her, “But you are entirely mistaken. We shall be dismissed as well.”

This is what Fleischmann said *after* the fact. It could be simple rationalization. I was asking for a record of him making the prediction before it happened. If Caldwell had documented the conversation...

Quote

He was definitely not beaming at the press conference.

I've seen it. He looks beaming to me.

Quote from JedRothwell

There is not a single credible paper describing technical reasons to doubt any major replication.

Again, this is a different subject, which has no bearing on the reason I cited the enthusiastic if brief welcome that cold fusion received.

In any case, the problem is that there is not a single credible paper describing technical reasons to think LENR is happening. All of the observations are far more plausibly attributable to artifacts, experimental error, chemical effects, and a large dose of confirmation bias, than to unprecedented, unidentified, radiationless, nuclear reactions that have no commensurate reaction products.

As McKubre says in the latest ICCF abstract: "Nearly 30-year old anomalies should have grown to adult maturity and self-sustainability or been buried and forgotten. By various factors we have been heavily constrained from pursuing and accomplishing the one thing that would make anomalies go away: correlation, preferably multi-correlation"

In other words, nothing in cold fusion scales. The heat does not scale with fuel or with reaction products. The claims are not replications at all but erratic claims of a wide variety of effects never quantitatively reproducible, and invariably becoming smaller when the experiment is improved. This is characteristic of pathological science.

Quote

Technically, by late 1989 there was no doubt whatever that cold fusion was real

You can only know your own mind. You may have had no doubt, but then you had no doubt about Rossi either. But you cannot know that others had no doubt in 1989. Certainly, the DOE panel reported having doubts. They concluded “that the present evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process termed cold fusion is not persuasive.”

Quote from JedRothwell

The only opposition is due to academic politics.

And this political influence was absent for the first few weeks during the “huge bubble of enthusiasm”?

And somehow the publication of the claims and the lewan/Koonin presentations coincide with the revival of academic political opposition. Scientists around the world were herded into board rooms, and told, “you can’t be excited about cold fusion anymore. Don’t you know that scientists are supposed to be corrupt, greedy, and short-sighted? We can’t allow this horrible free, clean, and abundant energy to become a reality. What will our children think if we shirk our responsibilities as mean and nasty ogres?”

Yea, that’s what happened. Or how do you explain the sudden onset of academic political opposition?

Anyway, the only political interest in suppressing cold fusion would be the loss of funding for hot fusion scientists. But every other physicist and scientist would benefit enormously from the funds freed up, from the new science to explore, and from the obvious benefits of clean and abundant energy that benefit the entire planet. In fact, it is precisely these interests that account for the “huge bubble of enthusiasm” to begin with. And those interests did not change from the first week to the fifth.

Quote from JedRothwell

The effect was replicated at high signal to noise ratios in 180 major laboratories (listed by Storms).

You’re changing the subject. I cited the well-documented reaction of the mainstream in 1989 to show that the possibility of cold fusion was initially welcomed. This statement of yours has no bearing on that, but since you bring it up,

You’re wrong! You’re making things up.

There are only about 180 entries in Storms’ table, and Miles accounts for 9 of them, Zhang and Arata another 9, Eagleton and Bush for 7. There are at least 7 authors (or author groups) with 5 or more entries, and 28 others with 2 to 5. That brings the number of affiliations to about 60 or less, which incidentally, is rather close to your own tally of replications published *later* in 2009, in which you identify 51 affiliations.

Such a cavalier misrepresentation of the contents of your own papers kind of destroys your credibility with respect to the rest of the cold fusion literature.

Quote from JedRothwell

I know what transpired in the first few weeks after the press conference. I know what happened in the first day after the announcement. Influential scientists at MIT and elsewhere not only disparaged the work, but they declared it fraud and they called the arrest and imprisonment of Fleischmann and Pons in the mass media.

Could you provide a citation for the call for the arrest and imprisonment of P&F on March 24, 1989? I don’t believe it happened.

I am aware of the publication in the Boston Herald, in which MIT scientists accuse P&F of fraud because of the changing energy of the neutron peak. That article was published on May 1, 5 weeks after the press conference, and importantly *after* the MIT scientists had a look at P&F paper. There was no mention of arrest or prison in the article.

You still don’t seem to get it.

I have no doubt that some scientists were skeptical from the start, and some may have been vocal, but that’s not point. Storms’ book shows with detailed justification that the dominant narrative immediately after the press conference was one of excitement: “a huge bubble of enthusiasm”. That demonstrates a willingness to give cold fusion a chance, at the very least. The sentiment changed after the evidence became publicly accessible.

In my own limited exposure to a half dozen universities at the time, there was not a physics or chemistry lab that was not in some way kicking the tires of cold fusion. You can dismiss these efforts as meaningless from the point of view of challenging the reality of cold fusion, but I cite them only to show that the overwhelming sentiment ranged from welcoming enthusiasm to giving the benefit of the doubt.

Quote

As Beaudette describes, Fleischmann predicted this would happen,

Beaudette describes how Fleischmann says after the fact that he expected it. I have not seen a prediction from Fleischmann at the time that this would happen. Indeed, in the interviews at the time of the press conference, he was beaming with pride.

Quote from Shane D.

If LENR becomes established, your references may at best buy a footnote in the history books: "After the announcement, there were a few weeks when FPs results were generally accepted by the science community".

I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t agree that general acceptance ever existed. Serious scientists are much too cautious for that. I would say that there were a few weeks when the possibility of cold fusion was enthusiastically welcomed.

Quote

Especially so after that footnote is weighed against the many lost years, and cost to humanity, their shortsightedness, and in many cases avarice, caused.

The question remains: why did this short-sightedness and avarice take 5 weeks to kick in? Did they forget how corrupt, greedy, and self-serving they were for a short time, until someone reminded them? What changed?

The only plausible explanation for the change in their judgement is based on examination of the evidence. And expressing one’s judgement based on evidence is what scientists are expected to do.

But yes, if LENR were to be vindicated, its disparagement (even if based on evidence) would be embarrassing to many people. The same can be said about any pseudoscience, like the ecat, astrology, creationism, perpetual motion, or homeopathy.

Quote from JedRothwell

I have copies of over a hundred newspaper clippings and other mass media records from the first years of cold fusion.

What part of the “first few weeks after the press conference” don’t you get? I agree that after the APS meeting 5 weeks later, cold fusion was overwhelmingly disparaged. I’m talking about the initial reaction.

P&F were briefly treated like rock stars who had toppled big physics. It was a charming narrative and the press ran with it. The reception Pons received at the ACS meeting alone demonstrates that mainstream science was open to the possibility of cold fusion. The positive reactions from the likes of Teller, Carlo Rubbia, and eventual uber-skeptic Morrison corroborate this idea.

Yes, it’s true, I haven’t read everything, and I haven’t met the principals, but Edmund Storms has. He even agrees with you that cold fusion suffered egregious discrimination. But his account of the first weeks after the press conference demonstrates that cold fusion was initially welcomed and taken seriously. Here are a few excerpts (emphasis mine), but there is much more detail in chapter 2 of his 2007 book:

"A day after the public announcement, work was under way at LANL … People were quickly organized … with a speed that is no longer possible at LANL. Everyone scurried off to find palladium and heavy-water before the limited supplies were snatched up by someone else…"

—

"Excitement was building as more people heard about the “discovery” and wanted to get in on the action. If real, such an important discovery hardly ever happens during a scientist’s career, … "

—

"During most of April, large and animated meetings were held every week as people tried to understand what Fleischmann and Pons had done and how the claimed effects might be duplicated. ..."

—

"By April 19, multiple programs were underway at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL), ... [10 other national labs]"

—

"In addition, 56 people, involving 8 teams, were working on the problem at LANL. Of course, non-government laboratories as well as groups in other countries were also working hard. […copious details of labs around the world getting busy…] As this list of laboratories demonstrates, interest was widespread and spontaneous, with studies started in at least 50 major laboratories worldwide involving at least 600 scientists. In addition, many articles in the press and onTV spread interest to the general public. All of the major news magazines featured Fleischmann and Pons on their front covers."

—

"At one point, the director of LANL, Dr. Siegfried Hecker, confided to me that he had not seen so much enthusiasm at the Laboratory since World War II. “Physicists are actually talking to chemists,” he observed with amazement. This attitude was being duplicated all over the world. To be sustained, this huge bubble of enthusiasm needed some very significant confirming results, ..."

—

All that activity, quite apart from the effusive language, demonstrates that mainstream science was *not* dismissive of cold fusion, but enthusiastically open to it. Moshe Gai, at Yale, was so excited, he ate and slept at the lab for a month perfecting a neutron detector to test the claim. Allan Bromley, who became Bush’s science advisor, arranged a collaboration between Gai and Lynn, an electrochemist who had been at Utah, and was inclined to believe the claims. Experiments were done by chemists at Stanford, and physicists at MIT and Harwell, and as Storms writes, at labs around the world.

And Congress opened a hearing on P&F in those early weeks with these extravagant words from the Science Committee chairman:

”Today we may be poised on the threshold of a new era,” Roe intoned. “If so, man will be unshackled from his dependence of finite energy resource."

—

According to The Scientist (May 29, 1989) (my emphasis),

"Other committee members were equally effusive in their praise of the two men, who appeared as conquering heroes in the battle to free the world of its reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear fission. “Gentlemen, the world awaits the crucial details of your amazing claim,” said Rep. Marilyn Lloyd (D-Tenn.), who heads the committee’s energy research subpanel. “We all want this to work.””

"In fact, anything less than enthusiasm would have seemed almost unpatriotic. The scientists had come to ask for $25 million in federal funds for a fusion research center in Utah. The Utah congressional delegation, led by Democrat Wayne Owens, was preparing to introduce a bill that would send $25 million, various tax benefits, and other perks to the Utah fusion researchers. Walker had proposed transferring $5 million from existing fusion funds within the Department of Energy. And Sen. Jake Gain (R-Utah) was taking reservations from his fellow lawmakers for a special chartered flight to Salt Lake City to meet with the governor and with officials from the University of Utah."

—

Of course, we all know that Lewis and Koonin brought everyone back down to earth about a week later, and Congress had second thoughts.

In spite of your objections, I maintain that the record shows clearly that for a brief time, cold fusion was welcomed with enthusiasm, and that initial reaction demonstrates the instinctive open attitude, probably helped by the then very recent disruptive introduction of high temperature superconductivity. The eventual skepticism could not have taken over because scientists suddenly remembered their role as sticks in the mud. It happened after the evidence was properly examined.

Quote from Eric Walker

I may have missed the gist of your point, but I think we make too many assumptions by concluding that Barker's (claimed) speeding up of spontaneous fission is not LENR.

The chance that Barker’s claims have merit is vanishingly small, but whether you want to call it LENR or not, it has no bearing on the credibility of the claims of transmutations in metal-hydride experiments. My objection is that people who claim they can transmute unstable nuclei based on alleged transmutations of stable nuclei, do not demonstrate it in that context, even though it would be *easier* to detect and identify.

Quote

“But the patent still provides the basis for an interesting set of experiments to attempt to replicate what he's describing;

I disagree. If he’s actually claiming to affect alpha decay by putting the sample inside the Van de Graaf, then it’s complete nonsense as HG has said. If he’s claiming to use the electric field outside the generator, then it’s not exactly a novel idea to determine the effect of applied external fields on reactions of all kinds. My naive impression would be that since the field he is talking about is just barely strong enough to influence atomic ionization, it would fall about a millionfold short of influencing nuclear decay. And that leaves aside the complete absence of any implementation of the patented idea in decades by him or anyone else, in spite of the huge cost of containing radioactive waste.

Quote

Scientists who require solid evidence of competence obviously may be scared away. But there are also good scientists who have more of an appetite for adventure.

All scientists have an appetite for adventure, and even more of an appetite for honor and glory that such a discovery would bring. And therefore the absence of any scientists taking him seriously probably reflects the fact that good scientists in the field are already familiar with the influence of electric fields on nuclear reactions, and have no confidence in his claims.

Quote

The important question, of course, is whether there is any substance to Barker's claims.

The answer is almost certainly: no.

Quote

I’m optimistic that if LENR exists, it can be nailed down in more than one way.

Me too, which is why the failure to nail it down after protracted effort for 30 years does not bode well....

Quote

The thing I wonder about is whether you're going to get novel nuclides along the lines you suggested and to which suggestion I responded.

And I consider the likelihood of producing more than sixty transmutation products from a wide variety of nuclear reactions, and all of them being naturally occurring stable isotopes is vanishingly small.

Quote from Eric Walker

Starting from naturally occurring isotopes, fission is (hypothetically) exothermic in elements as light as strontium:

OK. Yes, there are some exceptions. By virtue of the zigs and zags of the binding energy per nucleon curve, some lower mass nuclides can have greater stability with the same relative neutron excess, as in your examples.

But I think your idea that exclusively stable products make sense if the reactions are all fission is not consistent with the claims of more than 60 transmutation products in Parkhomov’s report from last year. I doubt you could explain more than a few (if any) of those claimed transmutations by exothermic fission. It seems most of them, if they were products of transmutation, would have to result from captures or induced emission of small particles, and in that case, unstable products would be more likely than stable. Certainly 60 products, all stable, is not plausible.

Quote

“In any case, radiation associated with such unstable nuclides (even short-lived) would be highly specific identifying the nuclide unambiguously. I have not seen such claims.”

Another claim of speeding up fission (thorium-232) can be found here: […] In this case they used lasers to (allegedly) speed up the natural activity and measured it using gamma spectrometry.

Here I was looking for claims of unambiguous identification of unstable nuclides from the radiation signature, and that’s not what this is.

But, whether or not there are ways to affect half-lives is not relevant to the objection I raised elsewhere. People are claiming ubiquitous transmutation in metal-hydride type LENR experiments, and therefore suggesting that radioactive nuclides could be rendered stable by transmutation. But transmutations of unstable nuclides are never actually claimed in these experiments, even though they could be detected with far greater sensitivity and specificity, thereby lending some credibility to the other claims of transmutation, which are largely dismissed as contamination effects. Accelerating existing decay rates in completely different experiments does not lend credibility to transmutation claims in these experiments.

Quote from Shane D.

IH did exactly what I and others wanted them to do, and that was to vet the Ecat. The way they accomplished that was ugly, expensive, and amateurish, but in the end they got it done. Thanks to them we knew for sure the Ecat did not work, and that Rossi was as dishonest as the day is long.

Now NASA is in a similar position to vet the Genie Reactor. They will do a thorough job of it, and in the end we will know if it works.

But at the *beginning* of the IH association, people used the association to give Rossi credibility, just as you did with NASA in the earlier post:

“Now they are working with NASA, and I would think they of all would have a good idea of the integrity of the GEC team they partnered with. … An out and out scammer like Rossi would have been noticed long ago.”

Notice the present tense. Nothing there about “will do a thorough job”. After IH had been with Rossi for 6 months people were saying an out and out scammer would have been noticed long ago. But it took a few more years, at least to convince the likes of you.

So, anyway, we now seem to agree that confidence in GEC should be postponed until evidence is available.

“And yes, I did learn something from Rossi, and no doubt you will keep reminding me of it.”

What are friends for?

Quote from Shane D.

I think you are missing the many years they did spend in the lab developing their technology. Mosier-Boss of SPAWAR and Forsley of JWK, started work on this well before their 2007 patent filing. This has been a long time brewing.

Right, but when SPAWAR shut them down, all they had was disputed claims of an extremely low neutron flux. What they are proposing requires a much higher neutron flux, and this has *not* been established in the lab.

“And to suggest they are scammers is preposterous.”

Making a fusion-fission reactor with the neutron fluxes they have claimed is preposterous too, but that doesn’t seem to bother you.

“Now they are working with NASA…”

It’s always a mistake to base confidence on associations. Didn’t IH and Rossi teach you that?

Quote from JedRothwell

This is not the record.

Yes it is. I am talking about the first month after the press conference. There were some physicists who were highly skeptical from the start, but they kept their peace initially. The initial reaction in the press and in mainstream science was almost entirely positive. And that includes reactions from physicists like Morrison who would later (not very much later) become a vocal skeptic. All your citations post-date this period.

Read Storms chapter 2. It *records* the enthusiasm that swept mainstream science in the weeks after the press conference. He was at LANL, about as mainstream as you can get.

“Pons never addressed "thousands" of scientists. He was applauded by a group of electrochemists, but attacked by physicists.”

According to Nature (https://www.nature.com/news/20…full/news070326-12.html): “When Pons spoke at an ACS meeting in 1989 he was greeted by a standing ovation from a packed hall of thousands of chemists.” It was an ACS meeting, and they were not all electrochemists, and in fact there were many physicists in the audience as well. I know one of them, and he said people were hanging from the rafters in a large auditorium.

P&F were eventually attacked by physicists, but not in that first month. The attacks and all your citations happened after the Lewis/Koonin papers at the APS meeting 5 weeks after the press conference.

The enthusiastic reception that Pons and Fleischmann received in the first weeks after their press conference shows that the mainstream was open to the possibility of cold fusion. It fell apart because the evidence did not stand up to scrutiny.

Quote from Shane D.

LR,

You and your colleagues gave FP's 3 months -at best, before kicking off the "Cold Fusion is dead" parties, and passing out the T-shirts saying the same thing....yes newbies, that really happened.

So is 3 months the norm for vetting a new science?

No, most similarly far out claims are dismissed in much less time. This one was given more credibility because of the stature of the claimants.

But, the time to rejection has nothing to do with the question of whether the mainstream was open to the possibility. This is a matter of record: They were not just open, but positively giddy about cold fusion. Pons got a standing ovation from thousands of mainstream scientists. Labs all over the world put aside their research to look at cold fusion. Everyone “wanted to get in on the action. If real, such an important discovery hardly ever happens during a scientist’s career” as Storms puts it.

So what do you think happened between the initial enthusiasm and the later rejection? Do you think they suddenly remembered that their role was to reject new ideas to protect the status quo? Because that certainly didn’t occur to them a year or two earlier when high temperature superconductivity was discovered. That was also a far out claim, but the mainstream awarded that discovery with a Nobel prize.

No, what happened first and foremost, was that scientists had an opportunity to examine the evidence claimed by P&F, and to see how clumsy the experiments were, how equivocal the evidence was, and in some cases how blatantly wrong the interpretations were. That was enough for some (those who knew the most nuclear physics) to be confidently skeptical. Others took more time. The DOE panel studied it in depth for 6 months. Morrison continued to follow it closely for a decade.

And yes, the failure of many to replicate also contributed to the rejection, and maybe those early failures can be dismissed because the loading was not high enough, but at the same time, some claimed replications came within weeks.

Anyway, since the first month shows the mainstream is instinctively and enthusiastically open to cold fusion, it’s not 3 months that matters but the 30 years that have lapsed without any improvement in the evidence.

Those NYT articles were published *after* the brief period of adulation for Pons and Fleischmann.

One of the mainstream scientists most critical of cold fusion was Morrison, and here's him not being able to get enough of it in the weeks after the P&F news conference.

"… I feel this subject will become so important to society that we must consider the broader implications as well as the scientific ones. Looking into a cloudy crystal ball, […] the present big power companies will be running down their oil and coal power stations while they are building deuterium separation plants and new power plants based on cold fusion. No new nuclear power stations will be built except for military needs…."

But don't take my word (or Morrison's) for it. Storms has a detailed account in his 2007 book on how the mainstream went totally nuts for cold fusion -- for a while.

Well, no one ever said keeping kosher was convenient.

Quote from Shane D.

Yes, that is something all LENR supporters, from bloggers like me, to those in the labs, will have to learn to deal with. We blew it. Going forward, the Rossi disgrace will be used by the mainstream scientists you represent, to reject any new successes coming from the field.

Nah, the mainstream would eat up good evidence for cold fusion, regardless of Rossi. In 1989, for a brief period, they couldn’t get enough of what they only *thought* was good evidence for cold fusion. It was rejected when they discovered it was not good after all.

Rossi however serves the useful purpose to show that most of the cold fusion community is not qualified to tell the difference between good evidence and bad evidence.

Quote from Shane D.

GEC did try to save the planet first, starting with Guam, before having to switch gears and conquer space propulsion.

I think that decision had something to do with their technology being a little too close to nuclear energy for comfort.

It’s not “close to nuclear energy”, it *is* nuclear energy. That is the appeal of it.

In spite of the down-sides of current nuclear fission technology, and the public’s fear of it, there are hundreds of reactors in operation, and some still being built. In this context, the introduction of a successful sub-critical fission technology that could use U-238 and Th-232, with their 500 times greater abundance (not to mention the ability to burn actinide waste, and remediate fission products) would be met with an enthusiastic welcome, at least within the industry. So, the only plausible explanation for not deploying it on earth is that they can’t. The Guam deal was probably fiction. Otherwise the NASA agreement would not involve validation as a first step.

(Of course, if the SPAWAR team could scale neutron production up by some kind of fusion reaction, that would already be highly exothermic, and the first step would be to exploit that heat, rather than use the neutrons to induce fission, so their plan looks totally implausible from an even earlier stage.)

There's still a factor of 1/2 or 3/2 to make it all kosher.

Each classical degree of freedom of a freely moving particle has an average kinetic energy of kB*T/2.

The temperature of a simple monatomic gas therefore corresponds to an average kinetic energy of

3/2 kB*T

Quote from RussGeorge

It is busy times amongst the green fields and rabbit warrens of Essex with all manner of hydrogen experiments taking place in a lab not quite yet all put together in the month of moving in. As it has been rightly said, science is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Three experienced dedicagted guys on their feet in the lab day in day out for weeks is a very substantial committment of value to making progress. Each hour on ones feet at a lab bench is worth weeks of armchair time if such efforts are even comparable at all.

Just imagine how productive Einstein could have been if he had spent more time at a lab bench, and less sitting and thinking...

What makes you think that one has to be at a lab bench to perspire?

Anyway, according to wikiquote, Edison said "Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

Quote from Shane D.

If it is real as GEC claims, it will revolutionize space travel, and shortly thereafter upend science here on terra firma...embarrassing the hell out of Louis in the process.

After years of expecting Rossi to embarrass the hell out of skeptics, and then ending up totally red-faced yourself, you are understandably hoping for some pay-back.

But it won’t come this way. If GEC could make power reactors based on LENR, they would not start with space travel, even though that is an obvious application. Imagine someone inventing a potion that can cure all disease, and then making an agreement with NASA to use it to prevent motion sickness among astronauts, before, oh, I don’t know, eradicating cancer and heart disease on earth. Not really a plausible script, is it?