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Re: COLD FUSION



On Wednesday, Jul 2, 2003, at 23:01 US/Eastern, Hugh Haskell wrote:

At 22:22 -0400 7/2/03, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:

At one point the ETI team sent their cathode to Mizuno and in his
laboratory this cathode produced excess heat. The same cathode,
however, did not produce excess heat in Texas. Likewise, Mizuno's
cathode worked in Japan but not in Texas. And this happened despite
the fact that scientists cooperated to make the experiments as identical
as possible. How can this be explained? What should one think about a
situation in which six groups are able to demonstate excess heat and
one is not able to demonstrate it?

I would say that it means that one group or the other is seeing
things that aren't there, because that is what they desperately want
to see, or there is a subtle difference in the experimental setup
that has been missed, or one group is cheating.

The first alternative is what happened to Blondlot in the N-ray
fiasco. But it happens rather often, especially when the signal to
noise ratio is very low. There is a story told by Brown in his
biography of Chadwick, that, during the years when the debate raged
over whether the beta-spectrum was continuous or discrete, Chadwick
had become convinced early on that it was continuous, but a
well-respected lab in Vienna was consistently giving results that
favored the discrete spectrum, so Rutherford sent Chadwick to Vienna
to look at their experimental setup. As it happened, the Viennese lab
used female students (not necessarily science students) to read the
scintillations on the phosphorescent screens, and they were finding
the evidence for discrete energies. Chadwick watched them at work for
a while and found two things about their procedures that he didn't
like. First, the women were not properly dark-adapted when they began
their scanning duties, and second, they were told where to look for
the scintillations. If you have ever taken one of those vision
sensitivity tests that opthalmologists use, you know that many of the
light flashes you might see during those tests are bogus. You can
fool yourself into thinking you saw a flash when there wasn't one.
That's what was happening to the Viennese women. As soon as Chadwick
had them get properly dark-adapted, and stopped telling them where to
look for flashes, they stopped seeing the ones they were expected to
see, and the pattern became random. The Viennese lab withdrew its
claim that the spectrum was discrete.

Because he was a nice guy, Chadwick allowed the lab to discretely
backtrack on their claims, rather than blowing the whistle on them,
as Robert W. Wood did to Blondlot.

When two different groups get contradictory results, it seems pretty
clear to me that one of the groups is getting it wrong. I can't say
definitively which it might be in this case, but my money is on the
Texas lab being right.

Thanks for describing an interesting historical episode, Hugh.
I agree that “cold nuclear transmutations” claims, based on
ppm amounts of reaction products, can be suspected of being
erroneous due to contamination introduced during processing.
This is an example of an area where the “signal to noise ratio”
it typically very low. But I do not think that the same is true
when a setup generating heat at the rate of 200 W receives
electric energy at the rate of 100 W, for example, as reported
by Naudin (see item 72 on my list*). Or consider findings of
Karabut (see item 13 on my list*). The isotopic composition
of iron after processing was drastically different from that
measured before processing. His Pd cathode had ~2% of
57Fe before processing (natural composition) and ~50%
after processing. The factor of 25 is hardly an example of a
small signal to noise ratio.

Let me quote from the item 72 on my list. “What might
skeptics say about recent cold fusion data?

1) Muzino and others in Japan are liars, like Karabut and
others in Russia, like Bressani and others in Italy, like
Lonchampt and others in France, like Bockris and
others in the US. The data are fraudulent.

2) These people only pretend to be scientists. Their Ph.D.
diplomas were counterfeit; their professorships at famous
universities were bought; the books and hundreds of
articles they published were produced by somebody
else. They are members of an international “mutual
support society.”

3) We already know everything about nuclear phenomena;
facts which disagree with existing theories are not
acceptable. Absence of commensurate amounts of
neutrons and protons is a sufficient reason to ignore
claims about unusual nuclear processes.

4) Cold fusion researchers were often wrong in 1989.
Therefore what they are finding now must also be
wrong. They should never be forgiven for announcing
a discovery via a press release, or for claiming that
excess heat experiments are very simple.

5) Claims made under the banner of cold fusion were
not described in articles published in leading journals.
Therefore they cannot be accepted. The editors of
these journals refuse to publish cold fusion articles;
they know better what is right and what is wrong.

6) Neither the Department of Energy nor the National
Science Fundation support research in the area of
cold fusion. Therefore such research is not worth
taking seriously. Those who perform experiments
cannot be objective about their own research.

7) Practical applications of cold fusion have not been
demonstrated; therefore the underlying phenomena
cannot be real.

8) We know nothing about recent cold fusion findings;
therefore they must not be correct. The entire field
was declared pseudoscientific in 1989 by a panel
of experts. The opinion of experts must be
respected; it can not be challenged by new findings.

9) This was a serious objection; I commented on it
extensively at the end of item #72*.

* My items are at http://blake.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/cf/
Ludwik Kowalski