Cold fusion/Experts/Abd ul-Rahman Lomax/Bliki

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Cold fusion topics:

Rossi

not bad. People are asking prematurely. Rossi is a commercial claimant, and it is quite likely that if he has something, it's unreliable, but he would keep thinking that he'll solve the reliability problem by next month, hence the frequently failed promises. However, there is no good way to distinguish this from outright fraud. Rossi's theories about his reaction have little or no relationship to what he might have done, found conditions that set up low energy nuclear reactions. For example, Rossi has claimed copper as the ash. It's quite unlikely; deuterium is more likely from the possible physics, but nobody really knows. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 19:31, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

What is cold fusion

I answered this one. Today, my answer is:
"Cold fusion" is a name popularly applied to reactions reported by Pons and Fleischmann in 1989, the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect, and effects and reactions thought to be similar. We don't know what it is, but we do know what the FPHE does, it converts deuterium to helium, releasing energy that shows up as heat. How it does this, we don't know. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 19:31, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Pseudoscience

The most prominent answer is partly correct:
Tom Nickell
The original claims of Cold Fusions were testable hypotheses; the hypotheses were tested and found to be false.
That's science and not pseudoscience.
Continuing to believe the claims after they are clearly shown to be false belongs to the world of cults and conspiracy theory.
The respondent is correct that "cold fusion" is not a :pseudoscience." But he obviously believes in a series of things that are just not so.
  • He has an idea of the "original claims," but he very likely doesn't know what they were.
  • He believes that these "hypotheses" were tested and found to be false, and not just as a finding, but as a clear showing.
That didn't happen the way he imagines.
  • Pons and Fleischmann, in 1989, did not claim to have achieved "cold fusion." They did claim an "unknown nuclear reaction," based on two announced experimental findings: levels of heat that they could not explain with chemistry -- and they were among the world's foremost electrochemists -- and low levels of neutrons.
  • There was a rush to replicate, prior to the general availability of a precise protocol. It is now well-known that the conditions of these early replication efforts were not such as to demonstrate the effect. These were replication failures, and replication failure does not prove that the original report was in error.
  • The claim of neutrons was in error. There are no neutrons from the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect, or if there are any, they are at extremely low levels.
  • The anomalous heat was never found to be "false."
  • To the contrary, it's been widely confirmed, and more.
So I responded, and at this point, the response is collapsed, because it has been downvoted.
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax
The original claim was anomalous heat in highly loaded palladium deuteride ("Fusion" was a speculation, not a claim.) That claim has been tested and confirmed, and the reaction product, helium, has been confirmed. This is all science. What is not science is claims about the history of cold fusion that are not based on the actual scientific work, as published, but on opinions about the work.
The approach to cold fusion that was announced in 1989 is extremely sensitive to material conditions and is difficult to control. If any commercial product is possible, it will almost certainly use a very different approach.
This is not controversial in the scientific journals, it is only, to pseudoskeptics, "in the world of cults and conspiracy theory." Notice that "conspiracy" was not mentioned. I didn't cite sources yet. The discussion continued. It was written, then:
Tom Nickell
Ummmmmm. Yeah. Right.
See here's the thing: Any rigorous demonstration of fusion would be very big news and of extraordinary interest to the relevant professional communities. Professional communities spread all over the world, not just the USA.
SO. NO. If fusion and helium and neutrons have been demonstrated rigorously it is NOT being suppressed by prejudice or greed. The 'demonstrations' have flaws, which cause competent experts to dismiss them. That's how science works. You have to convince the people who actually understand the relevant science.
It is obvious that Mr. Nickell is completely clueless as to what is actually the state of the science, and its international character. He thinks that present cold fusion claims involve neutrons. He has a concept of the "relevant professional communities," but almost certainly is thinking of the high-energy physics community, when that would only be relevant to a judgment of a theory of mechanism (i.e., "fusion"). The actual experimental work was electrochemistry and related calorimetry, and Pons and Fleischmann were experts at that, and their work has mostly been confirmed and reviewed by electrochemists.
To be explicit: the actual claim is of anomalous heat, not explainable by chemistry, and the relevant expertise would be those who understand electrochemistry and calorimetry. And that expertise led to confirmations of the effect, and validation of the excess heat claims. And then, later, the heat/helium correlation was found and, again, confirmed by electrochemists and experts, particularly experts in working with and measuring helium.
Was this big news? The original claim was very big news. It is said that half the discretionary research budget in the U.S. was spent in attempts to confirm the original report. Mostly that was wasted, it was far, far too rushed, work was done based the slimmest reports. The real confirmations did not start to come in until about the time of the U.S. DoE ERAB report, too late to be included in it.
Notably, that report did not -- as Nickell would think -- reject cold fusion. It considered it unconfirmed, which was accurate as of the date of the report. (There was at least one confirmation, the work by Melvin Miles, mentioned in the report as negative, but before the report was issued, Miles attempted to contact the DoE to tell them he was now seeing anomalous heat. They did not return his phone calls. It took months of electrolysis to set up the conditions of the effect, but the early negative replications gave up after weeks.
Rushed science can be Bad Science.
Nickell is referring to "demonstrations," and this may be about Rossi's work. That may have nothing at all to do with cold fusion. "Demonstrations" are what commercial efforts, seeking to raise funds for development, do. Science is not done that way, he's correct about that. The problem here is that he does not know what has been done, but he's dead certain he understands.
Hence the sarcastic "Ummmmmm. Yeah. Right."
So he claims, "Any rigorous demonstration of fusion would be very big news." The experimental work was done and announced in 1991, and it was certainly noticed by John Huizenga, the highly skeptical co-chair of the 1989 ERAB panel, he covers it in his book, but expects that it won't be confirmed (because he thinks the results are impossible, and it's clear why he thinks that: he is holding an assumption that if helium is being produced, the reaction must be ordinary deuterium fusion, which must emit a 23.8 MeV gamma, and, in fact, this would mostly escape the cell and not show up as heat. So was it big news? No, by this time certain journals had declared that they would publish nothing more on cold fusion, they considered it all a foolish fantasy, etc. The illusion of a conclusive rejection of cold fusion had been established by 1991, in spite of the lack of any definitive demonstration of error (other than the original neutron measurement error). Yet by 1991, positive results were greatly outnumbering negative results in the journals.
Again, he mentions "prejudice and greed." He's got conspiracy theory on his mind. He had gone on:
"... extremely sensitive to material conditions and is difficult to control. "---That's the classic diagnostic of Crank Science. Experiments have to be repeatable.
Experiments have to be repeatable. Experiments have to be repeatable.
Experiments have to be repeatable.
The truth does not have to be repeated. Yes, to serve as confirmation or disconfirmation of hypotheses, experiments do need, usually, to be repeated. It's obvious that he believes that there was no repetition or confirmation. And he's running a standard pseudoskeptical rant: "crank science." Yes, "difficulty with materials" can be an excuse for shoddy work. However, what if the conditions of an effect actually do involve material circumstances that are difficult to control? In this case, inadequate work has been done to actually explore the conditions more than superficially. That's very expensive work. It's happening at the University of Missouri, to some degree, in their nanotechnology lab.
It has been found how to produce material that will *usually* show the effect, but the effect is transient, it doesn't work, then it works, then it stops working. Does that make it impossible to confirm?
No, there are simple ways around this. If cold fusion is an "unknown nuclear reaction," nevertheless, there must be a reaction product. To cut to the chase, helium is the product. The conversion of deuterium to helium is so energetic that it only takes a tiny bit of helium to explain the anomalous heat. Miles ultimately found helium in the outgas, it was absent from controls, and present when anomalous heat was present. He showed that it was strongly correlated with the heat being evolved.
And this has been confirmed by about sixteen independent research groups around the world. No alternate explanation, other than production by the same reaction that is producing the heat, has been credibly proposed.
So I responded along these lines. I cited Storms (2010). It's obvious he didn't look at that. He replied:
Tom Nickell
You fundamentally misunderstand the scientific process.
"Hard to control" effects that cannot be replicated reliably are not proof of anything.
He's correct, but is not understanding what is being said. The effect can be replicated, whether or not that is "reliable" is a matter of definition. It's not reliable enough to predict the level of heat that will be obtained, for example, but there is an experiment that is reliable: set up the FPHE, using the state of the art, ideally simply replicating a known protocol, with decent calorimetry, but design the experiment to capture helium in the outgas. A good protocol to follow would be the well-documented SRI M4. Record and measure the amomalous power levels (heat). Measure the helium in the outgas and compare that with heat. This has been done many times. It's reliable, even though heat itself is not reliable. No heat, no helium above background. Heat, helium commensurate with the power, and roughly half the helium expected from the known fusion energy ratio. The rest of the helium is apparently trapped in the metal of the cathode, near the surface. In SRI M4, steps were taken to release that helium, and the resulting ratio was quite close to the fusion value. However, this result has not been confirmed. What is widely confirmed is the existence of the correlation at a value "consistent with" the fusion value and the heat measured.
Claims of phenomena that do not convince competent experts are not proof of anything.
So who is a "competent expert"? To understand the work in cold fusion takes time, and if one is already convinced that cold fusion claims are bogus, one will not take the time. In 2004, a few scientists went back to the U.S. DoE and there was a brief review. In spite of serious deficiencies of that review, the 18-member panel was divided. On the most basic anomalous heat issue, half the panel believed that the evidence for that heat was conclusive. A third of the panel thought that the evidence for a nuclear origin of the heat was at least "somewhat convincing." In reviewing the individual reviews and the overall panel review, it is quite clear that the presented evidence was not understood, because the descriptions of that evidence, in the reviews, was blatantly false. Yet in spite of that gross misunderstanding, this report was almost a majority that the heat effect was real.
Phenomena that violate well-established laws and theories require stronger proof than claims that are consistent with established laws and theories.
What well-established law of physics is violated? The claim was simply that there is a nuclear reaction that was unknown. It was not claimed that this was fusion, and no specific mechanism was claimed. With a specific mechanism, established laws can be applied. What was contradicted was not the laws of physics, but the accuracy of a certain approximation, and the work of Pons and Fleischmann was specifically designed as a test of that approximation. However, since then, the evidence has become very strong.
The question here was whether or not cold fusion is "pseudoscience," but Nickell's answer made it one of the reality of the effect. He's claiming that this was tested and that the tests showed that it was unreal. That never happened. Had it happened, there never would have been that second DoE review in 2004. And had it happened, the research would have stopped.
Instead, millions of dollars have been invested continuing the research. Fleischmann said it would take a Manahattan-scale project to develop this for commercial application. I'd say he may have been optimistic. We have no proof, so far, that commercial applications are possible, the effect is, quite simply, too fragile, too unreliable, so far. Yet it's real, and it's rather obvious, nobody will put in what it would take to develop control over an unknown reaction taking place in nanoscale structures if they don't have clear evidence of reality.
Nickell is generally demanding reliability first, when that's the cart before the horse.
-If- someone has solid experiments, it is -his- responsibility to present the information to the scientific community, --answer-- the criticisms, and then collect his Nobel prize.
The work has been published. There have been criticisms and they have been answered, in the journals. I pointed to a recent review in a mainstream multidisciplinary journal, that was ignored. Later, I'll add references to sources here.
There are too many cranks and crackpots out there for the scientific community to take every claim seriously. Cold Fusion was given a fair hearing and properly dismissed.
That's common pseudoskeptical cant. For years, nearly all publication on cold fusion in the journals has been positive, treats the effect as real. The Storms review in Naturwissenschaften 2010 was comprehensive. Yet the claim is repeated, on blogs, in commentary on Wikipedia talk pages, in comments on stories in media, that it's not worth taking seriously, that this explains the silence in the journals of "scientists." Real work is going on in research groups and universities around the world. There is, so far, no breakthrough in what the skeptics demand: a "demonstration" experiment that shows ample heat, reliably. To replicate the effect can be done for maybe $10,000 (Jed Rothwell once estimated this, and he knows what's involved), certainly for $50,000. To measure helium accurately, however, is difficult, requiring more expensive equipment. Nobody is doing this work any more because it's accepted.
Develop a repeatable experiment and ye shall be heard. Otherwise, be quiet.
He has no clue what is even being claimed. A replicable experiment: set up the FPHE, develop, using existing techniques, a showing of anomalous heat in at least some tests, and measure and examine helium generation for correlation with the heat. Miles did it double-blind. This was very solid work.
So Nickell has a hypothesis, that if a repeatable experiment is "developed," the developer will "heard." Okay, in 1991, Miles announced his first results. Later results were published in a mainstream journal. Miles was "heard," because his work was confirmed by many. What Nickell is assuming is that if such an experiment existed, he'd know about it, but he obviously has not reviewed the literature. It's cargo cult science. Apparently, he believes in the "institution of science," that it is infallible, because he states conclusions based on that belief. There are a number of erroneous beliefs shown:
  • Cold fusion was "tested" and found to be "false."
  • If someone makes cold fusion "work," they would win the Nobel Prize. Yet it "worked" in 1984, with the first meltdown of Pons and Fleischmann. It was still unreliable by 1989, when they were forced by University of Utah legal to announce. But it works sometimes. In more recent work, more than half the time in skilled hands, of experts who are not fooled by newbie errors in calorimetry and who are scientifically cautious.
  • Cold fusion experiments are not repeatable. This is only true with a very shallow definition of "repeatable." We would never accept this definition in, say, medical science. It's common in plasma physics, because the very messy conditions of the FPHE are avoided. Plasma physicists are not trained in electrochemistry, and they famously made many bonehead errors in attempting to "test" the work of Pons and Fleischmann. The people who succeeded, mostly, were electrochemists and many already knew the palladium deuteride system, such as McKubre. One skilled electrochemist wrote that it was the most difficult experiment he ever performed.
  • Competent experts are not convinced. Some are, some are not. But no "competent expert" has demonstrated artifact in the general heat results. (There are hundreds of reports of excess heat, and there have been artifacts identified with some of the work. Not with the crucial work, and especially not with the heat/helium work, which is what demonstrates that the effect is nuclear in nature.) Nickell has no sense of any intermediate condition: where experts are divided.
  • Cold fusion was proven false when first announced. That never happened, and this contradicts both DoE reports, and is not found in any recent journal article, and what might look like that, from 1989-1991, is misleading. For example, there was a report setting an upper limit for neutrons in these experiments, at a very low level, and that was considered a rejection of cold fusion, since it was believed that fusion reactions must emit neutrons, but only shows what is not controversial any more: the effect doesn't produce neutrons to speak of. (The SPAWAR work of around 2009 is of very low levels of neutrons, speculatively considered as possibly due to secondary reactions or rare branches. It's notable because many still believe that even very low levels are impossible.)
  • There is no strong evidence for cold fusion. That's easy. Refuse to look at evidence, and, for you, it doesn't exist. If evidence contradicts what you believe, declare that it does not exist, based on proof: if it existed, it would be in the pages of Nature, and when Nature, early on, proclaimed that they would no longer publish anything on cold fusion, they were simply being sensible, why publish reports that must be false, since "cold fusion is impossible?"
  • Cold fusion is like every crackpot or crank claim. So if anyone points to evidence that cold fusion is real, it's proof that they are a crackpot or crank.
Q.E.D. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 19:31, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax
There are repeatable experiments. They have been repeated. There are consistent results. (I mentioned one, the heat/helium ratio.) They are published and reviewed in scientific journals (and in expert study and reports). I cited such a review from 2010. However, "science" -- as a social entity -- does not always behave as some firmly believe.
Silence is advised for the ignorant, but the ignorant believe that they already know, no research or effort is needed, nor citations.
Nothing new about that.
There is comment on this topic on [this page and section]
Nickell responded:
Where's the experiment repeatable in any laboratory?
Where's the publication in a major technical journal?
Where are the presentations at international meetings that convince the skeptics?
I repeat: It is the responsibility of people claiming extraordinary results to supply extraordinary evidence.
Come up with a truly repeatable experiment and ye shall be heard.
Until then, this is Crank Physics.
Nickell is claiming that if one "comes up with a truly repeatable experiment," then one "shall be heard." There is a repeatable experiment, first announced in 1991 and published in detail. It was heard, there was response. It was repeated. There is no contrary evidence, only contrary speculation that is actually implausible, contrary to the experimental conditinos. This work has been reviewed positively in peer-reviewed mainstream scientific journals. As we will see, Nickells wants the results to appear in certain journals. He does not know and possibly won't believe the history of those journals and cold fusion, even though it really is not controversial. From the pattern being shown, that he simply repeats his claims without evidence or sources, he is likely to simply ignore the evidence, but we'll see, he could easily demonstrate otherwise. Each of his questions deserves an answer, but from experience, I know that then there will be more questions, the "conditions for acceptance" are a moving target, the "goalposts are moved." The original objections to cold fusion were answered long, long ago. New objections took their place. The human mind is capable of endless creativity, once convinced of its own rightness. Moving beyond that limitation is the goal of scientific training.
  • Where's the experiment repeatable in any laboratory? The FPHE is repeatable. By the way, the "any laboratory," to be sound, must mean that a laboratory is capable of replicating the conditions of the original finding. If one follows the protocols and the "state of the art," i.e., sound electrochemical technique, and takes care to obtain material known to work, one will see the heat effect. Many negative replications occurred when experimenters did not start with replication, they started with some "improvement" or variation considered harmless. And then when they did't see anything, they gave up and report failure (or nothing.) In particular, Miles, who began replication efforts immediately within a week of the announcement, at first found nothing, and he was an expert elecrochemist. He reported that to the 1989 ERAB Panel, and that result is in their report. However, he persisted. Before the report was issued, he started seeing excess heat. He reported that to the panel, before the final panel report was issued. We do not know what happened to his revised report. He's said they did not return his phone calls. He had worked for six months before seeing results.
  • However, there are replicable experiments, we know that because they have been replicated. For an example, the protocol developed by Energetics Technologies was tested and confirmed by SRI International, Mike McKubre, and by ENEA (the Italian nuclear energy agency), as published in the American Chemical Society Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook in 2008. Many cold fusion experiments have been replicated, but most are not replications, they are original explorations. The crucial experiment, the original one to demonstrate directly that the FPHE is a nuclear effect, was Miles. It is also replicable and has been replicated. What is reliably replicable is not the heat, which varies -- with all this work, with some cells showing no heat, some showing modest heat, and some high heat -- but the heat/helium ratio.
  • Where's the publication in a major technical journal?. I'll confess to some level of irritation here, because I pointed to a review of the field, which includes reference to many journals. Key to this question is probably "major." However, to take the question straight, Pons and Fleischmann's original announcement was published in Nature. Nature published, according to the biblilography at lenr-canr.org, 41 papers or comments in 1989, and nine more in 1990. No more mention of cold fusion appeared in Nature, worth putting in the bibliography. So what happened? Overall mainstream publication rates on cold fusion increased in 1990, it did not decrease, see the Britz database. What happened is shown in two editorials, both published March 29, 1990:
In those editorials, two editors of Nature explain their view of the status of cold fusion a year after the discovery. Much of what is in the editorials is correct, but much is misleading, from what we now know. Lindley ends with Would a measure of unrestrained mockery, even a little unqualified vituperation, have speeded cold fusion's demise? There was vituperation, well-documented historically, and it continues, so it's an odd comment. Obviously Lindley thinks there should have been much more. In both editorials, there is much derision for the incorrect nuclear radiation measurements, but no concern for the heat anomaly, what the artifact might be. Even many years later, Richard Garwin, interviewed by CBS Sixyt Minutes for a special on cold fusion, (2009), had, as explanation for the reported heat, "They must be doing something wrong." Measuring heat is not necessarily easy. There are many ways to make mistakes. However, as pointed out by the skeptic Nate Hoffman, in "A Dialogue on Chemically Indusced Nuclear Effects, published by the American Nuclear Society with support from the Electric Power Research Institute in 1995, p. 76, "These heat measurements are being done by very knowledgeable experimenters who know how to avoid artifacts." Artifacts can be identified with controlled experiment. That was only done, to a small degree, one time. Nate Lewis found that when he failed to stir his cells, he saw, in a set of experiments, apparent excess heat. So were the general results from a failure to stir? Experts have reviewed this possibility. The answer is no. And, of course, this would not in any way explain the heat/helium correlation, which actually confirms the calorimetry.
At the time the editorials were published, few would have believed that helium was the major product. Nature shut down all commentary on cold fusion. They did not allow critical commentary on the negative papers they had published, that's been documented (by Miles). To these editors, the matter was closed. No, we don't look to Nature to publish remarkable work on cold fusion. There has been such work, Huizenga noticed it, and it was published in a mainstream journal and was criticized there. One might think that discovering evidence for the ash of cold fusion would be as important or more important than the discovery of heat, the basis for the original claim. Helium is a nuclear product, but it is not obviously so, unlike neutrons or tritium. That is, there is plenty of natural helium, from the decay of radioactive elements in the earth and air. Finding elevated helium was, indeed, remarkable. Miles was published in
This work was later criticized by S. E. Jones. Details of that interchange are or will be covered elsewhere.
  • Where are the presentations at international meetings that convince the skeptics? Few skeptics attend meetings where LENR results are presented; however, skeptics have been convinced by such presentations. A big example would be w:Heinz Gerischer, who was apparently convinced by an early presentation of Miles' results that the effect was real. Would this skeptic know if others were convinced? w:Robert Duncan (physicist) was convinced, not by a presentation at a scientific conference, but by having been hired by CBS News to investigate the situation, and by actually examining the research.
  • I've been to an International Conference on Cold Fusion, ICCF-18, in 2013. Few would be convinced by what they see at such a conference, it takes way too much background. I have the background, and I'm not convinced by a lot of what is presented! Those conferences won't do it. The scientists in the field are not skilled at writing polemic, they write as academics, assuming high interest on the part of the reader. Some have poor English. But Nickell probably is referring to conferences specializing in nuclear physics. You won't see presentations on cold fusion at these conferences, generally, because there are few new "physics" results to report. The experimental work is generally electrochemistry or materials science. Physicists typically demand an "explanatory theory" before they will consider cold fusion; papers reporting remarkable experimental findings have been rejected on the basis of "no explanatory theory." And theoretical papers have been rejected because they move outside what is commonly accepted. Good example: Julian Schwinger, Nobelist in Physics, resigned from the American Physical Society because they refused to consider publishing a theoretical paper by him on how cold fusion might be possible.
  • No conspiracy theory is necessary to understand the rejection cascade. It's just what happened, but pseudoskeptics often refuse to look at the actual history, or color it with their own crayons, extensively. Schwinger's theory may well have been wrong. He didn't know that the reaction was on the surface, nor that the primary product was helium, with very little or no tritium. As with Nature, the debate was cut off in certain journals. Not in all.
  • I repeat: It is the responsibility of people claiming extraordinary results to supply extraordinary evidence.
This is a heuristic principle, not a scientific one. Yes, if you say that you have a UFO in your back yard, I'm not going to travel cross-country to see it unless I have more evidence. However, I'm not going to spend a lot of effort claiming you are delusional, either. Not without actually considered the evidence. And that is what we are seeing here: evidence is considered not to exist. Yet it obviously exists, there are issues over interpretation, some of which have long ago been resolved. Nobody is repeating the heat/helium experiment any more, because there is no contrary evidence, and people working seriously in the field simply accept it. It's tedious to exclude helium and to measure it, so, unless one has a ready mass spectrometer with the required resolution, nobody bothers. (In one report, I think from 2004, helium measurement was used to confirm low-level calorimetry; they measured elevation of helium over ambient, instead of attempting to exclude it. That specific work is unconfirmed, but it generally confirmed the ratio reported by many others.)
  • Come up with a truly repeatable experiment and ye shall be heard.
  • Until then, this is Crank Physics
So, we have shown and referenced (through the Storms review), a repeatable experiment, that has actually been repeated. Nickell simply continues to deny that it exists. We are likely to see how, faced with evidence of existence, he then backpedals and adds additional requirements. Nobody is suggesting that he "believe in" cold fusion, but his position is that anyone asserting evidence for cold fusion is a "crank." That's a self-confirming belief, characteristics of pseudoscience, it's just inverted (and is thus usually called pseudoskepticism. Above, with his "extraordinary evidence" claim about "responsibility," he is inventing a nonscientific, moral concept. He's not the only one, this is standard skeptical cant. It's a fuzzy idea, because no matter what evidence is asserted, it can always be claimed that it is not "extraordinary" enough, and, then, an additional "proof" is given, i.e., if there were extraordinary evidence, we would all know about it. It's a variation on the "better mousetrap" meme, which is, quite simply, not how the world works.
Another variation on this is the idea that "if this was real, the inventor would be rich." That assumes the "invention" of a practical device, which probably has not happened yet. It's also not likely to happen without massive funding, because what is involved is probably not only building nanoscale structures with exactly the right properties, but, then, either maintaining or renewing these structures, because the reaction itself apparently often destroys them. It might never be possible, but until the understanding that the effect is real becomes more widespread, we are not likely to find out unless someone gets very lucky and manages to, more or less accidentally, create a material that works reliably and sustainably. I'm not holding my breath.

In what journal?

So Nickell continued, after I again referred to the Storms review:
Tom Nickell
The 'major journal linked' is a review article.
Amazing. I said it was a review. However, reviews refer to primary research. There are about a thousand papers on cold fusion in mainstream scientific journals. A review paper is not limited to those, so other sources deemed reliable are mentioned, and all of that was subject to the approval of the peer reviewers at Naturwissenschaften. Skeptics will go on to assert this or that misleading claim about Naturwissenschaften, the author, and scientific principles that they make up on the spot to preserve their position. Nickell has not shown any sign of high knowledge on this subject, so far. There are skeptics out there with far, far more knowledge, who will cite much more specific contrary evidence. But he might learn.
Tom Nickell
In what major journals have the primary reports been published.
Surely, such earth-shattering results should be in Nature or Science.
First of all, is this an "earth-shattering result"? We know, quite well, why this work was not published in Nature, but in an electrochemistry journal. Let's start with it being an electrochemistry experiment, which should properly be criticized by electrochemists. It wasn't, by the way. It was criticized by Steven E. Jones, a physicist, in a physics journal (see below) and his response was almost entirely speculative and theoretical, and ignored the correlation, which is the major finding of Miles. A summary of this critical position could be: there could be error with the heat measurements (with this or that speculation), and there could be error with the helium measurements (leakage is the usual suspicion), therefore the comparison is meaningless. That position completely neglects the controls and precautions reported, neglects the strong statistical argument, is inconsistent with the results, and, in addition, Miles was later confirmed.
Miles did more work with this system. He tightened up the helium measurements using more accurate mass spectrometry. He also went to sample flasks of stainless steel instead of glass, to allay concerns about diffusion through glass. His overall results are stunning, as to the solidity of correlation shown. On other pages on Wikiversity, we study this work, and I'm writing an invited paper on it for publication in a mainstream journal, more than that I cannot reveal at this time. The paper will be designed to encourage the funding of one more replication of Miles (or McKubre, more accurately), with increased accuracy. In theory, skeptics should want to see this, right? If this is "pathological science," the effect should disappear with more accurate measurements, right?
(People in the field are not particularly excited by this, because they already accept the known result and consider it solid enough that many other research priorities loom larger. However, heat/helium is the only *direct* evidence that the FPHE is nuclear in nature, as distinct from being, say, some unknown or unrecognized chemistry. The other "nuclear" evidence largely contradicts the understanding that helium is the only result, but none of that other evidence is as strong as the helium evidence. A more accurate measurement will place an upper bound on other products, but there is, so far, no other product seen at comparable levels.) --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:27, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
The most surprising feature of our results however, is that reactions (v) and (vi) are only a small part of the overall reaction scheme and that the bulk of the energy release is due to an hitherto unknown nuclear process or processes (presumably again due to deuterons).
The reactions mentioned were D + D -> T + H and D + D -> He-3 + n. It is obvious from the experimental results reported that if those two reactions, the two normal branches of DD fusion, were happening, the neutron radiation levels would be fatal, but the radiations they measured, probably erroneously, were at far smaller levels. This was a preliminary report, there was much more experimental detail in
Miles reviewed his work in an official U.S. Navy technical report, Anomalous effects in deuterated systems, he gives additional detail and argument, i.e., there was criticism of his work based, in some cases, on erroneous assumptions about what he had done and not done. Miles is careful and conservative. He is quite aware of possible artifact.
In 1998, Miles responded to the criticism by Jones of his work, in comments published by J Phys Chem B. I have these papers and have reviewed the exchange of Miles and Jones elsewhere.
Storms, in his 2007 book and in his 2010 Naturwissenschaften review of the field, has covered confirmations of Miles' work on heat/helium. Much of this work has not been published in peer-reviewed journals, but is in conference papers.
  • The most accurate heat/helium work is found in McKubre MCH, Crouch-Baker S et al (1998) Energy production processes in deuterated metals, Palo Alto, EPRI. EPRI is the w:Electric Power Research Institute, which funded McKubre at SRI to investigate the FPHE. This is not a journal publication, it's the report of a professional laboratory of high reputation, dedicated to scientific objectivity, which is what the clients want. EPRI eventually released this work. Other work at SRI was done on w:DARPA contract, and has not necessarily been formally published, though a piece of that work (the Case replication) found its way into the 2004 Department of Energy review paper. I will here call attention to the report summary on pages 7-8.
There is a ready question: if there were these positive findings, why did not major funding for commercial applications continue? The answer is clear. Setting aside the standing commercial ventures, which are likely underfunded and which mostly keep their techniques secret (for unfortunately sensible intellectual property reasons), nobody has found a way to make the reaction reliable enough for power generation.
SRI reported that only 20% of the experiments they ran for the EPRI contract produced excess heat. This is completely adequate, under the experimental conditions, to show that the effect is real, and when the effect happens, it can be unmistakeable. But mostly, in that work, it didn't happen. With some approaches, higher success rates have been seen, over fifty percent, but levels of heat were still quite variable.
Making matters worse, the original experimental approach, the most confirmed, is severely limited by the temperature at which it may operate. For commercial power applications, operating at much higher temperatures would likely be needed, so commercial possibilities focus on gas-loading, and that requires different material conditions, etc. Added to this, palladium and deuterium are both expensive, and there are supply limits for palladium. Palladium usage for extensive power generation would cause the price, already high, to skyrocket. So most commercial efforts at present are studying nickel and hydrogen, and that reaction, if real, is much less established and understood, and the ash has not been established.
Given the level of effort that has been expended, over the last 25 years, quick success at creating reliability, which is crucial for commercial applications, cannot be expected. Rather, a sober scientific approach at this point suggests more modest work to explore the nature of the effect.
The exact Nuclear Active Environment (NAE, Storms) is not known, it's strongly suspected to be nanocracks, but this is unproven and the precise size of the cracks is unknown. The mechanism for energy transfer from the reaction to the cell environment is unknown. (Two major theories are bursts of low-energy photons -- Storms, Takahashi --, and phonons -- Hagelstein.) Detecting and measuring either of these would be valuable for the formation of explanatory theory.
An obvious experiment would be a more accurate determination of the heat/helium ratio. SRI M4, covered in the report linked above, suggests an approach, and this might simply be a replication of that work, with a few modifications to increase accuracy and address standing objections. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:48, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Real

Remi has "Science can not fully disprove any hypothesis but our understanding of atomic theory makes the prospect of cold fusion highly unlikely." This is correct. The question had the explanation:
I recently read an article about the Fleischmann–Pons experiment at the University of Utah. Although it was disproved, proponents of free energy allege a fair peer review process was not done before rejecting the idea.
The question incorporates a popular assumption that the "Fleischmann Pons experiment" was "disproved." There is a massive misunderstanding of the process of science. As Remi points out, "science cannot fully disprove any hypothesis." However, there is what might be called "effective discrediting of a hypothesis," and there is also a stronger discrediting that discovers and demonstrates, with controlled experiment, error in the hypothesis.
Was the "Fleischmann Pons experiment" "disproved"? Disproof of experimental results only happens when error in measurements or reporting is demonstrated. There were two major aspects to the FP report, one was excess heat (which they had been seeing for five years by the time they reported) and the other was a single measurement of neutron radiation, at a level that was mysteriously low, but any neutron radiation would be considered significant, above the very low cosmic ray background.
The neutron measurements were artifact, and that has widely been acknowledged, it is not controversial at all. However, Pons and Fleischmann were expert electrochemists, of high reputation, and were expert in calorimetry, the measurement of heat.
So the first level of discrediting is when reported results are not confirmed, in spite of attempts. That happened, in 1989, but this is a negative. That is, a number of reputable research groups attempted to confirm the report of anomalous heat and radiation from palladium deuteride, and those results were published. As was explained in the 1989 ERAB report by the U.S. Department of Energy, negative confirmation does not "disprove" a primary report. It is always possible that, as an example, the proper conditions for an effect were not created. Yet if there is no confirmation, of a report that seems to have major consequences for the revision of theory or expectation, interest in the new report will decline, very normally.
However, any *confirmation* of the original claim will normally have an opposite effect. The history of cold fusion was not "normal."
Was the FP Heat Effect confirmed? Let's put it this way: many skeptics claim it was never confirmed, and one can find in newspapers and other media claims that it was never confirmed, and claims that it was "disproven."
Back to the process whereby a report is discredited, the second level of rejection arises when controlled experiment demonstrates the artifact in a report. That's typically more work than merely coming up with a negative replication. It requires actually observing the effect under the same or very similar conditions, and then showing that this effect has a prosaic cause.
N-rays and polywater are often compared with cold fusion, as "false claims" that saw some early acceptance and that were then rejected. With N-rays, it was demonstrated that the effect was due to the imagination of the observers, by removing a "prism" that was supposedly focusing the N-rays onto a phosphorescent screen. The observers continued to report the flashes of light. With polywater, the effect was shown to be due to unexpected contamination of water by human sweat, through analysis of the "polywater." In both cases, the experimental basis for the "hypothesis" was removed, shown to be an illusion.
That never happened with the FP Heat Effect. On the contrary, reviews of the calorimetry confirmed that the methods were sound. Further, after a substantial delay, as expert electrochemists worked with the material, confirmations of anomalous heat began to appear. Scientists saw the effect in their own labs.
At this point, there is a "confirmed anomaly." That does not "prove" cold fusion. It does create circumstantial evidence, but to revise major expectations, circumstantial evidence may be inadequate. At this point, however, it might be appropriate for skeptics to cease the confident claims of error, but skeptics are also human.
That cessation did not happen, among some of the skeptics and most especially those who were nuclear physicists. These, generally, did not trust the methods of electrochemistry, and the very messy experiments. Highly loaded palladium deuteride is not a simple material. The loading causes it to expand, surface cracks appear, depending on the nanonstructure of the material as manufactured. In the FPHE, most palladium did not work to create the effect. Pons and Fleischmann did not realize this. They had been very lucky. When, after the announcement, they ran out of the original material, and obtained more, it didn't work. They could no longer replicate their own work. What had happened?
The manufacturer had changed the process.
What I'm writing here is all documented, in reliable sources and testimonies. So if anyone wants sources for any statement I make, please ask specifically!
However, the work on cold fusion did not stop there. An original mystery about the FPHE was the ash. If there was a nuclear reaction, what was the product? The apparent fuel was deuterium. Deuterium fusion seems "impossible" at room temperature. (Actually, it's not impossible, just super-rare, and if there is a catalyst that lowers the Coulomb barrier, it's quite possible, and muon-catalyzed fusion is a known example.) If two-deuteron (d-d) fusion does take place, in the normal manner, muon-catalyzed fusion shows that the products are the same as with hot fusion: half the reactions produce a fast neutron, half produce tritium and a proton. From the levels of heat produced, there would be fatal levels of neutron radiation if this were happening. Tritium is easy to detect at low levels. Tritium was indeed reported at low levels, but a million times lower than would be expected from ordinary deuterium fusion. Helium is a known product of hot d-d fusion, but the ratio is very low, so low that it is often neglected as a possibility.
If helium is the sole product of the fusion of two deuterons, conservation of momentum requires the emission of a gamma ray at 23.8 MeV, i.e., nearly all of the fusion energy will be released in that gamma. This would, again, be fatal radiation at the reported heat levels, especially because most of the radiation would not end up as heat! No, the gamma is not produced.
Pons and Fleischmann believed they had created conditions inside the palladium lattice that somehow allowed fusion, but they knew that what they were seeing was inconsistent with ordinary fusion. That's why they *did not claim* fusion, they claimed evidence for an "unknown nuclear reaction." However, they also saw evidence for helium, which was surprising. They did not publish that, the levels were low. However, Pons and Fleishmann cathodes, that had generated heat, were analyzed for helium. No helium was found. This seems inconsistent with what was later found, but it isn't. The issue is where the helium is found.
If the helium were created inside the metal lattice (as they expected if helium was the product), it would stay there. Helium is not mobile in palladium, except for helium very near the surface, which can migrate through crystal defects. We now know what happened to their helium. Instead of being a bulk effect, cold fusion is a surface effect. The helium is created at or very near the surface, and about half escapes in the gases being given off by electrolysis. About half is trapped in the metal, but the penetration depth is a few microns at most. When their cathodes were analyzed, the outer 25 microns of palladium was removed to avoid confusion with atmospheric helium. Hence whatever helium was there was removed.
Miles showed, by 1991, that helium was present as the only or as a major product. This work continued for some years. John Huizenga noted, in the second edition of his book, Miles' work, calling it the "most spectacular claim at the [ICCF-2] conference." Huizenga went on to explain why he expected that the claim would not be confirmed. It was entirely based on a theory that, if real, the heat would be the result of d-d fusion, and therefore a gamma ray would be emitted.
What Miles did was to measure helium in the outgas, in a set of experiments that ensured -- and demonstrated with controls -- that the helium was not due to leakage from atmospheric helium. This work has been confirmed, with increased accuracy. (Miles' original helium measurements were very rough, order-of-magnitude. Later results were more precise.)
Reading Huizenga again, he notes, in the previous paragraph, McKubre's finding at SRI of excess heat beyond understanding through chemistry. He then remarks:
Although the McKubre experiment is considered by many advocates to be the premier evidence for excess heat, no nuclear reaction products were reported!
Of course they were not reported. Analyzing for helium is difficult, under the reaction conditions, and takes special measures and equipment. Later, McKubre did measure helium, with relatively high accuracy, and confirmed Miles, taking the heat/helium ratio as measured to within about 4 percent of the expected ratio from conversion of deuterium to helium (which ratio is expected regardless of mechanism, but if the reaction produces energetic products -- like those gammas -- there will be less heat measured.) All the elements of the picture, as research accumulated, began to fit together.
There may be more than one kind of "cold fusion," because in the thousands of papers that have been published in this field (maybe 3000 or more if we include conference papers), there are many effects that don't match the simple idea that cold fusion produces helium and no energetic radiation or radioactive products above very low levels. However, the substance of cold fusion, as in the FPHE, has become clear:
  • The reaction requires very high loading, I just heard Miles say 85%. That is about where reports of heat start. Most of the early negative replications did not measure loading, they simply assumed that if they electrolyzed for a few weeks, they would see the effect. Most palladium has a surface that will readily allow deuterium to escape; until the work of Pons and Fleischmann, it was widely assumed that 70% was the maximum attainable. That assumption was clearly incorrect, it's one of the widespread errors that still lingers about this field, and part of why non-electrochemists were typically unsuccessful in the work.
  • The reaction requires special material. Ordinary, off-the-shelf palladium will not normally work. ENEA (the Italian nuclear energy agency) has done much work in the manufacture and processing of material that is much more effective for generating the FPHE than ordinary material. That the material demonstrably makes a difference (as shown in many reports) is another sign of the reality of the reaction. At the very least, some material condition must be doing something different than expected.
  • The reaction requires conditioning of the material. Off-the shelf palladium, even special palladium, ordinarily produces no effect until after long electrolysis. This is now explained by the development of very small cracks, in a particular size range. Conceptually, the cracks may be creating some resonance that allows what otherwise does not occur. Cracks too large, deuterium escapes. Cracks below the size where D2 gas may form in them, maybe. The reaction *does not occur in the bulk.*
  • The only persistent product is helium, produced at or near the surface.
  • The ratio of the product to heat is near the value expected from deuterium fusion, but I usually say "expected from the conversion of deuterium to helium." d-d fusion is not the only way to get from deuterium to helium, but if helium is the only product, the laws of thermodynamics require the energy to be 23.8 MeV/He-4, and the best measurement, so far, is at about 25 MeV/He-4.
  • There are no other products at high levels. If there is charged particle or photon emission, the levels are low or are at low energies (under 20 KeV for charged particles). See a review of the field, Hagelstein, Naturwissenschaften, 2010, on energetic particles in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment.
  • There is, as of now, no accepted theory that predicts reaction levels from conditions. There are confirmed observations that reaction levels are correlated with certain conditions, such as loading ratio, and current density in electrochemical approaches (as with the FPHE). There are hydrogen controls that show that 1% light hydrogen mixed in with the deuterium is enough to poison the reaction. (This creates an easy error source, because heavy water, exposed to air, will gradually shift in isotopic composition to include more light water.)
  • There is at least one theory that does predict 100% fusion from a rare but conceivable material condition. The theory is incomplete, but it does use quantum field theory to calculate the fusion rate. The condition remains unexpected. There are related theories that rely on the formation of Bose-Einstein condensates at room temperature. That's theoretically possible, one might say, but none of this has been deeply studied.
  • Bottom line, cold fusion is a mystery, and remains so, 30 years after being discovered by a systematic search for nuclear effects in highly-loaded palladium, testing the approximations that would make them impossible or highly, highly unlikely.
So the field stands as a challenge to physicists, to explain with physical theory what the chemists have found with experiment. I sat with Richard P. Feynman for freshman physics in 1961-63 (yes those years). The one thing I remember specifically from him about physics was that, even though quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are extraordinarily precise in predictive value, given simple conditions, we cannot calculate the solid state, it is far, far too complicated. That is beginning to shift with the availability of brute-force simulations, but these simulations are only as good as the models presented to them. The theoretical work mentioned above is by Akito Takahashi, an experienced hot fusion physicist, who saw, in bombardment experiments, elevated levels of multibody fusion reactions, far beyond naive estimate (about 10^23 higher than expected). So he started looking a multibody reactions, and has calculated a fusion rate for a "symmetrical condensate" that will form if there are two deuterium molecules confined such that the deuterons are in a perfect tetrahedron at low relative momentum. He calculates that if that configuration occurs, it will fuse to Be-8, which will then fission to two helium nuclei. That's standard physics, but with the standard reaction, those helium nuclei would probably be hot. This would then violate the Hagelstein limit of 20 KeV. So something else must also happen, and it must happen *reliably*, or the energetic particles would have been detected.
There are physicists working on the problem. Besides Hagelstein and Takahashi, there is a funded theoretical exploration under way at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I saw a presentation at SRI by the principal investigator. They are looking at resonances in a linear chain of deuterium atoms, separated by one electron, so this is "p-e-p-e-p-e-p ..." That is the structure currently proposed by Storms in his own theory. Storms "mechanism" does not seem plausible to me, we will examine it elsewhere, but his reacting structure may be the real thing. Or not. Takahashi and others are looking at other kinds of "clusters."
Cluster fusion seems ridiculously unlikely, but remember that Takahashi saw, experimentally, that our intuitive expectations can be way, way off. Multibody fusion does take place in the Sun, those rates can be calculated, and that is the "naive expectation" that he found was violated.
I fully understand why physicists would want to avoid condensed matter conditions; on this scale, they are ridiculously difficult to control. Plasma conditions are such that certain approximations work very well, and experimental results are easily definitive and, assuming one has access to the necessary equipment and materials and expertise, are generally reliably reproducible.
On the contrary, the surface of palladium deuteride after long electrolysis -- the condition that sets up the FPHE -- is a mess, the cathode attracts every cationic contaminant, the surface becomes insanely complicated both as to chemical constitution and as to structure.
But science, overall, deals with complications like this all the time, especially in the life sciences. We do not expect a medication to work "reliably" in order to conclude that it has value. It's enough if it works a certain percentage of the time. We understand that every human body is unique, in detail. We even approve medications where we don't know how they work. We do not require theory-in-advance. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:10, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Slate.com

Charles Seife is a journalist, not a scientist. He is the author of Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion, and here of a "Fusion Energy’s Dreamers, Hucksters, and Loons, Bottling up the power of the sun will always be 20 years away.. Unlike Gary Taubes, a science journalist who wrote Bad Science in the 1990s, Seife is not a careful reporter. Taubes also has his spin, but presents piles of sourced fact. Seife doesn't.

In this Slate article, which does cover the checkered history of fusion research, he has a remarkable paragraph, which he chattily introduces with:

If you've guessed that the story of fusion energy can get a bit bizarre, you'd be right.

It is, indeed, a bizarre history. Huizenga called cold fusion the "Scientific Fiasco of the Century," in his book. If the story were just a few scientists making mistakes, would it be the "fiasco of the century"? I don't think so. There are serious books written about this, such as Bart Simon's "Undead Science," a sociological study. Popular opinion about cold fusion, including popular opinion among scientists who have not actually studied the field, is commonly diametrically opposed to what can be found with a little research. That is one of the signs that this is truly a fiasco. How do so many people believe what is trivially debunked?

One of the things that happened was that a series of "entertaining" stories were made up, in at least one case to sell books. Seife is firmly in that tradition. He has a story to tell, a framing in which all facts will be presented, a story of idiocy, blindness, greed, fraud, you know, the stuff of soap operas. Very popular. Fact? Who cares about fact? Fact doesn't sell books and articles. Entertaining stories that confirm what people already think, that's the ticket to success!

Seife then goes on:

For one thing, the history of fusion energy is filled with crazies, hucksters, and starry-eyed naifs chasing after dreams of solving the world's energy problems. One of the most famous of all, Martin Fleischmann, died last year.*

He originally had "this year," but the article was published in 2013, and Fleischmann died in 2012. (I'd guess that the article was written in 2012, but then the correction is dated January 4, 2012, when it was obviously corrected on January 4, 2013. The article is formally dated January 3, 2013. Just can't get it right! I have days like that.)

More to the point, this casually classifies Martin Fleischmann, possibly the world's foremost electrochemist at the time, as, what? Crazy, huckster, naif? Maybe naif. Fleischmann apparently believed in scientific process, but he was also aware that what he had found was not going to be easily accepted. He delayed announcement for five years, and still wasn't ready when forced by circumstances. Fiasco, remember? Fiasco all around, enough fiasco for much drama.


Did Fleischmann dream of "solving the world's energy problems" We know his story of how he and Pons came to do the research. It was not energy research, it was basic scientific research to verify a certain approximation made in calculating fusion rates in condensed matter. This is what scientists do: verify assumptions with actual testing. Nobody had looked where they were looking. Fleischmann has written that they expected they would find nothing at measurable levels. They thought that the difference between the predictions by approximation and reality would not be measurable with their techniques. But they looked. And their cell melted down,in 1984, with heat that they were unable to explain by chemistry. Many, later, simply decide to disbelieve this story, as they disbelieve the later autobiographical information about their intention. It simply does not fit the "dreams of limitless energy" story. However, these were scientists. Science was their life and their career. Why would they lie? The aftermath of the meltdown, the damage, indicating very high heat, was observed and reported by at least one other observer, this is documented. Something very unusual happened. What?

Along with a colleague, Stanley Pons, Fleischmann thought that he had converted hydrogen into helium in a beaker in his laboratory, never mind that if he had been correct he would have released so much energy that he and his labmates would have been fricasseed by the radiation coming out of the device.

They did not "think" that they had converted hydrogen to helium in a beaker. They actually did not know what they had done. The results did not make sense. Let's start by correcting some facts. It was not a "beaker." (At least one attempt to replicate foundered by using a cell that was squat like a beaker. Their cells were long and thin, such that deuterium gas evolutions stirred the cells, important for accurate calorimetry.)

It was not "hydrogen," as such. It was the stable mass-2 isotope of hydrogen, deuterium. There is a huge difference. They were often faulted for not doing control experiments with ordinary hydrogen, but, in fact, they did. The problem was, Fleischmann later said, that the hydrogen experiments were not the "clean control" that they expected. That could easily be misunderstood.

First of all, the calorimetry they were using was state of the art, very sensitive. The signals they were seeing, from some experiments, were not close to noise, at all. Later work has shown that in this type of experiment with PdD, substituting hydrogen produces null results, and hydrogen controls are often used. Further, Storms showed that even one atom percent of hydrogen in heavy water would poison the cold fusion effect.

But most work does not use such sensitive calorimetry as the FP methods. What did they see? We can't tell, but there are many, many mysteries in this field. The mostly likely thing that they were seeing was a different nuclear reaction with light hydrogen, at a much lower rate. Storms thinks the mechanism is the same. But this is a red herring, it's like trying to understand the life cycle of elephant lice without first understanding elephants.

What about helium being made? Pons and Fleischmann did not report helium. They were perfectly aware of the problem Seife brings up. If the reaction were d+d -> helium, and were the same as the hot fusion reaction, helium is a rare branch, the figure in my head is 10^-4 of reactions produce helium, and to conserve momentum, the emission of a 23.8 MeV gamma ray is necessary. Because this gamma ray will mostly escape the apparatus, being highly penetrating, and with the levels of heat they were seeing, were this the reaction, yes, they'd have been fried. But it is more than that. To produce as much heat as they had been seeing, with ordinary fusion, half the reactions would produce an energetic neutron, which would also escape the apparatus, and levels of those neutrons would also have been fatal.

They knew all this, the idea that they were ignorant hicks is just an idea made up by pseudoskeptics who want to tell their usual story of stupid people, i.e., anyone with ideas different from theirs. (Real skeptics are curious, because they know they don't know everything. Pseudoskeptics are supremely self-confident.)

Pons and Fleishmann did not actually claim cold fusion as the explanation for what they had found. They had borrowed a neutron detector from and thought that they had measured some neutron radiation, but they knew that the levels were far too low. As it turned out, even those levels were error. They were outside their expertise, unlike the case with their heat measurements, the core of what they found.

They also reported tritium. Tritium, at low levels, is a confirmed effect from PdD cold fusion, but it has never been correlated with heat, unlike helium. (Production of helium in these experiments is quite enough to explain the heat. Tritium is more than a million times lower in level than helium. Pons and Fleischmann knew that something was awry, this couldn't be ordinary deuterium fusion. So what they actually claimed, in their first paper, was not "cold fusion" except as to the neutrons, where they speculated about it, but an "unknown nuclear reaction."

And that reaction actually makes helium. Without the gammas. Anyone who knows physics well would know that there are possibilities for such reactions. But someone like Seife does not know physics well. Storms covers the possibilities in his Naturwissenschaften "Status of cold fusion (2010) paper. For a simple example, if condensed matter conditions allow multibody reaction rates to be much higher than in a plasma, and there is experimental evidence for a drastic enhancement, and if 4D fusion is possible, it would produce Be-8, which will then fission into two helium nuclei. No gamma. Just helium and heat. Unfortunately, this isn't quite it. The "Hagelstein limit" (from a 2010 paper by Peter Hagelstein) is 20 KeV for charged particle radiation in cold fusion reactions. If there were helions at 23.8 MeV, as in the naive conception, there would be secondary reactions and effects that are not observed.

Pons and Fleischmann did not report their helium findings, thinking they already had enough trouble. I don't know details, but they believed the reaction was a bulk reaction, taking place deep in the metal lattice, where the deuterium concentration was very high. One of their active cathodes, with a history of producing excess heat, was analyzed for helium. None was found. Because helium is not mobile in palladium, generally (the reality is a bit more complicated, that's a first-level explanation), this seemed fatal to the idea that helium might be a product. (Later, we have realized that the reaction is not in the bulk, it is a surface reaction, and in that analysis, 25 microns of the outer layer of the cathode was removed to avoid measuring helium from ambient levels. The rough half of helium that is trapped is probably buried no more than a micron or two deep.)

Cold fusion is a mystery. Nobody knows what is happening. Eventually, I'll be wrong about that, and I might even be wrong today. But until someone wins the cigar, I'm sticking with it. I know some of the theorists. Great people. Willing to stick their necks out. Nobody, yet, that I'd nominate for that Nobel that may be waiting. Miles maybe deserves one for his discovery of the heat/helium ratio.

Fleischmann wasn't the first—Ronald Richter, a German expat who managed to entangle himself in the palace intrigues of Juan Peron, beat Fleischmann by nearly four decades—and the latest schemer, Andrea Rossi, won't be the last.

The Richter story is fascinating. However, Fleischmann and Pons funded their own research, until later, when Toyota set them up in France. Rossi funded his own research, though he now has investors. Seife is completely clueless about Rossi, so strong is his story of flim-flam and fraud and "schemes."

Rossi is an entrepreneur and inventor/engineer. He is not a scientist. He is not asking for research funds (like Richter did). He is seeking investment, and apparently has backers. He is commonly accused of being a fraudster, but who is he defrauding. The "demonstrations" are shows, and they might as well be magic shows. This is *not* science, at all. It's not verifiable (unlike the work of Pons and Fleischmann, which has been massively confirmed). Rossi, because of the patent situation, must rely on trade secret to protect his IP, until he actually has a product ready for market. Under those conditions, he needs two things:

1. To be visible enough that qualified investors will contact him. You cannot go out and buy stock in Rossi's company. This is all highly confidential, disclosures are under NDA. Public demonstrations are legally meaningless, unless an investor is actually defrauded by them. Because an investor benefits if Rossi benefits, the same motivations that may be moving Rossi, will move the investors. Rossi would not sanely accept investment from small fry, because he will need to disclose the secrets, and "small fry" would not be worth suing if they violate the NDA.

2. To look like a clown or fraud to others. In something I wrote on Quora today, I pointed out magicians often wear clown outfits, to distract from the fact that they know exactly what they are doing, creating a controlled impression.

3. To create red herrings, false leads, to confuse competition.

And then there is the total fraud hypothesis. Against this hypothesis are those investors, who appear to actually be putting in significant money, and none of them have complained. My opinion as to the most likely explanation: Rossi has something. He tested many combinations of materials and found one that worked better than others. Hard work, and he did it. However, it's still not reliable. Sometimes it works and then the reaction dies down. But he believes he can get it to work. People like him believe in themselves. So he is always on the edge of being ready with a product. Just a few more months.

Now, there are rumors that he is selling a megawatt reactor to China. The application is one where low COP will not be a problem, it will not be used for power generation, but for heat amplification. It is not impossible that he has reached sufficient reliability for that.

And it's possible that it is all smoke and mirrors.

Debunkers like Seife only know one kind of story. There are others. Regardless, cold fusion is a verified reality, as long as we don't stick on the word "fusion" too much. It's LENR, almost certainly, that is, a low energy nuclear reaction (it is very unlikely that this is some concealed form of hot fusion, i.e., high energy collisions that overcome the Coulomb barrier.)

I am writing a paper on this and am seeking skeptical comment on my claim that there is a single reproducible experiment, the measurement of the heat/helium correlation in PdD experiments, that it has been confirmed, and that this is the only direct evidence we have that the Fleischmann Pons Heat Effect is a nuclear reaction.

(The rest is circumstantial. The heat alone is an anomaly. Anomaly does not demonstrate nuclear, even if the heat is shown to be above what chemistry can do. Maybe it's something else! Don't get me wrong, some of the circumstantial evidence for "nuclear" is very strong.)

Wikipedia article

November 3, 2014

I was doing some research for Quora and came across the following situation with the Wikipedia article, at the end of the lede. One of the signs of a battlefield article on Wikipedia is sourced information in the lede. Generally, the lede should be a high-consensus summary of the article, and every fact in the lede should be supported by verifiable text in the article. What happens is that users add possibly controversial text to the lede, and source it, to make it more difficult to remove, and most users don't know the alternative of moving the material to the body of the article, where more detail may be presented etc. Or that if it is a summary of what is in the article, accepted, it does not need a source.

The lede currently has:

A small community of researchers continues to investigate cold fusion,[6][11] now often preferring the designation low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR).[12][13] Since cold fusion articles are rarely published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, the results do not receive as much scrutiny as more mainstream topics.[14]

Supporting this, then, are references:

6. Browne 1989
Browne, M. (May 3, 1989), "Physicists Debunk Claim Of a New Kind of Fusion", New York Times, retrieved 2008-05-25 alternative link).
11. Broad 1989b, Goodstein 1994, Platt 1998, Voss 1999, Beaudette 2002, Feder 2005, Adam 2005 "Advocates insist that there is just too much evidence of unusual effects in the thousands of experiments since Pons and Fleischmann to be ignored", Kruglinksi 2006, Van Noorden 2007, Alfred 2009. calculates between 100 and 200 researchers, with damage to the their careers. [see Wikipedia article for links.]
12. "'Cold fusion' rebirth? New evidence for existence of controversial energy source", American Chemical Society. [2009]
13. Hagelstein et al. 2004 [ ]
14. Goodstein 1994,Labinger & Weininger 2005, p. 1919.
Goodstein, David (1994), "Whatever happened to cold fusion?", American Scholar (Phi Beta Kappa Society) 63 (4): 527–541, ISSN 0003-0937, retrieved 2008-05-25.
Labinger, JA; Weininger, SJ (2005), "Controversy in chemistry: how do you prove a negative?—the cases of phlogiston and cold fusion", Angew Chem Int Ed Engl 44 (13): 1916–22, doi:10.1002/anie.200462084, PMID 15770617, "So there matters stand: no cold fusion researcher has been able to dispel the stigma of 'pathological science' by rigorously and reproducibly demonstrating effects sufficiently large to exclude the possibility of error (for example, by constructing a working power generator), nor does it seem possible to conclude unequivocally that all the apparently anomalous behavior can be attributed to error." preprint found at

So what have we here? By the reference numbers:

6. This is a 1989 source, a well-known New York Times article that played a major role in generating the "bogosity cascade," visible to anyone who knows the field as full of errors, such as

Dr. B. Stanley Pons, professor of chemistry at the University of Utah, and his colleague, Dr. Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in England, touched off a furor by asserting on March 23 in Salt Lake City that they had achieved nuclear fusion in a jar of water at room temperature.

That sounds totally flaky, right? First of all, "jar of water" was radically incorrect. The error of thinking that this could be done well in a "jar" actually afflicted the hasty Cal Tech replication, which was then much of the basis for the furor at the APS conference that is being reported. The actual device was a long, thin, custom-made cell, designed for sound calorimetry, and stirred constantly by the bubbling from electrolysis. Cal Tech used a much larger container, which was not stirred well, and one of their experiments showed apparent excess heat that disappeared when they stirred the jar. They then assumed that this was what had happened to Pons and Fleischmann. Basically, replication failure is replication failure, and one never knows the cause until it is demonstrated in an actual replication that duplicates the observed effect, and that *then* is shown to be artifact. By being unskillful with the calorimetry, the Cal Tech group created enormous damage, because they were considered highly credible. Electrochemists have taken that work apart, it was poorly done.

Then, it wasn't a jar of ordinary water. It was deuterium oxide, heavy water. And saying that the alleged fusion took place in the jar is deceptive. It's like saying that hot fusion takes place in California, because a laser inertial confinement fusion facility is located there. Pons and Fleischmann believed that the reaction was taking place in highly loaded palladium deuteride, a very unusual material, and very poorly investigated at the loading levels they found necessary for the effect to show up. Now, much of this was not known widely at the time of this NYT article, but I was following this news at the time, and I'd have immediately seen the slant being presented.

The jar was at room temperature. At the time, it was not known what the "temperature" of the reactants was. Sometimes bubble fusion, for example, is confused with cold fusion, because the apparatus is at room temperature. A Farnsworth w:Fusor is at room temperature. The energy of the particles within it is equivalent to the better part of a billion degrees K. Basically, this was an ignorant journalist writing a story to be interesting. I do have the benefit of hindsight. However, these stories persist, they are repeated, often over and over. The "fusion in a jar" claim I have seen recently. I've seen "jam jar." Not in a jar. In palladium deuteride, a metal alloy, loaded to over 90 atom percent deuterium, a level that was commonly thought impossible at the time, hence the negative replicators did not bother to go above about 70%, where they even bothered to measure loading. It just happens that a relatively simple way of creating palladium deuteride is by electrolysis of heavy water; the deuterium evolved is captured by the palladium, until the level is about 60 or 70 atom percent or so. Getting above that is difficult, and much palladium material won't do it. The material cracks and the gas escapes. The effect is also seen with nanoparticle palladium that is gas-loaded, under some conditions.

Let me emphasize this: Pons and Fleischmann were looking where nobody had looked before. What were they looking for? They were testing the assumption that reactants, under the conditions of condensed matter, the solid state, would behave with respect to fusion the same as in a plasma. It was a reasonable assumption, and Pons and Fleischmann actually thought they would see nothing at detectable levels. The goal of their research was not, as commonly asserted without evidence, "a dream of limitless energy." They were doing basic science.

In any case, a 1989 source could not establish, in 2014, that "a small community of researchers continues to investigate cold fusion." This kind of glitch is common on Wikipedia. A continuing conditions is taken as established by some source and it is assumed to continue, and the nature of the source is not specified. A statement in a source may be assumed to apply to when the source was published. So, this statement should have "As of [year], ...." to be accurate. However, when you have editors who are operating on personal belief, these distinctions get completely lost.

11. is a series of sources that may show that there is continuing research. The fact is that there is one source, a source that from Wikipedia guidelines, would be golden, a peer-reviewed review of the field, in a mainstream journal. But that source is not used. It is fairly clear why. In some of my last edits to the Wikipedia article, before I was declared banned, I had obtained the removal of lenr-canr.org from the global blacklist and had created a reference to this review, with a convenience link to lenr-canr.org. I placed many convenience links like that. They were all removed, on the grounds that they were not necessary for verification. And I'd seen many times that when readers could not access papers, major errors sometimes took years to find. There is a group of editors that does not want readers actually reading the papers, they want their conclusions to be unchallenged. It became completely obvious. The source is still in the bibliography:

Storms, Edmund (October 2010), "Status of cold fusion (2010)", Naturwissenschaften (online) 97 (10): 861–881, Bibcode:2010NW.....97..861S, doi:10.1007/s00114-010-0711-x, PMID 20838756. There is a preprint at .

If you read the preprint, however, you will recognize that very significant information about cold fusion is missing from the article. Attempts have been made to include this information. It often results in bans or attempted bans of the editors attempting it. I am not the only one.

There is no problem with the statement referenced. Work does continue. Whether or not the community is "small" or not is a matter of slant. Cold fusion is, at this point, a "scientific curiosity." Even people who know that the effect is real are not necessarily motivated to work on it, because 25 years of work has made it obvious that this is not easy to make practical.

However, the pseudoskeptics want to emphasize "small," because the story is that these are "diehards." Fanatic believers. People who just won't accept reality. Yet the basic claim of Pons and Fleischmann was never found to be false. It has been widely confirmed, and, much more than that, the ash has been identified and shown conclusively to be correlated with the anomalous heat, and the reasons for early replication failure are well-understood. The denial of reality is in another place here, among pseudoskeptics who hate to be wrong, and, I've seen, will retreat behind endless rationalizations and then disappear from the conversation. They can prevail on Wikipedia because of defects in the structure. That will eventually fall apart.

12. is a press release issued by the American Chemical Society, calling the field "low energy nuclear reactions." Cold fusion was never a scientific name for the discovery. At the time the term was first used, it was with reference to muon-catalyzed fusion, a known fusion reaction at low temperatures (very low! these experiments were done close to absolute zero). The term was then used to refer to Pons and Fleischmann's claim, partly because P&F incorrectly reported neutrons, when, as we came to know, these reactions did not produce neutrons or other ordinary nuclear products, other than helium, which also occurs naturally.

The real claim of Pons and Fleischmann, for what was producing the heat they observed, was an "unknown nuclear reaction." So the phenomenon is easily known as "low energy nuclear reactions." However, the actual name for the full field is "Condensed matter nuclear science," which is another slant. This studies possible nuclear phenomena in condensed matter. However, the term "cold fusion" is still colloquially and familiarly used by researchers. It's avoided formally, normally, which is one reason why the title of Storms' 2010 review is so striking: he actually called it "cold fusion." Because it's cold, and, apparently, some kind of fusion is involved, the evidence has become very strong.

That SPAWAR announcement, the ACS press release, created quite a splash. SPAWAR found neutrons, in a way that, on the face, is very strong. However, this also creates massive confusion. The main reaction clearly does not create any neutrons. SPAWAR found accumulated neutron tracks -- and they are almost certainly neutron tracks, the triple-track configuration is highly characteristic of energetic-neutron-induced C-12 breakup, on detector chips that were exposed, immediately adjacent to a cold fusion cathode, for weeks. The level of neutrons is tiny. In these experiments, heat was not measured, so there is no known reaction level. However, in other work, the level of reactions might be 10^12 per second. I'd be surprised if analysis showed more than 1 neutron per second. This is a level not detectable, generally, by electronic detectors, very difficult to distinguish from background. The SPAWAR chips may have shown perhaps 10 tracks per chip, background was one. But electronic detectors generally have a larger detection area.

The SPAWAR work has not been replicated. The Galileo project did attempt replication of the SPAWAR method of track detection, but at the time, the SPAWAR researcher did not disclose the conditions that led to high neutron counts, because the military had not yet concluded that this was better kept secret. She did suggest using a wire cathode, silver, platinum, or gold. Steve Krivit, running the Galileo project, insisted on everyone using a single cathode material, so that all experiments would be identical, and asked her to choose. She had to choose silver. In the later published work, silver showed almost no neutrons, platinum more, and gold, by far, most of all. To replicate their finding, one would use a gold cathode.

That is a substrate wire, the actual reactive surface would be palladium, plated on the wire as part of the protocol. Why the substrate material makes a difference, nobody knows. This is one more cold fusion mystery, there are many. That is why this field is so much fun!

To the point, this press release (which would not generally be considered reliable source anyway) does not show that the community prefers the LENR name. This is classical Wikipedian synthesis, an invented interpretation. Not necessarily wrong, mind you, but context matters. The press release mentions Steve Krivit, who directly rejects the term "cold fusion" and argues strongly that "it's not fusion," but another form of nuclear reaction. So it's true for Steve Krivit! Not for everyone.

13. is the report presented to the U.S. DoE in 2004. It is titled "New Physical Effects in Metal Deuterides," a very neutral name for what they cover. Not "in a jam jar," one might notice! A footnote in the report has:

1. This is a matter of considerable importance and perhaps some confusion. Many claims for nuclear reaction products exist in the field now more broadly termed “low energy nuclear reactions” or LENR.

This is with reference to this text:

With these results of a clear enthalpic excess unaccountable by known chemical or physico-chemical means, it was determined at SRI and elsewhere to undertake a thorough and systematic evaluation of possible nuclear processes, by careful screening of potential products.

This is a very weak support for the text, and, again, that paper is not reliable source by Wikipedia standards. It's a primary source. It is a review of a field, yes, but not published by a publisher responsible for the content; rather, the DoE was tasked with reviewing this and considering it. The paper was not peer-reviewed. It was carefully prepared, but in a rush, and was quite confusing in certain respects. Here, it does not establish that "the [allegedly] small community of researchers prefers the designation. I can say that in private correspondence, the term is usually "cold fusion." Or they will use "LENR," one well-known researcher insists on LANR (Lattice-Assisted Nuclear Reactions.) They will not use the word "cold fusion" for the claims of Andrea Rossi, they will use LENR, perhaps. Or "fraud!" (There are many opinions within the field.)

14. And now the reason for my writing this today. Labinger and Weininger. The paper is a decent one. It is from 2005. This is far from informative about the state of the field today. It is quite informed, for a 2005 article, about the nature of the controversy. It pays attention to the Miles work on the heat/helium correlation. It does not seem to be aware that this has been confirmed. At that time, the major confirmation existed in a report from the Electric Power Research Institute, and was not so widely known.

What is sourced from it is not supported by the paper, and could actually be contrary to the overall sense of the paper. To repeat, this is what is sourced:
Since cold fusion articles are rarely published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, the results do not receive as much scrutiny as more mainstream topics.

Do recall that this is being used, on Wikipedia, to establish an ongoing situation. First. are cold fusion results only "rarely published in peer-reviewed scientific journals"? That is blatantly false, as to an ordinary meaning of "rare." Rare compared to what? The general reader might get an impression of a paper every few years, maybe. When I last studied the rate, it was one every two months. There is a study here, Cold fusion/Recent sources, last year studied, so far, 2010. That goes up and down; lately, I've seen many papers popping up.. Do these get as much scrutiny as "more mainstream topics"? No, probably not.

It is still true that many physicists won't even look at a cold fusion paper, but they don't read all the "peer-reviewed scientific journals," I saw one physicist say that he'd believe cold fusion was real when he read it in Nature, "I pay them to filter information for me." And Nature, of course, about 24 years ago, promised not to publish any more papers on cold fusion. But Nature is not the world of "peer reviewed scientific journals."

There was a critique of the Storms 2010 paper published by Naturwissenschaften. It was by Steve Krivit, who attacks the "fusion conclusion," but who believes in LENR. I strongly suspect that others submitted critiques, but that none were publishable. There was a negative Letter published by Kirk Shanahan, who has been a critic of cold fusion since the early 1990s, it was published by the Journal of Environmental Monitoring, which had published a review by Krivit and Marwan of the field. Again, it's likely that JEM got nothing better. That Letter, unique among all critical papers, actually brought up the heat/helium correlation, but radically misunderstood the evidence examined. When the evidence is understood, the correlation coefficient calculated by Shanahan is strong confirmation of the effect. Basically, strong skepticism led Shanahan to be incautious in what he wrote. His error was so preposterous that the scientists who responded did not mention it, possibly did not understand what he had done, they simply affirmed the correlation as clear. (Many in the field joined with Marwan in replying, while Krivit backed out, citing problems in negotiation.)

It is a problem in the field that some work is announced and not published, that receives inadequate review. Some papers are published for their interest, and it's easy to find defective claims. However, this happens in all fields.

This was an examination of one short snippet of the lede on Wikipedia. The entire article is a can of worms. You can find good stuff there, but there is really only one body of evidence that is direct and confirmed evidence that the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect is nuclear in nature. I'm going to look again and see if it is there.

Okay, the claim about peer reviewed journals is cited in the article to Goodstein, who wrote

Cold fusion papers are almost never published in refereed scientific journals, with the result that those works don't receive the normal critical scrutiny that science requires.

That was in 1994. At that point, as I recall, publication rates were dropping on all sides. By then, more positive papers had been published than negative, and that continued. Goodstein was complaining about the shortage of attention, and the harm done. It is still true that within the field, there is a custom of respectful reception of even outlandish results. Privately, however, cold fusion researchers vigorously criticize poor work. In some cases, there is poor work done by aged researchers, who may have done much better work when younger. There may be some level of kid gloves, of courtesy for venerable scientists. I could tell some stories, but I won't. Some of us lose it, to some degree or other, as we age and it is kindness to treat people with respect. This happens on all sides.

I have seen one piece of work, published in a peer-reviewed journal by a very respected researcher, that led to a replication attempt. It failed. In fact, had careful attention been paid to the original publication, this was not surprising. However, very good work continues in the field, and is being published. Along with a lot of anecdotal evidence, some of it quite interesting, that is neglected, because of a shortage of funding and labor.

What is actually needed is what the Department of Energy panels actually recommended. That is missing from the article, because it is contradictory to the general "pathological science" orientation of the prevailing editors. More research, the kind that is ordinarily grant-funded, and done by grad students, to resolve "basic issues." There remain some very simple basic issues, of high importance, that have never been nailed down. Where, exactly, do these reactions occur? Storms thinks "nanocracks," very small cracks on the surface of palladium. This is supported by evidence but not confirmed. It could lead to control of the reaction. The heat/helium correlation is already established, so researchers in the field are not scrambling to do the expensive research to confirm it, but the exact value of the ratio is of high interest theoretically. This is a repeatable experiment, it's been repeated, we know the value from general results as 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4 (Storms, 2010). There is one result where the outer layer of the cathode was dissolved, to release trapped helium, and this got closer to the theoretical value of 23.8 MeV/He-4. There is one rough confirmation of that approach, another experiment where reverse electrolysis was used to strip the cathode, that also got closer when this was done (compared to other results from the same set of experiments, which showed 60% of the expected helium). That work was never formally published, it was cited in presentations at conferences. There is a lot of work like this. Unconfirmed is a common fact with cold fusion.

But the heat/helium ratio is very adequately confirmed. See Storms (2010), or his new book (2014) that goes into more detail.

Ah, there is a reason why I avoid reading that article. It has:

In February 2012 millionaire Sidney Kimmel, convinced that cold fusion was worth investing in by a 19 April 2009 interview with physicist Robert Duncan on the US news-show 60 minutes,[89] made a grant of $5.5 million to the University of Missouri to establish the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance (SKINR).

This is bosh. Duncan investigated the work of Energetic Technologies. Who funded Energetic Technologies? Sidney Kimmel. Does the source support the claim? No. Wikipedia editors read sources and make up what they mean. They are not skilled journalists, for sure. Kimmel called Duncan, according to the source, after that show. That's all. He had already invested heavily in cold fusion, supporting Irving Dardik, a doctor who had transformed his health. There is actually a book about this. Yes, SKINR was established. I visited the lab in 2013, at ICCF-18, held at the university. Young students involved, a lot of energy.

This was the problem on Wikipedia, for me. When I found an abusive blacklisting, and confronted it -- successfully -- I started to look at the cold fusion article. I could quickly see that there were problems. I knew the physics involved, and some of the chemistry. I started to research it, and -- a first for me -- I bought all the books, including the heavily skeptical ones (which can be invaluable, such as Taubes, who convers the history in depth, with sources and plenty of personal interviews, and the only problem with Taubes is his attitude. Long story.) Very quickly, I knew far more about cold fusion than any other editor, and I would write about it, where it seemed important to understand the topic in order to understand what is in the article. Wikipedia is famous for being murder on experts. They do this! I was not yet an expert, just more informed..... I've seen this again and again, with many editors. Being highly informed is a sign of bias. You have to have some motive to become so highly informed, would be the thinking. You must be a "believer." And so it goes.

Okay, there is one body of evidence that transcends the circumstantial nature of excess heat and other nuclear product reports, the heat/helium correlation. It is not mentioned in the article. There is reference to work that mentions it:

In response to skepticism about the lack of nuclear products, cold fusion researchers have tried to capture and measure nuclear products correlated with excess heat.[76][133] Considerable attention has been given to measuring 4He production.[13] However, the reported levels are very near to background, so contamination by trace amounts of helium normally present in the air cannot be ruled out. In the report presented to the DOE in 2004, the reviewers' opinion was divided on the evidence for 4He; with the most negative reviews concluding that although the amounts detected were above background levels, they were very close to them and therefore could be caused by contamination from air.[134]

Now, I could give circumstantial evidence contradicting the "cannot be rule out" claim. The researchers were knowledgeable. The 2004 DoE review was presented with evidence on heat/helium, but misinterpreted it. That is itself a long story, I first discovered this in working on the Wikipedia article. What was actually a stunning confirmation of the heat/helium correlation was read as if it negated it, i.e., as if the results were mixed. Off the top of my head, because I need to get on to other things today, there were 16 cells. Half of the cells were hydrogen control cells. A few cells showed excess heat *and all these cells showed helium. All of the hydrogen cells showed no excess heat and no helium. However, in reading the report, you can see it in the summary, the work was presented as "in 16 electrolytic cells showing excess heat, five showed helium." These were not electrolytic cells, they made that up. They were gas-loaded Case cells. And most of the cells did *not* show excess heat. Now, given that misinterpretation, the reported conclusion looks good.

They ignored the Miles work, which was cited.

However, there is direct evidence. Correlation between excess heat and helium demonstrates that both results are valid (at least on average). Leakage could not produce this result. I have seen one not-completely-silly explanation: hotter cells might leak more helium. Nice try. However, excess heat cells are either not hotter (flow calorimetry used, with cell maintained at constant temperature), or only a little hotter, often as little as one degree. Heat/helium work has not been done with really hot cells. Actual cell temperatures vary widely. Miles' work was done with positive internal deuterium pressure, these were not closed cells, but no inflow as allowed, there was a bubbler that allowed the evolved gases to exit. His experimental background was far below ambient helium. He would have detected leaks.

The Wikipedia article completely ignores the most recent comprehensive review of the field, and almost completely ignores the many other reviews. Wikipedia policy and guidelines are tossed out the window.

I've seen this again and again. Labinger and Weininger contain fact about cold fusion research, specifically about heat and helium. While L&W are sociology of science -- not really about cold fusion except to summarize the field for their purpose, this is a peer-reviewed journal. That material is not used. Instead what is quoted is the U.S. Department of Energy, review, which is a primary source, not reviewed, with an anonymous author, a bureaucrat. It's quoted because of the appearance. It appears very negative, dismissive. However, that review was, overall, a vast change from 1989. It contains a sentence that is what the faction has commonly included, the present article has:

A second DOE review, convened in 2004 to look at new research, reached conclusions similar to the first.[10] Support within the then-present funding system did not occur.
10. US DOE 2004, Choi 2005, Feder 2005

The DOE report has this, justifying the first sentence:

While significant progress has been made in the sophistication of calorimeters since the review of this subject in 1989, the conclusions reached by the reviewers today are similar to those found in the 1989 review.

However, there was a lot more in the review. In the 1989 review, when we look at what is available on the history, there were about 15 reviewers, and it looks like two of them were not heavily negative on cold fusion. One was the Nobel Prize winner co-chair who threatened to resign if the report were not objective and relatively neutral. So the 1989 report must be read in that context. In 2004, there were 18 reviewers, and the report has it that half of them considered the heat evidence "conclusive." One-third considered the evidence that the effect was nuclear in nature at least "somewhat convincing." This was vastly different from 1989, but what was "similar"? The actual recommendation was *the same*. In 2004, it was put this way:

The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual,well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV. These proposals should meet accepted scientific standards, and undergo the rigors of peer review. No reviewer recommended a focused federally funded program for low energy nuclear reactions.

The 1989 review has uniformly been presented and framed as a thorough rejection of cold fusion, but it made a very similar recommendation. In 1989, though, that recommendation was somewhat coerced by the co-chair. In 2004, it was apparently "nearly unanimous." Attempts to present more information from the DoE review, explaining what the actual result was, were consistently reverted. Essentially, these editors are expert at maintaining defensible appearances.

Then the comment, "Support within the then-present funding system did not occur." Given this was an ongoing recommendation, this could not be based on the sources shown, from 2004 and 2005. The review presentation did not ask for specific funding. The language of this seems to be taken from the 1989 report, which referred to normal funding. This is an unsourced statement. As far as we know, the DoE has funded only very little cold fusion research since it tossed millions of dollars into it, feverishly and foolishly, in 1989. Some of Kirk Shanahan's skeptical work, not experimental, just analysis, has had DoE funding, through his employer, a DOE facility. I know of one declined proposal, and not the details of that proposal. The sense in the field is that it's a waste of time to make proposals to the DOE, that they will not follow the recommendations of their own panels. And the reasons for that would be political, not scientific. And the Wikipedia article ignores much the great body of information available on the politics of cold fusion, there are reliable sources that could be used.

There is far more information in reliable sources on cold fusion than could fit in one article. Over the years, though, attempts to create more detailed articles were strongly opposed. One page was all that this huge mistake deserved, would be the general sense. (One of the examples of administrative abuse that I came across when researching the matter was an arbitrary, unilateral, undiscussed deletion of a related article by an involved administrator.)

To give an idea of what is involved in improving Wikipedia coverage on this topic, an article was created on the w:International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. In 2008, the deletion discussion started by an administrator who had very strong opinions on the topic (he was later reprimanded for some of his actions.) That discussion had very low participation, I think it escaped the notice of other editors who would have been interested. When the AfD was filed, as far as I can see, none of the active editors on that page were notified. One of them, at least, was highly skilled. All it takes, then, is a week of inattention to one's watchlist, and the page disappears, and you don't see it in the watchlist any more.

A user, in September 2012, created a new version of the page. This was linked from the cold fusion article. The article stood without objection until renominated for deletion in June 2013. Reviewing the contributions of the nominator, I see a familiar story. There was no attempt to discuss this on article talk pages, no attempt to improve the article. In any case, this time, the person who had created the page was an experienced Wikipedian. I see some of the same old same old argued for deletion. Nobody ever looks for these patterns. Sometimes in arbitration cases, patterns of behavior come up, and sometimes editors will be sanctioned, topic-banned. And sometimes, years later, those bans are quietly lifted, the editors go back to the same behavior, and either nobody notices or nobody cares. Enormous work can go into preparing and handling an arbitration, it can take weeks. Now, here, there is a conference. Everyone agrees the conference exists. There are some reliable sources. On the old Wikipedia, the way it used to work, if there were a few sources, sometimes as few as one, articles were allowed to stand as stubs, unless there was no hope of finding "significant coverage."

But the cold fusion article has long been a battleground. It was declared subject to discretionary sanctions. In practice what this means is that if someone is not an established user, and edits the article in a way disliked by the majority sitting on the article, they can be quickly banned. Those who are established can still do almost anything they want. Few have the skill to confront that, and they keep it that way.

So here is a long discussion that really should have been considered a waste of time. Yet if not enough regular users show up and get involved, these can easily go to Delete. Some administrators will do what is supposed to be done, declare the result based on strength of arguments, but many will just go with "consensus is," which means, sort-of, majority. And a faction can muster votes, easily, they know how to do that, if they care enough.

In this case, the admin did consider the arguments. There were 6 keep votes and 5 delete. That would normally result in No consensus, which is a keep result, but Keep can sometimes discourage renomination. However, looking at the users who voted, I see patterns, of course. One user voting Keep was naive, clearly, argued irrelevant issues, at length. Naive users do not realize that this can backfire, it irritates Wikipedians, and they can vote Delete out of spite! Mostly what is visible is POV editors clearly, from long-term behavior, wanting to keep material they dislike out of Wikipedia. Hardly anyone ever studies this. I did.

When enough regular users show up, this faction frequently loses. I've also seen that again and again. But it can take enormous work to set up that situation. Meanwhile, the smallest changes, that ought to be no-brainer improvements, are rejected. In certain fields, this is what can be expected on Wikipedia. And the Arbitration Committee, when faced with this, more than once, has punted. They really don't know what to do about it. I did attempt to make suggestions. An administrator who was inspired by what I wrote ran for and was elected to the Arbitration Committee. That did not last long. He discovered that he could do practically nothing. And then he was threatened with harm to his family. He realized that Wikipedia was just not that important, and he resigned. I agree with him.

The faction imagines that "cold fusion believers" are "desperate" to get their point of view into Wikipedia. The actual cold fusion community doesn't care about Wikipedia, like most scientists, they know how defective it is. I was a Wikipedian first and interested in cold fusion, second, so I was unusual. I was standing for the principles on which Wikipedia was founded and which are still officially policy. And when I concluded that this was hopeless, that the way Wikipedia did things was far too entrenched and that reform was actively resisted (many reforms, such as flagged revisions, I'm not talking just about some fringe topic), when I saw that arbitrators were essentially powerless (they attempted to form a committee to consider and recommend reforms, with open membership but facilitated and formal process, they were shouted down), I abandoned Wikipedia. I was formally banned after I was completely done.

Those who knew how to work within the system to fix this have generally been banned. For behaving badly? No. For allegedly having an "agenda." Even if they were totally careful to follow policy and only edit conservatively. Pcarbonn and myself are only two, I've seen others, though Pcarbonn was the longest-standing. Pcarbonn was mostly interested in cold fusion. I was a general editor, very interested in Wikipedia structure and process. I knew the structure and how to file an RfC and an Arbitration. I knew how to make requests, for example, the Storms paper was formally approved for use as Wikipedia reliable source, at the Reliable Source Noticeboard. Which does no good if editors simply revert it out, and they certainly did that, with the flimsiest of excuses or none. Because this is not just one editor, it's very difficult to address. Wikipedia is totally vulnerable to factional editing, and many Wikipedians don't want to believe that. They will believe it if the topic is, say, Israel/Palestine or the Church of Scientology, but an ordinary science article? With a number of administrators involved? No. Impossible! "We would never allow that!"

Jed Rothwell is caustic, but long before stopped trying to edit the article and simply made occasional suggestions as IP on the Talk page, signed, generally right on, he's highly knowledgeable. He was banned without any ban process, by administrative fiat of the administrator he had skewered over his ignorance. His web site was blackisted by the same administrator, that's what got me involved. No reason, it was completely out of process, and, then, to get a global blacklisting, because his Wikipedia blacklisting was about to fall, he misled the global blacklist administrators. It took me two years to get that undone. And getting it undone was given as the reason for again banning me from cold fusion, I had allegedly written too much in that request (which was not on Wikipedia.) I did what it took, and it worked, and ... banned. That's Wikipedia! That story has been written over and over, the process is utterly unreliable.

There is a Nobel Prize Winner in physics who has attempted this or that. The faction has threatened to ban him, but they haven't yet had an administrator willing to take the heat, and he doesn't push too far. Mostly, like most sane people, he's realized that editing Wikipedia is pushing a boulder up the hill, it is likely to roll back down again.

Wikipedia works very well in certain areas, where controversy is not entrenched. Cold fusion is not such an area. There are people who have, long-term, dedicated a great deal of time to attacking cold fusion on the internet. They use pseudonyms, they do not generally reveal their real names. They could not get an article published under peer review, unless maybe at Skeptical Inquirer, i.e., a publication with bias. Some of these edit Wikipedia.

Original bliki post: Abd (discuss • contribs) 20:31, 3 November 2014 (UTC) (may be edited later)

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