Talk:Cold fusion

An editor has been banned from editing the Cold fusion article, for a period of one year.
	Pcarbonn has been banned by the Arbitration Committee from editing the Cold fusion article. The user is additionally prohibited from discussing or proposing changes to the article, on this talk page. Upon expiry of this ban, any editor may remove this notice. Please refer to Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Cold fusion, the relevant Arbitration case in which the editor was banned, for further details.
This notice was posted by Tznkai (talk) 22:07, 15 December 2008 (UTC) on behalf of the Arbitration Committee.

Major lead problems

As currently written, the lead pretty much directly states that muon-catalysed fusion has severe theoretical problems and has been rejected by science

This is because someone keeps making the lead paragraph talk about the broad definition of cold fusion, but has not bothered to transition to the Fleishmann and Pons claims after that point, meaning that the paragraphs discussing problems with Fleishmann and Pons' claims now read as if they applied to a wide array of mainstream physics as well.

Seriously, can't we just through all the mainstream physics stuff into disambiguation and keep the focus of this on the Fleishmann and Pons stuff (and related fringe theories and crankery) that everyone means when they talk about cold fusion nowadays anyway, and just let the broader definition stand as part of a disambiguation link, e.g.

This article is about the Fleishmann and Pons claims of 1987, and the resultant controversy. For fusion at below the high tempratures needed for thermonuclear fusion, see muon-catalysed fusion.

Might have to skip using the template and just write the text in italics (for instance, adding "and related articles" at the end of that would be more accurate, but we could easily disambiguate it, and avoid all these problems. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 04:25, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

It used to have a much better definition in the lead, but it was "simplified" a few days ago here. I'd certainly support restoring the old version of the lead. Not sure about moving this into the disambig section. Phil153 (talk) 04:29, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

We only discuss the one definition in this article, it just confuses matters to act as if we're going to discuss other things too. There are accepted physical processes that were rarely referred to as cold fusion before the events we do discuss, we should make this clear. We should also make it clear they are not what we are discussing. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 21:14, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

I offered a reasonable first paragraph some time ago. Nobody claimed it had a POV problem; they just thought it wasn't "formal" enough for an encyclopedia. Even though you might be aware that most readers would rather not wade through technical jargon. So here, I'll copy it so you can complain about it all over again:

The phrase "Cold Fusion" is a description. Whether or not it is a correct description has been disputed ever since 1989, when it was coined. In that year the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons described some experiments involving the electrolysis of heavy water, and claimed they had observed quantities of heat energy being released that could not be explained in terms of ordinary chemical interactions. They therefore proposed that the energy could be explained if nuclear fusion reactions were occurring between deuterium nuclei under relatively ordinary physical conditions, far colder than the conditions inside stars, where fusion typically occurs in Nature. It is known that special events such as muon-catalyzed fusion can occur even at liquid-hydrogen temperatures, but it is also known that muons are not available to explain Fleischmann's and Pons' results. Therefore the label "Cold Fusion" exists to describe whatever other mechanism might be able to do that, and that label has persisted in spite of all the conflicting research carried out afterward, some of which directly contradicts the original claims that something unexplainable in terms of chemistry had happened.

This article will describe the original experiment, attempts to duplicate it, variant experiments on the general theme, theoretical objections, ...

(take it from there, folks!) V (talk) 15:16, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I can create a complaint, myself. I think I saw something in the article that indicate the phrase was actually coined before 1989, which if true would require the above to need a revision. V (talk) 13:28, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

From a science standpoint, "cold fusion" is a hypothesis to explain what is commonly called the Fleischmann effect (that page redirects here) and other phenomena. There is much more consensus that the effect exists than for the hypothesis that it is caused by fusion. Note, of course, that the F effect might be caused by some systematic experimental error, in which case the "cause" is that error, not fusion. There is quite possibly less consensus on any specific hypothesis regarding the existence and specific cause of such an error than there is over cold fusion. Shanahan, here and in published work, claims just such an error, a calibration problem, but this would not, of course, explain evidence of radiation and detection of nuclear ash. Another hypothesis would be that CF is a result of experimental bias, i.e., researchers are looking for a thing; failures are not reported, only successes are. This possibility is particularly of concern when individual experiments sometimes "fail," when an effect is difficult to reproduce. There is, however, a remarkable paper presented at ICCF14 (2008) which reports Bayesian analysis of a large number of CF experiments, including many replication failures, and showing that if a simple set of criteria are applied to the experimental reports, experiments meeting all of these criteria (I think there are four) showed excess heat, and those that failed one or more of the criteria were much less likely to show heat. They conclude excess heat under these more-precise conditions is confirmed with high reliability.

One of the most important and unfortunate aspects of the situation was that the hypothesis that cold fusion was the cause became confused with the experimental report of excess heat. The implication that this was cold fusion caused massive premature independent attempts to replicate, based on inadequate information and understanding of the necessary experimental conditions, and, quite simply, it's not surprising that this early failure to replicate existed. To jump from that to a conclusion that the experimental science was bad was, from a scientific point of view, a non-sequitur. It must be said that the conclusion, from the early work, that fusion was taking place was also quite premature. It remained quite controversial even up to 2004, where a majority consulted for the DOE report considered the evidence "not conclusive." But I think a majority also considered that the F effect was real, i.e., that there was more heat than expected, and that further research was warranted.

When I first started looking at this article, I pointed out that the DOE report recommended further research. It was claimed at that time, quite confidently, that this was mere boilerplate, that "they always recommend that." However, if you read the individual reports from the reviewers, it is quite clear that it was a strong opinion, not just bureaucratic hedging. --Abd (talk) 13:33, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

You also made the claim that the majority of the 2004 DoE panel thought that there was excess heat back in January. At the time I pointed out that this characterization was incorrect, that the panel was "evenly split". Was that in any way unclear? --Noren (talk) 07:58, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

I didn't notice this until now. I did not make the claim Noren claims I did, and I worry about editors who can't seem to read the sources they cite. I made a casual comment from memory, it was this:

There was substantial opinion among the consulted experts (majority, I think,) that something anomalous is going on, and some opinion that it was or could be nuclear in nature (strong majority that this wasn't yet "conclusive").

I did not say that "the majority" thought there was excess heat. What I asserted was "substantial opinion," which "evenly split" more than qualifies as. Evenly split is one short of a majority. Not bad for a memory that was noted as such, with the qualifier "I think.") Now, what about "something anomalous"? Quoting from the review:

Evaluations by the reviewers ranged from: 1) evidence for excess power is compelling, to 2) there is no convincing evidence that excess power is produced when integrated over the life of an experiment. The reviewers were split approximately evenly on this topic. Those reviewers who accepted the production of excess power typically suggest that the effect seen often, and under some understood conditions, is compelling. The reviewers who did not find the production of excess power convincing cite a number of issues ....

As reported, the reviewers were divided "approximately evenly" on the topic of excess power. But the one side is claiming that the evidence is "compelling." That's a strong statement. The other side did not find the evidence "convincing." I would ordinarily assume that, unless the world has been divided into factions with no middle, that some of the latter group would consider that "something was anomalous," -- or could be anomalous -- but not "convincing." So, while I'm not prepared to prove the accuracy of my statement, (1) I didn't make a claim of a majority, it was stated as a possibility from my memory, and (2) that it was a majority would be consistent with what the report says. There is more documentation on the panel that bears examination, but the central point I keep returning to is that the 2004 report is often assumed to be a rejection. It was not. The panel was divided, and we don't see this level of division in ordinary "fringe science." --Abd (talk) 02:40, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

The statement that Abd made above that I was responding to, "But I think a majority also considered that the F effect was real, i.e., that there was more heat than expected, and that further research was warranted." indicates that he believes a falsehood. It is indeed worrisome that he does not seem to have read either the report itself or my reply back in January, else he would have known that there was no such majority who thought there was more heat than expected.

Abd, To turn your "Evenly split is one short of a majority." justification around, would you respond favorably to a claim that "Most reviewers did not find evidence for excess heat" if that statement were justified with "Evenly split is one more than a minority"?--Noren (talk) 05:23, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Muon-catalysed fusion

I suggest a section on muon-catalysed fusion. The book by F. Close ("Too Hot to Handle") has a section on muon-catalysed fusion and treats it as a type of cold fusion. (I don't know what other sources do.) ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:01, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

The section would be a brief description and comparison with other asserted forms of cold fusion; the section would reference the mail article, Muon-catalyzed fusion.

Our article doesn't give a decent definition of cold fusion. This is what we have: postulated nuclear fusion process of unknown mechanism offered to explain a group of disputed experimental results first reported by electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons.

That's not wrong, but note that this excludes much of the field of Condensed matter nuclear science, which article was forcibly merged here by a now-banned editor, enforced by an administrator.

The problem is that there are political issues over the naming. One of the major (and vague) arguments against "cold fusion" is that it's allegedly impossible, because of the Coulomb barrier, except at high temperatures. Muon-catalyzed fusion is a clear counterexample to this. Our article, Stephen Jones claims that Jones was the first to use the term "cold fusion," referring to muon-catalyzed fusion. Later, it was his desire to distance himself from the Fleischmann and Pons work, so the name was deprecated. Clearly, though, it's fusion taking place at low temperatures, through the mediation of a muon. One of the theories advanced to account for alleged deuterium fusion in palladium is screening by electrons rather than by muons. The behavior of electrons in a lattice can be different from that in a plasma or in free space. --Abd (talk) 21:46, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

I agree that muon-catalyzed fusion should have its own article, for a number of reasons. But I also think it should be covered by this article, in summary style, which would then cover all forms of fusion that take place at temperatures inadequate to overcome the Coulomb barrier directly.

However, "cold fusion" is a popular term. The term for the general phenomenon is "low energy nuclear reactions," or "chemically assisted nuclear reactions (thus lenr-canr), and the field is now referred to as Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. In the scheme of things, overall, we'd have an article on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, which would cover the whole field, with possible subarticles on specific examples. (Muon-catalyzed fusion, I'm not sure if it would fall under CMNS, but I think the actual work is done in condensed matter, high temperatures could reduce the reaction rate, I think. However, CMNS is generally based, in theory, on the more accurate Quantum Electrodynamics, necessary to model the condensed matter environment, and that analysis isn't necessary for muon-catalyzed fusion, if I'm correct, which can be understood with the more approximate Quantum Mechanics.) Cold fusion would become an article on the "cold fusion affair," the very interesting history of what led up to the 1989 announcement, the furor, the political intrigue, the rush and haste to confirm, with scientific norms pushed aside, the mass condemnation and assumption of "no replication" when clearly there hadn't been time to reproduce, the entrenchment of rejection, the harm done to scientific inquiry by the "pariah science" label, the ongoing research efforts and their political vicissitudes, the chicanery and fraud, and the ongoing criticism and its basis (i.e., present research rejected based on twenty-year-old negative results?), etc. --Abd (talk) 21:46, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

There is already a hatnote at the top of the article directing readers to the muon article. (If I understand well, "cold fusion" was a short-lived name that is no longer in use, so that would be enough. Details can be given at the muon article.) --Enric Naval (talk) 05:04, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

There are two issues: the name (i.e., usage) and the substance, i.e., "cold fusion" implies fusion at low temperatures, and muon-catalyzed fusion is just that. Suppose that it turns out that there is some other fundamental particle which had escaped notice, or some similar effect, that functions like muons in catalyzing fission at low temperatures, but only in a condensed matter environment. Or suppose that electrons are the particle involved in the P-F effect. Why would only one of these be called 'cold fusion' and not the other? The name is "no longer in use," quite clearly, for political reasons. Because muon-catalyzed fusion is of a nature such as to make it, almost certainly, not utilizable for commercial power generation, it was easily set aside and treated differently. By the way, it is also quite possible that deuterium fusion through palladium loading is likewise not usable, though the jury is out on that and remain out. If it works, there is no intrinsic reason why it couldn't be used. The Arata approach has already been used to generate power, sustained, at low levels, in a demonstration, running a Stirling engine. (This is not a claim that there was net energy payback; though my seat-of-the-pants judgment of the overall energy balance of the experiment is that there has been.) 7 g. of palladium catalyst, deuterium gas loaded into it to saturation at high pressure, there is heating there initially due to friction and other effects. (Palladium gets the hots for hydrogen, I think.) (I'm not sure I've understood this.) Overall calorimetry wasn't done; what was done was to study energy flow, i.e., the experimental cell, a pressure vessel, was contained within another vessel, an isolation cell. See the charts in Arata's recent work, showing temperature differential between ambient, the isolation cell, and the experimental cell. Steady generation of heat, very clearly, some residual effect that doesn't decline with time. (Some of the initial heating is considered to be fusion by Arata, at a higher rate. Other work, such as that of Iwamura, considered flow of deuterium through the lattice to be important; Arata is reporting a phenomenon at lower levels that sustains. This is a low-level "heat after death" phenomenon. How much of Arata has been confirmed, and to what extent is Arata confirming earlier work?

Why the extended discussion? Well, cold fusion caused the flap it did and generated the response it did because of the energy generation potential, which certainly isn't commercially realized yet. I haven't been able to figure out of Blacklight Power is a genuine research project, commercial project, or sophisticated con. (And, again, I think there is RS on them.)

One of the major arguments against cold fusion, commonly advanced, is, well, if it's real, how come there have been no commercial applications? However, Fleischmann claims to have believed that, early on, commercial applications would take a Manhattan-scale research project, which didn't happen. The experiment looked simple, when it was poorly understood, i.e., before it was understood how sensitive it is to exact conditions. Many different conditions are now known under which such reactions are reported; part of what that large-scale project would be doing is studying how to optimize the effect. Obviously, as something that only happens occasionally, with the theory being little-understood, it's not terribly useful. What's interesting about the Arata work is that it seems to be capable of operating continuously. He calls the cells "reactors." If the work is valid, a few degrees of steady heating from 7g of palladium that is not consumed to any significant degree, the deuterium is consumed but still at a tiny rate (generating helium), could be scaled up. How efficient it would be, though, would depend on the behavior at higher temperatures. My guess, though: it will work. --Abd (talk) 05:35, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

This is all your own opinion. Please provide sources showing common usage of "cold fusion" to describe something other than the phenomena described by Pons and Fleischmann and the stuff spawning from it. --Enric Naval (talk) 07:33, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Enric, you totally miss the point. Sure, "Cold fusion" in popular usage ("common usage")," refers to the P-F work and efforts to duplicate it or otherwise understand it. However, one research investigation leads to more. "Cold fusion" refers to alleged deuterium fusion. There are now other reports indicating fusion and fission reactions, catalyzed in the condensed matter state. Iwamura is only one source. It's difficult to classify Iwamura's work under "cold fusion," but it certainly is low-energy nuclear reactions, condensed matter nuclear reactions. Iwamura's work isn't covered by the popular term. But, sure, it arose out of investigations inspired by Fleischmann's work. Further, there is a whole story to be told, available in reliable secondary source, about the reaction to Fleischmann's work, the allegations back and forth, the social story, which is largely absent from Wikipedia at the moment, perhaps because the antifringe crowd tried desperately to confine this article to "science."

Is Cold fusion a science article? If so, why does it bear the name of a popular conception? What did the 2004 DOE report call the field? Here, we have what we have considered a reliable source, but we use a different name. Why?

Hint: They called it Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.

Further, there is a lot of work on the Fleischmann-Pons effect. Excess heat. The papers don't mention fusion. Are they about cold fusion? On what basis would you claim that they are? You are aware, I presume, that in 2004 half the DOE reviewers considered evidence for the F-P effect to be "compelling." The other half held out, pointing out possible defects in experimental design. My opinion is that we should have an article on the F-P effect, which would cover that specific field, and research and analysis and review of it. A science article. Cold fusion would then summarize that article as a section with reference to the main article on that narrower topic. Etc. One of the reasons we have had and are having such difficulty is that we have been stuffing multiple topics into a single article. Sure, they are related. But some of the topics are apples and oranges. Science history is a different topic than science itself, it includes discussion of the people involved, what they did, how they responded, what was in the popular media, and so forth. --Abd (talk) 01:33, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

We organize articles by topic, as determined by how reliable sources subdivide human knowledge. Muon-catalyzation has been checked and rejected as a possible explanation; basically, they are not stable and it would require a huge influx of cosmic rays cascading down to generate enough natural muons to have an effect. Blacklight Power is less a "genuine research project" and more a ... well, the sources are cited in the article. They might be worth mentioning as part of the modern movement, but I am not sure without checking exactly how tangential their relationship is. Also, essentially no one else thinks hydrinos exist. Aaaand I will just sign off with a plea for nice solid secondary sources before we start reporting anything other than "some proponents proclaim". - Eldereft (cont.) 16:43, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Eldereft, perhaps you misunderstood my proposal. I wasn't proposing discussing muon-catalysed fusion as a possible explanation for the Fleischmann-Pons effect. My proposal is to make a section of this article which is a summary of the muon-catalysed fusion article, per WP:SUMMARY. Yes, we organize by topic: muon-catalysed fusion is a form of cold fusion, or at least is a form of low-energy nuclear reaction, and note that low-energy nuclear reaction redirects to this page. Close's book considers it a form of cold fusion. We also organize articles per due weight; if books about cold fusion generally give a certain amount of space to muon-catalysed fusion, then we need to give it similar weight. I'd appreciate it if people who have access to other books on cold fusion would state whether they mention muon-catalysed fusion and how much space they devote to it. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 13:36, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Enric Naval: If sources on Cold Fusion spend time talking about muon-catalysed fusion, then we should do the same here; just a hatnote is not sufficient due weight in my opinion, but it should be mentioned within the article itself. This book: Close, Frank E. (1992), Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion (2 ed.), London: Penguin, ISBN 0-14-015926-6 has several pages on muon-catalysed fusion and treats it as a form of cold fusion. What do other books about cold fusion do? ☺Coppertwig (talk) 14:49, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Hum, I had never thought of looking for comparisons to the muon thing. I can see comparisons the public announcement of cold fusion by F&P with the public announcement by Jones, and how this affected the public reception [1] (see top of page and footnote 5) [2] (page 223, although it's treated also at other pages that are not viewable), the "undead science" book deals with it [3] In this last link, page 40 can be used to source the "cold fusion" name. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:04, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the sources, Enric Naval. I'm not proposing making a comparison, but covering the topic of muon-catalysed fusion within this article as a form of cold fusion. For now, rather than adding a whole section (which I still might or might not want to do later, depending on further examination of sources to establish how much mention will be due weight within this topic), I suggest changing "Jones had worked on muon-catalyzed fusion for some time, and had written an article on the topic entitled "Cold nuclear fusion" that had been published in Scientific American in July 1987. " to "Jones has worked for some time on muon-catalyzed fusion, a known method of inducing fusion without high temperatures. He had written an article on the topic entitled "Cold nuclear fusion" that had been published in Scientific American in July 1987." I think the sources we've already seen (including the very Scientific American article mentioned in the passage) justify giving at least this much weight to it as a subtopic. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 20:19, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

I went ahead and inserted that modification, I think it adds relevant context. I only changed "fusion" to "nuclear fusion" and took the reference (nobody is disputing that muon-catalyzed fusion works and they can go look at the muon article if they have problems with it). --Enric Naval (talk) 21:29, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!! Your version is better. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:31, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Additions to "further developments"

I edited the latest insertion by Abd [4]. I cleaned up the following:

• Delinking of all the redlinks
• Writing for proper weight
• Added more sources instead of press releases
• Removed irrelevant information

Abd, I know you're excited and believe that cold fusion is on the verge of being vindicated (I'm not sure you're aware of previous flashes in the pan), but there's no reason to redlink all the things you think will have articles if it does become vindicated. There's also no need to insert irrelevant and poorly weighted histories. This is just a press release, this is still a fringe field, and the claims are still not accepted or even close to being accepted by the mainstream. We're an encyclopedia, not News of the World. Phil153 (talk) 02:37, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

I also undid another edit from Abd [5]. I can only describe this edit as whitewashing. (and sorry for using this strong language, but, well, it's what I would think from any similar edit that I found in any other article) --Enric Naval (talk) 18:07, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

That's borderline, Enric. Anyway, suit yourself. Here is what I did:

Technology", in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the announcement of cold fusion. At the conference, researchers with the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) reported detection of neutrons in a cold fusion cell using a CR-39 detector, a result published months earlier in the peer-reviewed journal Naturwissenschaft. The findings were described by the researchers as "very significant", but mainstream confirmation of the results is lacking.

I removed the "very significant" comment because it is the researchers talking about their own work. Significance is indeed established by the media response, but the citation given is inadequate to support that, and I would much rather see, if we are going to have text about significance, have it be sourced from independent statements. They do exist. As to "mainstream confirmation of the results is lacking," that was not supported by the source, and is apparently synthesis. (I.e., "I'm not aware of mainstream confirmation, therefore we can say there is no mainstream confirmation." However, around here, whatever confirmation of cold fusion is published, it is apparently, by definition, not mainstream. Naturewissenschaften is pretty mainstream, that they have published the SPAWAR work is a kind of "mainstream confirmation," but this is all attempt to create an alleged POV balance through synthesis. I put in what was solid from the sources, nothing more, and definitely less than was possible (my original edit to this section had much more information.)

Enric Naval then made this edit:

The findings were described by the researchers as "very significant", although it was criticized because it doesn't explain how could fusion could happen in the described conditions. Krivit pointed out that the results could be caused by some other unknown nuclear process.

Since the report isn't about cold fusion, but about the detection of neutrons, and proposed hypotheses about the cause of those neutrons are not central, and because the criticism isn't shown to be informed, the source is a wire service, which is problematic for WP:RS. The Krivit comment is true. Krivit, if you read what's available of his comments, considers the work very significant and is really only trying to distinguish between the core of the report (Neutrons!) from the speculations and hypotheses, on which one must know much more (about the context and the continued experimental work) to have a cogent opinion.

So, I edited it again, to:

The findings were described by the researchers as "very significant". Steven Krivit of New Energy Times noted that the results could be caused by some unknown nuclear process other than fusion.

As far as I'm concerned, the "very significant" fluff could be taken out. If it wasn't significant, we wouldn't allow it in the article! The "criticized" was passive and not attributed.

Then, I addressed other issues in the report with [6]:

I simplified the caption of the triple-track image.

I replaced reported detection of neutrons in a cold fusion cell using a CR-39 detector... with reported detection of neutrons in a palladium/deuterium co-deposition cell, finding characteristic triple tracks in a CR-39 detector....

This is much more informative and specific. If you look at the CR-39 article, you will see classic triple-track pitting from neutrons. What is a "cold fusion cell"? Remember, some of us don't believe there is any such thing as cold fusion. But I presume that most of us do believe that there are cells where palladium and deuterium are co-deposited onto the cathode, and this has been done since the 1990s, it is one of the simplest and most reliable methods of setting up the Fleischmann-Pons effect. The paper doesn't mention "cold fusion cell." The press release doesn't mention a "cold fusion cell." Krivit is saying that it might not be fusion. He's right: there are other low-energy nuclear reactions that have been proposed. In fact, if "cold fusion" is the cause of the heat, that is, if there is some predominant reaction that generates the heat, that reaction isn't the cause of the neutrons, at least not directly, because there are far too few neutrons to be more than some unusual byproduct. It's connected, whatever it is, but how connected I'm not sure.

I also took out reference to Naturwissenschaften as a "life sciences journal," which was clearly placed there to impeach the credibility of the journal with respect to articles on a field that crosses over chemistry and physics. But that's a gross misunderstanding of the journal, derived from some weird way that Springer classifies the journal on-line. If you look at the mission statement of the journal, which I've cited elsewhere, it's very clear that this is quite like Nature, it's a general natural sciences journal, which expressly solicits articles on crossover topics, and physics and chemistry are included.

This was reverted by Enric Naval with (Undid revision 279799778 by Abd (talk) oh good god)

Indeed. Enric then reverted again with (revert too, of course it's a criticism, read the source, he is explaining all that is wrong with the paper)

First of all, what's the source and who is being talked about? This is the text that Enric replaced: The findings were described by the researchers as "very significant", although it was criticized because it doesn't explain how could fusion could happen in the described conditions

Passive voice, unattributed criticism, please, no. Further, as Krivit points out, the paper is reporting significant experimental results, and whether it is explained or not is really beside the point. These aren't physicists, they are chemists, and chemistry is what they did, though they used one tool from nuclear physics, CR-39. They report, previously, in these cells, excess heat and copious short-range ionizing radiation. In this report, they show the presence of small numbers of energetic neutrons. So, the "criticism" is that they don't provide an "explanation." But some very bright physicists have been working on this problem for 20 years and there is no consensus on explanation. Before explanation comes experiment and data, and it's been pointed out many times in reliable source that if it's demanded that theory come first before we will look at the data, this is the "death of science," I think it's been called.

However, in fact, the paper does present mechanisms, and refers to prior theoretical work; however, this isn't central to the paper.

The "criticized" here is apparently referring to the Agence France-Presse report. In that report, we have this:

Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss's published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.

"It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons," he told the Houston Chronicle.

"The whole point of fusion is, you're bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow."

There are two criticisms here: one is that no theoretical basis is provided. But that's obvious, in fact. This isn't a paper on theoretical physics. The criticism boils down to "This looks like cold fusion, which is impossible, because [of the Coulomb barrier]."

The other criticism would be cogent, if it were accurate. I.e., And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons. It's bogus objection. This was the source of my comment somewhere that we should extend a little assumption of competence to these people, the paper was, after all, published in a major journal with tight peer review.

Neutrons are a characteristic sign of nuclear reactions. You get them from fusion or fission. So, what sources would there be? Cosmic rays can produce fission and fusion reactions, and certain alpha emitters can cause fusion-fission reactions in a target. Is it a reasonable hypothesis that the neutrons are from cosmic radiation or from natural radioactivity in the apparatus?

The hypothesis is easy to test, actually. I think it might be about time that editors here read the paper. This was published in a peer-reviewed journal, what is there trumps what is in the media about it, as well as comments by a physicist who might just be responding to a reporter's phone call without studying the research. Had this physicist ever heard of the SPAWAR work before? The paper itself is at http://www.newenergytimes.com/Library2/2008/2008BossTripleTracks.pdf

Please look at the left-hand column of p. 136. There is extensive discussion of alternate possibilities for the radiation (which includes the ionizing radiation reported previously).

After reporting prior work from other researchers finding radiation, they describe this:

After etching, it has been observed that the density of tracks on the CR-39 detector is greatest where the cathode had been in contact with the detector (Mosier-Boss et al. 2007). This indicates that the source of the tracks is the Pd that had been plated on the cathode. The distribution of the tracks along the length of the cathode is inhomogeneous suggesting that some Pd sites are more active than others. Results of these experiments also showed that the production of charged particles occurred in bursts. Control experiments indicated that the tracks were not due to radioactive contamination of the cell components; nor were they due to impingement of D2 bubbles on the surface of the CR-39 detector; nor where they the result of chemical attack by D2, O2, or Cl2 (Mosier-Boss et al. 2007). These experiments also indicated that LiCl is not essential for the production of energetic particles and that the density of tracks significantly decreases, by at least three orders of magnitude, when H2O is substituted for D2O. Since the natural abundance of deuterium in light water is 0.015%, it is possible that the tracks observed in the light water experiments could actually be due to Pd–D interactions. Microscopic examination of the CR-39 detectors used in Pd–D electrolysis has been done in areas where the density of tracks is less. In these areas, what appear to be triple tracks are observed interspersed among the solitary tracks. The number of these triple tracks is very low—on the order of a ten or less per detector and are only observed in heavy water experiments. These triple tracks have been observed in every Pd–D co-deposition experiment that has been conducted using Ag, Au, or Pt cathodes in both the presence and absence of an external electric or magnetic field. When Ni screen is used as the cathode, tracks and triple tracks are only observed when an external electric or magnetic field is applied. Triple tracks are indicative of a reaction resulting in the formation of three particles of equal mass and energy. In this communication, the origins of these triple tracks are investigated.

This is the conclusion of the paper:

The mechanism by which DD and DT fusion reactions can occur in Pd is not yet understood; nevertheless, theories are currently under development. However, since no tracks, single or triple, were obtained when CuCl2 was used in place of PdCl2, it can be concluded that the deuterium must be inside a metal lattice for these reactions to occur and not simply adsorbed on the surface of the metal. This implies that the metal lattice facilitates these reactions indicating that nuclear phenomena can be influenced by the atomic and electronic environment.

Now, is "in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons." in any way a cogent criticism of the paper? It appears that they excluded everything they could think of. If this physicist can think of something else as a reasonable possibility, why, I'm sure he could write a communication to Naturwissenschaften. Meanwhile it should be understood that we have peer-reviewed reliable source, the paper itself. We have the press release by ACS, and we have massive press notice, and, so far, nothing seriously notable as criticism except yesterday's lunch, i.e., all the old criticisms recycled as if nothing new had been found. Take a look at the early criticisms, how important neutrons were considered. There is a very interesting comment in The Economist today:

Certainly there would appear to be something strange going on. But even if Dr Boss’s results really are evidence of high-energy neutrons, many physicists will continue to deny that cold fusion could be real. That is because there is no theoretical explanation for electrochemical cold fusion within the existing laws of physics.

So: "Physicist denies that cold fusion could be real. Dog bites man. The Pope is Catholic." Sure, this article must note the existing "consensus," which is not a scientific consensus but a social and political phenomenon. That consensus wasn't confirmed by the 2004 DOE report, it was not ever a real scientific consensus, but a kind of mass hysteria (the initial rush to confirm or refute) combined with natural skepticism. The skepticism was quite appropriate, and it remains appropriate, but at a certain point, healthy science will start to look at experimental data. From what I've been seeing, the data has actually been strong for more than a decade, indicating LENR, and the inertia and frozen assumptions from twenty years ago is quite adequate to explain the skeptical half to two-thirds of the DOE panel. We have to remember that those panels were convened, not to make scientific determinations, but funding determinations. It remains unclear whether or not there are serious energy generation possibilities from cold fusion. The conditions are extraordinarily sensitive, and the heat generated low compared to the expense of the preparation and intrinsic cost of the materials. Sure, it's possible that it could be scaled up, but ... Fleischmann wrote that commercializing cold fusion would take a Manhattan-level project, i.e., truly massive investment. I still find the 2004 DOE conclusions reasonable, but it should be noted that the "mainstream journals" haven't responded to the suggestions of the DOE, though, in reality, that's not the case with all mainstream journals, Naturewissenschaften is not a fringe journal. Nor is, in fact, Frontiers of Physics in China. Or the Japanese physics journals that Arata has been publishing in. Etc. --Abd (talk) 02:55, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

I will be reviewing the edits made in the last day further, in line with what I've discussed here, and, of course, all comments are welcome. Except, please don't waste space with tl;dr. Just dr if it is tl. --Abd (talk) 02:55, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Errrr, hum,you are mixing here a lot of topics that have their own sections below. I was talking about this edit, where you remove the "claims" part from a caption, and the qualification from a journal. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:17, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Mosier-Boss SPAWAR paper on neutrons.

Naturwissenschaften, Volume 96, Number 1 / January, 2009, Pamela A. Mosier-Boss, Stanislaw Szpak, Frank E. Gordon and Lawrence P. G. Forsley, [http://www.springerlink.com/content/022501181p3h764l/ Triple tracks in CR-39 as the result of Pd–D Co-deposition: evidence of energetic neutrons

Abstract: Since the announcement by Fleischmann and Pons that the excess enthalpy generated in the negatively polarized Pd–D-D2O system was attributable to nuclear reactions occurring inside the Pd lattice, there have been reports of other manifestations of nuclear activities in this system. In particular, there have been reports of tritium and helium-4 production; emission of energetic particles, gamma or X-rays, and neutrons; as well as the transmutation of elements. In this communication, the results of Pd–D co-deposition experiments conducted with the cathode in close contact with CR-39, a solid-state nuclear etch detector, are reported. Among the solitary tracks due to individual energetic particles, triple tracks are observed. Microscopic examination of the bottom of the triple track pit shows that the three lobes of the track are splitting apart from a center point. The presence of three α-particle tracks outgoing from a single point is diagnostic of the 12C(n,n′)3α carbon breakup reaction and suggests that DT reactions that produce ≥9.6 MeV neutrons are occurring inside the Pd lattice. To our knowledge, this is the first report of the production of energetic (≥9.6 MeV) neutrons in the Pd–D system.

review of this in New Scientist:[7]. Nice image: [8].

I think the significance of this paper has been missed in the media reports. Neutrons are not a common product of whatever is going on within the palladium lattice. He-4 production is reported by a multiple reports as being commensurate with excess heat measured. Earlier efforts to find neutrons either failed to find them, or the levels found were very low, approaching background or noise levels. Mosier-Boss's work confirms that the level is very low but it is present. What this means is that the normal or most common pathway involved in the reactions doesn't produce neutrons. I think Mosier-Boss proposes deuterium/tritium fusion for the neutrons. This is a side effect. Whatever is happening inside the lattice isn't just one simple reaction, lots of very messy stuff is happening in there, apparently. One of the researchers at the press conference yesterday described his first experience trying electrolysis with palladium foils; in the end, there were signs of mini-explosions and local melting having taken place in those foils, plus evidence of nuclear transformations. It's almost as if a new world has been opened up: one of the criticisms at the 2004 DOE conference was that there wasn't just one effect being proposed, there were many. Too much new stuff, it's confusing. Some find this result, some find that, it's very easy to suppose that it is simply all nonsense, after all, doesn't nature behave itself? --Abd (talk) 02:47, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

What this means is that the normal or most common pathway involved in the reactions doesn't produce neutrons.

You're assuming way too much. Surely you can see this?

The fact remains that much of the "evidence" is directly contradictory. That's one the huge black marks on the field that both you and Jed(BA in Japanese) seem not to appreciate - instead, true believers usually wave away contradiction with increasingly unlikely rationales, and everything is seen as "real" and positive. People who actually work with nuclei and know them intimately, such as nuclear physicists and chemists, understand that many of the results are laughable and certain to be wrong. Even in the unlikely event that some cold fusion mechnaism is confirmed, I think you'll find that most of the results are error.

Of all the possible outcomes that involve something real for cold fusion, by FAR the most likely is that some process is producing low levels of neutrons, and the rest is total BS. Phil153 (talk) 03:00, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

"much of the evidence is directly contradictory" --I'm assuming you mean self-contradictory. Please provide 3 examples. V (talk) 13:39, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Phil, I hope he doesn't mean self-contradictory, as that would be reflect poorly on his intellect. Empirical evidence cannot contradict itself, it always contradicts OTHER empirical evidence (and at that it only seems to) or none at all. Not even on the quantum physics scale can nature contradict itself. At best, it can be ambiguous. "Self-contradiction" can only happen when the thing contradicting is made out of multiple, smaller things, which individually contradict each other. For instance, a person making two different statements that are logically related but incommensurate is contradicting them-self. But evidence as such can never even truly contradict other evidence (nonetheless itself), because nature is always consistent. Only interpretations of the evidence can.

Also, where you say "contradictory", I see no contradiction, I see incompleteness. Perhaps it's the thing where one person says the tree is brown and another green, when actually it's brown on one side and green on the other. In computer programming, when you have an organizational problem, you add a level of indirection. You seem to be subtracting a level of indirection to create an organizational problem where there is none.

You say "Of all the possible outcomes that involve something real for cold fusion, by FAR the most likely...". I would say rather that right now there isn't any "most likely outcome". (And regardless we are only dealing w/the a priori probabilities.) We do not have enough information. That is, the information entropy and the KL-divergence are fairly high right now. We really don't know very much about how nuclear stuff behaves in condensed matter, a state that physically and mathematically is way different from a plasma. We also have things happening that don't fit what we expect (from nuclear plasma physics, at least). See I take a world view that takes information theory as a first principle, so to speak, in contrast to what one might call a more "cartesian" world view. And that says (among other things) that the most likely outcome is that our model will be updated somehow but until that happens -- by definition -- all outcomes (updates) are equally likely. (though "equally likely" is somewhat of a deceptive term because there is always a prior, i.e. a metric to the space of probabilities, even so-called "flat" ones.) In any case, my standpoint is "We don't know, but I would certainly like to find out." Perhaps I'm a little tougher to satisfy. In any case, I think it's a far better stance than prematurely jumping to a conclusion and vociferously decrying all others only to run the risk of being grossly mistaken in the end. Kevin Baas^talk 15:43, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Kevin, while evidence gathered in a single experiment cannot contradict itself, the phrase "much of the evidence", when fairly obviously referring to the whole body of work, can indeed include experiments with contradicting results --the star witness for that were all those CF failures after the 1989 announcement. However, to clairify what I meant, I would like to point out that I was specifically trying to prevent comparisons between CF data and standard theory. We already know about those contradictions, of course --and they are not relevant unless theory is supposed to trump data. So, I want to know more about which "directly contradictory" experiments Phil is talking about. V (talk) 16:11, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

For what it's worth I had originally confused yours and Phil's dialogue together (i.e. erred in attribution). (I'm not feeling well so my mental acuity is somewhat diminished.) Then in going back in correcting this error I had done so incompletely. No offense meant and I'm clear on what you meant now. Sorry. Kevin Baas^talk 16:55, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The prior SPAWAR work shows high levels of radiation. Phil153, you are making assumptions about "true believers." Nobody knows "nuclei" intimately. Period. In particular, we don't know how nuclear behavior is different in the condensed matter state as distinct from the plasma state, partly because it is extraordinarily difficult to study. Basic nuclear science was developed and studied with interactions where individual nuclei interacted, which takes high energy when they are in isolation, and the math is much simpler. We already know that when they are not in isolation, different things can happen; muon-catalyzed fusion and the Mossbauer effect are examples. Above, there is a paper giving a plausible -- to this nonspecialist -- theoretical explanation for condensed matter nuclear reactions at low temperatures. There are other hypotheses; these are being generated by physicists, Phil, and, in particular, nuclear physicists. Some process is producing low levels of neutrons. That's right. My conclusion also. What kind of process produces neutrons, Phil? Please do remember the controls. Lots of criticism of the present work is based on some strange assumption that there are no controls.

However, the hypothesis that the predominant reaction is D2 + D2 -> He4 plus energy, with the energy being expressed with high energy alpha radiation due to Mossbauer-effect-like coupling, even though it goes substantially further than the Mossbauer effect in terms of how much coupling must take place, is consistent with both the measured excess heat and measurement of He4. Prior work on neutrons showed either no neutrons or low levels, difficult to distinguish from noise, except for experiments where measurement error was either found or was a reasonable assumption. Mosier-Boss simply found a way to detect neutrons at very low levels, because the detector is integrating by nature, whereas prior efforts measured short-time-scale radiation levels.

So what we are seeing, in fact, putting it all together, is evidence of a whole class of reactions, with different pathways and different products. There is a pathway that generates neutrons. What is that? It might well not be fusion, but, Phil, it would be, practically by definition, a low energy nuclear reaction. (Though there is some possibility that local conditions create hot fusion conditions on a very small scale, similar to the claims about bubble fusion.)

But how did it happen that Mosier-Boss found neutrons? They were looking for them, Phil, because they had already found excess heat, alpha radiation, and He-4 (which is the same as alpha radiation after it has lost its energy to heat, which is what ionizing radiation does). They look at the heat and the levels of He-4 found and they match. Phil, what will happen, I predict, is that we are going to go into each detail for each issue and find community consensus on it. Be careful how tightly you stick yourself into some position. I am not predicting what the consensus will be, I will simply present what evidence we have. In such a discussion, because it's not in the article, we are not limited to what is clearly RS; however, there is plenty of RS on this topic. We will also use subpages or user pages for this, at least for preliminary work.

Now that people know how to find the neutrons, I'm going to predict that there will be efforts to correlate the neutrons found with the tritium pathways, i.e., by comparing neutron levels with levels of tritium found, which were always too low to be considered proof. But correlations of weak evidences, repeated over substantial numbers of experiments, can actually be quite powerful. Many of the objections raised against prior work on the basis of low repeatability ignored the consideration of controls.

Abd, the tritium thing isn't so easy because the T+D reaction is a significantly higher-probability reaction than the D+D reaction. So, any tritium that gets produced is likely to be almost immediately consumed, with only neutrons and He4 to indicate that that pathway happened. And the He4 is problematic because of the oddball D+D->⁴He direct reaction (the extent to which it occurs that is greater than 1-in-a-million is the extent to which it interferes with measuring ⁴He produced by D+T fusion). I'd like to see more data about high-energy protons. ³He should get produced as often as tritium, and may not be consumed quite as quickly (fusion with a deuteron means 2 protons repelling 1, instead of 1 repelling 1 when tritium fuses with a deuteron), but when it does fuse, a proton shoots out instead of a neutron. And when it doesn't fuse, ³He should accumulate to a detectable level. In fact, because I forgot about the electron-shell issue while writing the preceding, it is possible that there are very very few energetic protons; any ³He produced might immediately grab 2 electrons from the palladium conduction band and become unavailable for fusing by low-speed deuterons. That is, the electron shell of helium would prevent any loose electrons from being able to shield the nuclei, when one approaches the other. ("electron catalyzed fusion"). I think I've mentioned before that the electron shells need to be out of the way, for CF to happen.... The net result of the preceding OR is that, thanks to the 50/50 split of ³H/³He production, neutrons measured should be correlated with a measurement of ³He. V (talk) 16:29, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

I confess to making a silly error (have had other things on mind today). When D+D->T, we also get a high-energy proton. I don't expect the T to last long enough to accumulate to significance. When D+D->³He, that is when we get a high-energy neutron. OF COURSE a neutron count could be correlated to a measurement of ³He! Duhhh... V (talk) 19:23, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

And now for silly error #2: confusing 4 different reactions (my mind really was mostly thinking about other stuff yesterday!) Anyway, to try to set straight the above mess, the relevant reactions are: D+D->T+p, D+D->³He+n, D+T->⁴He+n, and D+³He->⁴He+p. To the extent that the first two happen at all in the CF environment, we should be able to observe a 50/50 split of production of modest-energy protons and neutrons. We can reasonably expect the tritium (T) to be consumed as described above and for ³He to accumulate as described in my shell-in-the-way explanation below. Neutrons released from the D+T reaction are significantly higher-energy than neutrons released from the reaction that creates ³He. Anyway, if we have a 50/50 production split of T and ³He, and if all the T is consumed and yields high-energy neutrons, then there should indeed be a fairly close correlation between high-energy neutrons and ³He. Whew! V (talk) 13:54, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, V. We don't know, really, what is going on in there, so we don't know how to apply fusion cross-section information from other areas. He4 is known to be the predominant reaction product in these experiments, no matter how "problematic" it might be, theoretically. And that is why there are only low levels of neutrons, they are happening, almost certainly, because something else sometimes happens. Actually, V, I think you just contradicted yourself. The electrons aren't "out of the way" if it's electron-catalyzed fusion, which is indeed one hypothesis that is reasonable among others, they are very much there. In the lattice, though, they aren't attached specifically to the nuclei, they are present in a very different way, and the theory is that they may then be able to serve as matchmakers.

Not a contradiction, but apparently my assumption was incorrect regarding its understandabilty. Start with the background that if two whole atoms are involved, their nuclei can't interact easily because the electron shells repel each other and keep the nuclei too far apart (the shells are in the way). Jump forward to an opposite situation in which neither nucleus has an electron shell; one or more loose electrons could come along and shield them from each other, so they might get close enough to fuse, slightly similar to muon catalysis. Now back up to the intermediate situation where one of those nuclei has an electron shell. The shell repels other electrons. Therefore if a bare nucleus penetrates that shell, no low-energy loose electron can accompany it, to shield the two nuclei from each other. Since it is reasonable to expect that any He3 nucleus, once formed, will immediately grab 2 loose electrons from the palladium conduction band and put them into orbit (http://www.standnes.no/chemix/periodictable/electronegativity-chart.htm --H and Pd are the same, but think about the electronegativity of doubly-ionized helium!), the logical consequence is: Even if it just grabbed 1 electron, the resulting shell ("in the way"!) means that nucleus is no longer available for electron-catalyzed fusion. OK? V (talk) 18:50, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

There was a prior report in New Scientist on the same work as is involved in the current report, but before the information about neutrons had been published. http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/101ns_001.htm. SPAWAR has long been reporting strong ionizing, but non-penetrating, radiation from those cells, at copious levels. The present report should be read in conjunction with the prior work. Radiation detection isn't new, what is new is neutrons shown to be associated with the cathode. This research is, in a way, being presented for political effect. One of the biggest objections to cold fusion, from the beginning, has been the missing neutrons. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, but it involves hypothesizing new reaction pathways or mechanisms. What Mosier-Boss has done is to show that, yes, there are neutrons, so that old objection disappears; there is now evidence that there is fusion at a very low level. When neutrons were found by Georgia Tech, it was immediately big news. Unfortunately, they not only didn't actually detect neutrons, there had been an unexpected problem with the detector, and they probably also weren't getting cold fusion, either. Practically nobody knew how to find the effect then. Subsequent failures to detect neutrons were thought to have sealed the coffin. However, we now know that there were, indeed, neutrons, but at quite low levels. Some of the early results, dismissed because of the very low levels, may actually have been real, i.e., caused by neutrons from cold fusion in a minor pathway (under the conditions), but the evidence wasn't conclusive or even close. That, in turn, explains why some researchers were tantalized, seeing results they couldn't duplicate. Scaramuzzi writes about the history, how early results kept him looking, even though he later concluded that these early results were in error. But Fleischmann's excess heat wasn't an error, he'd been careful about it; only his neutron measurements were truly problematic. --Abd (talk) 17:09, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

It's really a remarkable situation in science, I know of no analogy that actually holds. How many international conferences, with papers published by major universities, were held regarding polywater or N-rays? The effects of wishful thinking as an explanation, often given, is a hypothesis. Is it falsifiable? Taken to an extreme, no, it isn't. At a certain point, however, that hypothesis breaks down. It appears from what I'm finding in the vast literature on this topic that it was falsified by 1990 or 1991, i.e., by then it was clear that something anomalous was happening, and that LENR were a reasonable hypothesis. But by that time the mainstream wasn't following the research, it had already concluded "junk science," and mainstream scientists are busy, they don't have time to follow what they believe are junk science claims, known to be false.

Except the evidence that they were basing a judgment of "false" on wasn't scientific evidence to that effect, except considered in isolation. I.e., the published claim that Fleischmann hadn't stirred his cells and that the experimenter attempting confirmation found an appearance of excess heat, which disappeared when cells were stirred, did not at all show that Fleischmann's work was in error; rather it set up a new and reasonable -- and falsifiable -- hypothesis about the source of the heat observations. And it was shown to be false, but by that time few outside the field were listening.

I have come to the opinion that there is fusion happening. But I arrived here, early in January, neutral on that topic, or actually slightly biased against it. See, I was very familiar with Fleischmann's work in 1989, and followed what was happening as closely as I could, given that I had no access to a university library. Nevertheless, like nearly everyone else except those involved with the research and who had seen anomalies themselves, I developed a sense of "too bad, it would have been great." I was aware, over the years, that there was continuing work, and, indeed, I attributed this to be probably the die-hard phenomenon. I was totally unaware that replication efforts were succeeding with increased frequency as the researchers learned how to set up the special conditions, because it didn't get media attention, and, in fact, through this period we see the popular press repeating over and over, when it did cover the topic at all, repeating the error about lack of replication. It took Fleischmann and Pons years to get their technique to a point that the university believed that it must be announced, they were not ready to publish or announce. So along come hordes of physicists trying to quickly duplicate what had taken expert chemists years to do, and when they didn't succeed, in a very short time, we know what happened.

Yes. Pathological science. The whole story, as is available in reliable source, must be told, not just half of it. The issue of balance has been used quite inappropriately to exclude masses of material found in reliable source; in order to avoid balance issues, the classic solution is subarticles. The article on the overall topic maintains weight balance, but subtopics each have their own balance depending on the exact subtopic. For example, what methods of calorimetry are used, what are the problems associated with each, how do these apply to cold fusion research, what do we have from reliable source on this? The cold fusion article cannot possibly bear the weight of this. Hence an article was created Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments. I presume you know what happened. But, I predict, we will get that article back, or something like it. The article was userfied to User:Abd/Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments so that it can be seen and information from it taken back to this article. Was that a POV fork as claimed? How? The main editor was Shanahan, which was a problem, sure, because he is COI. But we could have fixed that problem. It's only a POV fork if it is not NPOV, or if it is used to preferentially exclude information needed for this article's balance; however, that is addressed with proper summary.

There were editors working on this article who had strong POVs, some of who were quite knowledgeable, and it was quite unfortunate that they have been (from both "sides,") banned, because what we need is not the exclusion of POV, but the creation of NPOV text, which we can only recognize through consensus. A claim of consensus based on stability, when, clearly, reversion is being used to keep reliably-sourced information out on the undue weight argument, is a false claim. It's not stable, it requires constant maintenance by a faction, against what may be a smaller faction here, but which then effectively trolls for POV editing from the outside world, when people with some knowledge of the topic (including researchers involved with it) recognize the imbalance of the article. That will still exist no matter what, to some degree, but when we have actually found consensus, the active editors will be united in maintaining the article against whatever would upset the consensus, and it will be much easier. --Abd (talk) 14:15, 25 March 2009 (UTC

Discussion discussion

The above discussion is so far into WP:OR and specifically WP:SYNTH that it's embarassing. Please redact.LeadSongDog come howl 22:50, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

OR and SYNTH on the level I engaged in, where reasonably verifiable by review of the sources, and representing proposed consensus or approach to consensus though discussion, is permitted on Talk pages if reasonably related to what can ultimately go in the article. I'm not going to redact. And there is much more there that is directly related to how we will proceed to find consensus on the article. So ... suit yourself, LSD. Turn on the coffeemaker, tune in to the community and the sources, or drop out. If you don't want to read what I write, fine, you are not obligated. When it turns into edits, you will have lost no rights, unless the community -- njot just me -- made a decision without your participation, and even then you can -- respectfully -- challenge it. Turn on the coffeemaker, tune in to the community and the sources, discuss, or drop out.--Abd (talk) 00:08, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Again you say this, but policy and consensus does not agree with you, Abd. You need to accept that. The very top of this talk page says, in a template that's all over Wikipedia: This is not a forum for general discussion about the article's subject. I don't think the above could be described as anything but using this as a forum for general discussion of the subject. I'm a violator on this as well, and I don't think it's right to tell people who raise this issue and ask you to redact to basically buzz off if they don't like it. Phil153 (talk) 00:27, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

The proof is in the pudding, Phil. Want to take it before the community? That's where consensus is found, no single one of us or small group has the right to claim to represent consensus when there is disagreement. I couldn't stop you if I wanted to. But WP:NOTAFORUM, interpreted as some interpret it, makes finding genuine consensus difficult, so, maybe it's time to confront that. Ready for it? You think something is inappropriate for a Talk page, to the point where the incivility or disruption of taking it out is outweighed by the distraction of leaving it in, you know what to do, but I can't predict my own response in advance, nor that of the community. Well, maybe I can. Depends on what you do! You think my behavior inappropriate, I presume you can read dispute resolution guidelines.--Abd (talk) 00:54, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

It's not me that's complaining, since I do it too, mostly in response to your off topic adventures. I'm merely supporting the validity of LeadSongDog's (and other's) complaints. Your assertion that there is disruption or incivility by enforcing WP:NOTFORUM, when accepted policy explicitly says that such comments may be removed by anyone, is not helpful. Nor is your assertion that complainants should basically buzz off if they don't like it, or that you won't reconsider your actions short of dispute resolution. If someone told me that I was writing hundreds of kilobytes of comments insufficiently related to improving the article, I'd respect their request. Phil153 (talk) 01:08, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

That would be nice of you. I'm not you, and I don't think that my comments are insufficiently related. Phil, you have overlooked that WP:DR starts with direct communication, then very gradually escalates. I know what I'm doing, Phil, and the sooner you realize that possibility, the easier it will be. Removing someone's comments is almost intrinsically disruptive or uncivil, which doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done. I noted the balance. My participation has almost always brought forth the kind of complaint that arose here, for many years. I've been tossed from mailing lists by moderators, but whenever there has actually been a discussion among list participants, the conclusion was that it was related and valuable. The fact that some people don't think so points, more properly, to a suggestion that they not read it. Reading Talk isn't obligatory. If I make some long, allegedly or actually rambling statement, that includes, say, a justification for an article edit, and I make the edit, you can still revert it as if I hadn't made that statement. However, if someone else (not me) then reverts you and refers to the statement and discussion, you might then have some obligation to read it before reverting again. --Abd (talk) 14:41, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

If you knew what you were doing you would have already succeeded in your campaign to get lenr-canr unblacklisted. Good faith is gold. Your above reply is basically "I'm 100% right, the 3+ people complaining and requesting are wrong/less intelligent/haven't had time to read it, end of story". Not a helpful approach to anything, let alone a collaborative editing environment. Phil153 (talk) 06:30, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I agree that this page has turned into a gushing FORUM full of OR and SYNTH. It would be much better if editors brought their ideas here in a clear and concise manor. If a sentence or citation is so complex or controversial that it need to be defended with a 5,000 byte statement...that spirals into 50,000+ byte two party dialogue concerning esoterica...that no one else wants to wade through...and everyone forgets what the original point was. Well it doesn't serve the talk page goals.--OMCV (talk) 01:12, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

OMCV, would you care to explain how people can decide-by-consesus what should or should not go into an article, without discussing it? Without bringing up information that supports each view (include/don't-include), regarding each item? V (talk) 13:30, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

The WP:NOTAFORUM policy is clear that discussion on article Talk pages is to be for the purpose of improving the article. I do not discussion cold fusion here except for that purpose. When I wish to have a discussion with an individual editor, I use user Talk or email. However, when I wish to bring up a topic that I consider has bearing on the article, and wish to both inform and solicit comment from editors interested in the article, for the purpose of preparing to form or review actual edits, I do it on article Talk. There is no other place to do this, though we could create one in WP space, or create a mailing list. One approach to the problem of a burgeoning Talk page is refactoring. I've started using, in some places, collapse boxes with discussions, giving some summary of the discussion at the top or after the box, describing the discussion as it bears on the article. It's work, but it can be worthwhile. Imagine how useful our Talk archives would be if they were refactored according to topic. That's actually suggested, but it is hardly ever done. If the policy and its application is not clear, and if disagreement on this remains, my suggestion about WP:DR was not defiant, it was a real suggestion that could generate value for the project. The policy, properly, leaves broad discretion in the hands of editors working on an article. And then there is always WP:IAR, Rule Number One, which we sometimes forget, but which should always be remembered whenever someone tries to claim that a matter is definitively decided and closed because of a policy or guideline. Consensus is how we decide the scope and application of guidelines and policies, until and unless we are operating at the level of ArbComm or the WMF, which decide by vote or delegated authority.--Abd (talk) 14:55, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

What about putting some collapse boxes in the main article (could lead to less need for subarticles)? That complete lisct of references you talk about below might also be a good candidate for a collapse box. The reader could expand anything the reader finds interesting. V (talk) 15:55, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Haven't seen it done, but it might be possible, or it may be deprecated. It's kind of six of one and a half-dozen of the other. Subarticles aren't a problem, as long as we have editorial consensus and we make sure that the subarticles aren't POV forks. I think we can handle that.

Off-topic quick comment: Collapsing article text to reduce the need for subarticles? Please don't, there are very good reasons not to do that, but I'm not going to argue them here, make a suggestion at WT:MOS where people familiar with this stuff can explain it better. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:31, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, I don't see a clue in the MOS, and "reasons not to do that" might not apply in some situation. If an editor thinks it should be done somewhere, I see no guideline against it, but ... accepting the edit or proposal is up to the other editors; I'd suggest arguing, if there is to be any arguing, from our purpose and principles and a that point getting advice from other experienced editors makes perfect sense. The problem with "making a suggestion at WT:MOS" without having an example where some editors think it should be done is that you may get an answer that isn't grounded in the particular needs of the article. On the other hand, subarticles may be better. There is then focused discussion on the subtopic on the Talk page for that subarticle. My own opinion is, without having participated in or followed old debate on it, that certain kinds of subarticles that truly are subtopics, not simply related topics, should be done through file hierarchy; which then clearly shows that the subarticle "belongs" to the main article. But that's way ahead of what's needed right now. --Abd (talk) 23:31, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I'll just make one point: adding collapsable boxes does not change the size of the article. A 100KB article will still be a 100KB article even with boxes. Nah, I'm not going to argue this here, not the proper forum. You can make a sandbox or something to show an example. Also, scratch WT:MOS; read WP:SIZE instead and make a suggestion on its talk page. --Enric Naval (talk) 03:03, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

If it is better to have sub-articles than collapse boxes, that's fine with me. However, I do think a collapse box might be appropriate for something like a long long reference list. V (talk) 14:31, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) I agree that this is possible, V. Enric, the issue isn't article size as in memory space, but rather clarity an usability for the reader. Absolutely, don't argue this here. It's one thing to toss out an idea just to explore possible implications for the article, quite another to try shoot it down based on pure speculation. If an example appears where it would be appropriate, we can try it. If anyone objects, well, we can consider that too. (Note that there could be accessibility issues, there are people reading Wikipedia with devices that might not render collapse boxes properly, etc. But trying to anticipate all this in advance, bad idea. The purpose of bringing it up here is simply to explore various ways we can present the article. Collapse boxes make a great deal of sense in refactoring talk pages. --Abd (talk) 21:33, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Variations on "pathological science"

I know this is off-topic, but for the purpose of comparison, due to all the discussion above about pathological science, I'd like to point out that here is an outfit that made some claims a couple years ago about having discovered a perpetual-motion device, and then invited people to study it. They are now inviting companies to license it.... http://www.steorn.com The steorn Wikipedia article indicates they still haven't revealed to the public details about how it works. IF it works, of course. The CF field is a model of Good Science, not pathological science, in comparison, because HOW its results are obtained are fully explained. (WHY those results happen is another issue altogether.) V (talk) 17:39, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Off-topic --Enric Naval (talk) 06:21, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Blatantly "impossible," and they know it. I'd say that if they have, in fact, found something, they may be going about it exactly right, not in terms of science, but in terms of how to make a ton of money and bypass the skepticism. They might even make the money if it's bogus, but that would take some awfully stupid engineering companies, I wouldn't bet on it. More likely, there is an energy-conserving explanation that is, simply, not obvious, and more focused work on it, and especially with efforts to scale it up, will reveal it. On the other hand, if one of those engineering companies does manage to scale it up and they start manufacturing usable power sources ... we will have to revise some long-standing concepts, much deeper than those involved with cold fusion (which doesn't violate conservation of energy in spite of some media sniping to that effect.) Basically, at this point, nothing to see here, move along. V, you are correct, the CF field is real science. The report above is based on what is claimed to be a reproducible experiment (they loan out the apparatus and engineers were invited to take it apart, etc., but some of those reviewing it seemed to express the idea that "we don't know why it works, but it works." That's an observation, but since we don't know what "it" is, beyond what little can be derived from the video (Looks like there is some rotational energy involved, and they talk about the interaction between gravitational and magnetic fields, but the level of motion they are getting could be caused by some *very* subtle effects. I made a radio when I was something like ten or twelve that was powered by ... radio. There are sources of energy floating about. Normal vibration of the earth, for example, can be turned into useful power on a very small scale. For all practical purposes, this isn't science, it's only one element of science, an observation, and since it is secret in details, it isn't "human knowledge," our topic, which is, by definition, shared knowledge. --Abd (talk) 00:47, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

• Noticed an interesting press release at EurekAlert: 'Cold fusion' rebirth? New evidence for existence of controversial energy source. It's just a presentation at the ACS, but something to watch out for. II | (t - c) 18:01, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

A little late to the party, II, but welcome. We've been discussing this very press release and the media fallout above. It is not merely a presentation at the ACS conference, the substance was published in Naturwissenschaften in January, I think. so, peer-reviewed and notable because of all the press attention, a useful combination. The press reports are typically awful, repeating stuff that quite simply isn't true, (as to 1989, "but nobody was able to replicate it," which is a rather stupid statement for any reporter who actually looks into the topic, what with 150 papers or so published in peer-reviewed journals over the last twenty years that show excess heat when palladium is packed with deuterium, radiation, Helium-4, etc, but a little of the coverage has been reasonably good. --Abd (talk) 00:18, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Collapse for readability. The CR-39 paper is already mentioned at Cold_fusion#2009_reports, and includes an image of the triple tracks. Collapsed discussion includes an explanation of the phenomena. --Enric Naval (talk) 06:21, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
I'm not joining any party. I don't know enough to comment much, but I do think the article should be mentioned in the body of the article. II | (t - c) 00:27, 26 March 2009 (UTC) Aw, c'mon. "Party" means fun, not factional affiliation. Overlooked guideline: WP:FUN. I'm serious. If editing Wikipedia isn't fun, it's doomed, because it will only be edited, then, by POV-pushers, COI editors, or random ignorant anonymous editors -- for whom making a small contribution, or vandalizing, is fun. Sure, there are a few who might be called highly motivated NPOV editors, but there are more who think themselves such but are actually POV-pushers, and the former kind (true NPOV believers, who believe in it more than they believe in their own opinions) tend to burn out, there comes a point where it just isn't emotionally worth it to push the boulder back up the hill. --Abd (talk) 15:16, 27 March 2009 (UTC) It is. See Cold_fusion#2009_reports, at least that's where it is now. With an image of one triple track. FYI, it's not being noticed much in the media, but the image we have below the triple-track is from prior work of Mosier-Boss. Basically, they found, and published some years ago, high levels of ionizing radiation, probably alpha radiation, low-penetration, using the same technique: CR-39 chips placed next to the cathode. That radiation can't penetrate the chip, it only affects the surface. They found the neutrons when they examined the other side of these chips. The cathode side of the chips is heavily damaged, when they run the experiment as long as they do when they find the neutrons, you can see it is altered (a milky appearance) with the naked eye. My guess is that they find the neutron tracks at all depths from the back, but they wouldn't be visible in the region that is affected by the alpha radiation. In any case, contrary, again, to what some have said, the previous co-deposition CR-39 work has replicated, though I'm not sure about the neutron findings. The technique of co-deposition is much simpler and more reliable than the bulk-palladium electrolysis methods. Given that the work had already been published (we had been discussing it here, for example), what really happened this week is that the ACS didn't just schedule a session to appease a few members. They expanded the session to four days from a previous one, and they issued a press release that emphasized the importance of the work, to the media. It got attention, which is what has been missing for a long time, notice of voluminous of experimental work, much publication in peer-reviewed journals, but almost entirely outside the U.S. Conferences and books, building up a whole field off the radar of the general scientific community, not because they were secretive, but because that general community had its mind firmly made up, especially the bulk of nuclear physicists. But, see, the experimental work here involves chemistry. Who is the expert here? (Some of the researchers, though, are physicists, for example, a Chinese review paper I cite above on this page is by a nuclear physicist who also published on the topic something like 15 years ago, but with a classical physics-type confirmation that something anomalous was going on.) --Abd (talk) 01:13, 26 March 2009 (UTC) OK, glad to hear that the paper is covered. Your post had too much information. Here is not the place to educate me on cold fusion... II | (t - c) 03:20, 26 March 2009 (UTC) Well, you stated that you believed the article "should be included." I discussed why I agreed. It is indeed significant, but mostly for political reasons. Neutrons were expected, and they were hard to find, they didn't exist at the expected levels. That is probably the number one reason that cold fusion was widely rejected. It's obvious that whatever is going on in the lattice doesn't usually generate neutrons. A huge body of research was generated to study what does occur. But what is taking place there is very complex, and more than one kind of low-energy reaction apparently takes place. It's the old story of the elephant and the blind men. A group of them encounter an elephant; they can't see it, but they each are able to feel parts of it. So one reports it is like a tree, another reports it's like a snake, another reports it's like a vine. Etc. The reports are discounted and rejected, because, obviously, they are reporting different things, if there were really one thing there, they would be confirming each other in details. This problem was raised in the 2004 DOE review. --Abd (talk) 15:05, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

About those missing gamma rays, a question.

From the article in the section on "theoretical incompatiblities."

The γ-rays of the ⁴He pathway are not observed. This type of radiation is not stopped by electrode or electrolyte materials, making it necessary to postulate that the 24 MeV excess energy is transferred in the form of heat into the host metal lattice prior to the intermediary's decay. The speed of the decay process together with the inter-atomic spacing in a metallic crystal makes such a transfer inexplicable in terms of conventional understandings of momentum and energy transfer.

D+D fusion results in a helium nucleus. Energetic helium nuclei are nothing other than the alpha radiation found in the earlier SPAWAR work, and also reported in the recent Naturwissenschaften paper. However, if I'm correct, conservation of momentum requires that the vector sum of momenta of the reaction products equal that present before the reaction. In other words, we don't get an energetic alpha particle without getting something in the opposite direction. This may be why some theories are proposing that the mechanism involves 4D, not 2D. The product would be two energetic alpha particles carrying away the energy released by fusion; because these interact with the lattice and other materials, the energy is converted to heat. Anybody know of reliable source on this approach to solving the problem of the missing gammas? If I'm correct, what we get from standard DD fusion is an energetic alpha particle in one direction and a gamma in the other. And we don't get significant amounts of gammas. (Apparently, the SPAWAR group has detected gammas or X-rays also. Prior groups found radiation evidence on X-ray film.) --Abd (talk) 03:37, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

That's the "third miracle". The only hypothesis I know of that answers all the miracles was not RS-published and is this one: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cold_Fusion_Hypothesis It presumes electron-catalyzed fusion as the answer to the first miracle, and it notes than unlike muon catalysis with its lone muon, there are lots of electrons available in solid metal, to participate in the reaction. Instead of talking about "quantum tunneling" it points out that as fusion begins the two nuclei are some distance apart and that they are able to exchange "virtual pions", some of which will be electrically charged. Any electron that is in-between the two nuclei, enabling the start of fusion, can interact with those pions via the electromagnetic force, acquire energy, and be ejected. (In muon catalysis, note that the muon is 206 times closer to a proton than is an orbiting electron; the electrical attraction is 206² or 42436 times stronger --possibly doubled because of the nearby proton in the other nucleus-- yet the muon (206 times as massive as an electron) can often acquire enough energy to shoot away from the reaction site, to some place where it can catalyze another fusion.) As soon as the electron leaves the scene, the twin charges of the protons in the two nuclei can attract another electron from the conduction band of the solid metal; the point of greatest electrostatic attraction is in-between the two nuclei. To some extent other electrons are already there, thanks to their "cloudiness" per Quantum Mechanics. Any significantly-present electron can then interact with the virtual pions, acquire some energy, and also be ejected. If enough electrons get involved that way, before the nuclei merge, then the total energy removed from the reaction could suffice to prevent a just-formed ⁴He nucleus from needing to break into, say, tritium and a proton, thus answering the second miracle, regarding reaction percentages. The third miracle is simultaneously answered because of all those electrons that carried away energy (no gamma needed). When the metal is very very thin, such as during a co-deposition experiment, not enough electrons are available as just described, so more-often the result of the fusion is tritium-and-proton or ³He-and-neutron (and an occasional gamma or X-ray of rather less energy than 23.8Mev could be associated with ⁴He, depending on how much energy actually got carried away first by the available electrons). V (talk) 14:58, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the third miracle. However, the gamma problem assumes isolated nuclei. It also assumes that DD fusion is what is happening. There might be some other pathway. The classic proposal to solve the gamma problem is to postulate that somehow the recoil energy is coupled to the lattice. But if, instead, it is transferred to an energetic ionizing particle (electron, perhaps), this particle, then, would mostly transfer the energy to the lattice or otherwise to the immediate environment. What the Mosier-Boss would brings into relief is that there is more than one kind of reaction taking place. It's quite well established that neutrons aren't present in quantities sufficient to explain the excess heat; the neutrons found are significant, very significant, in fact, but far, far below what would have been expected. Note that even a tiny amount of radiation generated by the electrolysis or other catalytic action is quite as revolutionary with respect to theory as full-blown, clearly positive-net-energy-generating fusion would be.

We definitely need to work on the theory sections. There are lots of theories that have been advanced to explain possible low-energy nuclear reactions. Too many, in fact, cold fusion researchers have lamented. Mosier-Boss have estimated the energy of the neutrons, which gives a clue. It's a bit like what we have seen in this week's media reports, which repeated over and over that the excess heat wasn't replicated, when, in fact, it's been replicated many times. (Replication isn't the end of the question, because perhaps there is some systematic error, but it is one thing to say that the experiment couldn't be repeated, and another to claim that the interpretations haven't been proven.) And then we see objections on the basis that no theory has been advanced to explain the results. Besides that being the cart driving the horse, it's also misleading: there are many theories that have been advanced, some by highly competent theoreticians. But because the experimental results weren't considered solid, few bothered, apparently, to review and critique these theoretical explanations and, from the "mainstream side," to design experiments to test the hypotheses. So part of our review process here will be listing the theories that have been advanced, particularly those in reliable source. Lack of response to a publication doesn't establish that it isn't usable as reliable source, though it does require caution about weight, which is mostly about how the research is presented. --Abd (talk) 21:23, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Cold_fusion#2.-_The_branching_ratio (the section on the second miracle) explains that there three known pathways. The second miracle refers to how the first two pathways are observed much less frequently than they should, and the third miracle refers to the lack of y-rays when the third pathway should be happening. It also explains how the transfer of the y-ray energy to the lattice can't be explained using the "conventional understandings of momentum and energy transfer".

And no, I don't know of any RS giving an explanation of how this energy transfer could happen (there might be non-accepted-by-mainstream fringe theories, I think that the "lattice behaves like condensed matter" is the most famous one and the only one notable enough for inclusion. Just provide acceptable RS for the other theories to see if we can fit them in the article. P.D.: Indeed, the Frontiers of Physics in China paper you brought here[9] was about condensed matter) . --Enric Naval (talk) 07:08, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

"one quick response from a physicist who looks like he didn't read the paper"

That's the reason given to remove Paul Padley's assesment from the article [10]. However, Krivit's opinion was not removed from the article. The Agence France-Presse source clearly quotes both guys (giving one opinion from each "side"?), so, either we quote both or we quote none. (heh, the New Scientist source cites Johan Frenje, who appears to be a better source. At the end I left it at:

The report results suggest that energetic neutrons have been emitted, but don't explain what process was causing them.

using both sources as reference. --Enric Naval (talk) 05:18, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

It's thoroughly ridiculous that Abd is removing the sourced opinion of a well regarded mainstream physicist on important claims, and replacing it with the speculative opinion of a fringe journalist who lacks even science credentials. Phil153 (talk) 07:32, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

1. He may be a well-regarded mainstream physicist, I don't know. He's someone convenient to the newspaper to ask, he was not a "reviewer of the paper," which would usually refer to someone involved with peer review, or someone who has had more than a few hours -- if that -- to consider it; as far as we know, he was called and the opinion was off-the-cuff based on what the reporter told him. The opinion tells us nothing that would not be expected from your random physicist.
2. I don't have a problem with properly framed reference to his comment ... but this comment will be forgotten by several months from now. Quite simply, there is no cogent criticism there, which is easily seen by actually reading the paper. Done that yet, Phil?
3. I didn't replace it with the opinion of Krivit. He may not have science credentials, but he's an expert in the field, is published and widely known, used as a source in peer-reviewed journals, as I recall -- we'll see when I put up the NET article. That was put in as a "criticism," Phil, but misrepresented as such. It was actually a defense if you read it.
4. Enric's compromise looks good to me. The report also doesn't explain how cold fusion will solve the energy crisis, and which way the stock market will go, but .... if other editors want that in there, fine with me for the moment. Though the paper does explain what might be causing the neutrons, though it doesn't explain the possible fundamental physics. Uh, read it? Krivit's "criticism" was claiming that this was "speculation." Can't win for losing. --Abd (talk) 11:22, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

This is the current text (with refs converted to links, ref text in the brackets):

On 22-25 March 2009, the American Chemical Society held a four-day symposium on "New Energy Technology", in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the announcement of cold fusion. At the conference, researchers with the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) reported detection of neutrons in a cold fusion cell using a CR-39 detector,[ACS Press Release 'Cold fusion' rebirth? New evidence for existence of controversial energy source] a result published months earlier in Die Naturwissenschaften. [ http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16820-neutron-tracks-revive-hopes-for-cold-fusion.html Neutron tracks revive hopes for cold fusion (New Scientist}] The report results suggest that energetic neutrons have been emitted, but don't explain what process was causing them.[New Scientist, ibid]Scientists in possible cold fusion breakthrough (AFP) Steven Krivit, editor of the cold fusion magazine New Energy Times, pointed out that the results could be caused by some nuclear process other than the one suggested by the authors, deuterium-tritium fusion.[AFP, ibid].

I see the following problems with it; I've made edits based on this and they have been reverted, some of them more than once. I would appreciate discussion of each point, for which I've created subsections below. --Abd (talk) 03:24, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Re the ACS press release, it would be more productive to discuss the actual release, rather than Eurekalert's cut-down version of it. The author of the release is elsewhere described: "Mark T. Sampson holds a B.S. in biology from Washington & Lee University in Lexington,Virginia, and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. A member of the National Association of Science Writers, he currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia." Please note that the release is prospective, describing presentations to be made at a later date than that which it bears. We really need documentation of what was presented in order to avoid writing "On 23 March 2009 the ACS announced that Boss et al planned to present during a conference that ...." Of course WP:NOT#NEWS pertains.LeadSongDog come howl 05:13, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

*sigh* And now Abd has changed it again and removed Krivit's comment. You put:

• Such neutrons could be evidence of low-energy nuclear reactions

However, what the AFP source says is that this is evidence that LENR, or cold fusion, produces neutrons. --Enric Naval (talk) 06:46, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Now you put:

• "Neutrons are indicative of nuclear reactions."

However, that's just what the authors claim. The NS source gives opinions of scientists who agree with this and people who don't (Krivit), and the AFP source also cites Krivit and another person who doesn't agree either (the Padley guy). That's not an accurate summary of what the sources say. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:22, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I can understand why Krivit (who was roundly abused here without cause except "fringe") and Rothwell (who was likewise abused and who also showed some level of contempt and incivility) may have had bruises on their foreheads after this. Krivit does not disagree with "neutrons are indicative of nuclear reactions," nor, indeed, does Padley. Padley suggests that "other sources" have not been ruled out. Those other sources are, in fact, nuclear reactions other than cold fusion, such as nuclear reactions from cosmic rays, contamination of equipment, or, in the specific case of Krivit, nuclear reactions other than deuterium fusion, and there is quite a bit of coverage on this. Krivit is quite explicit. In the New Scientist article, we have:

Johan Frenje at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an expert at interpreting CR-39 tracks produced in conventional high-temperature fusion reactions, says the team's interpretation of what produced the tracks is valid.

"I must say that the data and their analysis seem to suggest that energetic neutrons have been produced," he says, although he would like to see the results confirmed quantitatively.

More controversial is the team's suggestion for the process that produced the neutrons. High-energy neutrons are unlikely to be produced by a normal chemical reaction, says Mosier-Boss. So, it's possible, she says, they are created during the fusion of deuterium and tritium atoms tightly packed in palladium framework at the cathode. The tritium also being a product of the fusion of two deuterium atoms.

Some researchers in the cold fusion field agree. "In my view [it's] a cold fusion effect," says Peter Hagelstein, also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And then we have Krivit's remarks, as interpreted by the New Scientist reporter:

Others, though, are not convinced. Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, has been following the cold fusion debate for many years and also spoke at the ACS conference. "Their hypothesis as to a fusion mechanism I think is on thin ice … you get into physics fantasies rather quickly and this is an unfortunate distraction from their excellent empirical work," he told New Scientist.

Krivit thinks cold fusion remains science fiction. Like many in the field, he prefers to categorise the work as evidence of "low energy nuclear reactions", and says it can be explained without relying on nuclear fusion.

So how Enric can imagine that this is rejecting the idea that neutrons are indicative of "low energy nuclear reactions" is totally beyond me.

Generally, the media reports on this have taken this work seriously, even though within the field this is an interesting result but not at all revolutionary or, what it has been called in the media, a "rediscovery of cold fusion," because the CR-39 results unambiguously show energetic neutrons, so explaining this away will take finding other sources of energetic neutrons besides low-energy nuclear reactions in the Pd-D system, made especially difficult by the controls involved. I.e., they didn't just run the experiment once or several times and saw these triple tracks, they ran it under different conditions and saw triple tracks with some and not with others, quite consistently with the hypothesis that what is critical is palladium highly loaded with deuterium (co-deposition is significant because it accomplishes this quickly, with excess heat and radiation appearing within minutes instead of weeks or months).

A lot of work has confirmed that the effect, whatever it is, is taking place at the surface of the palladium, not deep within the material, which is why experiments that increase the surface area of palladium involved seem to be more replicable or even reliable, such as Arata's work with palladium black or other very finely powdered palladium alloy, pressurized with deuterium and no other input energy.

Their work was to some extent confirming prior findings, not only by their group but by other researchers and groups, and CR-39 results go back to the early 1990s, with a tantalizing mention in Hoffman (1995), A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects, p. 57:

The mainland Chinese have a team investigating anomalous nuclear effects in deuterium/solid systems that have come up with interesting evidence for charged particles involving charged-particle burst tracks on the plastic film CR-39 with Pd/D systems but not with Pd/H systems.

Padly is quoted in the AFP source, but this is taken (and attributed to) the Houston Chronicle article:

But that does not mean the results indicate cold fusion, said Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss’ published work.

“Fusion could produce the effect they see, but there’s no plausible explanation of how fusion could occur in these conditions,” Padley said. “The whole point of fusion is, you’re bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow.”

The problem with Mosier-Boss’ work, he said, is that it fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons.

“Nobody in the physics community would believe a discovery without such a quantitative analysis,” he said.

Padley is reacting to a detail, for the most part: Mosier-Boss actually agrees, in what the same article quotes from her, that the results do not necessarily indicate "cold fusion."

“If you have fusion going on, then you have to have neutrons,” she said. “But we do not know if fusion is actually occurring. It could be some other nuclear reaction.”

Mosier-Boss's comment is puzzling, in fact, because there can be fusion without energetic neutrons, and, in fact, their own work essentially confirms that. What has long been a part of the puzzle is that the excess heat findings, multiply verified, show far more heat than the measurements of neutrons would allow; a major paper involved in the massive rejection of cold fusion in 1989 was a Nature report setting upper limits on the level of fusion involved, given the assumption that neutrons were being emitted from the process, and it far, far from explaining the reported excess heat. Mosier-Boss is important in showing that nuclear fusion is probably occurring, but as a minor reaction pathway; she suggests it may be D-T fusion as a secondary response to some of the other LENR taking place. (I.e., the D-T fusion would possibly be "hot" fusion, the energy for it being a result of different LENR reactions.) For example, they have long found, confirming other reports, energetic ionizing radiation, probably alpha. Energetic alpha particles can stimulate further "hot" nuclear reactions; one of them would generate hot tritons as a result, which can then classically fuse with deuterium; the resulting neutrons would be the right energy to explain her results. Thus her findings do have a classical explanation, though one that depends on a hypothesis of a precedent reaction with no generally accepted explanation (even within the LENR field). There are explanations, though, we discuss one above, that does not depend on "new physics," but simply a more sophisticated (if it is correct!) analysis of the condensed matter environment.

Padley's most cogent criticism is this, except that it is missing crucial detail: fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons.

Given that the paper does exclude a series of possible other sources, because of controls or other conditions of the experiments, the question becomes, and it will necessarily be, in critical review of the Mosier-Boss work, the detail, "What other sources"? Krivit suggests "other low energy nuclear reactions," which requires new physics. But experimental artifact can never be ruled out, some very striking results in this field were later found to be a result (or at least possible result) of unexpected experimental conditions that suggested misleading conclusions. Here, though, it starts to get very difficult to come up with alternate scenarios; most of them, in fact, involve something new, if the recent theoretical work cited above is still considered new (which it is, it hasn't been accepted except in a minor way).

[One possible "other LENR" would be muon-catalyzed fusion; the theory would be that muon catalysis becomes more efficient in the condensed matter environment; the muons come from cosmic radiation. This would explain the chaotic nature of the effect; the little "mini-explosions" that have been observed (visually!) on Pd-D co-deposition cathodes would be, effectively, muon detectors, each one catalyzed by a single muon, passed around.) Has this idea been published? I know that the possibility of cosmic muon background being the explanation for cold fusion has been mentioned elsewhere.] --Abd (talk) 20:24, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

cold fusion cell

"Cold fusion cell" is a nonscientific, nonspecific term. Do "cold fusion cells" exist? The process inside the cells is unknown, with only inferences, speculations, or theories, there is no consensus on it among the general scientific community. The cells are called palladium-deuterium co-deposition cells. Read the paper! palladium-deuterium codeposition describes what the cells are with reasonable accuracy. Take a generic "cold fusion cell," which could be taken to mean any cell of any kind where there is an attempt to observe nuclear processes, and it might or might not show neutrons. It might or might not show excess heat. "Cold fusion cell" is not used in the peer-reviewed source, nor is it supported by the references. It's synthesis, which might be acceptable to some degree, but it is far better if we use scientifically precise and neutral language. If we aren't going to describe the cell more precisely and accurately and neutrally, we should just eliminate the reference to the cell itself.

Surely the AFP source says very clearly "low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices", the New Scientist source talks about cold fusion and nuclear reactions, and only mentions LENR in this context: "Like many in the field, [Krivit] prefers to categorise the work as evidence of 'low energy nuclear reactions', and says it can be explained without relying on nuclear fusion.".

So, according to the sources, "cold fusion cell" is a perfectly correct and sourced name for the device used in the CR-39 experiment, it's not synthesis at all, and you are making OR to support other name. --Enric Naval (talk) 06:29, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

When there is difference between peer-reviewed reliable source and media reliable source, we prefer the peer-reviewed source. That a "device" is even involved is synthesis, and that the synthesis might take place in the media makes it usable, but definitely not preferable. To my knowledge, there is no peer-reviewed reliable source for "cold fusion cell" or for calling an experiment that sets up certain condensed matter conditions, and then the behavior is observed, a "device." A "cold fusion cell" would mean a cell in which "cold fusion" takes place by design. The very name is POV until and unless cold fusion is accepted by consensus. --Abd (talk) 16:34, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, but "cold fusion cell" gives 47 hits in google books [11], and in quite a few reliable sources: "The golem" from Cambridge UP, volume 357 of Nature, "Cultural boundaries of science" from University of Chicago Press, the proceedings of the 16th IEEE/NPSS Symposium Fusion Engineering conference, "Fundamentals of renewable energy processes" from Aldo Vieira da Rosa, Physics Briefs journal, Science magazine, Physics Abstracts journal, "Voodoo Science" from Oxford UP by Robert L. Park, the "Undead science" book, proceedings of Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, "Anomalous Nuclear Effects in Deuterium/solid Systems" from the American Institute of Physics, "Science, reason and rethoric" from Pittsburgh UP, the hearing before the Subcommittee on Energy of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives in 1993, and "Il Nuovo cimento della Società italiana di fisica" from the Italian Society of Physics (that's the one from Preparatta?).

Also, "cold fusion cell" name appears in the proceedings of at least the 2th, 5th, 10th, 11th and 12th conferences in cold fusion. It also appears in lenr-carn.org in 18 different papers [12] and on 46 different pages in newenergytimes.com [13]

My head hurts from all this. I'll let other editors decide if the sentence is understandable without saying that it's a "cold fusion cell". Giving it a second thought, maybe it's already understandable from the context. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:54, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

CR-39

I've wikified this several times and it's been reverted out. Weird. Sloppy editing at best. The CR-39 article has some good photos of the plastic used as a radiation detector, showing both the single pitting obtained from ionizing radiation and the triple tracks resulting from energetic neutrons.

It's reverted because it's wikilinked at three different places, when stuff is usually only wikilinked once. It's usually wikilinked more than once when the two wikilinks are very separated from each other (not the case here), or if there is other specific reason (like lists of stuff where every entry is wikiliked even if it appears elsewhere in the text, again not the case here). --Enric Naval (talk) 06:54, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikilinking at any significant mention where the reader might not notice other links is preferred, and there is little or no harm from extra wikilinking. In this case it's particularly important to wikilink because photos of the triple track phenomenon are shown in the CR-39 article. The preferred place to wikilink is in the text where the mention is particularly significant. Photo captions are separate and might be reviewed by the reader separately, so wikilinking there is to be encouraged.--Abd (talk) 16:48, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I agree on making 1 wikilink in the text and 1 in the photo caption, because they can be read separatedly.... but please don't link both photo captions when they are one directly next to the other, that's just overkill. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:39, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

The report results suggest ...

Results don't make suggestions, people do. There is a strong tendency here to WP:WEASEL and the usage of the passive. It's true that the study reports evidence -- strong evidence, actually -- of the emission of energetic neutrons (report results? how about experimental results suggest? report suggests? -- but those are all still with lost performative. How about cutting to the chase? Why does anybody care about "energetic neutrons"? We care because they are a signature of some kinds of fusion reactions, because it seems very difficult to explain these results without some kind of fusion taking place in there, which even could be hot fusion, given the controls and observations. Neutrons aren't detected when the cells are run with water instead of heavy water.

The report is being widely recognized as possible evidence of low-energy nuclear reactions.

If that's the sentence -- and the "wide recognition" refers to very substantial media coverage, -- then the Krivit remark becomes redundant, actually. Some media sources seem to have thought that Krivit was criticizing the experiment. He wasn't, I'm certain of that. He was criticizing the suggestions of the study authors that the imputed energy of the neutrons suggested D-T fusion, and not to say that that this is wrong, but that this is only one among many possible or theorized low energy nuclear reactions. Krivit strongly supports the SPAWAR work. Abd (talk)

By "If that is the sentence," I meant, "If we use this sentence...." not that this is what was stated. (And there was an extra sentence fragment above, confusing everyone including myself.)

That's not the sentence, please check the AFP source and the New Scientist source and look for the correct sentence, whatever it is, or point to the source where this appears. I think you got the sentences mixed up somewhere. --Enric Naval (talk) 06:57, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I think I've already quoted Krivit exactly more than once here, from the NS report or others. However, notice this text from Science Daily, my emphasis:

Researchers are reporting compelling new scientific evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called "cold fusion" that may promise a new source of energy. One group of scientists, for instance, describes what it terms the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring.

One report like this, no matter how striking, isn't the end of the story. However, the SPAWAR work reported here is only one aspect of a series of experiments showing other evidences for LENR, and many aspects of that work was either verification and extension of what had been reported by others, or has been verified by others. It's too big a story to rush into. The point to take home and to have in the article now is that neutrons were a kind of "holy grail" for some, early on. The lack of neutron detection was widely considered (incorrectly, in my view and the view of many others) to be proof that fusion wasn't taking place. Neutrons were detected before, but always using non-integrating detectors, at levels insufficient to account for the excess heat and other results, such as He4. Because CR-34 is well-known to show ionizing radiation from the Pd-D system under "CF" conditions, at much higher levels than what Mosier-Boss is reporting for neutrons, it's possible that more detailed microscopic examination of the tracks in prior work may have missed the rare triple-tracks. The other researchers were looking for an explanation for the excess heat, and the neutron report from Mosier-Boss utterly fails to account for that heat. What it shows is, though, that nuclear reactions, probably of the kind expected, i.e., a pathway that involves emission of energetic neutrons, is, in fact, taking place where it should not. It may be hot fusion, but what, then, is causing hot fusion there in the cell? Where is that energy coming from? (And, of course, experimental artifacts, while becoming difficult as an explanation, still cannot be ruled out absolutely.)

There is an interesting blog at [14]. Somebody should teach the younger generation a little respect! This "nuclear chemistry PhD student" thinks that he's thought of something that the researchers did not think of. Why does he think that?

I asked why they haven’t observed any gamma rays from their cold fusion experiments. Pamela Mosier-Boss was quick to reply that they indeed did measure gamma rays, but they “came in bursts… and are averaged away [over the duration of the experiment]“.

Aha!, he thinks, imagining that they had overlooked the obvious. They didn't. They simply didn't address it at a news conference where they were getting questions right and left. They found gamma rays in bursts. That's a reported fact. But the student jumps to conclusions:

The answer is simple, they measured background. Background is a random process, it will come in bursts, they may even cluster to make a peak for a short time, but when you run it over the course of the whole experiment it is “averaged out”; that my friend is background you measured.

Okay. He's correct. But they did not report gamma rays. Are there gamma rays from the reactions in the cells? From this report, we don't know. The bursts might or might not be significant. They might or might not be background, and that is actually difficult to determine. This student asked a question and got a very precise answer. The student, perhaps too eager to be smarter than those who might be much more experienced than he, jumped to conclusions, which conclusions, ironically, are implied by Mosier-Boss's answer. He might even be a decent nuclear chemist, but he doesn't know how to listen yet, how to recognize what is true about what others say, instead of simply looking for what is wrong. Here is what he says:

So should I believe the claims of a scientist who does not understand the difference between background and peaks? Should I believe a scientist who doesn’t understand the basic consequences of his own technique? You don’t even have to be a nuclear chemist to call bull-shit on this one.

That's correct. You merely have to be immature. It's she, by the way. What was wrong with her statement? It was actually what a mature and experienced scientist would say in an environment with time constraints: just the facts, hang the conclusions. The conference, by the way, is available as video, so we can listen to this interchange, I suspect, I have a vague memory of the question. (See the ACS site). She gave him the information he needed to conclude that the gamma bursts could be background radiation. He concluded, because she didn't specify this, that she didn't understand....

But then he goes in a more positive direction:

Honestly, if they are measuring more energy out of their systems than the energy they are putting in, then this is fantastic news. If they see excess heat, then they need to chase this line of inquiry down.

Of course, hundreds of researchers around the world have been doing just that for twenty years. The excess heat is quite well demonstrated. (Remember, even given what is also well-documented and extreme bias against cold fusion, half the 2004 DOE panel considered the findings of excess heat to be strong); Hoffmann, in 2005, in his report published by the American Nuclear Society, made cogent remarks on this, and many of the problems he also cites have been resolved in subsequent work. I'll cover Hoffmann elsewhere, he says some very remarkable things about the political situation which we could be covering far better than we have.

The blogger links to the press conference video and says where his question is. I haven't checked yet. Enjoy. --Abd (talk) 21:21, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

That sentence doesn't sum up correctly the sources. A better summary would be:

• This is the first clear evidence that a cold fusion cell is producing energetic neutrons, which are indicative of nuclear fusion. However, the neutrons still have to be measured quantitively, and the neutrons could be produced by other phenomenona.

--Enric Naval (talk) 00:37, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

You have two sentences there, Enric. The first is accurate. There has been a lot of work on neutrons before, but using other methods of detection, not integrating like CR-39, and the levels were always down in the noise because if the measurement difficulties; the lack of reliable neutron detection, coupled with the fact that the levels of neutrons reported were far below what would be expected from the excess heat, is probably the most important brick in the wall of rejection. The last sentence is synthesis if not attributed, and attributing it to a casual source, as distinct from a detailed examination, is a WP:UNDUE problem. However, we might be able to find consensus for some similar statement. "The neutrons would still have to be measured quantitatively (actually, that's done, I think, but I could be wrong. It's possible to estimate neutron flux from the track density, but, this is important to realize: This detection of neutrons is evidence that something is amiss with theory, but it is not evidence about cold fusion. That may have been Krivit's point. A pipe broke above your kitchen, and water is pouring down, massively. You walk in and the place is soaked. You notice a slow drip from the faucet. Aha! Now I know why the kitchen is wet!

The neutron detection is politically interesting, i.e., the politics of science. If confirmed -- and given prior research in the field, the clarity of the results, the controls, and estimation of the energy of the neutrons (which is right for hot fusion) -- that seems very likely, and my guess is that a lot of researchers are now pouring over images of their CR-39 chips looking for triple tracks, so we may actually see some very rapid communications -- this means that nuclear fusion at very low levels -- is taking place in the Pd/D system. Or some other nuclear process, we all agree on that, but it sure looks like *hot fusion*, and the fact that the cell is close to room temperature doesn't negate this at all. (Bubble fusion, for example, though still controversial, is hot fusion, with the extraordinary temperatures being generated by bubble collapse.)

Sure, in theory, there might be some kind of natural radioactivity that is generating the neutron results; except that would probably then upset more experimental science than a conclusion that this is cold fusion. After all, experimental science is not upset by special findings under special circumstances.

I've been following the blogs and it's amazing how many writers think they have invented this killer argument: if it's fusion, how come, after twenty years, we don't have a home cold fusion heater? Huh? Answer me that? --Abd (talk) 00:35, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I'll answer that!

I think I've seen this argument here, too. The answer is that the original research, and most of the academic ongoing research has been driven by science, not practical application, and it is quite obvious that cold fusion, if it happens -- it sure is looking like it does -- only takes place under very delicate conditions, it took years to figure out what they were so that replication rates rose (they are now at 90-100%). The Arata results point to something that might eventually develop into a commercial product, because the heating effect looks stable. Unfortunately, as Jed Rothwell points out -- he's active in the blogosphere on this -- Arata's work is a tad frustrating, short on detail. He also defends Arata; Arata is looking for striking demonstrations, not precision, it may have to do with being older than everyone else! (Rothwell speaks Japanese and has spent a fair amount of time with Arata looking over the work. Arata's lab is apparently teeming with Chinese scientists who are taking careful note. Somebody might end up eating our lunch -- "our" means the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and Australia.) The fact is that with the science as it is right now, assuming the work of the last few years is real and showing cold fusion, it could still take a long time to develop practical heating systems, if ever. There is a disturbing understanding in the field that these experiments occasionally go into some kind of thermal runaway, there have been explosions and excess heat way above not only chemical levels, but also normal cold fusion levels in ordinary successful experiments. However, suppose that we can get a watt of output from an Arata cell with 7 grams of his alloy. Rough guess. (There is a temperature differential maintained between the cell and the environment of 4 degrees C., but it is insulated, you can see it in the photos.) Arata doesn't give a fig about the calorimetry or total energy generation, he is simply making a thermodynamic demonstration of sustained heat generation, plus he then measures helium. Now, with a mere 70,000 grams of palladium, I could generate 10 KW. I've seen figures of more than 100 years. Cool. Oops! At current prices, that is about $500,000. Plus the cost of the heavy water, I haven't checked that out, and the rest of the device, and if these applications arise, the price of palladium will definitely go up. Now, tell me! It may be expected that this might work. Would you buy one? More to the point, if you are a venture capitalist, would you invest the very substantial sums that it will take to scale this up and be sure that it is safe (how?)? Oh, and one detail. Suppose that the explosions or runaway heat are due to a rare event where a cosmic ray of a particular kind or energy hits the device and triggers excess reaction. That is, this thing might look stable, and be stable for a long time, and then .... kablooey! Clean and safe? Maybe. It will take a ton of money to find out. Until much more is known, I wouldn't want to sleep next to a few kilos of palladium deuteride, not to mention the ordinary fire risk. There is a *huge* amount of explosive deuterium gas in there, it is essentially compressed to practically a metallic state, if I've got it right. Palladium is very unusual stuff when it comes to how it mates with hydrogen or deuterium. Sorry, but dreams of "free energy" are still that, even if this is cold fusion. On the other hand, maybe .... There are claims of devices just about to hit the market, and there have been for years. One of them might turn out to be real, there are some fairly heavyweight people working on this, with some understandable secrecy, and, indeed, if they can get it right, there is more money to be made than I can imagine in one sitting. I'll believe that when I see it. And take it apart and put it back together. --Abd (talk) 00:35, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Enric had a second sentence, However, the neutrons still have to be measured quantitively, and the neutrons could be produced by other phenomenona. I'll start with this not being encyclopedic. "have to" -- according to what? Neutrons don't "have to" do anything, they'll just sit here for practically forever. "Quantitatively," what does that mean. 10 neutrons per chip, i.e., 10 characteristic triplets per chip, I think they say how big the chips are, with a lot of ionizing radiation doing major damage to the other side, the side toward the electrode (but only where it is in close contact with the electrode.) They calibrate each chip with an Am-141 source in one corner; that is ionizing radiation of a known energy, so they can then estimate the energies of the particles causing the pits. The controls? No triple tracks, or very isolated ones. Sure, the work should be verified, but if you think that, for the purposes of our article, this is really important, you've missed a point: this is nuclear radiation, alright, a smoking gun for nuclear reactions, but it's the kitchen faucet with a slow drip. What about the water pouring down from the ceiling? And the work showing lots of ionizing radiation (forget background! it's moot) has indeed been verified, and there was prior work with similar results. One of the real tricks here is that progress in the field has allowed the SPAWAR group to get reliable excess heat, which correlates with both the ionizing radiation and the neutrons and the helium. The neutron levels are tiny, though; the helium is at levels expected from the measured heat. And that correlation has been observed since the early 1990s. Hmmm... that's not in our article, must not have happened....

But, yes, however, nobody showing familiarity with the experiment -- Pauley doesn't show that, his criticism is quite generic, could have been made about nearly every cold fusion report for the last twenty years -- is saying that "other phenomena" means anything but some nuclear reaction other than fusion. But what is cool about this experiment is that the reaction product is what so many researchers were looking for and failed to find in 1989, neutrons of the energy that's right for a known fusion reaction. Just very few of them, but well above background. There aren't that many energetic neutrons flying around in most places. And if there were in the SPAWAR lab, or in the heavy water, or in the cells or electrodes, the controls would show the triple tracks also. They don't.

One more tidbit. Robert Park has reacted to this. Author of Cold Fusion: Voodoo Science.

4. COLD FUSION: TWENTY YEARS LATER, IT'S STILL COLD.

Monday was the 20th anniversary of the infamous press conference called by the University of Utah in Salt Lake City to announce the discovery of Cold Fusion. The sun warmed the Earth that day as it had for 5 billion years, by the high temperature fusion of hydrogen nuclei. Incredibly, the American chemical Society was meeting in Salt Lake City this week and there were many papers on cold fusion, or as their authors prefer LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions). These people, at least some of them, look in ever greater detail where others have not bothered to look. They say they find great mysteries, and perhaps they do. Is it important? I doubt it. But I think it's science.[15]

He's right. It may or may not be "important," at least to energy generation. But, indeed, it is science. Mosier-Boss et al have unexpected experimental results. I'll point out that science does not grow from expected experimental results. Science is not dead yet, and neither is cold fusion, in spite of all the pronouncements that were made twenty years ago and repeated regularly, out there and here.

Park and others are discussed in an excellent article that is, unfortunately, on a public-journalism web site.[16] --Abd (talk) 01:08, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

but don't explain what process was causing them.

The paper should be read:

http://www.newenergytimes.com/Library2/2008/2008BossTripleTracks.pdf

The paper explains as much as is possible what could be causing the neutrons, and refers to theoretical work that has been done.

detailed discussion

The SPAWAR group is an experimental group, reporting observations and measurements in controlled experiments. Lack of explanation of results is not a criticism of an experimental report at all. Like most experimental reports, the authors speculate or note what the results they found suggest, and they do that, and more than that could actually be inappropriate in a paper like this. They are making what is, politically, a very important report, because lack of neutrons was one of the killer arguments in 1989. Some media reports are calling the SPAWAR work a "rediscovery of cold fusion." It's really preposterous. This group has been working on cold fusion since, I think, 1990. They've been publishing results all along. Their work has been shared, for years, with the other cold fusion researchers; detection of radiation with CR-39 in palladium deuteride experiments didn't originate with them. What they did was to look more closely at the chips, apparently. Instead of looking at the heavily pitted areas close to the electrode, they looked in lightly pitted areas and on the other side of the chip (away from the cathode), that's when they found the triple tracks. So what they "discovered" was neutrons, not cold fusion, which was discovered in the years preceding 1989 by Fleischmann and Pons (with some possible earlier reports, plus, of course, muon-catalyzed fusion). Cold fusion researchers had mostly given up looking for neutrons, because they are actually moot in terms of explaining the excess heat. The heat is being produced, quite clearly, by reactions that don't involve neutron emission; what the SPAWAR group found has to be a result of a process that usually proceeds in some other way. What's missing from this report and from most of the media reports is that the same group, and others, have been reporting ionizing radiation for years, radiation that is also evidence of nuclear reactions, but at far higher levels. Given that helium is also being found, in quantities correlated well with what would be expected from the measured heat, it's pretty obvious: there is fusion taking place, by whatever pathway; the helium isn't there when there is no excess heat. The "don't explain" comment is in direct contradiction to what is in the next sentence, though, in fact, the phrase "deuterium-tritium fusion" wasn't mentioned by Krivit, but Krivit's comments don't make sense without stating what the authors of the paper propose as the nuclear process causing the emission of neutrons. "what process was causing them" is referring to the neutrons. The paper suggests that they are caused by D-T fusion, which will produce neutrons of the right energy. But "process" could refer to the mechanism or conditions that allow fusion to take place, in spite of the Coulomb barrier. The flap arose because of the ACS press release; and then the media was present at a press conference. The ACS seminar, though, was merely a presentation and opportunity to ask questions regarding the previously published work, and here is a copy: http://www.newenergytimes.com/Library2/2008/2008BossTripleTracks.pdf If a physicist is going to criticize the work, don't you think he should read it? I don't see any sign of that in his comments. The comments in the original source : Today's announcement is based partly on research published by Mosier-Boss' group last year in the journal Naturwissenschaften. In this sense, she has not repeated the mistake of Pons and Fleischmann, who announced their findings before they had been tested by the peer-review process and published in a scientific journal. But that does not mean the results indicate cold fusion, said Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss' published work. "Fusion could produce the effect they see, but there's no plausible explanation of how fusion could occur in these conditions," Padley said. "The whole point of fusion is, you're bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow." The problem with Mosier-Boss' work, he said, is that it fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons. "Nobody in the physics community would believe a discovery without such a quantitative analysis," he said. If such experiments did produce fusion reactions, they would generate highly energetic neutrons as a byproduct. These are what Mosier-Boss says her San Diego-based group has found. "If you have fusion going on, then you have to have neutrons," she said. "But we do not know if fusion is actually occurring. It could be some other nuclear reaction." What Padley said is simply a continuation of prior opinion without any reflection of the new findings. His objection is purely based on theory, with one exception: if it were plausible that the neutrons were coming from source other than a nuclear reaction (which might not be "fusion," and his theoretical argument is against fusion, not against any and every possible nuclear reaction), then he'd have a major point: but it is, quite simply, false to say "the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons. That is, sources other than nuclear reactions. Not necessarily "fusion." But Padley seems to have fusion in mind. Above, in Talk:Cold_fusion#Additions_to_.22further_developments.22, I quote where the paper does exactly that, i.e., rule out other sources. Is every possible other source excluded? No, just the ones they could think of. I suggested above that Mr. Padley might propose some in a communication to Naturwissenschaften, if he can think of any.

While we have reliable source that Mr. Padley said this, the disconnect between his comments and the actual paper are too great: this is a physicist, asked to comment by a newspaper, having had little time (quite possibly), vs a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal. That's undue weight. Padley said nothing that hasn't been said hundreds of times before. What the paper is evidence of is low-energy nuclear reactions, though it's possible that the neutrons are being produced by hot fusion (if cold fusion takes place, it may create energetic nuclear species, such as a triton, which would then normally fuse to produce helium plus a neutron.) The point isn't any particular theory to explain what is happening, but that the evidence is strong for nuclear reactions. It could take years, decades, to figure out what is actually going on in the Pd-D system.

I will edit the article consistently with what I've written here. Please incorporate and accept what you can, and please discuss the remainder in detail. --Abd (talk) 03:24, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

You are doing a bunch of OR to "prove" that Padley didnt' read the paper. Do you have any secondary source saying that they explained what process what causing the neutrons? --Enric Naval (talk) 06:33, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Sure, and there is indirect reference to it. What in the world was Krivit talking about? He was suggesting that their explanations were premature, and was trying to deflect criticism based on the explanations rather than the actual experimental findings, which are stunning in their simplicity. I certainly cannot prove that Padley did not read the article, but his comments don't show that he was aware in detail as to what is in it. A lot of the media reports of the last week have been like this, they make assumptions about what was in the paper, then respond to it. What Padley stated to the paper was a stock comment, which could have been made, and has been made, about nearly every cold fusion paper, whether or not it was actually cogent in context. If we are going to report the Mosier-Boss paper, and we are practically forced to, we should not report criticism that clearly isn't on point, unless we do it in a way that reflects proper balance. Reporting a probably unconsidered comment to a newspaper reporter looking for "balance" as distinct from doing research in depth, as if it were on some equal level (peer-reviewed vs. quick comment to a reporter who clearly doesn't know the topic), is a violation of WP:UNDUE. --Abd (talk) 13:50, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

So, to sum up, it is your contention that:

A. Professor Padley does not reach the same conclusions that you do from the available data

B. Anyone who does not reach the same conclusions that you have must not have read the data

C. Anyone who has not not read the data should be excluded as a source for this article.

We can skip step A, and merge B and C to get the central conclusion you are making:

Anyone who does not reach the same conclusions that you do must be excluded as a source.

This is pure, unabashed POV pushing. You're attempting to a priori exclude sources that do not agree with your preconceptions of what the outcome should be. Your logic is falling into the No true Scotsman fallacy of excluding evidence that disagrees with your predetermined conclusion, with "has really read the papers" substituting for true Scotsman. --Noren (talk) 14:15, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Noren, that's not a fair characterization of what I've said. I'm sure that there are cogent criticisms that could be made of the Mosier-Boss work. But Padley's comments show no evidence that he has actually read the work and the background to it. The vast majority of physicists wouldn't have. As to source for this article, what Padley says is utterly not new, and it is explained through the filter of a newspaper reporter who also didn't appear to understand the issues. In other words, fairly common "science" journalism, based on a cursory review of a press release, without further research but pulling together the most obvious claims from the past ("unable to reproduce it" is a very common one, as if 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals confirming the excess heat observations of Pons and Fleischmann don't exist), and then a call to an "expert," a physicist, who who should know about these things, right?

In fact, the science of low energy nuclear reactions (that is, the search and effort to confirm or refute that they take place) is extraordinarily complex, and few physicists would have an inkling of the complexities unless they have studied the specific field. From Hoffman:

Young Scientist: I can see that this field is no place for electrochemists to play amateur physicist.

Old Metallurgist: [...] this field of research is one no place for physicists to play amateur electrohemist. Actually the best requirement is experience in doing these experiments. There are too many ways to get false-positives and false-negatives from these experiments for an experimenter to work intensely for several months and then claim definitive realities. It takes years of refining the experimental technique and instrumentation ot learn how to avoid the pitfalls that trap.

This was Hoffman writing in 1995, A Dialog on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects, A Guide for the Perplexed About Cold Fusion.

The SPAWAR group has been working on the problems for almost twenty years. They know what they are doing, and they have many published papers in peer-reviewed journals. The media missed, almost entirely, the deeper implications of their work, probably because the finding of neutrons was so startling that the fact was missed that these neutrons don't explain excess heat and helium production. They appear to be the neutrons expected from classical fusion, the ones that were tantalizingly present or imagined at close to background before, and good chance that is exactly what they are. Hot fusion taking place in a room temperature device. Why not? But only at very low levels. Good thing. Dead graduate students -- or Navy researchers. In 2007, the same group published similar research, also in Naturwissenschaften, showing ionizing radiation, which is a signature of the predominant process, almost certainly. This isn't new research, SPAWAR was confirming what's been reported and published around the world, using a specific technique that is highly reliable. And, yes, it's been confirmed. And the confirmation published. Yes, I'll stand with what I wrote: if Pauley has read the research and the background, he didn't betray it in his comments, or the reporter didn't report enough of what he said. Both are quite possible.

Instead what appears is that the physicist is speaking as an "expert," i.e., someone who knows stuff. You ask an expert to get the real scoop on something, which works if the subject is one known to the expert. But, remember, this is a "pariah field." I've argued that the alleged scientific consensus is phony, because "scientific consensus" implies the agreement of those familiar with a field, whereas the "pathological science" judgment is almost entirely made by those who don't know the research history beyond what they saw twenty years ago and which has been repeated over and over and over since then in the media and buzz. But not, Noren, in reliable scientific source. Definitely, cold fusion is a pariah field, which is about people and their reactions to things, not science. --Abd (talk) 23:37, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

As to UNDUE, we have two persons quoted here. Dr. Padley has a Ph.D and is a professor of Experimental Elementary Particle Physics at a major university. Mr. Krivit earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration and Computer Science and describes himself as an "investigative journalist, photographer, author and international speaker on the topic of LENR research." Which of these sources should be given more weight, the professor of physics or the business administration major who is operating with a business model of selling articles on the subject? NPOV would clearly indicate the former, yet you are advocating the latter. --Noren (talk) 14:15, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Actually, Noren, you are a bit confused. I actually took out both comments. However, an editor here imagined that Krivit was criticizing the SPAWAR work. See, these are researchers. They are not "cold fusioneers" out to prove that their baby is alive. They are experimentalists. They build stuff and see what it does. And what they have developed with twenty years of work takes platinum electrodes in heavy water with palladium chloride and lithium choride, as I recall, and electroplates the palladium onto the platinum cathode; because this is taking place in heavy water, deuterium gas is evolved at the same time and place as the palladium is being deposited, so the basic conditions of the Fleischmann-Pons effect are created almost instantaneously: palladium lattice highly loaded with deuterium. They get immediate excess heat. They get He-4. They get ionizing radiation, above 1 MeV, I think. Put those together and smoke them, what fantasy arises? The work has been confirmed, and, in round outlines, it confirms earlier work done by others. The experiments are controlled. Now, what is a particle physicist, whose training includes very little that bears on the condensed matter environment, what kind of comment would you expect?

I've described the situation a number of times: we have expert chemists, starting with Fleischmann and Pons, saying "This is not chemistry." (There are hundreds of them.) And we have physicists lining up to very loudly proclaim, "This isn't nuclear physics." Okay, what is it, Noren? And what would make you think that a particle physicist would know much more about it than any college-level physics student, unless he is one of the rare ones who have actually investigated the field instead of taking news about it from the media. Remember, the journals the guy reads don't publish on this, because it is a pariah field, one in which some consensus is presumed, unless, perhaps, he reads Frontiers of Physics in China. They, at least, publish in English; some of the best work in the field is only published in Japanese.

If you think that a particle physicist would be expected to understand the condensed matter environment, when most of his field has to do with how isolated nuclear entities behave, typically in a plasma, well, you have not grasped the dimensions of the problem.

How many editors here think that the 2004 DOE review soundly rejected low energy nuclear reactions? By now, some of them have, at least, stopped trying to remove direct quotations from the DOE report from the article because those quotations don't jibe with their opinions as to what the result was. There have been some excellent books written on this topic, I just got the next one in the mail today, Undead Science, by a sociologist.

But, basically, the first book to arrive was Hoffman, and what Hoffman says is pretty much what I've been saying here for weeks now, with so many editors imagining that I'm promoting some fringe position. Nope. I am skeptical of any POV, including my own. I'm not a "cold fusioneer." I'm neither an electrochemist nor a nuclear physicist, I just happened to spend some time with one of each. Linus Pauling and Richard P. Feynman, and with that and twenty-five cents, a long time ago, I could have gotten a ride on the subway. --Abd (talk) 23:37, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

I will use this link: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/chronicle/6333164.html as my source for Padley's remarks, one of which is this: “Fusion could produce the effect they see, but there’s no plausible explanation of how fusion could occur in these conditions” -- My comment on that is this: Why is it necessary to have a plausable explanation Right Now? Suppose I found some data indicating that a large asteroid was on a collision course with the Earth --do you think the data should be ignored while we try to figure out how that asteroid got onto that course??? I'd say the more important thing is to verify the data first (or show it to be inaccurate), before worrying about other stuff. This means that Padley's remarks, so long as they are not about verifying/disproving the data, are ignorable --or if not entirely ignorable, can be accompanied by commentary to the effect that such remarks are not Scientific because they presume that theory trumps data. Need I remind you that the U.S. Patent office will not reject an application for a perpetual motion machine, provided the application is accompanied by a working model? This means the Office recognizes both the importance and limits of Theory. V (talk) 15:58, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Suppose there is a new article with a headline: "Physicists reject cold fusion, consider it unworthy of discussion, conclusively rejected twenty years ago." You know, we have reliable source which says practically that. So, suppose we have this in the article, clearly supported by reliable source, of a quality higher than newspaper reports, but balanced, i.e., the history of this and the details are not excluded (because we also have reliable source that this rejection is for reasons other than "science," and, in fact, some of the sources cited above as proof that CF is "fringe" go on to show that conclusion). So, now, some paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the ACS, the largest scientific society in the world, and which is the mainstream in chemistry, holds a four day seminar on low energy nuclear reactions, not a token one-day as in the past, issues a press release, holds a press conference, inviting a person whom we have called a "POV-pusher" here to be on the press conference panel, and then a newspaper calls up a physicist and gets a comment that simply confirms what we have already discussed in depth in the article. Do we report it? It's not notable, in comparison, and it isn't balanced. Putting the two together, no matter how much RS we have on it, Padley's remark adds nothing that we did not already know and should have in the article without any dependence on him as a source. There is actually only one source, everything else on Padley about this is copied from the Houston Chronicle source, the copying shows some kind of notability, but, more accurately, it shows how newspapers were desperate for balance, they need to have some kind of negative comment, and anyone familiar with the field would know where to get it, from a particle physicist. Most newspapers did no research of their own, apparently, reports like the one in New Scientist were much better. There are particle physicists working on cold fusion, and they must be prepared for isolation and loss of research support, if they are in the U.S. Miles, a senior researcher, was told, when the Navy shut down his China lake research, to report to the chemistry stock clerk. We only have the results of his later work there because outside funding appear to suport its completion. If the newspaper had called up a particle physicist in China, it would have been different, for He Jing-tang is, for example, I believe, a hot fusion physicist, very much supported by government funding. They are doing CF research there, and cooperating intensely with the Japanese, and if we don't wake up (speaking for the en. world), they will eat our lunch. But my interest here is not saving the world or the "West," it is finding consensus. If the Chinese eat our lunch, maybe they deserve it more than us, and I'll probably be dead before CF makes any difference. And I have a Chinese daughter who will be, quite likely, native-speaker fluent and literate in Chinese and English, and an Ethiopian daughter who will probably be the same. So they will be ready to save a shifting world if I can't! --Abd (talk) 15:28, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Coverage of Mosier-Boss paper by Wissenschaft-online

[17], in German. I've read the google translation and it looks like this report has a bit deeper coverage and more balanced criticism. And the article also repeats a number of common errors, and the better criticism still seems to neglect the care exercised in the experiment to rule out the cause of the neutron detection from other sources, including natural background. If this were just one experiment, one piece of plastic, the experiment would be quite vulnerable to that explanation, but it's not, the paper covers a series of experiments, including various controls. For example, no deuterium, but hydrogen, no triple tracks. --Abd (talk) 16:25, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

What are you proposing we do with this source, as relates to article improvement? Phil153 (talk) 06:33, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I propose we get a good translation! --Abd (talk) 14:55, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

"Lack of accepted explanation using conventional physics"

This title is better but it would be good to have a title that reflects the fact these subsections are about the reasons against believing the cold fusion reports. Therefore, they need a title that gets across the idea of "problems" or "weaknesses" or "criticisms." I tried to be very neutral by using the word "incompatibilities." Keep in mind that there is already an explanation (not universally accepted) that is compatible with conventional physics: The pro-cold-fusion researchers are incompetent. Therefore, we shouldn't focus on the "lack" of explanations, but the lack of consensus. Does anyone have any better ideas? Olorinish (talk) 14:45, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

I preferred the old version, for both brevity and accuracy. The old old version, "Theoretical Issues", was even better. I'd also note that we shouldn't be renaming this like madmen, as has happened lately; lots of places, including news articles, link to this specific subtitle, and it should be stable, not changed on a whim because someone believes cold fusion is real. "Theoretical issues" is just fine. Phil153 (talk) 14:54, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

I have no objection to "Theoretical Issues". I might ask why it got changed away from that, to the POV-laden "Incompatibilities" label. Olorinish, I don't even object to including a statement to the effect that many physicists have assumed that the chemists were incompetent, so long as it is accompanied by a statement to the effect that those chemists consider those physicists to be incompetent chemists, plus arrogant or worse. After all, it takes arrogance-or-worse to assume that just because they , the physicists, were unable to replicate the chemists' data, the data must therefore be essentially impossible to replicate, or even fraudulent.

Hmmmm...note to Kirk Shanahan: Why didn't they see the CCS effect? Why should that effect exist only in experiments that are otherwise-interpretable as supporting the claims of P&F? Simplest answer: CCS does not exist in a significant way.

Anyway, building upon the other paragraph, it remained and remains true that the field of nuclear events is traditionally a field in which physicists play, not chemists, and that is the ultimate reason why the failures of the physicists, to replicate the chemists' data, assocated with this particular physicists' playground, led to the current low status, worldwide, of this research area. V (talk) 06:14, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Plenty of chemists laugh at it as well. Go read or ask at professional chemist forums what they, as chemists, think of cold fusion. They have as much contempt for it as the physicists. It may have a bit more respectability (or a couple of friends in high places in the ACS), but let's not pretend this is a physics vs chemistry thing. Phil153 (talk) 06:23, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm not pretending this is a physics-vs-chemistry thing, especially because I know full well that chemistry has been technically a branch of physics ever since atomic structures began to be understood (1920s?). However, the CF arena is a physicist-vs-chemist thing; we have lots of data supporting that description! V (talk) 18:01, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

This has been described many times. Chemists observe phenomenon in chemistry experiment. They are expert chemists, and they can't explain the result with chemistry. They say "this isn't a chemical effect, and the only thing we can imagine is that it is nuclear. The nuclear physicists, mostly, say, "this can't be nuclear because you can't do nuclear physics with your chemistry set." Now, which side of this is right? More to the point, which side is using the scientific method?

Hint: is the chemists, because they are doing and reporting experiments, developing hypotheses, trying to falsify them, building a body of knowledge. The physicists in this particular story are sitting on their theoretical laurels, and when other physicists publish theories to explain what the chemists are finding, they ignore them, they don't do the hard work to check the math and the quantum mechanics or quantum field theory. You ascribe the ACS seminar as being due to a few "friends in high places in the ACS." Perhaps. Something wrong with having friends? But do you think that friends would call on friends to lay their reputations on the line for some fringe crackpot theory? And how did they manage to trick the reviewers at Naturwissenschaften? And can we rely on your speculations about what you'd get by asking "a professional chemist forum" what they think? You know, if I went and did that and brought it back here and tried to rely on it even for discussion here, I'd be taken out and shot. Maybe that's what you are aiming for, little would surprise me lately. --Abd (talk) 06:58, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

(written earlier today, before Objectivist (V) commented) If the headline discriminates against those that "believe" that cold fusion is real, it's POV. There are explanations of cold fusion, including some that don't involve new physics but rather new analysis. Problem is, hardly anyone is paying attention to them. If you don't believe that cold fusion happens, and you are a theoretical physicist, how likely are you to dive into some very difficult math just to prove it wrong? On the other hand, those damn neutrons! WTF are they doing there?

Olorinish, your POV is showing. "The pro-cold-fusion researchers are incompetent." You really should start reading reliable source on this. Stop reading the junk in the media, some of it is correct, but most of it is just recycled old reports like "nobody could confirm." Start reading the peer-reviewed journals, much of this stuff is available at lenr-canr.org or newenergytimes.com. And read the section I will start below on Hoffman. --Abd (talk) 06:22, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

The problem with using "Theoretical" in this section title is that it does not reflect the fact that cold fusion reports are in conflict with previous nuclear reaction experiments, not just previous nuclear reaction theories. The problem with using "issues" in this section title is that the section is not just about issues, it is about criticisms. To keep the article NPOV, it should contain the strongest reasonable evidence and the strongest reasonable criticisms. The present version does a good job of both; I simply want the labels to reflect what is in the text.

Abd, I consider it insulting for you to tell me to start reading "reliable source" on this, especially because I recently claimed I have been keeping up to date. The "Triple tracks in CR-39..." article is interesting, and people should replicate the work, but a lot more is needed to overcome the poor reputation of the field. Olorinish (talk) 11:48, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Are you aware, Olorinish, of the degree to which the SPAWAR work is, itself, a confirmation of earlier work, going back at least to 1990? And that earlier aspects of the SPAWAR work have been confirmed? (I have the impression that the neutron findings have also been confirmed, though I'm not aware of peer-reviewed publication, which takes some substantial time. Or should!) In any case, we can agree that the article is interesting, though by this time we'd have practically no choice about that, given the media coverage. Now, tell me, what does the "poor reputation of a field" have to do with science? I know of one effect: publication can be suppressed, but that is all the more reason to pay extra attention to what does pass peer review. Sorry about the "insult," I'll admit I was feeling a bit peeved by, The pro-cold-fusion researchers are incompetent, which, I hope you can see, was a tad POV, eh? (And simply not true, unless by "pro-cold-fusion" you mean the nonscientists, not people like Mosier-Boss, or, for that matter, Fleischmann. (There is a good discussion of Fleischmann's errors in Hoffman, and the errors were politically serious but did not cut to the heart of the research. It's the excess heat!) How about letting us know what you've been reading and your impressions of it? What do you think about the Mosier-Boss report in detail? I know some don't like to see this discussion here, but I think it is actually crucial to our project, we don't discuss very well by trading sallies into the article. Or we could create a subpage, I suppose, to discuss a particular piece of work, what's in sources about it, and the various considerations involved. --Abd (talk) 19:31, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Abd, I know that you are trying to improve the article, and you raise interesting questions, but I would really like to focus discussion on improvements to the article. In the past two years or so that I have been keeping tabs on this article many people have come and gone, and I think part of the reason they are gone is that they burned themselves out, which is something I don't plan to do. I actually think the article is pretty good as is, and that much of the recent text on the talk page is distracting from the task of improving it. Olorinish (talk) 13:54, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Then your best course of action is clear: don't be distracted! But don't try to stop others from discussing what they consider worthy of discussion toward the purpose on which we agree. As to the present state of the article, I've been thinking of suggesting that the POV tag is removed, I'm not sure that the remaining problems are worth the ugliness. I certainly wouldn't object to its removal. However, I would disagree with "pretty good." It's acceptable for the moment, there is a huge story to be told, based on reliable source, that isn't told because it's consistently been excluded. That story will probably require more than one article; the science alone is probably worth more than one article, the story (i.e., "history") another. --Abd (talk) 14:53, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

[18]: "at issue": 1: in a state of controversy : in disagreement 2: also, "in issue" : under discussion or in dispute That pretty clearly includes criticisms. So there is no contradiction or lack. In fact, "issues" is the more inclusive term. And it's also stronger than "criticisms", as it acknowledges that there are, well, issues, whereas "criticisms" on the other hand, can be absolutely baseless.

As to theoretical, well, that's precisely the nature of the issues. Ya, theories are models fit to empirical evidence. But they are not the evidence itself - or the empirical itself. You seem to be confusing the map w/the territory, as it were. You see, Cold fusion reports are not in conflict w/previous nuclear reaction experiments, they are in conflict with the theory developed from previous experiments. (And that is subject to dispute, actually.) A subtle but important distinction. Without such a distinction there would be no distinction between "theory" and "experiment" in the first place. Kevin Baas^talk 13:15, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Headline: US Navy laboratory unveiled evidence of cold fusion

Headline: Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is "significant" evidence of cold fusion

Agence France Presse at Google

_{WASHINGTON (AFP) — Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is "significant" evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.}

--Ihaveabutt (talk) 17:54, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

-I deleted most of the pasted article. There was too much to qualify as fair use under copyright law. Phil153 (talk) 23:00, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, and it was unnecessary. We've been discussing this source for days. The link serves, it wasn't necessary to bring the whole article here! --Abd (talk) 03:12, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Navy research cold fusion reports

Editors who track news may wish to track these 2009 headlines:

Cold fusion experimentally confirmed

US Navy researchers claimed to have experimentally confirmed cold fusion in a presentation at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting. ...

New Cold Fusion Evidence Reignites Hot Debate IEEE Spectrum

'Cold fusion' rebirth? New evidence for existence of controversial ... EurekAlert (press release)

Cold fusion is back: Scientists report evidence Merinews Found by Google News Search: Navy Cold Fusion http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=cold%20fusion&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wn

--Ihaveabutt (talk) 18:02, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

I think I'll wait until mainstream science confirms that yes, it has been sufficiently replicated to be able to say that the evidence exists and that it's really caused by cold fusion and not by something else (whether overlooked factors or some other previously unknown process). I would also wait until the amount of neutrons released is calculated. See Wikipedia:Recentism. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:42, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Enric, we've been having a party here and it seems you did not notice, which might account for some strange edits lately. I might ask, have you read the Mosier-Boss peer-reviewed paper? It's not exactly current news, the real current news is that the ACS held a four-day symposium instead of a token one-day bone that had been tossed to cold fusion researchers in the past, and they actively promoted the symposium to science editors with a press release. In other words, my dear skeptical fellow editors (skeptical is not a term of opprobrium), "mainstream science" has recognized the field of low-energy nuclear reactions. By no means does this mean that some kind of "majority" exists, we cannot, for example, report these results or the hypothesized nuclear reactions as fact, but we can report the results themselves, and, indeed, we must (or, more accurately, we must allow editors to report them, taking care to maintain balance according to what is available in reliable source, and considering the relative reliability of the sources).

Editor-who-has-a-bottom, you are, again, late to the party. The news reports are already mentioned in the article, see the section currently: Cold_fusion#2009_reports. Welcome, and if you review or watch the article, you may be able to assist keeping it balanced. We can always use some extra hands, but, please, remember that this has been a highly contentious topic, and we need to keep in mind the value of finding consensus. --Abd (talk) 21:36, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

You are making an overly optimistic reading of those articles. Mainstream still considers cold fusion fringe science, and it's waiting to see if the CR-39 results are confirmed/replicated/whatever. --Enric Naval (talk) 00:36, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

The specific neutron results are fairly new, but the research group is very highly regarded. What's "Mainstream," Enric? Is the ACS mainstream? Was the 2004 DOE review mainstream? If you think the DOE treated cold fusion as "fringe science," in any way other than an emerging field of research, still quite controversial, you are dreaming a bad dream. Yes, quite clearly, pick your random *nuclear physicist* and ask about cold fusion, you are quite likely to hear a tirade about pathological science, failure to replicate, and a host of incorrect ideas about the history and the actual research. Is that "mainstream"? I.e., is mainstream science determined by people who are uninvolved with the field? Is this "nuclear physics" or is it "chemistry"?

Sure, for years, your career was over if you tried to focus on cold fusion. I had a Wikipedia editor tell me that he must maintain his anonymity because if it was known that he was discussing cold fusion, that would be it for his future. Most of the major researchers are quite old, basically they were ready to retire and they essentially said to the "mainstream," "screw you, this is real science and we don't care, we don't need your approval." And so they continued plugging away at it. And publishing in peer-reviewed journals, many of them. Others simply contributed to the field at conferences; how to get reliable replication of excess heat was very informally developed as a consensus and spread through conferences and the internet. Some of this history has surfaced in reliable sources, we'll be able to tell the story.

The basic problem: a majority of nuclear physicists think that cold fusion is preposterous for theoretical reasons, bolstered by very misleading information that was spread in 1989. Again, we have reliable source on that fiasco. (But not all nuclear physicists, for sure, and some excellent work has been done by experts on hot fusion, especially in China.) But a majority of chemists familiar with the research appear to consider that the excess heat is real, that it can't be accounted for by ordinary chemical process. See the 2004 DOE report, and look at the details. Now, reports of radiation with CR-39 from the Pd-D system go back over fifteen years, this is very widely reported, and the only thing new here (and it's not really that new) is neutrons. That the SPAWAR chips do show evidence of energetic neutrons has been independently confirmed. Read the articles! But ... the neutrons are really almost irrelevant, except politically. You want neutrons, we got neutrons. But not enough to make a sandwich, or heat your home or even a handwarmer. (But I don't know, offhand, of published confirmation of the neutrons in peer-reviewed reports or conference proceedings. Most researchers haven't been that interested in neutrons of late! What there is published confirmation on is ioninzing radiation detected with CR-39, excess heat, and He4 generation, all correlated. I.e., no or very low excess heat, little or no radiation beyond background, little or no helium beyond normal levels. Increase one, the others increase. The neutrons tell us nothing about the basic cold fusion process and it's quite possible that they are produced by hot fusion based on the energy released by cold fusion. In other words, folks, notice what some critics are saying, they may be more right than they realize: the neutrons are not coming from cold fusion, but from hot fusion. Begs the question, doesn't it? --Abd (talk) 03:37, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

I don't think you're getting it, Abd. Cold fusion, like zero point energy, the existence of UFOs, the veracity of homeopathy, and the Grand Unified Theory, would be big events if confirmed and accepted by any meaningful part of the mainstream. See WP:REDFLAG and WP:FRINGE to understand how this forms a part our content policies. Just look at the massive press on the first announcement, the multiple papers published in the most presitigious journals in the world, etc. As it is now, cold fusion, LENR, tiny-monkey-firing-neutrons-out-of-his-proverbial (TMFNOOHP), whatever you want to call it, is fringe and rejected by the mainstream. To suggest and particularly to edit otherwise at this stage is a pure WP:TRUTH crusade and attempting to right great wrongs. Phil153 (talk) 03:51, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Phil153, there isn't any source of quality for the claims you just made so confidently, and there is plenty of reliable source for the problem of bias in the field, plus there is continued publication in peer-reviewed journals, and not just marginal ones and not just conference papers. ArbComm has taken a dim view of your approach, which is closely aligned with that of a recently banned and blocked editor. Neutrons, Phil. Those damned neutrons. What are they doing there? But we might have asked the same thing about the excess heat, which has been massively confirmed, about He4, ditto and correlated with the heat, and ionizing radiation, ditto. Peer-reviewed, we do have some coverage in the article, and the other side of the story is, in fact, a story of bull-headed stubborness, well-documented. You really should read Hoffman, a skeptic, Phil. It might open your eyes, assuming there is something under those lids. See if you can get a copy. A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects, prepared by the American Nuclear Society with support from the Electric Power Research Institute, 1995. I'm going to take your comment here as trolling and ignore it, I've got some serious work to do. Your attitude is part of the problem. You could be part of the solution, if you start trusting in our consensus a bit more. My name is not Pcarbonn, and I'm here to shift the article toward what is in reliable source, not pop media knee-jerk fantasies about pseudoscience, nor naive acceptance of the latest theories or speculations. Reliable source. What a concept! Good luck. --Abd (talk) 06:37, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Hi Abd,

Thank you for the reply. You have just made both your position and your continued intention of incivility abundantly clear, despite numerous warnings. It's time to escalate this and seek further dispute resolution. I'll start an RfC on your cold fusion related behavior in the next few days (you'll be notified), and we'll see if the community can help resolve this. Phil153 (talk) 13:30, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome, Phil. If you can be precise about your objection, it may result in far less wasted time. What a coincidence, though! I've been writing an RfC myself. Ever done it before, Phil? It's my first time, though I've prepared evidence pages for RfCs. Let me put it this way, I would not dream of putting up a user conduct RfC merely because someone was, in my view, uncivil to me, and DR does not begin with (1) user is offended, demands offense stops, and doesn't think it has stopped. (2) user files RfC. So, I suppose, you might read that guideline as well. It works, when people use it.

While I sometimes get a bit excited, I do write with an awareness of ArbComm looking over my shoulder, so, please, be aware that jumping up to the higher levels of dispute resolution can cause close attention on your own behavior. If you are ready for that, then, of course, this won't be a problem for you. However, I read the comment to which you were replying as a strong declaration of POV, and if you have been editing with that POV in mind -- which I suspect the record supports -- then you might have some trouble. I recommend going the actual DR path. Enough said here, if not even too much --Abd (talk) 04:26, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

I think Abd got the title of that Hoffman book slightly wrong. Here's some information I found: http://www.padrak.com/ine/NEN_4_6_6.html V (talk) 13:49, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, I didn't capitalize the D, and I see that I substituted Reactions for Effects. And I deliberately didn't include the subtitle, "A guide for the Perplexed About Cold Fusion." I'm fixing both of those about without strike-out, if you don't mind. Thanks. Great book. Just got the rest of my order: Huizenga, Taubes, Mizuno (Nuclear Transformation: The Reality of Cold Fusion, originally published in 1997 in Japan, then translated by Jed Rothwell), and last and not least, Storms (2007). Houston, we have ignition. --Abd (talk) 04:10, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Phil, I don't care if the article contains statements about the current pariah status of the field. I just don't want that as an excuse to prevent CURRENT DATA from being included in the article. In Other Words, This Argument Is Not Acceptable: (1) CF is a pariah field. (2) All data generated in a pariah field is worthless/ignorable. (3) Any such data can therefore be excluded from a Wikipedia article.

--WRONG!!! V (talk) 06:50, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

In fact, since the article is about cold fusion and claims made in that field, the Reliable Source rule might not apply, to the extent this field is a pariah field. Does the article on perpetual motion require RS about working perpetual motion machines? Hah! The article is basically about claims made in that particular pariah field. Well, as far as claims are concerned, both the New Energy Times and Infinite Energy magazines are reliable sources of claims! V (talk) 14:09, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Discussion of the DOE review by Abd
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Something has not been understood, I think. RS is RS, though there is some variation from field to field, that is, sometimes the standards get a little looser, in practice, in fields where editors aren't slamming each other's edits against the wall. Yes, an article on perpetual motion, if push comes to shove, requires RS. But what is RS? It depends on the nature of the text. Newspapers are RS, generally. Yes, I'd argue that New Energy Times is RS, maybe also Infinite Energy magazine, but, by the nature of these publications, some level of bias may be inferred; they have an audience to please; nevertheless, these publications show notability within the field. They can be cited as evidence that some report is being made or some position advocated, and these reports should be attributed. I see no sign that NET would, for example, put words into a scientists mouth. They are reliable as to report, but not necessarily as to general-interest notability or objective review. On the other hand, everything I've read in NET has been far and above what I saw in the news media last week, with error after error being picked up and repeated, where a little on-line research would have fixed much of it. But do they make more money from doing that research? Probably not. Not general-purpose media. Someone else must do it for them, hence the importance of the CAS press release. The press release was pretty accurate; but newspaper editors still gummed it up, jumping to conclusions and reporting those as news. Note that Krivit's comment about it possibly not being fusion was widely interpreted as criticism of the work, which error was also repeated by some editors here. It was actually caution about the hypothesis advanced by Mosier-Boss to explain the results. (And, remember, one physicist claimed that they didn't "explain the results.") I think we should use extreme caution with off-the-cuff remarks by someone not necessarily familiar with current research in the field, the background; I'd bet a dollar to a donut that the physicist from Rice wasn't aware of how much CR-39 work has been done around the world, and all the various controls that have been tried, or the correlation of excess heat with He4 generation and the radiation, etc. I happen to have a disease which is potentially fatal. As you might imagine, I do a bit of reading about it. That reading leads me to suggest treatment approaches to my doctor. On the narrow issues I've researched, I know more than he does, but as to general context, I'd be silly to presume that I understand the overall issues. Ask him a question where he hasn't looked very specifically at the research, he may very well come up with some response that is unrelated to reality. Ask your random physicist, your quite good physicists, and you've be very lucky to find one who knows the background to the SPAWAR world. Most physicists haven't been paying attention to the work for almost twenty years. After all, wasn't it proven back then that the results were phony, the researchers didn't know beans about nuclear physics and the work was totally junk science, and nobody could reproduce it? But the picture shifts when you get scientists to sit down and review the evidence, hence the 2004 DOE review. Given that, it's fairly clear, there are many physicists and quite a few chemists who made their minds up twenty years ago, and that some of these would end up on the panel, or be influenced by them, that half the panel thought the evidence for excess heat was "compelling," and that one-third of the panel thought that evidence for low-energy nuclear reactions was "somewhat convincing," this was actually a stunning vindication of the field, if the media had been paying attention. But the media was focused on "cold fusion" and the dreams of "limitless energy" -- which might be hopeless even if LENR is quite real -- and all that many saw was the denial of major federal funding, and the overall conclusion of "not convincing" was read as polite bureaucratese for "bullshit," which it most definitely was not. And there was edit warring and mediation and ultimately banning of editors over the last year over even having detailed reports from the 2004 DOE review in the article. We now have most of the important findings, with adequate detail, (my current impression), but when these extended findings were inserted into the article, they were reverted out as "cherry-picked," I've just been reviewing the old history, and exactly the same thing happened to me when I tried it, at first. In other words, there have been forces here who definitely have wanted the article to reflect the "scientific consensus" which they believe, firmly, to be that Cold fusion is pseudoscience or junk science. However, we don't presume consensus from seat-of-the-pants estimates, what our friends think (one long-time editor here actually detailed quite explicitly why he believes it to be junk: he has an old friend who is a professor and electrochemist, who actually worked, when younger, with Fleischmann, who saw excess heat (!) but rejected the nuclear hypothesis and still does, and, in one place, he said that he trusted his old friend more than Pcarbonn. Sure. But our "old friends" aren't sources for the article, and what was ironic was that the same editor was faulting Pcarbonn for alleged appeal to authority. Whether you, dear editors, trust Pcarbonn or the nameless professor or Fleischmann or me or anyone else isn't relevant here, except that we should, indeed, follow the basic legal principle of assuming that testimony is true unless controverted. I. e., assume good faith. --Abd (talk) 19:18, 30 March 2009 (UTC) In many other articles, current reports published in peer-reviewed journals are used; where there is no consensus regarding them, i.e., no secondary source, they are used with caution and attributed. Instead of "Palladium deuteride at a high enough deuterium density emits neutrons," the specific research is cited and attributed to the specific author. With rare exceptions, this would be from clearly reliable source, and any peer-reviewed journal is that (I'm not claiming that there are no exceptions, only that if we start picking apart peer-reviewed journals that are reasonably such on the face, the Wikipedia structure for determining notability and verifiability falls apart). Yes, it appears to be a steady-state phenomenon; at atmospheric pressure, it's difficult to maintain a high enough density, but Arata does it by pressurizing palladium black with deuterium gas. Very simple. No energy input other than the natural heat generated when the gas enters the evacuated cell and is lapped up by the palladium. That heat dissipates, completely disappears when it is hydrogen, disappears completely, but when it is deuterium, it remains at a steady (but low) level, it appears this continues indefinitely. I haven't seen reports on what happens, say, six months later. Is the closed cell still at 4 degrees above ambient? (But because they are really interested in the helium, they open the cells long before that to measure helium.) This is published in peer-reviewed journals, folks. We have a tiny mention of it in the article, there is far more detail available. Now, where should that detail be? It belongs in the encyclopedia, but not necessarily in this article. Where? The position of Nature is quite important and should be covered, there is reliable source on it. When there is conflict between reliable sources, definitely, the more reputable one has an edge, but, remember, conflict in sources doesn't mean conflict on fact (usually); rather what happens is that we create conflict when we interpret the sources. To find NPOV, we must step back from that. I've been reading on this topic intensely over the last two months, coming up to speed, and I'm not aware of any conflict in sources. Realize the implications of that, folks, if you want to emphasize WP:AGF. Where we come into conflict is in how we interpret the sources. Nature is a source from 1989 and, I think, 1990, reporting work and opinions from then. If Joe Blow says something in 1989, published, and then Fred says something different in 2008, is there a "conflict in sources." No. Joe said what Joe said in 1989 and Fred said what Fred said in 2008. What was said in 1989 was said in a prestigious journal and one which we can show then stopped publishing on the topic by policy, not through peer review. We mention all this, including any notable dissent to that, if it exists. And if Fred's opinion or report was published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2008, it is later research, which is generally presumed to incorporate and reflect considerations of earlier research. Negative reports in 1989 do not contradict positive reports in 2008, unless it can be shown that the experimental conditions were exactly the same. Which is absolutely not the case with, for example, excess heat work. You may not like the implications of this, some of you, but ... I am not trying to change the world through Wikipedia; I'm trying to change Wikipedia through attention to both peer-reviewed reliable sources, other sources as appropriate for history and opinion, and editorial consensus based on careful and thorough process rather than who happens to have an axe to grind on a particular day. --Abd (talk) 14:33, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

About cold fusion still being fringe, I'll just point out the sources here and here. All this OR and wikilawyering about bias is starting to get tiring. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:48, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Enric, a lot of those links look ancient. Could you be more specific, regarding up-to-date RS claims that the field is still fringe? Thanks! V (talk) 22:56, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

The ones in the second link are all from 2007 and 2009, and the first link includes some from 2005, 2006 and 2008. Do I really have to go and spend more hours digging out also all the RS saying that the DOE 2004 reached the same conclusions and DOE 1989 and that it changed nothing (including declarations from cold fusion proponents), or the ones saying that nothing has changed in the last 20 years (meaning that the old sources still apply)? :P --Enric Naval (talk) 08:37, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Ah, but DOE did not declare the CF research to be fringe science in either of its reports. The reports basically said that the data-to-date (date of reports) was not convincing ENOUGH for a large research program, while leaving the door open for support of a "well-designed" experiment. That last could be taken as a challenge, because it likely requires a theoretical model for the observations that led to the DOE reports (a model that would be tested by the experiment). That in turn runs into the problem that there currently isn't consensus even in the CF field regarding theory; who decides which experiment is well-designed enough? On another hand (meanwhile), though, Basic Research, the conducting of oddball experiments just to see what happens, doesn't require much theory, and has given us such new data as the CR-39 triple-tracks, data not available when the DOE panels were doing their thing. You seem to be taking the position that conclusions based upon old data still apply; new and different data can be discounted or ignored merely because of the type of conclusions that were originally reached outside of the DOE panels ("CF is fringe science"). Why? V (talk) 13:41, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Please look at all those old and recent secondary sources that took me hours to collect and which unambiguously state that cold fusion is fringe. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:23, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Enric, I do not seriously doubt that the CF field is still considered "fringe" by a large percentage of scientists. Perhaps we need to properly define what we mean by "fringe"? Some definitions are more positive than others, but for the moment I'll treat the word as being associated with "deluded". So, what I am doubting is the notion that that large percentage of scientists have looked at recent data. In other words, Scientists A and B could have looked at data from the early 1990s, and concluded then that CF workers were deluded. Now, if Scientist A had not looked at recent data, it would be perfectly logical for us to expect A to say, today, that CF workers are still deluded (and thus you could obtain a very recent reference regarding "fringe"). But if B had looked at recent data, would B retain the same opinion as before? And should A's opinion in this matter still be regarded as authoritative?

Next, I think you did not answer my question. I wrote: "You seem to be taking the position that conclusions based upon old data still apply; [therefore] new and different data can be discounted or ignored ... Why?"

Finally, another thing I wrote about, which you seem to have decried as "wikilawyering", remains to be addressed. It is actually critical to how the overall article should be written, because even from the Neutral Point Of View, differing viewpoints are possible! I've pointed out elsewhere on this page that certain data items are tied to a POV regarding include/don't-include the data. It is possible that some of that data is even POV-specific regarding the validity/invalidity of deuterium fusion inside solid palladium metal. To include the data could bias the article away from NPOV! But to not include the data means that the article is "poorer" in terms of being encyclopedic.

Let me ask you this: Is CF research worthy of the effort that people are expending on that research, or unworthy of that effort? If it is unworthy, equivalent to researching perpetual motion machines, then I submit that the article can list quite a lot of CF data under such categories as "CLAIMED OBSERVATIONS" and "PROPOSED EXPLANATIONS". We do not need Prestigious-Journal-type of Reliable Sources for mere claims; all we need to follow is the WP:Verify policy regarding published information. On the other hand, if CF research is worthy, equivalent to studying high-temperature superconductivity, then we need to be much more careful about what the article includes.

Take your pick, one approach or the other. Mixing them, as appears to have been done so far, is sheerist hypocrisy, and I make no bones about saying so. More, I will continue to say so until the article is consistent in its approach to this topic. V (talk) 15:11, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

V is more or less correct. We still need to be careful about balance, but WP:UNDUE is often used to present "majority POV" in a way that obscures dissent; further, we have the serious problem here that "mainstream science" is undefined. We would normally use "mainstream" to refer to what is appearing in peer-reviewed publications, with newer publication taking precedence over older, yet it appears that some exception is being insisted upon here on the basis of media and non-peer reviewed secondary source about the widespread opinion of "pseudoscience" or "junk science" or "fringe." I don't find the problem all that difficult; my position is that RS is RS, and if we have RS for it, and if even a few editors believe it to be notable (not all RS material is notable, there are non-notable details), then it should be in the encyclopedia. Not necessarily in this article. For the moment, though, the status quo is that it has all been crammed into this one. When we start doing more careful and extensive work, this article is going to get awfully busy, in more ways than one. Heads up! --Abd (talk) 15:42, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Navy research cold fusion reports (arbitrary break 1)

(Unindent). Sorry about those hours of collection, Enric. You haven't understood what I'm saying. I'll try to be very, very succinct.

• The DOE reviews do not treat cold fusion as fringe science. A DOE panel is not going to very explicitly and unanimously recommend continued research into a fringe science if the members of the panel consider it a fringe science. I.e., it is conclusive that cold fusion is not fringe science as considered by an informed panel of experts. Some (not all) of them criticize aspects of the research and consider it "inconclusive." That word has a very specific meaning to a scientist, and it is far from "junk."
• The "scientific community," the vast majority of which is unfamiliar with the work of the last twenty years and often depending only on secondary awareness of what happened in 1989, and this includes many nuclear physicists, considers cold fusion to be "pseudoscience," unworthy of attention.
• Now, I saw nothing in the evidence you dug up that I did not already know, so what was the purpose that work? --Abd (talk) 03:57, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

@V, I think "being dismissed/disacredited by the large majority of scientists/scientific community" is a quite accurate definition of "fringe" in science. That most scientists have looked or not at recent data is irrelevant, since the point is that they still consider the same way as 20 years ago, so it's still fringe. Now, it seems that you are making assumptions in what would happen if most scientists looked at the evidence, but there is no guarantee that they would react as you predict (now, of course, if you just provided here a RS saying that most scientists would accept cold fusion as valid science if they just looked at the evidence, that would be something to work with and add to the article...).

You have missed the point. Opinions always are derived from certain collections of data. New data may or may not change an opinion. Let's focus on "informed opinions" here. Which opinions are better-informed, those that include recent data or those that exclude recent data? Why should opinions created long ago be considered valid today, IF the holders of those opinions have not kept up-to-date? I submit that only the opinions of those who have kept up-to-date are relevant with respect to descriptions of the "status" of the CF --or any other-- research field. Here is evidence for MY just-stated opinion: http://www.allgreatquotes.com/stupid_quotes105.shtml This is the essence of why I asked in an earlier message here, "Could you be more specific, regarding up-to-date RS claims that the field is still fringe?" V (talk) 19:18, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

So, which of those sources are not up-to-date, and on what do you base yourself to reach that conclusion? --Enric Naval (talk) 13:48, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

There is no way to tell, without asking the people who made the statements in those sources, whether or not they have kept up-to-date with recent research. You seem awful willing to assume they are all up-to-date, though. Why? V (talk) 14:35, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Uh, because they are "reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy", just like WP:RS demands? Because they are not contradicted by other recent RS that deal on the same topic? Because there are RS saying that nothing has changed, so there is not really anything to be up-to-date to?

I'm still waiting for what I asked: a RS saying that most scientists would accept cold fusion as valid science if they just looked at the evidence at the evidence produced since 1989 --Enric Naval (talk) 18:51, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

You are asking for something different that what I was talking about, due to a misinterpretation which I've described above. I did not say the thing you are asking about, so I don't need to find RS for it. Also, I'm not talking about "since 1989" as being recent; I'm talking about the last two or three years as being recent. Anyone who says "nothing has changed" is clearly either lying, or is ignorant of the CR-39 and other data (such as quite-reliable heat production) gathered recently , and it doesn't matter where such a claim is published, for the claim to still be either a lie or a revealing of ignorance. However, perhaps we are differing as to just what "nothing has changed" means? In my book the gathering of new data, of a type not previously gathered, counts as more than "nothing"; it counts as a change. If in your book the phrase refers to the numbers of scientists investigating the field, dare you say that, in spite of all the recent news, ZERO extra scientists have started investigating the field? While I'm sure the numbers haven't increased by droves, I doubt that anyone can accurately say nothing has changed in that regard. There is even recently published (not in an "RS" publication, of course) a hypothesis that perhaps explains all the miracles without invoking radical physics; that too counts as a change on the theoretical front, even if it isn't widely known-about yet. So, just how well-informed are those who claim that nothing has changed, eh? V (talk) 20:09, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

• on the second half of your comment, see WP:UNDUE, if a claim has have been found by RS to flawed, then we don't need to dedicate much space to it, except to explain briefly the intentions and claims of the experiment, and its flaws, plus the short-term/long-term repercusions if it had any, methinks. Non-notable claims can simply be listed, like I did with the list from Storms.

I agree that RS data is better to be included than non-RS data, and can even supercede non-RS data. However, I maintain that if the attitude around here is that CF research need not be taken seriously, then it is hypocrisy to insist on including only RS data in the article. And it should be obvious that if the attitude here is that the research should be taken seriously, then it would be hypocrisy to include any non-RS data in the article. Since I observe that both attitudes can be found among various editors here, I conclude that it is logical to include some non-RS data in the article (appropriately labeled, thereby dealing with the UNDUE issue). V (talk) 19:18, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

I think that you are mixing up WP:RS (use reliable sources) with WP:FRINGE and WP:REDFLAG (for extraordinary claims use high-quality reliable sources or don't include them at all) --Enric Naval (talk) 13:48, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

No, I'm not mixing anything. Just apply those "standards" to the perpetual motion article, and see what survives. That article is approached from the POV that the idea need not be taken seriously; therefore it can include descriptions of various claims. Therefore editors who approach the CF article from the same POV have no right to exclude descriptions of various claims, because to do so would be hypocrisy. Can you tell me how the CF article would be hurt if it included a section with a lead paragraph that went something like this? "The following are descriptions of some of the claims made by researchers in the field, regarding experimental results. Many of these results have either not been substantiated by other workers, or not been published in traditional technical journals. The lack of an accepted theoretical explanation for these results has hindered wider investigation." (Then each item in that section, say only three or four of them, not too many, could be referenced in accordance with WP:Verify.) V (talk) 14:32, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Most, if not all, of the claims in that article have enough notability to have articles of their own.... The only exception would be the list of patents, which is a bit of WP:LISTCRUFT IMO --Enric Naval (talk) 18:49, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

And here we have Abd and possibly others suggesting quite a few subarticles to be associated with this one. And perhaps the perpetual motion article is not the best to compare, since modern work in the field is basically excluded. Perhaps the hydrino article would be a better choice, to see what is left of it after the RS standards are applied to it. I notice you didn't answer my question about how this article would be harmed by having a section having less-than-RS-data (the most recent and scientifically intriguing data) in it, following an appropriate introductory paragraph. V (talk) 20:09, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

The modern work in perpetual motion??? appliying RS standards to hydrinos??? Oh, good god, I'm so much not replying to this thread until you provide RS sources saying that the work on those last 2 or 3 years has made any significant change.... --Enric Naval (talk) 22:16, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Ah, perhaps NOW you are starting to see what I'm talking about. There is indeed "modern work" in perpetual motion; see http://www.steorn.com And, the whole point of mentioning hydrinos is, since that research area is not taken seriously by most scientists, and non-RS material is allowed in its article, it logically follows (if hypocrisy is to be avoided), that to the extent to which CF research is not taken seriously, non-RS material can be allowed in this article. V (talk) 13:30, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

So, your argument is that if one of the 6,838,019 wikipedia articles does it, it follows that it should be done here? All that your logic requires is for all of the other articles on wikipedia to be perfect and follow all the rules exactly, so we couldn't possibly be copying a mistake. Is this true in your opinion? --Noren (talk) 14:18, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm saying there is a reason why non-RS material is allowed in certain science-related articles, and that reason is directly related to the general perception of the scientific field toward that topic. There would not be an existing article on hydrinos if only RS material was allowed in it. Well, the CF field is unusual in that it was at-first acceptable enough for a quantity of RS material to be published, and then... Practically all the most recent research is non-RS. No one here denies that research has continued in spite of the general scientific opinion. But nobody has explained why the RS policy should continue to be applied, with respect to describing the most scientifically intriguing recent work, when CF is nearly as disreputable as hydrinos. Noren, what is your answer to my question above regarding how the article would be harmed by including a small selection of non-RS stuff, with an appropriate introduction? V (talk) 16:06, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

We don't have an article on hydrinos, lol. Hydrino theory was moved to Blacklight Power, see Talk:Blacklight_Power#Requested_move, and Hydrino is a redirect to that same article, with that article being about a company founded by a guy who made a now-discredited claim of having discovered something called "hydrino", (and Storms is, apparently, the only one making the claim that hydrinos have anything to do with cold fusion). --Enric Naval (talk) 16:52, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Steorn of all things qualifies as "modern work" in perpetual motion? It only qualifies as another self-deluded/fraudulent attempt to peddle PM machines. Dude, when you make the same case for cold fusion research make sure that you provide examples of much better quality :P I mean, man, don't give examples of companies with a HUGE financial conflict of interest and that have absolutely no published serious research supporting them and that are widely regarded as a most probable hoax/fraud/self-delusion/failure-to-deliver-the-promised-extraordinary-proof. Whatever, WP:SOFIXIT, just find a RS from here and add it to that article. The only relevant hit in google scholar is for Explore (journal) [19], which was written before Steorn botched their London public presentation and failed to say which 22 scientists have supposedly reviewed their invention (and what conclusions they reached) --Enric Naval (talk) 15:16, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

I admit facts regarding Steorn are few and far between, but one thing likely to be true is that they recently (no more than a few years ago) discovered something they thought they could sell. Certainly the company existed for several years before announcing their "discovery". Possibly the discovery involved discovering old work by somebody else, and I'm sure that as soon as enough details finally escape, anyone who has been playing with "overunity electric motors" --another group of moderately recent claims (say less than 30 years old) in the field-- will have something to say about it, if old work is indeed involved. So, for the time being, I'm willing to stand by my statement that Steorn's stuff is "modern work". Even if older than the last few years, it is certainly modern in comparison to those old mechanical gadgets described in the perpetual motion article. As for RS descriptions of Steorn's stuff, my expectations of being able to find any are so low that I see no reason to try. But, if one simply wanted to keep the article up-to-date, there is plenty of non-RS stuff available, that could be marked as such, in the article. THAT'S why I compared it to this article. V (talk) 16:27, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Steorn is (very rightfully) included in History of perpetual motion machines as yet another machine that doesn't work. (also, Steorn's research has not been released by the company, so it hasn't been evaluated by any reliable source to see if it has any merit). --Enric Naval (talk) 18:58, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) V, we have a ton of RS on facts that are not included. It is true that sometimes sources can be used that don't match general descriptions of reliable source, but WP:V is "not negotiable." The usage of "non-RS" material is restricted by the particular needs of particular articles or fields, and I see no reason at all to make some "exception" for Cold fusion. If anything, I'd prefer that the standards here be stricter than normal, precisely because the topic is so contentious. Please don't ask for the inclusion of non-RS material here, at this point. When and if we have subarticles, some of them might allow some relaxed sourcing standards, but in the absence of some specific case, it makes the natives restless. I'm out on a limb far enough, thank you, to propose Storms as RS and papers listed in Storms as sufficiently reliable for citation as to claims or unverified findings (if they are unverified), but Storms (2007) is clearly RS. We must always remember that there are three separate issues: WP:V, which is satisfied with proper framing and sometimes less than reliable source, provided that it is sufficiently reliable make the text verifiable with certainty, WP:RS, which is a weaker guideline, but which is particularly strong with science articles, to the point that the even tighter standard of peer-reviewed academic source may be appropriate, and WP:UNDUE which is a guideline that is only satisfied through consensus; there are too many unclarities involved, still, even though ArbComm has attempted to clear it up. --Abd (talk) 16:39, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Abd, Some sources like New Energy Times or Infinite Energy have presented information that may be relevant to the article, and that data is excluded here only because of sticklers for RS. The data most certainly passes the "verify" policy, however, since the magazines are quite accessible. It is good that partly because of the recent anniversary certain RS media are carrying data that is not yet available in the more prestigious publications. How long will that last, though? With some luck some new Prestigious Researchers will decide to try replicating recent results. If they succeed the Prestigious Publications will not likely refuse to publish their data. If they fail, though.... The existing researchers will continue struggling so long as they have encouraging results to tell each other about. That does not mean any future discoveries will make their way to a level higher than NET or IE...and thereby get excluded from the article. Should CF happen to be real it would not be good to wait for another Anniversary for such a discovery to make its way out of the non-RS gutter. But having that DATA in Wikipedia, even if it is marked as being of uncertain reliability, offers a chance for a random Prestigious Reader to say, "Hmmmm...that experiment sounds interesting, fairly simple, and it's supposed to be reliably do-able, too. Might be worth a try..." An encyclopedia with room for gigabytes of text is all about the spreading of knowledge, not about inhibiting that spread via arbitrary decisions about can or cannot 'fit'. Thus this article could have a "Recent Claims" section, updated with new claims as they are made in both RS and non-RS sources, removed as time passes and the claims are not supported by other experiments, or moved into the main article body when they are. V (talk) 19:13, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

(ok, just one quick reply to point out [20] in Science News, where the comments from readers leave clear that Petit (the author) spoke to Krivit and Rothwell while writing the article, that he was aware of the evidence, and that he wasn't convinced by it. So, there you have, one RS that we can be sure that is up-to-date) --Enric Naval (talk) 01:23, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Enric, you really puzzle me sometimes. From Krivit's comment:For the record, I am the "acquaintance" to whom Petit spoke and provided, at his request, an update on Fleischmann and Pons. And for the record, Petit declined my offer to brief him on what has been learned since 1989. What I get from this is that all that was communicated was about F and P. It's unclear what that means, but Krivit is explicit that Petit declined a briefing on the extensive history of research after 1989. Rothwell mentions contact, but only at a superficial level. Petit isn't a scientist, he's a reporter. Sure, it's RS, but of a low quality. And there is no assurance that Petit is "up-to-date." He doesn't discuss the new evidence. The Mosier-Boss work that became so famous a month later was known to Krivit and Rothwell (and anyone who had been paying attention here). There is practically nothing about post-1989 research in the article, thus matching Krivit's report. Here is what I see, at first glance:

But even without these men [P and F], hopeful research putters along after all this time. In the past year teams in Japan and in India report encouraging evidence of heat from small test cells, heat they cannot explain. Obscure journals and regular meetings bring a steady stream of new analyses and proclamations of hope that if one gets conditions just so, a fusion reactor fed isotopes found abundantly in seawater will light our cities, perhaps propel our cars. Even mainstream science meetings have the occasional session devoted to such so-called low-energy nuclear reactions. The 2008 American Chemical Society convention in Philadelphia included more than a dozen papers reporting evidence and theories for how simple tabletop reactions might mimic the reactions that power stars.

That is a radical distortion of the state of research in the field, the vast majority of which isn't about "fusion reactors fed isotopes [from] seawater, propulsion of cars, and mimicing the reactions that power stars. He doesn't understand the science at all or he wouldn't write that way. Cold fusion doesn't mimic what happens in stars! If it even works. I think the subtlety of the difference between LENR and "fusion" would entirely escape him. He's still carrying around the hype of 1989. However, did you notice the comments by Josephson? Are you aware that this is the Nobel Prize winner Josephson? --Abd (talk) 04:20, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

I will not accept that you throw away sources with your OR. Science News is a good RS for trends in science, Charles Petit is not just "a reporter", he has been a full-time science reporter for 40 years[21] and he won 1999 AAAS-Whitaker Prize for Science Writing, the 1995 C. Everett Koop Award from the American Heart Association, the 1991 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award[22], and the 1990 Science in Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers, he covered the original P&F paper back in 1989, he did speak to Krivit and Rothwell so it's obvious that he was aware of the existance of both New Energy Times and lenr-canr.org and we don't know which papers he looked at and which he didn't or if he went to Jed's website to read papers on his own. --Enric Naval (talk) 04:56, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Enric, please don't describe my discussion in such terms. I'm not trying to "throw away" Science News; rather I'm pointing out that Petit, in the actual article, shows no knowledge of the recent research, which is consistent with what Krivit reports, and, in fact, with what Rothwell reports, so we need to consider that, and not report some vague overall conclusion that he makes as if it were on a par with a review of the literature. But it's RS, and if there is some fact there that we don't already have better source for, by all means, use it. You object to my OR, but what I write here is based on an extensive review of the literature, an ongoing process, and when it is speculation, I label it as such. Above, you present your own "obvious" conclusions which are not anything more than pure speculation, and which, in fact, contradict the very sources you assert. Maybe he read more widely, maybe he did not, and if you know how journalists work, you would not be so confident that he did. If he didn't, his conclusions, represented very little in the article, would mean nothing. Why should he research a matter when he's not going to write about it? All I can say is that if he did read more widely, he didn't betray any evidence of it. If you wish to deny this, please cite the evidence! As to awards and recognition for excellence, Gary Taubes is a truly excellent science reporter, in certain ways. His Good Calories, Bad Calories is brilliant. But something went astray when he wrote his book on Cold Fusion, and we have reliable source on that; there is discussion in Hoffman which is quite pointed, and Simon notes the asymmetrical nature of Taubes. We'd call that POV here. Storms confirms what Hoffman wrote earlier, on p. 15 of The Science of Nuclear Reactions (2007): As Taubes made clear to me, he did not know and did not care if cold fusion were real or not. He only wanted an interesting story that would make him enough money to do what he really wanted to do, which was write plays for Broadway. Obviously, it's necessary to factor for Storms' conflict of interest, he is hardly a neutral observer. But Hoffman was, in my opinion. Note that prominent figures in the cold fusion community detest Hoffman. That's one sign of possible neutrality! Obviously not a conclusive one! --Abd (talk) 17:00, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

That "asymmetrical nature" thing about Taubes would be: "While historians and sociologists of science have been generally critical of the realist and asymmetrical explanatory perspective of Close, Huizenga and Taubes (...)"[23]? Bit of a misquote there.... --Enric Naval (talk) 20:00, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Navy research cold fusion reports (arbitrary break 2)

@Abd

• your first point: the DOE did not have to decide if the science was "fringe" or not, and didn't do or need to do any ruling on such a thing. You are just interpreting the results.
• your second point: see reply to V, provide a source saying that
• your third point: [removed initial irritated response] we follow WP:V here, not intuition, so sometimes it's necessary to compile verifiable sources to support a certain point.

--Enric Naval (talk) 16:35, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

DOE did not have to decide if the science was "fringe" or not. This is the "can't see the forest for the trees" argument. It's correct, which is true for lots of wikilawyering arguments. However, Enric, what is your personal opinion? Does the DOE -- or any similar governmental agence involving a hard science -- behave as it has behaved with Cold fusion with pseudosciences? It's possible to consider that the 1989 hearing did not resolve the pseudoscience issue. But, then, why, 15 years later, a new review? Again, sure, it's possible to argue that the "cold fusioneers" had some political pull. But, then, why would the reviewers unanimously recommend more research? They were picked to be neutral, Enric. You know, those N rays or polywater might be damn useful! Do you think that you could get an 180-member panel to unanimously agree that more research was needed? The "death of cold fusion," widely reported in the media was not based in peer reviewed source showing conclusive evidence that Fleischmann had done "poor work." Negative reports were featured in Nature, then rebuttals were rejected, ultimately as a matter of editorial policy, not based on peer review rejection. Other journals continued to publish, but, then, it was always claimed that the highly reputable Nature negative reports were authoritative. We have reliable source on this history, Enric. Yet that history isn't anywhere in Wikipedia. Why not? If you really want to know this field, and be able to judge what is proper balance, you will need to read some of the reliable sources on this, and only a little of this is available on the web; what's on the web is easily dismissed as being pro-cold-fusion. So, if you have read Hoffman (A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects),1995), if you have read Storms (The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) (2007), if you have read Simon (Undead Science), if you have read Mizuno (Nuclear Transformation:The Reality of Cold Fusion), let me know and we could discuss this on an even footing. These all satisfy WP:RS at a level above that of casual newspaper stories, generally. And when you read any of these books, keep in mind the recent reports (beginning in 2007, I think) of CR-39 neutron detection as a clearly minority reaction product (from blatant, naked-eye-visible chip pitting, probably from alpha particles, to the triple-tracks characteristic of proton recoil from high-energy neutrons, many orders of magnitude lower than the ionizing radiation detection), and when you read the earlier sources, keep in mind this: it has been claimed that as experiments increased in precision, the effects lessened or disappeared. That's true, but only a half-truth. What happened is that some effects considered crucial (the neutrons!) went down into the noise, because methods less sensitive and less specific than CR-39 were used. As calorimetry got better, the experiments where, essentially, there was no Fleischmann effect, it being far harder to reproduce that was originally understood or claimed in media reports, showed accurate negative results, whereas, before, some positive results were from bad control or measurement (just as later review has claimed -- without rebuttal -- that some early negative experiments actually found heat, but it was discounted or concealed by poor analysis, the most striking example of this is the MIT work, where it was noticed that the published hour-average power chart scale had been shifted from the "raw data." The raw data shows excess heat at the level found in early experiments that were considered successful. Was this a result of, say, an uncalibrated chart scale in the raw data, or an analysis error? I'd say we don't know, conclusively. And that is the point.

However, improved calorimetry, such as the careful work of McKubre, showed excess heat more and more clearly; and co-deposition work largely disposed of the problem of most palladium samples not displaying excess heat. Remember the discussion above about the Chinese source from Frontiers of Physics in China? It's RS, Enric, there is no way to impeach it objectively.

And this is from the chart on page 98: Total estimated experiments 14,720. [this is just from certain experimental groups). Average reported reproducibility: 45 % (last five years, which is way up from earlier work such as Fleischmann's), 83 % (previous year). But that's not all. He Jing-Tang shows four research groups, one each in Japan, Romania, the United States, and Russia, combined estimated number of experiments over 4200, showing 100% success in the previous year. We could combine what is found in verifiable sources to confirm those numbers, but that would be OR. He Jing-tang has done it for us.

The normal scientific process of back-and-forth questions, challenges, new research to test various hypotheses that might impeach results or confirm them, was interrupted by what can only be described as science politics and the appearance of entrenched camps. When science follows consensus process, and when that process is kept open, with even standards being applied to "defenders of the status quo" and "challengers," scientific consensus may take quite some time to settle, but it settles in a place where the consensus is real, not artificially enforced and maintained. Enric, you are reading my own conclusions, but we could have an article rooted in a complete presentation of reliable source that would, my opinion, provide the reader with what is needed to make their own informed conclusion. If I'm wrong, don't you agree that such a presentation would not lead the reader to my conclusions?

I am not proposing that we put in the article, "The 2004 DOE review showed that Cold fusion is not a fringe science." That would be preposterous, and it would be, indeed, WP:OR or WP:SYNTH violation. But there is a reason why WP:RS and WP:V and WP:OR should be relaxed in Talk page discussions: to apply mainspace policies to Talk will chill it and hobble it and make it ineffective for finding actual consensus. Enric, consensus is my primary concern, not "cold fusion." --Abd (talk) 14:09, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Ah, sources, let's analize them:

"The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction" by Storms, 2007. I have read the review at Journal of Scientific Exploration (which is already listed in the article's bibliography) It turns me off a little bit that he didn't manage to convince not even the reviewer of the Scientific Exploration journal, and that, apparently, this book wasn't reviewed by any other journal. Let alone the fact that, apparently, it's being cited mostly (or only) by journals and papers inside the cold fusion walled garden....

And I love how Storms himself appears on this Science News article [24](in the commentary section) to say that there is evidence for cold fusion being real. It's plain evident that his claim is not accepted at all by that magazine.... So, nope, Storms is a fringe writer with limited or none acceptance in mainstream, and WP:UNDUE applies when deciding how weight we should give to his articles. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:21, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

"Nuclear Transformation:The Reality of Cold Fusion", Mizuno, Infinity Press. This is a plain out not-important-at-all fringe publication with no reviews in journal and that nobody cites, not even inside the cold fusion walled garden....

"A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects" Hoffman, same as Muzino above

"Undead Science", Shamoo, the only one that I can agree that is a good RS. Also, he covers all these books in his account and then a few more [25], (it also covers Mizuno [26]) Mind you, Shamoo doesn't reach the same conclusions as Storms, he doesn't think that there is enough evidence to show that cold fusion exists. Also, I just plain love how he keeps making statements that totally nail down the situations that I keep finding here at this page:

"Cold fusion researchers believe that many skeptics are simply blind conformists who are unable to accept the accumulating evidence before their eyes."[27] page 8

--Enric Naval (talk) 21:57, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Enric, you are applying subjective standards to determine what sources are adequate for inclusion of text. I've discussed this issue on my Talk page, I won't repeat this here. Storms is a reliable source, and "fringe writer," quite simply, is a subjective judgment and irrelevant. As to the sources you cite, you really should read them more thoroughly, you seem to habitually miss the point, and report them, especially the review of Storms, with conclusions that are the opposite of what the reviewer intends and expresses. That;s dangerous. For my extended discussion, open the collapse box. --Abd (talk) 00:46, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

extended discussion of sources by Abd (talk)

If we have RS, we have a basis for inclusion, and balancing must be done with RS in the other direction, and weight is determined by preponderance of sources (which includes considerations such as number of sources, quality, and age), not by exclusion based on some subjective judgment. Now, we can create subarticles, but that will require consensus (or they will not survive). Mizuno (to correct your spelling) was not just published by "Infinity Press." That was the translation into English from the Japanese by Rothwell. Hoffman same as Mizuno? Have you looked at the book, Enric? Are you aware who published it? Now, whether or not you agree that Storms is RS, you will, I assure you, be facing real edits based on it, and you will have to decide what to do about them. In the end, Enric, it's not up to you to make the final determination, nor is it up to me. I certainly hope that it won't be up to ArbComm. It's about six steps to ArbComm, and I find that consensus can usually be found with about two or three. Exceptions are rare, and don't bode well for those who make them necessary, they are usually based on refusal to discuss coupled with insistence on outcome. (ArbComm won't make content decisions, actually.) If you wonder why I write so much on this page, part of it is the nonsense that is put up. It takes one or two sentences to make a nonsensical claim that appears reasonable, it takes many more words to show it for what it is. The review at Journal of Scientific Exploration is great, thanks, Enric, for the link. But your interpretation of it is strange. The conclusion from the review: ... the book is not neutral on the subject. Nevertheless, these weaknesses are comparatively minor and do not detract from the major message of the book, the rather solid experimental evidence of some exotic process taking place, from a careful and self-critical researcher. What then is the bottom line? This writer is still agnostic with respect to cold fusion because even a thorough worker like Storms has not succeeded in demonstrating the effect at will. This is not to say that we can dismiss cold fusion but simply that we must wait for evidence so convincing that even skeptics must accept it as real. If it indeed is real, then it is subject to parameters that as yet elude most workers in the field. Other newly discovered phenomena have been irreproducible for some time (albeit rarely for 18 years as here) and this alone does not prove it to be false. We shall have to wait and see. The Storms book certainly is recommended reading, for both skeptics and proponents. This is quite similar to Hoffman, only less skeptical. The reviewer is concerned about repeatability. Phenomena are known that are not easily repeatable, but they are accepted because of controlled experiment. To give an example that I'm making up, but based on the kinds of findings that do exist in this field, suppose I run 1000 different CF cells. Fifty of them show excess heat. Terrible reproducibility, but I see enough excess heat to be convinced that it's real. I've tried to make these cells as much like each other as I can. You can say, well, perhaps there is some artifact. But then, say, I stick some CR-39 chips in the cells. The CR-39 chips are protected from chemical damage. Some of these chips show the characteristic pitting of radiation. All of the cells with excess heat show pitting. The chips from the "dead" cells show background levels of radiation, or sometimes a little more. This would be statistical proof at a high level that the effect is real, even though the conditions that produce it are still unknown. But this review was written probably in 2007. That same year, the He paper was published in Frontiers of Physics in China, showing some groups, over the previous year, having 100% reproducibility rates. Storms doesn't show this, if I'm correct. Note that the reviewer clearly accepts that there is some anomaly here, not experimental error, he's just agnostic on whether or not it is fusion or not. There is a theory that deuterons in the lattice sometimes become fully wave-nature, and two deuteron waves constructively become a wave of higher amplitude, which then returns to particle-nature, as a helium nucleus plus energy. Would this be fusion? The Coulomb barrier would be irrelevant. It wasn't two deuterium nuclei coming together, it was two photons of high energy becoming one with doubled energy. Same result, though, frankly, I'd call it fusion myself, I don't care what's happening inside the black box. But there are other possibilities still. Bottom line, there is no accepted theory even among cold fusion workers. But that doesn't mean that there is no theoretical explanation. As one writer commented, the problem is that there are too many, and some of them could be very difficult to test. First step: confirm that the effect is real. Storms claims that has been done, and, in fact, if you read the reviewer carefully, the reviewer actually accepts that. It's only the "fusion" conclusion that the reviewer considers not yet proven. And I have to agree with that, and so does Krivit, notably. Then we have the Science News article [28]. Uh, Enric, comments? But first, from that article, a point made at the end: Like playing one ticket or even a lot of tickets for the Mega Millions lotto jackpot, cold fusion is a terribly long shot. “I’m still waiting for them to so much as boil water for a cup of tea with cold fusion,” says Richard Garwin, a retired IBM Research physicist, longtime government adviser, winner of the National Medal of Science and prominent member of the 1989 DOE review of Pons and Fleischmann’s work. Garwin likely never will get that tea. But as the state lottery promoters say: Hey, you never know. This is typical nonscientific response. Nobody rejects muon-catalyzed fusion because you can't boil a cup of tea with it! Mosier-Boss showed a very small level of neutrons. But a very small level upsets the theoretical impossibility applecart. There is lots more evidence that is much more significant in terms of energy generation, but I've seen nothing that would lead me to predict a home-fusion teamaker in my lifetime. It is merely possible. Tell me, is it possible to win the lottery? You know, I could buy many tickets and never get more than a few weak winnings. So does that mean that nobody ever wins the lottery? You really should read Hoffman. He's neutral, and skeptical. But a scientist in approach, unlike too many skeptics. Nevertheless, the Science News article is interesting, thanks for the link, I'd missed that article, it came out last month, and most of my searches had "Mosier-Boss" in the terms. (The March 14th date was obviously not first appearance.) The comments are from some major figures in the field, and Storms does make a brief appearance, February 27, just after Krivit. It's worth reading the comments. They are far deeper than the article, which is unusual. Shamoo? Undead Science is by Simon. Undead Science is 2002, and it does not cover Storms (2007) but rather earlier reviews by Storms. It reviews Beaudette, which was kicked out of the sources here as being fringe. Simon says, about Beaudette, "the most up-to-date overview." Which was true in 2002. Uh, Enric, your point? Your quotation from Simon is, shall we say, selective, is it betraying a bias? No problem, I don't object to editors being biased, except when they claim to be neutral! So, from the same paragraph as your quote, describing a hypothetical physicist who is clearly intended as a general example: Cold fusion is dead, and those who continue to do research on the subject are part of an incompetent or sadly misguided minority of scientists who may or may not discover their error. Enric, I suggest some more caution. By all means, defend the article against POV text. But please watch out for subjective interpretations like "fringe," "walled garden," etc. If you looked at the sources you've been selectively quoting from, you'd see that the field is far from a walled garden, there are walled gardens involved, but what about the huge number of peer-reviewed papers? That continues.

The RS guidelines are designed to avoid endless debate over differences between source reliabilities. I really suggest taking a fresh look at all this. --Abd (talk) 00:04, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Abd, you are getting that quote totally wrong, that's not Shamoo's opinion. That quote is prefaced by "From this physicist's perspective", as in "From the perspective of the physicist that I just quoted in the previous sentence as an example of a scientist who doesn't have a problem with how the controversial presentation twisted the perception of cold fusion, unlike sociologists and historians of science like myself". If you want Shamoo's perspective, then quote: "If cold fusion is dead, then how shall we account for these observations?"page 8 or "On the one hand, many experts say that cold fusion is dead, but on the other hand we can always find scientists who will disagree." page 11 "Cold fusion is not dead but undead, like a ghost (...)"page 196 --Enric Naval (talk) 15:42, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Storms is, as evidenced from the Science News article, a fringe promoter of cold fusion that has failed to convince the mainstream scientific community that there is undisputable evidence for cold fusion. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:02, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Puzzled, color me. What "evidence," Enric? Storms is not mentioned until the comments at the end. I'll be frank, here is what I'm seeing: tenacious effort to discredit cold fusion and any researching in the field. That effort is not supported by reliable source, but it is claimed that it is. Time to back your claim up with specific evidence, Enric, this is getting ugly. I don't believe that there is indisputable evidence for cold fusion, but I do claim that Storms is reliable source. Blacklight Power is mentioned above. The detail in the Blacklight Power article is voluminous. Claiming that the only association with Cold fusion is the mention in Storms, though, is preposterous. Blacklight Power frequently makes presentations at conferences on low-energy nuclear reactions. They certainly are claiming a theory that supposedly explains cold fusion. I'm skeptical (but who am I?), and I'm pretty sure that most cold fusion researchers are skeptical. So?

Something really weird is going on here. I'm going to let the smoke clear here; this entire debate is going nowhere. V., I highly recommend dropping it, but, instead, working on specific edits. If you want to use New Energy Times, use it. Cite it without the link, citations are valid without URLs to copies. If a citation stands in the article, it's then "sorta" simple to get it whitelisted, and get a few of these, the whole site can be whitelisted. But be careful. There are editors here who have not realized the implications of ArbComm decisions on fringe science, and they pay utterly no attention when I cite those decisions. One baby step at a time, V. You get to have your POV, and Enric gets to have his, and I mine. Our job is to find agreement. It is not necessarily easy, but it can be done. Even with some calling for my ban. --Abd (talk) 01:00, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

CR-39 and positive and negative results.

The current flap over the SPAWAR Cr-39 results (showing neutrons in small quantities, few mentioning that the same detectors show copious alpha989 or 1990. Here is a negative result: Search for energetic-charged-particle emission from deuterated Ti and Pd foils, P. B. Price, S. W. Barwick, W. T. Williams, and J. D. Porter, 1989, Phys. Rev. Lett.,Volume 63, Issue 18.

A positive result: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LiXZtheprecurs.pdf, 'Li, X.Z., et al. The Precursor of "Cold Fusion" Phenomenon in Deuterium/Solid Systems in Anomalous Nuclear Effects in Deuterium/Solid Systems, "AIP Conference Proceedings 228". 1990. Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT: American Institute of Physics, New York. (nowiki tags courtesy of the antispam volunteers at meta).

Some nice photos in the Chinese work. They compare their results with those of Price. Here is what they say about it:

In October, 1989, P.B. Price et al. published their results of experiments using CR-39. (5) They found only two tracks for charged particles in CR-39. This is quite different from our results. Having compared the experimental details we found an important difference: they cleaned the samples with aqua regia. We repeated our experiment with the sample cleaned with aqua regia. To our great surprise, the tracks in CR-39 disappeared (Fig. lg). We analyzed the surface of palladium cleaned by aqua regia, using the auger electron scanning probe. A clear peak of chlorine appeared (Fig. 2). Using the argon ion mill, we found that the chlorine penetrated into the palladium to a depth of a few hundred angstroms (Fig. 3). When we used the chlorine gas to contaminate palladium surface intentionally, we again found that the CR-39 tracks disappeared.

Hoffman refers to Price and to the Chinese work (I don't yet know if there was later publication of the Chinese work, but it was the mention in Hoffman that led me to this.) Here is what Hoffman says about this. Much of the book is in the format of a YS (Young Student), who is extremely skeptical, and the OM (Old Metallurgist), who is about as rigorously cautious about jumping to conclusions as I can image.

OM: As a matter of fact, there is an interesting example of an artifact negating a possible positive result. The mainland Chinese have a team investigating anomalous nuclear effects in deuterium/solid systems that have come up with interesting evidence for charged particles involving charged-particle bursts tracks on the plastic film CR-39 with Pd/D systems but not with Pd/H systems. When P.B. POrice et al. did the experiment, they found a pair of tracks but no burst mode. The discrepancy was found to be a chloride film on the palladium from an aqua regia rinse. This cleaning step formed a few hundred angstrom thick barrier over the palladium athat prevented the creation or permanent recording of charged-particle bursts from the palladium surface. The linking of hte disappearance of particle burst tracks with the chlorine barrier layer was confirmed by auger analysis of the surface and replication of the effect with chlorine gas exposure rather than an aqua regia rinse.

The OM goes on to give a proposed mechanism for the inhibition which, in fact, seems implausible to me, with the benefit of twenty years of hindsight. He thinks it interferes with the recording of the radiation, but he may not understand how CR-39 works. The radiation damages the plastic, it doesn't directly cause pits, rather, it makes it vulnerable to later etching. Much more likely: the chlorine poisons the LENR effect, which takes place at the surface or within 25 microns or so of it, there is now substantial evidence, and it is highly sensitive to surface conditions. (There are a myriad of these details, which is a major reason why replication was initially so incredibly difficult and erratic.)

Here is an example of a negative result published in reliable source (Phys. Review Lett.), with deeper research explaining the earlier result published as a conference proceeding. Which one of these groups was more thorough and careful?

The fact is that Price couldn't have anticipated, probably, that the aqua regia rinse would have any effect. Aqua regia is commonly used to clean palladium. That original research wasn't sloppy, and it was proper that it be published. What was improper was publication preference for negative results over positive results, which definitely happened in those days.

The SPAWAR group has a means of determining if they obtained the "cold fusion" conditions: excess heat. Price probably had no such indicator, and was simply presuming that one "deuterium-loaded Ti and Pd foil" was like any other. Easy assumption to make, I'd think. And quite wrong.

Hoffman is a review of cold fusion work up to roughly 1993 or 1994, and is solid and reliable. That doesn't mean he's always right, but this book is equal in quality to something published in a peer-reviewed journal, he is extremely cautious and thorough. He's been criticized )from the "pro-fusion" side) for not reporting on excess heat experiments, but that was not his focus: he was looking at the radiation and nuclear ash experiments, and he assumes excess heat as a background (but he doesn't assume it is nuclear in origin, and, in fact, he's focusing on nuclear effects in order to see if there is evidence for nuclear reactions as distinct from "something else." And, by the way, he keeps in mind that there could be a nuclear effect other than fusion. He uses the term "chemically induced nuclear effects," which is the equivalent of the later "chemically assisted nuclear reactions" and which is functionally the same as "low energy nuclear reactions," it being assumed that chemistry is (relatively) low energy. --Abd (talk) 18:44, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Here's a blog with a possibly relevant discussion. Some of the comments include a number of links, a few of which might also be useful. http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/03/cold_fusion_warmed_over.html V (talk) 13:52, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Distinction Between "Cold Fusion" and "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR)"

Should a distinction be made between the terms (and articles) "Cold Fusion" and "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR)"? LENR seems to be a broader category, whereas the term "Cold Fusion" seems to implicitly require the joining of one or more atomic nuclei. Currently both "LENR" and "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR)" redirect to the "Cold Fusion" article, the first line of which implies that "Cold Fusion" and LENR are equivalent concepts, when they may not be. I would contend that Cold Fusion is just a subset of LENRs (whether either exists is an open question). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Krellkraver (talk • contribs) 00:40, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

You are correct, actually. But "Cold fusion" is the popular term, with tons of citations in the media. It has also been used in peer-reviewed sources, but where I've seen that it is often in quotes, i.e., the source is deferring to the common usage. The 2004 DOE review referred to "Low energy nuclear reactions." The general science is now called Condensed matter nuclear science (that is also a redirect, and protected as such, more about this later,) and there is a society and a peer-reviewed journal.

Actually, muon-catalyzed fusion is a known low-energy nuclear reaction. Ironically, I've been reading, the term "cold fusion" arose from the coincidence of Steven Jones' announcement of his muon-catalyzed fusion results -- which he called "cold fusion," with the Pons-Fleischmann announcement. Hoffman points out another example where nuclear behavior is influenced by the condensed matter state. Beryllium-7, when ionized, is stable. When it is absorbed onto the surface of a satellite or meteor, the availability of electrons now changes the Be7 chemical state. This new chemical state has a quite finite half-life. See [29]. But, of course, the LENR or CANR (Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions) work with the Pd/D system takes this to a much higher level. --Abd (talk) 01:26, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

They are synonyms for the same thing, LENR is a later name introduced to replace the old disacredited name. I'll point out that the DOE 2004 review appears to use both terms interchangeably. See also a 2002 analysis of "the attempts to rename the phenomena"[30], and in 2009 BBC[31] and Wired[32] plainly treating LERN as a new name to introduced to avoid the connotations of the old name. See also a paper in the ACS 2004 meeting treating them as synonyms[33]. From Science Daily "(LENR), the process once called 'cold fusion'"[34] --Enric Naval (talk) 08:15, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

I see, and I concede your points, though the terms themselves seem confusing and somewhat misleading in common usage. And thanks, Abd -- I stand corrected, it's good to know there are scientifically accepted examples of LENRs. Krellkraver (talk) 08:19, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

One might ask why muon-catalyzed fusion doesn't have a section in this article, as such, but merely disambiguation. The current lead for muon-catalyzed fusion has It used to be known as cold fusion; however, this term is now avoided as it can create confusion. A much more appropriate name would be cool fusion, particularly if muon-catalyzed fusion ever did become a practical power source.

I'll probably fix that. This is speculation in the lead of an article, not supported by source. Muon-catalyzed fusion takes place at room temperature or lower. It was called "cold fusion" by Jones. Jones and Fleischmann had agreed to announce together. Why? Well, obviously, they were both reporting cold fusion. Different catalysts. I can say my suspicion as to why it's not here. It's because muon-catalyzed fusion is well-accepted, because it was based on theory first, experiment later. Muons are exotic nuclear particles and so the idea that they might catalyze fusion wasn't any big leap. How do you make muons, besides the natural ones from cosmic rays? With a particle accelerator, a tool that nuclear physicists use. Steven E. Jones coined the term "cold nuclear fusion" to refer to muon-catalyzed fusion. See Steven_E._Jones#Muon-catalyzed_fusion. That also mentions confusion. In the mid-1980s, Jones and other BYU scientists worked on what he then referred to as Cold Nuclear Fusion in a Scientific American article, but is today known as muon-catalyzed fusion to avoid confusion.

Lost performative is one door through which POV can sneak in. "Avoid" implies some active agent with a motive. What would be the confusion? Well, we wouldn't want muon-catalyzed fusion to be rejected just because Pd-D catalyzed fusion is rejected, would we? That's true, but the reverse is also a motive. We wouldn't want the reputation of Pd-D catalyzed fusion to be considered possible just because muon-catalyzed fusion is possible, and the standard argument against Pd-D fusion is that "low temperature fusion is impossible." It's very inconvenient to deal with exceptions, because allowing even one exception opens the door for others. It makes polemic messy.

The shift in usage, such that we don't use "cold fusion" to refer to muon-catalyzed fusion, took place for the same reasons that LENR researchers have dropped the name "cold fusion." Now, what's really interesting about the current splash, the Mosier-Boss work, is that, first of all, they don't use the term "cold fusion." News articles do. The core of their work isn't about fusion, it's about excess heat, helium, and radiation in the Pd-D system. Is it fusion? Nobody really knows for sure. Krivit seems to think that it is probably some other nuclear reaction. Other than what? If the input is deuterium and palladium (and there are experiments where that is all that is present, no electrolysis, just finely powdered palladium and deuterium gas, that's Arata's work, but many others did similar work), and the output is heat and helium and radiation (some experiments were designed to detect radiation, not Arata in his recent work), what's happening in the cell. The result is fusion, obviously. But not a fusion of a kind known before, probably. Until the Mosier-Boss work.

They have shown with striking evidence, very unlikely to be impeached (my opinion), that a product of standard hot fusion is found from Pd-D codeposition, energetic neutrons. I think the reason this may not have been noticed before is that the CR-39 is so extensively pitted by the alpha radiation that this is what the researchers saw (and reported previously). They have to run a Pd-D cell for weeks to get the 10 triplets per chip that they are reporting. That means 10 neutrons were detected.

It doesn't explain the heat and it doesn't explain the alpha radiation, but ... have they shown cold fusion or hot fusion? The neutrons are at the energy characteristic of D-T fusion, that's why they report it. But ... this isn't necessarily cold fusion at all. A very reasonable hypothesis is that it's the standard fusion reaction, not a new one. I'm really looking forward for the implications to sink in. Hot fusion is taking place in a thin film of palladium deuteride.

Useless for energy generation, probably, at least for the "clean" kind that cold fusion is supposed to be.

But then, where did the heat come from? How did it happen that a deuteron and a triton managed to get enough energy to fuse? Maybe it came from the same place as the excess heat in the experiments, from the same reaction that also produces alpha particles with energies of the same order. Now, is that science worthy of study and pursuit, or is it some fringe fantasy? Park is quite right, it's science. He says that he doesn't think it will be important. Again, as to whatever is making the neutrons, he is probably right. If what I've suggested pans out, this has no energy implications at all. That is, the process making the neutrons has no such implications. But whatever is powering that process, giving the particles that high energy, may, possibly. And even that is speculative. Low-level fusion in Pd-D does not directly translate into power, and one thing that the last twenty years has shown is that scaling this up is very difficult. Just getting the damn stuff to play its trick was very difficult, most experiments failed. But contrary to what was reported in the media, over and over again, last week, some experiments did not fail, and with time and improved understanding of the conditions, they have started to approach 100% reproducibility with some techniques.

It is time to call the field what it is, low energy nuclear reactions or, even more generally, condensed matter nuclear science. Cold fusion is a popular name and an example, but it is not the entire field. (LENR and CMNS aren't exactly the same, but they extensively overlap.)

The Rice physicist criticized the work with the theory of the Coulomb barrier. What he seems not to have imagined is that it might be getting very hot in spots on that cathode. (And, in fact, that is what is observed, small flashes of light.) Why was the Coulomb barrier theory an objection to the observation of energetic neutrons? This is why I consider that comment off-the-cuff, he has applied assumptions based on twenty-year old review of the topic, without considering what possible exceptions might exist, including what should be the obvious ones.

The thinking would go like "They may not use the word, but this is obviously a "cold fusion" experiment, and we know they are bogus, the Coulomb barrier is too high." But why is this considered a "cold fusion" experiment? What if they had stated their research goal as being to find out if hot fusion is taking place in the Pd-D? Would the physicist have made the same objection? What if, for example, what we are seeing with the neutrons is rare bubble fusion. (Deuterium can start bubbling from the cathode.) Bubble fusion does not violate any accepted theory. It is sometimes confused with cold fusion because the environment is cold. But the temperature of the environment is an average, it does not describe the limits. I'm sitting in a room with an incandescent light. What is the maximum temperature in my room? Bubble collapses. How hot it gets is controversial, but no "laws of physics" would be violated if it gets hot enough to allow a low rate of fusion.

(I'm not proposing bubble fusion as an explanation for cold fusion or for the neutrons, because I'm aware of simpler hypotheses. The point here is simply that the Coulomb barrier is no argument against Mosier-Boss's work at all. As another example of a possible way that the barrier might be overcome, a lattice structure might, at its surface, confine free deuterons to narrow channels, thus increasing (greatly, perhaps) the precision with which they approach each other, using the energy they have much more efficiently. It would be a form of Inertial confinement fusion, with emphasis on precise confinement rather than high temperatures. This would be expected to increase the frequency with which the deuterons tunnel through the barrier, making the estimations of fusion frequency we have in the article vastly understated; those rates are based on free deuterons, unconfined individually. Work smarter, not harder.) --Abd (talk) 17:25, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

By the way, "cool fusion" is a lousy name for muon-catalyzed fusion. Where did that neologism come from? It's cold fusion, period, no hotter than the posited Pd-D catalyzed fusion, maybe even cooler. --Abd (talk) 17:27, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

This is why the article is very carefully disambiguated at the start: If we had to cover both the highly questionable and the well-accepted in one article it would get incredibly confusing for the reader. Every attempt to add muon-catalyzed fusion to the article resulted in it either appearing that Fleischmannr-Pons related reactions were accepted, or that muon-catalysed fusion was also highly questionable. Muon-catalyzed fusion has nothing to do with the Fleischmann-Pons claims, and thus should not appear. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 22:04, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, I'll disagree on one point, agree on the rest. A common argument against the F-P claims is that "low temperature fusion is impossible." But muon-catalyzed fusion is a clear counterexample. What if there is some other kind of catalysis? And, indeed, that is exactly what F-P's work suggested. There have been theories that MCF is the mechanism behind Pd-D fusion, it might go like this: cosmic ray muons occasionally cause fusion in the Pd-D system, and the condensed matter environment is such that the recatalysis rate goes up drastically, thus causing many more muon-catalyzed fusions than normally take place. Though it would explain a lot, such as problems with reproduciblity, I think that theory has been generally rejected, but the point is that there is not a total disconnect, and the reader should have enough information to know that the general argument that low temperature fusion is impossible is bogus on the face, mere polemic. Suppose I say that I knocked down 100 pins with a single stroke of a bowling ball. If you are used to thinking of pins as being distributed randomly in position, and the bowling ball comes in without regard to the individual pin positions, the claim might seem highly unlikely, impossible in fact. But if there is a groove that sometimes causes the bowling ball to line up with the pins, it no longer is so unlikely. The existing opinion before F-P, with few exceptions, was that no arrangement of the atoms involved could make it possible to overcome the Coulomb barrier. F and P thought that the quantum mechanical calculations on which this view was based were inadequate approximations, and that the more sophisticated quantum electrodynamics or quantum field theory was necessary. But they weren't nuclear theorists, they were electrochemists (the best in the world, actually), so they set out to find examples. The Pd-D system seemed like a likely candidate. They found something. --Abd (talk) 22:55, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, if there was a reliable, independent source discussing that as part of the history, by all means it should go in, e.g. "Such a reaction at first seemed possible because of the existence of muon-catalysed fusion..." But we'd need a good source, and must be very careful to keep the focus on the F-P. I'd suggest that a contemporary or independant source would be best - this sort of thing has a tendency to spring up post-hoc rationalisations, so a source within the cold fusion community writing long after the initial announcement would be a weaker source. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 02:30, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

here pages 40 and 41, detailed account of how Jones being implied in the research caused scientists to give more credence to the claims, plus the appeareance of the muon thing a short time before creating the sensation that unplausible stuff in nuclear physics could be posible if only you tried it, plus the newspaper reports mixing up everything and creating false impressions in the scientists. --Enric Naval (talk) 03:49, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Fleischmann has written several papers on what he was looking for. It makes sense. He claims that he did not expect to see anything as strong as what he actually found, he thought he might, if he was lucky, see some barely detectable effect. This division of people into "within the cold fusion community" and outside is suspect to me, though. There is no reason to suspect that Fleischmann would distort this, he gains nothing by it. He was a careful researcher within his specialty, his calorimetry has remained quite solid in review, and the sources I see mostly attribute the problems to a combination of pressure to rush to announcement and publication from the university lawyers, and secrecy which was a big complication from what came to be seen -- incorrectly -- as this vast fortune that might be made for the university. It remains quite doubtful that cold fusion will see practical applications beyond some nifty science fair projects, and even that ain't easy at all. On the other hand ... there is a reason why China is putting quite a bit of effort into this. The energy density Fleischmann reported, and which has been confirmed by others, was sometimes enormous. The problem has been that it's been very difficult to control. That's being resolved; for example, co-deposition seems to have become highly reliable. But codeposition may be limited and it's one thing to get a watt of power, if you are lucky, and another to scale an effect like this. Nevertheless, Fleischmann's published recollections are usable, and speculation about "post-hoc rationalizations" are not sufficient to keep it out. Any RS for that? (I have not seen any contemporary sources on the goals of the F-P research program, and they were famously secret about it. Fleischmann explains why in the papers.) --Abd (talk) 03:58, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

[unindent for convenience]I don't think I was very clear: maybe this list will help:

• If we just have Fleischmann or Pons saying what he thought (in retrospective), we can only say Fleischmann thought that muon-catalysed fusion gave justification, but not that anyone else thought that. E.g. "Fleischmann wrote that he believed that it was worth trying, because..."
• If Fleischmann or other people compared it to muon-catalysed fusion at the time as a reason it might have merit, then we can discuss it as part of the history of the belief: It would be clear the view was contemporary, and (should presumably demonstrate) it was discussed at the time within the mainstream physics community. E.g. "The proposed mechanism seemed plausible at first because previous experiments with a type of fusion known as muon-catalysed fusion had demonstrated that fusion could happen at such temperatures under certain circumstances, and hence..."
• If independent historians documenting the belief say that the comparison was made and gave weight to the belief, as previous.
• If some mainstream physicists discuss why they believed it at the time, before changing their mind, again as previous, if somewhat weaker phrasing.
• If a no-name member of the cold-fusion community compared it to muon-catalysed fusion, even if he says that's what convinced him to investigate, that's not evidence that such comparisons were ever mainstream or historically important outside that one person, so it probably shouldn't be mentioned at all. (No evidence it's more than a tiny-minority view).
• If a reasonably large organisation or group currently researching F-P cold fusion make the comparison, we can say that that organisation gives it as a justification for why such things are worth studying, while making clear this is still a fringe belief. But it wouldn't show that the comparison was ever mainstream, so wouldn't justify saying anything about the initial mainstream reaction to F-P, and hence should probably not appear in the history section.

Does this help clarify my views? Basically, we need to be careful not to use a source to say more than it justifies. For instance, Fleischmann and Pons having thought something, if they didn't say it at the time, doesn't let us say the view was ever considered by anyone but them.

It's probably a bit of an obvious point for me to be making (rather badly the first time) but I think it's useful to consider what types of evidence it would be most useful to find - Fleischmann or Pons memoirs or any independent (from cold-fusion proponents - e.g. contemporary mainstream discussion or histories) discussion of muon-catalyzed fusion allows us to say rather more than we could say otherwise, so it'd be more useful to look for one of those. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 04:42, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, SH, especially for taking the time to detail your view. I think you are setting the standard too high. Martin Fleischmann is highly notable; his memoir is a reliable source as to what he claims about his work. We do not present such a thing as a "fact," but as a notable opinion or claim. "According to Martin Fleischmann, writing in 2002 and 2003, ...." Given that there is no other explanation for his work, it's actually crucial to encyclopedic coverage of the affair. There are other sources for the issue of QM vs. QEM, and, of course, I'll look, if someone else doesn't beat me to it, for confirming sources. There is the work or Preparata, as I recall, whom Fleischmann cites as providing theoretical background for the work (but later). -- Abd (talk) 16:05, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

IP edit about detection of neutrons

[35] added:

In fact, the Navy did not observe the release of neutrons directly, but their presence was inferred, as seen in this quote from the Abstract published in Naturwissenschaften (2009)96:135-142 ..."The presence of three alpha particle tracks..is diagnostic of 12C(n,n') 3 alpha carbon breakup reaction and suggests that DT reactions that produce >=9.6 MeV neutrons are occurring inside the Pd lattice"... Thus is it clear that neutrons were not directly detected in this Navy experiment. Also the Navy concludes on p.141 the ..."The mechanism by which DD and DT fusion reactions can occur in Pd is not yet understood...".

This was properly reverted, but I think an issue is raised which should be explained, to avoid further confusion. Nobody ever "observes" neutrons directly. You can't see them and there is no "neutron microscope." The tracks found by the Navy researchers are highly diagnostic of neutrons. These tracks, in the numbers found and with the pattern shown, indicate nuclear radiation, and the simplest explanation is neutrons. There are theories that exotic particles are involved in LENR, but, since the tracks are identical to neutron tracks, and since the energy is what was previously expected and sought in the early attempts to confirm Pons and Fleischmann's work, based on standard fusion theory, it looks like a duck "track" and it quacks like a duck. Neutrons are also detected with complex and expensive equipment, with far more room for artifacts; the CR-39 results are as conclusive as to neutrons as I can imagine. Absolutely, the "mechanism is not yet understood," that's a simple fact. But it has nothing to do with whether or not neutrons were detected. What the tracks indicate is energetic neutrons, and for various reasons it is improbable that they are coming from anything other than a minor effect involved in the previously reported anomalous heat and other effects, such as elemental transformations (the simplest of which is, perhaps, fusion). The neutrons indicate (but do not prove) that a tiny amount of D-T fusion is taking place in the Pd-D system. That wouldn't explain excess heat at all. But what is causing the tiny amount of D-T fusion, i.e., where is the energy for that coming from? D-T fusion, producing the neutrons with the particular energy, is hot fusion. (Though there may be other unidentified processes which allow it to take place at low temperatures, muon-catalyzed fusion is an example.) It is this that remains an unsolved puzzle, though there are lots of proposed solutions; but one of the most obvious is some cold fusion reaction or something that likewise releases nuclear-level energies. --Abd (talk) 16:18, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

DOE reviews question: inconclusive mechanism versus [promising?] observations?

Do the DOE reviews reject the observation-claims of cold fusion studies?

Some wiki readers may wonder whether evidence of excess heat (or other metrics) from cold fusion is deemed not conclusive, but some may also wish to know whether "not conclusive" means not potentially promising (an image that might be formed from media reports).

The introduction refers to the question of (unknown) mechanism (a good point), but does it cover the question of reviews of observation claims? Is the introduction guided by the idea that the question of mechanism is primary?

In the future, the observation-claims question might be settled. Is it already settled now?

Is this the crux of some of the epic conflicts herein? --Ihaveabutt (talk) 05:08, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

"Scientific skepticism requires that unless the experimental evidence justifies belief in these miracles, we must conclude that experimental errors are being misinterpreted as positive results."[36]. See also [37] pages 179-180 --Enric Naval (talk) 06:31, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Many useful points in articles' text. It seems like society may be demanding a "yes or no" answer (categorical). --Ihaveabutt (talk) 16:57, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

(Summary of Abd's comment of 19:26, 5 April below:)

The conclusion that the probability was low of it being anything but experimental error were reasonable in 1989-90, but no longer reasonable after sometime in the 90s. Some reputable research groups are now reporting 100% success at excess heat, but, unexpectedly, with energetic helium-4 nuclei and only suprisingly small numbers, (but detectable!), of energetic neutrons.

"Not conclusively demonstrated" just meant there was no certainty that fusion was the cause of the observations. Lack of proof of presence is not proof of absence. But now the emerging consensus is that it's some kind of nuclear reaction. Recent RS generally support the solidity of the calorimetry, except in popular sources recycling older ideas.

It's a fragile effect to initiate, but on rare occasions produces "heat-after-death", where sometimes a huge amount of heat is produced after everything is turned off: a perfectly valid form of "remarkable evidence" despite its rarity.

Present skepticism isn't based on the recent research; it's based on the events of 1989.

Being a nuclear phenomenon doesn't necessarily mean promising as a practical energy source that would be necessarily be funded by DOE; think of muon-catalysed fusion for example. Abd as summarized by Coppertwig 00:41, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the link to the SciAm article, Enric. Useful. First of all, this is a popular magazine, though relatively authoritative as popular magazines go.

"I entered graduate school wishing to help solve our impending energy crisis, so I studied 'cold fusion' carefully and with an open mind in order to make a wise career choice. I learned that the critical positive results have not been reliably and independently reproduced, and many careful and thorough studies have yielded negative conclusions, although often these unexciting results went unpublished. It is probably impossible to prove that 'cold fusion' is nothing more than the result of misinterpreted experimental errors, but the probability of it being otherwise is low.

I don't know when this scientist studied the matter, but what he says he learned was a reasonable belief in 1989-1990. Sometime in the nineties, it became unreasonable. He is making general observations that are true, but the implication that this applies to, say, excess heat, is misleading. This article was written in 1999, and, by then, there were many careful independent studies. (And apparently many careless studies showing excess heat as well.) He's right about the phenomenon of perhaps finding what you are looking for, but if a researcher does, say, 250 cells, finds no heat in 90% of them, and finds heat in 10%, and the heat is stgrongly correlated with some independent signature of fusion (usually helium is the one that works), and is likewise strongly correlated with a control (such as a cell with normal water in place of heavy water), that is actually conclusive evidence for excess heat. If the research selects the results, it would prove nothing at all.

By the 2004 DOE review, the reviewers were evenly split on the question of whether excess heat was reasonably clear. Given the huge entrenched bias, acknowledged by every independent review of the field, that's a stunning result. There are now research groups, reputable ones, reporting 100% success at finding excess heat. Is it fusion? Whatever it is, it isn't classic fusion, the primary ash is helium-4, and energetic helium-4 nuclei are the primary radiation signature, not the neutrons which everyone was looking for. There are neutrons, but at such low levels (but well above background) that many of the early confirmations of neutrons were probably artifacts, or certainly not conclusive. (For the neutrons, google "Mosier-Boss neutron" and you will find tons of references to the work which was published in Naturwissenschaften in January of this year.

So, as to the question. "Not conclusively demonstrated" meant exactly that. It did not mean "bogus." It did not mean "probably bogus." It meant that there was no certainty that fusion was the cause of the observations. The emerging consensus, rapidly shifting, is that there is some kind of nuclear reaction going on. Is it fusion? Nobody knows. But in skeptical sources, such as Taubes, it's said that if neutrons of a certain energy are found, then fusion is clear. The SPAWAR group found such neutrons, with a very simple method that appears to be artifact-free. (There have been objections raised, but the objections I've seen seem to be based on the theoretical difficulties, and proposals of artifact that don't seem to be aware of the actual experimental data and procedures.)

I have seen plenty of recent RS on the solidity of the calorimetry, and little or none recently that seriously challenges it, other than popular sources where, clearly, it's old opinions being recycled. Shanahan is one known critic who has been published, but his objections don't seem to apply to much of the confirmation, and are simply a proposed source of error for some of them.

If the SciAm editor's comments were considered to still apply, the 2004 DOE review results were phenomenally stupid. Further, understand that the field is extraordinarily complex. Calorimetry is not a simple thing, and the experimental setup that produces cold fusion, as the situation was in 2004, still quite difficult. It's a fragile effect, apparently, to initiate. (Sometimes it's not fragile at all once initiated, hence the "heat-after-death" results, which are sometimes (rarely) drastic; the energy input is stopped, and the cell continues generating heat until, sometimes, it produces more heat than could have been produced by any known chemical reaction. The rarity of such events doesn't discount their validity; indeed, these can be the "remarkable evidence" to prove "remarkable claims." Unless, of course, one wants to assume fraud or major delusion, far worse than simple expectation bias.

Hoffman makes a cogent remark about this. He has the Young Skeptic say, "Truly significant heat is very rare, this must mean that it's a result of experimental error, the heat is not real." (Or something like that, this is from my memory). the Old Metallurgist says, "The residents of San Francisco [and other cities with rare earthquakes) will be happy to know that earthquakes are not real."

Hoffman, by the way, is a skeptic, but one who realizes that lack of proof of presence is not proof of absence. Knowledgeable people active in the cold fusion field are now claiming that low-energy nuclear reactions are a certainty, there are so many studies with so many independent approaches, that they consider it preposterous to continue denying the matter. But that perception hasn't penetrated the wall of skepticism that still exists. At the present time, though, the skepticism is not based on recent peer-reviewed research, it is based, for the most part, on the events of 1989 and the strong belief that cold fusion "died" that year, this is why Simon calls it "Undead Science." It was declared dead, but it didn't die, the work and publication continued, in spite of major obstacles. In fact, if one looks at the 1989 review, it did not conclude what most have assumed, and it, like the 2004 DOE review, recommended continued study and focused grants to target specific questions. Storms reports having taken that seriously, making grant proposals, which were rejected. It appears that nobody ever got any DOE money after 1989; but, we must remember, the DOE is not the review panel, and the DOE seems to have taken the "dead science" conclusion from the report.

We also should keep in mind that the DOE would be interested in funding research reasonably likely to lead to useful energy generation. It is unknown if cold fusion will ever accomplish that. This is really a completely different question from the science, and funding decisions based on desire for cheap energy say little about the science. Nor is it necessary to brew a cup of tea, according to one famous skeptical demand, to show that the effect is real. Muon-catalyzed fusion is real cold fusion, accepted, and brewing a cup of tea with it is so far away from possible that it's a joke to even talk about it. Maybe a method will be found to scale up the reactions and get reliable usable excess heat, but major investment should be based, first, on conclusive demonstration of the heat, and until the physicists sign on, this will remain controversial. They won't sign on until they have the opportunity to truly explore the field, which could not happen, probably, in a one-day exposure (as with the 2004 DOE review.) --Abd (talk) 19:26, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

As to the second source that Enric provided, for example:

The experiments that had the best controls detected no fusion products and little or no excess heat.

Tell you what, if you think this is reliable, just try to put that in the article. It will be demanded that you provide reliable source. The book is reliable source, but not sufficient to counterbalance what is blatantly obvious from peer-reviewed literature, and other reliable source, more clearly sourced and referenced, that shows the opposite. Specifically, there is ample report of experimental measurement of He-4 production that correlates well with excess heat, and likewise with radiation (generally alpha radiation). You can put it in the article, yes, but only if you attribute it and allow balance to appear from what else is in sources of equal or better reliability. Frankly, that piece is so bad that I don't see any role for it except as a citation showing how widespread the misconceptions became. The book was published in 1998, and, long before then, anyone who deeply researched the matter wouldn't have said that.

There is a recent paper that applied Bayesian analysis to the body of experimental replication. They developed four criteria to apply to experimental publications, and showed that the criteria predicted, with high accuracy, success or failure in finding excess heat. This was a 2008 conference paper, we can't use it yet.

This simply proves the case of the "wall of skepticism," and what has been called the "success" of certain critics of creating impression of "bad science" and "lack of replication." What the cited page states is certifiably incorrect, it's not marginal. It wasn't ever true, but the impression that it was true was widely promulgated. To imagine that this claim is relevant today is preposterous. Consider the SPAWAR work (the latest results are just that, the latest results, showing energetic neutrons). The SPAWAR group is using a quite reliable method of showing excess heat, and it, itself, is confirmation of earlier findings. Ample controls, clear findings. --Abd (talk) 19:49, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Lol, I see that you just found the quote. I was wondering how long it would take you to notice that I had already added it 9 days ago XD --Enric Naval (talk) 05:08, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Enric, re "scientific skepticism" quote: that explains a lot, but I find that a fundamentally illogical approach. I'm with Hoffman on that, as cited by Abd above. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:43, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Archival time

The page is 600+kb...thats more than half a megabyte. Perhaps its time to archive some threads?Smallman12q (talk) 22:11, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

recent RS reviiewing the topic of cold fusion

2008:Michael_Brooks_(science_writer)

13 things that don't make sense/ He covers Cold fusion, a whole chapter. He tells the early story, then covers the most recent work. Note that this is before the neutron findings, but he discusses the implications of CR-39. He points out that the new discoveries are frustrating, in a way, in that (he claims) the excess heat isn't easy to reproduce, there is no magic solution to the energy crisis that has been found, though, I'd add, a door has been opened that could eventually lead to that. He says that "the CR39 chips provide almost conclusive evidence that whatever is going on inside those simple experiments, nuclear reactions are involved."

He covers many other aspects of the affair that are known in the field, but have been difficult to find reliable source on. Heads up!

Anahad O'Connor, The New York Times Science Times columnist, reviews the book on Amazon:

To be sure, some of the chapters are more entertaining than others. A section on cold fusion, for example, while understandably necessary in a book on scientific mysteries, may not turn out to be quite as captivating for some readers as the chapters that precede and follow it. That may have something to do with the notion that cold fusion has been unfairly maligned and ridiculed by scientists despite its continuing promise, an argument Mr. Brooks lays out well. But it is ultimately in his chapters on the Big Bang, dark matter, and other issues that relate to the cosmos where Mr. Brooks, who holds a Ph.D. in quantum physics, really works his magic.[38]

We have been worrying about a few words from a particle physicist from Rice University who may not be familiar with the literature on low energy nuclear reactions (perhaps someone can find something else written by that man on the topic); here is a whole chapter in a book published by Random House, a guy with a PhD in quantum physics, a notable science writer, who has clearly been paying attention. --Abd (talk) 03:55, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

CBS Sixty Minutes to do a report on Cold fusion

preview

My comment: while it is possible that low-energy nuclear reactions could lead to significant energy production, it's far from obvious, and could take a lot of time and a lot of investment; the effect is obviously fragile and difficult to control and may not scale well. On the other hand ... Arata's little bottles of palladium alloy hydride that sit there indefinitely being warmer than ambient, steady, show that something stable can be made; however, with that concept and $100,000 worth of palladium, you could make a water heater and save on your energy bills. Further, I'm suspecting that the basis of the report is the SPAWAR neutron report, which actually does not show that "the energy of the sun" is responsible for the heat, because the neutron levels are way too low. It seems to be the other way around: an unknown nuclear reaction that starts with deuterium and ends with helium is generating sufficient energy to cause a small level of classical fusion, which is a side-show, not the main act. --Abd (talk) 02:41, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Discussion with Jed Rothwell (long)

Abd wrote: Arata's little bottles of palladium alloy hydride that sit there indefinitely being warmer than ambient, steady, show that something stable can be made; however, with that concept and $100,000 worth of palladium . . . That's way off. The limiting factor is the temperature that thin-film or nanoparticle Pd can survive intact. You could generate as much power as an automobile engine does, using about as much Pd as there is in the catalytic converter. That's about $50 to $100 worth. That's assuming Pd is needed at all, which is doubtful. Arata's material can easily be improved and run at more optimum temperatures. His results have been independently replicated by Kitamura et al. using material from by another source. - Jed Rothwell —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.224.69.121 (talk) 14:50, 17 April 2009 (UTC) Rothwell is an expert. In spite of the ban, in spite of the argument against my comment, I take responsibility for the above post, please do not revert. He may be correct about scalability; however, no public experimental work has shown this; my comment stands with respect to what can be roughly inferred from the Arata reports of a 4 degree C. maintained temperature differential from a small reaction cell that is insulated, containing 7 grams of palladium, roughly $50 worth. We do know that the NAE (nuclear active environment) can be somewhat stable at the boiling point of water, or hotter, from electrochemical experiments, but, if I'm correct, small hot spots "burn" for a while and then go out. Arata has provided far too little data about his experiments to be sure about what is happening there, but if we discount fraud, which is extraordinarily unlikely, he is demonstrating continued, reasonably stable LENR, at low temperature; the power output, though, can't be determined from the data, though it might be inferred from his helium measurements, and I haven't looked at that. In any case, our concern here is the article, and the present report is of the CBS special coming on Sunday; the preview is stunning in its clarity, and it demolishes the claims that cold fusion is, any more, fringe science. It's cutting edge now, and we need to start treating it that way. (I.e., there is controversy and probably will continue to be controversy for some time, though closure might come fairly quickly if there are additional clear replications and more publication in journals that have been refusing to even submit papers for peer review.) The claims are now that prominent physicists and others have reversed their positions based on recent evidence. Maybe a few wikipedia editors, who should have been, personally, way ahead of this if they actually read the sources instead of just using them as tools in some battle over article control, might now start reconsidering, since the problem here arose from the disconnect between media sources ("junk science") or old peer-reviewed source (negative replication, and some "pathological science talk," and more recent peer-reviewed reviews and other peer-reviewed sources ("current science"). Now the media has started to pay attention, and the stories will be coming out. I came to this article a skeptic, and remained so for quite some time; my concern was administrative recusal and blacklist fairness. But when I become involved with an article, I research it. And, yes, I discuss it, often at length. That's how I learn! By the way, Jed is also correct to point out that commercial devices may not use palladium; perhaps nickel, for example. However, right now, the task facing the scientific community is to much more widely take the phenomenon seriously, develop theories or examine existing ones and rigorously test them, etc. In short, to follow the actual recommendations of the two DOE panels instead of how they were glossed by the media and too many scientists. ("Focused" funding became "no funding," in spite of continued replications.) I'd say it's urgent that the question of the existence of the phenomenon be resolved, and as well, a better understanding of theory and application, so the former recommendations of "no focused program" may no longer be wise; rather, my suggestion: fund the *critics*, challenge them to find an fix errors, and if they don't, given suitable resources and incentives, then ramp up funding on the engineering, and, with increased efficiency and reliability, if that happens, take it all the way up to or beyond hot fusion levels. Let the SPAWAR group build "plug-in" cells and provide them to skeptical physicists, take all the difficulty and mystery out of it for the skeptics, and let these physicists (mostly) figure out what's happening. If it's not fusion, fine. What is it! Telekinesis? I'm still not placing bets, except that it is very likely to be something that is, in effect, deuterium fusion, mostly. --Abd (talk) 15:18, 17 April 2009 (UTC) This belongs here now, as well, it has much detail on the upcoming report. Note that NET goes beyond reporting, it also editorializes, which makes it problematic as reliable source, it's like taking facts from a newspaper editorial, which is sometimes done; caution is required. But we need to see the facts reported, I'd say, it's a massive reversal, a crisis point: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2009/60MinutesTurnsUptheHeat.shtml --Abd (talk) 15:52, 17 April 2009 (UTC) The following had been posted by Jed Rothwell; I quote: "Abd wrote: ". . . however, no public experimental work has shown this . . . "Many experiments show better performance at higher temperatures. Arata's power density is nothing to write home about. His advantage is control and stability. Granted, these are crucial. ". . . We do know that the NAE (nuclear active environment) can be somewhat stable at the boiling point of water, or hotter, from electrochemical experiments, but, if I'm correct, small hot spots "burn" for a while and then go out. "That's correct. But "small" hardly describes it. The work at Mitsubishi, the Nat. Sychrotron Lab and Toyota show that active spots are microscopic, and only a tiny fraction of the cathode surface ever turns on and participates. So, all they have to do is: increase surface area (as Arata has done); increase the NAE from 0.01% to 10%; raise the temperature and boom -- the cathode evaporates. That's happened several times. The trick is to increase the NAE and keep the reaction under control. The power density and temperatures achieved so far in a few cases show that only about as much Pd as is used in a converter would be enough to generate roughly as much heat as an automobile engine does. The main difficulty after they learn to control it will be engineering materials that survive the intense heat and continue catalysis, and that happens to be the problem that was solved to make the catalytic converters. "Arata has provided far too little data about his experiments to be sure about what is happening there, but if we discount fraud, which is extraordinarily unlikely, he is demonstrating continued, reasonably stable LENR, at low temperature; the power output, though, can't be determined from the data, "We don't need Arata. Kitamura et al. (Kobe U. and Toyota) and others have replicated, and many more will in the near future. They are using far better instruments, as you see from their slides which I uploaded you-know-where. "- Jed Rothwell" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.224.69.121 (talk) 17:46, 17 April 2009 (UTC) Interesting comments by someone knowledgeable about the field. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 02:37, 18 April 2009 (UTC) I want to bring this back to the point here: just because cold fusion supporters may have something to crow about doesn't mean a cold fusion water heater is just around the corner. Rothwell is bullish on the possibility, and that is, in a sense, his job. But skepticism is also quite in order, and that's my point. Indeed, heat-after-death experiments, meltdowns, stuff like that, have been reported. So, indeed, the trick is precisely to "learn how to control it." We may think that human ingenuity can conquer every obstacle. Maybe. When? Investors dropped out of cold fusion research, not because they thought there was no science there, but because it began to become apparent that return on investment might take far too long, too much money, or never come. There are still commercial projects hanging in there, and I wish them well, but it has to be noticed how many times there were enthusiastic announcements of coming products that never appeared, and conspiracy theories, etc., only go so far. My point is that we -- and everyone involved -- should be wary of gushy text about solving our energy problems. Indeed, it could happen. Indeed, we should look at it. But overblown expectations are what killed cold fusion in the first place, as a legitimate field of endeavor (using the sociological language without implying that it was ever actually not legitimate in an absolute sense). We will have plenty to do here to reconsider the article in the late of the latest developments, including the activity of March and now and what will follow. In reality, as Rothwell knows, people following the field closely knew this all, and the problem was political. I removed a brief cynical comment from Jed, not specifically uncivil to anyone, but quite possibly able to be interpreted that way, and I ask him to consider himself, as it were, a professional, a consultant. I can't officially invite him to "speak" here, but his input was always valuable, when separated from what could be seen as unprofessional commentary about censorship, etc. If Jed objects to the removal, I'll replace it, but then I will be hands-off as to what ensues. --Abd (talk) 20:27, 17 April 2009 (UTC) I don't know of anything to contradict the above account. "Investors." The State of Utah. EPRI. The Japanese government. IMRA. Indeed, the U.S. DOE (at the very beginning). When it became clear that reproducing the effect (if it even existed) was not simple, and that scaling it could then be doubly difficult, put all the pieces together, they pulled out. Some agencies continued with very low levels of funding, right? The point is that commercial energy generation from the Fleischmann-Pons effect is difficult." That could change, but as far as we know, it hasn't changed yet. The presentation Rothwell mentions was presented at the March 2009 ACS meeting, a copy is at http://www.lenr-canr.org/PDetail5.htm#1620. Note that the Arata work, which was confirmed as reported in this "conference paper" has been published in reliable source (Japanese peer-reviewed publications), or am I confused about that? --Abd (talk) 22:10, 17 April 2009 (UTC) My suggestion, Jed, is that you refrain entirely from commenting on Wikipedia itself and what editors might or might not do. It makes the natives restless, for no good reason. Now, on the point, the CBS article represents a turning point. Duncan was solicited as someone who had never been involved. I'm pretty sure the genie can't be stuffed back into the bottle now. The real turning point may have been the four-day ACS seminar and their press release and press conference, and all the coverage of that. It's fun to witness this point in history, and to have been given a leg up on it by a few months from coming across the situation here. I'd say we are going to have a much more interesting article, and fairly soon. Watch this space! --Abd (talk) 22:48, 17 April 2009 (UTC)