Talk:Cold fusion/Archive 25

A New Reference
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue82/releaseoflowenergy.html "This book is historic because it is the first peer-reviewed book from an established scientific society (published by the American Chemical Society, but available from Oxford University Press)." The title is: "Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook" The price is, In My Opinion, ridiculous: $175 V (talk) 18:25, 5 March 2009 (UTC)


 * And back in Left Field, the place for Sources of Disputed Reliability, here's an article that purports to be a FAQ: http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/nagel.pdf
 * I like the diagram at the bottom of the second page. V (talk) 18:39, 5 March 2009 (UTC)


 * According to OUP's blurb, that's published in the ACS Symposium Series, a rapid-release system subject only to these publication guidelines. Note that peer review is in essence left up to the editor, in this case Jan Marwan of Marwan Chemie. According to this search, it is the only thing he has done (written or edited) for OUP. This hardly fills one with confidence.LeadSongDog (talk) 19:24, 5 March 2009 (UTC)


 * LeadSongDog has presented a distorted view of the review process. The editor does "conduct the process," but it is checked by ACS. LeadSongDog may not be "filled with confidence," but the confidence gauge on LSD's dash isn't any kind of standard at all. The book is RS, very clearly. The wall is crumbling, the dike is leaking, and the tide is rising. How far it will rise, I don't know. Don't have a CRYSTALBALL.--Abd (talk) 03:32, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm trying very hard to find a way to WP:AGF consistent with the above statement. I'm not succeeding. I think I'll go make a cup of tea.LeadSongDog (talk) 06:17, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Not a bad idea. I struck part of my comment, I'd thought about it and came to consider it gratuitous incivility, for, after all, you were merely expressing your feelings, which we should be allowed to do in Talk. The "wall" exists on Wikipedia, and it exists outside. In spite of the suggestions in the DOE reviews, that major journals apparently refuse to consider papers on the topic is a "wall," an a priori judgment that makes it impossible to resolve the issues, no matter how clear an experiment might be, no matter how balanced a review might be. I was just reading a paper about neutron emissions from deuterated foils, presented at, I think, ICCF10. Tungsten was the metal involved. This was serious research, but because it shows, if not fraudulent, a probable low level of fusion or other LENR process, because of neutron emission, it would quite likely be unpublishable in major journals covering nuclear physics. (The experiment run with deuterium gas showed neutron emission; controls with hydrogen, no emission. The levels were low, but this was done underground and with shielding against cosmic rays, the emissions were sufficiently above background to represent a clear anomaly. The Italians also found neutrons, in exceedingly careful work, as reported by Goodstein (1994), and the Chinese author of the FPC paper, early in the nineties, I think, found other evidence of anomalous reactions.) I'm beginning to get a clearer understanding of how to approach these issues, it will require creating Talk subpages where we review sources in a comprehensive, systematic way, rather than piecemeal with no clear conclusions. --Abd (talk) 13:44, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I like the fact that we're considering material from the American Chemical Society to provide support for what purports to be cutting-edge nuclear physics. Perhaps we should also scan publications of the Royal Agricultural Society for information on advances in aeronautics. 72.70.9.75 (talk) 01:56, 8 March 2009 (UTC)


 * If someone has figured out how to grow aircraft from seeds, we might indeed. The field of cold fusion, known to those working in it as "chemically assisted nuclear reactions," among other names, is one where chemistry and physics cross; the original work was done by electrochemists. Low-energy nuclear reactions are, precisely, those which might be chemically influenced, so if they happen (aside from muon-catalyzed fusion, then the expertise of chemists is relevant. Consider: chemist runs experiment that by all rights should be dissipating no more than so much energy. The measurement of generated heat is a technique used in chemistry, the field is called calorimetry, and it's not so common among physicists, if I'm correct; further, the determination of how much energy dissipation is chemically possible from the reactants is in the field of chemistry. The experiment generates, allegedly, much more than that. Whose expertise is needed to assess this claim? What has been happening is that chemists are saying, "This isn't chemistry, it must be nuclear in nature." And nuclear physicists, by and large, have been saying, "This couldn't be nuclear physics, nuclear reactions don't happen in chemistry labs, it must be chemistry, you must be making some mistake." So to speak. (Obviously, they can, be careful how much U-235 you allow to accumulate in a particular reaction vessel, I heard Feynman himself tell this story, but that's not what I mean.) --Abd (talk) 03:22, 8 March 2009 (UTC)


 * If plutonium was in the chemical mix, even less would need to be present to notice excess heat (due to shorter half-life). And such mixes do exist; here's a jug that was recently found:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/science/03plut.html
 * Anyway, back to CF-related stuff; I concur with Abd, since chemists spent decades in the late 1800s and all through the 1900s measuring the heat produced from (or absorbed by!) all sorts of chemical reactions. Chemical engineers need to know how much heat to handle, when reacting industrial quantities of chemicals.  Not to mention that when the military wanted good rocket fuels, the chemists were the ones to ask, not the physicists.  It is simply ludicrous, for physicists to assume professional chemists don't know how to measure heat-production accurately. V (talk) 08:31, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The concern with the accumulation of U-235 isn't about heat from normal decay, it's about reaching critical mass for sustained fission, which would have wrecked the processing equipment at Oak Ridge. In any case, we have a situation where experts in calorimetry, many of them, are reporting anomalous heat they consider impossible to be from normal chemical process, and we have physicists, most or many of them, refusing to consider any other explanation than chemical process or experimental error, and clinging to hypotheses about such errors that aren't supported by the literature, which is, in my opinion, odd. Some physicists are looking for independent evidence of anomalous nuclear reactions, and they have been finding it since the early 1990s or before, but this is only being published, for the most part, in non-mainstream journals. However, one of the remarkable things about the FPC paper discussed above, in the "Holy Grail" section, is that He Jing-tang is a nuclear physicist with the Institute of High Energy Physics, Academia Sinica, and was one of the 8 co-authors of the 1993 paper from that institution, published in China Physics Letters, "Study on Anomalous Nuclear Fusion Reaction using HV pulse discharge." This paper was cited above, but for convenience, it's at . --Abd (talk) 14:04, 8 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, I'm aware that with U235 and a half-life of something like 700 million years, one would likely have to invoke fissions to see significant heat. For plutonium, however, most of which is likely to be Pu239 derived from U238 absorbing a neutron ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptunium#History ), the half-life is only about 24,000 years, and that decay rate would be associated with considerably more heat (therefore I mentioned it above).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Objectivist (talk • contribs) 16:12, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Goodstein's analysis of the cold fusion history
We currently use Goodstein (1994) as a source for this:
 * In 1994, David Goodstein described cold fusion as "a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment. Between cold fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. Cold fusion papers are almost never published in refereed scientific journals, with the result that those works don't receive the normal critical scrutiny that science requires. On the other hand, because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here."[42]

We also refer to this source for the statement that:
 * The speed of the decay process together with the inter-atomic spacing makes such a transfer inexplicable in terms of conventional understandings of momentum and energy transfer.[93]

So far, so good. But Goodstein actually gives information about both sides of the cold fusion debate. This was 1994, not 2004 or 2009. I recommend reading the whole article if you are interested in the cold fusion issues.. Goldstein is saying that, on the one hand, there are very good theoretical reasons to consider cold fusion, of the "bad kind," i.e., massive heat, impossible. But, on the other hand, there are some very solid experimental results that don't seem to be explicable any other way. And he laments the situation that, because of problems with the initial announcement, the rush to judgment, the mistakes that were made, the physics world isn't taking the later, more cautious, results seriously.

I'm beginning to think we need at least two articles: one of them on the Cold Fusion affair, as an example of "Bad Science," which doesn't mean that Pons-Fleischmann were "Bad Scientists," though hardly anyone (including Fleischmann) thinks that they made no mistakes, but that the process of science by press conference, rushed attempts to confirm, rushed negative conclusions, etc., etc., was seriously defective, and there are enough sources on this to justify an article. What would the other article be? Well, what is "cold fusion" as an alleged phenomenon? What is reported? What theories have been published in reasonably reliable sources to explain the experimental results? (Which would include Shanahan's attempts to explain the alleged heat, etc., Kowalski's theories about non-nuclear damage to CR-39 chips, etc.) We can do all this without review articles, if we attribute opinions and simply allow what appears in reliable sources to determine balance. What must stop is the highly selective application of RS guidelines to exclude some material while including other material just as reliably sourced. It's going to take patient work to find consensus, but I believe we can do it. Goodstein gives very good experimental detail about Scaramuzzi's experiments, how much effort they put into addressing the criticisms of prior work. Did they succeed? Goodstein says that he still "believes" cold fusion is impossible. But he also "believes" that there are these experiments that haven't been explained any other way. That kind of tension is actually what makes for good science. His position was, in fact, reflected in the 2004 DOE review. Something is going on that hasn't been adequately explained. While there are still very good theoretical reasons to think cold fusion impossible, until the contrary experiments are more carefully reviewed and reproduced or rejected, we really don't know bleep. Theory is still theory, and science grew up when it abandoned theory as the basis for truth. Meanwhile, Goodstein reports Scaramuzzi as having figured out why the Fleischmann effect was so hard to duplicate, a loading ratio below 85% (which is hard to obtain), no heat. Above that, he reports Scaramuzzi as claiming 100% reproducibility.

As an example of problems that may still exist in the article, there is a section on non-nuclear explanations for excess heat. However, what's missing is that many experiments considered and ruled out these explanations. Further, experiments where ordinary water was used as a control have been performed. Apparently, Fleischmann and Pons did these experiments and were reluctant to report the results. Why? They indeed found some excess heat in them. However, there are more recent experiments that show the same: some excess heat from ordinary water. I think there are some SPAWAR experiments, and what they note, as I recall, is that the excess heat is explainable by the amount of deuterium present in ordinary water. I.e., much less excess heat. My point is that the article is presenting, in that section, "one side." Is there reliable source for the other side, of similar quality? (By the way, I'm suspicious of the ordinary water results, because, remember, loading factor of 85%? But maybe loading with mixed hydrogen and deuterium does something we don't understand.) --Abd (talk) 21:27, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Executive summary please. Verbal   chat  22:11, 3 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Sure: If you want to understand the topic, you'll have to do more than make brief, knee-jerk comments. You might actually have to read some sources, and think about what people write. One is mentioned. Goodstein (1994). It's cited in the article. Come back when you've done your homework. --Abd (talk) 02:45, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Ignoring your patronising attitude, your comment is longer than would be allowed in the article. Now that is fine, but it is not clear in the first few paragraphs what you are proposing. Conciseness is a virtue. So that we are all on the same page you should explain you proposal concisely, and then move on to justification - which should also be concise. If there are questions then this can develop into a discussion. Long comments just invite WP:TL;DR style responses, or will just be ignored. If they are ignored then they are useless. Basically, long comments aren't useful and do not help improve the article. Verbal   chat  13:35, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
 * My attempt at summarizing Abd's comment:
 * Abd proposes splitting this article into two or more articles: one about the Cold Fusion affair (history of science), another about cold fusion and excess heat measurements as alleged phenomena and explanations for them.
 * This article cherry-picks from Goldstein (which Abd recommends reading ) and needs to present the other balancing views that Goldstein expresses.
 * Selective application of RS guidelines must stop.
 * The article has an incomplete, unbalanced presentation of non-nuclear explanations, and needs to add arguments refuting these explanations, including information on control experiments using ordinary water. This is an example of a problem with the article.
 * Paraphrasing Abd, ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 15:00, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Obviously, Coppertwig has read well. Thanks. As to tl;dr, that's usually five characters too much for a response. There are how many million editors who didn't read a comment? Unless it's on your Talk page, if it's too long to read, don't read it, and tl;dr can be very appropriate on one's own Talk. Nobody has an obligation to read anything on this article Talk page, unless they plan to revert an edit explained here, and even then, it's not really a problem, what's important will come around again. --Abd (talk) 15:11, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I read and enjoyed the Goldstein article. Thanks for recommending it. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 00:10, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Having taken freshman physics from the man years ago, I can assure you that his name is spelled Goodstein. Sorry if that comes across as too picky, but given that "Goodwin" is also being used on this page (though that has been partially self-corrected) I felt the need to clarify. --Noren (talk) 14:28, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Section "Incompatibilities with conventional nuclear physics" must be greatly expanded
This section is currently very short. But the reason why there is so much skepticism is very important to explain in this article and that can only be done by giving the detailed theoretical reasons why cold fusion cannot work.

So, I suggest that we explain that according to quantum mechanics, the validity of which is almost unversally accepted, one can write down formally exact expressions for transistion rates. In practice one cannot analytically evaluate such expressions (different approximation scemes are possible) but one can still theoretically study the mathematical formalism and set bounds on any enhancement of nuclear reaction rates.

E.g., one can approach the cold fusion problem in a possitive way and ask what is necessary for the transition rates to be enhanced and then make estimates, which will then turn out to be negligible. See e.g. a different investigation here Count Iblis (talk) 00:23, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * This is the problem with such a theoretical approach: it assumes that the mechanism for cold fusion is known. It isn't. There are lots of hypotheses, but none of them have general acceptance even among those working in the field. Are you aware, Count Iblis, that Fleischmann has written that quantum electrodynamics theory is what led him to suspect that cold fusion might happen? What you have done is what many others have done: assume that "cold fusion" is just a matter of two deuterium nuclei deciding to get married. If we look at them in isolation, there is a large Coulomb barrier, and if the two nuclei are all that are present, the only way to put them together is with high energy that overcomes the barrier, like temperatures of millions of degrees. Are you also aware that cold fusion is an accepted reality, it is actually not controversial? I.e., muon-catalyzed fusion, in which a muon catalyzes the approach, brings the two lovers together at low energies?


 * It's pretty simple, actually. Normal deuterium fusion taking place in a plasma, which is where it was primarily studied, results in one of three reaction pathways, it's described in the article.


 * D + D &rarr; 4He + 24 MeV
 * In high energy experiments, this intermediary has been observed to quickly decay through three pathways:
 * n + 3He + 3.3 MeV (50%)
 * p + 3H + 4.0 MeV (50%)
 * 4He + γ + 24 MeV (10-6)


 * Conservation of momentum, if this is happening in isolation, requires that the energy result in at least two products, so in the first reaction, we get a neutron and a helium-3 nucleus flying off in opposite directions; in the second reaction, it's a proton and tritium, and in the third, normally rare, it's helium and a gamma ray. Now, all the products have been reported in low-energy experiments, but the levels of neutrons or Helium-3 or tritium that have been found are far, far below those that would be expected to explain the reported excess heat. Whatever is happening isn't standard fusion as was previously studied.


 * Perhaps the best way to introduce you to the subject of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science would be to suggest that you look at Iwamura. The paper is published in reliable source, and its been cited a bit, I discuss it below. http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/IwamuraYelementalaa.pdf is a hosted copy of the paper; can't create the link because one of our friends arranged to have the whole library of papers at lenr-canr.org globally blacklisted, another story for another day. Iwamura does have an operating hypothesis that has guided his experiments, and it led him to try something nobody had tried before. Long story short, he takes bulk palladium and sputters thin layers of calcium oxide and palladium onto it, followed by a somewhat thicker layer of palladium. The process creates very pure layers of these materials. Then a very thin layer of cesium or strontium is deposited onto the surface. The experimental apparatus includes equipment for X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, allowing determination of the chemical composition of the surface of the test material without removing it from the apparatus. The experimental chamber is then filled with deuterium gas at atmospheric pressure; the other side of the palladium is maintained at low pressure. The deuterium gas dissociates at the surface of the thin palladium layer and diffuses through the bulk palladium, recombining on the other side to reform deuterium gas. At intervals (2 days to 1 week), the deuterium is evacuated from the chamber and the surface of the test piece is analyzed by XPS. "New elements that did not exist on the test piece at the beginning of the experiment can be detected. Usually this process is repeated a few times to observe the time dependence of the given or newly generated elements." Then the chamber is filled with nitrogen. "The test piece is removed from the chamber and its surface is analyzed by secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). SIMS is a surface analysis technique in which energetic primary ions impact the surface and generate secondary ions, which are subsequently mass-separated and detected. SIMS is capable of analyzing all the elements with isotopic discrimination."


 * I advise reading the paper carefully. This paper was reviewed by one of the reviewers for the 2004 DOE report, who obviously didn't pay much attention, completely missing important experimental details and observations, and mistaking an observation for a theory that, of course, the reviewer rejected as impossible. What Iwamura found is that as the element originally on the surface disappears, a new element takes its place. Strontium disappears, Molybdenum appears, but not just any isotope of molybdenum, the mass spectroscopy reveals that it is almost entirely Molybdenum-96, very different from natural Mo, which is distributed between isotopes weighing from 92 to 100 daltons. Strontium was mostly Sr-88. This fits with a reaction where fusion of four deuterons with a Strontium nucleus has taken place. The four protons bump Strontium to Molybdenum in atomic number, 38 to 42, and the four neutrons plus the four protons bump the weight from 88 to 96. Likewise Cesium (No. 55, mass 133) becomes Praseodymium (No. 59, mass 141). When the experiment is run with hydrogen instead of deuterium, no transmutations are seen.


 * A big complaint about the excess heat experiments is that they were -- originally -- short on evidence of nuclear ash, i.e, the reaction products. Here, there is nothing but reaction product. No radiation, and the heat generated from this level of fusion would be below detectable levels (I think, and they didn't try).


 * The DOE reviewer wrote (also quoted below):


 * The analytical results, from a variety of techniques, such as mass spectroscopy and electron spectroscopy, are very nice. It seems difficult at first glance to dispute the results. However, the Japanese workers conclude, not that the elements in question are constituents from the interior of the Pd that migrated to the surface, but that they are the products of sequential nuclear reactions, in which changes of atomic number and atomic mass of 4 and 8 are preferred.


 * From a nuclear physics perspective, such conclusions are not to be believed ...


 * This is precisely what many observers have claimed about the whole cold fusion affair. Experimental results are discarded in favor of theoretical rejection. This reviewer comes up with a hypothesis, a simple one, but it was, indeed, so simple that Iwamura explicitly considered it in the paper, did the reviewer notice this? My guess is not. When someone has their mind made up, it is really, really easy to overlook contradictory details. The values of 4 and 8 are observations, not theory, based on quite precise measurements. There are numerous reasons why the migration hypothesis is preposterous, described below, isotopic composition being one. Another would be the mystery, then, of why a thin layer of Strontium becomes Molybdenum, so we'd have palladium contaminated with Molybdenum. Fine, that sounds possible. But wait, when we layer on Cesium, we get Praseodymium. What happened to the Molybdenum, it was scared of the Cesium?. No, there are only two reasonable explanations that I can think of: there was nuclear transformation under circumstances where classical theory would predict none, or there was fraud. Given that other, independent researchers have reported evidence for nuclear transformations, just not so precisely and simply and clearly, fraud is not likely. There are now many different experimental situations which have shown evidence of nuclear transformation (which includes fusion), and it's continued since the 2004 DOE review, where many reviewers were already convinced that there was something worthy of investigation, they just didn't think the time was ripe for a federally-funded program. Remember who was in office then? -- not that this would have influenced the reviewers, necessarily, but it might have shaped the conclusions of the report.

How much of this could go in the article is still quite unclear to me, but there is plenty of RS on various aspects of this whole affair, enough to keep us busy for a while. --Abd (talk) 03:29, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The only thing that bothers me about all this transmutation stuff is that it is a variation of the original theme. To the extent that, say, Strontium sequentially fuses with four deuteriums and becomes Molybdenum, ordinary physicists should (1) state that this is more difficult to occur (thanks to Coulomb repulsion) than deuteriums fusing with each other, and (2) state that  if  Sr  does  undergo fusions with deuterons to become Mo, then it would be completely logical to accept the idea that deuterium-only cold fusion can happen (regardless of not knowing how).   Other  than mentioning in this article that sort of support for the original form of cold fusion, all the transmutation stuff might best belong in its own article--or perhaps added to the existing nuclear transmutation article. V (talk) 05:40, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't follow. "The only thing that bothers me about all this transmutation stuff is that it is a variation of the original theme." - why does that bother you?  "...then it would be completely logical to accept the idea that " no it wouldn't.  reasonable to consider, maybe, but not "completely logical" - though it may recondition one's ontological priors to make it seem more plausible, it doesn't make follow logically.  and this is supposed to be why it isn't relevant?!?  It seems to me like that would make it more relevant.  "Other than mentioning in this article that sort of support for the original form of cold fusion, all the transmutation stuff might best belong in its own article..."  why?  you assert this, but you never make a case for it.  Kevin Baastalk 13:53, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Elsewhere on this discussion page is at least one remark to the effect that the main topic of the article is the idea of D+D fusion occuring inside solid metal at ordinary temperatures. The transmutation stuff seems to have been discovered as a side-effect.  So, logically, in the article, it could be mentioned, but it need not be given a lot of space in this article; it's different enough from D+D fusion to deserve a separate article (because other atoms, such as the Strontium mentioned, have quite a few layers of electron shells to inhibit fusion-type transmutations). V (talk) 14:09, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Besides the significance of the material due to its corroborating nature, many people take the approach that a theory which explains D+D fusion phenomena should also explain the transmutation phenomena (this is consistent with "theory"). While I don't have any problem with there being a separate page for these transmutation results - or one on the broader topic of C.M.N.S. (after all, wikipedia is not paper), I think there should always be a summary of the transmutation results in this article in due proportion to its relevance both as corroborating material and as (potentially) theoretically bound.  And in the absence of any article on CMNS or C.M.N.-transmutation, the phenomena should be described here in sufficient detail to elucidate its full scope and significance - at least insofar as the critics and supporters are concerned. Kevin Baastalk 15:13, 13 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, it should be easy enough to create a "stub" page for CMNS, and likely the very first thing on it should be a note to the effect that many physicists regard the notion as preposterous as perpetual motion. That should at least prevent immediate deletion of the page.  I see that when I typed the phrase into the Wikipedia search box, it redirected to the CF article.  I'm not sure how to intercept that and put a stub-article in its place.  Be my guest?  Later, of course, plenty more information can be added to it, as we decide what should belong there and what should belong here.
 * I see I neglected to explain the "completely logical" thing that you questioned. It's quite simple: the Coulomb repulsion between two deuterons is far less than the repulsion between a deuteron and any heavy nucleus like strontium's, so any mechanism that can overcome the latter, enabling fusion, can also overcome the former.  V (talk) 16:49, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) Ahem! Condensed matter nuclear science. Here is the basic issue: it was concluded long ago that mere chemistry, including the condensed state, could not affect nuclear reactions; there are quite a few reasons why this idea is reasonable. However, it's not at all clear that there was a dedicated effort to look for such reactions. When the P-F work became known, others started to look for evidence of LENR. My guess is that there are actually quite a number of different pathways to low energy nuclear reactions, it is not just one mechanism, which would explain why there are such inconsistent results as to radiation and nuclear ash. Yes. If elemental transformation is possible, as Iwamura reports, D-D fusion might be easier. So it's related. But we really should have at least two articles: Condensed matter nuclear science (go to the link then, from the redirected from link at the top, you can quickly get to the redirected article and look at the history to get the most recent version before the redirect. You can also look at Talk:Condensed matter nuclear science directly. The other article would be on the history. --Abd (talk) 17:56, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Iwamura
http://jjap.ipap.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle?magazine=JJAP&volume=41&number=7R&page=4642-4650 Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. Vol. 41 (2002) pp. 4642–4650

convenience copy: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/IwamuraYelementalaa.pdf (cannot be linked due to blacklist)

This is, of course, a stunning piece of work. Does anyone know what critical or other response it has received outside of the cold fusion community (where he has been widely cited)? Iwamura is reporting nothing less than total transformation of elements in a very thin film in an experimental setup where he could monitor the elemental composition of the film, taking place under highly controlled conditions, during the experiments, using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

''We noticed that a certain rule exists between given and produced elements. The increase in mass number is 8, and the increase in atomic number is 4. At present, we do not have a complete theory that can explain the obtained experimental results without a few assumptions. However, if several assumptions are accepted, they are basically explained by the EINR model,(5) which is one of the working hypotheses in the investigation of the nature of this phenomenon.''

5) Y. Iwamura, T. Itoh, N. Gotoh and I. Toyoda: Fusion Technol. 33 (1998) 476.

Now, this paper is mentioned in the 2004 DOE reviewer submissions. Lenr-canr.org claims to have obtained a copy of the 18 individual review papers, ( http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DOEusdepartme.pdf ) and this is in Review 7:


 * The paper by Iwamura et al. presented at ICCF10 (Ref. 47 in DOE31) does an exhaustive job of using a variety of modern analytical chemistry methods to identify elements produced on the surface of coated Pd cold-fusion foils. . ..


 * The analytical results, from a variety of techniques, such as mass spectroscopy and electron spectroscopy, are very nice. It seems difficult at first glance to dispute the results. However, the Japanese workers conclude, not that the elements in question are constituents from the interior of the Pd that migrated to the surface, but that they are the products of sequential nuclear reactions, in which changes of atomic number and atomic mass of 4 and 8 are preferred.


 * From a nuclear physics perspective, such conclusions are not to be believed ...

Storms and Rothwell -- http://www.lenr-canr.org/Collections/DoeReview.htm#Report -- respond:


 * ... The anomalous element could not migrate from the interior of the palladium because:


 * 1. Deuterium atoms, flowing from the surface to the interior, would cause diffusion of the anomalous element away from the surface, not toward the surface.
 * 2. Mass spectroscopy done at various depths shows that the anomalous element was not present in the palladium.
 * 3. The element that was originally on the surface disappears at the same rate as the anomalous element appears.
 * 4. The isotopes of the anomalous element are unnatural, and the isotope shifts are exactly what are expected should the missing element transmute into the new element

It's extremely clear that the reviewer dismissed Iwamura by making up another explanation that anyone understanding the Iwamura report could see could not be possible. Iwamura actually considers the possibility that the entire substrate contained the element that appears (it's a rare element, so I think he uses an upper limit for its possible abundance in the base material); if all the atoms in the substrate migrated to the surface, they could indeed account for the observed effect, but this, then, would violate the laws of thermodynamics. And, of course, there is the detail that the effect doesn't occur with hydrogen diffusion in place of deuterium, and the objections above. The numbers 4 and 8 are significant, of course, because they would represent the absorption of 4 deuterons by each atom of the element being transmuted.

In any case, the real point would be not the unbelievability of Iwamura's "conclusions," but his experimental data. Iwamura simply noted that the element disappearing and the element appearing differed in atomic number by 4 and mass number by 8. That's an experimental observation, not actually a conclusion. The reviewer seems quite confused.

Absolutely, it's a stunning result. But is it so stunning that it should be hidden under a rock? (Note that we aren't hiding this one, it's cited in the article.)

No matter how clear this becomes to me, or to anything short of a consensus of editors, I don't see anything yet to use in the article about the 2004 DOE review, except to note that the Iwamura paper is in a peer-reviewed journal and is reliable source, and it's possible that more of it could be used.

The individual reviews cast some severe doubt on the comments made earlier in debate over the reporting of the DOE review that the mention of continued research was mere boilerplate. There is very substantial support for research with some reviewers. As I've said, this isn't actually a fringe science, fringe science doesn't get that kind of support from a body of scientists chosen to advise the DOE.

Here is what I'd personally say about Iwamura. He is either a gross fraud or he has proven beyond reasonable doubt low-energy nuclear reactions. It's not an easy experiment to reproduce, but it could be done, and there is other work that supports that something like this is happening. There is reason why scientific frauds are essentially run out of town on a rail, they can cause tremendous damage, wasted effort, and all that. It's understandable that the scientific community was upset with Fleischmann, but it was also largely their own fault: they rushed to try to duplicate the work, not realizing the complications and difficulties, not waiting for full information, etc. There are DOE reviewers who strongly confirmed that more research is needed, but note that Iwamura's technique and many of the other techiques, including Pons-Fleischmann's original work, are not necessarily scalable to energy-generating applications, it's entirely possible that they would remain scientific curiosities that only take place under very unusual circumstances, and not scalable. Iwamura's work is done in a near-vacuum, the element to be transmuted is sputtered on, making a very thin film, and the level of reaction was very low, the released heat predictable from the conversion of mass to energy would still have been undetectable. But the scientific implications are spectacular. Iwamura essentially watched the transmutation taking place, very precisely. Occam's razor.

But one point could make it quickly into the article. The full nature of Iwamura's report is still not revealed in the article, and the article cited as if it were a refutation of Iwamura was written prior to the Iwamura publication, it mentions earlier reports of transmutation, much less specific and much less well-measured. Remember, Iwamura is reporting 100% conversion, under conditions of high purity. No batch problems, no "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't." --Abd (talk) 00:52, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Iwamura's XPS work has been discussed before, by a published scientist in the field whose opinion of the work was much less favorable than yours. Perhaps you should consider the science before making the sweeping claim that either Iwamura's a fraud or those who doubt this work are being unreasonable.  You do not appear to have considered that the reviewer might have dismissed Iwamura for good reason- that he made claims his experimental data did not support.  There are a number of ways this data can be misinterpreted (mistaking S3+ for Mo+ is one way that appears to have happened.) [this edit was by Noren and was separated from its next paragraph by edits by Kevin Baas (originally) and then Krirk Shanahan, the continuation paragraph begins "There was an RfC on the question ...." and the original signature is there]


 * Thanks for the support Noren. You might find this amusing:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090304/sc_livescience/modernproblemeveryonesanexpert  Kirk shanahan (talk) 16:51, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Noren, the possible S/Mo confusion is interesting, for sure, but Iwamura did not just report Sr/Mo transmutation, he also reported Cs/Pr transmutation. And two different spectrographic techniques must conspire to form the same error. I have not reviewed or seen the work Shanahan refers to, and it wasn't cited, as far as I noticed, in the prior discussion. Perhaps Shanahan can fix that. My comments were mostly based on the DOE reviewer's comment, which was ... terrible. The reviewer's job was to consider new evidence, and instead the reviewer's position apparently was, this would contradict theory, so however good the evidence looks, it must be wrong. A claim that Iwamura made a specific error, such as S/Mo, while it seems unlikely to me given how many ducks have to line up, is on another level. A claim that Iwamura's work is discredited because someone made up a possible but not demonstrated error, though, would be inappropriate. A doubt would have been raised, and, yes, if a series of such can be found, it then becomes possible to consider Iwamura wrong without being fraudulent. When I give my feelings about this work, it's not been approved by my lawyer, and every possible implication or meaning may not have been considered. I'll say it again, now that you know this. Iwamura's work is fraud or conclusive. But, of course, I haven't seen that paper Shanahan refers to.


 * In the Talk page discussion, V made the comment that transmutation isn't necessarily fusion. That's correct. It can be fission. What Iwamura reported would be fusion. Sr disappears, Mo appears. Cs disappears, Pr appears. The product is heavier than the raw material, Mo is Sr plus 4 D, Pr is Cs plus 4 D. Absolutely, I don't blame anyone for being skeptical. This just is not supposed to happen. --Abd (talk) 03:22, 10 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, posting links and information here does not always lead to others choosing to read them. Had you read the previous discussion of the topic I referred to you would know this, but I'll excerpt it here: "The problem comes in insuring they are not simple contaminants arising from simple chemical effects or in misidentifying anomalous peaks with the wrong element. The Iwamura XPS results fall in this latter category. The 'Pr' could also be identified as Cu, which is much more common, and the Mo (in XPS) was actually S, as per Mizuno's ICCF14 abstract."  The alleged Cs/Pr transmutation was also addressed, as was the other experimental technique.  I'll say this again, now that you know this.  Iwamura's work was sloppy and optimistic. Occam's razor was ignored by Iwamura, he jumped to an exotic interpretation of his data without first considering the more mundane possibilities. --Noren (talk) 13:54, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Now he did not make claims that his experimental data did not support. I believe what you meant to say is that he put forth a hypothesis that his experimental data did not conclusively confirm.  Because, for instance, there are ways that "the data could be misinterpreted" - things that could trick the equipment or person reading it.  but this does not mean that you should jump to the conclusion that the proper precautions were not taken AND that tricks did in fact occur (even thou you have no evidence of this) - (which many critics - even "scientific" ones! - seem to do).   rather, the thing to do then is to figure out how one could avoid being thus tricked, and find out if the experimenter had taken such precautions. and if not, to do the experiment again with said precautions.  one clearly can't do this in a criticism published before the experimenters' results - because the experimenters have not yet told you what they did.  but this piece of logic (and others like it) doesn't seem to stop - or even slow - pseudo-skeptics. Kevin Baastalk 15:10, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The 2002 Iwamura paper we are discussing was not convincing to the scientists who peer reviewed it in the (reliable secondary source) 2004 DoE review- published 2 years later.
 * I do not know of anyone who self-identifies as a pseudo-skeptic. The term is used here as a pejorative, and is inappropriate for this discussion. --Noren (talk) 13:54, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The term is innately pejorative. (and aptly so - a person who employs unreason in the guise of reason is a burden on any society.)  But that does not make the term inappropriate in every circumstance.  Hell, we have [an article] (or section, rather) on it.   A person who takes the above descripted approach in spite of logic undoubtedly meets the definition of "pseudo-skeptic".  In that sense, it is relevant to what I was saying.  And it is not directed at anyone in particular.  Also, said fallacy is surprisingly common and it is important to distinguish it from real skepticism.  (Pseudo-skepticism is just bad for the brain.)  So what I said was relevant and important.  And though I concede that the "...doesn't seem to stop..." aspect was an opinion, it is consistent w/the nature of pseudo-skepticism: it is persistent (stubbornly) in the face of contrary logic - unable to absorb any information that contradicts it.  In fact, that is one of the ways to recognize pseudoskepticism - one of the ways to distinguish it from real skepticism.


 * Now above I just enumerated the difference between a real skeptic and a pseudoskeptic - and what they would do (or at least believe the proper course to be) in the example situation (i acknowledge the existence of a third position - that of saying "it's not important or promising enough to continue experimenting" ). I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are, like me, a real (scientific) skeptic.  I communicated this when I said "I believe what you meant to say is..."  The rest of the paragraph was just meant to elucidate that difference, and why it is important. Kevin Baastalk 14:01, 13 March 2009 (UTC)


 * There was an RfC on the question Is this topic fringe?- the result was yes. You may want to consider the fact that your opinion on this matter is counter to consensus. --Noren (talk) 07:20, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * You may want to read WP:Fringe and the comments on Is this topic fringe? referring to it. I say this because you seem to be misinterpreting the consensus and/or policy. Kevin Baastalk 15:10, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Please indicate where in the two short sentences above that you perceive that I misinterpreted either of those things. --Noren (talk) 13:54, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I should have probably been more clear. I was refering to the fact that many of the people who voted "yes" commented that they did so on account of the broadness of the definition under WP:Fringe.  For example, you can take a look at my comment on the vote.  Interperting "Fringe" (as it pertains to WP) too narrowly can result in actions contrary to policy and consensus.  Also, the broadness of the definition in WP:Fringe has implications to how the such topics should be treated, which if I'm not mistaken are spelled out on the page.  Let me end by saying that I'm responding more to a feeling/sense I get of your response than any specific thing you said.  If I am mistaken, then just interpret this as a general word of caution. Kevin Baastalk 14:08, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Kevin. Noren, "opinion" "counter to consensus"? Consensus does not apply to opinions, it applies to edits and text, and to tendentious argument, sometimes. And consensus can change. If there were a problem with having an opinion counter to "consensus," meaning some determination of consensus in the past, then it would be impossible for it to change. I have given strong evidence that the topic is not fringe, I'd even say conclusive evidence. It is, however, commonly regarded as fringe, and, then, we face a true and difficult issue, the role of an encyclopedia when it comes to knowledge. Should an encyclopedia reflect "common knowledge," which boils down to opinion, or should it reflect "informed opinion" which requires basis in fact. It is typically possible to find sources for both, and the classical answer is "both." However, thanks for the pointer to the RfC. I'll examine it carefully and come back. --Abd (talk) 15:24, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Consensus can change, but I would nevertheless suggest that you carefully consider the existing consensus. Repeated, verbose, and/or emphatic exclamations of support for a claim do not make it true, nor can or should they trump a reliable source that disagrees with that claim. We do have a reliable source, the 2004 DoE review, that explicitly considered the 2002 Iwamura paper among others and found neither it nor the other submitted papers conclusive in demonstrating Cold Fusion.
 * I perceive that we do face a difficult problem, an area where common knowledge and informed opinion coincide, but where there is a determined minority who disagree with both. In this case the predominant view of the article should reflect what is both informed opinion and common knowledge, but the determined minority will never accept this, leading to prolonged and difficult conflict. --Noren (talk) 13:54, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * As long as CF-related phenomena are not completely understood, there will be political issues associated with this article. Even if the pendulum swings toward a pro-CF view, there will be a minority of opponents.  Is there not still a "Flat Earth Society"?  At the moment, part of the problem is the definition of "reliable source".  For some info on how so-called "reliable sources" can be mistaken, read the Arhennius article.  Or consider the various remarks about scientific progress on this page: http://atmoz.org/blog/2008/07/29/planck-and-science/ --possibly the first of Clarke's three laws is relevant, too.  Now I recognize that the body of self-consistent scientific knowlegde has grown to such a size that most things that don't fit (like perpetual motion) simply  can't  fit, and generally the old fogeys of Science are right most of the time.  But their knowledge does not make them omniscient, and they are still human enough to be able to occasionally jump to an incorrect conclusion.  In the case of the excess heat of most CF experiments, we have the Chemists' Club offering some support for their own (knowing their required calorimetry skills), and the Physicists' Club denying the evidence,  mostly because of how it was interpreted.   I object!  That is not the way Science works.  And so there is no rationale for this article to be biased toward that denial-of-evidence, by excluding information that could be relevant to a pro-CF explanation.  Even if a non-CF explanation comes along that correctly explains the heat, that is better than denying the evidence and exluding data (it could be historically useful). V (talk) 18:18, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * As to your claim that "they rushed to try to duplicate the work, not realizing the complications and difficulties, not waiting for full information, etc." How do you reconcile this with the 1992 through 1997, $20 million Japanese research program on Cold Fusion that ended with the conclusion that, "We couldn't achieve what was first claimed in terms of cold fusion"?  Is it your contention that this 5 year effort was a rush job that didn't wait for full information? --Noren (talk) 07:29, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * That was a different experimental; a different apparatus; a different setup; a different design. that's like saying the wright brothers were wrong about the possibility of human flight because of the many failed experiments before them.  As Thomas Edison discovered himself, there are over a hundred ways not to make a light bulb.  Kevin Baastalk 15:10, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Interjection in the name of accuracy: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/747226.html V (talk) 22:45, 11 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The "rush" refers to the early work, not to the later work. Noren, they rushed. We have reliable source for that. Are you questioning that? That other researchers, later, were more careful, doesn't contradict that at all. As to the NY Times report, I'm not satisfied that they are reporting their sources in a balanced way, the impression of "failure to confirm" was so strong at that point, in spite of plenty of publication to the contrary, that what was really a funding decision and not a scientific one (it was more of an engineering decision, where do you allocate resources likely to produce profitable results?), is being reported as if it were a scientific decision, a search for replication, when, I'm pretty sure, that kind of money was being spent on efforts that would scale. And until you have the basic experiment solid, scaling is way premature. Reliable replication didn't start to appear until the next decade, if I'm correct. In any case, what peer-reviewed publication came out of the Japanese effort?


 * Here is the point about "rush." Many groups rushed to confirm. Because of the rush, shortcuts were taken, and so failure to confirm could have been because there was nothing to confirm, or it could have been because shortcuts were taken. However, a rush of failure-to-confirm reports, then, came to be seen as proof that there was nothing there, and this was a perversion of normal scientific process, which is the big story here. Both sides screwed up, leaving us with a situation where ongoing work doesn't receive sufficient respect to enjoy either confirmation or rejection. There is now a paucity of anti-cold fusion publication in peer-reviewed publications. Yet there are truly remarkable claims being made in RS. Iwamura is an example. The only review of Iwamura that I've seen, from outside the CF field, is that comment by the DOE reviewer, which was preposterous. It boils down to, "impressive work, too bad your experimental results are impossible." In other words, cold fusion can be rejected out-of-hand because it is impossible, and it is impossible because ... why? CF not only does not violate any basic laws of physics, we know CF happens, with muons. We also know that momentum transfer to a lattice is possible, under some conditions, which would explain the low radiation. Fleischmann points out that cold fusion apparently violates certain laws of Quantum mechanics, but that these laws are known to be inadequate to deal with condensed matter, which is better addressed with Quantum electrodynamics. --Abd (talk) 15:56, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

More papers mentioning cold fusion.

 * http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/-search=61804500.7/0954-3899/31/10/040
 * This paper seems to take cold fusion (i.e., nuclear reactions that are not at high energies) for granted. I've been finding a number of papers on theory like this, this one is published in Physical Review.


 * http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/-search=61804500.4/0954-3899/32/11/L03
 * Published in 2006 J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys.

Tell me again, please, what the reliable source is for the concept that cold fusion is generally rejected? I mean now, not twenty years ago or even five years ago. (And rejected by whom? The general public? Scientists in general? Physicists? Nuclear Physicists? Chemists?) (By "now" I would mean, maybe 2007 or 2008 or later, given that there is ongoing publication in RS about low energy nuclear reactions.) It's a sincere question. --Abd (talk) 22:29, 8 March 2009 (UTC)


 * If you think fission=fusion (your weird interpretation offered of the first paper) or that 10 MeV is room temperature (your weird interpretation of the second paper) you probably do not belong editing here. Neither of these papers are about cold fusion or have any relevance whatsoever. ScienceApologist (talk) 23:11, 8 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Perhaps I was deluded by the fact that the paper's title is "Studies of neutron-deficient nuclei near the Z = 82 shell closure via cold fusion reactions." Cold f u s i o n. Weird interpretation? If this paper has "nothing to do with cold fusion," what in the world is "cold fusion" doing in the title? If there is some other kind of "cold fusion" that is "hot," then we need to say so and disambiguate. For many reasons, the one who may not belong editing here is you. I thought it might be different. I was wrong. There is still time to look at the paper again and notice that they are fusing Zr and Mo, SA. Better response from Phil, below. --Abd (talk) 03:45, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Isn't the second paper about obtaining Ununquadium by ion bombardment at high speed? Isn't this a perfectly understood phenomen that has nothing to do with cold fusion? --Enric Naval (talk) 23:27, 8 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Come on Abd - at least try to read and understand cites before posting them here. You seem to be doing a literature search and posting anything that fits and appears to vindicate cold fusion, then using it to support some specious text.   But neither of these are related to palladium and deuterium in any way.  These are "hot" fusion done at low energies. Such studies examine what happens when you bombard very heavy elements at energies near the coulomb barrier to create new isotopes.  It involves easily understand freshman physics.  For an explanation of what these are about and related discussion of CF (before it gets derailed by a toon), please read this Phil153 (talk) 02:18, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I was asking about the usage of "cold fusion," which appears in the title of the first paper. What specious text? I didn't propose no stinkin text. I noted the usage of the term "cold fusion," and, yes, I hadn't read the abstracts very carefully. Here is how I understand the first paper now. They are indeed running hot fusion, but they are using energies near the coulomb barrier; the energy may still be below the barrier, but this will cause nuclear approach to the point where the fusion rate starts to go up; they are trying to avoid fission, which becomes more likely the more the energy of impact. The name "cold fusion" is probably inappropriate in the title. Note that our article on muon-catalyzed fusion says that it might better be named "cool fusion," which is a total mystery to me, since the experiment described is run at a few degrees Kelvin. Here, it's warm fusion, really, just warm enough and no warmer.


 * Okay, now, looking at the source you pointed to -- are you proposing this as reliable source? -- it seems the term "cold fusion" is indeed used to refer to cool fusion. We need RS on that. Note that this source is typical of pseudo-scientific literature I've seen recently that is holding impressions of "looney tooney cold fusion" from twenty years ago, and that assumes that cold fusion experiments are simply the Pons-Fleischmann ones, that totally neglects all the work that has been done to address the problems with the P-F experiments. I'd be pretty sure that the author would think the reviewers at the DOE were off their rockers for giving cold fusion the time of day. Unless, maybe, they actually read the research, such as Iwamura's work.


 * The field I'm interested in is Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. We actually have an article, currently merged to this one. So the assumption that cold fusion has to be about palladium and deuterium is way off. There is plenty of work that doesn't involve palladium.


 * Now, the second paper. It likewise uses the term "cold fusion" to refer to much higher energies than are involved in what our article here discusses. So, definitely, we need disambiguation if we can find a good source, I'm not thrilled at just picking up the word from some usage examples. --Abd (talk) 04:06, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The link contained an explanation of what the studies were about. It was for your benefit (since you seemed not to understand what the studies said) and since it was a forum posting, obviously not proposed as any kind of source for the article.
 * As for the name, cold fusion is like fusion power in that it has an English meaning which is sometimes invoked and also as a popular and most common name for a specific field. Phil153 (talk) 05:37, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Abd, I suspect that the physicists attempting to make high-atomic-number elements would call the Farnsworth Fusor a cold-fusion device. For them, see, the atoms they want to make are mostly so unstable that a high-speed collision of the nuclei they want to fuse together --that collision would not yield a fused nucleus.  But if the speeds of the two nuclei are JUST enough to get on top of the Coulomb barrier, then a fused nucleus has a chance of resulting.  Note that the velocities of the two nuclei, having slowed due to Coulomb repulsion and now located just close enough to start to fuse, would be practically zero (COLD!)  A Farnsworth Fusor also need only apply just enough kinetic energy to deuterons, to get them close enough to fuse. V (talk) 05:52, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, V, I understand what they are talking about. The high-speed collisions do result in a fused nucleus, but with so much excess energy that it then immediately fissions, so it doesn't "yield" a fused nucleus. Yes, the term "cold" can be used, though I'd still call it misleading, because what is being used to overcome the Coulomb barrier is sheer energy, same as heat. But the point isn't my opinion or your opinion, it is that the term "cold fusion" is being used for something that we don't cover. Phil, what I'm discussing here is not the phenomenon that they are reporting. Yes, the link contained that explanation, and I wasn't complaining about that link being provided, it shows usage, but if we are going to incorporate that usage of the term, it would be better to have a more reliable source, don't you agree? We do have some flexibility, we could go ahead and note that the term is used for these kinds of reactions. And then he slaps his head! We can cite one of these papers as an example of the usage. Which one is better, do you think, or does anyone have a better idea? I'll go ahead and make an edit, but others are certainly welcome to improve it! --Abd (talk) 16:15, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) I edited Cold Fusion (disambiguation) to reflect the usage found that started this section. Accordingly, I'm closing this discussion, unless someone objects, in which case, revert me. --Abd (talk) 17:34, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

On "calibration constant shift"

 * I've finally figured out, since Shanahan was apparently trying to redefine standard terms, that his "constant calibration shift" is just a worthless way of saying that the calorimeter functioned just fine, registering unexpected heat. He wants us to believe that its calibration became "off" during the experiment, and then magically returned to a near-normal value after the experiment.  It's simpler (per Occam's Razor) to think the calorimeter actually measured heat.  Whether or not the origin of the heat was chemical (such as catalyzed hydrogen-oxygen reactions) or nuclear, is irrelevant.  Shanahan even specifies a source of heat to supposedly cause the calibration to go "off".  DUH!  The calorimeter is supposed to measure heat, and to stay reasonably calibrated while it does!  Any calorimeter that can't do that should fail testing at the factory.  Not to mention that calorimeters have been getting manufactured for many decades, and a calibration problem such as Shanahan describes would have made itself known long ago, as chemical engineers tried to scale up data given to them by chemists, who used calorimeters to obtain the data the engineers tried to scale up.  Is it any wonder I think his paper is largely nonsense? V (talk) 16:06, 16 March 2009 (UTC)


 * As usual, you haven't figured anything out. If you looked at my first paper, you would see that the calibration constant did NOT return to normal after each 'cold fusion' excursion, but progressed to a 'dead electrode' state, which then had to be restored by special treatments.  So, your first two sentences are nonsensical.  It is 'simpler' to think nothing happened (the ostrich theory of scientific research), but experience has shown many, many times that doing so is a mistake, as it is here.  And I have no clue what you are referring to when you say I specify a source of heat, etc.  And I agree: "The calorimeter is supposed to measure heat, and to stay reasonably calibrated while it does!", but the problem is of course that it doesn't do what it is supposed to do.  The remaining sentences are the 'Rothwell' attack, used several times by Jed in the past.  This clearly indicates you are unduly influenced by him, which agrees with your irrationality in your opposition to basic science facts like 4*3 is not equal to 4*4.  For those here who may not have seen it before, the idea is that my CCS overturns 'centuries' (Rothwell's approach, at least V just said 'decades') of calorimetry research.  Of course it doesn't.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 17:01, 16 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh, what fun! First, there is a difference between "the electrode" and "the calorimeter" --any attempt to confuse/conflate them is just more nonsense on your part; I said it was the calorimeter that you want us to believe magically returned to near-normal calibration.  Next, "And I have no clue what you are referring to when you say I specify a source of heat" --THIS FROM YOUR TALK PAGE:  "What I think is happening in the P&F cell is that material is slowly deposited on the electrode surface and it alters the surface energy such that H2 bubbles adhere better. Then O2 bubbles collide and merge, and the clean metal surface under the bubble catalyzes H2+O2->H2O."  -- Are you not aware that that reaction (correction: 2H2+O2->2H2O) is used in rockets partly because of the amount of energy (heat) released by it?   (And what about the difference between "material is slowly deposited" and "clean metal surface"?  Having both at the same time is ridiculous!) What more proof does anyone need, that your conclusion is nonsense?  Next, I haven't seen Rothwell's response to your paper.  I didn't need it to independently reach my conclusion; some of MY college training was in chemical engineering.  Therefore the evidence is: you have leaped to yet another nonsensical conclusion. V (talk) 17:35, 16 March 2009 (UTC)


 * For the reader, V has proven again he can't read. I made my point in the section that Abd collapsed, I don't need to do so again.  If anyone else is having as much trouble as V let me know.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:36, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, and P.S., it's calibration constant shift. Kirk shanahan (talk) 19:26, 16 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Tsk, tsk, a personal attack is a pretty poor way to defend your so-called "facts" and "logic". Go ahead, attack me all you want; I'm even willing to DIScourage anyone from complaining about it.  Because as long as you do that instead of defend your hypothesis, when it contains such obvious self-contradictions as experiments running for hundreds of hours with electrodes slowly accumulating deposits of contaminants from the heavy-water solution, and then somehow having a clean surface to catalyze a chemical reaction --nobody need believe that hypothesis at all. V (talk) 19:31, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) I request the editors tone it down. Shanahan is a published expert in the field and respect is due. We need less rhetoric. Shanahan has a hypothesis that may explain some of the experimental results. The field needs criticism, it's essential. His work was published in a peer-reviewed journal, so dismissing it as "nonsense," repeating the word, doesn't help matters.

I acknowledge my own skepticism at Shanahan's approach. For starters, it does seem that he's impeaching the usage of calorimeters by experts; nevertheless, some of us complain about what may be biased rejection of evidence for cold fusion, let's not engage in biased rejection of criticism of such evidence. We are not, here, attempting to make a decision on whether cold fusion happens or not.

Some of the calorimetry experiments are done with closed systems, so that all the released gases recombine within the system; a system like this should heat up due to the inefficiency of the conversion process. One of the problems has been that reports are made of power generation, but often energy generation (integrated power) isn't given. A cold fusion cell will store a certain amount of energy as hydrogen/deuterium gas and oxygen, separated; it may release that later. Palladium stores a lot of hydrogen, that's why it's of interest. It stores hydrogen (including deuterium, of course) with high density, essentially with the density of a solid, if I'm correct, so, yes, rocket fuel. Except, of course, these are chemists and they are quite aware of this fact, and when they say that the power generated could not be from any known reaction, I'm a little skeptical that they need to wake up and say, "My God! The hydrogen is burning! Forming water! When we said "no known chemical reaction," we didn't think of making water from the gases!"

Rothwell's criticism, while of some interest, isn't of much use to us, unless it's published in RS. We can discuss it, he knows the field, but I'm more interested in review of Shanahan's work by other scientists, Rothwell is a writer who has specialized in this field and is well-known for that. I consider him an expert, but in a general way, I'm not convinced that he's competent to criticize Shanahan's work. Which doesn't meant that his criticism isn't cogent; most of what I've seen from him, here has been quite cogent.

I suspect we will move along more efficiently if we start to narrow down issues. Shanahan, I especially invite to inform us of peer-reviewed comment on his work, since he might be likely to be aware of it. I mentioned him because it's an example of an alternate hypothesis. It is that, and whether or not it adequately explains the experimental results is another matter. I don't see how it would approach, for example, the radiation or nuclear ash evidence.

I've been coming to some understanding of what happened, why, in particular, the 2004 DOE review still came up with "inconclusive." One of the problems is that there are many effects that have been found. The research has not focused on one particular experiment, to try to reproduce it. Rather, experiments are all over the map. Some find helium, some do not, for example. That certainly looks suspicious; though there is a possible explanation: There may not be just one kind of LENR, there may be many. Some produce helium, some do not. All of them take unusual circumstances, and these were not noticed before because pretty much nobody expected them, due to the accepted theory; no expectation, no search, no results to study. Start searching, and something might be found. Iwamura's work, for example, reports elemental transformations on the surface of a complex sandwich of palladium and calcium oxide, where deuterium flow is established through the palladium lattice. This work alone would be worthy of serious attempts at replication. There has been some attempt within the cold fusion community and, I note, contrary to what some here might expect from that community, some of the report, at least, is negative. But negative results at first are not the same as "failure to reproduce." As with the original CF experiments, the precise conditions which show the effect may not be known.

I fail to see how Shanahan's criticism would apply to experiments which (1) consider the whole system, like a "black box" and study input power, integrated, and overall heating, or (2) which don't depend on calorimetry, such as experiments showing radiation. I don't see why the alleged systematic error would take place with deuterium and not with hydrogen. I don't see why the possibility of this would escape all those different experimental groups. But none of this means that the hypothesis should be contemtuously dismissed.

More to the point, I'm interested in how Shanahan would respond to the Bayesian analysis I mentioned. I'll find a link: I have to go do a bit of work, but why calorimetry experiments with the particular markers the paper (presented at ICCF 14) would show excess heat, with high reliability, but those without these markers would not. The markers, themselves, shouldn't affect the calorimetry, they have to do with expressed concern about purity of the materials, as an example, or other characteristics that would allow classification of experiments. By the way, I'm aware, as well, of a hazard involved in this Bayesian approach, but I won't detail it yet. --Abd (talk) 19:35, 16 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Abd, getting published even in a Respected Source doesn't necessarily mean today what it used to mean. For evidence, see http://io9.com/5117892/computer+generated-paper-accepted-for-prestigious-technical-conference  Enough specialist-specific technical gobbledygook can cause even expert eyes to glaze over.  But try to explain the paper in plain English, and logical contradictions can become much more obvious.  Perhaps the technical journals should request the plain-English translation along with the gobbledygook, to weed out pretenders in the future. V (talk) 19:54, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm asking Shanahan to explain for us his work with Calibration Constant Shift, a Guide for the Compleat Idiot on CCS, and I request that comments from others here be directed toward helping Shanahan to effectively and clearly explain it, not to refute it, argue against it. Perhaps, Dr. Shanahan, you could provide us with some text on this that, if we had space, we could put in the article, or you could refer to the old Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments article, which I've rescued from the junkbin at User:Abd/Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments.


 * Try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cold_fusion&oldid=239093535  Kirk shanahan (talk) 11:39, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Far too much detail for the article here, possibly even for the calorimetry article if it comes back, we don't need to know the equations, for example (my opinion). My impression is that this criticism of the calorimetry can be argued to apply to some CF experiments showing excess heat, but not to, for example, the Arata work, which shows steady generation of heat without calorimetry at all, merely measurements of heat flow, of interest without controls, but definitive with controls. --Abd (talk) 14:57, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * And this especially, but read the whole page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kirk_shanahan#The_Major_Fallacies_of_Cold_Fusion  Kirk shanahan (talk) 11:45, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * tl;dr. Well, I did scan over it. One point I'll make. Shanahan's calorimetry considerations are published in RS, they are a notable criticism of cold fusion calorimetry that applies to some of the experiments. It looks to me like he over-generalizes them, as if they applied to all of these. Quite clearly they don't apply to Arata's work with loading powdered palladium alloys with deuterium, where the conclusion of heat generation is based on maintained temperature differential compared with controls, not involving calorimetry at all. At some point, I may summarize "the major fallacies," they are buried in verbage, but I'll do that on Shanahan talk. I'm particularly interested in the claims made about Iwamura's work, especially the claims that triplet S-32 was mistaken for Mo-96.
 * A distinction between absolute experiments and controlled experiments must be made. An absolute experiment will produce a result: so much heat was generated when we did this. Much preferred are controlled experiments: When we did this, we got so much heat, when we did exactly the same, except with this small variation, we got no heat. This is basic science, if the change should not, by existing theory, affect the heat, something new has been discovered, something unknown. In particular, controls in cold fusion experiments often involve running the experiment with hydrogen instead of deuterium. The only difference between hydrogen and deuterium is nuclear, beyond some shift in quantitative values because the extra neutron in deuterium has some extra-nuclear effect, like heavy water (D2O) is a little heavier than water (H2O), but it's small. Shanahan's criticism applies to absolute experiments, but far, far less to controlled experiments. This is the difference between "precision" and "accuracy," mentioned in some papers and discussions. In well-controlled experiments, the absolute accuracy of the calorimetry is not relevant, all that is needed is that the results be significantly above noise levels, and changes in the "calibration constant" during the experiments should be irrelevant, as long as the compared experiments show what is expected, under the hypothesis of no excess heat, to be no difference, but, in fact, there is a difference that is consistent across multiple sets of experiments.
 * Let us suppose that Shanahan is correct, and that excess heat in the calorimetry experiments was an artifact of CCS. I'll back up a little. Pons and Fleischmann had expected, from quantum electrodynamic considerations, that cold fusion might occur under some conditions. Suppose that they didn't get the conditions right, and that the excess heat they found was an illusion. That would not prove that cold fusion was impossible, only that they hadn't found it. But because of this error, many other people started looking for it. Some may have found it. I would, therefore, caution Shanahan against overgeneralization from his own work. His work could be perfectly correct, in terms of what was published, and that would only allow discounting of some of the excess heat measurements, those where CCS effects were not addressed, but not others where CCS is moot or was addressed. CCS applies not at all to claims of transmutation, including measurement of helium or other nuclear reaction product, including radiation. --Abd (talk) 15:28, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Could I suggest this occurs at either Abd or Shanahan's (probably best) talk page, with a link placed here, and then interested editors could debate there. Occasional status updates relevant to the article, or any concrete proposals or conclusions, can then be pasted or linked to here for fuller discussion. Perhaps this should be done in a new section and this section be archived rather than just collapsed? Thanks,  Verbal   chat  20:45, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
 * One point: I'm not interested in "debate," as such. This is a discussion page, and the problem with "debate" is that it tends to focus on sides and winning. Discussion seeking consensus is almost the opposite of debate, though it can resemble it in some ways. Both discussion and debate may involve presentation of various evidences and considerations, but in a discussion, as distinct from a debate, the parties involved, ideally, do not hold fixed positions which they seek to promote. Rather, they are exploring a topic together, and, naturally, they each have their own opinions and current POV, which they may share, but they will, ideally, all be satisfied with any outcome decided. Sometimes people are so stuck on their own POV that such consensus is impossible, but that is actually the exception rather than the rule, when there is adequate discussion in a civil environment. --Abd (talk) 15:33, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Tell you what. Let's edit the Calorimetry article in my user space to bring it into good shape. Then we can decide if the material belongs in this article, or in a separate article. That article was actually started to stop edit warring here and allow exploration of the topic. It went to AfD, Articles_for_deletion/Calorimetry_in_cold_fusion_experiments, nominated by JzG, and there are arguments there we might attend to. The claim was that this was a POV fork. However, if we ensure that the article is NPOV, and if the article is summarized at Cold fusion, but still has more detail, those arguments should go away. Only if there is not enough material for an independent article, after it's cleaned up, should it stay deleted. (I argued for Merge, which preserves editorial flexibility, but I didn't take the second deletion to DRV because I prefer, usually, to try to satisfy the arguments made on the other side, which means waiting until an article is ready.) My feeling is that there is enough detail on Calorimetry in CF that it deserves an article, that is, there is enough in reliable source of sufficient notability and interest to justify more space than Cold fusion would properly bear. We don't have to decide now, I suggest the goal there is to create a clear, sourced, and interesting article on the topic. Because it's in user space, we are more free, we can put in unsourced stuff if someone thinks that sources can be found, our goal should be consensus, at first, not necessarily AfD survival or full satisfaction of WP:RS. If it's going to come back, we can clean it up. Open for business, anyone who wishes to participate. Shanahan, restrictions on WP:COI do not apply there. User:Abd/Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments. My user space. Be nice. folks. --Abd (talk) 22:36, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Clarity of article, etc.
Abd posted this comment at 19:52, 16 March 2009 which strongly enjoined editors to be civil. Abd also said "our task is not to decide if cold fusion is real or not" and described our task in terms of presenting material from sources with neutrality and balance, including material about current research presented with caution and balance. The following comment from V (19:59, 16 March 2009) was posted in response to Abd's original comment. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 20:23, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The article needs to be clear and understandable to the readers. I don't object to Shanahan's work being described in the article,  provided  it is done in a clear and understandable way (including lacking self-contradictions). So far, to the best of my knowledge, this is impossible. V (talk) 19:59, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, I made a further comment, but ran into edit conflict with Verbal's removal. Rather than contest this -- what a waste of time! -- I responded with what I'd written, then reverted myself, and I've done what I said I intended to do above, which is intended to proceed as V has said he does not object to. Let's start cooperating, let that start here. --Abd (talk) 20:41, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Thermochimica Acta
I noticed a day ago that the reference to my 3rd paper had been deleted. I've tracked that down to an action by JzG on 30 Jan, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cold_fusion&diff=267300501&oldid=267278001. No Talk page entry was made. The header on the revision notice was "POV and unreliable source". He also deleted Ed Storms ref as well, so I guess he thinks TA is an 'unreliable' journal. If so, then you all need to remove the otehr refs from that journal as well. Kirk shanahan (talk) 17:48, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * No, that removal seems POV. I'll fix it, if those references are still relevant. JzG deleted a whole series of references with that edit, and discussion? Discussion is for wimps. Why bother discussing if you know you are right? I'll do one at at time, so if anyone objects, they can object specifically. Looks like Enric Naval already got one back. --Abd (talk) 18:02, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Done. I think one reference was supporting text that has since been removed, about theoretical work. Maybe it should come back, but, hey, I can't do everything.... Thanks, Kirk, for noticing that. --Abd (talk) 18:30, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Review of sources
http://coldfusionpolicy.org/Cold%20Fusion%20Ann%20Biblio%20032106.pdf

This is a paper presented in a course on public policy analysis. It seems to be a relatively neutral analysis of sources on the topic of cold fusion, presenting sources to be used in public policy analysis on the topic. It's unfortunate that it doesn't seem to have been published.... but we may be able to begin some discussions with what is there.

http://coldfusionpolicy.org/ provides an overview, and addresses issues that are of major concern to us. It's worth looking at.

http://coldfusionpolicy.org/Grimshaw%20Resume%200108.pdf asserts the credentials of the author, who does not appear to have any observable bias from the history given. However, of course, Grimshaw isn't a chemist or physicist, i.e., an expert in science. However, "public policy" process is related to our editorial process here; it is properly advised by experts in the field, but actual determination is made by others, generally, who are not experts. (Experts attempting to control articles here frequently end up blocked.) So this paper may well serve as a support to our work, as if Grimshaw were an editor here, an editor who has clearly done a lot of the footwork. --Abd (talk) 14:00, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

There is a response to Grimshaw at http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/03/cold_fusion_as_policy_posterbo.html. This blog is an example of what, I'm sure, drives cold fusion researchers crazy, and it's an example of what Grimshaw talks about. The writer says, at the end, "writing as someone who did a cold fusion experiment in 1990, my personal opinion is that whatever they are seeing — it’s not fusion."

Everyone acknowledges that P-F type cold fusion was very difficult to reproduce, i.e., most attempts, early on, failed to find it. I think a lot of people tried to reproduce the experiment, far more than published. Most of these attempts failed, but it does not follow that "other researchers were unable to confim cold fusion." I've seen this statement again and again, and it is blatantly false in implication, that there was no confirmation. Not only was there confirmation, recent analysis of the publications that did appear has shown that experiments which followed closely P-F's methods and approaches succeeded. But this writer is extrapolating from personal experience, an experience which has almost nothing to do with whether or not cold fusion is real, and simply reflects a matter of consensus: most early attempts to reproduce failed. A number of writers, and we have reliable source on this, have regretted the way in which the appearance of consensus developed on cold fusion. Grimshaw points out the errors on both sides. He also points out that the nuclear physicists dominated the response to cold fusion; had it been dominated by chemists, the result might have been quite different. Chemists were saying "this isn't chemistry," and that is where their expertise is. Nuclear physicists were saying, "this isn't fusion," and that is where their expertise is. So what is it, then? It's obvious: it is either chemistry of an unrecognized form or it is nuclear physics of an unrecognized form. In other words, no matter how you slice it, there is new science here. Hence the continued recognition by both DOE review panels that further research is appropriate. Grimshaw goes further, using more formal policy analysis to recommend serious public support, given the level of certainty that he estimates from the research. Grimshaw is not limited by "peer-reviewed journals," but was able to consider all sources, weighing apparent bias, etc. Grimshaw did apparently speak at the cold fusion session of the American Physical Society in March, 2008. --Abd (talk) 14:22, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

A little more on Grimshaw, he is apparently adjunct professor at the University of Texas, LBJ School of Public Affairs. --Abd (talk) 17:55, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * If it's not published in a reliable source, it isn't a reliable source. As far as its neutrality, I note that it doesn't discuss Brian Clarke's or my work, so it clearly has problems on the mainstream side.  Don't include it.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 20:24, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Re: Section "Incompatibilities with conventional nuclear physics" must be greatly expanded
I disagree that no theoretical framework exist to describe the situation. To the contrary, we have a theory that is in principle almost exact (the deviations are due to unknown physics beyond the Standard Model at very high energies, e.g. supersymmetry, GUT etc.).

The fact that you can have muon catalized fusion and that the fact that deuterium in a solid is more complicated that just two deutron nuclei, in no way means that "anything goes".

One can disagree with a negative attitude toward the possibility of cold fusion based on theoretical arguments. But if we don't explain what the basis of these arguments are, then the article will fail to explain the basis of the dispute. Count Iblis (talk) 14:28, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I strongly agree with your last sentence Count. If we don't explain the basis of the dispute the reader loses.  That has been my driver for trying to get the mainstream criticisms into the article on the experimental side.  Good luck to you on getting it in on the theoretical.  There are too many people, skilled at Wikilawyering, who oppose this.  Just compare the Sept. 17, 2008 version with today and you will see the loss of such explanation in favor of pro-CF propaganda.  To the rest of you, I could sit here and write many more paragraphs in response to your comments, but in the end, I will not have accomplished anything.  The apparent goal of the current article is not in line with informing the reader of the basis of the controversy, which is why I would read the article if I came looking to find out about CF.  The only reason I came here was to do that.  So, my contributions are not needed, and in fact have already been offered and rejecteed (multiple times).  What amazes me is that the current crop of editors think progress has been made.  Once again, good luck with that Count.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 15:54, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * While I agree with Krik on the necessity of good explanation, the problem may be one of reliable sourcing. Kirk, however, seems to have a strong POV; that's not unusual with experts (of whatever variety). His criticism of certain aspects of cold fusion calorimetry appears cogent, but what was in the article was clearly inappropriate, and it's not gone because of "wikilawyering," though all sides on this have tended to push their POV using whatever "rules" they can think of as possibly applying. Rather, there is a problem with sourcing criticism of cold fusion. The reliable sources that exist are mostly old and based on arguments that often no longer apply. The biggest one, "lack of confirmation," may not have applied even in 1989; there are allegations of what may have been systematic exclusion even then. Huizenga wasn't exactly neutral. Regardless, it's an argument that has been repeated over and over, I see it constantly in critical comment on cold fusion, even up to material published in the last couple of years (but not in peer-reviewed journals). Yet there is publication of general confirmation over and over in peer-reviewed publications and far more if we were to allow conference papers. There is still plenty of room for debate on the quality of confirmation, but not as to its existence. It's enlightening to read the reviewer reports from the 2004 DOE review. It is quite clear that there are real scientific issues, unresolved, and that Cold fusion isn't your typical pseudoscience or clear example of scientific error, as it is sometimes treated. It's an active field of research, apparently excluded from some of the most significant publications on the basis of an alleged consensus that it's bogus, but published in some journals meeting our RS requirements. I agree that we should present the whole affair more clearly, and probably should fork the article into one on the social phenomenon (i.e., history of science) (where "peer-reviewed publication" may be an excessive standard), and one, probably on Condensed matter nuclear science, which seems to be the accepted name of the field as a science, and which is broader than the term Cold fusion popularly indicates. The articles will, of course, reference each other, with summaries following WP:Summary style. CMNS is, as a field, still quite controversial, with many standard physicists claiming, essentially, that the condensed state is irrelevant to nuclear phenomena, thus nuclei don't have a clue what's going on with those far-out electron shells and other neighbors, and chemistry is irrelevant to nuclear physics. Besides, chemistry is messy, far more complicated than nuclear physics, because the systems are far more complex. --Abd (talk) 16:48, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict)
 * What I think we can agree on is that prior theoretical considerations led to an expectation that nuclear fusion at low energies was impossible. However, in general, firm impossibility conclusions are, well, impossible. The Coulomb barrier seems like an unsurmoutable obstacle to cold fusion. But muon-catalyzed fusion is a clear counterexample. Of course this doesn't mean that "anything goes," but rather that special conditions may overcome the general expectation. "Conventional nuclear physics" represents what is generally accepted, but there is no theoretical reason, under accepted laws of physics, for cold fusion to be impossible.


 * "Fusion" is a misleading term; when "cold fusion" was claimed, the assumption was made that this was just like hot fusion. Only cold. That is an obvious error, in hindsight. It lead to, then, the other "theoretical objections." If this is fusion, where are the neutrons or gamma rays? With the accepted forms of fusion, they should be there, in abundance, given the levels of heat reported. How is it that the alleged unexpected energy is transferred to the material as heat, directly, if that is what is happening? Such a transfer is known to occur with the Mossbauer effect, but this would be of a different order of magnitude. However, these objections depend on a model for what is occurring in the experiment, and there is no accepted model.


 * We are faced with this: chemists say, "This is not chemistry." Nuclear physicists say, "This can't be nuclear physics, or, if it is, it's revolutionary and extraordinary proof is required." It's actually a symmetrical situation, for the chemists are saying, really, "If this is chemistry, it isn't a chemistry that we recognize."


 * We need to find reliable sources on the nature of the dispute, including this issue of theoretical considerations. I think they exist, some have been recently mentioned, and some are cited in the article. To dismiss excess heat and reports of helium and elemental transformation and radiation on the basis of theory is a gross scientific error, just as is to claim that such reports, in themselves, prove that fusion is taking place. Each experiment could have some kind of error, but it gets tricker when there are many experiments, with many different approaches, leading to similar conclusions. In 1989 that didn't exist. Once there are many such reports, it becomes pretty necessary to allege something like publication bias, as an example. Positive results are reported, negative ones aren't. However, as the experiments become better and better controlled and focused, this interpretation becomes less and less reasonable. Several months ago, if you'd asked me, I'd have said, like many others said, "That was really interesting back in 1989. Too bad it couldn't be confirmed." However, I've now read a lot of the recent work, and I can't any longer make a statement like that. There is definitely confirmation, at, I'd say, a level that should have justified, back in 1989, much more funding and continued work, had it existed then. Basically, in 1989, nobody knew, with clarity, how to run a cold fusion experiment, but Pons and Fleischmann had taken particular care in certain areas, whereas the initial attempts to confirm, done without adequate information from P and F, was rushed and inadequate, plus P and F probably did not know, themselves, enough of how to run these experiments and get consistent results. Based on recent analysis, electrolytical C-F is one sensitive little effect, very dependent on initial conditions and exact experimental details, in unexpected ways. The Arata work may not be; the approach, I believe, has had positive results from others; it is far less messy than electrolysis and calorimetry, likewise the analysis for helium is far simpler, with lots of ways to run controls. Folks, I'm still learning about all this; those who have claimed I have some POV to push are mistaken. If I seem to have a point of view, it's because I have formed an opinion, based on what I've seen, investigated starting with mild skepticism, but if there is anything I hate, it's getting nailed to a mere opinion. (And that's why the "skepticism" was mild, it almost always is with me unless the evidence is very, very strong. In which case it isn't really skepticism....) --Abd (talk) 16:25, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Some comments: I am a chemist and I say it's all chemistry.  I have never used theory (physics of fusion) to critique cold fusion results.  You are not reading the current reports with a trained and critical mind.  You are a victim of your lack of understanding about what being declared a pariah field has done to the field.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 16:36, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes. I had no intention of claiming that all chemists rejected chemical explanations, but it's clear that Pons and Fleischmann, recognized specifically in the field of electrochemistry, and involved in long-term investigations of possible quantum electrodynamical effects blurring the barrier between chemistry and nuclear physics, did so, and so did many others. However, Kirk, you don't know my mind. At all. I'm not "trained," and good thing. It often allows me to see things that are missed by those who are; but don't think, from this, that I don't respect training, I do. But training, by definition, steeps us in the status quo. We need both kinds of analysis, but give the trained the reins, you create social ossification and an impossibility of change. Go too far in the other direction, you have chaos. If everyone were like me, the subways would not run, lots of things would not work. I'm not a victim. The field is indeed a pariah field. One editor here wrote that his anonymity here was crucial to him, because if it were known, there would go his career in science. This is simply a local anecdotal confirmation of what has often been reported. It does not seem to be true in China, nor, maybe, in Japan. Being a "pariah" field has definitely damaged it. My comments about the use of theory to contradict cold fusion were not aimed at Shanahan, but at the specific issue in the "theory" section, which isn't about you, Kirk, so don't take it that way.
 * Question is, is it a "pariah" field today, and, if so, is this about science or is it about sociology and politics?
 * This is the irony: the 2004 DOE review (like the 1989 review), suggested the focused funding of research, and publication of it in peer-reviewed journals. That's being done, though surely with some difficulty due to the "pariah" problem. The DOE does not, however, suggest research into fields that it or the reviewers consider junk science. By all means, Kirk, your POV is very welcome here, and your knowledge as well, but be careful, please conduct yourself as a professional consultant, which is the best of what you can be here.--Abd (talk) 17:03, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "We need to find reliable sources on the nature of the dispute" - no such thing on the mainstream side (with the exception of my publications and those of W. B. Clarke), barely any on the proCF side - this is the effect of being declared a pariah field. It certainly is still a pariah field.  In 2007 I presented a poster entitled "What's New in Cold Fusion" at the Gordon Research Conference on Hydrogen-Metal Systems.  It was one of the most attended posters I have ever presented (maybe 10-20 people stopped to talk, normally my subjects are highly specialized and not of much interest to the general conference).  The biggest job I had was convincing them that the FPHE was real.  I had Szpak's IR video playing to show that.  After that, most just wanted to know that I was presenting a conventional explanation, and that usually ended the discussion.  They were not interested in knowing more.  I was also told later that several behind the scenes inquiries were made to my co-workers as to whether or not I was "OK", i.e. was I a good or bad scientist.  The field is definitely a pariah field.  The only people who work and publish in it are 'odd' (and yes, I know that applies to me, but I have explained before that as a worker in the field I personally wanted to know if I should be worried about my experiments blowing up or irradiating me).  That is the mainstream view.  Many hold these views for the wrong reasons, but I can supply the right reasons to them, if they were interested, which they aren't.   It is definitely about science, and the unwillingness of the CFers to conform to standard scientific practices and requirements.  Their failure to do so, which can be detected without any detailed study of their work, clearly put them in the psuedoscientific arena.  The DOE review statement about funding good proposals is stock, and means next to nothing.  You will note the DOE did NOT suggest research into the area.  They said good proposals might get funded, not that people should rush off and research CF.


 * With regards to my POV being welcome, actions speak louder than words. None of my suggestions for the article have been incorporated, with the exception that my work is referenced once, with no explanation of its impact.  We need to get back to what the Wiki reader is looking for, presumably an explanation of what cold fusion is, and then, why there is a big controversy surrounding it.  The current article barely addresses the _current_ issues, being mired in the view of the early 1990's, another side effect of having no RS for the mainstream view because none is published as the field is a pariah field.  The only way to have a balanced article is to present the historical facts and both sides of the controversy fairly.  But Wiki policy is Wikilawyered into preventing that.  We need to go back to Sept. 17 and start over.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 14:33, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) "We need to find reliable sources on the nature of the dispute" - no such thing on the mainstream side (with the exception of my publications and those of W. B. Clarke), barely any on the proCF side - this is the effect of being declared a pariah field. Yes. However, note that "pariah" and "pseudoscience" are not the same. Pariah fields are considered pseudoscience, typically, by a majority, but pseudoscientific fields don't have the level of support that cold fusion does among, say, DOE reviewers. The field includes, of course, work like yours, and this is precisely what you are reporting. Who is interested in clear criticism of a pariah field, don't we already know that it's all nonsense? Except that, of course, without criticism like yours, the judgment that it's nonsense is pretty shaky. I'll claim that my non-expert opinion is that it's shaky anyway, but, remember, my goal is always to find maximum agreement. I think, from the above, we can agree that the "pariah" designation harms research in the field, and understanding of it. You have outlined, above, the problem. Let me restate it.

The 2004 DOE review indicated that further research was appropriate, with publication in peer-reviewed journals. Now, there is publication in peer-reviewed journals, though allegedly it isn't in the most reputable. (I find it a bit puzzling that Naturwissenschaften isn't considered reputable, but let's drop that for the moment.)

There is ongoing publication in reliable source regarding research in this pariah field. While there is, in fact, continued publication of criticism of this research, none of it is overview, rather, there are specific criticisms, such as Kowalski's attempt to impeach the radiation evidence asserted by Spzak et al.

We have no recent reliable sources, on the level of peer-reviewed journals, which expresses the alleged scientific consensus that cold fusion is not taking place. We do have reviews and books, recently published, which suggest the opposite. I am not asserting that we should therefor put in the article that this alleged consensus has disappeared. I don't think it has. However, this requires that we present a more balanced view, as we would with any unresolved controversy. One side, so to speak, claims that there is no controversy, it's done and over with, cold fusion is dead, forget about it. The other, however, says, no, we now have evidence that is strong enough to assert with 99% confidence that cold fusion is taking place. (If I remember correctly, that's a claim in the Bayesian analysis reported at the 2008 ICCF.)

However, we also have, from over the years, a fair amount of reliable source review of the controversy, of the history of science aspect of this, and we have presented little of this in this article. This is why I suggest that we need two (at least) articles.

With regard to your POV being welcome, I was speaking for myself. It's very clear that there are editors who don't welcome it, just as it is clear that there are editors who are hostile to material that seems to support cold fusion. In my view, these are both dangers to the project. As to evidence of my intention, you complained about the removal of reference to your work. I restored it, promptly. Until then, I was unaware of it. I rescued the Calorimetry article, on which you had worked extensively, from the junkpile.

But please understand: Wikipedia process grinds very slowly, once serious controversy has appeared over an article. Waves of POV editors can see-saw back and forth, and this will continue until and unless a core of editors appears who are truly dedicated to NPOV, and who don't have a warped vision of what that means. (Some editors imagine that their personal opinion is, of course, "fair and balanced," when, as I continually assert, the only way we can be certain of NPOV is when we find complete consensus; the degree of our certainty is measured by the degree of consensus found. In organizations where unity is considered important, extraordinary care will sometimes be exercised to make sure that all points of view are considered and included to the maximum extent possible. Wikipedia probably will not go to that extent, but if it did, it would become so solidly NPOV that POV-motivated vandalism and edit warring would practically disappear. But when we are content with a mere majority of editors on one side or another, or even two to one, it can be very difficult to maintain stability with sound content.)

My view at the moment is that the article is defective in a number of ways, but it will take time to fix. See Eventualism. Fixing it by barging in with something "better," if it involves more than a very few changes at a time, is just about guaranteed to be useless and disruptive at this point. Right now, I'm working on building the community, and trying to be maximally welcoming to you is part of that. We should try to attract other experts, in fact, and one of the problems is that one of the experts has been banned. Instead of containing and confining and channeling his contributions into what is useful for us, they were rejected as "fringe" (is there something wrong with being "fringe" with a "fringe science"?), he was dismissed as a "kook." (If I did that, I'd be blocked in a flash, which says something about the situation.) His web site was disparaged as full of copyright violation, which allegation had no basis, etc. I'm dealing with all this, one little step at a time. Trying to push hard and fast, well, I'd be out of here quickly. As it is, I'm being quite successful, as long as I don't bite off more than I can chew or than the community can easily handle. One step at a time. Want a list of accomplishments? Well, I'll provide it by email to editors I trust to keep it confidential. I'm not stupid.

I disagree with your characterization of the 2004 DOE review, which is even clearer when the individual reviews are read. Definitely, research is recommended, suggesting targeted proposals with regard to certain open questions being specifically mentioned. That they did not recommend a general research program has been translated into some kind of dismissal of the field; that isn't what happened. The conclusion was precisely worded: the evidence is not conclusive. Many editors here seem to take that as an equivalent of "bunk." It's not. It means exactly what it says. That is, they meant that as to the situation when the review was performed. I'd say that the evidence now is more conclusive, but whether or not it reaches to the level of simple conclusive evidence isn't clear, and that would require far more careful and knowledgeable assessment than I'm capable of. Or that you are personally capable of, in my assessment. You can handle part of this, perhaps. We would need to, and I assume we will, look at details. Your criticisms seem to apply to some kinds of calorimetry or methods of assessing heat generation, and not to others. I don't see the application, at all, of your ideas to Arata's recent work, for example, and with regard to the Iwamura transmutation work, my guess is that you are an outsider, not an expert on the problems there, specifically. Welcome to the crowd. --Abd (talk) 20:18, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Example of the hysteria in 1989
We have text in the article: One of the more prominent reports of success came from a group at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which observed neutron production.[22] The Georgia Tech group later retracted their announcement.[23]. The first reference is to: New York Times, April 14, 1989, and the second is to New York Times, April 24, 1989, with more detail, but the first link covers the retraction. The Georgia Tech announcement of neutron detection was on Monday, April 10, and the retraction was on Thursday, April 13. a scientific instrument that was used to measure neutrons, a key byproduct of nuclear fusion, apparently gave inflated readings because the liquid it was measuring became as hot as 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

This report actually was irrelevant. It was a "report of success," perhaps, but so transient that it shouldn't have affected anything. Normally, such an experiment would have been reported, if at all, as "failure to detect neutrons," because, before publication, the kinks would almost certainly have been worked out. It wasn't said how they figured it out. The second article cited states that the Georgia Tech announcement of neutrons was one of two "first confirmations." However, the original announcement by Pons and Fleischmann was on March 23. From what we now know, any attempt to replicate the work in less than three weeks would likely have failed; techniques to find rapid excess heat and radiation with alleged reasonable reliability were not developed until much later. It would not he surprising, then, that the other announcement, from Texas A&M, then, was also defective.

The second article reports that Texas A&M announcement was in the morning, Monday, April 10. Then, ''At a news conference the next day, Charles Martin, the Texas A&M chemist who led the research team, was very careful to say that their work had not established cold fusion. All the team was claiming was that it had found the heat being produced by the electrochemical process. Dr. Martin said the researchers had stayed up the previous night writing a journal report, which was sent off before the news conference.''

Rush to publication, a foundation of bad science. This matter led me to Communicating science which examines this history in some depth and which may be a usable source for us. This is the kind of source that would be important for an article on the history of the affair. --Abd (talk) 19:11, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Would not "bad science" -- bad anything -- be precisely that which lacks foundation? Kevin Baastalk 13:10, 18 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Not exactly. There can be foundation for bad science. Problem is, it is not the Scientific method, but something else. Desire to be first to publish. Attachment to previously held opinions. Unwillingness to consider new ideas, or, alternatively, to provide a way for new ideas to be considered. (I'll come back to this.) Desire for funding. Competition, turf. Media oversimplification. Fuzzy concepts of consensus. Jumping to conclusions. Lack of communication. Etc.


 * A "way for new ideas to be considered" does not -- and cannot -- mean that everyone must constantly be open to considering new ideas on subjects generally considered closed. "Closed-mindedness" survives because it is usually efficient. It can be very frustrating, but it's also necessary, so those standing on the outside of a rigid "consensus" must learn to be patient, they are dealing with information filters that exist for very good reasons. Rather, it means that there are channels and ways for revisions of consensus to take place efficiently. It can be done. I won't detail how here, but I will point out that if scientists in general were more aware of the actual content of the 1989 and 2004 reviews (in spite of their alleged shortcomings), they would not be quite as generally dismissive of cold fusion as they are. There is real science to be done here. Elsewhere on this page, there is a discussion with Shanahan, I think it is worth following. --Abd (talk) 17:32, 18 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Pehaps "motive", "source", or something like that - in any case, if one chooses to use the word "foundation", they must concede that it is a shallow one. Anyways, I get what you're saying, just playing w/words here. :) Kevin Baastalk 21:03, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

A Chinese View on Summary of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2301330/A-Chinese-View-on-Summary-of-Condensed-Matter-Nuclear-Science

Li, X.Z., et al., "A Chinese View on Summary of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science," Journal of Fusion Energy, Vol. 23(3), p. 217-221, (2004) Cites Iwamura. --Abd (talk) 01:04, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

The journal is an engineering journal, most articles are related to hot fusion. --Abd (talk) 01:39, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * (At least this one does have an impact factor, no need to reply to thos comment, please) --Enric Naval (talk) 02:25, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Very cool web site. I'm annoyed that Science and Nature are listed under Cell & Molecular Biology but I can deal with it. Based on this analysis the Journal of Fusion Energy is completely isolated from the scientific community.  What warrants including this citation in this article?--OMCV (talk) 02:29, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * It's not the most reliable or well regarded journal, but I think the journal easily passes reasonable reliability standards, unlike the rather laughable Frontiers. It just needs to be understood that this isn't a particularly well regarded journal, and weighted appropriately. Phil153 (talk) 02:43, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Laughter is healthy, contempt is not. What, by the way, is wrong with the Frontiers series as reliable sources? Specifics? --Abd (talk) 02:49, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Whether a particular document is a "reliable" source depends on how that document is used in the article. The Chinese paper could be used as a reliable source that a particular person reported a certain result, but it shouldn't if it reports something dramatic like that the whole field changed because of that result. This is why I keep asking people to focus on EDITS first rather than sources. Olorinish (talk) 03:57, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * That's right, Olorinish, usage does depend on context. However, that is not the only approach, and when a topic is highly controversial, some background discussion first can make the later process much more efficient. If you want to focus on edits, please, be my guest. Participating in background discussion and consideration of sources in general is totally optional. Don't read it if you don't find it useful. Please. When I edit the article and I write, See Talk, then, yes, you should look for a Talk page comment specifically about that edit, especially before reverting it! --Abd (talk) 04:10, 11 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Contemptable sources deserve contempt. The Frontiers article is an embarassment to the writer, the review board, and the publisher, and not because of conclusions.  Similar conclusions are reached in the above paper, and in Storms, and I'm advocating for inclusion of those sources with appropriate weight.


 * About journal reliablility generally, I think the RS pages make the point well, although they are not clear enough and sometimes you have to go to example subpages. I'll have to tackle this on the RS pages to make them clearer.


 * The trouble is that there are tens of thousands of journals, and many of them are willing to publish all kinds of things for the right fee, or because a big name person is writing it or has influence, or because they're new and eager for articles. Often a key person on the editorial board is biased in a particular way or has peculiar opinions, and this reflects in what goes into the journal, regardless of peer review.  The reputation of a particular journal matters a great deal in how reliable an academic, peer reviewed source is considered.  This is even true among reliable publishers; some journals deliberately have more open policies allowing for speculative dialogue, which are not considered as anything but speculative dialogue by their peers.


 * This is why the ISI listings and eigenfactor rankings are so important, and why our RS pages states the vast majority of well regarded jouranls are indexed by the ISI web".   A journal that is not cited by its peers cannot be considered reliable, because it indicates that the articles in it or the journal's reputation generally are worth much to those peers.  This especially raises a WP:REDFLAG when the claims are extraordinary ones, and there is other evidence of poor scholarship or care.


 * RS is not a yes/no thing; the only thing binary is automatic exclusion of the worst sources such as self published works. A journal can have serious issues as to reliability and respectability in the field, in which case the things it references are close to worthless, especially in topics where it contradicts general mainstream views.  Phil153 (talk) 04:22, 11 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Which is one more reason why major journals, having taken the stand that CF is nonsense, must continue to keep that stand. After all, should they be proved wrong, with CF becoming mainstream science,  they  will be the ones contradicting the mainstream, and thus unrespectable! V (talk) 13:15, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, but Nature and Science and Physical Review A don't stop being industry leading journals because they publish a paper supportive of cold fusion. On the flip side, if they're the first to break credible research or reviews vindicating a major new field or theory, the upside is massive.  Your suggestion is just conspiracy theory with lipstick on it.


 * The point is that many of the tens of thousands of journals with low citation indexes and little regard in the field lack many good reasons to exercise care, and have plenty of causes to publish less than careful work. Just like The Baupville Daily News or North Korean Herald have far fewer reasons to be accurate than the New York Times.  Phil153 (talk) 13:55, 11 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm curious to know how a top-notch journal, that previously published papers dismissive of cold fusion, could publish a paper supportive of CF without its editors appearing to be fools (or worse)? Especially if the originally published articles are not formally retracted as "hasty" (or worse)?  My previous post assumed they wouldn't publish any pro-CF articles precisely because of this question.  And then I simply reached the logical conclusion, regarding the consequences of a prejudiced editorial mind-set...contemptable, it is! V (talk) 18:14, 11 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, if the CF researchers actually submitted a high quality paper that actually supported the contention that cold fusion was real (rather than just claiming that was so), I would assume they would publish it easily. Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:25, 11 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Except, the prejudiced mind-set automatically can do such things as assume  any  CF paper is low-quality. What have you to say about the claimed rapid appearance of excess heat in the co-deposition experiments?  Your anti-CF hypothesis previously involved great-enough timespan that one MIGHT accept the possibility of a calorimeter getting out of calibration in that span --but that amount of time doesn't pass in these experiments. V (talk) 22:51, 11 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Or...the prejudiced mind-set automatically can do such things as assume  any  CF paper is high-quality. "What have you to say about the claimed rapid appearance of excess heat in the co-deposition experiments?" Perfectly consistent with my proposed mechanism.  "Your anti-CF hypothesis previously involved great-enough timespan" - no, the DATA involved great timespans, and with the co-dep experimetns, it doesn't.  As I said, my explanation is perfectly consistent with all this data.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 11:21, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Nonsense! Nobody has that mindset at the "top" journals, while indications of the other mindset, the one I described in my last message, are documented in editorials in them.  And more nonsense:  You specified that the calorimeters got out of calibration.  You also specified the long timespan allowed buildup of material that would catalyze hydrogen/oxygen reactions.  You also needed the electrodes close enough together for plenty of oxygen to travel from its production site through the water (dissolved) to the other electrode, for any such reaction to occur.  You have not indicated that any of those conditions are true in the co-deposition experiments, much less all of them. V (talk) 15:02, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * ROFL...you really don't get it do you. That's why you shouldn't be editing this article, you can't attain or even approach neutrality.  The fact that you can't understand what I wrote and misstate it routinely is another reason.  (P.S. ...all of them are.)  Kirk shanahan (talk) 15:53, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Tsk, tsk, an obvious lie: "...all of them are." Because the long timespan is NOT a part of the co-depostion experiments.  Which proves you wrote nonsense, and therefore any claims on your part, that another cannot understand it, is ALSO nonsense.  Others can understand just fine that you have written nonsense.  And, being able to identify nonsense has nothing to do with POV; it has a great deal to do with plain facts and simple logic. V (talk) 17:33, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Define 'long' in the context of our discussion here. Kirk shanahan (talk) 18:07, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * You defined it yourself on your own talk page: "You need to remember that _most_ CF experiments runs hundreds of hours. The Szpak codep process cuts that way down" V (talk) 18:22, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent, I was going to keep going but it is getting a bit boring...) Wow…you just keep making my points for me! Thanks V! The rest of you, please note the full quote just below, note what it says about what is needed to get a heat shift, and note what I say about the co-dep process. Seems clear enough to me… ‘Long’ in this context is however long it takes to form the ‘special active surface state’ I explicitly postulated in my 2006 paper.

From my User Talk page: “This requires enough bubbles to be impacted to get a noticeable shift in heat production, which requires enough contaminants or structural changes at the surface to do that. That could take very long times in very clean systems, or, in the case of the co-deposition experiments, it could happen quickly due to the special conditions of that select system. You need to remember that _most_ CF experiments runs hundreds of hours. The Szpak codep process cuts that way down - why? Because it makes dendrititc Pd with lots of contaminants on it (from the plating chemicals). Kirk shanahan (talk) 21:54, 21 January 2009 (UTC)”

Now, what point was V trying to make? That I had somehow lied?? “Tsk, tsk, an obvious lie:” Yup, that’s what he said.

Lets see…I wrote above, responding to V (V’s comments in quotes):

“"What have you to say about the claimed rapid appearance of excess heat in the co-deposition experiments?" Perfectly consistent with my proposed mechanism. "Your anti-CF hypothesis previously involved great-enough timespan" - no, the DATA involved great timespans, and with the co-dep experimetns, it doesn't. As I said, my explanation is perfectly consistent with all this data.”

Then V wrote: “You also specified the long timespan allowed buildup of material that would catalyze hydrogen/oxygen reactions.”

So, does my comment from my UserTalk page from Jan 21 (which V _partially_ quotes) jive with what V says? Did I really lie??? Y’all be the judge… Kirk shanahan (talk) 19:01, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Why do you assume that the codep experiments involve a contaminated solution? You specify that a clean system takes a long time for contaminates to accumulate/have-an-effect, yet you offer no rationale why the codep experiments would not start off equally clean, and therefore not also require a long time for contaminates to build up.  Which therefore means you are not making sense.  As I indicated in a less-detailed way, above. V (talk) 20:04, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Oye ve! (Much banging of head on desk…)  “Clean” is a palladium-only surface.  Any chemical that contacts that can absorb and alter chemistry.  There are more chemicals in the codep process because in addition to the electrolyte chemicals, you have the plating chemicals.  As well, every chemical reagent used has contaminants, and the more reagents you use, the more contaminants you have.  Part of the conventional explanation for ‘heavy metal transmutation’ is concentration of contaminants on the electrode.  The codep approach both increases the electode surface area, allowing a faster, more efficeint concentration, but also profers more varied chemicals for absorption, i.e. it is a ‘dirtier’ process.  Keep it up V, you continue to prove my point...  Kirk shanahan (talk) 20:32, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * If you are going to arbitrarily change standard definitions, no wonder YOU think you are making sense while others don't. "Clean" in my book includes the whole system.  That means the chemicals used are as pure as available.  It means unneeded chemicals are not included.  For a codep experiment, the electrodes don't have to initially be palladium; palladium will be in one of the chemical solutions, to be plated (even if as dendrites) onto one of the electrodes.  Why you think there needs to be lots more junk in the experiment than a mixture of heavy water, electrolyte, and soluable palladium compound, is beyond reasonable.  It means the contaminants YOU claim must build up quickly, in a codep experiment, are not necessarily there, and don't get there in the short time of a codep experiment from, say, dust in the air.  Not to mention, the voltage used is intended to plate palladium and elecrolyze heavy water.  Since hydrogen and palladium have practically the same electronegativity, there is very little range that would encompass other elements.   So a great many elements, even if present as contaminates, will stay in solution at that voltage, and not become the kind of plated-on contaminants your hypothesis requires.  Platable candidates look to be molybdenum, rhodium, ruthenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, tungsten, gold, and lead.  Most of that list is too valuable to not have been carefully extracted at the chemical-product plant, and any chemist who knows his stuff, especially one aware of an argument like yours (how long ago did you say you published it?) would take steps to plate out anything less reactive than palladium, before using that solution in the main codep experiment, in which the palladium is expected to be plated out.  It means you still wrote nonsense. V (talk) 21:11, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "If you are going to arbitrarily change standard definitions, no wonder YOU think you are making sense while others don't. "Clean" in my book includes the whole system." - Given that we are talking about the 'special active surface state' that forms on an electrode surface, your book needs revising.  _I_ am using the standard definition of a clean surface from surface science.
 * No, you've told another lie. THIS is what you wrote: "That could take very long times in very clean systems" --The word "surface" is not in that quote.  **I** know I'm talking about what you wrote, but apparently you don't.  Which is more reason why the result of your writing is nonsense.


 * "That means the chemicals used are as pure as available." - Ah yes, that means 'still contaminated'.
 * I agree that what I wrote is not specifying 100% purity. The degree of impurity that qualifies as "contamination" is relative; it depends on the situation.  For example, your household tap water may have lead in it (from soldered joints in copper water pipes, but it depends on the age of the house).  Does that impurity count as contamination sufficient to discourage you from ever drinking any of it?


 * "It means unneeded chemicals are not included." - Your book again, not mine.
 * I should have been more clear. If a recipe calls for sodium chloride, I'm not going to add lithium fluoride.


 * "Why you think there needs to be lots more junk in the experiment than a mixture of heavy water, electrolyte, and soluble palladium compound, is beyond reasonable." - please cite (with sourcing) where I specify what I think needs to be there at the level you here imply that I do.
 * "It means the contaminants YOU claim must build up quickly, in a codep experiment, are not necessarily there," - which would those be, and more importantly, where do I specify them??? Citation please.
 * On your talk page you wrote: "it makes dendritic Pd with lots of contaminants on it (from the plating chemicals)." I then asked: "if the system is very clean, where are the contaminants coming from, that you need to exist?" --You never answered that.  Therefore I only have  your unsupported claim  (possibly equivalent to another lie) that there were lots of contaminants present.


 * "and don't get there in the short time of a codep experiment from, say, dust in the air." - nice reference to Bockris' work.


 * "Not to mention, the voltage used is intended to plate palladium and elecrolyze heavy water." - 'intended' being the key word.


 * "Since hydrogen and palladium have practically the same electronegativity, there is very little range that would encompass other elements. So a great many elements, even if present as contaminates, will stay in solution at that voltage, and not become the kind of plated-on contaminants your hypothesis requires." - Where do I specify this??
 * "dendritic Pd with lots of contaminants" --"with" can only apply if the contaminants electrolytically come out of solution, as in "plated-on".


 * "Platable candidates look to be molybdenum, rhodium, ruthenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, tungsten, gold, and lead. Most of that list is too valuable to not have been carefully extracted at the chemical-product plant," - first off, ppm concentrations of contaminants would likely be adequate, next, manufacturers at best offer '5-9"s' purity components in all but extremely rare cases, which means ppm level contaminants, finally, you fail to understand that my SASS is not limited to what you are claiming I limit it to. In fact I do NOT specify the nature of the SASS, as there is no specific data to support such an assignment.
 * I will express some confidence that you are flatly wrong, that such a tiny amount of impurity can catalyze the quantity of hydrogen-oxygen reaction at the RATE needed to explain the heat-production detected by the calorimeters. Especially since very few substances are able to catalyze the reaction in the first place, which lowers the odds that one of them will be platable along with palladium.  AND you are neglecting the fact that if one part per hundred thousand is your needed contaminant, right after one atom of it gets plated out, 99,999 palladium atoms also plate out at the same place and cover it, preventing it from being able to catalyze anything--I'm saying its effectiveness as a catalyst can't increase significantly, as plating continues.  One atom per hundred thousand will be a constant whether dissolved or at the surface of freshly-plated metal.  If we were discussing automobile catalytic converters, you'd be laughed out of town; one atom of catalyst (I see you mention platinum below) per 100,000 duds, at the interaction surface, is essentially the same as "poisoned to uselessness" (meaning, it's not about to catalyze a high rate of hydrogen/oxygen reactions).


 * "and any chemist who knows his stuff, especially one aware of an argument like yours would take steps to plate out anything less reactive than palladium, before using that solution in the main codep experiment, in which the palladium is expected to be plated out. - and where does it say that this was done by the codepers?  Specific citations please.  Quotations would be better.  (And, there is another problem even if this is done, which I will not explain at this point.  Let's see if you can guess it.)
 * I have no evidence that it was done, because there is no evidence that it needed to be done. But it remains a fact that in electrolysis the voltage determines which metals plate out; platinum can be plated out at a lower voltage than palladium.  If a solution contained both, and if one had reason to think that platinum, with its excellent catalytic properties when pure, would pose a problem when plating palladium, then plating platinum out of solution first solves the problem, because it will be buried by layers of palladium after the voltage is raised.


 * "(how long ago did you say you published it?)" - well, I never did publish what you imply I did in your diatribe above. Instead I just take the general condition of some "special active state", mentioned by Storms and perhaps others as well long ago, and add 'surface' to it since I studied a FPHE on Pt, which does NOT hydride, which means it must be occurring on the surface if related to the hydrogen.  I explicitly mentioned the SASS in my 2006 paper.
 * The answer to my question (2006?) merely would allow some comparison between experiments performed before and after it, to see what steps were taken to deal with things you claimed were problems. Where they took CounterStep "A" but not CounterStep "B" indicates (to me) places where that your description of "Problem A" was accepted as posssible, but your description of "Problem B" was considered to be nonsense, by the CF researchers who read your paper.


 * "It means you still wrote nonsense." - Well, if I had actually written what you say I did perhaps (but you are doing very poor job of understanding what I am saying). But in fact I didn't, so it certainly doesn't.  But what it does mean is that you are doing the standard CFer tactic of misrepresenting what I write in an illogical a fashion as possible so it becomes trivial to rebut.  Except they rebut the strawman version they create instead of what I write.  Looks good to the unaware layman, but proves nothing scientifically.  Your adoption of this tactic again proves you are  a POV-pusher who can't stand any criticism of the pro-CF position.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 03:46, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Looks to me like you are indulging in a twisted form of psychological projection. I ignore your additional nonsense, therefore. V (talk) 09:49, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "No, you've told another lie. THIS is what you wrote: "That could take very long times in very clean systems" --The word "surface" is not in that quote. **I** know I'm talking about what you wrote, but apparently you don't. Which is more reason why the result of your writing is nonsense."


 * Phase 3 - quoting out of context. - a) The _entire_ context of my thesis is the SASS.  The second "S" is for "surface".  b) Try looking at the sentence that preceeds the one you quote.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "I agree that what I wrote is not specifying 100% purity. The degree of impurity that qualifies as "contamination" is relative; it depends on the situation. For example, your household tap water may have lead in it (from soldered joints in copper water pipes, but it depends on the age of the house). Does that impurity count as contamination sufficient to discourage you from ever drinking any of it?"


 * Phase 4 - The use of red herrings. - What has any of this got to do with my thesis? (That was a rhetorical question, please don't answer it.) Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "I should have been more clear. If a recipe calls for sodium chloride, I'm not going to add lithium fluoride."


 * And my comment didn't refer to what you are discussing. Recall that 'unneeded chemicals' is your phrase.Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * " On your talk page you wrote: "it makes dendritic Pd with lots of contaminants on it (from the plating chemicals)." I then asked: "if the system is very clean, where are the contaminants coming from, that you need to exist?" --You never answered that. Therefore I only have your unsupported claim (possibly equivalent to another lie) that there were lots of contaminants present."


 * Phase 3 (again) - quoting out of context. - The key is the word 'dendritic'. If you a) understood my thesis, and b) read the full paragraph you extracterd the quote from, you would realize why.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * " "dendritic Pd with lots of contaminants" --"with" can only apply if the contaminants electrolytically come out of solution, as in "plated-on" " -  No, not really.  Again, if you understand my thesis you will understand why I replied 'not really'.   Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "I will express some confidence that you are flatly wrong, that such a tiny amount of impurity can catalyze the quantity of hydrogen-oxygen reaction at the RATE needed to explain the heat-production detected by the calorimeters."


 * What I actually wrote was: "... the clean metal surface under the bubble catalyzes H2+O2->H2O." So, again, your strawman fails to impress me. Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "Especially since very few substances are able to catalyze the reaction in the first place, which lowers the odds that one of them will be platable along with palladium. AND you are neglecting the fact that if one part per hundred thousand is your needed contaminant, right after one atom of it gets plated out, 99,999 palladium atoms also plate out at the same place and cover it, preventing it from being able to catalyze anything--I'm saying its effectiveness as a catalyst can't increase significantly, as plating continues. One atom per hundred thousand will be a constant whether dissolved or at the surface of freshly-plated metal. If we were discussing automobile catalytic converters, you'd be laughed out of town; one atom of catalyst (I see you mention platinum below) per 100,000 duds, at the interaction surface, is essentially the same as "poisoned to uselessness" (meaning, it's not about to catalyze a high rate of hydrogen/oxygen reactions)."


 * Phase 4 again, combined with Phase 2, the use of strawmen. Aside from the quote above, the only other time I invoke catalysis is here: "... possible in cells to get catalytic deposits formed in the gas space".  Within the context of this discussion it is clear that a better word thatn 'clean' in the above quote would have been 'bare'.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "I have no evidence that it was done, because there is no evidence that it needed to be done."  -  Say what??  What planet did you learn your science on?  Reports of heavy metal transmutation all over the place, and you think that is not evidence that might be explained by contaminant concentration?  I suggest you read Scott Little's RIFEX report...  Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "But it remains a fact that in electrolysis the voltage determines which metals plate out; platinum can be plated out at a lower voltage than palladium. If a solution contained both, and if one had reason to think that platinum, with its excellent catalytic properties when pure, would pose a problem when plating palladium, then plating platinum out of solution first solves the problem, because it will be buried by layers of palladium after the voltage is raised."


 * Another red herring, but you are getting close to the point I was going to mention last time. I'll give you another chance at it.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "The answer to my question (2006?) merely would allow some comparison between experiments performed before and after it, to see what steps were taken to deal with things you claimed were problems. Where they took CounterStep "A" but not CounterStep "B" indicates (to me) places where that your description of "Problem A" was accepted as posssible, but your description of "Problem B" was considered to be nonsense, by the CF researchers who read your paper."


 * Answering the 1st sentence: I _explicitly_ mentioned the SASS in my 2006 paper.  Pre-electrolyzing the electrolyte goes way back though, but I recall only one instance of it being reported in a CF-related paper right now, and I'm not sure it was a CFer or one of those who were unable to replicate results back in the early days.  The publication list is quite short post-2006, but the point is that this need is well known in electrochemical circles.  So "did they or didn't they?", that is the question.   Answering sentence 2: I agree, all CFers consider my explanation nonsense.  Unfortunately that is a bad decision on their part, since all their arguments are based on strawmen and use a lot of out-of-context quoting and red herrings.


 * P.S. What is Phase 1 you readers mught be asking?  This:  "No, you've told another lie." "your writing is nonsense" "(possibly equivalent to another lie)"  "Tsk, tsk, an obvious lie" - the ad hominem attack (AKA "If you don't like the message, shoot the messenger.")  V is a highly biased editor who doesn't want to understand the proposed conventional explanation for how to get a CCS, or the fact that the CCS is proven in one case and easily extrapolatable to all others via inductive reasoning.  As such, his edits should be expected to reflect this.  He should not edit the CF article and none of you should trust his writings.  I'm done wasting time responding to V for now at least.  Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Please identify the uncivil comments that I made, as I did with those that V made in the last paragraph of the section that you hid from view. Kirk shanahan (talk) 11:35, 16 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Kirk, Noren came to my Talk page and requested I respond to you. As you know, I'm trying to encourage your participation here, and that of other editors as well. This page isn't the place to deal with allegations of incivility except as they are affecting our community process; my judgment was of the exchange, not so much of each editor; an exchange like that takes two people, and while it may be easy to point out what one is "doing wrong," the fact is that the other is a part of it, and might be more subtly provoking the responses. My goal here is for discussions like that to cease, and certainly not to pin guilt on any specific person. If you want me to respond to this, which would require that I review your contributions personally and critically, please ask my on my Talk page, and I will respond, in this case, on yours. I certainly should not do it here, absent some special reason why all the editors of this article should see it. --Abd (talk) 17:11, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) However, all this only applies to balance when there are questions of conflict in sources. While there may be journals which are financially motivated (payment for publication), even these kill their own golden goose if they fail to be selective; but a journal like Frontiers of Physics in China has strong motivation to have good standards. The whole purpose of the Frontiers of "X" in China series is to raise respect for Chinese science, and the Chinese government is behind it as well as serious money. Cold fusion appears to be considered a respectable field in China, and the article that led to the title of this section simply reflects that. I'll remind editors that the publisher of FPC is Higher Education Press, and I wonder if there is any larger publisher in the world that doesn't have an article here yet. They are roughly number 45; and they are in active cooperation with Thomson Reuters, which is number one in the world, and which considers FPC to have very high standards (citations for this have been provided elsewhere, above. Some editors here may think the journal "laughable," but that does little more than expose their POV and bias. It's clear that, since they publish in English, they need a better copy editor! Absolutely, I don't deny that there are problems with FPC, but "laughable," they are not. This will all be tested if edits are asserting using information from FPC, which I expect is likely. --Abd (talk) 16:05, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Again with the accusations of POV and bias. Reliable does not just apply to source conflicts, it's a sliding scale, and it also applies to general conflicts with mainstream understanding.  Please read very carefully and absorb WP:REDFLAG.  It's part our core content policies.  Phil153 (talk) 16:24, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Sometimes it feels like swimming through molasses here. How do we know what "mainstream understanding" is? Does it appear, lotus-born? Or is it based on what we find in reliable sources? I'll stand with it. While WP:RS isn't a rigid standard, we should not pick and choose among reliable sources, unless there is *conflict* between them, and there is no conflict with a "mainsream understanding" unless there is a reliable source regarding that understanding. So the conflict is between two sources, (or sources on one side and sources on the other); further, the determination that there is conflict is itself a complex task, sometimes. If it requires synthesis, it can get dicey. If there is reliable source on the conflict itself, much better (perhaps a third source that covers the first two).

Suppose that we have source A which makes a statement, and it's in the article. Then I come up with source B, which says something different. It seems contradictory to me. Can I put in the article, "however, contradicting this, B asserts that ..."? I'd say that, generally, absent clear consensus or reliable source on the contradiction, not just A and B (let's assume they don't mention each other), we shouldn't assert contradiction. If it is acceptable to the editors, just saying, "however, B asserts that," may be okay, but even putting the statements together like that implies contradiction, so caution is in order.

There is no way to find NPOV without respect for consensus and consensus process. Which often takes a lot of discussion. --Abd (talk) 20:42, 11 March 2009 (UTC)