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The question is whether those anomalies are specific to the experiments, and or whether they all have the same (presumably nuclear - but with no theory that predicts them all) cause.
The arguments on this thread that are general are essentially reiterating that point. You are right - neither Jed's contention, nor mine, repeated, adds anything. Both sides see the other as ignoring something that is obvious.
Fair enough.
You are thinking that either I can find a mistake in every string LENR paper, or Jed is right.
That's incorrect. I'm not asking you to find mistakes in every strong LENR paper. I'm not even making an argument about who is right or wrong. It's an argument about what types of analysis are rigorous.
I'm simply making the point that talking in general terms about what might be a possible error is no substitute for reading individual papers and evaluating them based on the quality of the work.
It's often the case to me that you sound like you dismiss any possibility of LENR based on generalised, sweeping arguments about the possibility of error.
Two things can, in principle, be true simultaneously:
A) The super majority of papers that report tritium fail to adequately account for possible sources of error.
B) One paper is absolutely exemplary and conclusively shows a large, anomalous amount of tritium.
If you make an argument in general terms based on the observation of A, and find that argument to be dispositive, then you're never going to get to B, which is really the useful conclusion to get to.
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Those individual papers do not support LENR. They each show an anomaly. The different anomalies are not all predicted by a single LENR theory - yet. Until that happens the individual evidence in each case is just "appears to be an anomaly" and lack of clear reproducibility makes that inconclusive.
Agree to disagree. There may not be a theory, but there is a commonality of materials, experimental design, methodology and observation. Moreover, there is also a commonality amongst the observations - all the claimed products seem to be nuclear in their origin.
I would also dispute the idea that lack of clear reproducibility, in of itself, makes an observation of an anomaly inconclusive.
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For example, Jed will say (as will everyone here): anomalous excess heat is well proven and reproducible. Yet the modern attempts to find this are all uncertain, and show results much lower than those original F&P results.
Ok, but we should make some allowance for the fact that you can't get sponsored to do this work, and it's career suicide if you do. And then, on top of that, it's an extremely challenging experiment. In a way, it's not really a fair critique because the resources available to researchers haven't been continuous and stable.
Besides, what do the results of recent experiments say about the quality of older experiments? You imply that recent results somehow invalidate or cast doubt on prior results. That doesn't make sense.
Again, you make a general argument: "All the recent results are worse than the older results" and use it to cast doubt on F&P's work.
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I don't dispute apparent excess Tritium from the Tritium experiments - i dispute LENR as mots likely reason for it. In that case I can say in some cases what is a likely reason - e.g. electrolytic or evaporative fractionation - and in other cases just point out that contamination has not been ruled out.
Yes. That's a general argument. You can say that. But it's not useful unless you've actually read a specific paper and are making a specific argument about that paper.
"Maybe there's an error, because there's often an error" isn't a rigorous critique.
"I'm not satisfied with the way this group handled X, Y & Z, and I'd like to see experimental design changes of A, B and C and an attempt to control for T, Y, and U, in their next paper before I could accept this result as truly anomalous" is.
To your credit, you do often make that kind of argument. But you often generalise too.
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On any single experiment Jed will say - you are supposing some unlikely source of error. I will say - yes but it does not have to be very likely, because the set of possible anomalous "LENR" results is quite large, and the number of error mechanism sis also quite large. You only need one error mechanism and one anomaly to generate LENR evidence.
Again, this is a generality. "Maybe there's an error because there are a lot of possible errors" is not a scientific argument.
You're absolutely correct that you only need one error mechanism to explain by prosaic means an ostensibly anomalous result. Nonetheless, there's a world of difference between catching the hare and dreaming about dinner.
