and for those , not just failing to reproduce, but proposing an explanation in an article that was published (some got published in surprising way, and some were not retracted in surprising way), 4 articles.
Kirk Shanahan battle to make the 5th published.
Beaudette summarize the story:
Unfortunately, physicists did not generally claim expertise in calorimetry, the measurement of calories of heat energy. Nor did they countenance clever chemists declaring hypotheses about nuclear physics. Their outspoken commentary largely ignored the heat measurements along with the offer of an hypothesis about unknown nuclear processes. They did not acquaint themselves with the laboratory procedures that produced anomalous heat data. These attitudes held firm throughout the first decade, causing a sustained controversy.
The upshot of this conflict was that the scientific community failed to give anomalous heat the evaluation that was its due. Scientists of orthodox views, in the first six years of this episode, produced only four critical reviews of the two chemists’ calorimetry work. The first report came in 1989 (N. S. Lewis). It dismissed the Utah claim for anomalous power on grounds of faulty laboratory technique. A second review was produced in 1991 (W. N. Hansen) that strongly supported the claim. It was based on an independent analysis of cell data that was provided by the two chemists. An extensive review completed in 1992 (R. H. Wilson) was highly critical though not conclusive. But it did recognize the existence of anomalous power, which carried the implication that the Lewis dismissal was mistaken. A fourth review was produced in 1994 (D. R. O. Morrison) which was itself unsatisfactory. It was rebutted strongly to the point of dismissal and correctly in my view. No defense was offered against the rebuttal. During those first six years, the community of orthodox scientists produced no report of a flaw in the heat measurements that was subsequently sustained by other reports.
The community of scientists at large never saw or knew about this minimalist critique of the claim. It was buried in the avalanche of skepticism that issued forth in the first three months. This skepticism was buttressed by the failure of the two chemists’ nuclear measurements, the lack of a theoretical understanding of how their claim could work, a mistaken concern with the number of failed experiments, a wholly unrealistic expectation of the time and resource the evaluation would need, and the substantial ad hominem attacks on them. However, their original claim of measurement of the anomalous power remained unscathed during all of this furor. A decade later, it was not generally realized that this claim remained essentially unevaluated by the scientific community. Confusion necessarily arose when the skeptics refused without argument to recognize the heat measurement and its corresponding hypothesis of a nuclear source. As a consequence, the story of the excess heat phenomenon has never been told.
Few people realize how weak is the consensus.
Consensus exploit mostly failures by people whose competence don't apply (physicists) to the experiment.
They exploit failures in a reverted Poperian logic.
They ignore refutation of proposed explanation.
They ignore the weak number and weak quality of the refutations.
They ignore reference experimenters who confirmed the results.
They ignore well known problems experience daily in material science.
In a way for someone experience in history of science, in epistemology, in semi-conductors, they are incredibly naive and uneducated, and incredibly tolerant with incompetence and fraud when on their side.
In fact the fallacy at the core of LENR denial is the reverted poperian logic, that things cannot happen if they have no theory.
If you get that fallacy as true, then LENR was falsified because every theory was refuted, theory that it was easy , that just electrolysis was enough, that it was hot fusion in a jar, and all pet theories,
This reverted logic is core to today's pathology of science, who prefer unproven coherent theories, refuted numerical models, unrefutable infinitely tunable models, to uncertain experimental results and unexplained anomalies.
We are back at a dogmatic age.
Sincerely, Galileo was more respected scientifically than today's experimenters without (official) theory, and got home-arrested only for having insulted the Pope (who did not let his executors burn him)... Today, not only science is politicized, but even when not politic, there is dogma you cannot challenge even with data.
Even LENR community suffer from that fallacy with pet theory meditations more popular than old experimenters intuitions.
) I'm convinced that the solution is good old PdD science, but with bleeding edge nanotech/Li-Ion/nanoelectronic instrumentation. We need a theory to make it work reliably, and this need instruments, not shoestrings and proof of reality that nobody accept.
