Talk:Cold fusion/Archive 31

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Excess heat is "confirmed"

In his most recent reversion Abd states that "Well, the observations [of excess heat] are not only not challenged in the literature, they are confirmed massively." This, of course, is not true. Said observations are challenged as experimental error in multiple sources, including, but not limited to, "What is the current scientific thinking on cold fusion? Is there any possible validity to this phenomenon?" Sci.Am. October 21, 1999 - "The case for experimental error is supported by the unreliability and lack of independent replication of key results." "The NHE lab of MITI described a large series of experiments devised to check the original claims of Fleischmann and Pons. No excess heat was found," amongst others. I suggest that stating excess heat is a fact is misniforming our readers. Excess heat is measured in some experiments, perhaps, but that is considered by reliable sources to be experimental error. Hipocrite (talk) 13:52, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Hipocrite, the problem with that quote is that it is approaching ten years out-of-date. At the rate Science progresses, ten-year-old conclusions can hardly be called "current" in at least one sense of the term. Offhand, I'd guess that the actual majority current state is more like "trying to save a sinking ship" against a flood of data from the minority view. It will certainly be entertaining to see if that minority can hold the interest of the Popular Press, because only the Popular Press has the power to influence hard-core detractors into actually paying some attention to that data (when the data is everywhere, how can it be completely ignored?). SOMEONE among the "moderates" (like Robert Duncan originally was) will eventually be able to decide to put some resources into mediating an Experiment refereed by the detractors (who will know and watch out for all the pitfalls) and performed by the proponents (who will know what detailed experimental procedure is most likely to produce interesting results). I can hardly wait for the outcome! V (talk) 22:23, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Agreed in principle. It is considered by some reliable sources to be experimental error. But that seems to imply that it logically follows that it is experimental error. (due to the meaning of the word "reliable") Problem is is that many -- if not all -- of these reliable sources can't possibly know whether or not the excess heat observed in these experiments were due to excess error because they were not at the "positive" experiments, they did not examine the particular run, they did not check over the equipment, etc. etc. - there's no way for them to know whether or not those particular experiments were false positives. Unfortunately, many of them seem to like to give people the impression that they were there (or does the logic really elude them?), when, in fact, the most they can say is that the excess heat could be due to experimental error. Let's be careful not to misinform our readers in this regard, either. Kevin Baas^talk 14:41, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

For the record, APPARENT excess heat has been confirmed many times. It is difficult to get and very irreproducible. However, the calibration constant shift systematic error is fully capable of explaining these observations, so in the article, the idea that excess heat has been shown to exist should be clearly labelled as a CF advocate position, not a scientific fact. Kevin Baas points out that there is no way to know if reports of excess heat are false positives. This is completely correct, but likewise there is know way to know if they are not. The correct position to take in such a situation is to state clearly that experimentation to date has been inconclusive, not to conclude for one or the other alternative. KirkShanahan (talk) 15:51, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

If a thing is at all "irreproducable", it simply cannot be reproduced; there is no "very" or "somewhat". If you want to say "very" i think you need to say something like very "difficult to reproduce", or "not very reproducable". The "ir-" implies an absolute. You bring up "calibration constant shift systematic error" again. Why don't you just say they could have mis-calibrated it? That's a lot simpler and usually simpler is better when it comes to writting or speaking. And it's not fully capable of "explaining away" - it is only capable of explaining a corresponding amount of error when it is in fact a cause of error. And when it can be completely ruled out as a source of error it's "capability" is zilch. I don't agree that the idea that excess heat has been shown to exist should be clearly labelled as a CF advocate position. I certainly don't think it should be labelled as a scientific fact, but I certainly don't remember when we got into the habit of "clearly label"ing things as CF-advocate or CF-?antagonist? - nor do i think such a dichotomy would benefit the article -, and it is certainly a feasable position to take that there is excess heat but it is not due to fusion or any nuclear process whatever; i.e. one can hold that position and not be an advocate. One can also hold a neutral/impartial position - one can hold that the experimental evidence seems to suggest excess heat -- a purely empirical stance --, yet have no opinion or stance as to the source/cause. Finally, I do not point out "that there is no way to know if reports of excess heat are false positives." and this is in fact in-correct. There are ways to test hypthesis on the cause of the apparent excess heat by reproducing the exact experiments such that u get the positives. There are ways to apply the scientific method to determine the cause. And there are historical instances of such approaches. One has only to look at polywater to see how it is possible to conclusively demonstrate the falsity of a positive. (excuse the awkward phrasing) Kevin Baas^talk 21:45, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

No Kevin, irreproducibility and reproduciblity are not binary terms. Random error always exists in all scientific experiments, so nothing is _ever_ totally reproducible. The relative proportion of error to signal is the measure of reproducibility. Somewhere around 10-20% error, we can begin to use the term ‘irreproducible’. It is a judgement call based on what the judge is considering at the moment. ‘Very’ irreproducible means a very large % error apparent in the data.

Look it up: [1] [2] I never said they are binary terms. I said that "irreproducible" is an absoltue term, and then showed how "reproducable" can be used to show varying degrees. How could I show how reproducible can be used to show varying degrees if it is an absolute? More to the point, why would I if my aim was to show that it was an absolute; that it couldn't be used to show varying degrees? Please try not to over-generalize what i say to the point of making me out to say things that i disagree with. Kevin Baas^talk 17:37, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

The CCS has nothing to do with the experimenters ‘miscalibrating’. It’s not their fault. Specifically, the proposed mechanism for the CCS is purely chemistry. What the whole CCS package says is that the experimenters calibrate (assume perfectly for the sake of discussion) and then chemistry happens, shifting the system dynamics. That means the perfect prior calibration is now inapplicable, which in turn requires recalibration. However, the process of shutting down the experiment seems to cause the system to change again (see my 2006 pub for deails), which is a nasty, nasty experimental problem for anyone.

“And it's not fully capable of "explaining away"” – Sorry for trying to be compact. I guess I should have written that: “The CCS has the potential to induce errors of very large proportion. Thus without having published information to judge the potential magnitude of a CCS-induced error, the observation of apparent excess heat signals cannot be taken as any kind of evidence that true excess heat has been produced, by any process, not just a nuclear one. Two relevant pieces of information would be the time-to-time variation in calibration constants, and the amount of input energy that is registered by the system when the unitless part of the calibration constant that adjusts for losses is arbitrarily set to 1.” – would that have been better?

a little overdone, IMO -- but I understand that's intentional for rhetorical purposes, i.e. you know that. i thought my wording struck a nice balance between brevity and accuracy - though it was in response to what u were saying rather than a rewording of what you were saying, so the subject matter was somewhat different. anyways, i would change "cannot be taken as any kind of evidence" to something more like "cannot be taken as conclusive evidence", and in any case less absolute. It might be an indication, but other factors still need to be ruled out. but to say outright that it has absolutely no merit ("cannot be taken as any kind of evidence") is excessive and unjustified. (and remember, evidence doesn't need to always point to the right conclusion - for instance, both sides in a court case have "evidence", but one of them is inevitably wrong.) But yeah, my main qualm is that you seem to be using absolutes where things are not absolute, whether it just be in subtle nuances of phrasing or word choice (e.g. "irreproducible"). So I admit I'm being nit-picky, but I mention these things because I'm concerned that they may be an indication / symptom of a latent bias. Kevin Baas^talk 17:37, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

“I don't agree that the idea that excess heat has been shown to exist should be clearly labelled as a CF advocate position.” - Well, I don’t think it is anything but. The scientific position is that the case is unproven. We have an anomaly, yes, but proof that excess heat is real? No way. Only the CF advocates take that position, so I contend that it should be labeled such, as there is no RS for the alternative position.

Well in addition to the other arguments I've made, I think it would be original research to label it. Kevin Baas^talk 17:37, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

“Finally, I do not point out "that there is no way to know if reports of excess heat are false positives." and this is in fact in-correct. “ - previously you wrote: “there's no way for them to know whether or not those particular experiments were false positives”. If I take what I wrote and 1) contract ‘there is’, 2) insert ‘for them’, 3) replace ‘if’ with ‘whether or not’), and 4) replace ‘are’ with ‘were’, the only conceptual difference between what you wrote and what I wrote is that you wrote ‘those particular experiments’ and I wrote ‘reports of excess heat’. Now, I believe that one can correctly say” “Cold fusion researchers reported on ‘those particular experiments’ and claimed ‘excess heat’ (i.e. made ‘reports of excess heat’)”. That’s good English, right? So, I don’t get your point. Am I supposed to only ‘exactly quote’ all the time, and never reword concepts, even when I am not quoting?

you need to be more conservative in your interpretation. logical nuances abound and it's quite easy to accidently twist a person's words. people do that too often, i'm afraid, and it causes a lot of unnecessary suffering. i guess i'm saying that if you read what i write more like a question on an LSAT and less like a poem, esp. when we're talking about technical things, we might be able to understand each other better. (and more efficiently.) I try to be precise when i write, because there are a lot of things nearby that i don't mean. but that effort's wasted if the reader doesn't make a similiar effort. Kevin Baas^talk 17:37, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Though if i'm not mistaken, this misinterpretation here is a simple matter of a failure to recognize the difference between "did not" and "can not": I said they did not I did not say they can not. Kevin Baas^talk 20:07, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

“There are ways to apply the scientific method to determine the cause.” – Absolutely, I use them myself whenver needed. I’m talking about statistically designed experiments. I do my own, don’t need to consult statiticians for help. CFers never do. That’s the primary reason, when combined with their refusal to consider anything but a nuclear source, that their results are still so irreproducible 20 years on. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kirk shanahan (talk • contribs) 13:10, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I would say that not having discovered and mastered control of all of the conditions would be the primary factor in making any result difficult to reproduce. Whether those conditions be errors, unknown circumstances, or what have you. Kevin Baas^talk 17:37, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Let's see what Hipocrite is talking about. He had changed a long-standing part of the article with [3]:

An excess heat observation is based on an energy balance. Various sources of energy input and output are continuously measured. Under normal condition, the energy input can be matched to the energy output to within experimental error. In experiments such as those run by Fleischmann and Pons, a cell operating steadily at one temperature ~~transitions~~ was alleged to have transitioned to operating at a higher temperature with no increase in applied current.^[1] ~~At the higher temperature, the energy balance shows an unaccounted term. In the Fleischmann and Pons experiments, the~~ Fleischmann and Pons alleged a rate of excess heat generation ~~was in the range of~~ from 10-20% of total input. The high temperature condition ~~would~~ was alleged to last for an extended period, making the total excess heat disproportionate to what might be obtained by ordinary chemical reaction of the material contained within the cell at any one time. These high temperature phases ~~did not~~ were not found to last indefinitely and did not occur in every experiment, but in those experiments where they did occur, they would usually reoccur several times.

What's the problem with this? Well, it totally side-steps scientific tradition, and the reason why we place preferential reliance on peer-reviewed sources. The tradition is that experimental reports are accepted as more than allegations or arguments or volleys in debate, they are accepted as true testimony. The testimony is not as to underlying fact, but to observation. Fleischmann reported experimental results showing a measurement of excess heat. He could be wrong, i.e., there could certainly be experimental error. But his observations (which include his calculations) aren't "allegations," they are reports. And that is exactly how we should report them, ourselves. We do not report that there was actual, real, excess heat. We report that the experimental technique and analysis indicated excess heat. These are not "allegations," they are reports of the work done by the experimenter, which includes analysis. Now, if Fleischmann said that this was nuclear fusion, that was a conclusion and we could call that an allegation.

I reverted, with an explanation in my edit summary of (Well, the observations are not only not challenged in the literature, they are confirmed massively. The open question is interpretation; the apparent excess energy could be artifact.) It appears that Hipocrite did not understand this, from his objections above. Shanahan, a strong critic of cold fusion, above confirms this. The "observations" are massively confirmed, what Shanahan contests is the interpretation that the apparent excess heat is real, i.e., not just some kind of common problem with the experimental setup, or, if I'm reading Shanahan correctly, some unanticipated effect that causes calibration to go out of whack in a consistent way (i.e., always toward apparent excess heat, when this effect arises, not in the other direction).

I modified the language in an attempt to satisfy a possibly legitimate objection, as can be easily seen in the diff, I was simply adding a little language to make it clear that we are talking about an experimental report, an interpretation of data through a known method of analysis, as previously described, not necessarily actual excess heat.

Hipocrite removed this, with (excess heat is considered an experimental artifact. Replication failures do not make the fact that broken experiments break repeatedly meaningful - WP:SYN), substituting his own synthesis and giving undue weight, in this case, to outright rejection of the apparent excess heat findings, citing a 1999 source, the Scientific American article, apparently to justify this text (bolded):

In other experiments, however, no excess heat was discovered, and, in fact, even the heat from successful experiments was unreliable and could not be replicated independently.[ref] If higher temperatures were real, and not experimental artifact, the energy balance would show an unaccounted term. In the Fleischmann and Pons experiments, the rate of inferred excess heat generation was in the range of 10-20% of total input. The high temperature condition would last for an extended period, making the total excess heat appear to be disproportionate to what might be obtained by ordinary chemical reaction of the material contained within the cell at any one time, though this could not be reliably replicated.

He cites page 2 of the SciAm article. What does it say?

There is no widely accepted theory that might explain such effects, however. Therefore, most of the scientific community concluded that the 'Pons and Fleischmann effect' was experimental error.

Even so, several laboratories continued cold fusion experiments. Excess power remained small and sporadic. If some of the recent reports of new work can be verified, however, the years of effort might be paying off. Pons and Fleischmann now report excess powers of 100 watt (150 percent of the input power) sustained over a 30-day run. The Pons and Fleischmann technique calls for about 20 days of electrolytic conditioning, after which the cell is allowed to heat to boiling for the power run. This technique was reportedly reproduced by a separate group under G. Lonchampt, with support by the French Atomic Energy Commission and in consultation with Pons. Other groups in Japan and Italy are beginning to report excess powers in the 30 to 100 percent range. Experimental results of this magnitude are far beyond ordinary chemistry and point toward the possible existence of some new effect. It might not be 'cold fusion' at all. Whether the effect is a new kind of chemical reaction, a new pathway for nuclear reactions, or something either more surprising or more mundane will only be known after more research.

The source he cites is far from confirming his text, his text is made up to promote his personal conclusions, and he doesn't understand the text he is editing, he made mincemeat of the "energy balance unaccounted term" language. There is an unaccounted term, that's not in controversy; what has been in controversy (to the point that in 2004 the DoE panel was evenly divided on the question, half saying "convincing," the other half "not conclusive," which, by the way, isn't "rejected.") is whether or not there is real excess heat.

Note that since the 1999 SciAm report (which had another, more skeptical section), there has been a lot of work, and reproducibility is apparently way up. I'll pull up the reference from prior Talk here. See, folks, I put my research notes in Talk, I share them, and all this research into sources is dedicated to improving the article, in the end. There are also techniques that produce steady heat ("reliable,") and they've apparently been confirmed (I'm thinking of Arata in Japan, with gas-loaded nanoparticle palladium deuteride, no electrolysis energy put in to complicate things, published in Japanese peer-reviewed physics journals, and McKubre's confirmation, not sure about publication of that.) --Abd (talk) 01:15, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Reproducibility of "cold fusion" experiments.

The issue of reproducibility in cold fusion experiments is a complex one. The first difficulty is that no clear and consistent definition of reproducibility is used. If the cold fusion researchers are correct, what Storms calls the Nuclear Active Environment, or NAE, is difficult to form, and, for classic Pons-Fleischmann electrolytic cells, forms chaotically, and under conditions which are still poorly understood. So researchers may take what seems to be the same exact experiment, same everything as far as they know, and come up with different results. There are many phenomena in nature where this kind of result may be found. Simple example: toss a coin, repeatedly, and record the results. You may think that you toss every coin with the same starting conditions, it's even the same coin, but unless you control all the variables with insane accuracy, you are quite likely in a series of ten tosses, to come up with a range of results. If you manage to control the coin toss and catch very precisely, you might still come up with one set of results being "heads confirmed," and another group comes up with another set, "tails confirmed." Depending, of course, on the exact initial condition of the coin. Nevertheless, with statistical analysis you could show a probable frequency for the results, and many such studies would show confirmation of the frequency, not of the specific results for each study.

However, there are other techniques that apparently create an NAE, more reliably, but are these "replications"? If we look at the field in general, and ask, is there confirmation of the concept that excess energy is possible? (To take one result.) The answer is yes; but what is common is that the experiments vary in approach. One of the reasons is that researchers are searching for ways to improve reliability as well as to increase excess energy, questions of utmost importance for possible ultimate applications, and someone finding such a technique will be, to put it bluntly, rich. Whereas reproducing the work of someone else, years before, who got, say, 35% of cells to produce excess heat, and that was, at the time, considered inadequate, and the absolute amount of energy generated of no commercial interest, and a reproduction of the old result is likely to be rejected for publication (after all, it's the same-old, same-old), is boring and not likely to attract the serious effort required, given that there isn't funding for this. Complicating this is the fact that the U.S. Patent Office will reject patents, so researchers who do find a technique to increase reliability and energy output are highly motivated to keep it as a trade secret until they can develop into a product. Which, of course, has become much more difficult because various research groups may not be sharing successes! One of the early complications with Fleischmann's work, which is pretty well documented, is that his group didn't disclose exact techniques, on the advice, apparently, of their lawyers.

However, there is a document which examines publications in the field, put together by Jed Rothwell of lenr-canr.org, it's at http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf. By its nature, the information in this document is verifiable. I'm not proposing the document as a source for our article, but for review by those editors who are willing to take a neutral view of the subject. It shows some reason to suspect the common claim that negative papers outweigh positive ones in this field, and it shows an increase in publication frequency after 2004 or 2005, pretty clearly a nadir. (see p. 4 for the Britz bibliography chart and p. 5 for the lenr-canr.org chart). It should be known that Britz is skeptical about cold fusion, and, of course, Rothwell is quite sure cold fusion is real. I am most interested, for our purposes here, in an examination of the most recent publications in peer-reviewed journals, academic publications, and popular media. The graph on p. 11 shows publication by year of positive and negative results, as classified by Britz. Rothwell, later, challenges some of the interpretations, giving some specifics. In 1989, negative publications outweighed positive, roughly 83:46 (reading off the graph). Remember, by the end of 1989, the physics community was shouting "junk science." For 1990, the figure was about 76:75. And for every year after that, positive papers greatly outnumbered negative, there really are only a handful of negative papers after 1996. After 2005, there appear to be no negative papers.

Now, as to recent results, I recommend a review of HE Jing-tang, Nuclear fusion inside condense matters, a review article, from Front. Phys. China (2007) 1: 96―102. The journal and the paper were discussed at some length above, see Talk:Cold_fusion/Archive_24#Holy_Grail_Found.3F_--_2007_Review_article. Regardless of that discussion, this is reliable source, coming from a hot fusion researcher at a major fusion research group in China. In his section on "Reproducibility of cold fusion," he writes that In the process of electrolysis of heavy water using Pd as the cathode and Pt as the anode, if the following two conditions are satisfied spontaneously, excess energy will be produced. And then he gives the conditions:

D/Pd ratio larger than 0.88
The current density of the electrolysis is larger than 280 mA/cm2

In his table on p. 98, looking at excess heat, he gives results for groups that have done a total of 14,720 experiments, and he reports results for five years ago of 45% average reproducibility. For the last year before closing his paper, he reports average reproducibility of 83%, and he shows four research groups, in Japan, Romania, the United States, and Russia, as reporting 100% reproducibility. Garwin used to say that when there was 50% reproducibility, he'd be satisfied. He now wants two cups of tea brewed, which, of course, has nothing to do with the science. We don't reject muon-catalyzed fusion because you can't brew tea with it. The lowest reported reproducibility in the previous year was 50%, from an Italian group which we can speculate, from other data provided, has the least experience with cold fusion.

While I regret that this paper didn't provide detail on the sources involved, and is ambiguous in certain respects, this is of higher quality than any popular media source, and with media sources, we generally wouldn't have that kind of detail either. I am aware of no recent academic publications which negate the claim of excess heat. If we read the 2004 DoE review, and especially if we read the individual reviewer papers (they are available on both lenr-canr.org and newenergytimes.com), we can see that, then, there was very substantial opinion (fifty-fifty among the reviewers) that evidence for excess heat was "convincing." The other reviewers were less convinced, to be sure, but not entirely negative. What if the DoE panel had been looking at recent results, instead of older ones? In any case, the He Jing-tang paper is a secondary source, published in a peer-reviewed journal, which would support a much stronger statement in the article than anyone has attempted to place in it, to my knowledge. And against this source is what?

There are those who have been noting that Wikipedia is not the place to right great wrongs, and I agree. However, if we follow WP:RS without bias, we'd have to conclude that, on a matter of scientific research, the most reliable sources almost entirely favor cold fusion, because the "mainstream," whatever they are, abandoned the field. That could be unfair, but tough. If they aren't publishing, they don't exist, would be a hard-line view. However, my own opinion is that we don't reject sources of lower quality, we report them with caution. At this point, there isn't any real controversy over the claim that "most scientists" are of the opinion that cold fusion is bogus. But that view isn't based on current publications, it's based on very old work. Only in 1989 did the negative publications truly outnumber the positive ones, every year after that, positive publications outweighed them.

And, please remember, in 1989 hardly anyone knew how to get the damn experiment to work, Fleischmann's work came to a screeching halt for a while when their original supply of palladium ran out, until it was found how to process the stuff to get it to work. They'd been lucky, the first time, as were other research groups that reported positive results. Absence of proof is not proof of absence, it's a lesson too easily forgotten.

Further, a lot of the original negative work was reporting that there wasn't neutron radiation. And we now know that there isn't neutron radiation at anything like the expected levels, whatever there is, it's way down; enough above background to be quite sure that it's real (now, with the SPAWAR group results, which are confirming earlier results done with other techniques), but it has practically nothing to do with cold fusion; as Mosier-Boss considers likely, it's hot fusion, at very low levels, resulting from the energy release of cold fusion. 24 MeV alpha particles can do that!

He Jing-Tang also cites Takahashi, by the way, about the Be-8 hypothesis. Coming soon to an article near you. --Abd (talk) 19:05, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd, this is not what we should do in the article because a) your analysis is based on the numbers run by Jed Rothwell, who is not a reliable source and has a huge POV here b) your conclusions about mainstream sources go against what WP:PARITY says c) you know that Storms is a fringe non-reliable source, as discussed here d) you already tried to introduce He Jing-tang's article in Frontiers of Physics in China by raising the issue here, here and it was explained to you how it was a non-notable new journal of unknown reliability, but you still keep raising the issue regularly.

Your edits are getting increasingly non-helpful as you keep raising the same discarded issues again and again and adding more issues along the way until it all becomes a huge mess that you refuse to untangle. You are now very clearly going into naked fringe POV pushing and tendentious editing. Consider this a formal warning to stop this behaviour. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:38, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Basically, Enric, because I'm implying an intention to follow WP:RS and not a distorted local consensus cobbed together by a phony poll (i.e., a poll which asked leading questions asking for judgments based on inadequate information and inadequate prior discussion), I'm being "non-helpful" and the issues have been "discarded"? No, I don't think you understand dispute resolution. There is enough support here to assert edits; I've been abstaining from that because it's obvious that there are several involved editors willing to edit war, and I was occupied with RfC and ArbComm, where many of the same editors, including yourself, were pushing for me to be banned. I wasn't. ArbComm didn't even think it worthy of mention. That doesn't mean it's over, Enric, that means it's about to begin. A group of editors at this article, and to some extent elsewhere, are blatantly violating Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science. That can't be allowed to stand. I have a suggestion, Enric. Take a look at who preceded you, take a look at whom you are supporting and who is supporting you. And notice the road they are going down, and where it led. ScienceApologist was topic-banned from anything to do with Fringe science, and then Hipocrite assisted him in creating such disruption over it, trying to discredit anyone who dared to enforce the topic ban, that SA was given a lengthy block. SA was highly defended. Are you ready for this? Think about it. You have been able to compromise in the past. You are now working with take-no-prisoners editors who don't compromise. Some of that could fall on your head. Since you have been so kind as to warn me, I'll return the favor on your Talk page, just so it's clear. --Abd (talk) 00:56, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

As to the Rothwell document, it's essentially a collection of lists with some simple verifiable analysis. Against this you have? What I know of are old statements that were made with no actual statistics, they were mere opinions, which have then been repeated over and over. In particular, the chart of positive/negative/undecided publications is simply a graphical presentation of data from Britz. I'm not suggesting that we put this into the article! -- but it is surely appropriate for our consideration here, when we need to make considerations of due weight. Numbers of peer-reviewed publications are indicators of due weight. Britz isn't a "cold fusioneer," according to Rothwell, he's one of the few electrochemists who is still skeptical. (Read the paper, you'll see, Rothwell tears into Britz a bit, even though I know that they extensively cooperate in maintaining their bibliographies.) Rothwell claims that some of what Britz presents as "undecided" were positive, but the graph doesn't reflect those judgments. --Abd (talk) 01:57, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

You mean that *I* might get topic banned from fringe science topics if I pursue this? Not *you*? Seriously? That's... so out of touch with reality.... Do you *really* think that *I* might get topic banned from this page?

About the content. You are still asking us to use an unreliable biased source from Jed Rothwell, in his analysis of an unpublished compilation of papers by Britz in his personal page. And against all the better sources saying that the evidence for cold fusion is unsufficient and flawed. And all because of your personal opinion that the evidence is good (you keep cherrypicking the DOE 2004 by forgetting to take into account that "Most reviewers, including those who accepted the evidence and those who did not, stated that the effects are not repeatable, the magnitude of the effect has not increased in over a decade of work, and that many of the reported experiments were not well documented."), and without taking into account the many discussions here about most if not all of the publications not being good-quality or notable physics or chemics journals, included the one where Moussier-Boss published. And you keep trying to use fringe sources because mainstream no longer publishes about it. And you didn't want to sue media articles when they were negative, but then you had no trouble using the CBS 60 minutes positive coverage. And you said that we shouldn't use some certain negative sources because they used the word "background" without defining but you had no problem citing the positive Storms source who made the same thing. And you kept throwing things like "Mr. or Ms. Mainstream" [4], when in that same page I had gathered already enough RS to show what mainstream thinks [5], not to mention the RS in the section above about how mainstream sources plainly stating that cold fusion is similar to N-rays and polywater. Plain no, this has gone too far. Stop the fringe pushing right now and start acknowledging consensus when it goes against you. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:33, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

How ArbComm would deal with an AE request on this is unclear. But to imagine oneself as above reproach is naive. I'll note that Enric Naval has been calling for my topic ban for some time. "Cherry-picking"? That's the conclusions of the report, where the science is reviewed! The Rothwell source is documented, everything in it is verifiable, except for his stated opinions. These are bibliographies and bibliographic analysis, Enric, and against this, for the claims you make about the state of the science, what, exactly, do you have? "Most reviewers stated that the effects are not repeatable." You have to know some science to know what that means. The effects -- until quite recently, after the 2004 review -- weren't repeatable, for the most part. You'd run twenty cells and see a few with excess heat. However, if you look at only the cells with excess heat, other effects could be seen, in association, correlated. Not in the cells without excess heat. That's a form of repeatability, actually a strong one, and it seems that the 2004 DoE review largely neglected that, but still came up with some substantial support for this being real science, worthy of investigation. You are incorrect about using media coverage, rather, there is an issue with media coverage where clearly what is being said is simply regurgitation of old media coverage. The "couldn't be replicated" claim found in some of the media coverage is a sign of that. That's an old claim that has been repeated over and over. Enric, I'm making substantive arguments and it seems you are stuck. Consider the N-rays and polywater claims. Yes, that's been said. In peer-reviewed reliable source? When? Is it still relevant? But have I ever removed reliably sourced and properly attributed opinion like that?

Absolutely, you've been cooperating with the agenda of those who would exclude all positive information about cold fusion, and, yes, that could result in a topic ban. Just as my own work could result in a topic ban; some of it depends on the politics of the moment. However, some editors, including yourself, tried hard to get ArbComm to sanction me or at least criticize me for POV-pushing here, and they failed. That time. They are still trying. Can't say what will happen if it goes back. As it might, if we can't resolve this at a lower level. How about starting to seriously work on that?

What I see on this article isn't consensus, it's lack of consensus. You can gather together, sometimes, a group of editors to support an opinion, and the names are quite familiar. Remember, these are almost all in favor of what JzG was doing, and at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/JzG 3, two-thirds of the editors were more or less screaming for my head. Was that consensus? No, it was a concentration of interested and largely involved editors. The polls above were a travesty of process, and they certainly don't show the consensus you and Hipocrite have claimed. We will, I assume, do some real RfCs here. Watch and see how it's done, Enric, you might learn something.

Arrogant? Perhaps. But I do have well over thirty years of experience with consensus process. There never was a scientific consensus on cold fusion, there was a popular consensus. Lack of proof was widely considered proof of lack. The situation was very, very different with N-rays and polywater, there were very strong refutations and then the fields died. Yes, people sometimes are die-hards. Good thing, actually, but cold fusion has outlasted that. The biggest problem was the loss of funding, institutional support, and the radical deprivation of graduate students to assist in the research; Simon documents this in Undead Science: graduate students were threatened with career loss if they helped cold fusion research. That's reliable source, Enric. One of the editors here claimed to me that if he let it be known that he was in any way involved with writing about cold fusion, there would go his career. And he's a skeptic. Why isn't this history in the article? Do you have any interest in this side of the story? Or are you only only interested in one side? If you are only interested in one side, and you have worked on this article for a long time, yes, that is the kind of thing that could lead to a topic ban. I'd consider that unfortunate. --Abd (talk) 14:47, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

On Improving the Article

Despite certain claims made by Hipocrite, the previous section did have a few things in it about improving the article. For example, I quote something I wrote to Hipocrite:

"... it is about Wikipedia editors acting as if Generally Reliable Authority is identical to Always Reliable Authority, and that only the things they say can be included in articles here. It will seldom hurt an article to include off-the-wall claims that are marked as claims. --and inclusions of such, perhaps in their own section, could make an article more interesting to casual readers. That's because all sorts of History are about people, not just facts, and most people typically find the foibles of other people to be interesting. Is there no guideline anywhere about that? That is, is Wikipedia supposed to be "dry" or "interesting"? Or, from another angle, consider the cliche that "knowledge is power", and its logical corollary that ignorance is slavery. Thus those who would limit the spread of knowledge, in whatever manner, are in effect claiming some kind of right to have power over those who they would keep uninformed. It is therefore extremely important, in an encyclopedia, to include as much relevant data as possible. For example (I haven't looked yet as I write this), articles on Moon Landings can include claims/data/logic by those who say the events were staged and not real--and counter-logic can be included, too. The readers, of course, should be free to make up their own minds --and they should have the data that allows them to do it. Does Alexander of Macedon really deserve to be called "Great" when his actions appear to have consisted largely of large-scale theft of other rulers' territories? Winners may write the history books, but an encyclopedia (I haven't looked at that article either) doesn't have to restrict itself to the POV of the winners. I'm still waiting to hear about somebody on a witness stand, having sworn to tell the whole truth, object to the Judge that one of the attorneys is interfering with his/her ability to fulfill that oath. Well, with respect to CF, the "whole truth" includes a lot of claims that are not Officially Reliably Sourced. You do not deny that fact, do you? Yet your actions appear to be describe-able as attempts to suppress parts of that whole truth. Why?"

Hipocrite failed to reply to my question at the end of that, tsk, tsk. If Hipocrite was really interested in improving the article, instead of skewing it one way or another, an answer to my question should have been posted.

Then there is Kirk Shanahan wanting us to believe that a small amount of chemical heat from hydrogen-oxygen recombination can throw off a calorimeter designed to register lots more than a "small amount" of heat, and throw its calibration off to the extent that if it measures a lot of heat while an electrolysis cell boils its electrolyte away and melts one of its electrodes, we have to pretend it didn't actually happen; that it was all an illusion associated with a temporarily uncalibrated calorimeter. I agree that that speculation should be in the article, for entertainment purposes if nothing else! I disagree on giving it any more weight than claims that hydrinos can explain cold fusion. V (talk) 15:24, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

More ad hominem from V. I will post a reply on my Talk page immediately. KirkShanahan (talk) 15:54, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

( Partly because his talk page does not have a reply there yet)... More bad logic by Shanahan. My paragraph above contains a description of the CCS hypothesis, admittedly written to blatantly expose its most fundamental flaw (excess heat can possibly be detected by means other than a calorimeter). Since CCS is "pushed" and defended by Shanahan, there is nothing faulty in writing about "Kirk Shanahan wanting us to believe" it. NOR is there an inherent fault in, generically, Person A wanting Person B to believe something-or-other (sometimes that desire is even vitally important, like when Person A discovers the house they are in to be on fire). But somehow Shanahan has concluded that my statement somehow describes a flaw in Shanahan; by definition the statement "More ad hominem from V" can only be true if my statement describes a flaw in Shanahan. WELL, WHERE IS THAT DESCRIPTION??? I'm fully aware that THIS paragraph is not properly relevant to immediately improving the CF article, but I'm also aware that the only way to discourage people from injecting wildly flawed remarks like the one in the immediately-previous paragraph...the only way to get them to stop is to expose the wild flaw as publicly as possible. I explain my stance in more detail in the "ways and means" section near the bottom of my own talk page. And after they stop, then this page will be improved thereby (along with, in the longer run, the main article) --which means this paragraph (and any others like it in the future) might not be such a waste, after all. V (talk) 19:28, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, your description of the CCS is woefully inadequate. It is the fact that I have said this to you many times (now repeated on my Talk page, again...) that brands you clearly as a fanatic who repeats what he reads/is told by the CF advocates, and doesn't think for himself, i.e. a fanatic. Kirk shanahan (talk) 19:54, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Tsk, tsk, look who's really doing the "ad hominem" thing, instead of answering my question about where **I** supposedly did the ad hominem thing. So, your ad hominem statement is another obvious example of bad logic presented by you, Kirk (read the article to see why). Care to attempt it yet again? V (talk) 21:50, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Ummm...'check my Talk page' - What is it about that you can't understand. Especially note the answer to Abd I posted in response to his 'chastisement'. Why is it you can't focus on improving the article here? (Note to others: the current CF article has no significant description of the mainline reasons why 'CF' is not nuclear. I would think an interested reader hitting that page would like to know that. I came here to add such, and have been repeatedly blocked (note that I don't add edits unless there is consensus first, so the 'blocking' has occured primarily on the Talk pages. However my original edits of Sept. 17, 2008 and before were block deleted by Pcarbonn)). Kirk shanahan (talk) 11:46, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I do not object at all, to there being a section in the article about non-nuclear explanations for the evidence. I might note, though, that your POV is showing, in your description above, "mainline reasons why 'CF' is not nuclear", since the phrase "is not" presumes itself to be fact, when that is not known to be fact. Regarding your talk page (haven't yet studied the stuff that's now there), I am remembering that some time ago Abd asked you to write an "idiot's guide to CCS", and have been wondering where that is, just so I can see how different it is from the impression I already have of it. The longer you take to write it, the more I'm going to think I understand it well enough. For example, I'm encouraged by your description above, "woefully inadequate" of my description above that, simply because you did not say outright I was wrong (nor in what way I was wrong). V (talk) 13:30, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

OK, outright: You are wrong. Actually, that's difficult to say since you have never responded to the standard scientifc challenge I issued to any of you to prove you understood any of my comments by repeating back what I was trying to get across and then by discussing the implications of that. Abd started but fizzled out. You haven't even tried. What you write implies strongly that you have no understanding of what I am trying to say (and get into the article somewhere). Prove I am wrong by successfully answering my challenge and I will be happy to recant my assessment of you.

P.S. For teh record, rspond to my challenge on my talk page, not here. Kirk shanahan (talk) 14:12, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I have written the "idiot's guide" several time here and on my Talk page. You (and Abd) didn't understand it.

I don't recall ever seeing something described as an idiot's guide to CCS. And if Abd saw one and didn't understand it, then I would tend to think that you didn't describe it well enough; it wasn't written for the really uninformed person (as little as one word of specialists' jargon can lead to misunderstanding). Fixing that could mean going so far as to define all terms used, plus defining all the key terms in those definitions, just for starters. For Examples of How To Do It Right, read lots of nonfiction by Isaac Asimov. V (talk) 17:01, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I have a POV. It is a 'mainline scientist' POV. It needs to be in the article for balance. I have no intention of contributing to a pro-CF POV. BUT, I DO NOT BLOCK SUCH AN ADDITION TO THE ARTICLE. Pcarbonn blocked my additions. I tried to gain consensus on this page. He never agreed. Others supported him. He was then banned. Next, up pops V and Abd to take his place (with kevin Baas chipping in through all ot this). I do not 'POV-push' as you imply by bringing this up (another indirect ad hominem) since I FREELY ALLOW THE ALTERNATE POSITION TO BE EXPRESSED. Who else do you know who will defend my CCS proposal and the deceased Brian Clarke's work? The mainline gave up on the field years ago, they usually don't care. It is only because I work in this field that I do. If you want mainline thought in the article for balance, I am it. But, it is obvious from your vehement objections to everything I write, that you don't. Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:54, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

You may have misinterpreted what I wrote above about POV. Ideas and facts associated with a particular POV are completely allowed, but the wording used to describe them needs to be non-POV in any place where ideas and facts are in contention. That means one cannot describe an idea in terms that assume the idea is True, when the idea is not certainly known to be true. Also, it helps if the idea makes logical sense. So far, from your descriptions of CCS that I've read, it does not, as I've pointed out here and there. But it's been a while since the last time I examined it; perhaps your descriptions have improved. We shall see.... V (talk) 17:01, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't respond to people who ask me why I'm beating my wife ("Yet your actions appear to be describe-able as attempts to suppress parts of that whole truth. Why?") The "Whole Truth" for the purposes of Wikipedia includes only claims in Reliable Sources. Wikipedia cannot solve the GREAT WRONG that mainstream science has perpetuated on Cold Fusion. You'll have to get it published elsewhere. Hipocrite (talk) 19:57, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

"The "Whole Truth" for the purposes of Wikipedia includes only claims in Reliable Sources." --that is a false statement, as proved by the existence of articles on completely fictitious things such as Star Wars, Dracula, etc. The WP:Verify rules are what allows those articles to exist. And in a contentious science-oriented article, while RS may be preferred, there is no rationale to give it a monopoly. For a less extreme example, consider the high temperature superconductor article --there is no argument about the existence of that phenomenon, but there is plenty of speculation as to how it happens, even plenty of RS speculation. As soon as one of those guesses emerges from the debate as the "winner", all the others, despite the fact that they are currently RS, will have to be "demoted" at the least. Should they be deleted as irrelevant, and the winner be given a monopoly on the article? Why? The presence of those other ideas would stand as a testament to the creativity exhibited in tackling the problem; there will be historical value there.

In this article the primary subject has the major problem that the evidence, if it is to be regarded as real, needs to be explained in a way that appears to require some significant modifications or additions to certain well-verified facts. And the initial difficulty in replicating the original experiments did not help at all. So years have gone by while the experimenters kept trying different things, to isolate relevant variables. According to them, in non-RS publications of course, they can now fairly frequently replicate the original experiments. And according to one actual RS source, neutrons have been detected above the natural background level. Eventually that claim will be either verified or not-verified. For the moment, there is a good logical reason to include a fair amount of non-RS stuff in the article: There is currently no RS regarding neutrons-not-verified, and non-RS is the only place to find proposed explanations for HOW (detailed "how", not just "Duh, fusion did it") those RS-reported neutrons happened to appear during certain CF experiments. In other words, it would be a lie to say, in effect, by restricting the article to RS-only, "There is no detailed explanation for those neutrons." It is certainly true that there is no agreed-upon explanation, even in the non-RS literature. Very equivalent, that, to the high-temperature-superconductivity guesses.... V (talk) 21:50, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

If a claim is not made in reliable sources it cannot be used in Wikipedia. Period. End of discussion. Hipocrite (talk) 22:24, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Then you "lose" because speculations, such as detailed suppositions regarding how CF could happen, are not identical to claims, and therefore RS is not required for speculations, exactly as RS is not required for pure fiction. Only verifiability-of-publication is required, regarding that aspect of this field. V (talk) 13:06, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

No, I'm sorry, that's not how wikipedia works. Hipocrite (talk) 13:08, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Prove it. And just to spice things up, I might mention Chain Reaction (film), a movie which seems to have a variety of a cold fusion reactor in it. Verifiable/fictional stuff, that. (That article mentions bubble fusion, but the phrase never actually is used in the movie, leaving the audience to wonder.) How many articles are there in Wikipedia that talk about one aspect of science fiction or another? Anyone who wants to claim that "cold fusion" is fictitious science should be willing to accept non-RS stuff in the article. V (talk) 13:34, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

WP:V is a policy, which reads "Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source." I have no idea why you are talking about sourced information in fiction articles. Perhaps you should broaden your editing from just Cold Fusion to something else, also, to understand how Wikipedia works. Hipocrite (talk) 13:53, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

It is exactly because you have no idea why Wikipedia allows articles about fictional things, that you fail to understand my argument. The definition of "reliable" is the key point of contention here. If I have a reprint of "Frankenstein" (note the novel is in public domain) published by somebody selling old-fashioned computer printouts, and I quote text from it (in that article), will you automatically assume that the quoted text does not actually exist in any other editions, such as a reprint published by a major publisher? It seems to me that if you can grab a random copy from any publisher, and find the quoted text, then my computer-printout copy qualifies just as much as a "reliable" source for quotes, as any other copy. Or, how about the "reliability" of publishers like "New Energy Times" and "Infinite Energy", in publishing CF articles? You cannot deny that they are reliably publishing, when new issues become available at regular intervals, and they have been doing that for years. You cannot even deny that they can be relied on to publish artices about CF. And will those CF articles reliably contain claims about the subject??? Almost certainly!!! Therefore, if this Wikipedia article contains a claim, which is described in the article as being a claim, and it is easy to verify that that claim was indeed published in a source that can be relied upon to publish claims, then just exactly what is your problem about including it in the article???? V (talk) 16:21, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Our policy on reliable sources is clear. What part of "Extremist and fringe sources" and "Self-published sources" from WP:RS are you having a hard time grasping? Hipocrite (talk) 16:33, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Apparently WP:RS#Overview and WP:RS#Scholarship.LeadSongDog come howl 16:38, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, I see this: "How reliable a source is depends on context." Both of you know full well the context here is controversial. That means if the average highly educated CF-detractor eventually turns out to be wrong, the average highly educated CF-detractor suddenly becomes, by definition, an unreliable source on this subject. The mere fact that there is controversy over interpreting the data here means that nobody is truly the sort of Reliable Source you are talking about. Especially since the average "RS" in this field has, apparently, ever since the initial failures to reproduce excess heat, has turned a blind eye to improvements in experimental technique, that are claimed to more-reliably produce excess heat. When has ignorance ever been a valid Reliable Source???

Next, I see this: "if an article topic has no reliable sources, Wikipedia should not have an article on it." This does not explain why there are many thousands of articles on fictional things, which have no sources other than their original publications, for example Star Trek (film), which just came out and there has been no time for any ordinary/traditional RS material to have been published on it. So, the fact that such articles are quite-well allowed/tolerated (especially in light of the "Scholarship" section) means that there is leeway in interpreting the Rules -- and any claims by you to the contrary can be completely ignored!

Next, in the "Overview" section is this: "The following specific examples ... are not intended to be exhaustive. Proper sourcing always depends on context; common sense and editorial judgment are an indispensable part of the process." WHERE IS YOUR COMMON SENSE, HERE? A while back I wrote this: "Well, with respect to CF, the "whole truth" includes a lot of claims that are not Officially Reliably Sourced. You do not deny that fact, do you?" How do you expect to get away with claiming that Sources who are Reliable on other subjects are also Reliable on this one, when evidence is accumulating against the things they concluded more than a decade ago, and all they have done since is pretend that that evidence does not exist???

Just to spell out more completely what I'm talking about, Hipocrite, while I care not that you have chosen a handle that reminds one of double standards, I do care about the application of double standards toward Wikipedia articles. So I challenge you and LeadSongDog and anyone else who wants to insist that RS must strictly apply to this article ...I challenge you to see how far you really get, trying to strictly apply it to ALL the other articles in this encyclopedia. Because if you can't do it everywhere in Wikipedia, you have no basis to insist upon doing it here. V (talk) 13:10, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

So, untill we fix every other article on the encyclopedia, we can't fix this one? Hipocrite (talk) 13:13, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

PS - [6]. Hipocrite (talk) 13:26, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Straw man argument. He's saying that the same RS standards apply here as elsewhere. Otherwise, V is barking up the wrong tree, a bit. The problem isn't WP:RS, i.e., that "the whole truth" isn't found in RS, the problem is biased and POV-pushing application of the standards. We should and we must follow WP:V at all times; WP:RS is a documented way of doing that; other ways do exist, but they depend on consensus. --Abd (talk) 13:31, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

(Heh, and now to bring up the definition of "fix", as used in the classic phrase, "to fix the race"....) No, Hipocrite, I challenged you to see how far you get, trying to do that. I fully expect you to fail, for example, to be able to enforce a deletion of the article about the new Star Trek (film), since there is no scholarly RS for it anywhere, yet (although I admit I could be wrong about that finicky detail, given the nature of the Internet and the popularity of that particular fictional universe). Or, you would likely fail to enforce deletion of News articles on the front page of this site. I'm sure that with very little research quite a few articles could be identified, about fictional things, for which there is no Official Reliable Source other than the original publication of a fictional work. They exist for a reason, in spite of the RS rules. "Common sense" likely has something to do with that reason. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, you only need to fail just once, to strictly apply the RS rules to another article, to lose any right to strictly enforce them here. V (talk) 13:36, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd, you are wrong about what Objectivist is stating - he has now said multiple times that it's ok to use unreliable sources in articles about Star Trek films (this, of course, is wrong), and that it's thus ok to use unreliable sources here. The article on the Star Trek film is reliably sourced to the following sources - the British Board of Film Classification, Entertainment Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, The Courier-Mail, MTV, the Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, IGN, Rotten Tomatoes, and scores of other reliable sources. That there are problems in the Star Trek article are undeniable. That I have any interest in fixing them is fabrication. Am I required to fix every article before I fix this one? I think not. Hipocrite (talk) 13:43, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Hipocrite, in what way are all of those publications more "reliable" than Infinite Energy or New Energy Times? V (talk) 13:52, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

That's easy! WP:V "Articles should be based upon reliable, third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy." "Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for fact-checking. Such sources include websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist, or promotional in nature, or which rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions. Questionable sources should only be used as sources of material on themselves, especially in articles about themselves. Questionable sources are generally unsuitable as a basis for citing contentious claims about third parties." "Certain red flags should prompt editors to examine the sources for a given claim: 1. surprising or apparently important claims not covered by mainstream sources ... 3. claims that are contradicted by the prevailing view within the relevant community, or which would significantly alter mainstream assumptions, especially in science, medicine, history, politics, and biographies of living persons. This is especially true when proponents consider that there is a conspiracy to silence them." Hipocrite (talk) 14:04, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Nice try, but there are two flaws. The first is simple; the list of publications referenced in the Star Trek article are all second-party, not third-party. Likewise are NET and IE second-party publications. The second flaw relates to "reputation for fact-checking and accuracy" --who decides what a reputation should be? Consider the evidence that the mainstream science publications have mostly ignored information published in IE and NET --how can those mainstream publications claim that NET and IE are not checking the data (and therefore are unreliable) when they themselves are not checking the data? (Please remember that that "CF" is one particular interpretation of the data about excess heat; the data deserves examination regardless of whatever interpretations are applied to it.) V (talk) 14:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

{unindent}The mainstream journals have not ignored cold fusion. As a reviewer for some of these journals, I have reviewed several submissions in recent years. I have found in all cases that they are technically inadequate. Obviously, other reviewers have agreed with me, because they don't get publshed until they hit IE and NET, and I am one reviewer out of 2 (if the other agrees with me) or 3 (if not). Also, we have the Goodstein reference in the CF article that states that CFers do not conduct critical reviews of collegues work. This negates the purpose of peer-review. So, if submitted papers are rejected by mainlne journals as inadequate, and are then published unchanged in IE or NET, what does this say about the 'fact-checking' that goes on at IE and NET?

Thank you; that's more than I expected to see, having read elsewhere about so many mainstream publications not even bothering to send submissions on this subject out for peer-review. And that is the mental place from which I wrote what I wrote above. On the other hand, what of papers by some of the acknowledged leaders in the field, such as Michael McKubre? (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54964-2004Nov16?language=printer) I'm such they wouldn't say he was among the best if his work was consistently "inadequate". If you haven't happened to have seen any of his preprint papers, what might you say about the paucity of his publications on this subject in the mainstream? V (talk) 19:11, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

The idea that journals reject CF papers out of hand is overblown by the CF advocates. All journals have topic definitions, and CF usually doesn't fit there. Then there was the position the nature editor took way back, which was also overblown, even if reasonable. What the CFers usually say is that their submissions are rejected for bad reasons, which may be true given the mainstream gave up on CF a long time ago.

Do you realize that McKubre may have published less in peer reviewed journals that I have? He has workd in the field since the beginning, he has 'published' via ICCF proceedings and the like. I know he published 1 paper in '93 that I studied, but I can't think of any more off the top of my head, I'll have to check into it. In any case, why would anyone ever use a newspaper's assessment of who is the 'best' in a field. The reporters ask the CFers "Who should I talk to, who is the best in the field?", and they get some names. Of those McKubre is definitely the smoothest. You figure out the rest. Kirk shanahan (talk) 20:15, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I think I have seen McKubre described in more than one place as one of the best researchers in the field. Even if other workers had been asked, and had given his name, it would be reasonable to think those workers had plenty of names from which to choose, so picking him must mean something. So, if he actually is a good researcher, then it should logically follow that seldom would a paper he submits to an appropriate mainstream journal get rejected for being "inadequate". So all I'm saying is that the paucity of papers published by him (OR by any equivalently competent CF researcher; I would think there should be more than just one among hundreds worldwide) in the mainstream might be evidence of mainstream bias against anything/everything coming from CF researchers. I half-suspect that SpringerLink published that paper about CR-39 partly because it was so out-of-the-ordinary, for the field, and partly because evidence for neutrons has been requested by mainstream physicists since 1989 (how could they refuse to publish what they had been asking for?). V (talk) 21:57, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

One interesting reverse case is the paper by Szpak, Mosier-Boss, Miles and Fleischmann in TA 2005 that I wrote a comment on. That paper was originally 'published' at part of an ICCF Proceedings. Possibly due to reviewer comments, possibly due to the authors knowing they needed 'new' material to satisfy the standard requirement that a submission be new information, they added a section that discussed errors in calorimetry. It was in that section that they denigrated my CCS propsal based on my email to a collegue of theirs (a communication that I was not informed would be used as a reference in a publication). Clearly, the TA reviewers or editors (or indirectly via submission requirements) 'checked the facts' by requiring an attempt at reviewing the potential errors of the technique.Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:09, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

And as you know I would tend to denigrate the idea too, mostly for these two major reasons: (1) Calorimetry equipment has been used reliably for many decades, and only now this particular misbehavior manifests? (2) In control experiments using ordinary water, not heavy water, the excess heat basically does not happen, certainly nothing comparable to the heat measured when deuterium is used. Why would CCS occur only in the heavy water experiments and not in the light water experiments, when that is the only difference between them? V (talk) 19:11, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Re: (1) - Because never before had the particular experimental configuration been used. The heat redistribution causing the CCS is a unique feature of the F&P cells. That's why Storms should not lump them together (open and closed) with the other types of calorimetric data in his Table in his book. I don't know why the other types of apparati might have a CCS, I haven't studied them. But I know a CCS should be checked for, and isn't.

I wasn't clear above. The CCS, if caused by my proposed mechanism, is a unique ... Kirk shanahan (talk) 20:05, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I can't properly respond to that until I have more information (requested at your talk page). V (talk) 21:57, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Re: (2) Actually there are many claims for light water cold fusion in the lit. They usually use Ni based materials though, as I recall. This eliminates your 2nd objection, but further, H and D are NOT the same. Usually their physical properties are different by about 30%. Their thermoneutral voltages are different, their viscosites (as water) are different, their thermal conductivities as gases are different, etc. One should never expect the same results with H and D under the same nominal experimental conditions. Again, the CFers set up 'controls' with only nuclear effects in mind, and never understand that the chemical effects mess up their attempts. Kirk shanahan (talk) 20:03, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm aware that there were some reports of a very small amount of excess heat, proportionate to the natural proportion of deuterium in hydrogen on Earth, but have personally had some doubts about it (1/6500 implies a REALLY REALLY GOOD calorimeter is needed to detect that outside its error range!). If there are claims that might be connected to fusion between two ordinary protium hydrogen nuclei, I'd certainly like to know more about that. I'd MUCH rather build a reactor based on that reaction, than any other, with its fuel being the commonest stuff in the Universe.... I'm also aware that there are some significant differences between ordinary hydrogen chemistry and deuterium chemistry, entirely due to the doubled mass of deuterium, compared to protium. (For example, drinking heavy water exclusively, over regular water, will eventually lead to death; the body's chemistry is fine-tuned for protium reactions. A cup or two is certainly harmless, though.) On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the energy released by protium chemistry reactions is slightly more than the energy released by deuterium chemistry reactions. This would imply that if CCS could happen as a result of heat redistribution from a hydrogen/oxygen recombination, it should be MORE likely to happen for light water than for heavy water, because there is more heat energy (from the recombination) to redistribute. V (talk) 21:57, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Another demo of V's lack of knowledge on the subject, which makes some wonder why he is participating here. Check Britz's bibliography, search on 'nickel'. I quickly found two refs. before I quit. One claimed 20-30 sigma excess heat signals and more reproducibility that heavy water experiments. The maximum power converted into electrolysis products is given by the current times the thermoneutral voltage (TV). H's TV is 1.48, D's is 1.54, thus D provides more power in its electrolysis products. Further, %recombination can vary from 0-100, so which gives more power in a given experiment is unpredictable. Kirk shanahan (talk) 16:14, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

How exactly is the Wall Street Journal related to Star Trek? Do you know what third party means? The Wall Street Journal (and the other sources I listed) have a reputation for accuracy and fact checking. They also have no relation to cold fusion at all. New Energy Times and Infinite Energy have either no reputation for fact checking or a poor reputation for fact checking. They are very related to cold fusion (as advocates). I've finished discussing this. You can take it to the reliable sources noticeboard - please be clear that you are challenging the WSJ as a reliable source in your report. Thanks. Hipocrite (talk) 14:28, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps we are using different definitions of "third party". The WSJ is a news publication, right? Does it not subscribe to any news services whatsoever (the Associated Press for example)? Would it not receive, as a part of normal events, descriptions of upcoming productions from the movie studios? To whatever extent they send their reporters out to see a movie and write a review, they are second-parties to the production of the movie. An example of a third-party publication would be something like Storms' book, which reviews lots of data in the second-party publications. I'm almost certain there are none yet of that type, with respect to the new Star Trek movie (and therefore the current article should be deleted until true 3rd-party publications appear, regarding it, see?). Another example would be, even though it occurs in the second-party publication, someone who attempts to replicate a previously-reported experiment, and publishes the results. This is why the CR-39 data is interesting and frustrating, with respect to this article; we await 3rd-party results about that. But there are lots of equivalent 3rd-party results with respect to the older claims of finding excess heat. V (talk) 19:11, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

(The following part of this overal thread seems to have become orphaned from the message to which it was originally a reply. Please keep that in mind as you read it. V (talk) 21:57, 21 May 2009 (UTC) )

As to articles, and when they are under examination, this is true. Who is claiming otherwise? And as to neutrons, there is plenty of reliable source on neutrons; most recently, there is the peer-reviewed Naturwissenschaften paper of Mosier-Boss (2009), and there is massive media notice of it. There is, in the paper, some level of explanation of the neutrons, a reasonable hypothesis. By the way, it refers to the Takahashi theory so derisively tossed aside by Hipocrite, above, in beginning his Talk:Cold_fusion#Undue_Weight discussion. There is actually a huge amount of reliable source we could be citing, but if every individual sourced text is immediately reverted out by someone claiming it's not the "mainstream" view, when there is nobody named Mainstream to whom we can ascribe the view, and even though the view was attributed to reliable source, it's impossible to improve the article. I have no problem with attribution of cold fusion "claims." I'm not claiming that cold fusion is "mainstream." But it is, quite simply, no longer acceptable to totally exclude cold fusion research and reviews, it's probably time for Arbitration Enforcement.

As to lack of theory, there are theories, and Storms is quite clear that, as of 2007, there is no generally accepted theory, even among cold fusion researchers. However, Wikipedia doesn't require an interpretive theory to report facts. Rather, we require verifiability -- that's the actual policy, not WP:RS, which is a guideline, and this is a place where the distinction is important. I'm not rejecting RS standards, au contraire, but how they are interpreted is crucial, and they cannot be interpreted to exclude sources based merely on some alleged support of fringe opinion in them. Storms (2007) is RS, period, otherwise our RS standards have become totally subjective. Sure, if there is conflict of sources, then we consider source quality, with preference being given to peer-reviewed and academic sources. ArbComm has been quite clear on not allowing fringe reliable source to be excluded, and, no, that's not an oxymoron, so I'm thinking it may be time to take this up the ladder. Advice welcome. --Abd (talk) 00:04, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

To be clear, we have pits, not neutrons. And we have claims the pits come exclusively from neutrons, but there are at least two conventional mechanisms to get pits without neutrons that have not been addressed by the CF authors. If that is to go into the article, we need to make the distinction and problems clear.

The 'massive media notice' is a flash in the pan because Mar. 23, 2009 was CF's 20th anniversary. The journalists needed _something_ to update their 'same old story'. This is the problem with 'recentism' in editing Wiki articles. Kirk shanahan (talk) 12:05, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Sure. With neutrons, we get pits in a characteristic pattern, not ascribable to chemical damage. It's already in the article, Kirk.

On 22–25 March 2009, the American Chemical Society held a four-day symposium on "New Energy Technology", in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the announcement of cold fusion. At the conference, researchers with the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) reported detection of energetic neutrons in a palladium-deuterium co-deposition cell using CR-39,[60] a result previously published in Die Naturwissenschaften.[61] Neutrons are indicative of nuclear reactions.[62]

Absolutely, you can get pits without neutrons, but the paper extensively analyzes the difference between these triple-track pits and pits formed by non-neutron radiation, and, as well, the paper and prior published papers by the same group, cover with controls and analysis the other possibilities. For example, Kowalski criticized the "radiation" conclusion re the massive pitting (not the later neutron report), and there was response from the SPAWAR group back-to-back with the criticism. Note that Kowalski was reporting excess heat. What is now generally expected is that if there is no excess heat, there won't be any radiation, either. With co-deposition, excess heat has become reliable, apparently, so they do other forms of controls than merely looking for absence of heat, which was a common form of control in earlier work. (they would call these experiments those with "inactive electrodes," and this kind of control is in some ways even more convincing, because the experiments were as alike as they could make them. In other words, the difficulty of reproduction, that each experiment produced, even with attempts to keep conditions the same, different amounts of heat, becomes a tool of investigation, a maximized control; one is then studying, not the initial conditions, but correlation of effects.)

The papers do NOT extensively analyze the non-nuclear mechanisms proposed in 2002 (and well known to the CF community at the time since the proposal was indirectly (through Rothwell) responded to by R. Oriani.) They don't even consider other than nuclear sources. The papers are prime examples of the psuedoscience at work, in that scads of words talk about non-neutronic nuclear pitting, while shock wave or O2 induced pits are almost completely ignored (a grouped statement that H2, O2, and something else was tested is made, but with no data or references supporting it, i.e. supposition presented as fact). This is even when Kowalski himself has posted a picture of pits arising from a simple scratch, many of which look to me very 'tripletish'. Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:38, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Kirks synthetic and improbable tale of the media coverage is pure speculation. While some reports may be ascribed to the 20-year anniversary, some of the reports clearly involved investigative reporting of a greater depth. Further, the CBS Sixty Minutes documentary was very much an investigative report, as we'd expect from them and that program, and Robert Duncan very much a mainstream physicist. It's just one example, to be sure, but it is looking like this: take a mainstream physicist, motivate him or her to read the research, to spend more time than it than a one-day seminar (as in the 2004 DoE review for half the panel), and to talk with the researchers, a skeptic is converted to a "believer." ("Believer" is offensive, actually, it implies that the judgment is biased based on prejudicial assumptions; technically, it could be applied to stubborn skeptics quite as well as to stubborn proponents. Stubborn skeptics, as distinct from natural and rational ones, are attached to rejection, are skeptical only about the views of others, not about their own.) --Abd (talk) 16:19, 20 May 2009

I didn't say the reporters didn't do some work. But what they did is get the 'newest' stuff, and bring out the 'oldies' like Garwan for 'tried and true' commentary, with precious little in-between. Can you look at their reports and what I have been saying here for over a year, an actually claim they did a good, comprehensive job?? Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:38, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

As I posted on Henry Bauer's blog, Duncan was a 'newbie'. The CCS is subtle since it lies further back up the chain of typical errors. Duncan had no clue about it. I can look at the papers from ET than Rothwell has up, and see clear signs of CCS activity. (P.S. ET doesn't seem to know the difference between flow and isoperiboic calorimetry.) I sent my papers to Duncan after the report, but have heard nothing back, and probably won't. His video shows he is 'convinced', like V and Abd, but he never considered the recent critiques of the work, as V and Abd don't. Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:38, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Shanahan, it must be frustrating to see your work neglected, and I've tried to do my bit for inclusion, and I'd support the return of User:Abd/Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments so that adequate detail could be shown. There's lots of source on the calorimetry as actually used, experimental results in detail, and criticism, including yours. Sure, Duncan was a "newbie." That, indeed, was the point, someone neutral and not affiliated with one side or the other, except the general "side" of "physics."

I think you might consider being a bit more sympathetic, surely you can see the problem that research is neglected and there is difficulty getting papers published. I, for one, would like to see a really clear exposition of CCS, and how it applies to the various forms of calorimetry, and, I'm afraid, your expositions so far have been inadequate to explain the material to nonspecialists -- and maybe even to specialists --, and you haven't addressed at all the correlation problem of excess heat/helium. So I'll make up an explanation. CCS is due to some local heating effect, unanticipated, cause not stated, necessarily, though some are proposed (such as recombination). The local heating effect drives helium out of the palladium, thus raising helium levels in association with excess heat. Now I'll shoot down my own explanation. Helium isn't found in the palladium to an extent that would be necessary to explain the rise in helium. Further, excess heat from palladium deuteride in gas-loading experiments would have great difficulty throwing off calorimetric calibration with sealed containers that conduct heat well. Consider the Arata work where there is a cell inside a cell. The interior temperature of the inner cell is recorded, the interior temperature of the outer cell is recorded, and the ambient is recorded. They show a steady two degree C. increment, from ambient to outer and from outer to inner, both, after the heat from the formation of palladium deuteride settles down. With hydrogen, the cells both drop within a couple of hours to ambient. With deuterium, the temperature drops to the differential shown, and stays that way for thousands of hours. Just from a rough estimate, the energy generated in the later steady-state phase would be well over an order of magnitude greater than the energy released from the only known chemical reaction taking place in there. And helium is generated. I fail to see how anything like CCS could explain this. Further, the alpha radiation and X-ray radiation detected by the SPAWAR group, not to mention the neutrons, is hard to explain with CCS. Sure, I know what you do. You essentially claim that the pits aren't radiation, yet the controls used by SPAWAR pretty much rule out every alternate explanation, and the X-ray results from X-ray film are also pretty hard to explain. At some point, Kirk, you are working hard to find alternate explanations, and Occam's Razor collapses. Maybe if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it's a duck.

I'm sympathetic: you can't seem to get published, when you think you have a plain and simple explanation. But this is the exact problem that cold fusion researchers have faced for almost twenty years now. Some of the conference papers are junk, I have no problem assuming that. But some of them aren't, and yet they still face difficulty publishing in the major journals, they are rejected without peer review, based purely on the assumption that cold fusion research is, ipso facto, junk. And what you've done is cold fusion research. Leaving you out in the cold.

Your work is notable, though, because Storms responds to it on p. 41 and p. 172. The latter response is a bit more detailed:

Shanahan has proposed that changes in locations where heat is produced within an electrolytic cell could introduce error when flow calorimetry is used. This error is shown by Storms to apply to neither flow nor to Seebeck calorimetry, although the isoperibolic method can be effected. Swartz used a computer model based on hypothetical temperature errors to question the accuracy of flow calorimetry. No demonstration of the proposed mechanism has been reported. On the other hand, a potential error may occur when D2 and O2 gases are allowed to leave the cell. Jones and co-workers (BYU), and Shkedi and co-workers (Bose Corp., MA) observe the obvious, that an uncertain amount of recombination between D2 and O2 within a cell could introduce an uncertain error. Using this argument, Jones criticized heat reported by Miles, who replied in a series of exchanges. Miles answered by pointing out that he, as do many people, measured the amount of internal recombination occuring in his open cell, for which corrections were made. Accurate correctionss can be made as described in Appendix A [Storms' appendix A]. This error does not occur in a closed cell, which is now used by most people when anomalous heat is observed. [and he goes on].

Yes, Kirk, I notice that he's citing himself, and I would factor for that in any usage of this passage. I also just edited the Calorimetry article a little. Comments can corrections are welcome. --Abd (talk) 21:39, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

discussion of editor, not needed for work on article

Kirk's opinions here are actually not helpful; if he supplied us with reliable source on the objections, or even, for our purposes in Talk, specifics about the objections, the "other explanations," we could use it. Instead, we are seeing what comes from some experts: "Trust me! I'm the expert, you are ignorant." The attempt to discuss the Calibration Constant Shift at Talk:Kirk shanahan was a bust, he would not engage on the issues, kept claiming "ad hominem" attacks whenever his claims were criticized, and then asserted that if what the "teacher" is "teaching" is questioned, that's a personal attack. Yeah, some professors think like that. Not the good ones, that is, not the ones who know how to teach. They might be experts in their fields, but not in teaching. If developing true scientists is the goal, skepticism must be encouraged. Feynman had little respect for teachers who expected students to just copy down and study what they said, as if it were gospel, and little respect for students who followed that and didn't question. --Abd (talk) 16:19, 20 May 2009

While I think it is possibly inappropriate to discuss this here, as your interpretation of the discussion that you've been having with Kirk was raised here it needs a more public response: having just read the material on User talk:Kirk shanahan, the above comments represent a serious mischaracterisation of the discussion. Kirk has provided a line-by-line analysis of your points, while you seemed to have missed his central arguments. His analogy, and following claims, seemed apt based on what I read prior to that. It would be best if you focused on discussion about the article here, and tried to avoid attacking the editors. - Bilby (talk) 00:00, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

You have got to be kidding, right, Bilby? Shanahan's section header: Abd shows his fanacticism. If it's ever necessary, the sequence there can be extracted, showing how efforts to glean a coherent explanation from him were met with derision and contempt; however, of course, this isn't for here. Shanahan is not an editor of this article (for a long time), his opinions and behavior on his Talk page are moot. I will collapse this part. --Abd (talk) 01:27, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Striking or removing would make me happier, but I can live with collapsing. - Bilby (talk) 01:53, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Hey Abd, reread Bilby's comment of 00:00 21 May. Do you get the message yet? Here's another _new_ editor who can see what I have been saying. It's very plain to him, and everybody else, except CF fanatics. You can't see it because you have emotionally committed to a nuclear-only position. How can you do that, when you admit you are new to the field?? There is only one explanation, and I've offered it. Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:45, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Wow, Kirk, where did you learn to read minds like that? Ask for your money back. People emotionally committed to a field tend to be those actually invested in it. I was a skeptic five months ago. I'm still a skeptic, but one who has moved to a neutral or somewhat pro-cold fusion position, and I'm a dialectical thinker, which means that, depending on context, I will appear to be asserting one side of an issue. Look more carefully, you will see that I provide comments on both sides. For example, above I mention Vyosotskii's work on Water memory, which is about as fringe a topic as one can currently find outside of looney bins. To me, skeptic doesn't mean someone who believes anything new is false. It's someone who doubts all alleged knowledge, but there are practical limits. I don't doubt that I'm sitting at a keyboard entering this edit, not in practice.

Please, Kirk, tell me what happened with Robert Duncan (physicist)? How did they get to him? Bribery? Dancing girls? Sleight-of-hand? Or is it merely that a skeptical but open-minded physicist took a careful look at the research and the published material? I'm new to the field, but I'm not new to recognizing attachment, I'm an old hand at it, and attachment to opinion is what I see. Show me some quality research refuting the present major claims of the cold fusion researchers. I don't see the papers of 1989-1990 as contradicting more than a few of the positive results, earlier or later. Period. Rather, those papers raised reasonable doubts. In some cases, those papers were themselves defective, but in others, the doubts with respect to work they were directly criticizing were reasonable.

There isn't any debate over the difficulty, regarding what was well-established by 2004, of demonstrating the excess heat and other results and, as you know, they go together, excess heat as inferred from experimental records is highly correlated with helium as independently measured. Sure, that can happen by chance, but we routinely risk our lives depending on low probabilities more likely to fail us than that the correlation is to be due to chance.

So how are we going to approach this situation? I'm inclining toward a meta-article, a set of documents that reviews the topic from different perspectives. it might be best to start with history. What's the history of the cold fusion affair? What is the publication record? There is a huge difference between a negative replication and a refutation. We will not be likely to come to consensus on this topic unless there is a detailed examination of every necessary element, that's what I know from consensus process. Until then, it's one set of bull-headed conclusions against another, and "victory" is awarded to whatever side can successfully appeal to editor ignorance or prejudice. Kind of like what happened in 1989 with scientists. The Fleischmann report was quite disturbing to some, it meant we didn't know bleep, if it was true. Or so it seemed. (Actually, it would have only meant that the boundaries were slightly different than we thought. But never underestimate how much people dislike having their world-view revised.)

Until there is real consensus here, this article will be plagued with edit warring and contention. There are some who obviously believe that such contention is unavoidable and necessary. I disagree, and I have life-experience that teaches me otherwise. Many of those who are strongly opposing my work have been doing so for a long time, because I'm opposing what has been called "Majority POV-pushing," and, guess what? -- the majority can tend to think that their POV is neutral. It's a very easy mistake to make, especially when communication between the majority and the minority is poor. Improve that communication, and disputes sometimes disappear. The last thing I'd want is to win here at the expense of other editors. My goal is true consensus, not that my supposed opinion prevails. If we have true consensus, improving and maintaining the article will be much easier, many hands make short work. Do the math: if there is a 2:1 majority, often considered a supermajority, that still means that, compared to 100% effort, we have 33% net effort. The available labor can triple if people are united. --Abd (talk) 21:25, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

"proposed explanations" section seems too narrow

extended discussion.

I noticed that the proposed explanations section only covers two expl.: experimental error and hydrino theory. They are many more theories out there- both on sources of error or how fusion could happen - or even how excess heat could happen w/out fusion. ideally, a section called "proposed explanations" would give a good survey of them, but the section as is only lists two, and in so doing give them way too much weight in comparison to other theories (namely, infinity). I think this section should show more of the various explanations - a broad survey - or if this cannot be done well in a reasonable amount of space, we should consider removing it, or perhaps putting a broad survey of explanations in the article in some other way. Kevin Baas^talk 15:21, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Ack! You're just noticing that! I've only been complaining about that for months! For the record, any set of experimental observations dealing with the same class of observation (i.e., excess heat, He4 detection, pits, etc.) has a conventional explanation available. My original contribution to the article was to describe these for the specific classes noted in the article in support of the 'nuclear' cause. And I was asked to do this becasue the editors of that time period (c. May '08) noted the same thing you did! Kirk shanahan (talk) 16:42, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

If there were "proposed explanations" listed in a reliable source, like one of the DoE reviews, that would be great. If we're still talking about proposed explanations listed in fringe journals and books, I would oppose that. Hipocrite (talk) 15:31, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Excess heat - 3 pubs in Thermochimica Acta; He4 - DOE review panel concerns on contamination coupled with Clarke paper in Fus. Sci. and Tech (2003); heavy metal transmutation - not peer reveiwed, but specific examples of finding contaminants point of origin and/or re-identifying contaminants; pits - primarily evidence of physical damage effects and admission of same in papers (some not peer reviewed) + commonality of agreement on specific factors in experiments that would lead to such; and on and on. Kirk shanahan (talk) 16:49, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I've gathered the impression that you're pretty liberal in your use of the term "fringe", esp. when it comes to any publication that's ever said anything pertaining to C.F., and I certainly wouldn't think it prudent to narrow our sources down to one four-page review, though I realize that's not what you're suggesting. I just think that we should focus on explanations in as much as how much they represent the active research community, since, after all, our goal is to inform the reader about the what is out there and what is going on. In any case, if you have any suggestions about how to make the section better, e.g. some of the more common / representative proposals, or some ideas on wording / phrasing, i'd be interested to hear them. Kevin Baas^talk 15:46, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

I was just looking back, and early in March, Phil153, who has generally taken a quite skeptical position here, acknowledged that the paper in Frontiers of Physics In China might be usable somewhere in the article, he wanted to see a specific proposed edit.[7] Well, he got one, though he hasn't edited this article for months, see above for what Hipocrite removed. "Proposed explanations" would, for a fringe topic, necessarily be coming from fringe sources. If, aside from the "experimental error" explanation, they were coming from mainstream sources, the topic would not be fringe, by definition! The mainstream doesn't propose explanations of experimental phenomena they consider a mistake. From Storms, the two explanations that are most notable are hydrino theory, which involves a major revision of quantum mechanics, literally at the fringe (i.e., as a special case not normally seen, fractional energy levels for electrons, below the minimum Bohr orbit), and the Beryllium-8 hypothesis. But there are others which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. I wanted to find secondary sources, and Storms and He Jing-Tang are secondary sources, reviews of the field. I frankly don't understand why we can't use them to source theories as notable. No implication was made or implied that these theories were "accepted by the mainstream" which remains blissfully ignorant of them, as far as I've been able to tell. Cold fusion researchers have largely steered clear of theory, since they consider it most important to establish the phenomena first. Don't you think that's a good idea? Figure out if it is happening before trying to figure out why it happens? But Takahashi is an exception. See http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/TakahashiAtetrahedra.pdf , which is, unfortunately, a conference paper, though it gives an idea of Takahashi's work. From it, The extended model should contain consistent story of He-4 production without neutrons and mass-8-and-charge-4-increased transmutation without hard radiation. Around focal points (t-sites, o-sites, defects, etc.), microscopic coherence in radial dynamic motion of neighboring deuterons may realize the short-time bosonization of electrons to make sufficient screening ofCoulomb repulsion for fusion. There is [8], which appears to be in a peer-reviewed journal.[9] I haven't seen the whole paper, but it does talk about 4D fusion in the page shown. --Abd (talk) 17:46, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

The 2004 DOE review did discuss one theory: To explain these unusual characteristics, the reviewers were presented with a theoretical framework that purported to describe how collective energy from the material lattice couples to a deuteron pair to induce fusion, how the only fusion reaction channel that occurs would be the production of 4He, and how all the energy is coupled back into the material in the form of heat instead of high energy gamma-rays. The reviewers raised serious concerns regarding the assumptions postulated in the proposed theoretical model for the explanation for 4He production.

The problem is that this theory doesn't seem to be generally accepted as viable in the cold fusion field. Sure, it was proposed. Back then. Our article had some stuff about "coupling to the lattice," which is, in fact, a stretch, though it is one of the obvious possibilities that one would think of to explain the lack of gammas, but it's not just the gammas, it's the branching ratio; the mode for gamma emission is rare. The Be-8 theory, which certainly existed at the time of the 2004 review, doesn't seem to have been considered. I looked at the McKubre paper presented to the review panel and it does not seem to have contained proposed theories. However, the panel may have been orally presented with a theory, it might be somewhere in the papers cited in the McKubre review.

The 2004 DOE review is not of a quality comparable to peer-reviewed publications. What we usually look at is the summary, and we don't even know who the author of that summary is. We have access to the individual review papers, and those, of course, aren't peer-reviewed, they are individual expert opinions and they widely differ from each other. But the 2004 DOE review is one of the best gauges we have as to "mainstream" opinion on cold fusion, among mainstream scientists in related fields who actually look at the evidence. My position is that "mainstream scientists" who aren't familiar with the research aren't any better informed than much of the public, and they get their opinions either from the media, or from a look at very old data, twenty years old, in fact. --Abd (talk) 18:03, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Criticism of hydrino theory

extended discussion.

Hipocrite, in adding criticism of hydrino theory to balance the proposed explanation of cold fusion, has pointed to some very interesting work. First of all, here is the text he added:

Mills' explanation of Classical Quantum Mechanics and hydrinos has been doubted in the literature[116] and is not accepted by most experts in the field nor by mainstream science,[117][118][119] His critics say that, although he has published theory papers in peer-reviewed journals, he has published only in those dealing with speculative work.[117] They also say that he hasn't addressed several deep flaws in his theory.[117]

Sources:

116. Rathke, A critical analysis of the hydrino model, New Journal of Physics, 2005, 7:127.

117. Erico Guizzo, Loser: Hot or Not?, IEEE Spectrum, January 2009.

118. Morrison, Chris, Blacklight Power bolsters its impossible claims of a new renewable energy source, New York Times, October 21, 2008.

Rathke's paper begins with:

Recently, experimental results have been published in respectable physics journals that have been interpreted as support for a new model of the hydrogen atom [1]-[4]. This model predicts the existence of new orbital states for the electron of a hydrogen atom with enhanced binding energy compared to the known hydrogen ground state. These new states have been named hydrinos. Applications of these alleged states have already been considered. In particular, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts has funded a study to investigate new propulsion concepts based on the transition of conventional hydrogen states to hydrino states [5].

Although the hydrino model has received considerable public attention, the discussion of the underlying theory has mainly been restricted to the sweeping statement that the hydrino model is in contradiction to quantum mechanics and hence dubious (cf e.g. [6]). This lack of theoretical consideration is particularly unfortunate in view of the wealth of experimental evidence that has been published in peer reviewed journals in favour of the hydrino model [1]-[4], [7]-[22]. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by giving a brief review of the theory underlying the hydrino model. We investigate its internal consistency and comment on the possibility that hydrino-like states exist in standard quantum mechanics.

This is quite remarkable. First of all, it treats seriously the experimental evidence for the existence of hydrino (I had no idea there was a "wealth of experimental evidence that has been published in peer reviewed journals in favor of the hydrino model), whereas editors here, including Hipocrite, have treated it as ridiculous pseudoscience, perhaps fraud. I sincerely congratulate Hipocrite for bringing this to our attention, and the wonder here is that he referred to this theory as "garbage,"[10] and his comments as "truth." But I presume that by now he's actually read the paper and may have a different opinion.

Rathke is not actually criticizing so much hydrino theory, as it would apply to Cold fusion, as much as the deterministic model that predicted other hydrino behavior, Mills' Grand unified theory of classical quantum mechanics. Rathke concludes, however, that hydrinos are incompatible with standard quantum mechanics, which is certainly no surprise; however, in his more detailed text, he leaves wiggle room: a state of the hydrogen atom that is less energetic than the ground state cannot be ruled out completely under some exotic conditions at our current level of understanding. Such conditions are however not likely to be fulfilled in the relatively low-energy, low electromagnetic field environment of the plasmas studied by Mills et al. And he regrets that there hasn't been, at least as of his writing, independent reproduction of Mills' results by other experimental groups. That's something we see all the time with cold fusion. Remarkable experimental results, theoretically verifiable (or refutable). Nobody bothers. So many mysteries, so little time!

The IEEE Spectrum article is also quite interesting. It's highly skeptical, "This is part of IEEE Spectrum's SPECIAL REPORT: WINNERS & LOSERS 2009, The Year's Best and Worst of Technology," perhaps this is why Hipocrite cited it three times in three sentences.

The New York Times article has this: Its “hydrino” theory isn’t put forth by a single crackpot; instead, the company employs a good handful of high-level scientists who would presumably rebel if the idea was totally false. It has also taken over $60 million in venture funding. Despite a hearty rejection by the scientific mainstream, and being ignored for years on end, its founder, Randell Mills, has plugged on. We covered the company extensively back in May, when it started saying it had a prototype 50 kilowatt reactor. And then, As I noted in May, it would be odd, if Blacklight were a complete sham, for Mills to place himself in an end game in which he would be definitively proven wrong within just a year or two. So there does seem to be something deeper here. Physicists will deny the hydrino theory, and they may be right; perhaps that’s why there was a distinct note of smugness in Mills’ voice as he said, “The controversy and academic debate won’t stop commercialization.”

For our purposes here, we don't need to know -- at all -- if hydrino theory is correct, compatible with standard quantum mechanics, accepted or rejected. What we need to know is that it is notable as a theory, advanced to explain the phenomena called cold fusion, and that is certainly true. But I personally wonder that there is a science writer at the New York Times who says, "there does seem to be something deeper here," as he postpones judgment, but we have Wikipedia editors who are dead certain that this is all bogus. What I'll say is, "I don't know." I can only report what is in the sources, and think about it a little. --Abd (talk) 20:02, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Just because someone writes an article about it doesn't make it notable. Any time someone makes sweeping claims in their opening, you need to be dubious. Titanium Dragon (talk) 00:12, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, that's a subjective standard. "Dubious" isn't part of our reliable source guidelines. In any case, there is plenty of source showing notability for hydrino theory: publication in peer-reviewed journals, criticism of it published in a peer-reviewed journal, notice in major media, etc. I'll note Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Randell Mills, which decided on a redirect to hydrino theory, which was later moved to Blacklight Power. Titanium Dragon, how would you propose we determine notability? --Abd (talk) 01:49, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Review of Storms' book by Eric Sheldon

extended discussion.

The book of Storms received a four page review by Eric Sheldon here in Contemporary Physics in 2008 (vol 49, pages 375–378). Sheldon is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts. This article describes hydrino theory as "nowadays widely-discredited". The article of Rathke, cited above, is also damning in its conclusions. Because it is regarded as pseudophysics, at odds with conventional quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, hydrino theory rightly has no WP article of its own. It's not clear why Abd, who gives every appearance of having had no formal training in quantum theory, should be actively advocating hydrino theory here. It is exactly for that reason that the summarising and evaluation of books on WP is through reviews by professional academics like Sheldon, i.e. secondary sources. Pushing crackpot pseudoscience in this way, ignoring secondary sources (such as Sheldon's review), cherry-picking quotes from negative reviews to create a positive spin — this style of editing seems to run counter to all of wikipedia's core policies. I have no interest in editing the namespace article but have watched with consternation as Abd has attempted to generate pseudoscience fatigue on this talk page by his screeds of endless prose on the subject: why is he unduly pushing pseudophysics? Mathsci (talk) 02:54, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

For the record, the Contemporary Physics journal had an impact factor of 4.651 in 2007 in category "physics" [11], Naturwissenschaften had 1.955 in category "multidisciplinary sciences" [12], and Frontiers of Physics in China didn't have an impact factor. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:17, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Mathsci, calm down. I'm not "advocating hydrino theory." I'm reporting, as a Wikipedia editor should, what is in reliable sources. Hydrino theory is fringe. It certainly is at odds with standard quantum mechanics, that's the whole point, in fact. As to formal training, well, I did sit with Richard P. Feynman through his lectures on quantum theory, but that was a long time ago. I'm not "ignoring Sheldon's review," this is the first time it's been brought to my attention. Thanks for pointing it out. As to hydrino theory, it's not clear from the literature that it is actually "discredited." Certainly it's not accepted. But publication continues in peer-reviewed journals, it appears, none of which is particularly relevant here. Hydrino theory is notable as a possible explanation for cold fusion, and we have adequate source for that. It isn't necessary for a "proposed explanation" to be true, or accepted, and, in fact, were one accepted, cold fusion would no longer be fringe, would it? It's enough that it is notably proposed, which is the case. As to core policies, I'm hewing closely to ArbComm's interpretation of them, with respect to fringe science, whereas, Matchsci, you are quite out on a limb, busy sawing it off. --Abd (talk) 03:28, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

One problem. The URL given for the PDF for Sheldon's review doesn't work. I found the article, [13], but I'd have to pay to read it. --Abd (talk) 03:41, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Then perhaps you might have to abandon editing the article? Mathsci (talk) 03:56, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

<Immediate response suppressed>. I have to buy every source that some pseudoskeptic suggests? No, Mathsci, you are quite welcome to use sources that you have access to in order to balance the article, should that be required. I will also read the article when I have the opportunity. You provided, above, nothing of interest, nothing that I didn't already know, except for a presently useless reference to a review, though the first words, which I did find in Google scholar, were quite interesting, it looked like they were lauding the book (Storms). Hipocrite added balancing material, and, you might notice, I didn't attempt to take it out. I accepted it. At least in substance. I simply found it interesting to review, you can call that "cherry-picking" if you like, but ... your POV is showing. As it has been for some time. --Abd (talk) 04:02, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd, I think it's you that needs to calm down. You know the secondary source exists now, so it would be intellectually dishonest of you to ignore it. Anyway, if you had checked your email, you would have noticed that I had made a copy of the article available to you a little while back. Mathsci (talk) 04:20, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh and by the way, WP:NPA. I have no point of view on cold fusion, just on your use of sources. My namespace editing record speaks for itself. Mathsci (talk) 04:24, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I would be dishonest, indeed. Thanks, very much, for the email, which was mailed at Mon, 25 May 2009 04:01:13 +0000. I'd say that the claim about "you would have noticed" was a tad overheated! I don't check my email every minute. I've downloaded the paper and it's quite interesting. As to POV, it's quite apparently a strong "anti-fringe" POV which has, above, identified hydrino theory as "crackpot pseudoscience." That's polemic, not NPOV. Further, the characterization of my reference to hydrino theory, which, it appears, has been accepted by consensus here, and which was rooted in reliable sources, plenty of them, as "pushing crackpot science," is highly offensive and, really, Mathsci, properly, you should apologize. I have no POV on hydrino theory other than an opinion that it is notable. If I needed to decide if it was worthy of the Nobel Prize or of prosecution for fraud, I'd have to toss a coin. We will almost certainly know the difference within a year or two, Mills has been playing what's been called, in the New York Times, an "end game." For all I know, Mills will disappear with a few million dollars, having worked the idea to the limit. On the other hand, there are reasons to be skeptical of this view, as well. --Abd (talk) 14:50, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd, a simple "thank you" would have sufficed. Please stop using this talk page as a forum. On this page you seem to be suggesting pseudoscientific theories like hydrino theory should not be dismissed. The problem is that you argue this directly: you never provide any kind of secondary source. In the case of hydrino theory, it has been discredited by several secondary sources. To paraphrase your favourite physics lecturer, "Surely you're joking, Mr Abd." Mathsci (talk) 22:15, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm using this talk page to explore the topic with the goal of producing a better article. You seem to be using it to explore how you can accuse me of POV-pushing. I've been researching the field, intensely, and started editing the article. You haven't done either and don't seem to care to do so. It is not our job to accept or dismiss theories. We can discuss them for background, and the belief that one can approach a topic like this without such discussion, and still end up with a good article and consensus, is a fantasy. I "never provide any kind of secondary source"? Really?

Storms is a secondary source. He Jing-Tang is a secondary source. The Guardian is a secondary source. The New York Times is a secondary source, and now Sheldon, thanks to you, is a secondary source, a very useful one. Feynman wasn't just my "favorite physics lecturer," he was my favorite person. Because of him, I can beat cross-rhythms, 5:4 easily, maybe 6:5 at my peak, he could do 7:6, as I recall. And I can think in a way that integrates various points of view, a capacity that seems to be blatantly missing from what you report above.

Mathsci, You say that I'm "suggesting pseudoscientific theories like hydrino theory should not be dismissed." It seems you think that they should be dismissed, presumably by us, which is a POV, and, as applied to our work here, would represent POV-pushing. Above, I look at the balancing sources provided by Hipocrite. Did you think that this meant that I think those sources and criticisms should be "dismissed"? I was not objecting and did not object to that material, I didn't revert it when I had the chance. What I noticed was that the critical material acknowledges the notability of hydrino theory. This, apparently, disturbs you, but it is of importance to our work, it underscores why hydrino theory must be covered. Not "promoted" or "dismissed." Covered. --Abd (talk) 23:55, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Proposal to move "non-nuclear" section to the "Discussion" section

To keep the article structure consistent, we should move the "Non-nuclear explanations for excess heat" section to just after the "experimental error" section. Does anyone object? Olorinish (talk) 13:14, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

We should remove significant redundancies, aside from the natural redundancy in the lead. I do think it is a bit much to be saying, over and over, "this is rejected by the mainstream." What's accurate is that it was rejected, twenty years ago. Current status is far more ambiguous, with plenty of source that the field is being given more respect and appropriate skepticism, i.e., "show me!" instead of "don't bother!" --Abd (talk) 14:29, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Let's organize our thoughts

Apparently there are currently two big points of disagreement: Whether the article should have a hydrino section, and whether the article should have a Be8 section. I personally think the article would be fine with or without them, which is why I haven't been commenting much lately. I do, however, think the hydrino section should be smaller (about half of its current size) considering the current level of support for hydrino existence. Perhaps people could use this space for brief, productive discussion of what we should do about these two issues. Olorinish (talk) 13:27, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Hydrino theory is notable. Storms gives it several pages. The general theory itself is highly controversial, with continued publication in peer-reviewed journals and a relative paucity of specific criticism; Rathke is the best criticism to date, but doesn't appear to have been confirmed; Blacklight Power hosts a recent refutation of Rathke, citing math errors, but that's not usable unless we simply want to to note that the authors have replied. I think it's been submitted, we'll see if it gets published.

If you can present hydrino theory in fewer words, fine. What's there now is quite short, and if you want to trim it, the most obvious place is trimming the criticism, which is quite redundant, summarized by what we already know: just as cold fusion is not generally accepted, neither is any theory that proposes an explanation; if such a theory were, in fact, accepted, it would be all over, cold fusion would be accepted. Controversy over Mills' theories is covered at Blacklight Power and only the briefest summary should be in our article; Hipocrite was quite correct to add the reference to the Blacklight Power article.

By the way, I don't see a controversy over the hydrino section, it looks like it's been accepted. Be8 wasn't accepted by Hipocrite and he edit warred to keep it out, as I did to assert it, though usually with compromise, but I'm not seeing any objection to it now beyond Noren's comment, which simply asked a question about it. --Abd (talk) 14:38, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't like how the current version dedicates all that space to explain all that theory. I would reduce it to say that it started as an attempt to explain CF as a non-nuclear phenomena, that it theorizes a lower state of the electron in the deuterium molecule, how this is used to try to explain the occasional radiation, and then that it's widely discredited among scientifics (specially theorical physicists?), mainly because the theory goes against known quantum mechanics and doesn't offer experimental evidence.

That covers the relationship to CF, makes enough explanation to understand the concept, and makes clear where the Hydrino theory stands from the point of current mainstream science and why. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:55, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, your explanation is inaccurate, for starters. We really should have the full explanation somewhere, what I put in isn't full, at all, it's drastically cut down. The following isn't full either, it's cut down, but it's exact quote from Storms:

Mills proposes that the electron in a hydrogen isotope can occupy energy levels below those associated with normal Bohr orbits. For an electron to enter these fractional quantum states, a special catalyst atom is required.... This process is exothermic.... [but so far, not nuclear]. Once the electron has reached a sufficiently collapsed state, the nuclear charge would be shielded and the deuteron could fuse or enter another nucleus, thus providing a solution to the Coulomb barrier problem as first proposed by Mills. During fusion, the Mills electron might be ejected as a prompt beta particle, thus providing a solution to the single-product problem [i.e., conservation of momentum].

Normally, most deuterons are not close enough to a Mills catalyst to react. However, when deuterons are forced to diffuse through the lattice they have a much greater probability of contacting a rare catalyst atom....

There is much more. Note that none of this is proposed by Storms as "established fact," he is reporting a theory.

This is what we have now:

Mills (2006) has suggested that electrons can occupy energy levels lower than previously understood, but that under normal conditions, a barrier exists to prevent transitions to such a reduced energy state. Mills postulates that some atoms with an appropriate available energy level can catalyze the transition of electrons to this state. If an electron has reached a sufficiently collapsed state, this electron may then shield two deuterons similarly to muon-catalyzed fusion, allowing the nuclei to approach and fuse, and the electron could then be emitted as a prompt beta particle, thus explaining the lack of gamma radiation and conserving momentum.^[2]^[3]^[4]

Plus the critical material Hipocrite added.

I can boil it down more, I think:

Mills (2006) has suggested that electrons can occupy energy levels lower than previously understood. If an electron has reached a sufficiently collapsed state, this electron may shield the nuclear charge and allow the nuclei to approach and fuse, and the electron could then be ejected, explaining the lack of gamma radiation and conserving momentum.

Together with the link to Blacklight Power, where there could be more detail on hydrino theory and its application to cold fusion, this should cover it. On the other hand, some of the same editors have been working on Blacklight Power and I suspect that there might be resistance to inclusion of cold fusion theory there; Blacklight Power's project does not appear to involve cold fusion at all, it allegedly generates energy simply from the collapse of the electron. --Abd (talk) 17:35, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

drastic rewrite

extended discussion.

moved from Talk:Cold_fusion/to_do, this needs consensus and sources before going into the TODO list --Enric Naval (talk) 20:23, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

The entire article needs a drastic rewrite. The Widom-Larsen theory now satisfactorily explains LENR as a weak interaction phenomenon, not a strong force phenomenon. There is no longer much theoretical mystery. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.73.189.162 (talk • contribs) 18:22, 25 May 2009

We probably should cover Widom-Larsen theory. Storms gives it a little space, not much, but here are some references from Storms:

Widom, A. and Laarsen, L., ULtra low momentum neutron catalyzed nuclear reactions on metallic hydride surfaces, Eur. Phys. J., C46, 107, 2006.

Widom, A. and Larsen, L., Nuclear abundances in metallic hydride electrodes of electrolytic chemical cells, arXiv:cond-mat/062472 v1, 2006

Widom, A. and Larsen. L., Absorption of nuclear gamma radiation by heavy electrons on metallic hydride surfaces, arXiv:cond-mat, 2006.

Note that Storms was, above, alleged to have a conflict of interest due to his relationship with Lattice Energy, but he gives short shrift to the theory. I'll note, though, that W-L, as described in the second paper below, also proposes a Be-8 intermediary, it simply gets there in a different way.

Here is an article on W-L theory by Larsen: [14] (4 Dec 2008). See also [15] for another account (23 Oct 2007)

Steve Krivit of New Energy Times gave a talk at the 2007 ACS conference, video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1944189360430905288&hl=en; covering the field and reporting on W-L theory a bit, but there is much more depth in the documents above. Point to take home from the Krivit lecture: we don't know WTF is happening. There are theories that might explain cold fusion, but as the introduction to the "Proposed explanations" section said, According to Storms (2007), no published theory has been able to meet all the requirements of basic physical principles, while adequately explaining the experimental results he considers established or otherwise worthy of theoretical consideration.

It's beyond me why this statement was taken out.

The most complete and tightly organized source of information on W-L theory is on the New Energy Times web site: http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml. Reading this material should convey some sense of the level of controversy in the field over theory. Krivit is in communication with all the major players. On that page there are many references to peer-reviewed publications, but I haven't gone over it to see if there is enough for us to report this in the article yet. There is a listing of "all" of the W-L papers, with links, at [16]. Certainly Storms thought W-L theory was bogus at the beginning of 2008. A detailed critique from Storms is available at [17].

While New Energy Times is problematic as a source, Krivit is, indeed, a full-time investigative journalist who is paid to research and report on the field, and he appears to do so with energy and accuracy. He's also quite opinionated, sometimes, so care should be exercised with regard to presenting science from NET as "fact" without corroboration. But if Krivit says that so-and-so said such-and-such, he seems to be as reliable or more reliable than an ordinary newspaper. This is now the place I go to find news on the field. I've never found an error in it, but sometimes he's making some point. His whole conversation with Garwin, in the issue cited above, left me with "So?" I.e., he seems to have been extrapolating from a non-conversation, a few words, to some conclusion, basically that Garwin hadn't specifically criticized W-L theory, but only made an off-hand comment implying some criticism, which would be expected from Garwin anyway. Garwin needs a cup of tea, apparently, in order to get started. --Abd (talk) 23:25, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Reports of nuclear products in association with excess heat

extended discussion.

I've discussed this before, but the source of the problem just became apparent to me. There is a paragraph in the 2004 DoE report,[18]:

The hypothesis that excess energy production in electrolytic cells is due to low energy nuclear reactions was tested in some experiments by looking for D + D fusion reaction products, in particular 4He, normally produced in about 1 in 10^7 in hot D + D fusion reactions. Results reported in the review document purported to show that 4He was detected in five out of sixteen cases where electrolytic cells were reported to be producing excess heat. The detected 4He was typically very close to, but reportedly above background levels. This evidence was taken as convincing or somewhat convincing by some reviewers; for others the lack of consistency was an indication that the overall hypothesis was not justified. Contamination of apparatus or samples by air containing 4He was cited as one possible cause for false positive results in some measurements.

In our article, we have, "In the report presented to the DOE in 2004, 4He was detected in five out of sixteen cases where electrolytic cells were producing excess heat." I'd looked before to find the material in the McKubre report on which this was based, since there is much stronger evidence in the McKubre report than that on the correlation of excess heat and helium: the phrase above, if correct, would actually be strong evidence against correlation.

I found the source. It's a description of the Case experiments, and one reviewer considers it with this language:

Another class of experiments are referenced for the production of “excess heat” which do not involve electrolysis. The first of these is the Case experiments. Platinum group metals are loaded onto carbon substrates, 0.5 - 1.0 %. The excess heat is only observed with this low loading of platinum metals. This implies that carbon is involved in the effect. Six of 16 cells show excess heat. Four or five show helium excess as well. The most conventional explanation is that the carbon has adsorbed gases from the air, oxygen and helium. Oxygen combines with the deuterium to produce heat and helium is released on heating. The authors attempted to discredit this explanation by asserting that the container was helium leak tight. Presumably this was based on the ability to hold hydrogen. I don't see how the apparatus could be guaranteed leak-tight without a helium leak check. [the individual reviewer comments are accessible at http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DOEusdepartme.pdf )

These were not electrolytic cells, for starters, as the reviewer notes. They are gas-loaded cells, which produce excess heat with no power input, similar to Arata's work. There were not sixteen cells producing excess heat, at least not as shown in the report. The report actually doesn't state how many produced excess heat. McKubre's interest in this part of the report is behavior of He4 over time, the temporal correlation, not the quantitative one, which is covered in the earlier part of the report, this is Appendix B. One cell only, cell SC2 has excess heat and He4 data reported by time. So not only did the DoE bureaucrat summarizing the reviewer comments get this one wrong, based on misreading the reviewer's report, the reviewer apparently got it wrong as well, misreading the McKubre paper. The reviewer also seems to have ignored chunks of the report, raising questions which are answered in it, but that's a separate problem, and this kind of obtuse response seems common in this field. I just saw a blog by a physicist on the CBS special and it was totally derisive, with him asking why they weren't looking for helium. The CBS special was twenty minutes and that physicist could easily have done his own research and would have found that, indeed, "they" have been looking for, and have found, helium, in just the right quantities to explain the excess heat from d-d fusion, which doesn't prove that the reaction is d-d fusion, but it makes it rather look like it! Note that with these Case cells, the helium level rose as high as double background, so "leakage" starts to look a tad weak.

Meanwhile, we should be reporting secondary source review of these experiments, setting aside obvious errors like that above, and both Storms and He Jing-tang, if nothing else, do look at correlation, and the correlation is very strong. (Both He Jing-tang and Storms reproduce McKubre's single-cell plot of Case energy vs He4.) Storms gives, however, much more information than that. He Jing-tang presents some astonishing results from Arata, if I read them right. I'd want to confirm this with the original Arata report. Yes. ( http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ArataYdevelopmena.pdf ). Arata claimed 100 ppm helium generation from D2 gas-loading nanoparticle palladium, stimulated by "laser welding." Air background is 5.2 ppm. "The data for a corresponding study using pure H2 with a Pd sample powder showed no generated 4He." This was presented at ICCF10, August, 2003. Arata's work has been published in peer-reviewed journals in Japan, it may be tricky to find the papers. "Close to background," my eye.) --Abd (talk) 02:22, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Based on what I read from Kirk, I have three quick comments. The first is that correlation is only valid (given that it is unable to show a causal relationship, anyway) if you can show that the two data sets being correlated are accurate. Kirk has raised strong objections to the measurements of excess heat. Therefore if there is reason to doubt that heat was generated (or, indeed, that helium was produced) then any claims of correlation are effectively meaningless until the doubts can be removed. The second is that background levels of helium are, or so I gather, 5.2 parts per million. If that's the case, double that level would seem to be within standard variance, as per Kirk. At least the Arata findings are a tad under 20 times the background level, which still may not be convincing, but may be more interesting. But my third point is what are you trying to say? That you believe the DOE made an error based on your reading of McKubre's report? So we should ...? I'm not sure how this relates to the article, given that excess heat and helium production are both mentioned. - Bilby (talk) 03:32, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Correlation doesn't exactly show causal relationship (for starters, which of two effects is cause and which is effect?). However, what it shows, done properly, is common cause. The analysis Bilby gives is dead wrong. No, double the level isn't within standard variance. The charts involved show standard error bars. Measurement accuracy is well below the background level.

The errors in the DoE summary are blatant. Unless there is something I've missed! (i.e., some other helium result that was 5 out of 16.) These were not electrolysis experiments, period, the reviewer got that absolutely right, this error was only in the summary.

Mention of excess heat and helium isn't mention of a correlation. Correlation is, in fact, the strongest evidence for cold fusion. The big complaint in 1989 was lack of evidence for nuclear ash. That complaint was echoed in 2004, even though they had evidence in front of them; the summary shows that the evidence wasn't clearly seen and understood, though some reviewers did understand it (this is the evidence the summary calls "somewhat convincing," a view reportedly held by one-third of the panel). Our article, on helium "associated" with excess heat, is clearly wrong, the supposed results aren't in the McKubre paper that the panel was considering. I'd like to look at the other Case work published by SRI elsewhere to verify details, though. So the immediate relevance is that our article needs to be fixed to make it true to source, the ultimate source that is being cited by the anonymous summary of the DoE review. We are not condemned to repeat errors found in a secondary source.

Now, as to correlation. The Case experiments weren't presented to show correlation in multiple experiments, only one experiment was shown to show time correlation of excess heat and helium level. Note that these cells were studied in pairs, a cell with presumed active material and one without. But the presentation of data on this in the McKubre paper is scanty, I'd certainly want to know more.

Storms has a better presentation of the heat/helium data, from the more extensive Miles work. For thinking about this, in a way that is, at least, similar to the actual data, suppose there are 33 cold fusion Pd/D electrolysis cells. They are all operated in the same way. At the conclusion of the electrolysis, the cells are sent to an independent lab for helium analysis. 15 of them show no helium, 18 do. Also of the 33 cells, 21 show excess heat, 12 do not.

That's uncorrelated data, and it certainly does not look convincing. The helium could be due to leaks. The excess heat could be due to calorimetry error.

Now the correlation: the 12 cells that showed no excess heat also showed no helium. Of the 21 cells that showed excess heat, 18 showed helium. Storms notes reasons to suspect the remaining three cells as being different, one he ascribes to an error in heat measurement, the other two were a different alloy electrode, and there are always little mysteries like this.

The absence of helium from the cells showing no excess heat is stunning. Now, if the excess heat were at a level that it could compromise the integrity of the cells, that could cause leakage, but it wasn't. Absent a reasonably hypothesis for common cause, this is strong evidence, and it is evidence that the calorimetry is at least qualitatively accurate, and that the helium measurements are likewise.

However, there is more. The correlation is also quantitative. In other experiments, as well as with those Miles experiments, the quantity of helium detected correlates with the amount of excess heat determined from the calorimetry. So, again, what we have is evidence that whatever is causing excess heat is also causing helium to be found. Storms gives the figure of 25 +/- 5 MeV/He4. McKubre gives a more direct estimate of a bit over 30 MeV/He4, I forget the figure, but Storms has apparently done more analysis on the issue of missing helium (helium absorbed by the palladium and not recovered for measurement, and helium lost in other ways. (Note that any lost helium will raise the calculated energy/He4. Likewise any other pathways or causes of excess heat findings.)

So: We have strong evidence for excess heat, and we have strong evidence for helium associated with it. There is controversy about the exact level of energy/He4, Krivit, in particular, challenges the McKubre and Storms estimates, but Krivit, I'll note, is a journalist, not a scientist. He's quite good on reporting what the people have been doing, the best available. On the science, he's more knowledgeable than your average Wikipedia editor, for sure, but not necessarily than the scientists involved. But, at this point, for those who haven't followed all this, the figure of excess energy/He4 is significant because d+d fusion would generate He4 at 23.8 MeV/He4. That doesn't prove that the reaction is d+d fusion, and simple d+d fusion would be expected, for reasons our article should clearly show, to involve gamma emission to conserve momentum, but 4d fusion to form Be8 -> 2 He4, same energy figure, solves that problem, there is no need for gammas and they wouldn't be expected. What would, in fact, be expected is X-radiation from deacceleration of the alpha particles in the electrolyte or in the electrode, and that radiation has been amply reported. Classic technique: piece of protected X-ray film that, when developed, shows an outline of the electrode.

Storms covers all this, I believe, and is a reliable secondary source, we need look for no more, the Sheldon review confirms the reliability, and we aren't likely to find better in the near future, aside from possible magazine coverage here and there, nothing with the depth of Storms. We have no reliable source on the "scientific consensus" at this time that isn't passing mention based on no stated evidence, but I do assume that the general opinion of rejection is still more or less accurate. I've been talking to a lot of scientists on this, and the normal first reaction is rejection based on 1989. However, when they hear about the recent results, that changes rather easily. "I'll have to look that up. If that's true, there definitely is something there." (This is usually regarding the neutron findings of Mosier-Boss.) The ACS Sourcebook will be useful, but is actually, for the most part, a compendium of primary sources; the effect of it is to show notability of those sources, for they were selected for importance, and inclusion decisions there are a form of peer review. There is, however, some summary review there, though, in particular one written by Krivit that I'm looking forward to seeing in print. Storms, for this field, right now, is the gold standard for secondary source, much better and deeper than the McKubre report presented to the DoE. --Abd (talk) 15:04, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I must admit, I do wish that you would try and keep your replies to a manageable length, given that most of this has been said, by you, multiple times in your comments. But that aside:

First, "Correlation doesn't exactly show causal relationship" - no. Correlation doesn't show causal relationship. At most, it provides evidence, or hints - nothing more. This is a basic rule in any stats, and to suggest otherwise is problematic. If it didn't then I'd gladly join the Pastafarians in blaming global warming on the decrease in the pirate population.
Second, you're using very poor evidence to base these claims. If we can't regard the amount of energy produced as reliable (per Kirk), and if we can't trust the amount of helium (as a result of potential leakage) then we have no basis to claim correlation. It is irrelevant if the two values are in keeping with fusion if we can't trust the values in the first place.
Third, I care little if you agree with the second point, as I suspect the answer is no. What I do care about is that you still haven't addressed the core issue: what are you trying to say in terms of this article? Is it that you have decided that the DOE report was wrong, and can't be considered reliable? That Storms is better than the DOE, so one should be replaced with the other? Or are you just trying to argue that cold fusion really happens? Based on your comments, what is it that you want done? - Bilby (talk) 15:40, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

At this point, I'd prefer to be either making edits to the article, or rewriting it. Correlation, when strong, shows common cause. When weak, it might be chance. That's why statistical analysis is used with correlation, but, in fact, we don't know bleep about cause except through correlation analysis. If there were correlation between the decrease in pirate population and global warming, such that there were 33 experiments -- intervals without cherry-picking -- showing what has been shown with excess heat and helium, I'd be moving for the health of pirates. Or preparing for global warming. But there isn't. Further, there is no even preposterous causal connection, such that we might expect that increasing pirate population would reduce global warming ... no, strike that. If pirate activity became so high that global commerce would decline, global warming might! With excess heat and helium, there is a reasonable explanation, a causal connection, a theorized common cause, one that has not been rejected out of hand by major theorists (such as Edward Teller, but considered possible even if unlikely.

Second, it's not necessary for the measurements in correlation analysis to be reliable in an absolute sense. We use correlation analysis, in fact, to judge measurement reliability! Note that the measurement error in the calorimetry experiments is way below the detected levels, the calorimetry is accurate enough to discover some level of apparent excess heat from Pons-Fleischmann cells using ordinary water, probably due to the presence of deuterium in ordinary water, the levels are about right for that. Shanahan proposes that there is some heat distribution effect that causes a systematic error, which is a reasonable hypothesis deserving of test, though it's difficult to imagine that this affects all kinds of calorimetry. For example, it's hard to see how this would affect the Case results, which involve no electrolysis, so no energy input, only the very limited heat of formation of palladium deuteride. (Same with Arata). If the calorimetry were all over the map, varying wildly regardless of the existence or non-existence of the P-F effect, then we'd expect that this would not correlate with helium measurements, unless there is some common cause. As an extreme example of common cause, a lab assistant adds helium to the cells secretly, in an amount proportional to the heat that has been observed, and only to those cells. If the cells with no helium were only operated for a short time because no excess heat was being observed, then we could theorize that there was more helium in the excess heat cells because they were operated for longer. I don't think that's the case with these experiments.

Plus, leakage as a hypothesis doesn't cut it when the helium has gone above background, as it often has in this work.

What I've been saying is that we come to trust experimental values when they are correlated. Lots of scientific work is done, conclusions drawn, and huge amounts of money spent, with correlations far below what is seen with excess heat and helium. Mills estimates the possibility that the correlation between excess heat and helium in his experiments was one in 750,000. I could do the math, so could many other editors. But we have reliable source on it, folks. Storms. He's reviewing Mills' work, and published by an independent, non-fringe publisher. In 1995, Hoffman, a skeptic, wrote (see the article bibliography), as a conclusion on the issue of cold fusion calorimetry: In general, these heat measurements are being done by very knowledgeable experimenters who know how to avoid artifacts. As to the helium, the helium for Mills was measured by an independent laboratory, blind. In other words, it was measured by experts who knew how to measure helium and who had no idea of which cells were "supposed to" contain helium, no idea which cells had produced excess heat.

As to the third question, yes, we will change the article, because the statement we are citing from the DoE as if it were fact is blatantly, from the primary or secondary source (it's some of both) that the DoE used, false. That was inserted there by an editor who was removing text from a reliable secondary source who understands the issues and the evidence, and who, quite obviously (from extensive discussion) has no understanding of what "association" means.

I am not trying to argue that cold fusion happens. That's not my business, nor is it our business. Our business, or, more accurately, our technique, is to report what's in reliable sources. However, we might indeed ask what the purpose of knowledge is. Is all knowledge secondary and relative? Does truth matter? I think sometimes we put the cart before the horse. Consensus is the most reliable guide to truth that we have, and, in particular, the consensus of the knowledgeable. But that's circular, if we don't have objective standards for "knowledgeable." We use technically reliable source because we have no choice, we have nothing more reliable, our own original research and our own individual thinking being inadequate and too much subject to error, unless we can find consensus on it after full deliberation. But if our goal isn't truth, i.e., knowledge that we can stand on, that will carry our weight and guide us, and not deceive us and our readers and set us up for a fall, we've lost our way and we end up wikilawyering trivia. --Abd (talk) 16:56, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

We're not going to agree in regard to the correlation, but that's fine. Now that I know where you're heading it is probably irrelevant anyway. To refer to the general principle first, no, on Wikipedia truth does not matter. We rely on verifiability, not truth, and I would be inclined to argue that WP:V is the most important of Wikipedia's policies. I can't see how the project could function without this basic distinction. It is also worth noting that consensus isn't a guide to truth - at best, consensus leads to what people agree to be true, not what actually is (unless you wish to take a constructivist stance, which wouldn't be in keeping with your other comments).

But as I understand it, you, based on your reading, believe that the DOE report is unreliable and should be discarded in favour of Storms. That sounds a tad like WP:OR, but I think OR is bandied around a bit too easily here, so I'm not inclined to assume it is. However, the DOE report does seem to have a higher standard of reliability than Storms, so I suspect you'll have trouble getting much traction with this. Perhaps there is a reliable source that draws the same conclusion as you do about the DOE? - Bilby (talk) 17:46, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

First point: I would rather have no text than misleading text based on reliable source error. You are incorrect about consensus. First of all, I didn't state that consensus was truth. It isn't. Rather, it is our guide to collective truth, more reliable than individual opinion. It can be wrong. Look, this is a question that is well over a thousand years old, it's the issue of ijma in Islam. We have no way of judging NPOV other than consensus, there is no way to guarantee NPOV by following the letter of the law, it's a matter of individual judgment, applied collectively. The question of what to do if one has special knowledge that leads to an opinion at variance with general consensus or even universal consensus (except for oneself) was also faced: properly, you act in matters that only affect yourself according to your own best understanding, and you act in matters of social concern according to the consensus. Practically speaking, when push comes to shove, it comes down to sovereignty and what can be done without disruption (fitna).

To bring it home, what matters it if I improve an article, if everyone ends up arguing endlessly about it? It better be good!

The point is that it is more likely that the consensus is right, generally, than that I'm right, and I should be very sure of my own special knowledge before I would sensibly dare to step outside the consensus. I can know this by looking at others who are very sure of themselves, and I can see how they went astray -- but they can't. Since I'm also human, it's probably true of me as well.

Here, you may find me sometimes opposing majorities, but only when I expect, from knowledge and experience and perhaps even intuition, that, with sufficient attention, the consensus, or at least the majority, will support me, or will find some compromise that I can accept. I saw this happen at ArbComm recently.

Second point: I do not favor discarding the DoE report. It's highly notable. It also contains at least one blatant error, I pointed it out above. Compared to an ordinary peer-reviewed secondary source, however, it is flawed. The nine individual reviews written on the basis of study of the sources provided are quite important, but they aren't edited or reviewed, themselves. The nine reviews written on the basis of a one-day seminar seem to be of varying quality and depth, and nobody familiar with this field is likely to expect that a one-day seminar is going to drastically change anyone's mind, ideas are way too deeply entrenched. Then there is the summary, which was written by someone anonymous, and some editors here have placed great weight on what may have been mere obitur dictum in it, a gross summarisation meaning one thing and being given another meaning by us, by implication. Given all that, nevertheless, it is an historic event in itself, it would be totally silly to discard it. Storms is, quite simply, different. Storms has probably been fact-checked more thoroughly. I think that what must be realized is that Storms, as a secondary source, acts like a filter. The citation in Storms of a paper, including conference papers and even private communications, is prima facie evidence of notability, it isn't merely about verifiability. V doesn't appear to understand this well. That such and such an experimental result is reported by so-and-so meets WP:V from being published in conference proceedings, and we can sometimes use such a source with consensus. But those are primary sources, and inclusion in the proceedings is weak evidence of notability. That's what we need secondary sources for, some source that judges the importance of primary information.

And then there is the fact that relative reliability of sources doesn't come into play until and unless there is contradiction. Contradiction is much more rare than many of us might think. Where contradiction is commonly seen isn't in reliable sources, especially the peer-reviewed scientific kind of primary sources, but in interpretation of sources, and even more in the imaginations of editors. There is no contradiction between the negative replications of excess heat findings in 1989 and the positive replications from 1989-date. The experimental conditions were different. As I said, contradiction is rare. An example of alleged contradiction: MIT reported finding no excess heat. It was noticed by Eugene Mallove that the published chart had an offset that concealed the original data. For this reason you can find cold fusion researchers asserting that the MIT data was altered to present an appearance of negative replication. That's a contradiction that would require balancing the reliability of one source against that of another. Otherwise reliable source is reliable source. --Abd (talk) 19:22, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

About DOE 2004: since the error is blatant, it can be reasonably expected that other RS have noticed the error and talked about it. Where are those sources? I also expect to see other RS talking how DOE chose an unreliable way to analyze the evidence, or about how DOE is less reliable than X or Y. Where are those sources? --Enric Naval (talk) 00:36, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

You know, I'd read quite a bit about this review and hadn't noticed any mention of this. Cold fusion researchers have had a lot to say about the review, to be sure, but this particular error wasn't noticed, as far as I've seen. I didn't see it when I first looked, I remember being confused by aspects of the Case presentation in McKubre -- it was hard to read the graphs to get at what they were saying, and I misinterpreted it myself the first time -- so I don't know. The DoE review isn't a peer-reviewed paper, it is, rather a document with intrinsic notability. It had a purpose, which was not scientific accuracy, it was to make possible funding recommendations. Quite simply, it was what it was. Compare that with the IPCC documents on global warming, where great care was exercised with every aspect. No comparison at all! --Abd (talk) 04:06, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

So, ~~no sources?~~ no mainstream sources? The errors and unreliability of DOE 2004 can only be sourced from cold fusion researchers? --Enric Naval (talk) 16:10, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Read the summary below, Enric. It was already said above, and what is below was added before your edit, but .... the only sources necessary to show the error are available from the DoE archive. The DoE report was a comment, explicitly, on what was in the document submitted by "cold fusion researchers," yes. Isn't that the point? The DoE report includes that paper as Appendix 1. So the unreliability, if you want to call it that -- I didn't -- of DOE 2004 is shown by DOE 2004, very simply. It isn't necessary to see the individual reviewer papers, but if you want to understand what happened, you'd want to look at them. And this continual rejection of sources because they are associated with cold fusion researchers, in any way, even when simply providing convenient access to public documents, even if just for background, to help understand our more reliable sources, is characteristic of POV-pushing in this field. Stop it. --Abd (talk) 17:02, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

If the only sources saying that DOE 2004 has errors/ is unreliable are from cold fusion researchers, then it has to be attributed as a POV hold by them. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:32, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Enric, you present an impoverished idea of what Wikipedia editors can and should do. We do not report demonstrably false information as fact just because a reliable source says it, unless we balance it. We can and should balance secondary source error with primary source fact. The requirement is that the primary source facts reported should be directly verifiable without synthesis, by any ordinary person with ordinary skill applying reasonable effort. First of all, it's worth reading WP:OR over carefully. Then look at the essay linked from the WP:OR page, WP:NOTOR. See, specifically, this example:

A book, short story, film, or other work of fiction is a primary source for any article or topic regarding that work. Anything that can be observed by a reasonable person simply by reading the work itself, without interpretation, is not original research, but is reliance upon a primary source. This would include direct quotes or non interpretative summaries, publication dates, and any other patent information that can be observed from the work. For example, if there are multiple versions of a particular story, and one version does not have a particular character, or has extra characters, that is clear simply by reading or watching the work. The fact that one would have to read or watch the whole thing does not make the matter original research. The work is verifiable, even if it takes more time than flipping to a single page.

Notice that the example is quite on point here: After reporting what the DoE report says is claimed in the review document about the sixteen samples, 'blah blah.' we could say, "The Hagelstein paper, which was the review document, does not contain a report of 'blah blah.' However, it does contain 'bleep bleep.'" And there is probably more than we can say; there is some criticism of the 2004 report in reliable source, if I'm correct. This tidbit, however, requires no source other than the 2004 DoE material.

Notice also that we probably cannot report, for example, that "The 2004 DoE report erroneously interpreted the review document," unless we have secondary source on that. What we properly do is to present the elements of the (alleged) contradiction, without claiming contradiction, reliably sourced, and let the reader form his or her own conclusion. The elements are directly verifiable. The conclusion isn't. --Abd (talk) 22:55, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

To summarize, on "association."

extended discussion.

Our article has, in Coldfusion#Reports of nuclear products in association with excess heat, no report of association of nuclear products in association with excess heat, except for this: In the report presented to the DOE in 2004, 4He was detected in five out of sixteen cases where electrolytic cells were producing excess heat.[78] The note cites the summary review, but the text attributes to the report itself, which is available. This, on the face, appears to show association, though a very weak one, without the information that would allow the association to be judged. I.e, with two variables (how much helium was detected and how much excess heat was detected), there are four gross categories of association: heat and excess helium, no heat and no excess helium, no heat and excess helium, and heat and no excess helium. What is implied in the sentence is 5 cases of heat and helium, and an implication of 11 cases of heat and no helium, and no indication of how many cases there were of the other two categories. (i.e., we don't know, from our text, how many cells were tested for heat and helium.) As presented, the information is singularly weak, reading this, I'd say, my conclusion would be that helium and excess heat were not related.

This is what is in the actual summary report: Results reported in the review document purported to show that 4He was detected in five out of sixteen cases where electrolytic cells were reported to be producing excess heat.[19] This is a citation or interpretation of the review document. Now, is that information actually in the review document? It is not. What we are quoting as fact (that the review document "purports to show" the information) is verifiably false.

What is in the review document?

interjection by Kirk Shanahan, interrupting comment by Abd, which resumes below next full-left smalltext note

Examining Figure 12 and surrounding text in the review document indicates that 5 out of 16 of the samples showed He signals. The reviewer, while not 'quoting' anything in text in the review, correctly interprets Figure 12. Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:24, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually, no, Kirk, so you must have missed it too. There is nothing in the text of the Hagelstein paper or in the figure, that indicates that the 16 cases were cells "producing excess heat," as the summary stated. Heat data is only shown for one of the sixteen cells, cell SC2. The experimental setup is also described in what may be the first report of this work, the charts are there, available at http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHtheemergen.pdf

Now, by "reviewer" did you mean the DoE bureaucrat, who wrote the erroneous report quoted above, or did you mean the expert member of the panel? This is Review #6. That member wrote:

Another class of experiments are referenced for the production of “excess heat” which do not involve electrolysis. The first of these is the Case experiments. Platinum group metals are loaded onto carbon substrates, 0.5 - 1.0 %. The excess heat is only observed with this low loading of platinum metals. This implies that carbon is involved in the effect. Six of 16 cells show excess heat. Four or five show helium excess as well.

This expert did correctly state that these were not electrolytic experiments, but differently misstated the heat results, apparently making an assumption about it, that all six cells charted for helium showed excess heat. No wonder he concluded that there wasn't any association shown! I.e, there was excess heat and no helium, as with cell SC3.1? Or very low helium, as with cell SC1. But nowhere does the text state that SC3.1 or SC1 showed excess heat, nor does the chart show that. Excess heat data is only shown for cell SC2, in Figure 13. Why only that one? Beats me. I'd want to know all the results for all the cells. We have that kind of data from Miles, I believe. --Abd (talk) 04:24, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I see that you have noted this, and that the reviewer has misidentified the Case-type cells as electrolytic. Personally, this is not really a significant error, as the question is whether there is conclusive proof of He being generated, wherever that might have been. As I have noted however, the plots are bogus because we can't trust the measurements. This is why I tried to get included in the 2004 DOE review, but the powers that be didn't see my point I guess. Also of note is the direct ommission of the Clarke paper I comment on in the next section. This is more CFer obsfucation. McK knew intimately what Clarke et al had written. He _choose_ to exclude it from the presentation to the reviewers. I wonder why? Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:33, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

As I note below, the Clarke paper is not omitted, that's a gross error on your part. It's cited. I think it was discounted because it had nothing to do with this work, but, for sure, that's speculation, and if you have better information, by all means, let me know. But this is about people and how they behave, not experiments and what they showed.

(Folks, you should be looking at the charts in the Hagelstein paper from our article's bibliography.[20], figures 12 and 13.)

The error of the DoE reviewer (the summarizer) was major. The error of the panel expert was just as bad, because that expert should have recognized the problem. The Case evidence is weak (Miles is much stronger, and Miles' work was submitted to the DoE as part of the documentation package). (Storms presents all this much better, in his 2007 book, but that research was all done long before.) In my opinion, the team of researchers did a poor job of presenting the evidence to the DoE. The evidence is there, particularly in the complete package of papers, but presented in such a way that if a reviewer wasn't very careful -- some apparently were careful -- they'd miss critical points or become confused, as what I've found, here, shows. From other research, the correlation between excess heat and helium is strong, and so, from the helium measurments, I'd suspect that three or four of the six charted cells showed significant excess heat. The cells with a sharp rise are very likely, the long-term, slow rise could be leak and would thus would be expected (again, based on other results) to show little or no excess heat.... but if not a leak, the excess heat would be perhaps half of what was found with the really active cells. No, I'm not assuming a result to prove a result. If, however, it was not as I'm speculating, then McKubre would indeed be guilty of "obfuscation," actually, of a kind of fraud. If it were true as the panel member quoted above wrote, then to claim these results as evidence of strong correlation between excess heat and helium would be deceptive, cherry-picking of data. I don't think so. --Abd (talk) 04:24, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

original comment by Abd resumes:

Page 7 of the review document has a section on Helium and Excess heat. There is a subsection titled "Correlation of Excess Heat and Helium." This section discusses the work of a number of experimental groups, and includes analysis of the "Q value," i.e, how much heat is associated with each atom of helium found. This is work that is fundamental to both evidence for cold fusion and to the consideration of theories. There is no mention in this section of "sixteen cases." The section does, however, refer to Appendix B for some further discussion of helium and excess heat.

There is a mention of sixteen cells that Appendix, page 18, a report of a study of Case cells in which 4He was found. Just to start with, these are not electrolytic cells. Secondly, the total number of cells was sixteen. The total number of cells for which helium measurements were reported was six. One of these is flat, at zero ppm, leaving five which show any helium at all. One of the five shows very low helium, not exceeding roughly 1 ppm. One shows a slow rise to about 4 ppm. Three show sharp rises of helium levels, crossing the background level of about 5.2 ppm with no sign of slowing down, until reaching, for one cell, almost 11 ppm. This is the only cell for which excess heat is reported, in a chart on figure 13 on page 21. As far as we know from this appendix, excess heat was only found in one cell, though that is unlikely to be true. I'll return to that later, I believe there is a more thorough report on this work.

This appendix was not a report showing heat/helium correlation in more than one cell. The only reports showing correlation of excess heat and helium over multiple experimental runs were in the earlier section described above. The correlation is quantitative, at a level consistent with d + d -> He4 (or with 4d -> Be8 -> 2 He4).

So: the summary report is almost completely erroneous.

These were not electrolytic cells.
The review document doesn't show "sixteen cases where ... cells were reported to be producing excess heat." Where there is a reported set of sixteen measurements of helium, excess heat was reported for only one. The document isn't clear, but the purpose of this section was to report time correlation of heat and helium, and that was only done for one run.
Helium was found in five cells, but one of the five was at a very low level easily ascribed to contamination. And one of the remaining showed a very slow rise that did not reach background, and the data isn't reported for sufficient time to see if it would slow down as it approched background (as would be expected for leaks). So, truly, anomalous helium was only found in three cells. Not five.

The correlation of helium and excess heat is crucial, and the submitters of the review document knew this, and that's why they had a section dedicated to this. It appears that whoever summarized the document was distracted by the information in Appendix B, and misread it and then reported that. There was one individual reviewer report that made some of the mistakes made by the summarizer, but this merely helps us to understand how the summarizer came to make the mistake, being led part of the way there by the reviewer.

Without the correlation, or somehow overlooking it, the wonder would be that even one-third of the reviewers thought that the evidence for a nuclear explanation for the excess heat (that half thought was convincing) was "somewhat persuasive." That is, the reviewers did not generally make the same mistake as the summarizer.

Now, what do we do with this? Well, we don't quote the DoE summarizer as being what was in the review document, unless we also note that the information allegedly there wasn't. Which I prefer, because that piece of information (the error) is important in understanding subsequent events. The reviewer was a DoE official, and was, I'm sure, singularly unimpressed with the evidence, because the official didn't understand it, read it incorrectly." I would never say this in the article, but readers can come to conclusions themselves, if we provide them with what's verifiable.

The statement in the summary report is notable, it's obvious that editors here have agreed on that. The actual review document is notable, for lots of reasons. This is all reliably sourced as released by the DoE. So we report both. And since the energy/helium ratio is considered the strongest evidence for fusion, with a specific mechanism, and we have Storms for that as well as other secondary sources, we present the real evidence that was shown to the DoE, the review of Miles' work as presented by them, or, better, by Storms.

I mention subsequent events. The DoE review recommended further research. So did the 1989 review. After 1989, the DoE rejected, apparently, all requests for funding of any research related to cold fusion, and this has been ascribed to the continued influence of Huizenga, who chaired the original panel and who has been a highly skeptical commentator on the field, putting out his own book that gives the most negative possible interpretation on every bit of the work. (But it is still a valuable resource, it is only his conclusions and framing that are problematic. It's like Taubes, which is a goldmine as well.) After 2004, a well-known cold fusion researcher submitted a request to do exactly the kind of work that the report recommended, a modest effort. It was denied without review, apparently. I think it's easy to see why this might have happened. The official who wrote the summary was asked about it, or is the one who made the decision. While in 1989 and 2004 the panels were reasonably neutral, the continued influence was entirely from the most skeptical side.

I have, above, refered to the report as the McKubre report. That was an error; McKubre was an author and was crucial in presenting it, but the paper is the Hagelstein paper, this theorist was the lead author, and that's how we have it in our bibliography. --Abd (talk) 16:00, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Some comments on the 'heat-He correlation'

extended discussion.

Reference: “PRODUCTION OF 4He IN D2-LOADED PALLADIUM-CARBON CATALYST II”, W. BRIAN CLARKE, STANLEY J. BOS and BRIAN M. OLIVER FUSION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 43, MAR. 2003, 250

It is of interest to look at some quotes from the referenced article in light of the supposed He-excess heat correlation that Abd is pushing so much. In the following I have clipped out some sections, which is indicated by {deletion}, for brevity. This article is the one I attempted to get into the Wiki article, but which has been removed from discussion, even though it still remains in the Bibliography. Note that Dr. M. McKubre heads the SRI effort in this field.

The Abstract

”Measurements of He, 3He/ 4He, Ne and 13 other components{deletion} in four samples of gas from SRI International (SRI) are reported. Three samples were collected from SRI Case-type stainless steel cells containing ~10 g of Pd/C catalyst initially loaded with ~3 atm D2 at ~200C, and the fourth sample (not identified) was stated to be a control. Case and the SRI researchers have claimed to observe 4He in concentrations of ~100 parts per million (ppm) and up to 11 ppm, respectively, produced in these cells via the fusion reaction D + D = 4He + 23.8 MeV. Others {note: ‘Others” being ‘these researchers’, i.e. Clarke, et al} found no evidence for 4He addition that cannot be readily explained by leaks from the atmosphere into the SRI cells. One sample appears to be identical in composition to air, and the other three have been seriously affected by leak(s) into and from the SRI cells. The rare gas “forensic” evidence includes 3He/ 4He ratios and He and Ne concentrations that are almost identical to air values. The samples also show high N2 (a primary indicator of air), low O2, and high CO and CO2 due to reaction of incoming atmospheric O2 with C in the catalyst. In two samples, the original D2 (or H2) has almost completely disappeared by outflow through the leak(s). These results have obvious implications concerning the validity of the excess 4He concentrations claimed by Case and the SRI researchers.”

Points made in the body:

He levels reported (ppm) 5.48, 6.52, 0.70, 5.30

N2 content of samples (mole %) 86.0, 89.1, 1.67, 78.4 (dry air = 78.1)

“1. All samples show high N2, which is a primary indicator of air.”

“2. Sample 46D is most probably room (or outside) air”

“After this technical note was submitted to Fusion Science and Technology, we received a communication from McKubre, who stated, inter alia, that sample 46D “was taken directly from a cylinder containing only deuterium gas with approximately 5 ppm helium-4 that we use to calibrate our mass spectrometer.” It is therefore very puzzling that this sample, except for slight additions of H2, D2, and CO2, was identical in composition to normal (dry) air.”

From the Summary:

“The results of our measurements show that after the Case-type cells at SRI were filled with hydrogen {deletion}, the following events probably occurred:

1. The hydrogen pressure in the cell decreased from ~3 to ~0.7 atm during the first few days. {deletion}

2. Incoming atmospheric O2 started to react with C in the Pd/C catalyst to produce CO and CO2, although the inflow rate of O2 was low during the first few days. Remaining hydrogen in the cell leaked outward and also reacted with O2 (aided by the catalyst) to form D2O and H2O. {deletion}”

“We note that two plots of helium concentrations versus time given by McKubre et al.(4) in fact show that the helium concentrations reach maximum values of 9 and 11 ppm at 20 and 27 days, respectively, and then appear to decrease slightly at later times. At the present time, we do not understand why the SRI maximum helium concentrations are a factor of ~2 higher than the atmospheric value of 5.2 ppm, although the observed increase must surely be due to unrecognized systematic error(s) in the SRI experiments.”

So, from the best CF researcher around we have four samples submitted that were all supposed to be primarily hydrogen with traces of helium in them, and experts in mass spectrometry instead find air. Yet, McKubre et al report He production via ‘cold fusion’.

Note also that a slow in-leak of air would provide O2 for the H2+O2 reaction, which produces heat. That heat would appear as excess heat.

Bottom line: If the He-heat correlation is to be placed in the Wiki article, then a summary of this information needs to be placed there as well, along with the commentary on the CCS, since the evidence is that the CFers don’t correctly measure either excess heat or He. If you can’t measure your X and Y properly, an accidental correlation arising from a plot cannot be considered real. Kirk shanahan (talk) 14:38, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

If you can’t measure your X and Y properly, an accidental correlation arising from a plot cannot be considered real.

Amen, hallelujah. I haven't read these sources and wouldn't have the physics background to evaluate where the consensus of reliable sources lies if I did read them; I leave it to more knowledgeable people to sort out the physics. But I do know statistics, and I've been reading the statistical assertions made in this discussion with increasing bemusement. Thanks for leaking some fresh air into the fog of obfuscating verbiage. Woonpton (talk) 16:05, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Of course. Woonpton, there are a number of scientists who have been following the events here, and you might do us the favor of disclosing the source of your bemusement regarding statistics, there are quite a few of us who likewise understand that field.

Shanahan is correct, this information belongs in the article, if the Case work is reported, because it may be the most cogent recent criticism of the helium work. However, the Case work is actually the weakest work on this point, and was used in only one correlation study, of a single cell, as reported to the DoE. (But I haven't reviewed the original Case article.) The Case effect is actually an open mystery, and I'm not convinced that it should be in our article: what was important here was that distorted Case effect results were presented by the DoE summary as if this was the strong evidence of helium correlation presented, when it wasn't. On the Case effect, Storms, p.46:

After McKubre and co-workers reproduced the Case effect at SRI, I undertook to do the same. Jed Rothwell provided funds to build a system needed to purify the Case catalyst ... About a year was spent on this effort without seeing any ambiguous energy.

As is common in this field, the ability to make active material was lost. In this case, the drum of charcoal used by United Catalyst as the substrate was thrown out during cleanup, perhaps explaining why the catalyst they made later did not work. Because the unique characteristics required to make the material nuclear-active were not determined at the time, it is impossible to manufacture more active material according to known specifications.

We are left with two alternate hypotheses, both reasonable if we only look at the Case effect. One, there was experimental error of an unknown kind (or as hypothesized by the researchers whose work is cited above), or the effect is fragile and sometimes associated with unknown factors. There is no controversy over the latter, and it is also quite likely that some of the positive results were due to artifact. Even careful researchers make mistakes. To me, energy/He4 quantitative correlation, found over many experiments by different groups, with blind testing of the Helium in a significant part of the work (Miles, at least), is perhaps the strongest piece of evidence that the excess heat is real and that it is nuclear in origin.

I will allow this out-of-sequence interjection breaking up my post, by Shanahan. See the next full-left small-text below for the resumption of my post --Abd (talk) 18:30, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

No, three. (3) it was leaks, and the latter attempts somehow were done better, i.e. without leaks. Kirk shanahan (talk) 17:13, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Sure. As noted, causes of results may vary from experiment to experiment. Note that the "latter attempts" were earlier, and that they include work from several other research groups. Further, leaks don't explain correlation. --Abd (talk) 18:30, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

P.S., You do understand that Krivit had a whole article in a recent NET that critiqued the idea that anyone has shown the 23.8 MeV number in their experiments right? Kirk shanahan (talk) 17:13, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I do. Krivit is a bit obsessed about this, I've corresponded with him. I'd love to be able to use NET as a source, because it publishes material from all the major players, those discussions include comment from many well-known cold fusion researchers, and sometimes, critics.

Basically, nobody has found "23.8 MeV." That's the theoretical value for d-d fusion and would also be the same for 4d Be-8 intermediary fusion (i.e., you'd get, from the latter, two 23.8 MeV alpha particles). What has actually been claimed is that results are "consistent with" 23.8 MeV. I.e., 31-32 +/- 13 MeV/He-4 (McKubre), based on a single Case study, as far as I know, 24.8 +/- 2.5 MeV from a single SRI study reported by Hagelstein. Storms then claims that, by combining all measurements (he reports a lot of results using different units, i.e., He/watt-second, and I haven't done the conversion), he comes up with 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4. His conclusion is "this value is consistent with d-d fusion being the source of energy and helium, other reactions may also be consistent...."

For detail, at [21] is a 2003 review of heat and He-4 papers by NET. [22] is the October 2008 issue of NET, with discussion of what Krivit titles the "24 MeV belief." --Abd (talk) 18:30, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Resumption of my original post below --Abd (talk) 18:30, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Criticism of cold fusion work has often been based on two claims: lack of "nuclear ash," i.e., reaction product, and lack of radiation expected to accompany fusion. Almost any radiation, though, would show a nuclear reaction, radiation doesn't ordinarily come from chemical reactions. Finding helium correlated with excess heat, however, validates both sets of measurements unless there is some reasonable hypothesis connecting both as errors with a common cause, it answers the nuclear ash objection, since it is the ash, and it also can answer the radiation question, since energetic alpha radiation transfers its energy to the environment as heat, and there are at least two proposed mechanisms which explain why the expected neutrons would be missing. (Contrary to the claims made about me, repeatedly, that I'm pushing hydrino theory, I prefer the Be8 hypothesis of Takahashi, which neatly predicts no neutrons but only alpha radiation at 23.8 MeV) Energetic alpha particles would be expected to generate X-radiation, and that is reported quite clearly and cleanly (X-ray film that forms an image of the electrode, an electrode that wasn't radioactive before the experiment). Further, there is direct evidence of energetic alphas, much of the SPAWAR work, peer-review published, is about that. In 2004, though, energy/helium correlation was the only widely-known clear evidence for nuclear origin, so that this evidence was missed by the review, to some degree, was of great historical importance.

Believe it or not, Woonpton, what I'm about here is writing an encyclopedia article, one which neutrally reports the whole story as found in sources meeting our standards. Doing that requires confronting certain common editorial assumptions based on widespread misinformation as to what is actually in the sources. Please remember that in January, when I came across some administrative abuse over related issues, I was skeptical about cold fusion, though dedicated to NPOV. My initial concern was pure process, administrators shouldn't be using their tools in the service of their POV, and it was quite clear to me that this had happened. It took months, but ArbComm validated this view and rejected or ignored claims that I was POV-pushing. I only developed a POV about cold fusion as a result of becoming familiar with what is in reliable sources, plus extensive discussions here. I've encountered, in the literature, many stories like my own: skeptics who, for some reason, were motivated to actually look at the sources instead of relying on knee-jerk assumptions. Robert Duncan (physicist) is only the most recent example.

And what is my POV? It is that claims that low energy nuclear reactions sometimes take place in the palladium deuteride system are reasonable and worthy of further investigation. Given that it took almost twenty years to find experimental techniques that reliably show the excess energy production, at low levels, it's quite possible that this will never be commercially practical for energy generation, hence I would only recommend, at this time, modest funding. This is exactly the same conclusion as the 2004 DoE report. I am not out on a limb, if my agreement with the conclusions of the DoE report (errors aside) is any sign, I'm right in the mainstream. It just looks different, to some, until they have seen what I've seen. And that is why we discuss and why we don't edit war; exceptions, for me, are rare and confined to some specific need, where asserting edits and compromising through edits rather than through more tedious discussion that goes nowhere is more efficient. Watch: you will see the results. If they don't toss me out of here first! Seems unlikely, at this point, but you never know. I can't do a thing without consensus, and I wouldn't want to. --Abd (talk) 16:55, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd, you are not neutral. Your complete lack of understanding of the import of the Clarke work shows this. Let me be clear. At the same time McKubre was developing the data he presented to the 2004 DOE Review, he supplied 4 samples to Clarke, et al. McKubre expected and communicated that the samples were to be hydrogen with traces of He in them. Clarke, et al found air. This means McK had no idea what he was doing. And this is from 'the best' the field has to offer. That directly applies to the work presented at the 2004 DOE review. Net conclusion, we are in a fog of confusion, and the correct response to that is "we have no idea what is going on, but there's no compelling evidence for CF". However, you are unable to accept this because, somehow, you have transformed into a CF fanatic advocate, and anyone who reads what you write here can see that. Most of us don't like that. It leads to a POV'd article. Please stop. Go away if you have to. Kirk shanahan (talk) 17:22, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm not neutral, I didn't claim to be neutral. I wrote that my goal is a neutral article. What I understand is largely irrelevant, the community will judge; however, I do understand the import, though I may interpret it differently. You should know, if you are a careful scientist, that a single report isn't proof of anything, least of all that a researcher you assert is "the best the field has to offer" (that's quite debatable, he's notable and he's respected, but "best" is a big word) had "no idea what he was doing." If I take your account as accurate, more likely, he received the results and had no time to make sense of them, if, indeed, any sense could be made. I wouldn't include last-minute news in a report to the DoE unless it was very, very solid. Sure, those results called into question the Case work, but how much they call it into question involves details that haven't been disclosed here. The Case work was very narrow, and not crucial to the DoE report (that's why it was in an appendix, not in the main body); indeed, in hindsight, that report might have been more effective if it hadn't been added, because it clearly confused at least one person involved. The Clarke results were so far from what he'd found that it was very reasonable for him to suspect something odd had happened. I'll see what reports and claims there are on the circumstances, what follow-up there is, and report in a separate section. --Abd (talk) 21:42, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

friendly warning for Shanahan from Abd

Now, Kirk, you are very definitely not neutral, and,having a conflict of interest, you are not expected to be. That's why you have been properly advised not to edit the article (which advice you have apparently respected). If Rothwell were here and behaving as you are behaving above, I'd be warning him, so so take this as a friendly warning; if it weren't friendly, it would not be here, it would be on your Talk page, where you could be held responsible for having seen it. I have no intention to act to cause sanctions for your incivility here, but someone else might, and there is a decent possibility that all of this will end up before the Arbitration Committee again, there are arbitratable issues being raised that we might not be unable to find consensus on. My goal is to avoid that if possible, but also understand that the last time I went very far to try to find a way to avoid going to ArbComm, and only went because it was forced, I was troutslapped by ArbComm, not for my complaints and claims and work on this article and related issues, which a majority of editors currently active here derided, and attempted to have me banned over, but for not escalating sooner. (One well-known administrator described this to me, privately, as being "blessed by faint criticism.") There are lots of people reading what happens here, Kirk, who wouldn't agree with you about "CF fanatic advocate," but they don't necessarily jump in when they don't see it as necessary. I get the comments by email. From regular, experienced editors. I also get comments from people in the field, and from skeptics, some of whom are actually civil.

You would do better, Kirk, if you recognize the boundaries. ArbComm has a tendency, when the can of worms is opened, to go through it and toss out single-purpose COI accounts who haven't respected WP:NPA and WP:CIVIL. Sometimes even if they have! I would prefer to retain your expertise, but, obviously, we also need balance from other experts, and we banned the most available one. I'll work on that. --Abd (talk) 21:42, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Kirk, what of the possibility that Clarke mishandled the samples? Or if the sample vials(?) were defective and leaked during transport? V (talk) 20:05, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Doesn't matter. May be entirely possible. However, data that was supposed to verify claims has contradicted them. Net result is "No conclusion can be drawn." But note however, that Clarke's work is an order of magnitude more thorough than McKubre's, AND represents what a scientist should do when conducting trace analysis. I have said the same thing about Little's work on 'transmutation products', and another example is Indian study on Bockris' carbon arc experiments. Bottom line, all the chemical measurements being made in this field are at trace level, and the CFers have never established they can and do (note, this means _every time_) do the job adequately. Therefore, the tendency is to trust Clarke over McKubre, but as I said that is not necessary, as the point was to 'prove' CF, and that didn't happen. Kirk shanahan (talk) 20:33, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Kirk. I was thinking of saying something along the lines of what Abd wrote in his second paragraph below, but since he's already done it.... I WILL say that your 3rd sentence is a bit "off". A vial of gas is not "data", although data would be obtainable from it. V (talk) 22:08, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Do you really not undersand English? I wrote: "data that was supposed to verify claims has contradicted them". That's exactly what I meant to say, and it true. The data from the Clarke, Bos, and Oliver paper repudiates McKubre, et al's claims. How clearer can I be? (You bias is showing I think...) Kirk shanahan (talk) 11:50, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

It does matter. It's not an issue of trusting one researcher over another. Shanahan is stepping outside normal scientific protocol here, and his mention of this a sign of his attachment; the standard is to, by default, trust all the reports, which reflects the common-law principle that testimony is presumed true unless controverted. Experimental reports are just that, and we trust them. We assume that what they report is what was observed. So I assume that Clarke is reporting his expert analysis of what his techniques and instruments showed. You have done the same with calorimetry, by the way. You claim that excess heat is the result of an unknown surface effect that causes local heating, causing calibration constant shift. You claim that the experimental reports either show this or are consistent with this, which means that you are trusting the experimental results and are merely proposing an alternate explanation of them.

Let's clarify first. The 'it' that does or doesn't matter is the possibility that Clarke, et al, messed up their analyses. So, exactly how is it 'stepping outside of scientific protocol' to say: "yes they might have, but the fact that they produced an excellent paper describing their work _and_ have the reputation to back it up, leads to a conclusion that we can't draw a conclusion."? They are not junk researchers, their work looks good, and, in fact, better than SRI's and any other CFer, and you want me to ignore it? Whose not being scientific now?? My conclusion is not wild or 'over-the-top', it is what is expected when a careful, detailed report is made presenting results that demonstrate an ongoing concern is still a problem. I simply ask those making the claims that are under question (CF produced He) to 'show their work', and to replicate. SOP for scientific protocol. I will note your comment is another ad hominem ("Shanahan doesn't follow scientific protocol") made on no basis other than you don't seem to like the implications of what I wrote.

P.S. The standard is *not* to trust every report. All real scientisits know lots of garbage gets published everyday. _Everything_ that is published is questioned at some level. Science isn't the law, and publishing is a 'request for comment' from the general community. Why would you need that if it were true? I don't know where you think you learned sciecne V, but go back and do it over! (And the rest of the paragraph about how I do what you claim is equally off base.) Kirk shanahan (talk) 11:35, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Researchers have limited resources. It's easy to say that a researcher should have done this or that, but this or that may be expensive, not allowed by the budget or not possible with the research time available. Researchers report what results they have, balancing the need for more data -- there is almost always a need for more data -- with the need to communicate, so that others can become involved with analysis and confirmation, and, as well, so that they can receive credit for what they have done.

Shanahan still does not seem to face the issue and power of correlation. We'll be examining that in more detail, it's a fundamental issue that bypasses the objections about measurement accuracy. In the meantime, however, we should note that the charts in the Hagelstein report do show error bars, and that the effects are not buried in the noise, and are confirmed with multiple measurements or experiments, and the heat/helium correlation is roughly confirmed by all the work that's been done on it. (We have no data, to my knowledge, on the heat generated from the cells from the Case report.) Note that Krivit, in what Kirk referred to about the 23.8 MeV/He-4 "myth," is claiming that one report, based on his own original analysis of it, shows 16 MeV/He-4, instead of the figures from other reports that were above the 24 MeV level (loss of helium, expected, will cause the measured and calculated MeV/He-4 to be above the actual reaction value). This is still quite close to the prediction for d-d fusion, when earlier criticism claimed that nuclear phenomena were many orders of magnitude -- very large numbers -- out of whack from theoretical predictions. Being within a factor of two is quite strong a result, in fact! --Abd (talk) 22:01, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Ummmm, Abd, the whole point of CCS is to extend the range of the error bars, so that data only a short distance outside them can instead be encompassed by them. Kirk is right in that the MATH is plausible, but as for the rationale for a mechanism...well, I want to see evidence for CCS in experiments designed to find it! And there is one other "tiny" thing...to the extent that a CF researcher was able to claim a tiny detection of excess heat, proportionate to natural deuterium level, using ordinary water in the electrolyte of a CF "control" experiment -- well, any calorimeter that can detect that, then when re-used in a heavy-water CF experiment (that's 6500 times as much deuterium as before)...that calorimeter's error bars SHOULD be far far below the level of measurable excess heat, such that not even CCS could expect to explain it away. V (talk) 22:17, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

The issue is complex. I remain quite skeptical that Kirk's explanation is anything more than a long shot, a stretch. That it would remain through so many different kinds of experiments, including those that a measuring net heat flow from a tightly closed system such as an Arata cell (or Case cell), seems quite remote a possibility to me, but, yes, it should be investigated. About the ordinary water results, yes. They are measuring an effect three orders of magnitude lower than what they claim to see with heavy water. Kirk seems to be proposing, though, a non-nuclear excess heat effect that perturbs calorimetry because of the particular way that it manifests, through very local heating. Don't confuse precision (i.e., the ability to detect a very small change in evolved heat) with accuracy (the determination of an absolute level of heat evolution). Very precise results might be very inaccurate, if there is some systemic error. Look, the big problem with Kirk's results is that they haven't made a big splash. They've made a little splash. Storms does comment on Shanahan, which makes it notable. How does it feel, Kirk, to be notable because of Storms' response? Other secondary source that comments on Shanahan? There may be a little, I'm not sure. Not much. To a degree, any peer-reviewed response or other independently published response to Shanahan shows notability. --Abd (talk) 23:09, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd has again failed to research the things I write, and writes things that then imply I don't understand what is going on. Doing what I suggested, searching the Britz Bibliography, produced in about 5 minutes the facts that Notoya (FT 24(1993)202) produced a 4W excess heat signal with light water and nickel electrodes, and are other claims to 60% excess and 169% excess (Noninski FT 21(1992)163 and Notoya FT 26(1994)179). Storms' excess heat sig was 0.78W, McK's best (from c.'92-'93) was 1.7 as I recall, and his big '98 report best was only .36W. Point is, this is NOT 3 orders of magnitude under the signals obtained with heavy water, and it took 5 minutes to find this out. Kirk shanahan (talk) 14:30, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Clarke and Hagelstein

extended discussion.

Kirk shanahan wrote:

So, from the best CF researcher around we have four samples submitted that were all supposed to be primarily hydrogen with traces of helium in them, and experts in mass spectrometry instead find air. Yet, McKubre et al report He production via ‘cold fusion’.

At the same time McKubre was developing the data he presented to the 2004 DOE Review, he supplied 4 samples to Clarke, et al. McKubre expected and communicated that the samples were to be hydrogen with traces of He in them. Clarke, et al found air. This means McK had no idea what he was doing. And this is from 'the best' the field has to offer. That directly applies to the work presented at the 2004 DOE review.

Shanahan had presented material from “PRODUCTION OF 4He IN D2-LOADED PALLADIUM-CARBON CATALYST II”, W. BRIAN CLARKE, STANLEY J. BOS and BRIAN M. OLIVER FUSION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 43, MAR. 2003, 250.

The paper reviewed by the DoE in 2004 does refer to this paper, it is note 119. The context is a footnote on page 18. The samples may have had little or nothing to do with the work of McKubre reported in teh Hagelstein 2004 DoE review paper. The footnote:

One study by Clarke[119] did not measure any significant increase in helium levels in a mass spectrometer where levels much smaller than 100 ppmV/V would have been easily recognized. Clarke, however, did not observe the procedures described by Case, which were in any case incomplete. Neither was Clarke able to measure any temperature effects and his geometry, which consisted of milligram single samples of “Case-type” catalyst confined with D2 or H2 in very small sealed Pb pipe sections, differed greatly from that used and recommended by Case.

Clear as mud. If Shanahan has evidence on what these samples were and how they would bear on the Case cell work reported to the DOE, he's welcome to provide it. Notice the possible contradiction between the claim of Clarke to have measured levels in samples taken from "SRI Case-type stainless steelcells" and the claim in the Hagelstein paper that the samples were in "very small seald Pb pipe sections." Unstated, the provenance of the samples. I don't have direct access to the Clarke paper, maybe there are more details there. Otherwise, it's looking to me like the Clarke work is likely irrelevant to the Case study presented in Appendix B of the Hagelstein paper, which was, itself, a minor part of the energy/helium evidence, Clarke being blown up and stretched by Shanahan to make it appear highly relevant. Very impressive, Kirk.

There is more. When was the work done on Case cells at SRI? McKubre reported on this at a conference in 1999: The catalytic fusion process of Dr. Les Case got a significant boost in early June. Dr. Michael McKubre of SRI International reported on a series of convincing experiments. These appear to confirm Case’s conclusion that helium-4 can be produced by the catalytic action of palladium-doped carbon in heated vessels containing pressurized (several atmospheres) heavy hydrogen (D2) gas. McKubre spoke on June 3, 1999 at the Society for Scientific Exploration’s 18th Annual Meeting, which was held at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.[23]. The Clarke study was published in March, 2003. As I mentioned above, we aren't informed as to the provenance of the cells. Samples were "taken from" stainless steel Case-type cells, but how? And when? How had the cells previously been treated? What was the purpose of the provision of samples to Clarke? How long elapsed between the filling of the sample containers (what were the sample containers, how were they sealed, etc) and the Clarke measurements. Pesky little details, some of which might have answers, and some not. Bottom line: these were not measurements reported as part of a study, and the purpose isn't stated by Clarke. Normally, SRI does their own measurement of Helium with their own mass spectrometer. This may have been an attempt to check a calibration, for example, and somebody screwed up. Or open, literally. It's a bit unclear why Clarke even published, the paper as described doesn't assert the significance, though Shanahan does. What I see in the Clarke report is that the containers were very badly sealed, whereas, looking at the helium data from the Hagelstein paper, one container shows no leakage at all, two show possible slow leaks (one very low levels detected, also possible measurement error, and one with a steady rise toward ambient level, could be a leak indication, but then three that show drastic rises, clearly unconnected with and surpassing ambient. I see no relation between this and the Clarke results, except possibly with the slowly leaking cells -- which were all leaking at a lower rate than Clarke speculates (major shift in "a few days" vs data collected for the Hagelstein paper over as long as 45 days.) --Abd (talk) 01:42, 28 May 2009

Any real scientist understands the case I am making. The vehement objections being raised by V and Abd about this is proof that they are biased and should not be editing the article. I don't feel the need to say more in response to them now. If others have questions please post them. Kirk shanahan (talk) 11:39, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

P.S. You're confusing papers. Note the "I" and "II". Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:30, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Please remove this section to your own talk page. Verbal chat 06:46, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

^ Fleischmann 1990
^ Alok Jha, Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head, Guardian, Nov. 4, 2005, for background
^ William J. Broad, 2 Teams Put New Life in 'Cold' Fusion Theory, New York Times, April 26, 1991, claims "ultradense hydrogen"
^ R.L. Mills and S.P. Kneizys, Excess heat production by the electrolysis of an aqueous potassium carbonate electrolyte and the implications for cold fusion, Fusion Technology, 20, pp. 65-81 (1991).

[1] Fleischmann 1990

[2] Alok Jha, Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head, Guardian, Nov. 4, 2005, for background

[3] William J. Broad, 2 Teams Put New Life in 'Cold' Fusion Theory, New York Times, April 26, 1991, claims "ultradense hydrogen"

[4] R.L. Mills and S.P. Kneizys, Excess heat production by the electrolysis of an aqueous potassium carbonate electrolyte and the implications for cold fusion, Fusion Technology, 20, pp. 65-81 (1991).

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]