As I said, after the NSF/EPRI meeting and perhaps a few others, Lewis
should have said something like: "my initial concerns about this work
have now been satisfied, and I agree the effect is real." You are
supposed to be able to say that with no loss of face. It is pefectly
okay to have doubts at first but not later. At this conference, in
October 1989, even Fleischmann continues to express some skeptical
doubts about whether the effect is real.
The Q&A transcripts in this book are gold mine for future historians
of science. They show that at the conference, Lewis made exactly the
sort of remarks I would expect a good scientist to make when
confronted with conclusive data. Here is what he said after the
presentation by Guruswamy et al., p. 16-20:
Lewis: I would like to say that I find both your results and those
reported by Dr. Pons very believable. Can you identify any
differences in your experiments which might explain why you have had
no successes in two months, after previous experiments were successful?
Wadsworth: The only thing which I can think of is the fact that we
are now using a different lot of metal.
By the way, these results were reported here, and again here:
Guruswamy, S. and M.E. Wadsworth. Metallurgical Aspects in Cold
Fusion Experiments. in The First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion.
1990. University of Utah Research Park, Salt Lake City, Utah:
National Cold Fusion Institute.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GuruswamySmetallurgi.pdf
They were never reported in the peer-reviewed literature, so they
were not counted by Britz, but they are better than many of the ones
Britz counted.
Here is an example of both Nates raising a legitimate concern, and
having it answered, on p. 3-45:
Hoffman: Granted that your calibrations and measurements of the heat
out are absolutely correct, is this always so for the heat in? A true
RMS voltmeter is rarely used for galvanostatic measurements. If there
is any surging due to arcing, a normal voltmeter will not respond to it.
Fleischmann: The electrical system is under feedback control, so it
will be extremely difficult for this system to show any surging.
Bockris: We have measured ac effects in our equipment, and we have
seen about 4 mV.
Lewis: The value would depend on the potentiostat, if it is used, and
whether or not it is stable.
Fleischmann: Our system is stabilized against oscillation, which was
one of our first precautions to obtain accurate results.
And elsewhere, p. 3-47:
Lewis: Did you use the Stefan-Boltzmann expression to treat the original data?
Pons: We have always considered both radiative and conductive terms.
Our calorimeters operated at low temperature differential, and the
expression which we used then is what I indicated.
Lewis: Do you have experimental data on the calorimeter showing
varying electrical power input into a resistor which demonstates the
form of the heat transfer function?
Pons: Yes, those data are in our paper.
p. 5-21
Lewis: If you consider the total amount of tritium detected, compared
with the total in the amount of electrolyte added, then do a
separation factor calculation, can you say that you really have made
the tritium in the cell?
Storms: More tritium was detected than was introduced into the cell.
Lewis: By what factor?
Storms: By a factor of 70-80.
These brief exchanges may not have satisfied Lewis, but it was a
3-day conference, so he had time to discuss the matter with the
authors one on one, and look at the data.
So, at a closed conference he acts like a professional scientist, but
in public he does not. This intransigence and intellectual dishonesty
reminds me of Garwin. The Pentagon paid Garwin to go to SRI and write
a report. In the report, he said he saw nothing wrong with the
calorimetry. "We have found no specific experimental artifact
responsible for the finding of excess heat . . ." And yet on CBS 60
Minutes he told the public he thinks input power was measured
incorrectly. Garwin knows as well as I do that in many experiments
there is no input power, so this claim is preposterous. This is
unbecoming of a scientist. Cold fusion is important research, and it
is unethical for a scientist to make claims about it which he knows
are incorrect.
See:
http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#CBS60minutes
- Jed
