This becomes an examination of the tendentious pseudo-skepticism of
Joshua Cude, who, I have concluded, is so careless with the evidence
he presents, distorting it in his summarization of it, enough that I
consider it the equivalent of lying. People lie. It is sometimes
necessary to point it out.
The benefit/cost ratio of this discussion has been declining, but
some issues of interest have still come up this time. Mostly this
becomes a rehashing, though, of standard skeptical arguments,
repeated over and over with no attempt to find areas of agreement.
Arguments shown to be contrary to fact are repeated later, without
any sign that the counter-arguments have even been read. Bald
assertions that are demonstrably false by the presentation of simple
counterexamples, are again repeated. Etc.
I consider Joshua Cude thoroughly discredited, not to be trusted.
At 11:32 PM 2/22/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
Cold fusion would revolutionize the field of fusion if it were
valid. Physics journals would fight to publish the results, if they
felt they were credible. It is a physics field, whether you
... like it or not, I presume. The methods are those of
electrochemistry or materials science, not those of nuclear physics.
There isn't any radiation produced -- to speak of. Sure, there is
some nuclear process going on, but Joshua here is expressing
ownership of reality by a particular discipline. That's offensive.
Chemists have the right to say "this is not the chemistry we know,"
just as much as the physicists have the right to say "this is not
the physics we know."
What's offensive is when one says, "this is not what we know and
therefore you are wrong."
I'm saying that the chemists found something that they, experts in
chemistry, say is not chemistry. If it's not nuclear physics, fine. What is it?
Uninterested? That's your privilege. Are you a nuclear physicist, Joshua?
Cold fusion is either (Joshua's position) pure chemistry or it is
cross-disciplinary (my position; the methods of chemistry with a
result indicating something involving nuclear physics). So if Joshua
is right, then his position that physics journals should be covering
it is contradictory. If it's chemistry, it belongs in chemistry
journals, or in multdisciplinary journals if there are possibly
cross-disciplinary issues.
There is a law called Moulton's Law: when a bureaucracy makes a
mistake, it is impossible to fix.
If cold fusion were to turn out to be real, it would of course be
huge, and very embarrassing to all the skeptics. They would not take
the chance unless they believed sincerely, and with high degree of
certainty, that it is bogus, Moulton's law or not.
CBS spoke with Richard Garwin, who said that "they say there is no
doubt, but I doubt, so there is doubt," or something like that. I
don't doubt that Garwin doubts, but what "they" say is that "there is
no reasonable doubt." Is Garwin's doubt reasonable? To determine
that, we'd need to look at a lot of details. What is the basis for
his doubt? Just general lack of understanding?
That can be reasonable, sometimes. But it also is not evidence of any
kind, other than very personal evidence, which can vary greatly from
person to person. Is the problem that Garwin accepts a different body
of evidence than the ones who conclude that CF is real?
If so, what evidence is accepted, in common, and what is rejected,
and why, specifically, is this or that piece of evidence rejected, if it is.
And what is the basis for rejection? What can happen, and which
commonly happens, with entrenched conflict like this, is that the
evidence is rejected because it tends to lead to a conclusion that
the one rejecting does not like.
That's very common in debate. Evidence is attacked because of
conclusions that it could imply.
But science looks for maximum harmonization. We might know the truth
about cold fusion when we have an explanatory theory, or set of
theories, that harmonizes all the evidence, and when those theories
have been tested through confirmed predictions.
What I'm claiming is that we already have this, in part. This theory
does not explain everything. But it does explain a great deal, and is
not inconsistent with *any* experimental data. But this, Joshua
continues to reject, and bases his rejection of experimental evidence
on his *belief* that cold fusion, if real, would have resulted in the
creation of a particular kind of device that meets his personal
criterion, his own particular cup of tea.
This is an individual claiming authority over science. It does not
work like that.
This is what is really happening: the two largest scientific
publishers in the world, Springer-Verlag and Elsevier, are now
publishing substantial material on cold fusion.
Big deal. Publishers get paid to publish. It is the editorial boards
of journals that must answer to content. Elsevier publishes on the
paranormal, homeopathy, and astrology too.
Yes. So? Those publishers are, indeed, in it for the money. They must
satisfy their readership and their advertisers. The publishers are
highly motivated to have expert editorial boards that will make
content decisions that will maintain their reputation.
Really, here, Joshua is claiming that "mainstream journal" means
nothing. I'm quite sure that if, say, Nature publishes an article on
cold fusion (actually, was it Nature that recently published that
imaginative fiction about cold fusion that lampooned extreme
skepticism), Joshua will then find some excuse to deprecate it.
Remember, he's made it very clear, he's waiting for a killer
demonstration, of a particular kind, that CF supporters have said
might take a Manhattan-scale project to develop. He thinks it would
be easy. That's the unsupported opinion of someone who is very much
not an expert, as far as we know. It's just an excuse to be attached
to what he clearly believes: cold fusion is in the same category as
the paranormal, homeopathy, and astrology, and the mainstream
publishers and their review boards be damned. Only his opinon counts.
Cold fusion is just a small field, though there is "potential" for
something big. It's not nuclear physics, in how the research is
done. It's chemistry and materials science. It has implications for
physics only in a certain detail: it is a demonstration of how the
approximations of two-body quantum mechanics break down in
condensed matter, which really should have been no surprise, I
learned from Feynman, personally, that we didn't know how to do the
math in those complex environments. We have severe difficulty with
anything other than the simplest three-body problems.
That sounds like a pretty big detail in *physics*. But quantum
mechanics is used to analyze condensed matter with more than 3
bodies. The 3-body problem in nuclear physics is more difficult, but
nuclear forces are short-range; it's pretty implausible that the
hugely spaced lattice has much effect on nuclear forces. But,
whatever, it is definitely physics.
The analysis is physics, except that physicists mostly avoid the
complexity. It's chemists and materials scientists that actually deal
with such environments.
"Pretty implausible" is not based on actual quantum field theory.
It's based on an approximation. And that approximation is contrary to
experiment. That's what led Takahashi to propose multibody fusion.
Perhaps Joshua would be interested in reading the original work that
took Takahashi to this idea. Takahashi bombarded palladium deuteride
with deuterons, and found evidence for 3D fusion, the fusion of three
deuterons, instead of two, to be elevated over the naive "hugely
spaced lattice, therefore like a plasma" assumption, by a factor of
10^26. That's not some small, trivial difference!
That is the lattice very much, having "an effect on nuclear forces."
A huge effect. So Joshua is blowing smoke, confidently asserting what
he wants to believe, attempting to prove that he's right, without any
care for truth, typical pseudoskepticism.
However, the ash was found and confirmed, and the neat thing about
this is that it finesses the debate over excess heat.
Not sufficiently convincingly to the DOE panel, or to the physics
community in general.
As Joshua has already acknowledged, the "physics community in
general" -- note that what was originally "scientists" has become
"physicists," which is much closer to the truth -- doesn't read the
evidence, isn't following the debate, sits fat and happy in its
assumptions and conclusions from twenty years ago. A whole generation
of physicists has been raised on the propaganda. (As I saw with
nutritionists with the fat and cholesterol hypothesis.)
This is very different when particular physicists, like Robert
Duncan, are led to actually review the evidence, with time and
caution and independent motive to provide a de novo assessment.
As to the DoE panel and the helium evidence, that one is easy to
understand. The evidence was misread. Blatantly and obviously, as
shown by the review misrepresenting the evidence from the review.
This is not a mere difference in interpretation. It was blatant
error, complete misunderstanding and misreading. That would never
have gotten through an interactive review. Rather, the reviewers did
what they did, then wrote responses, and if there was some easily
corrected misunderstanding in those responses, too bad. This is not
at all how I'd run a review if what I wanted was a thorough
reassessment of an entrenched controversy.
For this reason, some suspect that the DoE review was, like the 1989
one, stacked, designed to come to a fixed conclusion. I'm not so
sure: why ascribe to malevolence what could result from simple ignorance?
And lots of cold fusion evidence is like that. It's a wall of fact,
difficult to penetrate and understand.
And yet heat is dead simple to penetrate and understand. That's my problem.
No, your problem is your attachment to being right. You have
disclosed nothing about yourself. You are an anonymous internet
"pundit." You can say whatever you like and avoid all responsibility,
and whenever sensible people start ignoring you, or you are banned
from a forum, you will simply disappear under this name and pop up
again with another.
The massive rejection of cold fusion, which extended to rejection
of a graduate student thesis solely because it involved cold fusion research,
Well, a usual criterion for a PhD is that it contributes to
scientific knowledge, and is publishable. I don't know if was
published or not, but one can argue that the entire field has not
contributed to scientific knowledge.
Making the point: the supply of replication labor was cut off, thus
reinforcing the complaint: lack of exact replication. Circular.
If a grad student had done research that demonstrated the Great
Artifact, that will-o-the wisp behind most skeptical argument, still,
that would have definitely contributed, in an important way, to
"scientific knowledge." Yet Joshua's position is not symmetric.
Apparently, if the student's results don't agree with what he
imagines is the mainstream, it doesn't "contribute to scientific
knowledge." Remember, he's already told us that he is not going to
accept the reality of cold fusion unless he sees that palpable heat
demonstration. So if a student shows that tritium is being produced,
at levels beyond explanations other than a nuclear reaction taking
place in a CF cell, that's not "scientific." It's useless, since it
isn't making heat. "Heat, heat, I want your heat," to quote the
inimitable Moulton.
Nobody gets a Nobel Prize for boring replication, running the same
experiment that others have run, over and over, and nobody gets rich from it.
But many new avenues begin with replication. And scientists know
that. That's why so many physicists from the modern physics
revolution became famous. They accepted new results eagerly,
replicated and extended. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit. If CF
were real, the same would be true.
There was plenty of replication, all rejected because "there was no
theoretical explanation." Some of the work was shoddy, but some was
not. No, this is a theoretical argument, and horribly flawed by
incorporating, by implication a false assumption, obviously false,
that there was no replication.
However, as I'm sure you know, a number of Nobel Prize-winning
physicists did not think it was impossible, and tried to develop
theories of how it might work.
One tried to develop theories, but Schwinger was in his twilight
years by then, and not many physicists took him seriously. "One" is
a number I guess. Josephson has expressed support for cold fusion,
and for the paranormal. Hmmm. Who else?
Another. Ramsey was the co-chair of the 1989 panel, and it was he who
insisted on mollified language, the language that made the 1989
review appear to come to "much the same conclusion" as the 2004
review. He threatened to resign if that language was not included.
Technically, Ramsey did not, as far as I know, try to develop a
theory, but rather clearly did not consider cold fusion theoretically
impossible.
This technique of impeaching scientists because of their interest in
this or that "famously fringe" field is common among pseudoskeptics.
I've seen it applied even when the scientist merely stated some
speculation, as an off-hand comment.
In addition to those three Nobel winners, there was Edward Teller,
with his "meshuggatron." He was joking, but he was also serious. He
called it that, obviously, because the damned thing was misbehaving,
doing the unexpected.
I have seen no analysis of the impossibility of cold fusion, from a
theoretical point of view, that did not assume that "cold fusion"
would necessarily mean "d-d fusion."
Folks, Cude has clearly spent a great deal of time with this field,
unless someone is feeding him ideas. This would not be someone who
hasn't discussed this before. As I've pointed out, Joshua seems to
have appeared, lotus-born, to criticize Rossi, and then extended that
to cold fusion in general.
Joshua, what's your interest here? Why have you spent so much time
studying a field that you believe to be so bogus? You belie your
disinterest, your claim that you are waiting for that killer demo.
You are not "waiting," you are attacking. Why?
And if we're going to decide the matter by lining up the opinions of
prestigious scientists, there are a lot more on the skeptical side.
Name some recent ones who are staking their reputation on it. Garwin
made an off-hand comment to a reporter, simply saying that he wasn't
convinced. I'm not seeing careful critical comment from anyone with a
reputation.
My favorite theory is Takahashi's Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate
theory, but it's obviously incomplete and probably is only a clue
to the real reaction.
The problem is that it is so contrived to avoid radiation. Nature
doesn't mind radiation, so why would it pick a 4-body reaction
instead of a 2-body. I don't buy it.
Joshua, again, you are betraying some considerable sophistication.
This is not a plasma. The conditions that arise to create the TSC
require confinement. Try to get two deuterium molecules into the TSC
position without confining forces, the molecules will dissociate
instead. TSC isn't a simple "four body problem," from the point of
view of chemistry, it is *two molecules," electrons included. You
can't get collapse ("condensate") without those electrons, because
the nuclei will repel each other.
No matter what theory you pick, Widom Larsen, or TSC, or anything,
there is a huge energy barrier you have to overcome.
No. The energy barrier is only that required to create a transient
state, TS. That's considerable, but may be within the Boltzmann tail.
Takahashi shows that, if TSC forms, it will collapse and fuse, the
fusion process takes about a femtosecond. That is a calculation from
standard quantum field theory, as far as I can tell.
You can write complicated equations to try to snow your audience,
but somehow, you have to get hundreds of MeV into a single atom or
lattice site.
No. The opposite. I'd say that, here, you show that you have not read
and certainly have not understood the Takahashi proposal. Far from
"hundreds of MeV" -- which is a great exaggeration anyway, but never
mind -- the collapse actually requires that the two *molecules* have
a relative temperature of close to absolute zero. That, in fact, is a
common objection to TSC theory, not the high energy one you make.
(That objection is answered by pointing out that bulk temperature and
local two-body temperature are different things, and that, in any
bulk material, two component bodies may -- and statistically will --
have transient low relative energy.)
This is a simple question for a theoretical physicist, I'd hope. Is
Takahashi's math correct?
It's a separate question whether or not the TSC state can form. What
Takahashi has shown -- but this has not been independently confirmed,
we can only say that Takahashi's theory is notable, it's been
published under peer review, and mentioned in secondary sources, but
not by experts who would be confirming the calculations -- is that
fusion is not just possible, but predictable, from a condition that
might be rare, but that could be within what is possible at room temperature.
Since it takes energy to reach the TSC condition (the energy is
absorbed by the lattice and the molecules, through action against
electronic repulsion, the electron shells, as the two molecules slow
to zero relative temperature, it becomes potential energy, as if
springs have been compressed), we'd expect the reaction rate to
increase with temperature, as happens.
If you can do that to produce electron capture (W-L) or a
symmetric 4-body fusion, then why wouldn't ordinary D-D fusion
happen at a much higher rate? It's just not a plausible coincidence
to me. Heat is hard to prove, and there is some exotic nuclear
reaction that produces no radiation. And not just one reaction, but
multiple reactions, all radiationless.
Because two deuterons don't collapse like that. First of all, the TSC
reaction is not radiationless. It can be expected to produce
emissions from the excited Be-8 nucleus, but these would be photons
that would be absorbed by the lattice. Even if Be-8 reaches the
ground state before fissioning, there would still be, as I recall,
about 45 KeV per alpha particle. That's above the Hagelstein limit,
so something else must happen. We do not know how fusion within a BEC
will behave, at least I don't! Do you, Joshua?
The BEC, when it comes out of collapse because the components now
have high relative energy, may distribute the energy to the electrons
as well. There are now four electrons and two helium neucli, with a
total of 90 KeV of energy to distribute. That's 15 KeV if it were
distributed equally. Maybe below the Hagelstein limit.
But the real process is not shown or demonstrated by the evidence
yet. This is merely a "plausible theory." It does predict some of the
behavior, better than W-L theory, I think. Surface reaction
(molecular deuterium becomes very rare inside the lattice), so if TSC
theory is true, we may be looking at what happens only at exposed
sites, one might think of them as pockets), no radiation beyond
relatively low charged particle radiation, non-penetrating, helium,
reaction rate increase with temperature, and some level of
transmutation (because the BEC is neutral, it has no coulomb barrier
to overcome with respect to other nuclei). But the initial condition
problem, Takahashi has not even addressed, and the radiation problem
is only speculatively addressed, mostly not by Takahashi.
Heat is not hard to prove. Heat has been measured accurately for a
very long time, the techniques are well known. With some methods,
heat is very simple to measure, it was only the more accurate method
used by Fleischmann that's hairy. It all gets simpler with closed
cells, but closed cells, are, then, dangerous, one fatality so far.
Cude, you seem to have no concept of the use of controls in
experimental science. Controls, taken together, show that the
calorimetry is accurate. No, your rejection of excess heat is not
based on the scientific method or sober assessment of evidence. It's
conclusion-driven, that's obvious.
Outwardly, you base your rejection on a theory, that if CF were real,
then X demonstration would be easy. That's a non sequitur, a pure
speculation. CF could be real, and the demonstration you desire might
be forever impossible. The demonstration you desire is probably
possible only if serious commercial applications are possible, which,
barring Rossi, is unknown.
And your demand for such a demonstration, as you apply it, which
would, politically, suggest denying research funding, then is
self-reinforcing, just like the situation with grad students and your
insistence that their research projects be "scientifically useful."
You have created a mass of interlocking requirements that, if
accepted, effectively, repress any contrary position.
Thus you represent, in a nutshell, what the physics community did in
1989. You are the problem, in a very real sense.
And you know that you have been involved with this, deeply, for more
than a month.
I'm responding to you now, differently than at first. At first, I
thought that you might be a true skeptic, merely uninformed about the
full body of evidence. That was a naive assumption on my part. No,
you are experienced at this, you know way too much, to quickly, to be
an ordinary newcomer, ordinary skeptic.
This is important. If Takahashi -- or something like that -- is
right, there is no "revolution" in quantum mechanics. The existing
theories regarding d-d fusion, the many years of work describing
the behavior of that reaction, none of that is tossed out. This is
simply something different, a complex situation that was never
before anticipated or analyzed. What TSC theory shows is that
fusion is not only possible, under certain circumstances, if that
circumstance arises, fusion is immediate, predicted, within about a
femtosecond. That's *calculation*, not imagination, from known
quantum field theory. The TSC condition happens to be relatively
easily calculated (still difficult!) because of the symmetry.
The thing about these exotic theories is that they can be easily
checked by theoretical physicists, without the expense, time, and
risk of failure and derision that accompanies checking experimental
CF results. And if they turned out to have merit, those physicists
would want to get a piece of the action. They would support and
extend the theory. But the only thing I hear is crickets.
Glad you can hear the crickets through all the noise you are making.
So ... Takahashi has been published and cited, he's quite notable. So
... where is this easy criticism? I see it for Mills and hydrino
theory, I don't see it for Takahashi or for, say, Kim, who has
published a somewhat similar BEC theory that appeared in Naturwissenschaften.
You may not like it, but that is a mainstream journal. You may make
the expected claims about NW, so far, only that the journal is "past
its day," which is irrelevant, if true. Springer-Verlag would not try
to recover by publishing fringe nonsense, they'd be squandering their
most valuable asset. No, I see it differently. NW, in spite of having
full access to multidisciplinary peer review, had become over-focused
on life sciences, and wants to recover their general position,
according to their own description of the journal. They would not use
cold fusion to do this unless they had advice from their own experts
that this was good science, that it would not blow up in their faces.
Thus the events at NW demonstrated the position of, at least, a small
set of experts who advise the editors, and I very much doubt that the
editor of NW would do this without consultation with the bosses at
SV. Who would confirm that position independently. I don't think that
they are stupid.
I think they have made a bold move that will eventually do just what
they want it to do.
Here is what the silence on Takahashi shows: that the bulk of the
theoretical physicists are either still not paying attention,
believing the propaganda from 1989-1990, or they recognize that the
problem is a very difficult one, that the road is littered with
highly competent physicists who tried and failed to figure it out.
Possibly it's some of both.
I asked a quantum physicist to look at Takahashi. I don't have an
answer yet. This is not something that one does overnight.
Having taken about two years to become familiar with the evidence,
I'm no longer questioning the reality of cold fusion.
Statistically, we are looking at about one chance in a million that
the heat/helium results are not coming from a true connection
between excess heat and helium.
Statistically, given the failure to prove the excess heat in 22
years, we are looking at a chance of 1 in a million that nuclear
reactions are producing measurable heat in cold fusion experiments.
That may be high.
The excess heat was proven long ago, to anyone willing to take the
time to review the evidence in detail. What I've seen examining it is
that the evidence is often not presented in such a way as to lead to
ready comprehension. Storms agrees with me. I mentioned that his own
review was not presented as effective polemic, and he agreed with
that as well, pointing out -- correctly -- that it had to match the
academic style of the journal.
You are, in that 1 in a million, simply pulling a number out of the
air, or out of some dark place.
You simply deny the heat/helium evidence with a wave of your hand.
That evidence *confirms* the calorimetry, it's based on a
replicatable experiment, that has, in fact, been replicated many
times, with no contrary reports. That's very, very strong, Joshua. It
reverses your odds, so, hey, what's a factor of 10^12 among friends?
But how will we find out who is right.
Time. In this case, though, I already know. I do have that much
confidence in my ability to assess evidence, and I know that I'm not
seeing any skeptics with arguments that don't fall apart under
examination. In this sequence, Joshua, you have basically lied, you
have taken evidence out of context and presented it to create an
impression contrary to what a complete examination of what you,
yourself, cite, as with Gozzi, where you took his quite strong report
and presented it as the opposite, based on how words taken out of
context can look.
You are, then, exposed as a liar. This isn't about your opinion about
cold fusion, it is about how you argue.
I have noted recently in private correspondence that false arguments
for a proposition are not evidence against the proposition, but I'll
note the irony, here. If your position is true, and supported by the
preponderance of the evidence, why do you find it necessary to lie?
If definitive results in CF come along, then we will know I was the
fool. But the absence of same, if in another 20 years, people are
still doing electrolysis experiments with a little excess heat now
and then and maybe a little helium salted in, advocates will still
claim it's real. I predict there will be only a few left by that time though.
Given that the condition you stated is already contradicted by the
evidence that exists and has been published. "A little excess heat
now and then and maybe a little helium salted in," is not a
description of what is in the literature, as to work since Miles.
But now that I know you are willing to lie, to misrepresent evidence,
I also know that it's useless to argue with you except as to maintain
public understanding of the pseudoskeptical arguments, as distinct
from genuine skeptical ones.
Joshua, you are perfectly welcome to sit in your belief that there
is no anomalous heat here (i.e, I assume, your belief that the heat
has an unidentified prosaic cause). But I will point out that this
is a belief, it is not a demonstrated scientific fact, for sure.
It's difficult to prove a negative. But in the judgement of most,
the belief that there is excess heat is a belief, and not a
demonstrated scientific fact.
"Excess heat," that is, heat not expected from a defined set of heat
sources, or any known sources, is measurable. Fleischmann claims an
accuracy of about 1 mW average power. Other, simpler methods may be
running at 5 or 10 mW, as I recall. You are essentially denying that
researchers can measure heat with calorimetry, when this has been
done for well over a century, and is a basic tool of
electrochemistry. The calorimetry is amply verified with controls,
and the behavior of "dead cells" -- those cells that do not produce
heat, for no identified reason, speculated to be due to
nanostructural differences, or perhaps oxide layer history
differences -- amply confirms that the calorimetry is right on.
If excess heat is a "belief," so is any conclusion from experiment,
as to something not directly measured, not visible in the raw data.
In some designs, excess heat shows up in the raw data! -- but that's
not as accurate as a fuller consideration.
Turning to the readers, Joshua's position is fundamentally
anti-scientific, pretending to be scientific. It's corrupt and
deceptive, not disclosing the source and the motives behind it. This
is someone who has put a great deal of effort into learning the
arguments, combing the literature for arguments to use, something
that could not be done in a month, even full-time.
This is what was never done: replication with demonstration of artifact.
It's a mug's game. Artifacts by their nature are hard to find, and
when it's someone else's artifact, even more so. The best approach
when results look fishy is not always to try to find the fish, but
to ask, if the suspected result is real, what else should happen. If
CF produces more heat out than it gets in, then you should be able
to use the output to power the input, and make an isolated heat
producing device.
No. This is the real skeptical question, and it was amply asked in
1989: if the heat results are real, there should be ash. What is the
ash? If there is ash, it should be correlated with excess heat. Is
there a correlation? At what value?
Making an "isolated heat producing device" has been done. Cude
doesn't accept it. Not enough heat for him, I think. Heat after death
represents, as well, an "isolated device." If it produces more heat
than could be explained by chemical storage, that's it. He rejects
that, doesn't believe the evidence.
No, he won't change his mind with an "isolated device," since he
didn't. He has a hidden agenda.
However, I'm glad that Cude effectively agrees that artifact was not
demonstrated. Many people believe that it was.
If a device can produce 10 kernels of wheat from one kernel, you
only need one kernel to feed the world. Once it gets going, there is
no input required.
Sure. Let's look at the analogy. You can produce 10 kernels of wheat
from one kernel. Easy. Plant it. Does that mean that the world is fed
because you have one kernel?
But as to effect, what? Helium. Tritium is apparently not
correlated or poorly correlated. Neutrons, very, very low level,
bursts, difficult to distinguish from cosmic ray background.
Transmutations? Still not correlated with excess heat, unless we
want to consider helium the product of transmutation.
Once Miles was replicated, it was really over as far as the science
was concerned. The rest was, and remains, politics.
Oh. Come on. Storms uses 25 data points from 4 experiments in his
Table 3, most from conference proceedings, and the rest from 1994,
and they vary by almost a factor of 2. So since Miles 1994, the
only results he uses to establish a correlation, the only results he
uses that "replicated" Miles did not pass independent peer review.
So that's an average of one result per year for the most definitive
experiment in the field.
No. Miles alone reports the results of 33 experiments. Miles alone
represents more than one result per year. The correlation approach
does not require exact replication, only replication of the
underlying effect. Variation, in fact, makes the result stronger.
These are all just standard skeptical tricks. So you don't think that
25 data points are enough. Those were from the strongest results, the
ones with the highest helium accuracy. Remember your idea, the
standard propaganda, that CF results go away when measurements become
more accurate?
This one doesn't. It gets stronger and closer to the prediction from
the hypothesis that the CF, Pons and Fleischmann reaction, is
deuterium fusing to helium. The opposite of what is predicated from a
"pathological science" assumption.
Cude holds a series of contradictory assumptions that he asserts, one
at a time, or a few at a time. It's polemic, debate tactics. Each
meme is designed to discredit cold fusion. Because that's his goal,
he doesn't care if his ideas are self-contradictory, he's just
looking for one more reader to be hooked, to swallow his bait, to
walk away with, "Yeah, how come they couldn't reproduce that experiment?"
He is promoting ignorance, working diligently to maintain it. I'd
call that positively evil.
He recycles his memes, showing no sign that contrary argument has
made any impression at all, he does not incorporate it into his next
round. It's transparent.
In prior correspondence, Cude asserted this claim that confirmation
of Miles was not published under peer review. I cited a series of the
confirming papers published under peer review in mainstream journals.
He simply ignored that and, above, repeats the assertion.
The remainder was, even for Cude, trash.
