Cold fusion/Storms (2010)/Radioactive decay of contaminant

< Cold fusion < Storms (2010)

Edmund Storms writes:

“

Radioactive decay is a slow process and one that makes detectable heat only when a very large amount of the radioactive material is present. In this case, the element would have to be an alpha emitter. The alpha emitters exist only at high mass numbers and these elements are very rare in the normal environment. If enough were present to make detectable heat and helium, their presence would be clearly visible from the energetic radiation they would generate. In addition, the rate at which heat and helium are produced would slowly decrease as the material decay away. None of these consequences of radioactive elements being the source of heat and helium have been seen.

”

Please check my math here...

It takes 1 kilo-calorie to heat a liter of water 1 degree celsius.

1 kilo-calorie = 4.2 kilo-joules = 2.6 x 10¹⁶ Mev.

One D-D fusion event produces about 24 Mev, so we would need the heat from 10¹⁵ D-D fusion events to heat a liter of water one degree celsius.

A liter of heavy water contains 6 x 10²⁶ / 20.04 = 33.2 x 10²⁴ molecules of heavy water, so if ~~one molecule~~ 30 molecules in a trillion were used for the D-D fusion, that would suffice to raise the temperature 1 degree celsius.

But a single Radon decay also produces about same amount of energy, so if Radon were present at ~~one part~~ 30 parts per trillion, and all of it decayed, that would also raise the temperature of a liter of water 1 degree celsius.

If Radon were present at one part per billion, only ~~1/10th of 1~~ 3 percent of it would have to decay to do the job.

The half-life of Radon is 4 days or 5760 minutes. If half of it decays in that time, then ~~1/10th of 1 percent~~ 3 percent percent of it would decay in about ~~12 minutes~~ 6 hours.

So, if my math is correct, Radon present at one part per billion would warm the water 1 degree every ~~12 minutes~~ 6 hours. That would bring it to a slow simmer after about a ~~day~~ month.

The impurities listed in the purest Deuterium are listed in parts per million. Storms tell me that some of the salts are found at around 6 ppm.

It occurs to me that as little as ~~200 parts per trillion~~ 6 parts per billion of Radon impurity would suffice to heat the water 1 degrees celsius per hour. Is that detectable? Is that enough to kill someone handling a vial of heavy water with ~~200 parts per trillion~~ 6 parts per billion of dissolved Radon gas? What about heating water just one degree per day? That would only take about 8 240 parts per trillion of Radon.

Is there a mistake in my math?

Caprice 12:52, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Review of math and implications

There are 3.7 x 10^25 molecules of heavy water in a liter at STP. (Density of heavy water: 1.1056 g/ml. 20.04 g/mol. Liter is thus 55.17 moles. 6.022 x 10^23 molecules/mole, thus 3.32 x 10^25 molecules per liter. For d-d fusion, two deuterium nuclei are required, the same as in one molecule of heavy water, so if all the deuterium in a liter fused immediately, we'd see 8 x 10^26 MeV of energy, or 2.5 x 10^10 kcal. It would get a tad hot, eh? However, the proportion of deuterium molecules to fuse instantaneously to raise the temperature 1 degree, 1 kcal, would be 0.4 x 10^-10, or 40 parts per trillion.

To take the number from Caprice (Barry Kort), if one deuterium from one molecule in a trillion fused, we'd see a temperature rise of 0.025 degree. So this part of his math is incorrect -- or mine is! His error may be in the calculation of molecules per liter.

In actuality, with finite fusion rate, the temperature rise would be lower, because the heat would also be transferred to other components of the cell, including the container. The calculation above neglects those.

Now, radon. Radon decays down through a chain of decays, ending with Pb-206. However, there is a "resting point," with Pb-210, half-life 22.3 years. The main path for this is, per w:Decay chain#Radium series (also known as Uranium series):

Rn-222
Po-218 (5.59 MeV alpha)
Pb-214 (6.12 MeV alpha)
Bi-214 (1.02 MeV beta)
Po-214 (3.27 MeV beta)
Pb-210 (7.88 MeV alpha)

Yes, the total energy is 23.88 MeV. So one radon atom will generate about as much energy as one d-d fusion. Problem is, it creates three alpha particles in the process. Why are we even considering radon contamination as a source of heat/helium? Because heat and helium have been correlated. But the reaction above would correlate heat and helium at 7.96 MeV/He-4. That it produces three alpha particles may have been overlooked by Caprice. The observed correlation is at 25 +/-5 MeV per He-4, not 8.

There is another problem. The high-energy charged particles that would be produced by this chain, if at levels necessary to explain the observed excess heat, would cause various observable effects, notably Bremsstrahlung radiation, as X-rays, I believe. Because of this and other predicted secondary effects, Hagelstein (2010) set an upper limit on normal charged particle radiation from the main reaction at 20 KeV. This is a disaster for most theories of cold fusion, requiring them to develop far more powerful models for how the energy is returned as heat rather than as high-energy charged particle radiation. There remain what Storms calls "plausible models," but none of them are well-enough demonstrated by experiment to deserve the title of "accepted." Only the gross model of "deuterium fusion, unknown reaction" has sufficient evidence to be considered accepted, and, obviously, this model doesn't explain mechanism at all. It's really just a coherent observation, a conclusion from the very strong correlation of excess energy at the deuterium fusion value. "D-d fusion" is a particular submodel, one that is quite unlikely for a number of well-known reasons.

So back to radon contamination as a possible source of heat and helium. Unlikely because of the low heat/helium ratio -- unlike what Kort suggests above -- this model has not even been considered, as far as I've seen, by skeptics or researchers in the field. It is also unlikely because of the following problem:

Let's suppose that somehow the heavy water becomes so contaminated with radon that, during the experimental period, its temperature rises significantly. Let's say that this is enough to raise the temperature by a degree C. This heat would be a constantly declining value. CF heat normally does not appear at the beginning of the experiment, but in the middle or toward the end. That is completely contrary to what would be expected from radioactive contamination. In a study cited by Kort in an effort to show some "battery charger" effect -- the study contradicted that, but Kort did not read the study, apparently, but only found an available image showing a snapshot of a few hours in an experiment that lasted for weeks -- excess heat tracked electrolytic current density, a common CF effect (current density associates with the generation of deuterium and thus makes small differences in deuterium loading, particularly causing movement of deuterium in the lattice, thought to be important for the effect). If radioactive contamination were the source of the anomalous heat, then we'd not see any connection at all with current density, and excess heat would be appearing in periods when electrolytic current was only the "trickle charge" current. No excess heat was seen in those periods in the McKubre experiments in question. The heat clearly appeared when current density rose above a certain value, and declined and disappeared when the current was lowered.

Further, and the basic reason that radon contamination wasn't on the table, lab materials like heavy water are not delivered so radioactive that they would be a health hazard. Heavy water used in an experiment is likely to be at least months old, and replenishment of a cell comes from stores, it would typically be the same production batch. If the temperature rise, say, 38 days after production (very short -- some place using heavy water extensively would probably buy three month's supply at least, for strong economic reasons), one degree per unit time, the temperature rise would be 1 x 2^10 higher at the production/seal date, before so much radon decayed. That would produce a temperature rise of 1024 degrees. Perhaps the manufacturer would notice that the stuff was vaporizing, all by itself. It would be kind of hard to bottle it, eh? And I am not even going to calculate the radiation levels involved. This stuff would give heat burns and radiation burns, intense ones. The vapor produced -- immediately -- would be highly radioactive and toxic, one breath might do you in from the alpha damage, this would be more dangerous than most radioactive substances, it would be setting off alarms wherever they exist, dosimeters would go off-scale, etc. Now, anyone who knows a shred about radon would know this, immediately. Storms tried to tell Kort, you can see it above. --Abd 18:26, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

So this is a nice example of gross failure of a student to falsify the null hypothesis --Abd 18:37, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

So this is a nice example of gross failure to falsify the null hypothesis, by looking for flaws in it, by considering all the implications, for someone proposing a hypothesis of radon contamination as a source of excess heat and helium found in cold fusion experiments and complaining that others weren't undertaking this falsification effort. The contamination hypothesis was proposed approaching a month ago, and all the basic arguments above, but without the math, were described on various pages here, and in correspondence with Dr. Storms. Storms did not verify the math nor did I, at the time, because the theory was ridiculous for quite different reasons, which were given.

So if this is going to be a learning exercise, as I intend for all these pages, the "learning" will have to be supplied by others than Barry, I suspect. Or is he going to note, which would be pretty simple, "I guess this isn't plausible!"? And will he stop excoriating Storms as "not following the scientific method," because Storms declined to say, more than briefly, why this was a preposterous proposal? And because Storms doesn't cover it in his peer-reviewed paper published in Naturwissenschaften in September of this year, "Status of cold fusion (2010)," and with relation to other novel hypotheses that Kort similarly dreamed up, without familiarity with the subject matter, Storms did not address hypotheses that nobody has significantly proposed and Storms himself knew enough to reject immediately?

Kort has frequently asserted that there are "two camps of scientists" coming to different conclusions, and he has attributed this to "different versions of the scientific method."

Perhaps, but Kort hasn't, so far, shown any peer-reviewed or substantial criticism, showing these allegedly "different conclusions," nor has he noted a crucial fact: different conclusions are totally expected if different facts are assumed. Even if the understanding of the scientific method is identical.

I'm not aware of any skeptical review in recent years that incorporates the known experimental results, from after the initial period of 1989-1990. Early skeptical reviews, as published under peer review, did not show that cold fusion was artifact, they, rather, considered that it had not been convincingly, at that time, proven.

We can look at the 2004 DoE review, and how heat/helium was handled there. It will be instructive. The correlation was essentially ignored by the fraction of scientists who remained skeptical. There is no coherent answer to the heat/helium findings there, and there are obvious errors -- blatant misreadings -- shown in interpreting the review paper by Hagelstein. And that will be its own topic, this will all be plain, I assert, when the evidence is compiled.

(Nevertheless I agree with the practical recommendations of the 2004 Doe review panel, which were the same as those of the 1989 panel, and the basis for those recommendations often gets lost in the noise in this field. More research is needed, because we have here a conundrum: experimental results that are not explained by currently accepted theory. Some of the promoters of cold fusion wanted a massive federal program, in both cases, but we don't know the basic science yet, the mechanism. Tossing money at engineering without knowing the mechanism is foolish. What's needed is basic science, development and testing of theories. That work is going on, without much federal funding, but "funding under existing programs" was recommended, and that has never been realized, with very, very minor exceptions that managed to escape the violent rejection of cold fusion and active attempts to suppress research on it. This is part of the history of cold fusion, it's amply documented in reliable sources (Wikipedia standard), and we will cover it on history pages, I assume.)

I'm very aware of current skeptical literature on cold fusion. It's almost all in "popular sources," like blogs or reader comments on newspaper articles, or an odd comment here or there solicited by a reporter from an "expert," i.e., a physicist with no apparent knowledge of the cold fusion research literature. The experimental researchers are almost entirely chemists, and their job is measuring heat and detecting elements, and that's what they have reported, with only a little standard theoretical speculation attached. It's up to the physicists to explain the results with theory. "Impossible" isn't a theory of mechanism! It is, rather, attachment to prior belief. It should be vulnerable, for a competent scientist, practicing the scientific method, to contrary evidence.

It's not going to be easy to develop the necessary theory, I strongly suspect. Lots of highly competent people, advanced theoretical physicists, Nobel Prize winners, etc., have worked on the problem, and no theory, so far, is complete, predicts the known phenomena accurately.

Except, of course, we can predict excess heat accurately by measuring helium accurately, that's been proven adequately with multiple confirmations of a repeatable experiment, and no negative reports. --Abd 18:26, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Self-contamination isn't such a strange phenomenon. Most diseases persist because the pathogen cannot be eliminated; rather it enters a cycle, re-introducing itself and renewing the pathology. The Ouroboros symbolizes that phenomenon of something feeding on itself. I found it ironic, when I looked it up, that the Ouroboros was the symbol of Alchemy. In the recent JCMNS paper by Storms & Grimshaw, the authors revisit Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. The point, of course is that you don't want to inadvertently swallow a pile of baloney — especially not your own baloney. That's what happens in false religions and cults. The Ouroboros Sigil is also used in Gnosticism and Hermeticism. Without a good baloney detector, an Hermetic School of Thought can easily become a Baloney Ingestion Cult. —Caprice 03:18, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

That's not "self-contamination," rather that's continued contamination. You are assuming that all Ouroboros does is to swallow the baloney. That will quickly lead to a visible bulge in the snake. Rather, the critical function is digestion, where the baloney is broken down into constituent elements and re-assembled. If it were reassembled as "baloney," then the indigestion would only get worse. Where would the energy come from? Obviously, if the process can continue, there remains undigested material.

Barry, your dream was for you. You keep trying to convert your own baloney into a message for others, but you don't eat it yourself and you don't digest it. You miss, entirely, the symbolism in your own dreams. You think it's about others. You think Feynman is writing about others instead of about you. Fundamentalists think that the descriptions in the Qur'an of the people who have gone astray is about others, and the same with fundamentalists in all religions.

Thanks for the reference to JCMNS, I don't regularly read it. I probably should. I could critique the Storms paper, because I can spot flaws in it, quickly. However, the basic point of the paper is correct, the flaws are just details, where he fails to address this or that skeptical point adequately, or understates a strength of the research. That there is a (conceptually) simple experiment that has been widely replicated isn't explicitly said. That individual P-F type experiments are variable in results has been a huge red herring. Correlation analysis easily penetrates that veil. And no amount of baloney barrage from you is likely to have any effect on that at all. Because you could not handle the facts, you turned to personal attack, claiming lack of falsification of the null hypothesis, even though all notable alternative hypotheses have, in fact, been addressed. You simply made up new ones, then faulted Storms for not falsifying them adequately, in your opinion, the opinion of an isolated crank. Nothing wrong with being a crank, but attacking people for not satisfying one is another matter.

I'm hoping that some intrepid and knowledgeable skeptic will attempt a critique of the Storms NW paper. Given that this is the most authoritative review published in the field for years, and there is zilch like it on the skeptical side, I find it quite interesting that the skeptical community has been mostly silent or reduced to restating blatant "baloney," stuff that wouldn't withstand a few minutes of neutral review. It's a sign to me that the corner was turned some years ago, perhaps sometime around 2004, with the last DoE review.

You aren't part of that skeptical community, you don't have enough knowledge, you just stick your foot in your mouth with nonstarters like "radon contamination." Shanahan would be, and surely there are others. Hey, you're close to MIT. How about recruiting some actual experts?

You can complain that these "fanatic believers" are taking over the journals and publishers, while "real scientists" sleep (Springer-Verlag, Elsevier, ACS/Oxford University Press, World Scientific, Higher Education Press, what publisher is next to be deceived and deluded?).

Good luck. --16:13, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I asked Kirk Shanahan about that last week. He wrote, "I am currently working on a response to Ed’s review [in Naturwissenschaften], but as he is the primary editor for ‘LENR’ papers in the journal his review was published in, I am unsure I will submit it there. My prior experience suggests it will be treated unfairly. However, I have also communicated with Ed extensively before, during, and after the publication of my first paper, and I came to the conclusion he understood my points but simply would not accept them for personal reasons." So I reckon you can watch for Kirk's forthcoming response, but he doesn't yet know where he will submit it. —Caprice 19:15, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I knew he was planning a response, but from what I've seen from him, if it's published, it will be published as he was published in Journal of Environmental Monitoring, apparently as a device for exposing all the silly arguments that lurk out there, unexpressed and therefore still doing damage. Unless he can come up with more than a rehash of that letter, he's not terribly likely to get published at all. He's been complaining about journal rejection for a long time.... The journal most likely to publish something would be Naturwissenschaften, in fact, and do you think that the editor there would allow Storms to block, unilaterally, criticism of Storms' work, even if he wanted to? Do you think that NW is run by idiots? Other journals are more likely to be hands-off, unless one of them wants to make a point about cold fusion, still believing it's Bad Science, which isn't a good business decision, probably. They'd better check with their experts! And I doubt that Shanahan is the most qualified person to write such a last-ditch attempt. Shanahan has mostly ignored the heat/helium evidence, claiming only that if heat could be defective, and if helium could be defective, heat/helium is therefore garbage, which is a total misunderstanding of the power of correlation to cut through noise and validate both sets of measurements. Shanahan has been criticizing cold fusion for twenty years, and is apparently a "die-hard." He ignores inconvenient evidence, or waves it away. What does that sound like?
The cat is out of the bag, Barry. That cat is going to be awfully hard to stuff back in, because experimental evidence keeps accumulating, and the number of people who have seen it. --Abd 21:40, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Storms would have to recuse himself from editorial judgment if he were inclined to block publication of a letter critical of his work. Of course, I reckon Storms would be more likely to accept a critical letter for publication rather than be accused of editorial bias. The real problem with Naturwissenschaften is that it's not a journal of low energy nuclear physics. It's a journal of life sciences. Looking at that issue, it's not clear to me what edible dormice, house sparrows, blue tits, basal frogs, fluorescent flowers, social insects, ants in your plants, and eastern dwarf lemurs have in common with cold fusion. —Caprice 22:37, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

You've made a common mistake. NW is, in fact, the premier CF journal as of late. To understand why, I suggest you look a little deeper. NW isn't a journal of the "life sciences," exclusively, there are some misleading facts that you simply accepted or inferred. It's a multidisciplinary journal of the natural sciences, explicitly covering all physics, but they solicit articles that cross disciplines. Cold fusion is a multidisciplinary field, where chemists and physicists have been at odds. Perfect for NW! And NW is venerable; Einstein published in NW. Did you really think that a "life sciences journal" would appoint a LENR editor? Do you imagine that NW doesn't have access to independent competent reviewers? Think again! This was all debated on Wikipedia about a year and a half ago, and resolved by consensus, just before I was banned the first time. Which doesn't stop people from ignorantly re-asserting it from time to time. It's the most common skeptical comment I've seen on physics blogs about the recent review.... Pseudo-skeptics are convinced that they are right, ab initio, so they seize on any handy wedge to insert.... they don't look too carefully. --Abd 00:21, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

I looked a little deeper. Naturwissenschaften (The Science of Nature) is the journal of two societies, Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte (Society of German Scientists and Physicians) and Hermann von Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren (Hermann von Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres). Springer lists Naturwissenschaften as a journal in the primary field of Life Sciences, comprising the subdisciplines of Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Aquatic Sciences, Behavioral Sciences, Biochemistry & Biophysics, Bioinformatics, Cell Biology, Ecology, Entomology, Evolutionary & Developmental Biology, Forestry, Genetics & Genomics, Microbiology, and Plant Sciences. The primary fields of Physics, Chemistry, and 21 other fields besides Life Sciences each have their own primary subject area divisions at Springer. Naturwissenschaften is one of 461 journals listed in Springer's Life Sciences primary subject area. The primary subject area of Chemistry has 8 subdisciplines, one of which is Electrochemistry, with 7 journals just in that subdiscipline. The subject area of Physics has 13 subdisciplines, including Condensed Matter Physics (with 44 journals in that subdiscipline), Particle and Nuclear Physics (with 23 journals in that subdiscipline), and Atomic, Molecular, Optical & Plasma Physics (with 18 journals in that subdiscipline). LENR seems very out of place as an occasional topic in but one of Springer's 461 journals in the Life Sciences. —Caprice 02:24, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

You have a point of view and interpret every fact through that point of view, it's a classic way that one "fools oneself." Have you looked at Springer's own description of the journal? It's not clear why they classify it with Life Sciences, except that they don't have a "multidisciplinary" division, they had to put it somewhere. The "divisions" I assume, are so arranged for business efficiency, or perhaps at some point they realized that most articles had something to do with life sciences, more than any other general area. Repeat after me: "Springer's flagship multidisciplinary science journal covering all aspect of the natural sciences."
Springer's page "About this journal." Besides their description, on the right, read "Aims and scope." Tell me, does cold fusion "demand an interdisciplinary approach?" --Abd 03:57, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Today's Science Quiz: What do edible dormice, house sparrows, blue tits, basal frogs, fluorescent flowers, social insects, ants in your plants, and eastern dwarf lemurs have in common with cold fusion? —Caprice 05:05, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

The above comment is redundant sarcasm, extending what was said above at 02:24, 25 December 2010, and repeating the edit summary from there. The answer to the question is obvious: articles on all of these (?) have appeared in Naturwissenschaften, which is a journal that covers all aspects of the natural sciences, explicitly, like Nature and, less precisely, Scientific American.

research in eigenfactor and an interesting exchange on Scientific American --Abd 01:01, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

As to impact factor, Scientific American and Naturwissenschaften are on about the same level, but I'm not sure that SA is "peer-reviewed."

According to Springer, impact factor is 2.316 (2009), rank in category (Multidisciplinary sciences) is 8 of 48. [ Eigenfactor] score for NW (2008), 0.0111, Article influence, 0.960. Scientific American, for comparison, 0.0097; article influence 0.879. The most prestigious multidisciplinary journals are Nature and Science. It think I looked at this a year ago and NW has gained compared to Scientific American. It's a bit apples and oranges, though, because Scientific American is a wider audience journal, a magazine, really. Science is 1.583 EF and AI 16.286. Nature is EF 1.7634, AI 17.279.

Searching for "Naturwissenschaften" and "Scientific American," I came across When Scientists Sin. I was aware of this review; it mis-states Goodstein's conclusions. Goodstein appears to be a cold fusion agnostic, from what he's written, and his comments about scientists that "convince themselves that they are in the possession of knowledge that does not in fact exist," has clearly been applied by Goodstein to both sides of the CF dispute. In the reader comments on this review the anonymous "Kemo sabe" makes an argument deprecating Naturwissenschaften Barry, this is a knowledgeable skeptic, but one who has no debate ethics. You might have something to learn from him. --Abd 01:01, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

This appears typical: when an argument is demolished, simply repeat it, without modification, paying no attention to any errors pointed out. Drives 'em crazy! Until they figure out that what appeared to be a discussion wasn't. --Abd 01:01, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Let me repeat it, without medication.

“

Naturwissenschaften (The Science of Nature) — the premier journal of record of LENR — is the journal of the Hermann von Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren (Hermann von Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres).

”

So it appears to me that Ed Storms was seized by a Flight of Fancy (Abduction of the Mind) and fell down a Gemeinschaft, where he has been trapped ever since.

Caprice 16:33, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Association. Nah. Association of heat and helium was first asserted by Fleischmann then confirmed by Bush and Lagowski soon after. Miles did the work to show correlation, but the helium measurements were crude, so this was described as "within an order of magnitude of the theoretical estimate of helium production based on fusion of deuterium." Huizenga noted Miles claim and how remarkable it was, in the second revision of Cold fusion, The scientific fiasco of the century., in 1993. See the quotations from Huizenga at Cold fusion/Excess heat correlated with helium/Sources.

Huizenga went on to state that, as of his writing, "as is the case with so many cold fusion claims [he's referring to experimental reports as "claims," which is a bit ... POV ... but that's minor], this one is unsubstantiated and conflicts with other well-substantiated experimental findings. .... [no He3, so branching is wrong... "must be" gammas ... hence "must be leakage." Recently Miles, Bush et al reported they are finding neither heat nor helium...]

Now, Barry, see if you can falsify the null hypothesis over Huizenga's conclusion that the helium is "highly likely" to be contamination from the atmosphere. Start with what he'd have known in 1994. What problems were with his assertions from the point of view of the scientific method? Huizenga was making a central and obvious assumption, one necessarily based on no evidence other than lack of prior reported observation, in a place where nobody had looked carefully before Pons and Fleischmann.

Why was it relevant that Miles and Bush had a flat spot when they couldn't get the reaction to appear? In the same pages, Huizenga reports that Droege and Droega had built a very sensitive calorimeter, and were seeing nothing. He quotesd, apparently relishing the implications, that "Tom Droege has remarked that "the cleaner I get, the more accurate I make the apparatus, the fewer bumps and anomalies I see."

That Droege statement may be the source of the claim often repeated to support the idea that CF is pathological science, that, supposedly, the more accurate the measurements, the less the phenomenon appears.

But consider the alternative hypothesis, it's really very simple. The CF phenomenon escaped notice for so many years because it only arises under some very marginal conditions, still not well-understood after twenty years. It's better understood now, for example, the normally necessary loading ratio is well-established. The ET experiment you mentioned is unusual in finding high heat at 80% loading, that is the place where, normally, the effect barely begins to be seen. Note that loading would not be expected to be related to excess heat, though you've proposed a mechanism, we'll get to that separately.

If Miles was no longer able to get excess heat, and wasn't seeing helium, that confirms heat/helium. But the skeptics fixated so firmly on the demand for "reliability" that they missed the obvious. If Miles' helium was leakage, why does it mysteriously not appear whenever he doesn't get excess heat?

That finding, no excess heat, no helium, is an experimental finding that has been confirmed by many groups. Storms doesn't mention the "negative replications" that found no helium, because he's really most interested in the magnitude of the heat/helium ratio, and that's hard to determine with 0/0. Eh? But 0/0 is, in fact, a confirmation of heat/helium, it's predicted that if heat is missing, so will be helium.

There are no negative replications on this. So what do we say if there is a mass of data, from many independent research groups, confirming the same observation. Do we start to treat this as "established." Sure, it could be rebutted at any time, by counterexample. It's at the point where a single contrary observation would itself need confirmation, but there is no such contrary observation, so far. The most that there is are three cells in the overall Miles series of 33 cells where excess heat appeared but no helium. And there is an obvious set of possible explanations for that:

1. The calorimetry had a glitch. This is asserted for one of the cells, there had been a problem. 2. There may be other nuclear reactions! Two of the cells had a different cathode composition, those cells showed some excess heat but no helium. There are different results, in general, as well, from light water experiments, some signs of other anomalies. But this doesn't negate the huge mass of work with palladium deuteride and what appears to be the main reaction. Light water contamination is always a ready problem with heavy water electrolysis. Storms, early on, showed that 1% light water was enough to poison the reaction, *mostly*, it appears that the hydrogen is preferentially evolved and thus the hydrogen concentration in the cathode is high enough that it has a major effect on deuterium loading, my abduction. However, light water, Storms hinted to me, is more likely to produce other anomalies, such as transmutation and neutrons. I might need to "poison" my cells to see the SPAWAR neutrons, if SPAWAR cells -- which are open cells -- are sufficiently contaminated with atmospheric light water.

Barry, I love experiment. I can theorize all day, but I can't theorize myself out of a paper bag. I have to actually poke real holes in it. You imagine that I and Storms are caught in "abductive fantasy." No, Storms, at least, has been running experiments in this field for more than twenty years. Like everyone else, he had trouble finding the effect. But he kept trying, because he knew that replication failure was just that. A failure. While it's possible that an original effect was so badly investigated and reported that there truly is nothing to find, that wasn't the case with Fleischmann's excess heat. (It was with his neutron report, probably not with his helium and tritium results; the latter were at such low levels that they were easily dismissed, but not actually shown to be artifact. Just speculated -- reasonably! -- to be so.)

The "pathological science" crowd forgot something, in comparing cold fusion to N-rays and polywater: those were found to be unsupported because the original experimental evidence was actually shown to be artifact with a prosaic explanation. Rather than this happening with cold fusion, where the original and primary and clear evidence was anomalous heat, the original evidence was confirmed.

There is anomalous heat. This was already a 50% position among experts ("conclusive") by 2004. So, then, the issue becomes finding the source of that heat. Is it due to some systematic error? Fine. Find it and show it. If you have an experiment that finds no heat, that doesn't show the artifact, the systematic error. A true falsificiation experiment would find excess heat, using the techniques used by others that appear to show excess heat, and then show the source of this appearance through appropriate controls. For example, if the source were radioactive contamination, identify the contaminant and show that it was present from the beginning, and merely overlooked by the other workers. If the source is calibration constant shift, demonstrate this by showing apparent excess heat, but recalibrating during the experiment to show that the calibration constant did indeed shift.

Barry, in the latter case, it's frequently done, calibrations mid-experiment are easy and common. If they are not complete enough, it could be easy to arrange. I.e., Shanahan's claim is that heat appearing at an unexpected location can throw the calibration off. He's correct, under some experimental conditions, not others. But calibration heaters could be placed in various locations. one could be co-located with the cathode, one at a recombiner, etc. I've never see this extensive a calibration set-up.

The researchers in the field are not going to perform this experiment, because these experiments are expensive and time-consuming, and, for independent reasons, they trust their calorimetry already. I can't speak for them, but for myself I would not perform this experiment, because the helium knocked the ball out of the park. The possibility of serious calorimetry error is now far too remote to warrant routine investigation, and it's been that way for those aware of all the research in the field, since the 1990s. Fleischmann's calorimetry was confirmed by an independent investigation (some level of error was found, it was, after all, a new method he'd invented, but nowhere near enough to explain away his results), and we could go on and on.

There is no example I've seen of no heat found, but helium detected. I'm surprised, in fact. Helium leakage is indeed a problem, but such an obvious one that experimenters are apparently taking adequate measures to cover that possibility. On the other hand, is there reporting bias? It's not impossible. heat/helium is now so well established that if an experimenter finds a little heat and no helium, with a palladium deuteride experiment, they might well conclude they've made some mistake and try again.... That's why it would be important for skeptics to do actual experimental work instead of just dreaming up "alternative hypotheses" and demanding that others do the testing.

It is just as offensive for them to do that as it would be for cold fusion researchers to demand that skeptics "waste their time" -- as they'd see it -- investigating cold fusion by replicating experiments themselves. I cannot demand that any skeptic waste their time becoming familiar with cold fusion evidence, unless they start seriously asserting that researchers in cold fusion are deluded, lying, and should be excluded from funding publication. Skeptics that do that are not really skeptics, they are pseudo-skeptics, obviously. And this is what some have done, Barry, it's well-documented.

Correlation, however, the finding of that particular ratio of heat/helium, close enough to 23.8 MeV/He-4, is so powerful that it trumps the reasonable possibility of substantial error in measurements (heat, helium) being the source of the appearance of common cause.

Barry, I highly appreciate your willingness to try to find problems with Storms' review. You may be clumsy at it at times, because you aren't het sufficiently knowledgeable about the experimental conditions, and you will therefore assert alternative hypotheses that are preposterous, such radioactive decay as the source of heat/helium correlation. It's preposterous, but at least you took the correlation seriously!

It's useful here, because if you can think it and say it, others will merely think it, and that thinking will be an obstacle to their progress in learning. We are thus exploring how to move beyond our preconceptions; it involves serious discussion of even preposterous ideas. Easily, we fall into "But that's preposterous," without exploring and explaining in detail exactly why it's preposterous -- if it is.

We are, here, exploring the details of why cold fusion is still, by many, considered so obviously bogus that it can be confidently asserted as "pathological science." We are deconstructing this, piece by piece.

You have asserted that there are two groups of scientists, coming to different conclusions about cold fusion. You must be aware that for this claim to be meaningful, they must be aware of the same evidence. If there is negative evidence, negating deuterium fusion, for example, and the CF "believers" aren't aware of it or don't consider it, obviously they will come to different conclusions! In order to really know that there is some difference in the way the scientific method is applied, we must discover the differences between the groups and what they consider and where their logic diverges. That takes very detailed study, more than most people have patience for. If we try to do this in a day or a week, we will fail. So it also takes time.

The U.S. DoE review consisted of eighteen reviewers, as I recall. One set of nine received a packet of papers, including the Hagelstein review paper referring to them, and one set met for a one-day session. There was no extensive back-and-forth, where misconceptions on the part of reviewers could be addressed and corrected. It was utterly inadequate to be expected to result in some major revision of opinions. Yet, even given that severe handicap, the results of that review, in detail, were far more favorable to cold fusion than I would have expected.

The pseudo-skeptics have trumpeted the review as if it were a rejection of cold fusion. It was not. The first review, in 1989, actually was such a rejection, but political forces demanded that the conclusion be softened to suggesting more research "under existing programs," pointing out that proving a negative was impossible. So that's what the report said. In 2004, the call for more research was actually unanimous. There was no forcing of a compromise. Everyone accepted that there were experimental phenomena calling for investigation. But because that was the same "overall conclusion," the pseudo-skeptics claimed that there was "no change," even though anyone familiar with the 1989 review could see a vast difference.

In the Wikipedia article, several people, over the years, attempted to insert, in the article, the "sub-conclusions" from the report, that showed very substantial support for excess heat (50%: "conclusive"), and weaker but still significant support for a nuclear origin (1 reviewer convinced, one-third total that the evidence was at least "somewhat persuasive."). It was always removed as "cherry-picking," too much detail, and the reason is obvious: if they can say that the "results were the same" as in 1989, they can play on the common perception that 1989 was a stunning rejection of cold fusion. It's a very good example of POV-pushing in action, where MPOV (majority point of view among editors) is allowed to radically dominate.

Most editors with a background in science know the MPOV. Cold fusion, as we know, has been the very paradigm of Pathological Science for twenty years. Positive reports were being excluded, actively, from the main physics journals, and physics has far more of a following than electrochemistry.... So when a Wikipedia editor or admin with some science background sees someone trying to present evidence that shows positive results or opinion about cold fusion, they very easily conclude that this is a "POV-pusher," and they don't have time to actually investigate. ArbComm easily fell into this trap, and banned Pcarboon and then me. (And allowed the banning, out-of-process, of others, such as Jed Rothwell and now Ura Ursa.)

Wikiversity can bypass all this, by allowing deep investigation. We can make sure that "believer" and "skeptical" positions are clearly presented with evidence -- and, Barry, you should realize that "skeptical believer" is not an oxymoron, it would mean, legitimately, someone convinced by preponderance of evidence and/or Occam's Razor, that some conclusion is warranted, but the mind doesn't close, except as to routine thinking. I damn well hope I'm skeptical!

We can also present conclusions regarding evidence as found in published reviews. We need not meet Wikipedia standards for reliability, with attribution, we can present primary sources, we can place them in context. We can study any and every aspect of this field, from the sociology of science (there are at least two major sources on this, and some papers published under peer review), to the history (I find it fascinating), to ongoing experimental work, etc. We can run a "lab," and we might actually be able to test some hypotheses and alternate hypotheses. Testing calorimetry is much more expensive than the work that I'm doing, but it's not utterly out of range for some, and collaboration is possible to lower per-person costs. Miles has designed a calorimeter that he claims can be built for $50. That probably doesn't include the sensors, nor the equipment to record the data, but the latter is cheap now, i.e., people have the computers already. The experiment itself would need to be more robust, which takes more palladium and more heavy water, both quite expensive. (The four main expenses in my work for a cell are, in declining order of cost, heavy water, platinum cathode, gold anode, and palladium chloride.)

Normally, the grunt work of boring replication is done by grad students. That's starting to open up; for years it was repressed because grad students are normally motivated by the prospect that their work will be published, and that it will help them get their doctorate, and, very specifically, decent work by a grad student under Brockris in Texas was rejected simply because it was about cold fusion, the guy had to do a different thesis. When the news of that got around, the supply of labor for normal replication work -- no glory is given to mere replicators -- disappeared. That may have been a greater blow to CF work than any direct denial of funding.

Abduction is a critical component of the actual scientific method.

Actually, abduction is the creative component of theory construction. The critical component is the part where you take an imaginable model (such as Radon contamination) and run the numbers. We did that as our first example of imagining a theory and then carefully evaluating it by running the numbers. The imaginable model that I'm currently entertaining is one suggested by ideas that I got from you, from Ed Storms, and from Kirk Shanahan. From you, I got the clue that excess heat only appears when the cathode is fully loaded. From Storms, I got the clue that the coefficients of the calorimetry heat flow equations change as a function of the composition of the atmosphere. And from Shanahan I got the clue that small perturbations in the calorimetry constant suffice to explain the excess heat. When I put those three clues together, I abduce the intriguing hypothesis that Shanahan's CCS could arise from perturbations in mix of gases in the headspace that arise when D2 gas is being evolved, after the cathode is loaded. Now the critical part is to run the numbers. Here is where the mathematical difficulties lie. Where is the model that gives the correct value of the calorimetry constant as a function of varying mixtures of D2, O2, and D2O in the headspace? —Caprice 19:39, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Creative. That's correct. Without abduction, the "imaginable model" won't exist, or would not be distinguished from other models by probability. Now, you are creating models out of your imagination, often not well-informed about the experimental conditions. That's fine here, as long as you don't try to fault researchers in the field for not have had the same imaginations as you. Remember, usually, they do know the field, the experimental techniques, and certainly they know their own work. They won't "abduct" a model that is blatantly in contradiction to what they've seen!
This is a specific page, dealing with radioactive decay of contaminant. How about we set this page discussion aside for the time being, since you have abandoned that abducted theory, and start a new one. Your theory is not "Shanahan's CCS," it's a new form of CCS. What would you like to call it? If the name is "Whatchamacallit," you can start the page, Cold fusion/Storms (2010)/Whatchamacallit, but something like Cold fusion/Student studies/Kort/Whatchamacallit or whatever name you want to use for yourself or the theory. And then I can look at the details. You have some inaccurate ideas. --Abd 03:46, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you decided to call this page by that specific name, rather than adopting a more generic name that captures the essence of the methodology I am demonstrating, which is to employ abductive reasoning to generate interesting hypotheses and then to employ critical analysis to see what those hypotheses imply. As to the specific hypothesis of Radon decay, I still consider that a good explanation for the ash (Pb, He, Xe, and all those other plated out cations found by Mizuno) already being in the fuel when it's loaded into the cell. I no longer consider Rn decay to be a likely source of excess heat during the interval when the cell is active. Rather I now believe that the strong correlation of excess heat to excess current (after the Pd is fully loaded) is the main clue to focus on next. That's why I'm now focusing on the first (and most obvious) implication of that observation, namely that excess current perturbs the mix of gases in the atmosphere which (per Storms) systematically shifts the coefficients in the applicable calorimetry calibration formula. What I am doing (in terms of methodology) is called "Abductive Inference and Qualitative and Quantitative Implications of Imaginable Hypotheses." Perhaps that is what this page should be called, since that's what I'm doing here. The recurring methodological process (cooking up something tasty to chew on) is more important than the name of yesterday's chewable treat from the kitchen. —Caprice 11:02, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

I called this page by this name because that is what was being discussed. You are now asserting something quite different (and contradictory). Sure, radioactive decay of contaminant might explain Pb showing up in post-experiment analyses, if the initial quantity could be adequate, we'd have to look at details, and, to echo what you've been writing, quantitative analysis would be needed. I'm not going to discuss, however, CCS on this page, it's totally irrelevant to the name. Pages are cheap. Create one or I will; I was simply giving you an opportunity to choose the name and how it is organized under the general Cold fusion topic. Meanwhile, see the section below. --Abd 17:16, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Radioactive decay of radon as source for Pb, etc.

Storms has this to say about "Production of transmutation products":

...the experimental results must be examined with care to avoid being misled by contamination or analytical error. However, even though a complete examination is not possible in this paper, so many examples of transmutation have been published ... [that] the claim must be given serious consideration....

Absolute proof is not yet available because replication is difficult and many obvious sources of error torment the measurements. Various methods have been used to determine the presence of these transmutation products, each with its own but different source of error. Consequently, all claims cannot be rejected based on the error in one method, such as the existence of overlapping molecular species when SIMS (secondary ion mass spectrometry). As will become apparent, the possibility of transmutation being real and related to the fusion process is not as difficult to explain as it might first seem.

Note that Storms is only, about transmutation, claiming that there is good cause to investigate transmutation more deeply. He's not asserting the multiple report argument as proof, specifically because these reports vary so much and, indeed, there probably has been -- he doesn't say this -- some part of what has been reported that was due to contamination, at least, Earthtech did a good job of showing that.

Above, Caprice asserts radon contamination as an alternate hypothesis. Some radon is common in the atmosphere in some locations. So some lead showing up would also be common. The issue is how much, so I'd suggest to Caprice that the numbers be run. If the experiment is closed to new atmospheric contamination, increase in lead produced by radon decay should be accompanied by a corresponding reduction in radon content. It should also be accompanied by radiation; if the lead increase is high enough, that radiation would be detectable at the beginning of the experiment, at least. I'll leave it to Caprice, asserting the radon contamination hypothesis, to run the numbers. However, I can, before that, say the following:

Radon contamination would not explain the presence of elements outside the radon decay chain, such as Xe and other reported elements, so I have no idea why Caprice would assert that. Radon would not explain helium results (which are at far higher levels than the levels reported for other possible transmutation products, unless the levels of Pb found were adequate. Storms does cover the possibility of transmutation producing helium, in the section of the review covering helium. That would include "radioactive decay" from contamination, really, it's a form of transmutation, though prosaic. The energy balance is wrong, as can be seen, for the bulk of the helium, but there could be a minor contribution to heat. Look at the numbers.

Radon contamination and other contamination as a general result could also be an explanation of variation in transmutation reports, since contamination would vary. But this doesn't apply to helium, which is at far higher levels, and so clearly associated with excess heat; i.e., if the helium were due to contamination the very good correlation of excess heat becomes quite puzzling, and, as well, the (strong, but less strong) correlation of excess heat with loading ratio and current density. --Abd 17:16, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Mizuno found copious amounts of Pb-210 (and many other cations), copious amounts of Xenon, and no Radon. Storms found it hard to explain how Pb-210 could turn up by means of alchemical transmutation of Pd. It's much easier to explain how everything Mizuno found in his assays is well-explained by trace impurities in the heavy water obtained from Showa Denko (and other contaminants in the system). —Caprice 17:56, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

"Copious" seems implausible to me. How about stating numbers? What were the controls? Lots of CF experimental results are really "investigational reports," which are not adequately controlled to lead to strong conclusions, just to more investigation, possibly with better controls! What's the case with Mizuno? You aren't going to get enough from Storms, you'll have to read Mizuno's work. I'm not going to argue against stuff, doing your homework for you, until there is enough there to show it's worth looking at. Great idea! Check it out! --Abd 20:36, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

There's a chart in Mizuno's papers, showing the numbers. We previously discussed this here. —Caprice 20:51, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not seeing you quote the numbers, Barry. Please state your hypothesis so as to make testable predictions using numbers, make them, and compare them, if possible, with existing experimental results. What levels of contamination, and of what, would be necessary to find what Mizuno reported, how would Xenon and other found elements appear? Mechanism, please?

"No radon" is vague. An accurate report would be "no radon within detection limits." And those are important. What are the detection limits? How long was the experiment? When were the analyses done? Hosts of questions can arise, indeed. Often these details aren't present in actual publications, you have to ask the researcher to get the answers. "Trace impurities" is vague. What impurities, specifically? At what levels?

What chart? More accurately, which chart? What paper? I don't see that Mizuno was discussed in detail in the discussion you cited. If so, please make it clear. Again, I could guess and read a pile of papers by Mizuno, or just the four papers Storms cites, of which three are about "anomalous isotopic distribution," an issue you don't particularly address. The fourth is about neutrons and heat. If we are going to run the scientific method, we must be very specific about the data, not just make vague references. There is a Mizuno EDX result shown by Storms. I've little information as to how to interpret this in absolute terms, nor are controls cited. From Storms, it seems there were, indeed, controls or careful analysis of materials. Adequate? If Storms thought the transmutation data was fully adequate, he'd be reporting stronger conclusions!

Storms has noted the difficulties of considering transmutation vs contamination. You are aware of that, right? If there is some failure of the scientific method here, whose failure? Are incomplete reports, early reports, reports not followed up on, etc., "failures," or merely incomplete process? And, please remember, this general subhierarchy is about Storms, not Mizuno. Is there a conclusion Storms made that you are questioning? Which one? We can study Mizuno, specifically, and dedicate pages to it. Please try to help channel all this discussion into something pedagogically useful. --Abd 23:51, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Did you even read Mizuno's papers? He lists what he found, and includes a chart. He said he found Xenon well above the threshold of detection. And he did not list any Radon among the residues he found in his assay. You're not blind are you? You can read Mizuno's papers with your own eyes, can you not? Storms has trouble supporting transmutation because he has no plausible explanation for how Pb-210 could be there. —Caprice 00:48, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

No, I haven't recently read Mizuno's 31 papers listed on lenr-canr.org, many with download available. I have and have read his book (1997, English translation, 1998), and have seen some papers at some other time. What is so difficult about citing an actual paper? Not listing radon is no evidence at all that radon was unmeasurable, unless he states that. No, Storms doesn't have trouble supporting transmutation for the reason you give., but we will need to look at details.

Storms says why the transmutation evidence is questionable; he "supports" it in the sense of saying that he considers transmutation is one of the probable effects that any CF theory should explain, but not in the sense that he considers it conclusive. He specifically cites the problem of distinguishing transmutation from contamination, and merely points out that he considers contamination as an explanation for all the evidence improbable for reasons that, again, he gives. Is your reading comprehension being affected by some strong assumption or theory that you are carrying? However, this will come out in the wash. How about taking this straight and we'll look at the paper? Again, what paper, what chart? Sorry, I'm not going to undertake a search of the literature, pouring over all the charts in all of Mizuno's massive work, just because you, for reasons unknown to me, won't cite the actual paper. You've got something specific in mind, please disclose it. --Abd 01:25, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

See above, where I went back and added the links.

See Figures 2 and 4 of http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTisotopicch.pdf where Mizuno identifies numerous contaminants up to Atomic Weight 210.

See any of http://www.google.com/search?q=Mizuno+%22Gaseous+Xe+was+noteworthy+because+it+was+so+abundant.%22 where Mizuno repeatedly notes the abundance of Xenon, well above the threshold of detection.

Caprice 01:47, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. What is your hypothesis here? Please be as specific as possible. You can alter it later, but we can only consider one specific hypothesis at a time, I'd suggest. I'll look at the paper and may be able to make some preliminary comments with regard to what you've already stated about it. --Abd 01:52, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Since Mizuno said that his heavy water had 2500 ppm of impurities, my hypothesis is that he assayed those impurities and reported what they were. —Caprice 02:04, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Let me see if I understand this. You propose that, effectively, he found only impurities in the heavy water, i.e., that these impurities concentrated on the cathode as a result of electrolysis. Correct?
This is extraordinarily complex work, and I suggest that you read the paper again very carefully, with your hypothesis in mind, before we proceed, to see if you can falsify your own hypothesis based on data given in the paper. Consider the following preliminary questions:
What steps did Mizuno et al take to avoid doing what your hypothesis suggests?
What data does Mizuno report that is inconsistent with this hypothesis?
Storms is basing his report of Mizuno partly on Mizuno's later "Confirmation," published in 1998. I do not have a copy of this paper, and neither does lenr-canr.org. Have you seen it?
"Falsify" here merely means "reduce in probability" because, for example, there might be artifact in some measurements; but for the purposes here, we should take the experimental report as accurate. Artifact in measurements, unless it can be shown from the data itself (sometimes it can), normally is discovered through replication or later work. --Abd 02:34, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Mizuno says, "The heavy water was purified once in a quartz glass distiller." However that's not going to eliminate the impurities we are interested in. Lead Hydride (Plumbane), for example, is a gas. And Xenon is a heavy gas. So these are not going to be left behind during distillation. —Caprice 02:51, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

So, one measure taken was to purify the heavy water further by distillation. The supplied heavy water had 2500 ppm of impurities. But it was then distilled. Wouldn't this lower the level of impurities, making your comment about the possible total level of impurities inaccurate? Why would lead be present as the hydride? Is this plausible? You posit lead as a cation. That would be Pb+, not PbH4. Xenon is a heavy gas, sure, but what other properties does it have that would affect this experiment? Wouldn't distillation reduce the xenon concentration as well?

What other measures were taken?

I'm not seeing you working to falsify your hypothesis. Can you show some effort in that direction, instead of the "fooling yourself" direction, i.e, arguing why you could be right? Isn't this what you propose others do? --Abd 03:15, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Where is the inaccuracy? Mizuno stated that he started with heavy water with 2500 ppm of impurities, distilled it once, electroplated the residual impurities and then assayed it, reporting what he found. So now we have a measure of residual impurities after one round of distillation. Surely you don't expect one round of distillation to eliminate dissolved gases like Plumbane and Xenon, do you? —Caprice 03:29, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

So easily distracted, you are. You have not described the entire process, you've omitted some critical steps, and some critical results. How many clues do I need to provide you?

However, no, I don't expect distillation to "eliminate" impurities. Just to reduce them. You propose that he assayed "those impurities," but much (most?) of them would be gone, so, more accurately, your proposal is that he assayed the impurities that survived distillation, right? I'm asking you to be more careful than you are accustomed to, you are accustomed to debating with shallow thinkers, I think.

Barry, it seems you are taking this as a debate, indeed, rather than as an exercise in applying the scientific method, as you stated you wanted. What you said you wanted was a good idea. That's why I'm asking you the way I am. I'm asking you to attempt to falsify your own hypothesis, but you seem to be trying to defend it. Do you think I'm attacking your hypothesis? Where? For all I know, you could be right. Now, please, what could be wrong with your hypothesis? What experimental reports does it contradict?

Let me say, though, what I think is right with your hypothesis. It's the default! It is what Mizuno assumes would be the case, except for the results he saw, when he did what he did. Hence it is so important for you to recognize and understand the steps he took. Were these steps adequate? I don't know, and this is a very difficult question. But at least we can look at the steps and try to understand the points he makes. Do you understand his points? I'm not seeing clues that you do, not yet, because I suspect you are only looking for reasons to confirm your own hypothesis, because you'd like it to be true for other reasons, perhaps. "Fooling yourself," Feynman called that. Even if you are right! So, let's move on.

Barry, you are your own legitimate experimental subject here. Isn't it about time? Let's go through this, carefully. I'm highly sympathetic with your stated goals, and I'm just facilitating. You have a hypothesis. Can it be falsified with the data we have? Don't worry! We can turn this around, too, but one step at a time. --Abd 03:53, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I suggested elsewhere what it would take to falsify the hypothesis of contamination. According to the literature, that has not been done. Even the Student Guide on the LENR-CANR site recognizes the hypothesis of heavy element contamination, noting that "practically everything contains a small amount of most other stable elements. Therefore, proving that a particular element, after having been concentrated on a cathode by electrolysis, has a nuclear origin can be tricky." It's "tricky" because one has to falsify the mundane hypothesis of contamination. And that simply hasn't been done. Recall that Mizuno was finding counts of the order of 10¹⁵. If he were working with a sample of 25 ml (about one mole), that's 10 parts per billion. Ruling out the mundane hypothesis of contamination at those minute trace levels is simply not a realistic expectation. —Caprice 04:44, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Use of a sacrificial cathode

Above, Caprice points to prior discussion of a sacrificial cathode. One of the pages that shows up on that was my comment that I'd seen this discussed. I suggested to Caprice that he re-read the paper carefully, having come up with his hypothesis of trace contamination in the electrolyte being responsible for Mizuno's results, and searching for evidence that might falsify it. Caprice, it looks like you didn't do that. Mizuno used sacrificial cathodes, to clear the electrolyte of such impurities, the very thing you considered would be adequate.

Before the electrolysis experiment, electrolyte was pre-electrolyzed with other Pt mesh electrodes at 1 A and 150° C for 6 x 10^5 s (7 days) in the cell with the upper cover closed.

Definitely, I'd like to have more information about what Mizuno did. I'd want to see a progression of analyses of cathodes, from the first to the last. I can think of lots of things to do. I'd want a sacrificial palladium cathode, instead of the platinum that was used to clear the electrolyte of cations that would deposit, just to eliminate a variable (maybe some stuff would stick to the palladium cathode but not the platinum). But Storms pointed out the problem. Researchers can only do so much!

If you knew what funding restrictions Mizuno was working under, you might start to appreciate how much he did, it's far more than you have imagined. Storms notes Mizuno's work as about the best in the field, and there is a reason for that.

I'm involved in setting up experimental details, and I can think of lots of things to do, but I can only do so much at one time. Much of what I'd like to do is ruled out by cost. If I'd done the experiment when I first started working on it, and had reported those results, there are lots of possible criticisms that I'd not have addressed. But the faster results would also be valuable, because, then, others could continue to investigate even if I don't go on. As it is, I'll have a better-controlled experiment the first time, but I've also lost time getting there.

Caprice, I asked you to describe what Mizuno had done to avoid the concerns you raise. You mentioned only one fairly minor thing, a distillation of the D2O. There is more. You are correct that it's difficult to "rule out" contamination. But it's an error to think it impossible. Contamination can be expected to behave differently from transmutation generated in the cathode or at the cathode surface. Mizuno provides clues to this. You have ignored them, looking only at part of the results and then speculating about it. That's not good science. Now, because our goal is learning, perhaps you can learn something, and others with you, since this is all documented by the wiki software and can be refactored and summarized.

What else did Mizuno do? What results were different from what "contamination of the heavy water" would predict? --Abd 16:11, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Definitely, I'd like to have more information about what Mizuno did.

Me too. He says that after plating out impurities on a Pt mesh, he opened the cell, removed the "dirty" Pt mesh, and wired up the experimental Pd rod. Afterwards, the Pd rod was washed in "Mill Q" filtered water. Where are the controls for a comparable Pd rod that was similarly handled, but not subjected to electrolysys and also for a Nickel control rod subject to electrolysis? I would have expected to see charts that included these controls. —Caprice 18:39, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

By the way, at one point I mentioned that I'm starting with 25 ml of D2O, and you've picked up on that as if it were typical. My experiment is quite small for what is typical, deliberately, to keep costs down. It's the nature of Mizuno's work that he'd use enough to, with heavy electrolysis, not need to replace D2O mid-experiment, which would defeat the whole experimental scheme. The volume of the cell is 770 cc, though, which might be a clue. He's using, my guess, roughly 500 ml of D2O. That's about $300 worth of it at present prices for the purity he uses. Some experimenters start with D2O that is even more pure, but others save money by using less pure D2O, and some of them pre-distill, I saw the apparatus at Storms' lab. I'm starting with 99.9 atom percent, which is adequate, I assume the main contaminant is H. 1% H can almost completely poison the effect, and it's the biggest worry, because D2O will readily obtain H from atmospheric humidity. --Abd 16:23, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

One of the things that disturbed me was that, on the one hand, Storms noted that even a tiny amount of H can poison the effect, but when I brought up the similar Miley experiment (with a Nickel cathode and ordinary water), Storms wrote, "You assume the 6000 ppm of D2O in normal H2O is not the source of the transmutation reactions reported by Miley. I do not think this is a safe assumption at this point in our understanding." Abd, if even a tiny amount of H can poison the effect with a Pd electrode, how can a tiny amount of D in ordinary water now suddenly explain the same effect with a Nickel electrode?!? —Caprice 18:39, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

One issue at a time, grasshopper. We'll come back to this one, but, for now, I'm only pointed out that there are complex effects from H/D ratio. Heat/helium effects disappear, apparently, with H over 1% or so. However, some report that adding H to the heavy water -- or using light water -- increases transmutation. Storms suggested to me that neutrons, as an example, are increased by the presence of some H, and I just noticed a spectacular early experiment from Mizuno where he loaded a cathode with deuterium, then dunked it in light water, and got an immediate and very significant burst of neutrons.

My comment on H ratio was dicta here, a side comment. It has very little to do with your hypothesis. Bottom line, "same effect" might not be. Maybe there is a connection, maybe not. Storms thinks that when the true explanation is found, it will cover both classes of results. We can hope for Occam's Razor. But ... there might be two entirely different mechanisms! Let's return to what Mizuno reported and your hypothesis to explain it. This isn't a debate, remember, where one might think it a benefit to pull out an "Aha! Gotcha!" I just pointed out that your confident statement that nobody has used a sacrificial cathode was contradicted by the very paper we were supposedly studying closely. What say you on that? And the rest of the questions about your hypthesis? --Abd 19:58, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

My comment is that if Mizuno thought of using a sacrificial cathode, why didn't he use a sacrificial cathode in an experimental run? What he did was plate out as much impurities as he could, using a Pt mesh. Then, having gotten himself as pure a sample of fuel as he could get, why didn't he then run the experimental case against the control case, going forward from that point? He still doesn't have any control cases against which to compare his experimental run. —Caprice 20:13, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

You are now looking at what, perhaps, he didn't do. (Or he did do. I'd love to see what he published in 1998!). I agree with the problem of controls, but only based on my ignorance. Barry, you are forgetting that this is an original report, from work in progress, apparently being continued. Further, I suspect that Mizuno had substantial experience with the behavior of trace contaminants, and probably knew that the next run, with palladium, given what he'd done before, could be expected to be clean. You expected that! And, Barry, you are again jumping aside from the suggested task: review the paper and see what is there as to what precautions Mizuno took, and what results he saw that might tend to falsify your hypothesis. Sacrificial cathode, you suggested, previously, as a way to deal with contamination. He used sacrificial cathode(s). From your prior comment, that would be enough. I agree that it isn't "totally" enough, if we want to be complete; however this was indeed part of an "experimental run." What he may not have done -- or maybe did -- was analyze a Pt cathode and present parallel results. Instead, he presents ... Barry how about you tell us what he did and what he presents! Isn't suggesting new experiments a different task? ("The control case" isn't obvious, by the way. He does have controls, but not every possible control. Who does?) --Abd 20:40, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I suspect that Mizuno had substantial experience with the behavior of trace contaminants, and probably knew that the next run, with palladium, given what he'd done before, could be expected to be clean. You expected that!

If Mizuno expected a second run with Pd to be clean (or at least cleaner than the first run with Pd), then that disconfirms the CF hypothesis and confirms the contamination hypothesis. But as near as I can tell, Mizuno did not run with two (or four) cathodes in sequence. The contamination hypothesis would be expected to show a substantially reduced level of plating on the second run, while the CF hypothesis would be expected to show the same level of plating on the second (and third and fourth) run. And running with a Nickel electrode instead of Pd would be expected to show no plating under the CF hypothesis, and sequentially less plating under the contamination hypothesis. But Mizuno only reports one experimental run with Pd, and none of the controls with multiple cathodes used in sequence. —Caprice 21:29, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Barry, you did not read what I wrote correctly. He expected that the sacrificial cathode would have swept the electrolyte clean of cations that would deposit. "The next run, with palladium" describes what he actually did, i.e., he electrolyzed with platinum, then with palladium. You've interpreted it as some prediction that he didn't test. You are correct about reduction. If the source of the elements is contaminated electrolyte, the quantity would be reduced with each run. How much it would be reduced would depend on the clearance ratio, and with two sacrificial cathodes in sequence, one could get a very good idea of what's left. A sacrificial cathode could be palladium, no reason not to, AFAIK. I'm not sure why he didn't just use palladium in the first place, instead of platinum. But, again, this is about what he didn't do, not about what he did. What can we learn from what he did and reported? Note, though, that there is a limit to what he could do with a single batch of heavy water. This was heavy electrolysis, I think. It would eat up heavy water rapidly, unless a recombiner was being used. Forget nickel. Too many variables. Again, you are focusing on what he didn't do or didn't report.... or wasn't noticed. How about trying what I'm suggesting?

What did Mizuno do, and what did he find that might be inconsistent with the contamination hypothesis? If you don't come up with it yourself, I suppose I'll have to start pointing it out, as I pointed out the fact that he did use a sacrificial cathode, just as you had claimed he hadn't, that, if only he had, would show transmutation, if it didn't eliminate the anomalous elements found.

"Clean" meant, "free of contamination," not "without any anomalous elements."

To really understand this work, we should look at his entire published corpus, as well as related work. That's what Storms knows. I don't. One prediction you make is not necessarily correct. You are assuming uniform results, a common error in understanding CF experiments. They frequently do not show uniform results; i.e., what seems to be the same initial conditions often produces results that are quite variable. Essentially, and probably, there are unknown, difficult-to-control details like the exact nanostructure of the cathode (a huge variable, apparently). So a single experiment with reduced plating out of metals, say, with a second cathode, would not strongly show that it was contamination. If that happened consistently, yes. But Mizuno presents evidence that you have so far ignored, and it should be standing out like a sore thumb. Need any more hints? --Abd 21:56, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

How does Mizuno know what the residual contaminants are after he has purified his fuel with a cleansing cycle? He only assayed the Pd electrode, to measure what turned up on it after one run with his purified electrolyte. How does he know if he is measuring an experimental effect (transmutation) or the residual impurities? He either needs to run a control case with Nickel vs an experimental case with Palladium with his purified fuel, or he has to run two cathodes in sequence to see whether the amount of heavy element deposition remains the same (as predicted by the CF hypothesis) or decreases (as predicted by the contamination hypothesis). Miley's experiment (with Nickel and ordinary water) shows why Mizuno cannot simply assume there are no residual contaminants after he has purified his fuel. —Caprice 22:20, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

There is a recombiner. Pt mesh, apparently. There are other characteristics to the experiment, it's quite unusual, not your standard CF experiment. Have you spotted them? --Abd 22:03, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

There is a recombiner. Pt mesh, apparently.

What are you talking about? The Pt mesh was the electrode used to plate out most of the 2500 ppm impurities in his fuel. After that, he has fairly pure fuel, with an as-yet unassayed residue of impurities to measure, since that residue is going to compete with any anticipated transmutation effects when he switches to Pd. —Caprice 22:28, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I look at the paper, and see, quickly, errors you've made in your reporting of this experiment, important ones. Can you find them? You want to study the application of the scientific method, and finding one's own errors is a critical part of it, right? Here is your chance! I recommend creating a detailed description of the experiment and the results, that reports all important elements. That will give you a chance to find errors. And then, if you've truly overlooked something important even then, we can look at it and at the implications. Do you want any hints? --Abd 22:09, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

What I looked for in Mizuno's paper (and couldn't find) was the control case against which he was measuring the difference between heavy elements from (hypothesized) transmutation vs heavy elements from (hypothesized) residual impurities. —Caprice 22:33, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

You are looking for the wrong thing, if your agenda is as you have declared. You are looking for what doesn't look like what you are expecting, so you miss it. You've missed a lot. And I've got other stuff to do. Look at what is there, understand what's there (it's not necessarily easy!), then, maybe, you'll be in a better position to judge what is missing. I'm not satisfied with what's in the Mizuno report, I could easily suggest stuff I'd like to see, and telling you what that is would reveal one or more of your errors, but what I really don't know is the rest of Mizuno's work, and the work by others on which he's building, I don't know standard practice with this kind of trace element analysis, etc., etc. I haven't paid much attention to the transmutation claims, because it's a side-show, almost certainly.

If you are not going to carefully read the paper, and stop making the blatant mistakes, easily discovered just by looking again, I'm not going to continue this. I'll just list what I found and drop it until it's time to refactor all this into some kind of report or coverage of the ideas.

I'll give you one, a trivial one. The recombiner catalyst is platinum mesh. The paper says so explicitly. I'm no longer surprised that you would reject what I write without checking. Goes with the territory. --Abd 03:17, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

You are looking for the wrong thing, if your agenda is as you have declared.

My declared agenda is to study the relationship of emotions to learning, with a focus on what happens when one is laboring under an undiagnosed misconception. The CF saga is interesting because there are two camps, each with a distinct mental model. The only camp that is still paying any significant attention to the field are the so-called "fusioneers" who believe they have conclusively proven that CF is real, and that transmutation is real. I don't expect to find Mizuno disclosing his affective emotional state in his paper, but I do expect him to disclose his hypotheses and his methodology to resolve among alternative hypotheses. I was surprised to find that he did not compare and contrast the transmutation hypothesis with the contamination hypothesis (and design an experiment to distinguish between the two). Rather he measured the deposition that could have arisen under either hypothesis, leaving unresolved whether he was measuring the background residual contamination or the hypothesized transmutation signal. All we learned is that, whichever source of the deposited cations is correct (or merely dominant), the level of deposition is of the order of 10¹⁵ cations per 10 moles of fuel, or about 1 part per billion. What's significant is that Miley found roughly the same contaminants with ordinary water and a Nickel electrode. My conclusion: It's most likely the mundane hypothesis of residual contamination of impurities at the level of about 1 part per billion. What perplexes me is why Mizuno did not set up a control to measure that contribution to the total deposition counts. —Caprice 05:19, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Why this is such an opportunity to investigate the effect of mental models

The mental model of the two sides is not as far apart as you think. You now have an opportunity to study one of the mental models, your own, by developing adequate information. Trying to study the emotions of others through what they have written can be very hazardous. Talk about abduction! But you might have better access to your own.

Here are your clues, if you would look at them. You are not untypical of the skeptics, you have simply been willing to expose yourself here more than most of them. I might be less typical of the "believers." Most of them wouldn't give you the time of day, because they have been dealing with people like you for twenty years. The problem here is a breakdown of communication. You have what I can easily understand as a cogent objection to Mizuno's conclusions. But you don't yet understand what Mizuno found and why it's significant. You don't yet understand what Mizuno actually did; your mental model of the world makes it difficult for you to even see it. It's a pseudo-skeptical model: it assumes that CF is bogus, then looks for proof, and it filters out everything considered irrelevant to that. I hope you understand enough about psychology to understand that this is very, very normal and common, wherever held belief is involved.

Don't get my comment confused with some sort of assertion of belief in cold fusion, it isn't. I'd make the same comment if I believed CF was bogus, but was somehow able to see contrary evidence, and, in this case, evidence that someone was using a bogus argument to support a true proposition. I've done that for a long time, it has to do with my ADD, which allows me to hold contradictory hypotheses at the same time.

I read Mizuno's paper, about three times now, and I find that he hasn't disclosed all that he knows. You've missed the clues that the work was not as you've described it. For example, how many runs did he do with a palladium cathode? You have assumed that he only did one, yet there is text in the paper that contradicts that. Once one realizes that he (probably) did more than one, the next question is whether or not he changed the electrolyte, using an entirely new batch of heavy water and an entirely new clearing process, or used the same electrolyte, with just new palladium cathodes. If he didn't change the electrolyte, then he's done exactly what you wanted, and the results he presented were stable. What did he actually do? I don't know (so far) if he describes it in sufficient detail, I've missed it. But he's published a lot besides this paper, and he refers to earlier work for a fuller description of his methods. I haven't read the earlier work yet.

You have missed several huge factors, one of them so important that Mizuno titled the paper after it. You have not even referred to this, and it is evidence contrary to "contamination." Sufficient evidence? Sufficient for what? To prompt further investigation, certainly! But to stop, considering transmutation as proven? No, I don't think so. He obviously doesn't think so either, by the way. He didn't stop.

And then you will see my objection to the Mizuno paper. It's not a complete description of what he did, or it's poorly written. It's poorly written in at least one sense: he doesn't make obvious the degree to which he's considering contamination from the point of view of your objection. Barry, some of the cold fusion work was shoddy, and even more of the papers are poorly written, even when the work was solid. But not all, and if someone is seriously interested in the field, they can get through the poor writing. They ask the author for the missing information, or to clarify.

So here is how you can proceed with your investigation. You are so accustomed to people simply debating to support what they believe, that you may not trust what I'm telling you. In fact, I know you don't trust it, that's obvious. And that is part of the breakdown involved in this field. A set of mainstream scientists stopped trusting the experimental reports of a set of other scientists, seen as "fringe." This is quite different and distinct from not trusting the "fringe" conclusions, that's normal (and functional) skepticism. Cold fusion is seen by the sociologists as a breakdown of normal scientific process, precisely because of this problem. Lewis from Cal Tech went way outside of normal scientific courtesy, and, playing on the emotions of the physicists, the solidity of whose knowledge had been seriously challenged -- by the facts! but they wanted to believe it was by unethical and sloppy work -- he aroused them to contempt and what became pseudo-skepticism. Apparently the guy is normally quite a good scientist. He goofed. He was one of the negative replicators, and his work has been subject to a lot of detailed examination. It was fine, though he missed, apparently, a little excess heat; he didn't get much, because he didn't get the loading ratio required. So his work is part of the body of evidence that high loading ratio is required!

A serious mistake is made when experimental work is classified by the assumed "beliefs" of those who did the work. The conclusions might require consideration of belief, because they will be far more vulnerable to influence. Normally, though, the experimental results are far more objective.

As to dealing with your own beliefs, you have the scientific method to assist you. That method requires that you fully investigate the opposite of what you might believe. Did you err in your reports, here, of what is in and what is not in the Mizuno report? That's why I've kept hammering on this, and, rather obviously, you are reluctant to find the errors. That reluctance might be an "emotion," Barry, and it's affecting you.

Now, multiply your personal experience by all the mainstream skeptics who are so convinced that CF is bogus that they don't read the newer experimental reports, and whatever they do read, they read through a filter like yours.

Suppose there is conclusive experimental evidence that CF is bogus. Believers might easily read it the same way. One can think up alternative explanations to oppose to any conclusion. When Wood showed that experimenters "saw" N-ray flashes on phosphor even when the "prism" was removed, perhaps what we saw was a kind of persistence of vision. (One that might see visual activity, near threshold, as continuing even after it's stopped.) It's not hard to image testing this, but it would be more difficult and apparently wasn't done. (And, as well, the details of Wood's test might have ruled this out, and we may have been dealing with mere suggestibility. But someone can suggest that you see something that is real! What Wood really did was pull the rug out from under the only evidence for N-rays: visual sighting at the threshold of perception after dark adaptation. It might help to know that one normally allows the eyes to dark-adapt before viewing a spinthariscope, and, believe me, it's hard to tell the difference between real flashes and visual noise. I bought a piece of ZnS phosphor as part of setting up my lab. I think it's totally cool. I'm having fun.)

Problem is, such evidence hasn't been published. There were, indeed, plenty of early "negative replication," and careful work to show that palladium deuteride wasn't emitting many neutrons, if any, which appeared fatal to the fusion hypothesis. But the "fusion hypothesis" wasn't the "cold fusion hypothesis," it was a hypothesis that the reaction was d-d fusion, which, shall we say, it obviously was not. The later work subsumes and confirms all the early work, except for true error. Do what those "negative replicators" did, and you will not see excess energy and you will not find helium or neutrons or anything other than a smaller bank balance. It's expensive work, usually (that's what I'm working on changing.) Reproducible experiment, eh?

I suggest you complete this work here, but at any time you can short-circuit this; I'll write a summary of the Mizuno paper as a resource here. You've quite incorrectly assumed that cold fusion "believers" "believe" that transmutation has been "proven." I don't. Storms doesn't, or he'd have written his 2010 review quite differently. Storms, however, is a natural skeptic, you've missed that.

In order to understand Mizuno's "emotions," you will have to have much more understanding of the context. Mizuno is not trying to prove that cold fusion is real. If anyone would think it's real, before this newer experimental evidence, it would be Mizuno. Read his book! He is one of the people who saw evidence for fusion in palladium deuteride before Pons and Fleischmann. He saw bucket after bucket of cooling water evaporate, when the stuff should simply have been cooling down. He didn't hypothesize fusion from that, he simply chalked it up as one of those unexplained occurrences that any serious experimental scientist may see from time to time.

You don't need to know this to understand the report, but only to understand his speculations or discussion of it. It's traditional to try to explain experimental results, but it's a huge red herring, because criticism of the discussion can become confused with criticism of the reports.

You have a hypothesis of contamination as explaining the results. If you do your work more thoroughly, that hypothesis will be badly dented, but it won't be dead, perhaps. It depends on stuff that's not covered in the paper. Once we have done our work here, we can turn to his other publications and see if any of the questions raised have been answered, and we can also ask Mizuno himself, probably through Jed Rothwell, who knows Japanese and translated Mizuno's book. But we must do our "homework" first. What's in the paper? You've only seen what you thought was enough to confirm your standing suspicion: all cold fusion researchers are sloppy and fail to falsify the null hypothesis, whereas, you believe, the "mainstream" -- as you imagine it -- is more careful.

Having read maybe a hundred times as much in and about this field as you, Barry, I think differently, but so what? This is your opportunity to learn something huge, and it's exactly what you claim to want to investigate. How people form and maintain belief, how they handle apparent contrary evidence, etc. You start with the person where you have the most direct evidence, yourself. If you don't have the ability to detach sufficiently to accomplish that, develop it! You can, you know, it's a skill like any other, and you aren't dead yet. Once you understand yourself (and me) better, you can actually design experiments using the material uncovered, and investigate how real people actually respond to evidence contrary to what they believe. Be careful, though. There could be ethical issues, which is why I've suggested, strongly, that ethical standards for "action research" on Wikiversity be developed, to avoid harm.

There are already two major sociological studies on the cold fusion controversy. Plenty of room for a psychological one, and I believe that, if it's well-done, it would be published. Want to co-author it? We might keep each other honest. If we don't flip out in the process! Nobody likes their paradigms challenged, to take a phrase from Hoffman. Have you read Hoffman? As I wrote, highly recommended skeptical examination of the CF controversy, published in 1995. I *started* with Hoffman. Rothwell thinks he was thoroughly reprehensible, but Rothwell is a (highly knowledgeable) believer and is seeing this in more political terms, Rothwell is seizing on one or two errors Hoffman made. But everyone makes mistakes, even skeptics. Real skeptics, though, don't get trapped in them, because they remember to be skeptical of their own assumptions. --Abd 14:31, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

I read Mizuno's paper, about three times now, and I find that he hasn't disclosed all that he knows.

Hard to say what he knows, vs what he found. One of the things that perplexes me about his sequence of papers is the cutoff for reporting heavy element assays. In some papers, he says he found heavy elements up to atomic weight 210. In others, he says he found them up to atomic weight 208. The figures I cited appear to confirm the 210 upper limit (or beyond), but in the one paper where I found an actual table, the table only goes up to atomic weight 208. It's unclear to me what he knows (or believes) about these high atomic weight cations, but in any event I could find no discussion of this uncertainty regarding Pb-210 being found or not.

You've missed the clues that the work was not as you've described it. For example, how many runs did he do with a palladium cathode? You have assumed that he only did one, yet there is text in the paper that contradicts that. Once one realizes that he (probably) did more than one, the next question is whether or not he changed the electrolyte, using an entirely new batch of heavy water and an entirely new clearing process, or used the same electrolyte, with just new palladium cathodes.

You seem to be expressing some confusion, uncertainty, or doubt regarding his runs with a Pd electrode. You've abduced the possibility (or probability) of additional runs not described in the paper. If he did multiple runs, why is there only one graph showing heavy cation deposition after electrolysis? Wouldn't there be a graph for each successive run? That's the data that would most helpfully distinguish between plating out impurities vs transmutation.

What did he actually do? I don't know (so far) if he describes it in sufficient detail, I've missed it.

Then we both don't know what Mizuno did, with respect to addressing the question that I had in mind when I turned to his paper in search of an answer. What I found was that he evidently had adopted the view Ed Storms expressed when he said, "As I keep saying, the Null Hypothesis idea does not work in chemistry or in Cold Fusion. All kinds of possibilities are eliminated based on experience and knowledge of chemistry up front and without much effort." I suppose we can both agree that Mizuno's papers are poorly written (at least with respect to forthrightly addressing the challenge of differentiating between the contamination hypothesis vs the transmutation hypothesis), but I would never have turned to Mizuno's papers at all, save for the fact that Storms relies on Mizuno's work in his periodic reviews of the status of CF.

My beliefs are laid out here, where I surmise that misconceptions routinely arise in a learning journey (including original scientific research), and that recognizable emotions arise during the interval when one is laboring under an undiagnosed misconception. In particular, the emotions of Quadrant II are predicted: Surprise, Disappointment, Doubt, Confusion, Frustration, Exasperation, and Perplexity. I suspect that this case will reveal other comparable or telltale emotions not already in my list. Perhaps (as you suggest), there is some apprehension, trepidation, or alarm. Are we afraid to look, for fear that we might find the dreadful smoking gun that shoots down our preferred hypothesis? That haunting quote from Storms comes across (to me) as surly or haughty smugness. Should I add those imaginable affective emotional states to my list for Quadrant II?

Let me just add one other (unrelated) note here. Another correspondent drew my attention to the web site of Ludwik Kowalski, who is evidently aware of you. Items 19 and 20 on his list are also worth a look. I invited him to participate here, but he immediately replied, "Thank you for sharing, Barry. I have nothing significant to contribute."

Caprice 16:50, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Lots of stuff there, Barry.

"Misconceptions." That has an incorporated judgment. "Preconceptions" doesn't have that. You may investigate the effect of preconceptions on exposure to contrary evidence, but you will need to use much more objective measures than you've been using. You infer emotions from what people write. That's a highly subjective tool, unless you were to develop objective methods of analysis that don't depend on your own emotions. However, if you want to specially investigate misconceptions, you will need to be able to identify some! How would you propose to establish that some conception or idea is a misconception?
The problem can be solved, my opinion, but not with the approach you have been using. You are conducting research, collecting a mass of unspecified and unclear data, subjectively examined, forming unfalsifiable hypotheses, and not following the scientific method yourself. That's okay for pure investigation, you have no obligation to follow the scientific method, but it is a bit ironic, eh? And your results will be far less useful than if you use controls, etc., in your "experiments."
Uncertainty. That's not an emotion, per se. One can be uncertain with no emotional baggage. There are associated emotions, but probably we should have some agreed-upon definition of an "emotion" first. Uncertainty is an objective condition, present where there is inadequate evidence to generate certainty. Certainty/Uncertainty are a continuous spectrum, with the extremes never being rationally present, but being operationally present. That is, "certainty" is a state, and we could call that an emotional state, but it's more accurate to consider it an operational state, i.e., I'm certain that my daughter is in the next room, from many evidences, but that is not, itself, an emotion. Finding that she is not, in fact, there, would produce various emotions! Likewise, thinking about the fact of her presence in my apartment can generate motions. But the certainty itself merely means that I'm not considering contrary hypotheses, I'm not questioning the "theory" that she's present there, even though, at the moment, I have no "proof."
Cold fusion scientists long ago became certain that there is a nuclear anomaly in CF experiments, the evidence for that is truly overwhelming, but, of course, it only convinces those who become familiar with it and who have no emotional blockage to comprehending it. The papers you are looking at, as late as the 1996 Mizuno paper, are not written to convince people who reject CF. They are investigational, for the most part, so the "proof" you are looking for isn't there. For proof, you'll have to look at Storms in far greater detail than you have, and you'll have to stop interpreting Storms through your filter that assumes he must be wrong. You should have lots of clues that he might, in fact, be doing his job properly, among them that the review passed peer review at a very tough publication. That's not proof! But, again, you are looking for proof when proof isn't accessible either way. We can only look, at this point, at the preponderance of the evidence.
Storms is very clear about the difficulties with the transmutation evidence, but you have treated him as if he accepts it as conclusive. That's simply another of your errors, proceeding from your assumptions about researchers in the field.
You are correct about certain misconceptions arising during the journey toward knowledge, and about emotions arising. However, where you fall on your face is in looking for emotions in others while not recognizing them in yourself, or, if you recognize them, you don't acknowledge it. It is in the study of yourself that your journey to something more generalizable can begin, because your internal evidence is more directly accessible, and your testimony to your own emotions is "admissible evidence" by common law. Your testimony about the emotions of others would probably be rejected out of hand. You can say what you saw, not what they felt.
If I'm convinced that your study of the Mizuno paper is done, I'll then make my own detailed study and report, and, as well, my report on this discussion, which you will be able to review and criticize.
Kowalski. Ludwik is quite a character. He was a Galileo replicator, and published his results, with analysis contradicting SPAWAR conclusions. He might be right, or ... more likely, they are both right, harmonizing understanding not yet available. Ludwik ran a recent project, the Curie project, to replicate Oriani's work finding, supposedly, radiation from light-water electrolysis. Oriani claimed a "replicable experiment." I found it a sad case, because if one read Oriani's own paper, I didn't see any clear replicable experiment, just a pile of data on many different experiments, with data within the control set (control inadequately specified) being similar to some of what was claimed as "success." Ludwik's group reported results that did not show significant radiation, overall, but with anomalies present similar to what Oriani showed. All in all, a waste of time, proving nothing that wasn't already visible from Oriani. What both sets of experiments show is that if you look for radiation in places where you expect none, you will sometimes find some. The question is "how much," and simply that some finding is "unusual" isn't enough. There are always outliers in a substantial body of data. The Curie project was premature, based on inadequately defined prior work. However, it's possible that later work could still build on this.
A huge clue was found in a statement Ludwik attributed to Oriani, that the radiation did not depend on electrolysis current. Really? That was a huge tipoff! No correlation with current. So ... no correlation with the experimental conditions!
Contrast this to the cold fusion reports about excess heat and helium! --Abd 19:03, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
Poorly written. Referring to Mizuno. They are poorly written from my perspective and yours, but they may be much better than you think. They simply don't disclose or discuss everything. Were I a peer-reviewer, I'd have had a lot of questions to ask, but sometimes the review process gets cut short; after all, it may be more important to get experimental results out for others to see, than to nitpick over details. Reports can be fleshed out later. Again, you (and I) are criticizing Mizuno without, so far, looking at his central report, which you have totally ignored. And he does address the difference between transmutation and contamination, and very clearly. Just not in the way you expect. What he does may actually be better. Damn! How many hints do I have to give you? --Abd 19:09, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Mr. Lomax, tear down this wall. —Gastrin Bombesin (talk) 19:24, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Every bit of evidence helps advance in knowledge those who can stand back and examine it. What wall? "Wall of text"? The wall will be torn down and the materials used to construct something useful, when we are done. Are we done yet? --Abd 19:58, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

How does one evaluate the probity of the evidence? Are we doing experimental epistemology or are we doing popular epistemology? Is it our intent to teach the controversy or to breach the controversy? —Caprice 20:56, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

How? Show up, listen well, pay attention, be collaborative, and make sure you can repeat and report accurately what you have read, been told, or have seen. An inability to repeat the arguments or reports of someone with whom you disagree is a primary sign of attachment and lack of probity. Epistemology? I'd rather just try to figure out how we know stuff.

Yes, teach the controversy. Long ago, I figured out that it was possible to make statements with a high degree of certainty, it simply requires taking care to attribute claimed knowledge to the source, and then, of course, taking care in what one attributes, avoiding weak interpretation. That, of course, limits us to what amounts to raw data, so the scientific method suggests ways to move beyond that limitation, but only tentatively and with due caution, and certainty is not fully attainable with this. Still, sometimes, one can make some spectacular predictions!

Now, O Master of Avoiding Direct Questions, are we done here? Or would you prefer to have some time to take another look at that Mizuno paper? --Abd 00:20, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

If that's your thesis, then that's your thesis. As to the Mizuno papers, they do not come close to shedding any light on the question I was looking to find an answer to. —Caprice 00:45, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Absent objection, I'm interpreting that as an indication you are done with examining Mizuno, and I can, shortly, proceed to the post-mortem on it. You are right, Mizuno wasn't going to resolve the questions you now cite; if that was your purpose, why did you assert Mizuno? As I understand, you were trying to show that there were major contaminants, in the heavy water, but Mizuno's paper doesn't show that. The opposite, in fact, as to preponderance of the evidence. But "contaminants" wouldn't explain the calorimetry problems, not as far as anything claimed that I've seen. Note that a radioactive contaminant, if somehow able to slip through all the contrary indications, would not show calorimetry error: it would show a nuclear source for the heat and helium measured. But the ratio predicted from radon is wrong for the observed heat/helium ratio, and, of course radon just doesn't work, for reasons Storms tried to explain to you.

It's pretty obvious what you are doing, Barry. You are trying to find defects in CF work. Anything will do, and you don't have enough knowledge yet to quickly recognize what's plausible from what's not. That position of ignorance is useful, in fact. Here, from this discussion, upon examination, we have a demonstration of how bias can cause interpretation error, at least that's what I believe I can adequately show. That's part of the answer to your overall question of how the distance between the "skeptics" and the "believers" arose and how it's maintained. So ... thanks for sharing, and please, ask more questions, it's useful, but, please, let's get very specific, or else this goes around and around with no results. --Abd 01:24, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

What's plausible is to compare the predictions of the novel hypothesis to those of the mundane and/or null hypothesis and carefully design experiments that distinguish between competing hypotheses in a manner that minimizes any confounding variables. What I am doing is expressing astonishment that this was evidently not done in these ferchachta experiments. —Caprice 01:47, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Barry, you don't have the knowledge to judge, you don't even know what they did, so you don't know, accurately, what they didn't do. "Evidently" to you, not to me. I intend to put it together, including adding in, here, what you missed. And I'll probably find more. After all, I only read it three times, and I haven't read the context, i.e., the prior work -- which he refers to! If you were "astonished," you didn't read Storms accurately either. He warned that this work wasn't conclusive. And you still haven't mentioned the central claim that Mizuno made. --Abd 03:47, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

How long, must this keep goin' on?

See the next section. —Caprice 05:44, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

How Long Must This Keep Going On?

Title: How Long Must This Keep Going On?
Artist: Moulton
Composer: George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, and Barsoom Tork Associates
YouTube: How Long Has This Been Going On? — Jon Bon Jovi

As a lad, when I read about The Blue Carbuncle,
I was dissed by my brother, my cousin, and my uncle.
Sad to say, life was gray, so dull one would fall into a funkle.

So dear Abd, I swore, "Never, never more!"
On my list, I insisted that dissing must be silly.
Now, I find, I was too kind, so began punning willy nilly!

I could try pounding sand;
Throwing tantrums, standing grand.
Little use, too much abuse:
How long must this keep going on?

There were hopes for a time,
And some tropes I can't define.
I blog and tweet, again repeat:
How long must this keep going on?

I reckon that Pd could melt;
Into excess heat I'm hurled!
I know how Joseph Priestley felt,
Alone in his Phlogiston world.

Ask me once, then once more.
What a dunce I was before.
Let's take a break! For Freedom's sake!
How long must this keep going on?

When into your notes I peek,
That unending rendezvous,
Don't bug me if I'm a geek,
Let me find out if it's true!

Ask me twice, then once more.
That makes thrice, let's make it four!
Let's take a break! For Freedom's sake!
How long must this keep going on?

How long must this ... keep going ... on?

CopyClef 2010 George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, and Barsoom Tork Associates
Resurrection Hackware. All songs abused.

Hey, this may be the best song parody I've seen from you. You must be losing your touch, they are supposed to be atrocious, n'est-ce pas? Okay, okay, four times. But after a break. --Abd 18:16, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

(Note to onlookers: this page will be refactored. Consider this a rather messy informal seminar session. This is not the seminar report!) --Abd 18:16, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

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