Talk:Cold fusion

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"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 [1]. 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 [2], 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 [3] and on 46 different pages in newenergytimes.com [4]

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 [5]. 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.[6]

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.[7] --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)

I missed this at the time because I wasn't looking for videos. science.discovery.com. They consult a nuclear physicist with the DOE. Some of what he says about what happened in 1989 is off, but he clearly thinks the SPAWAR group are onto something. --Abd (talk) 04:42, 20 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."[8]. See also [9] 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)

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)

Removed proxy edits for banned user by Abd Verbal chat 09:18, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

diff of removal --Abd (talk) 14:54, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I'll put in my two-cents worth, regarding the removal: Please recall WHY an editor might be banned: it is usually for some specific type of offense. Well, the assumption behind a ban is that the editor will continue to be offensive in that way, and Wikipedia doesn't need to have it. Also remember that most bans are temporary, to give banned editors a reason to mend their ways. Well, we all know that some people learn faster than others. If an editor writes something that is both relevant and not objectionable, then why should it be deleted just because the EDITOR has been objectionable/banned? The purpose of the ban is to prevent objectionable posts, NOT to re-define "objectionable" as "anything written by so-and-so". V (talk) 14:36, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

It's actually well-established that editors may revert back in useful material from banned editors, on their own responsibility, so I was quite surprised to see the tenacious deletion here, that went far beyond the simple original reversion that is arguably legitimate. I'm considering confronting this, in a very simple way. But first I have an RfAr to file. --Abd (talk) 14:51, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

The comment above was removed by Verbal, with the edit summary, (→CBS Sixty Minutes to do a report on Cold fusion: nope, banned editor - do not add by proxy. This is not an addition by proxy, period, the summary is preposterous, and the removal is a violation of community practice regarding talk page behavior. I'm warning the editor. --Abd (talk) 04:35, 19 April 2009 (UTC) The removed commentary can be found on my Talk page. --Abd (talk) 04:06, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

There is some reporting on the program in New Energy Times, see
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2009/60MinutesTurnsUptheHeat.shtml
Most remarkable is the section on physicist Robert Duncan, with whom CBS consulted and funded for some investigation. Apparently, take a skeptical physicist, show him the actual papers and research, he's no longer skeptical. He's convinced it's real.--Abd (talk) 05:23, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

The full program is here. --Abd (talk) 03:38, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Does anyone have a reference to the DoD review mentioned in the report? According to the spot, the report concludes something like "there is no doubt regarding anomalous excess heat" (quoting from memory). I would think this would serve as a counterbalance to the 2004 DoDDoE report since it presumably incorporates the more recent advances such as the work at SPAWAR. Ronnotel (talk) 12:36, 20 April 2009 (UTC) fixed typo per following comment Ronnotel (talk) 14:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

That would be the 2004 DOE report. Note that the reviewers for the 2004 DOE report were evenly split on the excess heat question, which is remarkable considering the massive wall of rejection existing, it's unlikely that this wall didn't affect some of the reviewers. Beyond excess heat, there is the question of how much excess heat. In Pons-Fleischmann experiments, excess heat is highly variable, from none (used to be the norm until they nailed it down better) to melting the electrode (rarely) or more. (No explosions, though, the only explosion was found to be from rapid recombination after recombiner failure. I haven't seen that report, it may be confidential with release only of the page shown. But I'll ask those who should know and who shall not be named or else the sky will fall. There is plenty of RS, though, going back to the 1990s, supporting excess heat as being a real phenomenon. Excess heat does not automatically mean "cold fusion," though put that together with helium and alpha radiation and we have walking and quacking, maybe it's a duck. --Abd (talk) 14:14, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I should qualify my statement. The 2007 DoD report might serve as a counterpoint to the 2004 DoE review. It depends on the what the report actually says and who is saying it. But I agree that it seems somewhat silly that the person mostly likely to have access to this document, Jed Rothwell, apparently doesn't exist as far as this page is concerned. Censorship is an ugly thing. Ronnotel (talk) 14:39, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Ronnotel. Actually, I asked Krivit. If Krivit comes up negative, I'll ask Rothwell. If they both come up negative, the document is probably not publicly accessible. I did find excerpts from a 1993 report to the Pentagon. As found in many sources, the excess heat findings are considered credible and worthy of further investigation. http://newenergytimes.com/v2/reports/GarwinLewisReport/garwin.shtml

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/blog/ has an illuminating discussion of the 2007 report and a screen shot of part of it. Very strange story, actually. --Abd (talk) 19:27, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Based on the available description, it doesn't sound like the report is on par with the DoE review. Still, if it became available publicly it might be interesting to cite or link in the article. Ronnotel (talk) 19:42, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree, Ronnotel. There is actually a huge body of RS on this topic, covering research not mentioned yet here, the history and sociology of the affair, etc. It is likely much more than one article can bear, we will need to break this down, and it's a huge task, one reason I've been doing so much discussion and so little article editing. I'm not going to make major changes just to see them reverted, until the time is ripe, i.e., there is sufficient consensus for it. The DOE review(s) are definitely of greater weight, but the last DOE review was five years ago, the memo is from two years ago. The article has emphasized a comment in the 2004 review that the conclusions were much the same as in 1989, but what has been largely hidden is that, in spite of the problems with these reviews, they did not treat the field as a pseudoscience or fringe science, but rather as emerging science, still quite controversial, but worthy of investigation. Here, the recommendations for further research were treated by some editors, explicitly, as "boilerplate, they always say that." No, they don't, and there was no basis in RS -- at all -- for such a claim negating the plain words of the reports, and contradicting the individual reports. Cold fusion wasn't, in the view of these reports, a proven hypothesis to explain the experimental results, nor was it proven to be spurious or false. And I'd have to agree with that, certainly as to the 1989 report. By 2004, it's more debatable; when I mention that I think the 2004 report was still reasonable, I get off-wiki flak from Rothwell et al. He may be right. The truth is that "it's debatable."

Want to talk about "fringe," how about biological transmutation? Reported in RS (Storms, 2007). Plausible experiments which, if accurately reported, are next to conclusive. Replicated. And easily and immediately identified as quite "fringe." Yet sufficiently notable to warrant mention somewhere in the project. I have a special affinity for the report given prominence in Storms because the method of identification of the rare Fe-57 isotope reportedly produced, by bacteria which needed iron, was Mossbauer spectroscopy, which method I did in physics lab at CalTech, it's insanely specific and accurate. Most editors wouldn't see that immediately. --Abd (talk) 17:21, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Something I posted a while back and appears to have become archived, but may be relevant in terms of the "60 Minutes" report: http://www.analogsf.com/0904/altview.shtml There is a Choice Quote in the article: "I think we’ve reached a point where the deniers are now going out on a limb." V (talk) 15:53, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Removal of comments from this page

Verbal has been repetitively removing comment from this page, on the argument that it was from the allegedly banned JedRothwell. Whether or not Rothwell is actually banned is moot, because it's clear that there is an argument that he is, though that has not yet debated and decided by a neutral administrator. Any editor may revert edits from a banned editor, on sight. However, it's well established that an editor may revert these edits back in if the editor considers them a contribution to the project; this can even be done with article edits from banned editors. In a recent case of a topic ban, I consulted with an arbitrator on this issue, noting that a banned editor could make an edit and self-revert, and that any other editor could then revert it back in, and the original edit, self-reverted, would not be a ban violation. In prior situations, I have reverted in edits from banned editors, been taken to AN/I over it, and was sustained, so I'm quite clear on policy and practice on this. The original removal(s) were legitimate; however, reverting me and Coppertwig in our decisions that the comments were relevant, or, in the latest extremity, reverting a reference to the move of the comments to my Talk page, as suggested by Verbal, is not legitimate and violates Talk page guidelines. Comment from other editors is invited; because Verbal's latest two edits have clearly crossed into edit warring, I have warned Verbal, and, since this editor continued removal in spite of warning, I have asked the editor to suggest a mediator. I greatly prefer this to going to AN/I, which I consider a move of last resort. I must attend to other business, I will return with diffs and references to policy later today. --Abd (talk) 13:46, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Please don't do it here, another violation of WP:TALK. Take it to your talk page, I'll see it, as will others here. Verbal chat 14:42, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Do what? What part of WP:TALK is violated by notice here of a problem in discussion on this page, and inviting comment regarding the usefulness of the removed discussion? No, my Talk page -- or Verbal's -- are places where personal disputes may be resolved. This section does not raise a personal dispute, begins with facts and review of community practice, and what is relevant here is the usefulness of the removed discussion, the rest is context, and I don't believe the facts stated are controversial. Diffs will be supplied for the convenience of editors reviewing this. --Abd (talk) 15:46, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

To be clear, I could, of course, go to AN/I at this point; however, if there is no sentiment here for the retention of the material on this page, or for, as was most recently removed, notice of and links to the discussion as moved to my Talk page, I wouldn't bother. I move slowly and carefully, until the time is ripe.--Abd (talk) 15:49, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Jed is still up to the same behaviour that got him banned from this page (WP:OR, WP:UNDUE exaggeration of the importance anything positive regarding cold fusion, denial and smear of anything negative about it, applying WP:RS only to the sources he likes, etc), so I see no reason not to keep applying the ban. It's blindly obvious that he doesn't believe that he did anything wrong. --Enric Naval (talk) 15:48, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Other editors enabling his problematic behaviour is also causing further disruption. This banned editor seems to be the Dana Ullman of Cold Fusion, and long as his ban stands his posts will be removed. This is not the place or the way to get Jed unbanned or to try to work around his ban. Verbal chat 15:57, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

There is no position asserted here that the comments cannot be removed. The issue is the removal of re-additions by other editors, taking responsibility for them, and precedent is clear on that. I reverted in an edit by ScienceApologist here, to the article, after he'd been topic banned. I've reverted in other contributions from banned editors, it has been appealed to a noticeboard, and was always confirmed as legitimate. You are out on a limb, Verbal. Enric, you can "keep applying the ban" as long as you like, unless he's unbanned and that's clear. But don't revert insertions of comments from other editors, who take responsibility for them. Verbal keeps misstating the issue, repeating "proxying" over and over. Jed only adds discussion, as a COI editor, and he's expected to be biased, there is a total misunderstanding here of WP:COI. The only problem with Jed was occasional incivility, and if I'd been treated as he was treated -- it's likely to come out in the current RfAr wherein he is mentioned -- I might be uncivil too. --Abd (talk) 19:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Don't worry too much about Jed and his buddies, see http://en.alternapedia.org Kirk Shanahan —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.33.240.30 (talk) 19:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I think it's very important for people to remain courteous and assume good faith, or else you might get banned from wikipedia like this editor: [10] Olorinish (talk) 00:35, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

The "taking responsability" part of the policy was for content in the articles, not for comments on talk pages. This is just enabling Jed to keep using this page as his soapbox for his personal opinions (I already described in my post above the problems that got him banned). --Enric Naval (talk) 15:03, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

That's correct (about the policy). However, article content is stricter than Talk. This whole affair, in which this matter of the ban of Rothwell is just one incident, is now before the Arbitration Committee, and looks like the RfAr will be accepted, and that the Committee may examine the behavior of all parties, which includes Enric Naval and Verbal, since they have commented before the RfAr, see the acceptance vote of FloNight. Looking at the ten acceptance votes so far, I get warm fuzzy feelings, every one of them is spot on. We'll see. Pursuing a dispute with an entrenched administrator can be hazardous to one's wikihealth, but I've been pretty careful. We'll get to see just how many mistakes I made, I'm sure that every one will be dredged up, these things can be quite thorough. --Abd (talk) 16:56, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

60 Minutes piece broadcasted on April 19, 2009

Now that the 60 Minutes piece on cold fusion has been broadcast, Energetics Technologies' technique seems to bear on the "x" discussed in Dr. David Goodstein's article. Is this enough to merit an inclusion in the "Further Developments" section?

Krellkraver (talk) 11:25, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

An Overlooked Book?

Here's a book on the subject that seems relevant. Both sides of the issue are included, and the preface indicates quite a large number of papers were researched in writing it. I specify "overlooked" in the section header here only because I don't recall seeing it mentioned here before, and yet the book is in its second edition:

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/books/excessheat/ExcessHeat.shtml
V (talk) 19:09, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Beaudette's book does not deal with the CCS. I was in contact with him right at the time he was proofing his 2nd edition. He challenged me to explain several papers that he though proved excess heat, so I did, and I never heard from him again. Cold fusioneers are good at bringing up explanations for objections that they have actually answered. It's the ones they can't answer they never talk about (see Storms 2007 book for a prime example). Unfortunately, those are the ones that strongly suggest CF isn't nuclear. Kirk shanahan (talk) 20:18, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Beaudette was listed in the bibliography for quite some time, but then someone decided it was self-published, I think, and it was taken out. However, it's cited all over the place, we should probably put it back. Kirk, if you never heard from him again, why, that must prove you were right, eh? How about McKubre? Further, it's difficult to use CCS to explain away results like this, reported in Undead Science, Simon, 2002, p. 144:

"Melvin Miles at the China Lake Naval Weapons Research Center in California performed some of the most highly regarded helium experiments during the 1990s. Miles collected the gases that bubble off during electrolysis experiments, generating excess heat, and sent them to other laboratories for blind analysis using mass spectroscopy. In one set of experiments, six out of six cells producing excess heat also produced anomalous helium-4, while eight out of eight cells that did not produce heat also did not produce helium-4. In addition to this, Miles reported that the amount of helium could be correlated to the excess heat measurements such that the reaction D + D -> 4He + heat might be the prevailing reaction."

If I'm correct, Kirk, your CCS theory or analysis provides a possible explanation for excess heat in some measurements, but wouldn't it also predict loss of heat in some? Why would it favor error in one direction over the other? And then, how would this calibration constant shift manage to produce the correlation with helium? Miles' results actually answer two objections: possible calorimetry problems, and possible confusion of helium from natural occurrence with that from whatever is producing the impression, at least, of excess heat, plus the correspondence between heat and helium is supportive of fusion as the "result," not necessarily the specific reaction path. I.e., the workers who have confirmed Arata's excess heat from direct gas-loading of deuterium into palladium black or nanoparticle palladium alloy are hypothesizing that four deuterons are fused to one Be-8 nucleus, which then fissions into two energetic helium nuclei. This would, of course, explain where the missing momentum would go, and why there is no radiation (other than the alpha radiation detected by the SPAWAR group and others over many years) which is rapidly absorbed with the kinetic energy converted to heat and leaving the helium). it's an intriguing hypothesis.

Anyway, I've asked on your Talk page my first question. By the way, folks, Simon, quoted above, is a reliable secondary source, usable in the article. There are other results that are similar, from Miles, and from others. Storms (2007) discusses this work, pp 86-87) and gives more information than Simon:

"First, 12 studies produced no extra energy and produced no extra helium. Second, out of 21 studies producing extra energy, 18 produced extra helium with an amount consistent with the amount of extra energy. The exceptions were one sample having a possible error in heat measurement and two studies using a Pd-Ce alloy. Miles calculates the chance occurrence of this result as being 1 in 750,000."

And then there is McKubre, as reported by Storms (p. 89), with a nice chart showing a direct ration of estimated energy in kJ (from calorimetry) to measured helium; this set of experiments used palladium deposited on carbon, exposed to deuterium gas. "The helium content of the cell increased over a period of 45 days and exceeded the concentration in air after 15 days." From "a single very careful measurement made at SRI," "reported by Peter Hagelstein and co-workers," Storms reports the determination of energy generated: 24.8 +/- 2.5 MeV/He, which is consistent with d-d fusion being the source of the energy and the helium. (This is the Arata process, this work was replicating Arata's results.)

Storms goes on to note, after citing many other studies:

Once again we are faced with good work being done by independent laboratories producing an "impossible" result. To reject this work, we have to assume that errors in helium measurement and errors in heat measurement both conspire to produce a similar ratio regardless how or by whom the measurement is made. In addition, we need to assume these errors only operate when anomalous heat is actually detected. If the data are accepted, we also need to accept that somehow helium and energy are apparently being creaetd at the same time without generating gamma emission. Or this information can simply be ignored, as it was by many members of the DoE panel convened in 2004 to evaluate cold fusion.

I see that what we have in the article is pretty wimpy compared to what I've reported here from RS. Anyway, I'll appreciate your comments, Kirk. --Abd (talk) 04:27, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

New paper out

The infamous Jed R. has posted a new paper to his banned website by D. Kidwell, a presenter from ICCF14 (lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KidwellDtraceanaly.pdf). This is the same Kidwell that was denigrated in New Energy Times, Issue 30 (newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2008/NET30-jgk39gh12f.shtml), Item 12 under subheading “Two Oddities” (just search on Kidwell) . This paper is an excellent example in several aspects of what a good cold fusion paper should contain, and is highly recommended reading. When you read it, be careful to note:

a) the description of instrumentation, reagents, and methods used b) the comments on MS interferences, both from what he calls ‘adducts’ (which are the equivalent in ICP-MS to molecular ions in SIMS, see footnote 5) and from overloading of the instrument (aka ‘memory effects’) c) the comments on limits of detection of trace contaminants in the bulk Pd material (comments also made by Scott Little and brought up by myself on these Talk pages (and rejected as non-RS) – this paper shows that this knowledge is ‘standard knowledge’ in analytical chemistry) d) the fact that this paper does not make any CF claims, it’s strictly a study of ICP-MS applied to trace level analysis of Pd e) the fact that this is all about _trace_ level contaminants (standard analytical chemistry knowledge says that trace level work is significantly harder than non-trace work, thus necessitating better methods and proving the problems noted above are not detracting from the results, which no CF paper has done to date).

Undoubtedly the CF proponents who dominate this forum will cite ‘non-RS’ again, but in the opinion of this professional scientist familiar with both the cold fusion field and analytical technology, this is a must read. But I have no intention of debating that here. Kirk shanahan (talk) 17:33, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice, Kirk. The problem is going to be that conference papers aren't peer-reviewed. My opinion is that we can and should cite them for discussion purposes, but they aren't reliable source in themselves, and, you surely realize, this applies to the many hundreds or thousands of conference papers that are "pro-cold fusion," as well as the handful that aren't. By the way, this paper appears to assume that the FPE (Fleischmann-Pons effect) is real. What, exactly, is your point? However, I haven't reviewed the paper in detail, and the application of it to our topic here would probably require WP:SYNTH, something I consider fine on a talk page, but not in the article.

By the way, the New Energy Times article on ICCF14 is fascinating. Quite simply, investigative reporting on this level involving cold fusion or condensed matter nuclear science doesn't exist anywhere else. If one is interested in what is actually going on in this field, reading NET is a must. Because NET mixes reporting of fact, interviews, etc., with editorial comment, its use as reliable source is subject to great caution, at least, but for background, it is utterly invaluable. --Abd (talk) 17:52, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Dude, _I_ assume the Fleischmann-Pons-Hawkins Effect is real. I assume there are 'new' elements detected. I assume there are pits in the CR-39. I just don't require a nuclear process to get them. Kirk shanahan (talk) 19:09, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Real dumb experimenters, electrochemists who don't understand calibration constant shift? Mouse turds in the cells? Mouse bites on the CR-39? Come on, Kirk, don't leave us hanging! The Fleischmann-Pons effect isn't merely an appearance of heat caused by calibration constant shift, because it's known to exceed possible errors from that, and it's been shown with many different calorimetric procedures, plus it's hard to melt palladium with calibration constant shift or to boil away one bucket of water after another in a heat-after-death experience reported by Mizuno, and many other similar reports. There has been one peer-reviewed critique of the CR-39 results, by Kowalski, and I doubt Kowalski himself believes it any more. It was demolished in a reply in the same publication. And then the very distinctive patterns from energetic neutrons? Are you saying that you don't need a nuclear process to get energetic neutrons, missing from controls? There comes a point where excessive skepticism begins to violate Occam's Razor. I hasten to add that healthy skepticism is essential; Mizuno apparently said goodbye to the field at ICF14 because he felt there wasn't enough of it. But healthy skepticism doesn't reserve skepticism for the work of others, it includes itself in its purview; a very good example is Nate Hoffman (1994). --Abd (talk) 01:49, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Against my better judgement... "isn't merely an appearance of heat caused by calibration constant shift" - Actually, yes, it is. If you had actually read my 1st paper or the manuscript version of it on lenr-carn.org, you would have understood that, if you can handle algebra. "because it's known to exceed possible errors from that" - No, that's the point of my publications, a 1-3% error can explain the data in the Storms case, no info is provided by anyone else to be able to actually assess it, but the Szpak, et al publication I analyzed and published a comment on fits the pattern, as does most all of the other claims to have observed excess heat. "and it's been shown with many different calorimetric procedures" - no, it hasn't. Oh wait - inretrospect I'm not sure what the 'it' you refer to is, I thought it meant the 'falsity' of the CCS. Please clarify. "plus it's hard to melt palladium with calibration constant shift" - didn't ever claim that, I believe I actually did mention once that an explosion can produce that kind of appearance, but that was probably on sci.physics.fusion, which I'm sure you don't read either. "or to boil away one bucket of water after another in a heat-after-death experience reported by Mizuno" - you need to stop shilling for Rothwell, or I may have to bring up the rat pool party again (and the more rational evaporation explanation that Jed couldn't understand). "one peer-reviewed critique of the CR-39 results" - yes, I haven't published any comments on the CR-39 yet, but I did post two conventional mechanisms to develop pits back in 2002, which have never been addressed to date (there was one handwaving mention of one possibility, but I don't think it was in reference to what I posted in 2002, and we don't do science by handwaving). "the very distinctive patterns from energetic neutrons?" - to what are you referring? Surely not the 'triplet' garbage. 10 examples or less in a plate with possibly 100's of thousands of pits, and you expect me to believe the 'triplets' are not coincidental? Real n-ray thinking there Abd. Interesting to hear about Mizuno, seems he has a modicum of common sense left. "There comes a point where excessive skepticism..." - Yup, you've been talking to Rothwell far too much. It really astounds me that a person who claims to be capable of editing a technical article on Wikipedia has so little judgement. But, as I've said before, I can't fight a screwed up system like Wikipedia. Bye. Kirk shanahan (talk) 03:02, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

So many points, so little time. I didn't get anything on Mizuno from Rothwell except that Rothwell translated the book, so the references to Rothwell and his alleged lack of understanding are completely moot. You seem to have completely missed the point about those "10 examples," which is comparison with controls over many experiments, and that the 10 examples are obviously outside the heavily pitted areas, or on the back side of the CR-39, away from the cathode. They are missing from controls. And that's 10 examples in one run, not 10 examples overall. My guess is that if other experimenters re-examine their CR-39 samples, they'll find those neutron tracks. Conventional explanations of the pits? Remember: controls, and for *all* the radiation (i.e., the copious pits), CR-39 protected with thin mylar, CR-39 outside the cell, CR-39 suspended above the electrodes in the effluent gases (Oriani), please, be my guest, even if you haven't published, clue us in. I'm all ears. Yes, I expect you to believe that the triplets aren't coincidental. If it were one run, fine, some cosmic ray burst came down and smashed some poor heavy nuclei to pieces. Anyway, go ahead, there isn't any serious published criticism, and we need some. Give it your best shot. That's what experts are for, advice, to clue us in. Though, of course, not to control the article, that's for a different project. --Abd (talk) 03:55, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

See my general response below. Your fixation on 'nuclear' will most likely make it impossible for you to answer my challenge. This bias you have makes your comments here pure POV. Neutrality is supposed to be the rule. Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:25, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Abd, I have to disagree. Stuff being reported in this source is not notable. Wikipedia should report on Cold Fusion whatever information is deemed noteworthy enough to be published in reliable sources. We are not here to cover obscure details that are essentially original research. Jehochman ^Talk 02:27, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Jehochman, thanks, but I think you have missed a few things. I didn't start this section, it was started by Kirk Shanahan, who is a published author in the field, one of the few skeptics in recent years to have that honor, and we are blessed with his participation, serious and knowledgeable critics of cold fusion are getting hard to come by. I stated that we couldn't use the source for the article, but that it might be interesting for background discussion. In other words, as to the article, I agreed with the position you are claiming is in opposition to mine. The usage of the paper cannot be ruled out completely, but, in any case, nothing can be used at Cold fusion without a key ingredient: consensus. There has been long-term exclusion here of reliable source (not the paper in question here) based on some very shaky claims about priority of sources and synthesis of contradiction, but that is going to take quite a bit of time to address; meanwhile the field is shifting rapidly with recent events. However, as to New Energy Times, it could be considered a blog or private news report by an expert, a professional journalist, paid to do the work, and there is plenty of RS calling him just that, recently. (The discussion on RSN is way out-of-date.) The news report on ICCF14 is coverage that simply doesn't exist anywhere else in depth, detail, and actual reliability; unfortunately, it's mixed with editorial comment. Notability decisions are tricky, and there are no hard-and-fast rules beyond, in the end, that they are decided by consensus. To find consensus in situations of high controversy is known, off-wiki, to require extensive discussion, sometimes requiring obsessive detail, and too often we substitute "rough consensus" for deeper consensus, and the result is long-term dispute that never reaches resolution, blocked and banned editors but constant newcomers raising the same points, and ArbComm cases. But, hey, thanks for showing up! Stick around if you like, help keep us honest.--Abd (talk) 02:56, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

You guys are crazy. Reread what I wrote. I already said none of you would accept the paper as 'RS' because it doesn't fit Wiki's screwed up rules. So why are you arguing about whether it is RS and who said it is (it isn't and no one has!)? Abd, for the record, you do NOT have my consensus, and you will never get it until you can correctly repeat back my points and explain why they are important, possibly even crucial. Your contributions to this page have dumbed it down to a typical 5th grader level, and are highly biased towards the 'pro-CF' side. Revert to Sept. 17 2008 and start over, and maybe we'll see about getting my consensus. Kirk shanahan (talk) 03:12, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Kirk, I have made very few edits to the article. I know quite well I don't have "your consensus," it takes time to get that, and it also takes civility. Wikipedia's "screwed up rules" actually are quite sophisticated, but you have to understand the context and the purpose of the project, something which evades your understanding. I know what you wrote. I don't know if you noticed that I was the one who put your papers on calibration constant shift back in the references when you complained that they had been removed. Was that part of how I damaged the article and dumbed it down? Or is it just osmosis from my ignorance in Talk here? You want consensus? Start with one point, make it as narrow as possible. It works if pursued with good faith, try it. We might need to move the discussion off this page, however, and maybe bring only a result with a reference to the full discussion. --Abd (talk) 03:42, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

You first. Answer my challenge above and perhaps I'll answer yours.

For those who don't know what's going on with my references to Abd shilling for Rothwell, a) what he says has already been said by Rothwell years ago on spf and answered by me there, and b) see http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l%40eskimo.com/msg31406.html Kirk shanahan (talk) 13:21, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Rothwell is also an expert on the topic, possibly more widely informed on it than anyone else on the planet, except maybe Krivit. If my independent conclusions or opinions resemble his, sometimes, I'm gratified. My opinions here are not based on assuming that Rothwell is an authority or that Shanahan is not, but on the direct evidence I've examined, and the opinions of other reviewers. As to challenge above, I'll review it, but what is above seems to be a shotgun, not a single issue to be examined. If Shanahan doesn't lead the way, I will. He's listed critical points on his Talk page, some time ago, so I may start there, or I can extract a few points from his comments above. I'll link here to any discussion started there. --Abd (talk) 16:13, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I reviewed Shanahan's comments above, and while they contained questions, I found it very difficult to extract a clear point to discuss. So I'll ask again, "What challenge?" Shanahan, Please be specific and don't mix it with irrelevancies like Rothwell or "screwed up rules" that don't necessarily apply here in Talk, and especially in User Talk. You are an expert, pretend I'm your client. You've "challenged" me, you claim. Please explain what it is, without the noise. Let your challenge, if it is one point, be the one point you raise. You can raise it on my Talk; I don't necessarily watch yours so I might miss it, or not. --Abd (talk) 17:01, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I have, however, initiated discussion on User talk:Kirk shanahan. --Abd (talk) 01:42, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Some more relevant info?

I'm well aware that a lot of web sites are presenting lots of the same information, because of the hype over the 20th anniversary of the P&F announcement. Nevertheless, some of them seem to come up with odd tidbits that others miss. So, here's a couple of things I found:

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=after-20-years-new-life-for-cold-fu-2009-03-23

Search that page for the comment by lewisglarsen

Next: http://www.groundreport.com/Arts_and_Culture/The-ghost-of-free-energy

That page has some stuff in it about CR-39 which seems to be independent of the SPAWAR data. And there is a remark made, about publishing new data, that we already all know about here: "They say it is a Catch-22 situation whereby the tide of scepticism deters journals from publishing, which in turn prevents scepticism from ever receding." V (talk) 15:33, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

mmm.... Groundreport.com looks like a blog, but this is on the About page: Every day Ground Report’s network of over 4,000 international contributors publish breaking news articles, videos and photos, which are vetted by trusted corps of trained editors. That might qualify as reliable source, or at least somewhat reliable source. The facts in the article are pretty well established, I could probably find independent source for most of them, but the author puts them together in a clear way. Let's see what comments we get. There is lots of regret expressed out there in reliable source for the situation, the effective blacklisting of papers on "cold fusion," and how this inhibited true closure (both ways!). So we have all this great reliable source showing lots of phenomena that point to low energy nuclear reactions, we have secondary sources reporting this, we have very little recent reliable source on the same level that is truly negative, but we also have media reliable source and "scientist" opinions that cold fusion isn't worth the time of day, that "it" was never replicated, etc. So how to balance this? I think I know, but it's going to be a lot of work. One step at a time.

I want to note something: "it" was the Pons-Fleischmann report. It was wrong. It reported two basic things (of the top of my head): excess heat and radiation. The radiation was a mistake, everyone working now in cold fusion would say: there wasn't any significant radiation and we wouldn't expect what he found to be real. It was either a complete mistake or it was definitely not radiation at an important level. So, yes, you can say that "it" wasn't replicated. However, half of it, the important half, the excess heat, was, in fact, replicated, I have a list of over 150 peer-reviewed papers saying just that. We can find skeptical sources saying things like, back in the early 1990s, "they claim there are N papers, but I've looked at the papers, and only 10 of them are good studies, and there are more negative studies than that." Notice that the statement accepts that there are confirmations of excess heat, and good studies to boot. There is a very simple hypothesis that accounts for the excess of negative studies in the early days: nobody, including the cold fusion researchers and Pons and Fleischmann knew how to make the damn thing reliable. But that has changed. The shift began to occur in the 1990s, and the 2007 Chinese paper, from Frontiers of Physics in China, I cited above (now in archive, I think) reported that studies "in the last year" were 100% "successful," showing the phenomena every time. I haven't asserted these sources with article edits yet, because I was very new to the topic and wanted to assess the editorial environment; that phase is, I suspect, over for me. --Abd (talk) 20:09, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

CR-39 is mentioned in Hoffman, A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects (1994), a quite reliable independent secondary source, pp. 57-58:

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 burst tracks on the plastic film CR-39 with Dd/D systems but not with Pd/H systems. When P.B. Price et al. did the experiment, they found a pair of tracks, but no burst mode. The discrepancy was found to be a chloride film from an aqua regia rinse. This cleaning step formed a few hundred angstrom thick barrier over the palladium that prevented the creation or permanent recording of charged-particle bursts from the palladium surface. The linking of the disappearance of particle burst tracks with the chlorine barrier layer was confirmed by augur analysis of the surface and replication of the effect with chlorine gas exposure rather than an aqua regia rinse.

The Chinese work was published as an AIP paper in 1990, see the expanded comment below. It's possible that Price refers to it in his 1989 paper, in which case it was even earlier. Because of the review by Hoffman, this is usable stuff. There is an extensive history for the use of CR-39 to show radiation in cold fusion experiments. This affair also shows how negative results were -- prematurely -- worked up to show rejection, when, in fact, negative results were simply negative results, which may have other explanations besides the non-existence of the phenomenon. It cuts both ways, and that's why it was so damaging that the normal scientific process was shut down by 1990. --Abd (talk) 20:37, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

search for early Chinese work

Unfortunately, Hoffman doesn't reference sources for this beyond the name of Price in the text. I found this: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LiXZtheprecurs.pdf Response by Xingzhong Li, et al, to the Price finding, 1990 AIP paper. Cites Price as: P. B. Price, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts. 263, 1926 (1989). Remarkable comment in: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Srinivasannuclearfus.pdf Srinivasan, M., Nuclear fusion in an atomic lattice: An update on the international status of cold fusion research. Curr. Sci., 1991. 60: p. 417. One of the unique features of cold-fusion experiments, and possibly the main reason for this phenomenon to be looked upon with considerable degree of skepticism119 by the scientific community in general, is the poor reproducibility of the experimental results. During the crucial months immediately following the first announcement by Fleischmann and Pons there was a scramble the world over to replicate the apparently simple ‘battery and bottle’ electrolysis experiment. After months of patient experimentation, however, many experienced research groups failed to obtain any positive evidence for the claimed phenomena. They neither found excess heat nor neutrons, tritium or gamma rays[120-134]. Some experiments that were tailored to look for charged particles also failed to give any positive results[123,134]. By December 1989 there were perhaps more experimental papers with ‘negative results’ published on the topic of cold fusion than those with ‘positive results’. However, as of the present writing, the situation has been fully reversed, following the appearance of a large number of papers with positive results during 1990, as described already. The persistent efforts of many dedicated experimentalists appear to have turned the trend and the reproducibility has begun to improve significantly, as may be seen for example from the title of one of the recent papers[135] from Los Alamos, namely ‘Reproducible neutron emission measurements from Ti metal in pressurised D2 gas’. Price is cited for the bold text as note 123: Price, P. B. et al, Phys. Rev. Lett., 1989, 30. I finally found the original Price article: [11] Abstract: Searching for evidence of ‘‘cold’’ nuclear fusion in deuterium-loaded Ti and Pd foils with plastic track detectors, we detected the emission of α particles from trace-heavy-element decay, but found no evidence of dd fusion. Cycling TiD2 and PdD>0.4, in high-pressure D2 cells between 1 and 15 bars and 77 and 300 K, gave an upper bound of 0.7 cm-3 s-1 for the mean rate of dd→3He+n fusion. For electrolytically deuterated PdD0.8 our upper bound is 0.0018 cm-3 s-1 for the mean rate of dd→p+t. This is ∼1.5×106 and 180 times lower than ‘‘cold’’-fusion rates reported by Fleischmann, Pons, and Hawkins and Jones et al., respectively. There is much to consider here for the article.--Abd (talk) 20:29, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Reports of nuclear products in association with excess heat

Cold_fusion#Reports_of_nuclear_products_in_association_with_excess_heat has some problems. I tried to fix them, I was reverted. So, here we go.

The section heading refers to "association." These are not merely findings of nuclear products, they are nuclear products associated with excess heat. 100% association would mean that whenever there is excess heat, there is a finding of a nuclear product, and vice-versa, no excess heat, no nuclear product. The section gives the general reader little clue that this is the meaning, and treats the finding of helium, for example, as if it were simply an absolute measurement of helium, which, of course, then suffers from the problem of background helium. Current text:

In association with excess heat, researchers have reported observing gamma rays, neutrons, and tritium (3H) production.[76],[77] Although these reports do not measure quantities commensurate with a rate of deuterium fusion that would account for the excess heat, the quantities were reported to be in excess of background levels.

This first sentence is correct. What the article doesn't make clear is that consensus in the field is that excess heat is accompanied by helium generation, at levels commensurate with d-d fusion to form helium, with release of the known energy from that reaction accounting for the excess heat; it's not being released as gamma rays. The actual reaction may not be directly d-d fusion; for example, a paper I was just reading hypothesizes 4-d fusion to for Be-8, which then fissions to two energetic He-4 nuclei. These, then will occasionally generate other forms of radiation; hence the low-level findings of neutrons, X-rays, gamma radiation, etc. The low levels of these other products, then, are a characteristic of whatever process is taking place; they are not totally absent, but the levels may vary not only with excess heat but with other factors as well. Current text:

Considerable attention has been given to measuring 4He production.[78] In the report presented to the DOE in 2004, 4He was detected in five out of sixteen cases where electrolytic cells were producing excess heat,[79] although the amounts detected were very close to background levels and contamination by trace amounts of helium normally present in the air is difficult to avoid.[80] Gamma radiation was not detected, which led most of the scientific community to regard the presence of 4He as the result of experimental error.[80]

Again, yes, the first sentence is true, though what the source says is stronger: "Although there appears to be evidence that supports the existence of both elemental and isotopic anomalies near the cathode surface in some experiments, it is generally accepted that these anomalies are not the ash associated with the primary excess heat effect. The primary focus of attention has been on helium as the primary nuclear reaction product.[53]"

But the second sentence isn't supported by that source, as far as I could find. I changed the text to:

In the report presented to the DOE in 2004, an initial series of experiments, later replicated several times, was described where ⁴He was detected in eight electrolysis gas samples collected during period of excess heat production (as determined by calorimetry), whereas six control samples gave no evidence for ⁴He

This is what's in the source (Hagelstein, et al, New Physical Effects in Metal Deuterides,[12] presented to the DoE in 2004:

3.1. Correlation of Excess Heat and Helium

The first and historically most important experiments were performed by Miles et al., to correlate the helium content of gas produced by electrolysis (D2 or H2, and O2) with the average heat excess during the interval of sampling. Because of the very low 4He concentration expected and observed (1-10 ppb) extensive precautions were taken to ensure that samples were not substantially contaminated from the large ambient background (5.22 ppm). In an initial series of experiments, later replicated several times,[55],[69] eight electrolysis gas samples collected during episodes of excess heat production in two identical cells showed the presence of 4He whereas six control samples gave no evidence for 4He.

My edit was reverted by Enric Naval with a summary that indicated the text was supported by the Scientific American source.[13] However the text itself attributes the report to the Hagelstein paper, not to Schaffer in the Scientific American article, and what is in the Hagelstein paper is a far stronger report than the weak finding (weak in appearance as explained) that is described in the text. No "correlation" or "association" is described. Basically, the whole point is missed.

The Scientific American source has Some experiments eventually did report helium 4 production, although great care must be used to avoid contamination by trace amounts of helium normally present in the air. That's true, but isn't necessarily relevant to the Miles findings. What's happened is that editors have mashed together material from two sources. The real key here in the Hagelstein claim is the correlation, and it goes much further than simple "presence of/no evidence for," the amounts of helium found were commensurate with the estimated excess heat, such that estimates could be made for the energy involved in the formation of each helium nucleus from two deuterons, and it's the right energy. And other work, such as that of McKubre, confirms this energy value.

Our text papers the correlation over. It isn't supported by the source named. I did find, on page 19 of the Hagelstein paper, a reference to a chart showing "6 of 16 results of helium measurements in paired cells," which isn't what our article implies. Hagelstein is making a strong case for helium generation correlated with excess heat, quantitatively. --Abd (talk) 02:55, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

From DOE 2004:

“ "The detected ⁴He was typically very close to, but reportedly above background levels. This evidence was taken as convincing or somewhat convincing by some reviewers; for others the lack of consistency was an indication that the overall hypothesis was not justified. Contamination of apparatus or samples by air containing 4He was cited as one possible cause for false positive results in some measurements"quote in a book full text of final report of DOE 2004 ”

Additionally, Schaffer's analysis in Scientific American is a secondary source providing an analysis of a primary source, including not only the experimental data but also how much and why it has accepted by the scientific community. Schaffer should be preferred over our own analysis of the original paper. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:53, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Enric, the text attributes to Hagelstein's presentation what isn't the core of it, on the topic of helium. What they actually presented trumps the objection about background. Tell me, do you understand why? Simple question. Hint: it has to do with the title of the section, Reports of nuclear products in association with excess heat, and the text you restored doesn't! The title is not "Reports of nuclear products."

And how could the article presented in 1999 be considered a criticism of a report presented in 2004? Sure, with quite a bit more text, you could tie things together, but that's not what's there. It's actually a poor job of synthesis, and you've taken responsibility for it by reverting it back in. I'll wait a bit before reverting. --Abd (talk) 04:55, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

What Abd says is reasonable, and I support Abd's version. A 1999 paper can't be used as a secondary source to evaluate a 2004 report without a bit of OR. I also ran across the report of 8 runs with helium and excess heat and 6 runs with no helium and no excess heat: Abd is right that that correlation tells you something, regardless of a priori reliability of the helium measurements. I'm not sure whether it was the same or a different study, but I also saw something about the use of measurements of another substance (was it argon?) in conjunction with the helium measurements, as a way of determining whether contamination from the air was occurring; it would be good to say something about that, I think; and given the existence of such measurements, the current wording "there is the possibility of contamination" may be too strong. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 15:44, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

|Thanks, Coppertwig. I'm going to toss in a complication here, but it is only for background and to keep us from tipping the balance too far the other way. It turns out that there is substantial controversy within the CF community over the precision of the energy estimates, and addressing it is going to be complicated. But for starters, this editorial by Steve Krivit, which seems to sum it up well. To balance Krivit's view, I'll note something: under the d-d -> He4 hypothesis, any loss of helium, by whatever mechanism, will increase the estimate of energy per helium nucleus formed. Helium in evolved gases, for example, will probably be only half the helium generated, roughly. Further, if there are any other net exothermic reactions taking place, this will also likely increase the estimate as well (and there is evidence for other reactions). What remains uncontested, though, in fact, is that estimates of net energy per helium nucleus are consistent with the known value of 23.8 MeV (which allows them to be pretty far off, given all the variables). Further, time correlation isn't contested. --Abd (talk) 17:22, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

@Copper, I was unclear, the 1999 Scientific American is of course not analyzing the data from DOE 2004, it's analizing the reports of presence of Helium that were available at 1999. DOE 2004 is also a secondary source, it's analyzing the results available at 2004, and it says things that are very similar to what the 1999 source says (that's why I could source some of the sentences from both sources). P.D.: Hum.... maybe it should be rewritten to explain first the 1999 source's conclusions and then the 2004 source's conclusions, that would solve any synthesis problem.

@Abd, the possibility of contamination is sourced from both Scientific American and DOE 2004. Do you have any reliable secondary source examining the presence of helium and its significance?

Hagelstein was, and still is, being used only to source only one sentence, a sentence that I didn't change at all, and which doesn't conflict with the other sources but those don't make statements about how important the helium presence is. Turns out that it was a review that was sent to DOE 2004 reviewers so they would examine it and make conclusions for their reports http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DOEreportofth.pdf. It was later published as a conference proceeding in the 11th Cold Fusion Conference[14]. Now, you see, the paragraph that I quoted above is from the final report of DOE 2004, it's the conclusion of the panel after reading the evidence in Hagelstein's review. We should be use the conclusions from the final report, not our own interpretation of an intermediate review, specially if our own interpretation conflicts with that of the final report. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:03, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Reliable secondary source examining the presence of helium and its significance? Sure. Storms, 2007. It's more complete than Hagelstein, I was simply pointing out that what was in the article, what you reverted back in, wasn't what was actually reported in Hagelstein. Still isn't. However, I'll fix that, I'll put in Storms. It's a stronger claim anyway. There are two issues here: what are the researchers claiming, and what is the basis for criticism. The comments about difficulties of measuring helium don't address the correlation *at all*. Suppose the background were noisy, and the measurement so close to background -- or nonexistent -- what would be seen? Well, depending on what level is used for "background," a certain percentage of the cells would be above the control level, and the rest would be below, but this wouldn't be correlated with excess heat, at least not ordinarily. What Storms reports is, from a series of reports from Miles,

12 studies showed no excess energy, and produced no extra helium. Second, out of 21 studies producing extra energy, 18 produced extra helium with an amount consistent with the amount of excess energy. The exceptions were one sample having a possible error in heat measurement and two studies using a Pd-Ce alloy. Miles calculates the occurrence of this result as being 1 in 750,000."

But before this Storms notes:

Measurement of helium is a challenge because air contains enough helium (5.24 ppm) to make the small detected amount appear to be the result of air leak or diffusion through the walls of the apparatus. In addition, very few laboratories have access to tools needed to measure small helium concentrations with required accuracy. In spite of this limitation, on at least seven occasions at laboratories in three countries, helium has been found in amounts consistent with energy production. Of these efforts, four deserve special discussion because great care was taken and the data are presented in a form permitting evaluation.

Storms is much more specific and thorough than any of the other, earlier sources. The four laboratories would be

• Miles, summarized in "a recent review," Storms notes, and cites Miles, M., Correlation of excess enthalpy and helium-4 production: A review, in Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion, Hagelstein, P.L., and Chubb, S.R., World Scientific Publishing Co., Cambridge, MA 2003, pp 123. http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MilesMcorrelatioa.pdf
• Bush, B.F. and Lagowski, J.J., Methods of generating excess heat with the Pons and Fleischmann effect: rigorous and cost effective calorimetry, nuclear products analysis of the cathode and helium analysis, in The Seventh International Conference on Cold Fusion, Jaeger, F. ENECO, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT, Vancouver, Canada, 1998. pp. 38. http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BushBFmethodsofg.pdf
• Gozzi, et al. a series of references are provided. From the lenr-canr.org bibliography and library:

• Gozzi, D., et al., Calorimetric and nuclear byproduct measurements in electrochemical confinement of deuterium in palladium. J. Electroanal. Chem., 1995. 380: p. 91.
• Gozzi, D., et al. Excess Heat and Nuclear Product Measurements in Cold Fusion Electrochemical Cells. in Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion. 1993. Lahaina, Maui: Electric Power Research Institute 3412 Hillview Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304.
• Gozzi, D., et al. Helium-4 Quantitative Measurements in the Gas Phase of Cold Fusion Electrochemical Cells. in Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion. 1993. Lahaina, Maui: Electric Power Research Institute 3412 Hillview Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304.
• Gozzi, D., et al., Quantitative measurements of helium-4 in the gas phase of Pd + D2O electrolysis. J. Electroanal. Chem., 1995. 380: p. 109.

• McKubre, M.C.H., et al. The Emergence of a Coherent Explanation for Anomalies Observed in D/Pd and H/Pd System: Evidence for 4He and 3He Production. in 8th International Conference on Cold Fusion. 2000. Lerici (La Spezia), Italy: Italian Physical Society, Bologna, Italy. http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHtheemergen.pdf
• and then "A single very careful measurement made at SRI is reported by Peter Hagelstein and co-workers." This cites the report to the DoE. So we have, in Storms, a secondary source review of this paper, in more detail and later than the 2004 DoE review.

One more citation. Above, I referenced an editorial in New Energy Times that might be seen as casting cold water on the 24 MeV/He4 correlation between excess heat and Helium-4 detection. In the next issue, there were responses from a series of well-known researchers in the field and some others, giving great detail and perspective on the situation[15]. Among other things, Miles points out that Preparata and Chubb had predicted He4 would be found, from theoretical considerations. Miles says that he was trying to show that Schwinger was right, Schwinger had (earlier) predicted that the reaction was D + H -> He3, but instead of He3, he found He4. To quote:

MM: When we first came out with helium-4, Preparata made a trip from Italy to our lab in China Lake. He was so excited about it because his theory previously predicted the helium-4 based on quantum electrodynamics (QED), and that's the theory that Fleischmann liked. He and Fleischmann became very close because they both agreed that was the correct foundation for a model that would explain the helium-4 production. In Chapter 8 of his book, Preparata presents his case for cold fusion and production of helium-4.

The second person that I didn't know beforehand, who contacted me and was quite excited, was Scott Chubb because he also had published a theory that predicted helium-4 in the outgas. Both he and Preparata predicted correctly that we would find helium-4 in the outgas. They were both excited that I verified that. I don't know who's right and who's wrong on theories, but I give them both credit for having a theory that predicted what we found experimentally.

This is the first time I've heard that serious theory, instead of the hunch of Fleischmann about quantum electrodynamics vs. quantum mechanics, had predicted major findings in the field. The absence of theory has long been alleged. --Abd (talk) 04:40, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

(All the research done at 2003 and before should be considered as covered already by DOE 2004).

Please remember WP:UNDUE, Storms 2007 is way less notable than the DOE report and Scientific American. I think that it's ok to add Storm's conclusions if you find them significant, but you shouldn't replace the conclusions of the other two better sources, you should give Storms them way less space and relevance than those sources, you shouldn't imply that the other two sources are somehow wrong just because Storms says that they are, and you should make clear that Storm does not reflect the mainstream thinking in the matter (just plain attribution to Storms should accomplish that). --Enric Naval (talk) 12:41, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Of course, but how do we determine due weight? It seems, Enric, that you are holding some assumptions about that. Perhaps you should review WP:UNDUE, which provides some guidance on it. On science topics, peer-reviewed publication has priority. My own view is that we don't exclude anything that is found in reliable source, though we have quite a bit of discretion as to where and how we present it, and that we make these decisions by consensus, not according to fixed rules. My original point here is that a rather arbitrary juxtaposition was made of material from quite different sources, anachronistic, with the criticism being very general and not necessarily applicable. No, we can't assume that the 2004 DoE review covered all prior research, we know exactly what they considered. What they primarily considered was the McKubre presentation, which was that of a small subset of researchers working in the field, not even necessarily representing the consensus in the field (though they are certainly strong figures in the field.) We have, now, an independent review of the field by a neutral (nay, originally quite skeptical) physicist retained by CBS News. How much weight do we give that? How do we know what "mainstream thinking" is? We know what it was, but, in fact, it was always a complicated question. Mainstream what? All scientists, including, say, biologists? All physicists? All chemists? All those familiar with current research in the specific field? It's all problematic in a field which was rejected outside of normal scientific process. The shutdown of access to major journals, which allowed poor negative research to be published, but response was suppressed, is well-known, now, we have plenty of RS on it. It's a huge story, that mostly we haven't told yet. Storms less notable than the 1999 Scientific American report? What part of the report? Some of it was favorable to cold fusion, you know! Absolutely, no repression of reliably sourced information. Balance it with other reliably sourced information. Okay?

I'm going to repeat a question, since you passed over it: Enric, I'm not confident that you understand the issue of "correlation" or "association," as distinct from simply finding helium in a cold fusion cell. Can you relieve my anxiety on that point? --Abd (talk) 19:42, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

I tried to asses the notability of Storms' book, and I could only find one book review at the Journal of Scientific Exploration [16] Looking at google scholar[17] it seems that his book hasn't been cited by anybody. So, yes, it seems to be less notable than an "ask the experts" report published by the Scientific American in the 10th anniversy of FP announcement, and it's certainly way less notable than DOE 2004 report. Again, see WP:UNDUE.

(your anxiety is noted but my knowledge about statistics is off-topic here, you are welcome to leave me a message on my talk page to discuss it) --Enric Naval (talk) 20:15, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

The reason I asked, Enric, is that you don't seem to have answered the central objection at all, about correlation or association vs raw findings, but have focused on other issues, hence I suspect you don't understand it. Anyway, don't worry. I'm just going to edit the section according to the source, or according to better sources. Storms is actually a stronger source than the McKubre report to the DOE, truth be told. Storms is important as a review of actual, named, papers that otherwise wouldn't be sufficiently notable, in particular, conference presentations by expert research groups. As to disagreements we may have, there isn't anything that can't be handled with dispute resolution process. Usually at quite a low level. --Abd (talk) 20:37, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

The SciAm report is notable and quite useful as to the state of the field in 1999! That is 10 effing years ago, Enric! What would those experts think if they saw the energetic neutrons found by SPAWAR? What would they think if they saw the Bayesian analysis presented at ICCF 14 showing that you could predict, with amazing accuracy, which experimental papers would find excess heat and which wouldn't, from characteristics of their description of the experiment, four criteria? (That's another statistical analysis that shows, quite convincingly, that the negative results were negative because they didn't reproduce the experimental conditions!)

What would they say if they visited the labs and talked with the researchers, and carefully reviewed their work, as the CBS advisor did with Energetics Technologies in Israel?

You have consistently, Enric, tried to compare an off-the-cuff comment by a physicist at Rice University, reported in the media on the basis of a single interview, with reports from investigators who spent significant effort reviewing the literature. As of 2004, it's clear, half the reviewers were convinced excess heat findings were conclusive. Where would the level of agreement be today? The evidence has not gotten weaker! Reproducibility is way up, the Chinese paper was reporting, as of 2007, over the previous year, 100% success. At what point do we notice that the balance shifted?

I'll answer that: we start to follow what is in peer-reviewed reliable source, preferentially, and we use other source as well to report on how society views it all. We start telling the full story, not one expurgated and effectively censored by editors who wikilawyer out solidly sourced material because of WP:UNDUE weight arguments. If a topic is truly fringe, then the weight of what is in reliable source will -- with appropriate caution -- reflect it. This is the problem, Enric: peer-reviewed reliable source is now, majority, on the side of cold fusion being real. That's not common when the media sources have been the other way. I've only seen a few examples in my life, say, this one and Atkins Nutritional Approach. The research has shifted, but the prior conventional wisdom is still, apparently, majority POV in popular sources. --Abd (talk) 20:37, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Edit what you like, but if you violate WP:UNDUE then don't act surprised when you get reverted or reworded for compliance. --Enric Naval (talk) 02:30, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

OMG, you mean my edits can be reverted? Look, Enric, around here, I expect to be reverted when I don't violate WP:UNDUE. I'm going to insist, though, on accuracy of what's in the article, that it be true to source and not synthesized, and that what's in reliable source be included. One of the problems here is that some active editors seem not to understand the sources, always a problem when people without the technical background and specific interest become very active with an agenda. I've been a bit distracted, what with all this RfC and ArbComm flap, and I'm eager to start using the sources I have, which, by the way, include Taubes and Huizenga, I didn't just buy books by "true believers." Well, okay, perhaps the last two are true believers. In themselves and their firmly held opinions. Taubes I know as an excellent science writer, and Hoffman claims Taubes is quite accurate as to fact, and only off-the-wall (not his exact words!) when he's mindreading as to people's motives. I also now have good relationships with experts in the field, who know the sources, and who aren't shy about telling me when I'm full of shit, so .... let's go! --Abd (talk) 03:36, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't think that prolongating the discussion here right now is going to repercute into improvements in the article. I suggest that you do your edits to the article, as this gives specific examples of what you mean, and other editors can tweak them. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:05, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

POV tag placed

Cold_fusion#Reports_of_nuclear_products_in_association_with_excess_heat

The current text misrepresents the claims made before the DOE in 2004 by McKubre et al, vastly weakening them, and then juxtaposes them with general criticisms that may not apply to the experiments in question. For example, what levels are close to background? What, indeed, is "background"? Level of helium in ambient air? Average level of helium in control cells? Hint: it's the latter, and the levels in the control cells, and generally in the cells under test, is much lower than ambient. What's been done here is to mash together nonspecific criticisms with specific claims, as if those criticisms were made of the specific experiments. Essentially, criticism of any cold fusion experiment becomes, by extension and synthesis, criticism of all of them, even very careful ones and even later ones which addressed prior objections. We need to rewrite this section to reflect what the section header says. The criticism is of general findings re helium, i.e., someone runs experiment, sends off a sample, Helium is found. That's pretty shaky. The section is about "association."

The source has, not 6 out of 16 (that's in a later section not strongly about association, but, frankly, much more difficult to understand), but "12 studies produced no helium and no extra energy." Of 21 studies that produced extra energy, 18 produced helium." (That's a combination of different studies, so there are some problems, but I'm just picking this example; within a single study, there is actually more uniformity, and there is, in addition, correlation of the amount of helium with the excess heat.)

This is a far stronger claim, and "background" doesn't explain it at all. In fact, the correlated results strengthen both findings of excess heat and findings of helium, absent some independent process that would produce both or not neither. Obvious hypothesis: whatever produces the helium also produces the extra heat! Now, what would do both? We better not say the name, because we'll be called fringe. Leakage of ambient air would produce helium, but not heat. Calorimetry errors would produce an appearance of heat, but not helium. How to put them together? The probability of this being by chance aren't difficult to estimate.... hint: very low. Miles wrote one in 750,000. I haven't done the math, but we treat people with medicine, risking their lives, with far higher probability of error than that. We invest huge sums of money with far higher probability of error than that....

The big objection of nuclear physicists to cold fusion research? Where's the ash? Helium is the ash. There is then the problem of the transfer of momentum to the lattice or the rest of the cell, and that's addressed, in fact, by the more recent findings, confirming much earlier ones, of alpha radiation (which is, of course, correlated with heat and is, in fact, the same finding as helium except it's energetic helium nuclei. That's where the energy is going; the problem of momentum has more complex solutions, such as an intermediary product of Be-8 which then rapidly decays to two energetic helium nuclei. If this is what is happening, it's quite convenient: it means no harmful radiation; alpha radiation like this is non-penetrating, and helium is harmless or even useful. Other ash is found, but not in enough quantities to explain the heat, this includes the SPAWAR neutrons from the big media flap in March.

If you don't want to read this stuff, watch for edits to the article. There will be some. Reading here isn't obligatory at this stage, because any important arguments will be repeated succinctly and with reference to RS. --Abd (talk) 20:16, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

By the way, thanks, LeadSongDog, for fixing the section-POV tag. I saw that and didn't have time to deal with it. --Abd (talk) 03:36, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, you were right in that I was misrepresenting heavily the source. Indeed, I had cited the wrong source (Hagelstein's review to DOE2004, instead of DOE2004's final report). No wonder that the text didn't fit the source :P --Enric Naval (talk) 21:02, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I reworked the section to separate the 1999 source from the 2004 source, put them in chronological order, attribute who said what and when, etc. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:47, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

or muons

I propose inserting "in the absence of muons" to make Normally, in the absence of muons, very high energies are required to overcome this repulsion, since it's generally accepted that such high energies are not required during muon-catalysed fusion. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 17:51, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

I'd recommend replacing "muons" with "a catalyst such as a muon", because that way we can specify something about why muons are interesting, and leave open the possibility that a muon might not be the only catalyst. Also, "energies" should be expanded to "kinetic energies" for greater clarity. That is, a photon can have very high energy and be completely irrelevant to a fusion reaction. Meanwhile, in the electostatic-confinement fusor device, high kinetic energies of hydrogen nuclei are very specifically/precisely used, without much raising the temperature of the rest of the device. So: Normally, in the absence of a catalyst such as a muon, very high kinetic energies are required to overcome this repulsion V (talk) 20:18, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I see someone has already put this in. Thanks; however, I weakly oppose "a catalyst such as" unless a source is found that implies there might be other such catalysts; I prefer just "in the absence of muons". Or how about "in the absence of muons as catalysts", or something? ☺Coppertwig (talk) 01:26, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, outside of RS, there is at least one and possibly more than one published speculation regarding electrons as a possible catalyst. If your unease would be satisfied by "a source is found that implies", would those be good enough for you? Also, see Note 13 inside the muon-catalyzed fusion article, which mentions the possibility without indicating any degree of liklihood. And outside of formal publication, a quick Google search for "cold fusion" catalyst will bring up 24,000 hits, this one for example: http://mtaonline.net/~hheffner/EcatFusion.pdf . V (talk) 16:46, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Finally, just for the fun of it, here is a REALLY wild idea: anti-proton catalyzed fusion. Consider the fact that when an electron and an anti-electron (a.k.a. positron) meet, they usually don't instantly annihilate each other, they first go into a mutual orbit around each other for a short time, forming positronium, before they merge. I assume here that a proton and an anti-proton will do the same. This means that if we inject an anti-proton into pressurized deuterium gas at room temperature, the anti-proton could replace an electron and go into orbit around a deuteron much like a muon can (only 9 times closer since it is about 9 times more massive than a muon), and COULD catalyze a fusion between the deuteron it orbits and the nucleus of a second deuterium. Would the anti-proton acquire energy from the reaction like a muon, and escape to cause another fusion? Maybe, maybe not (again because it is about 9 times a massive as a muon). At least we wouldn't have to worry about the anti-proton lasting only 2 microseconds like a muon; it is as stable as an ordinary proton. But of course eventually it WOULD destroy itself along with a proton, ending any possibility of catalyzing more fusions. Still, all you, Coppertwig, wanted was support for the idea that something other than a muon could catalyze fusion. I don't care if the preceding is OR; it uses known data with quite good logic, to present you with more information than perhaps you had before, about those possibilities.

Indeed, this abstract http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=APCPCS000420000001001359000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes indicates something I didn't know before about muon catalyzed fusion (that as many as 170 can happer PER MUON in liquid deuterium, before it either dies or fails to escape orbit), so I would be willing to bet 1/9 that many could occur if an anti-proton was the catalyst. INTERJECTION-- I think that math is wrong; forgot to take into account the inverse-square law; the electrical attraction between anti-proton and deuteron would be 81 times the attraction between muon and deuteron. If that has to be multiplied by 9, due to the mass difference, then it would be very rare for an antiproton to escape its orbit; it could still catalyze a fusion, though, after which the electrical attraction is doubled because two protons will be in the nucleus...--INTERJEND (Also (cool!), something I've been speculating about for years seems to be true, that if the deuterium is compressed (as in inertial confinement fusion), the amount of MCF per muon goes up.) On the other hand, this article (RS!!!) indicates that at most only one fusion can be catalyzed by an antiproton: http://www.springerlink.com/content/6658672700g6133t/ --Nevertheless, that's enough to rest my case :) Does anyone want to modify the article here to say "a catalyst such as a muon or anti-proton" and add that reference? V (talk) 16:39, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Certainly not me! And I'd oppose it. Even if we could make up a theory that might eventually win a Nobel Prize, we can't put it into the article! I find it totally obvious that the most likely explanation for the "cold fusion" results is that some form of catalysis exists other than by muons, electron-catalysis, for example, where an electron shields reduces the Coulomb repulsion (and that is, in fact, the hydrino theory that Storms seems to favor: it's hypothesized that the so-called ground state of the electron isn't, and that electrons can therefore, under certain circumstances, have lower energy that the presumed minimum, thus allowing them to be closer to the nuclei, thus allowing the nuclei to approach more closely than expected.) but, without some reliable source suggesting it, with those words or equivalents, I can't say that in the article. And, in fact, it might not be catalysis, the palladium, for example, and every other involved substance or particle, might be a nuclear reactant. We wouldn't know, except by some unusual reaction products, which might not be detectable for various reasons, such as the reaction product being a common element already present in the experimental setup to a level that would mask the tiny quantities produced by nuclear reactions sufficient to cause the observed heat. --Abd (talk) 00:43, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd, currently the article has this text: Normally, in the absence of a catalyst such as a muon, very high kinetic energies are required to overcome this repulsion --Coppertwig was leery of the implication by this wording that something other than a muon could make it easy for Coulomb repulsion to be overcome. We are aware that an electron might be able to do that if it could approach an atom's nucleus rather more closely than normal --a thing that, because it is not normal, can't be mentioned in the article without RS. However, the SpringerLink article clearly indicates that an antiproton can also make it easy to counter the Coulomb repulsion between nuclei, and while that quite probably has nothing to do with CF observations, and is almost certainly useless from the practical side of things, it does satisfy the condition that indeed something besides a muon can catalyze a fusion reaction. My question about adding a mention of the antiproton to the article was more about heading off any future editors who might object to the current wording more strongly than Coppertwig --this part of the discussion won't necessarily be readily available to defend the current wording. However, if the antiproton was mentioned as a second catalyst, with the SpringerLink/RS reference, such a future editorial objection would be "headed off at the pass" so to speak. V (talk) 13:16, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

"It's easy to pull a rabbit out of your hat, once you know how to do it with a moose." Seriously, if you had an abundant supply of antiprotons, why would you need fusion? LeadSongDog come howl 17:37, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

True enough, but that is not the issue here; the issue is about catalysts other than muons, for hydrogen fusion. I was simply trying to indicate that certain current wording in the article was basically OK. Still, if you did NOT have an abundant supply of antiprotons, and if they could catalyze a lot of fusions....."if wishes were coins, we'd all be rich". On the other hand, what about injecting an anti-proton into the middle of an ICF compression? The hot environment would keep the antiproton from going into orbit, so it might be able to catalyze a number of fusions, just by passing between two colliding deuterons.... V (talk) 17:45, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I'll point out that what you are trying to find, V., is a possible example of catalysis. There are theories published using various forms of catalysis; hydrino theory is that. The "argument" from LSD is moot, in fact, because the production of energy is not the point; whether or not cold fusion is ever useful for energy production is completely beside the point as to the science of it. A lot of damage was done, and continues to be done, by overblown expectations. It's very clear, now, reading the 1989 DoE report, that the "rejection" then wasn't of the possible science, but simply of the idea that enough had been shown to justify a massive federal program of research, based on impressions that even if low energy nuclear reactions were taking place, it was still unlikely to become a useful power source. From the ERAB report:

1. Based on the examination of published reports, reprints, numerous communications to the Panel and several site visits, the Panel concludes that the experimental results of excess heat from calorimetric cells reported to date do not present convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion.

Consider this: there has been about twenty years of work on this, with research groups all over the world, with commercial efforts, optimistic announcements, etc., and still no "cold fusion water heater," nor even a readily available demonstration device showing the phenomena. What has happened, in my view, is that the basic science has been confirmed: there is excess heat, and I'm further convinced as to what was still minority opinion in 2004: there is helium at what Storms calls 25 +/- 5 MeV, and there is alpha radiation, and there are other nuclear phenomena. And none of this means that there will necessarily be, ever, useful power generation. I agree completely with the DoE conclusions, in round outlines: more research is needed, appropriate proposals confirming the basic science (or rejecting it!) should be considered, peer-reviewed publication should be encouraged, etc., but simple prudence suggests no massive program until the science is better understood. Now, tell that to the journals that refuse to consider articles on the topic! The DoE panel recommended further research in 1989, but, in fact, proposals designed to do exactly what the panel recommended were consistently rejected by the DoE. However, other agencies did provide funding at low levels, hence the SPAWAR results, for example, and other research. I'd say that, given the possibility that some way would be found to ramp up reliability, the funding levels were quite low compared to what would have been -- and would still be -- prudent.

Just on the level of basic science, hang the energy production, the possible implications of the experimental results that Storms notes as being considered significant in the field would indicate as appropriate much more serious efforts by skeptics -- real skeptics, the kind that don't reject what they don't understand, but also don't believe anything without proof, including "existing theories," to find and prove artifact or error -- or to confirm some of the extraordinary results. The Vysotskii experiments, for example, indicating nuclear transformation by bacteria, are so striking, yet the experiment, as described, is so simple (much simpler than your average cold fusion electrolytic experiment) that I wonder -- has anyone tried to reproduce this? If not, why not? In the experiment described by Storms, Fe-57 was detected by Mossbauer spectroscopy. What Mossbauer spectroscopy takes is quite simple, basically a good gamma detector, and the appropriate radioisotope (Co-57 in this case) as a gamma source, and a linear motor. (As I've said, I did Mossbauer measurements in my second or third year at CalTech). In any case, I'm going to report, in a new section below, some of what I'm finding on Vysotskii, who reported the Mossbauer findings. Turns out some of his work (on related topics) is indeed published under peer review. --Abd (talk) 01:30, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd, I quote from Coppertwig: I weakly oppose "a catalyst such as" unless a source is found that implies there might be other such catalysts

All I was trying to do was satisfy that request. The SpringerLink article will do that nicely, I'm sure.

Relation to theory

I propose changing "in view of several theoretical reasons cold fusion should not be possible" to "in view of the lack of explanation of cold fusion using conventional physics", as I believe this is a better representation of the views generally presented in sources, for example Goodstein, who says "It proved that there are still genuine surprises waiting for us that, once understood, don't violate conventional physical laws". [18] ☺Coppertwig (talk) 17:59, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

I think the current wording is the result of an earlier discussion regarding the phrase "conventional physics". We do not necessarily need to invoke non-conventional physics to explain fusion (muon catalysis fits within conventional physics, and likely an alternate catalyst could, too). The theoretical problems of cold fusion stem directly from knowledge about previously observed fusions, and I suggest that that is the point the article should be making. So: in view of the lack of explanation of cold fusion using knowledge gathered from past observations of fusion V (talk) 20:27, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

This sentence probably refers to the first weeks after the PF announcement, see how the following sentence continues with what happened after the first weeks/months: "By late 1989 (...)".

I think that no explanation had yet been proposed at that time, neither using conventional physics nor using them, while Koonin and others had just given a talk giving reasons for why it shouldn't be possible, Goodstein says that this talk "[executed] a perfect slam-dunk that cast Cold Fusion right out of the arena of mainstream science"[19]. In the presentation by Koonin one of the points was "Cannot be accommodated by acepted theory". No opinion on how the sentence should be worded, just providing some info. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:43, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, if you want to use the exact quote, referenced, I can't especially argue against that. But it wouldn't hurt to clarify to the reader that "accepted theory" about fusion is derived from observations of known fusions, so that if cold fusion is real, certain aspects of the event must differ from what is known. In other words, just because so-far-observed hydrogen fusions have certain characteristics, CF detractors have mostly assumed that all hydrogen fusions everywhere must have those same characteristics --an assumption which must be wrong if CF is real. V (talk) 13:16, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

One of the problems with the article is that it makes no clear distinction between the rejection of 1989-1990 and what then ensued. Reviews of the field, such as Simon (Undead Science) and Goodstein make it clear that, just as the original press conference bypassed normal scientific procedures, so too did the rejection. It's obvious, especially in hindsight, that if cold fusion is real, it's an elusive effect requiring conditions which were not known by anyone in 1989, Pons and Fleischmann spent five years getting to the point where, what, 10%?, of their experiments showed excess heat. Further, P & F held on to secrets for quite some time because of patent concerns from, first, the University of Utah, and then IMRA in France. The success ration didn't get up to 30% or better until much later, with many different groups working on improving it. Now there are techniques that show anomalous heat immediately, and they've been replicated, but .... the so-called "mainstream" journals reject papers in the field without review. That's breaking down, for contrary to what's been alleged here, Naturwissenschaften is mainstream. As we saw in March, it's easy to find nuclear physicists who will cheerfully repeat what was a rapid judgment in 1989, but without seeming to be aware of the newer findings. This makes synthesizing text across the time span problematic; we should probably be careful to note when results were reported, and when criticisms were made. Often the early criticisms are repeated later, in response to more recent reports, and even though the recent reports specifically addressed the early criticisms, examples abound.

On the point of theoretical possibility, the real theoretical situation wasn't that fusion at low energies was impossible, it is that there was only one known mechanism, muon-catalyzed fusion. It doesn't violate existing physical theory if there are others, so the question is, first, are there any others? And how would we know? There are theories that have been constructed which explain the effect without "new physics," and others which do use "new physics." "New physics" would refer to new theoretical constructs, such as hydrino theory, if I've got it right, that postulate realms of behavior not otherwise observed. We can't say that these are impossible, but, sure, they are unlikely. However, P & F were looking for evidence of a situation where quantum mechanics would not be adequate to explain results, where the more complex and difficult quantum electrodynamics would be necessary. It seems they may have found one, and, through others, a whole class of phenomena; but this doesn't actually involve new physics, necessarily, just a more sophisticated and complete analysis of existing physics. --Abd (talk) 20:31, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Removal of New Energy Times from the blacklist

This publication was once listed as an external link, as was lenr-canr.org and Dieter Britz's bibliography.

I just looked at the 2004 Featured Article version of this article, and, while it had problems, it had much better external links. I also see, in the Bibliography, books about the topic that were later removed. The FA version also had a link to lenr-canr.org for conference papers, all things that I'd expect to see in a good article on this topic.

In any case, http://newenergytimes.com is now usable, courtesy of a neutral administrator requested by me at AN. For reference, the AN discussion, and the blacklist discussion.

It takes time to do this stuff, next will be lenr-canr.org, the blacklisting of which was no more proper than that of newenergytimes.com. If any editor wants to be notified of a request for lenr-canr.org whitelisting here (it's meta blacklisted, so it's not as simple to fix, at all, but a local whitelisting would make the meta listing moot for us), please indicate here and I or anyone else aware can notify you. --Abd (talk) 05:10, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

It still has to meet WP:RS, and I wouldn't expect to see any lenr-canr.org links in a good article. Abd's "neutral" closing admin had a long running dispute with JzG and was censured for it (Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/C68-FM-SV#Viridae). NET also seems to fail WP:RS, so any use would be exceptional and have to be very well justified. Verbal chat 08:20, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Verbal, your POV is showing. I didn't choose the closing admin, there was a neutral notice at WP:AN, and JzG, while he made a comment in the discussion, wasn't involved any longer. It was not his action being reversed, effectively, but Beetstra's, and he had already recused himself. So, let's find out what the actual consensus is, if someone else doesn't beat me to it, instead of blabbering more. I'll be adding an external link, and we'll see what happens. Note that we already have an external link to lenr-canr.org in Martin Fleischmann, and that was heavily reviewed. We should have many more here, as convenience links, if nothing else. Same with NET. Abd (talk) 14:40, 26 April 2009

Could you propose the link here as NET isn't a WP:RS. Also, I didn't say you chose the admin, but it did happen to be one who should have recursed. From your criticisms of JzG I'm surprised you don't agree. Also, things like "Your POV is showing" are inherently uncivil, please strike it. Verbal chat 14:51, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

RS not necessary for external links. People are already complaining about how much I Talk. Cutting to the chase, --Abd (talk) 17:29, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

External links should be reliable, and add to the article. They should meet the criteria in WP:EL. Why do you think NET meets the criteria, including reliability, and what do you think it would add to the article? Verbal chat 17:33, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Link added per WP:IAR: If I were a reader, I'd want the link. I will add some diffs showing views of other editors on this. The position that an external link is not allowable because some POV may be attributed to it is preposterous. As to WP:EL, please review Links to be considered: Sites which fail to meet criteria for reliable sources yet still contain information about the subject of the article from knowledgeable sources. Whether or not NET "fails to meet criteria for reliable sources" is debatable. But whether or not this site contains "information about the subject of the article from knowledgeable sources" is not. It does, period, and it's invaluable for news on the topic, the "state of the art," and the precise nature of the controversy. --Abd (talk) 17:53, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Suffice to say I disagree, and using IAR in such an area, where objections were already raised, is a bit galling. However, it is moot as I've added a See also link to the new article you've written: New Energy Times. Verbal chat 17:59, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Wow! Thanks. Good move. Adequate. As to Gall, you made some good ink with it. That's the use! Look how quick this was! We could have argued for forever. Now let's see if it sticks to the paper. --Abd (talk) 18:21, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

I have put this back as a "See also" link, we should link to our articles where appropriate. Verbal chat 09:25, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

New URL for CBS video on cold fusion.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4967330n

For a report on why the video was edited, see

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/blog/?p=74 --Abd (talk) 21:40, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Revert over alleged copyvio

I add a convenience link to a copy of the Naturwissenschaftern paper by Mosier-Boss, et al, on the neutron finding, hosted at newenergytimes.com, newly removed from the blacklist. It was removed by Bilby citing copyvio. There is no apparent copyvio. I'm not an expert, but this basic issue is the same as with lenr-canr.org, which has been reviewed by experts. (1) no legal risk to the project for a link in a reference unless there is unreasonable neglect of probable violation. (2) violation is unlikely, New Energy Times is quite visible, and papers there would be hosted in compliance with copyright law, it's preposterous to assume otherwise. This isn't some transient hacker site! I would revert but I'll wait. Do I need to cite all the discussions on this with respect to lenr-canr.org? Where the argument was basically blown out of the water? --Abd (talk) 11:25, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

This isn't lenr-canr.org, so it needs to be looked at separately. I had a look at the paper, and it states that it is copyright Springer-Verlag 2008. The place where it is hosted at Springer repeats the copyright claim, and charges for copies of the paper, so it isn't one of the freely downloadable papers that they sometimes have. Although even if it was, the copyright claim is still valid. So without any evidence to the contrary, (nothing on New Energy Times that I could see showed that they were permitted to redistribute the paper), I removed the link (quietly) per WP:COPYLINK. As an aside, the paper was published in the January 2009 issue of Naturwissenschaften, but the e-publication date is 2008 (hence the year of copyright). Normally I reference to the journal, so my guess on year would be 2009, but it may be that 2008 is the correct year to use. - Bilby (talk) 12:11, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I'll look at the year issue, you may be right. As to copyvio, the same situation existed with lenr-canr.org. Except it was Elsevier, in the one case that was examined closely. Now, in the case of lenr-canr, we had an email from Rothwell asserting permission from authors and publishers, at one point, but in the end, this wasn't important. However, on the face of it, Springer is, I'm told, fierce about enforcing copyright. Given how prominent NET is in the field, it's probably preposterous to assert copyvio. This was the argument that carried the day with lenr-canr.org, and it was reviewed by people who should know. Because we have no actual knowledge of copyvio, only the kind of assumption you made, Bilby, there is no legal risk to Wikipedia, only a general guideline to avoid linking to copyvio sites. I have an inquiry in to NET to clarify this, and I think that Krivit may have made statements about this in the past. --Abd (talk) 19:12, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I endorse the removal of this link. NET is may be a big fish, but in a very small pond. Springer-Verlag claims copyright, NET is not a generally a WP:RS, so I don't see why they'd be a reliable source that they're not breaking copyright - I'd like to see something from SV or the wikipedia foundation copyright people okaying this. I find Abd's arguments unconvincing. If SV is fierce on copyvio then we shouldn't host this link. Abd, and others, please propose NET links first to avoid this kind of removal. Verbal chat 19:17, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Please do not forget that while we might not be able to use a tempting convenience linke, we ought to at least be able to reference the original document to the extent that a publication like Springer allows (usually an abstract page). I say this because not having any link leaves the possibility open for some editor to come along and delete article text based on the claim that there is no RS for it. So, having a link to even just an abstract page can allow the Wikipedia article to describe stuff that is located in the RS article, and casual deletion can be detered. The full original article is of course available to anyone who wants to pay for it. It might even be "fair" for someone doubting the Wikipedia description to buy the RS article; that person might think twice in the future before challenging other similarly-referenced information.  :) V (talk) 20:37, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

The doi number in the reference already generates a link to the Springer abstract page. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:26, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Abd, I understand where you're coming from, but I think lenr-canr's assertion that they get permission is important. I've had a look at lenr-canr now, and they seem to mostly link to copies of conference papers, which is perfectly reasonable as in general conferences are much nicer about this. Similarly, I think you're understating the importance of Wikipedia's stance on copyright - it's policy, not a guideline, and it is important to avoid contributory infringement. In this case, I'd argue that it is reasonable to expect that Springer and the journal would not give permission for open distribution of their papers, (especially those published in the last 12 months), and given that there is no evidence to the contrary, we should assume that they didn't. - Bilby (talk) 22:36, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

You may be right, Bilby, for the wrong reason, though you hinted at the right reason in your first sentence. Whether Springer allows reproduction or not in general is moot, they might have given permission specifically, there might be special agreements with authors, etc. However, you are right. Lenr-canr claims permission. When I looked, I found what I'd not noticed before. New Energy Times doesn't claim permission, but, instead, claims fair use for their list of papers, which, I'd say, is a tad iffy for the reproduction of a published paper in toto. Now, perhaps, I understand why lenr-canr.org doesn't have copies of this paper, and why I'm going to need to work on delisting lenr-canr.org (because there are many published papers cited in our article that they host, with claimed permission). Without better information on New Energy Times, I'm certainly backing off and will, I assume, only assert links to it that are, on the face, hosted with permission, or are their original material (which is most of the site.)--Abd (talk) 23:49, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Enric, yes, we can see the abstract. I recommend, if possible, reading the paper. It was being used to make a claim that isn't supported in that paper, detection of neutrons together with excess heat. The paper doesn't actually say that, it reports neutrons from palladium-deuterium codeposition electrolysis, but reports no association with excess heat; it does report, I believe, association of neutrons with copious alpha radiation. I believe there are other papers that do report association with excess heat of alpha radiation. It's quite iffy using an abstract to source text, abstracts can be misunderstood. --Abd (talk) 23:53, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Confirmation?

There have been some recent reports in favor of cold fusion, but there is still no sign that the mainstream view of scientists is that neutron production or nuclear-related heat has been "confirmed." If someone thinks differently, let's discuss it here. Olorinish (talk) 03:58, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

If there are a series of reports, the later reports confirm what the earlier reports state. That is not the same as this being accepted by "the mainstream," an entity that is pretty vague. We have sources on what the mainstream was twenty years ago, and we have sources that provide some indications about later. The SPAWAR work is, however, a strong confirmation, particularly interesting in that the level found was so low, which, indeed, confirms earlier work. It's not a "replication," because the various experiments used different methods.

It's an unusual problem because there isn't any clear definition of "mainstream." The last DoE review was 2004. Long before then, the cold fusion community had given up making neutron claims, because the levels were so low that, first of all, as Storms notes, a showing of neutrons doesn't provide much evidence about what is going on, it is likely a rare side-effect, and the levels were so low that arguments about cosmic ray and artifacts were difficult to overcome. Storms notes this in explaining why he's not covering the neutron findings. So what is the "mainstream" view on neutrons? It's meaningless. What we do know is that the Naturwissenschaften reviewers thought the paper worthy of publication. We know that the American Chemical Society thought it worthy enough to feature it in their press release on the recent low-energy nuclear reactions session, and it was widely seen as highly newsworthy. No cogent criticism has appeared, as far as I can see; negative comment on science blogs, etc., has been largely confined to regurgitation of opinions from twenty years ago, reminding us of the coulomb barrier, etc.

In my view the neutrons are not coming from cold fusion. They are coming from hot fusion. They are the right energy, apparently. But, then, how is hot fusion happening in this cold fusion cell? And the simplest hypothesis is pretty obvious: cold fusion is creating energetic particles with sufficient energy to occasionally cause hot fusion. Indeed, those particles are what was previously detected with CR-39, that's what produces the copious pitting. Alpha particles, i.e., helium.

Obviously, I'm not putting this in the article. However, it's a simple fact that the SPAWAR report confirms earlier reports of neutrons. "Confirms" doesn't have the meaning that Olorinish seems to place on it. It doesn't have to do with "conclusive." It has nothing to do with whether or not the "mainstream" has accepted the results or the implications. --Abd (talk) 01:00, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

There is an additional complication, regarding the fact that the SPAWAR people have indicated their CR-39 evidence indicates neutrons of greater than 9MeV of energy. I'm not sure if that is the minimum number needed to crack a carbon-12 nucleus into three alpha particles, or if it is a number derived from the magnitude of a triple-track. That is, the more energy a neutron has, the more energy the three alphas will have, and the more damage they can do inside CR-39 before they stop moving. Well, the complication is that the only way to get a 9MeV+ neutron from fusion is if the fusion reaction is the deuterium+tritium reaction --and that normally produces a 14MeV neutron. So, why didn't the SPAWAR people say they saw evidence for 14MeV neutrons??? Perhaps the magnitude of the triple tracks they saw simply wasn't large enough.

Well, then, where did the extra (14-9=) 5MeV go? One possble answer relates to the "electron catalyzed fusion" (ECF) hypothesis that I've mentioned on other occasions, which supposes that a lot of the conduction-band-electrons in the metal can get involved and carry away energy. Note that the ordinary two-deuterium reaction, when it yields tritium-and-proton or helium-3-and-neutron, also yields a total energy (maximum) of about 4MeV, while the reaction that yields helium-4 also has a total energy of nearly 24MeV. Logically, if ECF can carry away say 5MeV from the two-deuterium reaction, then the product of that reaction MUST be helium-4, because that is the only way more than 4MeV can be released. And since researchers aren't being killed by (24-5=) 19MeV gammas, it follows that ECF, if this is what is happening, can carry away rather more than 5MeV.

Back to the SPAWAR experiment, which uses "co-deposition" of palladium and deuterium, with one result being that the deposited metal is very very thin (think 2-dimensional vs 3-dimensional). This will reduce the number of conduction-band electrons available to participate in ECF, so less total energy can be carried away. If less than 4MeV gets carried away, then the two-deuterium reaction can yield tritium or helium-3. The tritium is then available to react with a deuterium, potentially able to release a 14MeV neutron. However, if ECF in the very thin deposited metal is causing the reaction and carrying away a few MeV...then it logically follows that the neutron will have less than 14MeV. It all "fits". Whether or not it is true is another matter altogether, of course! V (talk) 13:41, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Neutron radiation

I reworked this section and want to report on something that I didn't put in. The main problem with detection of neutrons is that neutrons are penetrating radiation, and there are neutrons generated from cosmic rays. Some of the neutron work was done deep underground, to avoid this background, other work was done with detectors that could analyze particle paths to distinguish where the particles were coming from. But there is another possible artifact that could confound these experiments, and one might think it could apply to Mosier-Boss as well. M-B detected very low levels of neutrons, but well above background, and these were controlled experiments, i.e., it's not simply running an experiment and finding triple tracks and announcing neutrons, the experiments are run under various conditions.

One of the problems pointed out by Hoffman is that cosmic rays can generate neutrons from collisions with the deuterons that don't happen with hydrogen, making light water as a control not conclusive as to the matter of neutrons. However, Mosier-Boss did run control experiments simply immersing the CR-39 in the electrolyte.

M-B cite prior work on neutrons:

There have been reports of neutron emissions in the Pd–D system (Jones et al. 1989; Takahashi et al. 1990; Lipson et al. 2000; Mizuno et al. 2001). To our knowledge, this is the first report of the evidence of the emission of ≥9.6 MeV neutrons formed in situ during a Pd–D electrolysis experiment.

There is a reason this report generated such a flap in March. --Abd (talk) 04:57, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Removal of Park book

Please, man, Robert L. Park is not a dubious reference. He's a Fellow and former executive director of the American Physical Society, his book was published by Oxford University Press, and he got reviews at lots of places, and free access ones were glowing endorsements: The Guardian[20], The Economist[21], The Independent[22], New York Times[23], Human Biology journal [24], Angewandte Chemie[25], Discover[26], Issues in Science and Technology[27], Science[28]. The only negative reviews were in the Journal of Scientific Exploration[29] and in the Times Higher Education Supplement[30] by Brian D. Josephson (I loved his opinion that the book should carry a disclaimer saying "the opinions in this book are unquestioningly shared by many scientists, but they should not be"). --Enric Naval (talk) 21:31, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually, the edit fixed multiple problems, including "electron flux". The previous version said "[not]...accepted" but not by whom, or what theory exactly, or when. "Several miracles" is opinion, not fact, and not necessarily still the author's opinion. Park had said that "energetic neutrons are unambiguous evidence that fusion has taken place", and now that neutrons have been reported, he says: "They say they find great mysteries, and perhaps they do. Is it important? I doubt it. But I think it’s science." [31] Here, "important" would mean practical use for the energy produced. Abd as summarized by Coppertwig 12:57, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd's original comment of 01:42, 30 April 2009

Enric did not understand the removal. Here is the diff: [32], (→Lack of neutron radiation: who's been writing this article, anyway. Add proper reference to Mosier Boss. Accepted as plausible? By whom? Remove dubious Park reference, redundant triple-miracle comment.). This is what was there: Fleischmann and Pons reported an electron flux of 4,000 neutrons per second, while the current understanding of nuclear reactions would dictate that even an energy output as low as 1 Watt would have given a flux of 1012 neutrons per second, which would have traspassed easily the walls of the cell and killed both researchers by radiation poisoning. There isn't still an explanation accepted as plausible for this lack of neutrons, as any explanation would require several "miracles" to happen.<ref>{{harvnb|Simon|2002|Ref=Simon2002|p=49}}, {{harvnb|Park|2000|p=17-18}}</ref> The question about who's been writing the article should have been who is "editing" it. Electron flux? "There isn't still an explanation accepted as plausible" has a lost performative: by whom? And "still" would have to refer to the date of publication. The claim of "plausible" is from Simons, and it was with reference to a specific theory proposed by Walling and Simons in 1989, a theory which predicts helium at levels which are actually found. But, at the time, it wasn't considered plausible, for reasons given elsewhere in our article. Simons is talking about 1989: "There was no agreement as to its plausibility; the theory simply required too many "miracles." What does Park have? It's very interesting. He says that "energetic neutrons are unambiguous evidence that fusion has taken place." Now, the absence of neutrons is not proof that fusion has not taken place, because of the d+d -> He4 mechanism, in which case there are some "miracles," which has a certain sound to it, and the words were used that way, for polemic effect, back in 1989. That is, some unexpected or unexplained conditions: what is normally a rare form of fusion is the predominant form, the energy normally emitted as a gamma ray is "transferred to the lattice" -- this is actually an error! repeated in the 2004 DOE report --, and a single energetic alpha particle violates conservation of momentum, there must be some other product. However, there is a fairly common theory that does reduce to only one miracle, and which seems to be consistent with all the evidence: 4 d -> Be8 -> 2 He4 at 24 MeV each. There is no transfer of energy to the lattice, there is alpha radiation, which is absorbed by the matter it passes through, and since the NAE is at the surface, half of this energy ends up as heat in the electrode and half as heat in the electrolyte. The miracle is that *four* deuterons fuse. What would this take? Rather obviously, it would take confined conditions, this would *never* happen in a plasma. But it's only one miracle. If that happens, all the rest is explained. The two helium nuclei are ejected with equal and opposite velocity, thus conserving momentum. A "transfer of energy to the lattice" isn't necessary at all. The stuff about trespassing the walls is true, but basically fluff. This is commonly referred to as the "dead graduate student effect." Park has a much more recent opinion than what he wrote in Voodoo Science. He's turned. From his blog, ... 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.[33] "Important" would refer to production of useful energy through LENR. There are reasons to think it possible that LENR will never be a significant power source. The demand for a cup of tea brewed with a cold fusion heater was for show, not for science. We don't demand cups of tea for muon-catalyzed fusion. However, the fact is what is said in our article: there is no accepted theory as to how cold fusion would happen, and if we don't know what's happening, we can't really predict what can be done with it. It may not be scalable. Or it may be scalable. He is agreeing that this is science, the process of developing and testing knowledge. --Abd (talk) 01:42, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

It seems that Park's comment has been blown a bit out of proportion, and claims that Park has changed his position are most probably incorrect. That's because a) he hasn't made any retraction of the claims made in his book, b) just back in November 2008 he had commented unfavorably on Arata's findings[34]. c) looking at that same column I noticed that just six hours ago he wrote: "An appearance on an evening entertainment program [CBS] won't make [cold fusion] science, and it's unlikely to change the minds of many scientists, but it's the most they've had to cheer about."[35]

You are right about "plausibility" in Simon, the current level of acceptance of the ⁴He theory needs a better source.

The "transfer of energy to the lattice" is mentioned as a serious problem in the theory in 1994 by Goodstein [36], in 2000 by Scaramuzzi http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Scaramuzzitenyearsof.pdf in 2002 by Park, and in 2004 by DOE 2004 [37]. Goodstein specifically mentioned the Mössbauer Effect as the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen in cold fusion: no heat is produced at all in the lattice.

The theorical problems are called "miracles" by Heeter in the Scientific American [38], Scaramuzzi, Park, Huizenga (Simon in "Undead Science" seems to source the exact word from his book), Taubes in his book and probably also in a Science magazine article[39], a review of the field by a guy from the Bhabha center in India quotes Hagelstein calling them "miracles"http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Srinivasannuclearfus.pdf and then says that Hagelstein's impression is reflected by the conclusions of DOE 1989, and, eh, you know, just look at this google scholar search and pick any relevant entry, there are plenty of them. --Enric Naval (talk) 15:04, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Implying that any solution to the problem involves multiple miracles is incorrect. The theory D + D + D + D → ⁸Be → ⁴He + ⁴He requires only one "miracle", and doesn't involve any "transfer of energy to the lattice": the energy is carried away by the two alpha particles. Maybe sometimes there's more than 100% loading of deuterium in the lattice, and more than one deuteron occupies the same niche; maybe fusion occurs when there are four in a niche. Many other theories have been proposed. New phenomena seem to be "miracles" until they're understood.

Bottom line: we need to consider the timing of sources, and what evidence those sources would have been considering, not just what they say as if a source on a matter of science is authoritative forever, to be given equal weight with later research and review. Abd as summarized by Coppertwig 12:57, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd's original comment of 17:55, 30 April 2009

Enric, I know the "miracles" problem. The point is that "transfer of energy to the lattice" is a problem that doesn't apply with Be-8 fission, there is no transfer to the lattice, the energy is entirely found in the equal and opposite momentum of the two alpha particles. The only "miracle," then, is that Be-8 is initially formed, and, if it happens in a single process, it truly is one miracle, not many. The point is that implying that any solution to the problem involves multiple miracles is incorrect, I just pointed out one, and I didn't invent it, where there is only one "miracle," and any new discovery that shows an exception to previous overgeneralized theory can be seen as a "miracle" until it's understood. Further, to take comments made early on, and then in secondary sources a bit later, as applying to all theories, including those developed later, is synthesis. What we are going to have to do to be fair to all the sources is to start presenting cold fusion as both history and science. There is a history to the claims and counterclaims. In other words, the problem I have with the language that you seem to think you should establish, when it wasn't challenged as such, isn't over the existence of that language, it is that we should not report this as scientific fact. It's not. It was opinion and theory and can't be generally applied outside its original reference, which would be the theories specifically considered by the source. It applies to nothing else. I've been making inquiries about the Be-8 theory, I want to see what is found. I may have seen it only in conference papers. My own thinking about it isn't terribly relevant, but lattice behavior of deuterium could be very different than we expect. It is possible to get loading of deuterium in the lattice above 100%, and loading is subject to local variations. Above 100% means that there are extra deuterium atoms occupying the normal positions in the lattice. Two is obviously reasonably common. What about three or four? What if, whenever four deuterium atoms occupy a single "position," which would be rare (thank God it's rare!), they fuse. How often would this take place? It's possible that a QED analysis of the result would show a high fusion rate. I don't know if that's been done. If that analysis does show a possibility of fusion at some realistic rate, we'd have a theoretical basis for cold fusion that requires no miracles at all, merely something quite unexpected. To repeat the hypothesis, some local condition causes four deuterium atoms to fuse, but probably not two or three unless at very low rates (very much lower than what is already very low!). They form an excited Be-8 nucleus which immediately fissions to form two alpha particles at 24 MeV. This predicts that (1) alpha radiation would be found at significant levels, vastly above background. Check. It predicts that helium will be found in association with excess heat at a value, if all the helium is extracted and measured, and the generated heat (which results from the normal absorption of the helium energy as the local medium slows and stops the alpha particles) is accurately measured, of 24 MeV/He-4. Check! So ... one miracle, which might not be a miracle at all. I hasten to add that many brilliant minds have worked on the problem, and there are many theories to account for what's happening, and some of the theories claim to not involve new physics. Getting a paper published on a theory that explains cold fusion, though, may still be extraordinarily difficult, for a long time, they have been rejected without review by most "mainstream" publications, and what is being published under peer review is mostly raw experimental report, with a few reviews. Still, the Mosier-Boss report does speculate a bit on what is going on. Hot fusion, in fact (i.e., same input, same output, just no proposed mechanism for getting the energy to do hot fusion, though it's obvious, given that these cells generate the famous excess heat that requires, it's long been claimed, nuclear process. Nuclear process generates more energy than is required to overcome the coulomb barrier.) I mean, if that's not interesting, I don't know what is. Bottom line: we need to consider the timing of sources, and what evidence those sources would have been considering, not just what they say as if a source on a matter of science is authoritative forever, to be given equal weight with later research and review. --Abd (talk) 17:55, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

More on Bob Park's current opinion of the field - new What's New talks about cold fusion again - science, but not promising and researchers are prone to embracing any scientific sounding nonsense that purports to show excess energy. - 2/0 (formerly Eldereft) (cont.) 00:04, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Except that the topic here, Cold fusion, was started by two scientists, experts in their field -- which included calorimetry -- that, indeed, found excess heat, a finding which has been repeated as shown in 153 peer-reviewed papers. Yeah, the original report was mixed with errors: the neutron findings were bogus, they were not nuclear physicists. It has become quite reasonable to assert a consensus, now, of excess heat. That was already a 50% opinion of the 2004 panel, and there has long been expert opinion that the heat is real, for example, Hoffman in 1995 points out that the people doing the calorimetry (some of them) were experts at it, and the calorimetry has never been successfully impeached in any conclusive way. Is the excess heat from fusion? How would we know?

Park, from today's blog, I'd say, was backing off from earlier claims that this is all "voodoo science," but hasn't really realized the import of recent findings. Neutrons. Previously, the critics considered neutrons to be the signature of fusion, neutrons were considered conclusive, and that there were no neutrons was considered conclusive evidence, by many, that there was no fusion. (Never mind that there is another previously known pathway that doesn't produce neutrons). Okay, there are neutrons. The SPAWAR group was confirming earlier work; though they estimated the energy of the neutrons, that was original. Where are experiments and confirmations, at what point does this become real science?

I can say it: secondary source. And we have plenty of secondary source on this! Not as much as I'd like, for sure! But enough. --Abd (talk) 01:24, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd, you say the Fleischmann-Pons (FP) neutron findings "were bogus": is that actually accurate? I mean, I don't know: I haven't read much about it. If we don't have a reliable source commenting on the FP neutron detections in light of the more recent confirmed neutron detections, then we have to be careful what we say. We can quote sources, but need to be careful about implying that a statement is or is not fact. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 13:10, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I think it is. If I'm correct, Fleischmann retracted. I should find the sources, but we currently say that Fleischman reported 4,000 neutrons per second originally. Later work found nothing like that, Mosier-Boss found 10 neutrons (but in a small area, a single CR-39 chip, I'm not sure the size, I could look it up) over weeks of electrolysis, that's something like five times background or more, plus it was confirmed over many experiments. Other reports show what are low levels of neutrons, nobody confirmed the originally reported high levels. Ironically, the Fleischmann report was the basis of a major criticism in the other direction: the level was way too low to represent what fusion would be expected to produce, therefore it was considered strong evidence against fusion, hang the excess heat. So nuclear physicists rejected the neutrons (and found contradiction in the report, the famous "missing Compton edge," showing probable artifact) and then concluded that the excess heat (Pons and Fleischmann's expertise) must be an error also, and that conclusion proved to be quite persistent and durable, in the face of very substantial evidence to the contrary.

I don't know how to put it in the article yet, but the significance of the Mosier-Boss neutrons is really great, and it was widely viewed that way, to the extent that many media sources described this as some new discovery, which it wasn't. They were merely confirming earlier work with a very simple technique, and probably finding what others would have found if they had known where to look. Lots of other researchers reported the heavy pitting of CR-39 that almost certainly represents alpha radiation, and probably ignored the very small levels of triple tracks. They probably didn't even examine the backs of the chips; if they did, and saw a couple of triple tracks, they may not have realized the significance; after all, most researchers have been interested in determining what's going on that generates excess heat; and the neutrons do not explain the excess heat. 4,000 neutrons per second did not explain the excess heat! Not even close. It's a side-effect, not the main show. But what a side effect! It essentially requires the presence of some nuclear process in the cell, thus, with a single modest claim, overturning the whole theory on which rejection of cold fusion is based! What's the nuclear process? It's fairly obvious: deuterium into a black box, helium and alpha radiation at roughly the right energy out. A very small percentage of those alpha particles then causes other hot fusion reactions that produce neutrons. --Abd (talk) 13:59, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Another fine source

See http://www.loe.org/shows/shows.htm?programID=06-P13-00008 for a transcript of Public Radio International's February 24, 2006 "Living on Earth" show. The segment "Cold Fusion: A Heated History" seems to be a balanced presentation in language that is fairly comprehensible.LeadSongDog come howl 17:11, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Excellent find, LeadSongDog. Please, folks, read this. It's RS, carefully researched, balanced. Since then, the evidence has gotten stronger, not weaker. Long before this, the CF field had mostly accepted that neutron findings were going to be useless as a proof of nuclear reaction. Now, we have very good evidence for neutrons (Mosier-Boss, 2008, Naturwissenschaften, widely reviewed in news media), just at levels such that they don't tell us much about what's going on, they are obviously some kind of sideshow.

I am not rushing to shift the article, but am pointing in the direction I believe we need to move. --Abd (talk) 18:13, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

By the way, look at the links at the bottom of the article. Why aren't we linking to those sources for further reading? We now have a See Also to New Energy Times, but what about the other one? lenr-canr.org. These can be considered advocacy sites, though lenr-canr.org claims to try to be neutral (but the site owner obviously has strong opinions), but that can be stated. If you want to learn about Cold fusion, would you only want to read reports and documents by skeptics? --Abd (talk) 18:19, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

NPOV - Undue

This article provides undue weight to a limited number of experiments done by a limited number of facilities that have not been confimed or verified. That there are a bunch of hucksters and frauds out there perpetuating a bunch of schemes, and that they have aligned themselves with some less-than-stellar names in physics to promote poorly-designed experiments might be notable in an article about, say Fraud, but to report breathlessly about their "brekathroughs" in an article about Cold Fusion is providing undue weight. Hipocrite (talk) 14:31, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Due weight, in science matters, is determined by the weight of what is found in peer-reviewed reliable source, in other matters, such as general opinion and the history of a science topic, by what is found in media or other reliable sources. Hipocrite wasn't specific, but arguments based on WP:UNDUE are a favorite trick of anti-fringe editors, who have long used it to push in a direction contrary to what has been clearly asserted by ArbComm in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science, to exclude from articles what is found in reliable source. It won't be tolerated any more. If Hipocrite wishes to discuss specific text, the editor is welcome. We have inadequate coverage of the "hucksters and frauds," there have been some notable ones, indeed, though that has little to do with what is actually in the article, there are no notable allegations that there is any significant presence of frauds among those cited in the article. --Abd (talk) 15:30, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

The core claim of Fleischmann in the beginning was excess heat. That claim has been confirmed with experiments reported in 153 peer-reviewed published papers. Fleischmann's original claim to have found radiation was based on experimental error; radiation, however, has subsequently been found by many different research groups, the most recent finding, of neutrons by the SPAWAR group, was itself a confirmation of earlier published findings using different techniques. I removed the POV tag that Hipocrite added, because the tag was removed very recently and there is no ongoing, serious dispute about the article, and Hipocrite was not specific about his claims above. I actually agree that the article has a POV bias, but apparently in the other direction, and the extent to which the article is misleading is that it does not report, accurately, the shift in the field that has occurred over the last five or ten years. That's a problem that can be fixed with time, and unless there is some serious obstacle that appears, I'd prefer to trust the other editors that any disputes can be resolved. --Abd (talk) 15:44, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I can't understand your huge blocks of text. There are whole sections of this article focused on 2008-2009 experiments. This is undue weight. Hipocrite (talk) 16:28, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

If by "whole sections of this article focused on 2008-2009 experiments" you mean there is one section titled "2009 reports" consisting of a single, three-sentence paragraph, then yes, there are "whole sections of this article focused on 2008-2009 experiments". Kevin Baas^talk 18:42, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

This is a science article, where later research supersedes earlier. Hipocrite has not been following this article and appears to be pursuing some external agenda. The topic of this article is complex. I do suggest that editors who don't understand it be careful about how they mangle the article. Hipocrite removed the whole section on 2009 reports with the edit summary, (Per talk page suggestion by KB.) Given the disruption he's creating elsewhere, and unlike any other editor working recently on this article, and unlike editors like JzG and ScienceApologist, I doubt his good faith, I doubt that he believed that.--Abd (talk) 01:03, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I was being facetious, by the way, with the "whole sections" comment -- my aim was to show that Hipocrite was grossly misrepresenting the balance of content. Kevin Baas^talk 14:49, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd is right that there should be some mention of 2009 reports in the article. One small paragraph and an image are reasonable responses to the recent press attention. Olorinish (talk) 01:22, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

That's right, we already list reports from other years. I removed the section title because it was accidentally giving it more weight by giving it its own separate sectio, when DOE 2004 doesn't have its own section. I suppose we could make subsections like "DOE 1989", "after DOE 1989", "DOE 2004", "after DOE 2004".

P.D. newer research supercedes past research... when it's of the same or higher quality, and has been reported as having superceded past research. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:25, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I believe that usually, for science topics, due weight is based (if possible) on sources such as peer-reviewed review articles, and not on the media. For this topic, due to its controversial nature, possibly some weight on media is warranted. However, I think the main due weight for determining NPOV should be based primarily on three sources: the 2004 DOE report; and two peer-reviewed review articles: Biberian (2007) [40] International Journal of Nuclear Energy Science and Technology, and Hubler 2007 [41] (Surface and Coatings Technology). (I believe these are peer-reviewed papers in regular journals not devoted to cold fusion.) Have I missed any important good-quality sources? Reporting of more recent events and results can be guided by other secondary sources. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 01:43, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

For weight, we should use sources that represent the most widely hold view (the mainstream view), which can be given also by media sources like, for example, the Scientific American or the New York Times (when it's making a serious article). Also, DOE 2004 would have a lot more weight than those two papers, as that report shaped the US spending and probably the worldwide spending. Let's not forget WP:PARITY. --Enric Naval (talk) 03:27, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Those two papers are more recent, and may consider aspects of cold fusion that were not looked at in the DOE review, which focussed on three questions. However, the DOE review used a panel of reviewers, so it can be considered more reliable. As far as media is concerned, we can also use the 60 Minutes piece, which employed a physicist to investigate and reports the views of several scientists.

I'm not sure what you mean by "sources that represent the most widely hold view (the mainstream view)". For example, the DOE report says that the reviewers were evenly split on one question, so the report is not representing only a single view. Similarly, the 60 Minutes piece presents different opinions by different scientists. This article should not present only one view, but at least two views. It's our task to figure out how much weight to give each of those views. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 11:53, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Surely I mean the view among most scientists that cold fusion doesn't work, as reported by several sources in the article, but many also think that there could be some interesting non-CF phenomena happening, as many of those sources point out. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:28, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

The view of most scientists is an uninformed view, perhaps based on what they heard on the news years ago. I don't think we should cherry-pick sources in an effort to increase the representation of that view.^{(16:26, 10 May 2009 (UTC))} The DOE report, for example, gives views by scientists who have taken the time to look at the evidence. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 17:00, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't think that I'm cherry-picking sources, and wikipedia is not a place for righting WP:GREATWRONGS. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:35, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I didn't read Coppertwig's comment as accusing you of cherry-picking, at least not deliberately, but as noting that simply finding a lot of references to some term doesn't establish that this is an expert opinion, something we can lean on, and, as to "great wrongs," the only "wrong" I'm interested in is the possible one that our article doesn't fairly represent what is present in reliable sources, with due weight according to the complex principles we've been enunciating, with your help: primary vs. secondary source, peer reviewed or not, probability of neutral evaluation in a secondary source, notability, and avoidance of synthesis (such as interpreting two primary sources as contradicting each other, or a secondary source in, say, 1989, as contradicting a secondary source in, say, 2007, or, for that matter, any primary sources after 1989. Generally, my view is that, to avoid POV dangers, we don't exclude any material from reliable sources, but present it in a context and with proper attribution that makes applicability, time sequence, etc., as well as balance, clear. It's quite possible (I think likely) this can't be done within a single article, so we will, I assume, consider appropriate forking. --Abd (talk) 21:03, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I've struck out the part about cherry-picking: that was a bad choice of words: I'm sorry. Enric, I would appreciate it if you would describe your suggestion, and the rationale behind it, in more detail: I'd like to get a clearer picture of what you're proposing. I'm not sure whether you mean selecting sources on the basis of what opinion they present, and it's not clear to me how much weight you're proposing to put on the sources you're talking about. I suggest choosing and weighting sources based on objective criteria such as whether they're peer-reviewed etc., and after selection looking at what POVs they express (one source may express more than one POV) and using that information to determine the amount of weight to give to each POV in this article: are you disagreeing with that approach, Enric, and if so could you elaborate on the reasons? Since there are lots of peer-reviewed sources and books on this topic, I don't see how WP:PARITY would be needed: could you elaborate on how you see it as applying here, Enric? I agree that we're not supposed to be righting great wrongs here: that means we don't refuse to report information from reliable sources just because we personally disagree with it. Again, it might be useful if you explain in more detail how you see that essay as being relevant here. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 16:26, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Sourcing

Papers published at lenr-canr.org by people who work for "Lattice Energy, LLC," are not reliable sources. Try to avoud using them. Hipocrite (talk) 14:51, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I have to agree re lenr-canr.org. Not sure about LE LLC, but they do sound suspect. Verbal chat 14:54, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Storms is a notable author in the field. I originally reverted Hipocrite, but undid that because there are other sources less reasonably disputed that would be available for the facts, which Hipocrite merely tagged for citations after removing the one that had been there for a long time. I'm not going to pick today to argue whether or not a paper by Storms, cited to show theories proposed (it is verification of proposal), with original publication on lenr-canr.org, can be used. The place of employment or a company that an author has consulted for has nothing to do with RS. There are a number of companies working in the field, they are real, and they are legitimate, but it's also true that the field has attracted charlatans and frauds. After all, there could be trillions of dollars worth of energy expenditures at stake, or, alternatively, people who believe this to be fleeced. No big surprise. --Abd (talk) 15:49, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

The source was placed by Enric Naval with [42], citing earlier discussion at Talk:Cold fusion, Other explanations of Cold fusion. The paper was apparently published not by lenr-canr.org, but by New Energy Times, on-line. I'll find the link. --Abd (talk) 16:04, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Cold Fusion for Dummies by Edmund Storms. This is not the strongest source to use, I suspect, but the author is notable in the field, for sure. He's the author of many published papers on the topic, plus the 2007 book, The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, World Scientific, 2007. --Abd (talk) 16:10, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

"Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications. However, caution should be exercised when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else is likely to have done so." (WP:V) ☺Coppertwig (talk) 11:58, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Self-published material, if used, should be attributed, since the author's personal expertise is what makes it usable. "According to Notable Wing Nut, he was innocent of fraud and accurately reported all data in his published paper.[cite NWN's blog]" --Abd (talk) 13:37, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Not necessarily. I think you're confusing two things. We can use self-published material, even by someone who is not an expert, for information about that person, as in the hypothetical example you give. Separately, we can (carefully, under some circumstances) use self-published material by an expert who has already extensively published elsewhere. For example, if the author of a book and many articles on cold fusion now posts on their blog "I was wrong: cold fusion is real after all", or something, we might be able to use that, in a similar way that we would use a published article by that expert, i.e. it might or might not require attribution. Well, a statement like that would require attribution anyway, but some sorts of statements might be simply reportable as facts without attribution. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 15:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Living organisms?

Thanks for making an effort to expand a section that I do think needs expansion, Abd.

I did a double-take at this part:

"Storms then lists observations considered within the field to be sufficiently established to affect the formation of theories: ... Living organisms are able to host transmutation reactions".

At first I thought that amounted to presenting as fact that the accepted mainstream view is that living organisms host transmutation. That would certainly need a reliable source!! But then I re-read it: oh, it's only saying these are considered "within the field" to be sufficiently established. Well, even so: what exactly is the definition of "within the field", and is that observation really that well established within the field (to the point that we can state as fact that it's established within the field), or is that just Storms' opinion?

Anyway, I inserted "which he states are". I haven't read the source. I'm just editing what you've added. Please check whether my edit is reasonable based on what the source actually says. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 17:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Yeah. When I first saw this, I thought "Uh oh, Storms went off the deep end." It's a hazard when one is working in an "undead" field. Because one is already bucking the "conventional wisdom," the barriers to accepting as worthy of consideration some truly kooky stuff are lowered.

However, I happen to be placed, from my experience, to understand that the claim of biological transformation has at least one very solid report behind it, where artifact seems quite unlikely, and that may not readily be understood by editors without this background. Storms considers "Living Organisms" on p. 141-142, and what got my attention, when I bought the book and read it, was the Mossbauer spectrogram on p. 142, showing absorption of gamma rays at a energy specifically associated with Fe-57 and nothing else. He doesn't explain this specificity, actually, he does, but it's easy to overlook that's my personal knowledge from having done a Mossbauer experiment, probably in 1963, but you can read Mossbauer spectroscopy. There is no other elemental identification technique which is so specific. Now, I haven't worked with this stuff for years, so it's certainly possible I've missed something, you don't notice my putting stuff into the article from my personal opinions or imagined knowledge.

This is the experiment: Voysitskii and co-workers at Kiev Shevchenko University (Ukraine) and Moscow State University (Russia) dissolved MnSO4 in D2O containing bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans or Saccharomyces cerevisiae T-8, and found increased amounts of Fe-57, a rare isotope of iron. They measured in one experiment 8.7 +/- 2.4 x 10^15 atoms of Fe, which would have generated 22 kJ at a rate of about 80 mW. Production of Fe-57 occurred only when MnSO4 and D20 were both present, and some elements, when present, inhibit the reaction. "Later work" involved a different reaction and Bacillus subtilis.

Storms then goes on to speculate, with one sentence, on spontaneous human combustion. He left me in the dust on that, I wish he hadn't done that, but he did! But it has no relevance here (The possible relevance, I suppose, would be an answer to where the energy for spontaneous combustion might come from, but this seems entirely unnecessary to me, and if that much energy could be generated from biological process, why, then, don't we use this already, routinely? It's not like we didn't have a billion years to figure out how to do it! The energy is there, in ordinary water, because of the deuterium fraction. It's quite understandable that bacteria might evolve some mechanism to create needed Fe when they don't have it, but nuclear energy is pretty nasty for organisms, they would need to have some process that might disrupt the protein accomplishing the catalysis, but not run it at a scale that would disrupt the whole bacterium! Some of the CF mechanisms proposed would be, quite possibly, usable by proteins designed to accomplish it; there might not be seriously disruptive side-effects, and, even if there were, with individual bacteria "sacrificing themselves" to provide their cohort with iron, the development could still be driven by evolution.

Has this been confirmed? Certainly not widely, but there have been reports of transformations like this going back to 1967 in Japan (Komaki, Revue de Pathologie Comparee 67, 213) according to Storms, and another report, same author and publication, 1969. Maybe I'll add some text and references to Biological transmutation. (That article is quite weak, with only one reference to anything that Storms talks about, a paper presented at ICCF 10 by Vysotskii et al., Storms cites another paper presented at ICCF 11.)--Abd (talk) 20:45, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

There is a lot of crack pot claims here that I'm not going to address. I am concerned that you (Abd) are giving Mossbauer spectroscopy way too much credit in this section and in your discussions on Cold Fusion in general. Mossbauer spectroscopy is not a wide spread method for elemental identification. Your statement that There is no other elemental identification technique which is so specific. is questionable at best. I think Inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy is the gold standard of trace metal identification. Mossbauer is mostly used with Iron and rarely with a hand full of other elements. You state that a sample absorbs "at a energy specifically associated with Fe-57 and nothing else." I assume you are talking about shift and not splitting? In any case this bothers me, how can you be sure it can be nothing else? Actually how can you be sure the group reporting the data is reliable? I don't know Mossbauer well enough to be sure that such an absorbence can be nothing else; but I know that there is a common test for such claims. Did these folks spike the sample they think has Fe-57 in it with authentic Fe-57? If they did this and new peaks grew in than their claims are bogus.--OMCV (talk) 04:11, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I suggest you take another look at Mossbauer spectroscopy. You are right that it's not a general method, it only works with certain elements, those that are products of gamma decay from another element with the same atomic weight, and that can be used as a source. The source emits gamma rays at a frequency that is very narrow, because of the Mossbauer effect, and the spectrogram is taken by observing the level of absorption of the gamma rays as the frequency is shifted through moving the source toward or away from the sample. I haven't seen the original paper and Storms gives only a little detail, but Storms, p. 142, reproduces three spectrograms, two with Mn + D2O and one calibration run with Fe + H2O. Normal Fe will contain 2.11% of Fe-57, according to our article. The spectrogram is identical between the Fe control and the Mn sample runs, i.e., two peaks, one at about 0.1 mm/sec and one at about 0.6 mm/sec. The Fe control run shows greater strength of signal, but the experimental runs are not down in the noise. OMCV, it seems you assumed that they wouldn't do controls. That you would assume this shows the weight of assumptions you are carrying. Sure, the world is vast and errors likewise, but this is what Storms says about biological transformation, on p. 145:

As noted in Section 5.15, living organisms appear to be able to initiate nuclear reactions to acquire essential elements denied by their environment. This process is studied by culturing single cell organisms in the absence of essential elements. Growth of the missing element is measured using various techniques. [Mossbauer spectroscopy is not the only technique reported.] Transmutation has been detected in cultures based on either D20 [three sources cited] or H20 [four sources cited]. Evidence for heat, radiation, and energetic particles has been neither sought nor obtained. So many unanswered questions, unresolved logical conflicts, and incredible consequences haunt these claims that a rational interpretation is very difficult. Additional replication is essential because the implications of this research are so important.

These are not the ravings of a crackpot, but of someone who is familiar with the sources and issues. General skepticism is fine, but skepticism that results in blindness isn't. Absence of proof is not proof of absence, and the whole cold fusion affair was a matter of confusing the former with the latter, such that when proof did, in fact, appear, it was rejected since the matter was already "closed." This is, indeed, the theme of Simon's Undead Science.

Looking for a copy of one of the Vysotski papers, I came across an interesting article that makes an analogy between newspaper and other reliable source coverage of the Titanic disaster and that of cold fusion.[43]. Obviously, it's not on this specific point, but I write here for those who, in order to be able to assist with editing the article, want to understand the background. --Abd (talk) 15:05, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually "controls" have been a major problem of CF in general. I wouldn't be surprised if these people didn't do the "right" controls.--OMCV (talk) 11:40, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Of course, from long-expressed opinion from OMCV, we are not surprised that the editor wouldn't be surprised. However, I haven't seen the original of this paper; the report from Storms clearly shows at least one control. Controls were a problem early on, but that problem has largely been overcome. Nobody is claiming here that the research is conclusive; Storms notes that confirmation is required. The Mossbauer work, though, should be quite simple to reproduce, so what does it mean that nobody has published positive or negative confirmation? It's not like this was yesterday. The bacterium is a known one (known for very high resistance to radiation). I'll answer my question. It means that there is knee-jerk rejection of findings in this field, without review, and we need to tell that story in much more depth, there is plenty of source on it; it's an article on history, not on the science of cold fusion as such. Stuffing all this into one article is actually crazy. What do people think about resurrecting Condensed matter nuclear science? It was never deleted, just protected, and the protection should be quite easy to get lifted. --Abd (talk) 12:20, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Isaac Asimov (generally a reliable source in matters scientific) once wrote a spoof essay/story about the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs, the title was "Pâté de Foie Gras (short story)". In case you don't know, that French phrase translates as "liver of fat goose". In that most famous Goose, the liver is described as being able to fuse oxygen-18 to make an iron isotope that I forget which it is, and then use the energy produced by that fusion to fuse the iron into gold. Fictional but fun (well thought out)! V (talk) 06:08, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Here is a book review of interest on biological transmutation. The review is CF-era, the book was published in 1980, reprinted 1998: [44]. This is stuff that belongs in a CMNS article, actually, or, of course, the article on Biological transmutation. --Abd (talk) 20:48, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

There are also some sources linked at [45]. Vysotskii presented a paper at the ACS conference in Salt Lake City this March: (must have left that edit sitting in my other computer, will fix later). --Abd (talk) 12:13, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Lecture by Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan, the scientist who was asked by 60 Minutes to look at a cold fusion lab, gave a lecture at the Missouri Energy Summit on April 23 about the scientific method and cold fusion. A video of the lecture is here. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 23:08, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

It's a 100 MB file, I downloaded it and watched it, the Duncan lecture -- which is quite good -- starts in the middle. There might be another way to access just the Duncan lecture, but I couldn't find it. Duncan is really emphasizing the scientific method, which is about an ongoing process and which does not involve fixed conclusions. Ever. He reports one incident after the CBS special where a physicist called him up and was very angry, and his report shows the problem. When he asked the physicist to sit down (metaphorically, I suppose) and go over the evidence, that was angrily rejected with a comment that summed it up: something like "We already did this (i.e., in 1989-90) and you charlatans won't give up." The physicist obviously was so angry he forgot who he was talking to. Duncan isn't a charlatan, he's a reputable physicist, and simply looked at the evidence (new evidence! plus, probably, a revisitation of the old evidence, which was never properly analyzed) and came up with conclusions that were already creeping up toward majority opinion in 2004. Our resident skeptics managed, for a time, to keep the fact out of the article that half the 2004 review panel considered the evidence for excess heat "compelling." One-third thought similarly (perhaps not so strongly) about evidence for nuclear reactions. This isn't "fringe science," at least not any more. It's "emerging science," breaking through, supported by a huge amount of research of increasing clarity. If we simply follow reliable source guidelines, and apply the concept of undue weight in a neutral fashion, as recommended, we'll be fine. But if we cleave to either extreme, we'll have an unbalanced article. Right now, it's unbalanced, in my opinion, toward the skeptical side, but I reverted the re-addition of the POV tag because I believe we are working on and can resolve those issues, and since the imbalance is simply a matter of delay in reporting a shift in opinion, it's not as serious as would be, say, imbalance in the other direction, treating cold fusion as if it were a proven and accepted phenomenon. It's not. It's emerging science, with controversy remaining, lots of it, and we can and should report the nature of that controversy as shown in secondary sources like Simon. And if this makes the "pseudo-skeptics" -- the ones who confuse their own negative certainty with skepticism (certainty is the opposite of skepticism) -- look bad, let them generate reliable source to defend themselves. I don't think it's there. Good example of a genuine skeptic: Hoffman (1995). --Abd (talk) 15:25, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

How much weight for Storms book?

Abd recently added 5 paragraphs based on the Storms book [46]. Including all that text gives far too much weight to a single source which, to my knowledge, does not represent mainstream thinking on cold fusion. To make the article more useful to the typical reader, these sections should be greatly condensed. In fact, I condensed them fairly well into a single sentence [47], although reasonable people might find an additional point or two worth including in the article. What do people think is the appropriate amount of space the Storms discussion should have in this article? Olorinish (talk) 00:20, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

By definition, theories regarding what is happening in cold fusion experiments isn't "mainstream." The section of the article is intended to examine theories that have been proposed to explain low-energy nuclear reactions. We can't do that without presenting non-mainstream theories! I boiled Storms down to the essentials of his presentation, omitting the details, but I don't see how to reduce it further without distorting it, and I explained this below (which was written before seeing the above comment. Absolutely, what I wrote could use editing; better, we should reorganize all the theoretical material, for there is now quite a but of duplication. Storms organizes the issues, beginning with the challenges that theories in this field face. We could pull that out, but should be able to refer to it within this section, making sure that the other section includes all of his "challenges." There are many theories that have been presented, I was just reading one published, peer-reviewed, last year. But that's a primary source, not analyzed by a secondary source yet. We could refer to it as a proposed theory, but the strength of the Storms presentation is that it's an overview of the field of cold fusion theory, even though it's certainly not perfect. --Abd (talk) 00:38, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Storms is reviewed or cited in:

M. Srinivasan, CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 94, NO. 7, 10 APRIL 2008
John L. Russell Jr., Low energy nuclear reaction polyplasmon postulate, Annals of Nuclear Energy, Volume 35, Issue 11, November 2008, Pages 2059-2072. On this one, I only have the search engine return: Fortunately, two recent books, in 2007, by Edmund Storms “The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction” (Storms, 2007), and in 2006, by Hideo Kozima “The ... The abstract is of interest in itself:

An explanation is proposed for the nuclear reactions that occur in the electrolysis class of LENR processes. The proposed explanation postulates that a proton, or deuteron, dissolved in the hydrogen bearing metal cathode, absorbs its associated atomic electron to become a short lived state of the neutron with the resulting neutrino in a singular wave function centered on the neutron. The energy required to initiate this endothermic reaction is supplied either by the ion current during electrolysis type experiments, or by ion bombardment in plasma type experiments. It is the energy of this bombardment of the cathode with heavy ions that creates a coherent polyplasmon field within crystalline metallic grains that are present in the metal cathode of typical active electrolysis cells. The LENR process consists of a second order reaction mediated by a coherent plasmon field excited in the conduction electrons in a hydrogen bearing metal that is in the form of crystalline grains of the order of a few microns in dimension. The coherent plasmon field in each grain is called a polyplasmon. The metallic grains typically form during solidification of a metal, the impurities being forced to the grain surfaces. The resulting grain thus forms a resonant structure that can be filled with a number of coherent plasmons, i.e., a polyplasmon.

Energy from the polyplasmon is coupled to the nucleus via electron capture by hydrogen. Because the neutrino has mass, its wave function has a second class of solutions. This description can take the form of a short lived pairing with the neutron that results from electron capture by the hydrogen nucleus. This short-lived compound particle is named the “dion” and in the case of deuterium results in a “dineutron”. Because the dion and dineutron are formed with essentially thermal kinetic energy, they can capture in nearby nuclei, either in hydrogen or in the host metal. Most of the resulting exothermic nuclear energy is absorbed in the plasmon field by a variety of mechanisms that increase the intensity of the plasmon field and hence the rate of electron capture – that then increases the rate of nuclear reactions. This stochastic chain-reaction process continues in the grain until it is terminated by the random occurrence of losses preventing the continuation of sustaining nuclear reactions before the plasmon field decays away, or until the rise in temperature of the metal grain alters the physical properties of the metallic grain sufficiently to disrupt the polyplasmon field.

Multiple reported experiments confirm that most of the nuclear energy released is absorbed by the host metallic cathode and the electrolyte. Calculations from first principles are consistent with many of the reported quantitative and qualitative phenomena.

Enjoy. Do we put this theory in the article? Attributed, of course. --Abd (talk) 19:54, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Here is the book published by Kozima, referenced above at the end of the truncated sentence from Russell: [48], this is published by Elsevier. A well-known "fringe" publisher? Not. Appears to have extensive coverage of theory. --Abd (talk) 20:02, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Cold Fusion (HOW), first pages:

Step 1: Put on a white coat and white slacks. Act like a professional.

Step 2: Go into the bathroom. You will need the tub.

Step 3: Gather a Dewar flask, and anode, and a cathode. Find some nice palladium or nickel. You'll need them in bulk -- thin films or powder. Some people use plasma, but those people are imbeciles. Get some white shoes and put them on. Get ready to excite your palladium with electricity, magnetism, or a laser beam.

I should get a white coat, don't you think? I've already got the white beard and white hair, so it should look nice. Sew the arms to the back and turn it around, and it's a straight jacket, they are always white as well. --Abd (talk) 20:35, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

|}

An article on the Widom-Larsen theory is found at http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Widom-Larsen.php. --Abd (talk) 21:00, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

More RS (peer-reviewed] for Widom-Larsen: [49]. --Abd (talk) 21:16, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Regarding CF explanations

Is there any objection to writing an article about Cold Fusion Hypotheses? Obviously this article could link to that and benefit by not needing to cover, here, all the explanations that have been proposed, while such an article could focus on proposed explanations for CF, refer to this article to reduce its own footprint, and not worry TOO much about RS (none of them are RS, right?). All that would be needed for that article is verifiability, that each hypothesis described has been published. V (talk) 19:24, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, in theory, sure. A content fork. Care should be taken that it isn't a POV fork. The theory you propose, V., is one that I support, but historically, it's easy to get deletion of what will be called POV forks even if they aren't. If we have consensus here on it, we can do it. In fact, didn't I just suggest just that as a solution to the present problem?

No, in fact, Storms is RS, and there is plenty of RS besides that. Thus, since some editors seem to want the Storms material out, I'll start putting in other RS material, much shorter, wherever the relevant facts aren't in the article. Storms was nice as an overview, filtering out the less notable theories, but without that overview, we are forced to cover all of them! In the end. All it takes is patience, watch and help! All of you! And if at some point you think Storms was better, by all means, replace Storms, or support someone else replacing it. I may or may not revert removals, it depends on what I judge as the least disruptive action without undue sacrifice of article quality. I don't see a rush, but I'm also not going to lie down and pretend I'm dead. I'm not dead yet, that will come soon enough. --Abd (talk) 19:00, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Interview with Storms in Infinite Energy (magazine): [50] --Abd (talk) 19:17, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Review of Storms (2007) in Infinite Energy (magazine): [51] (Review by Scott Chubb] --Abd (talk) 19:20, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I think such an article can hardly be POV if it covers a lot of hypotheses.

I just saw an interesting thing about "RS": http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/ --Not to imply that anything like that has happened in Physics, but it doesn't hurt to be wary.... V (talk) 19:32, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Removal of Storms material.

Orinish removed the Storms material on theory with (far too much weight for such a single non-mainstream source; Abd, could you summarize your point in one paragraph?). I reverted this. Storms is reliable source, quite clearly. I'm going to insist that this material is usable. It can definitely be reorganized; if this is out of balance, then it should be balanced with other reliably sourced material. Storms examines, in some detail, the various theoretical considerations; most of what is elsewhere in the article as theoretical objections to cold fusion is also covered in his outline, more coherently. (Parts of the article have clearly been written by editors who were reading sources, all right, but didn't understand them.) These are mostly lists, and I don't see how to present them and extract from them what is significant without distorting them.

(I already condensed greatly, keeping his lists mostly intact.)

We could, indeed, reorganize all the theoretical material into one section that covers all the issues and notable theories, as well as theoretical objections to experimental results and objections to theory (those are two different things) but Storms is practically unique as a recent reliable secondary source that covers the field. Storms should not be presented as an authority on "general acceptance," but on what is notable and accepted within the field of CMNS or low energy nuclear reactions. Some of what he reports may be his own opinion and not generally held, which is why significant attribution was scattered through the text. Even more could be done with respect to this: Storms could be identified as a long-time Cold fusion researcher.

I would also be using the Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, from the ACS (mainstream enough?) but the damn thing is $175. (Amazon $140). There are also recent theoretical papers, at least one presented at ICCF 14 may be of considerable interest, but probably can't be used yet, until it's published under peer review or there is secondary source discussing it. --Abd (talk) 00:24, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

What does Storm mean by this statement? 12. Living organisms are able to host transmutation reactions. Is he implying that critters can survive environments where transmutation reaction occur, such as someone being treated with radiotherapy? Or is he implying there are critters whose biological function employees transmutation? No matter what its a really weird statement.--OMCV (talk) 02:25, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

He means that there is evidence some organisms may be able to "host" or cause transmutation. Yes, it's really weird, quite unexpected, but, dammit, there is also some striking evidence. See above, Talk:Cold_fusion#Living_organisms?. --Abd (talk) 03:02, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Seriously this Storm guy seems to be a nut or at least gone nuts like so many others cold fusion proponents, such as John Bockris and Rusi Taleyarkhan. He shouldn't get much weight in this article.--OMCV (talk) 03:20, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I.e., RS standards be damned, if you think he's a nut, he's not to be used? The question is whether or not an article on Cold fusion can have an adequate section covering theories that have been advanced. Without the Storms material, we can do it, but .... it will be much more difficult, much more complicated. Anyway, Hipocrite just reverted without discussion, removing the Storms material. To me, the question is really how long it's going to take, not what's going to happen. Obviously, I can't predict the exact form of the article, I'm hoping it will be better than anything I can imagine, but the days of excluding RS material because of divisive editor opinion are over.

Meanwhile I just watched the video of Robert Duncan. It's a bit of a nuisance, a big .wmv file and Duncan's lecture is in the middle, but ... he makes the point about the scientific method and about how it was interrupted in 1989, and it's time to restart. Quite a few anecdotes could be told from that lecture; the one that matches so much that I've read from Simons, from the accounts of Krivit of interviewing scientists, is how some physicist called him up after the 60 minutes show and was really angry with him. He asked the man to go over the evidence with him. My memory of his report of the man's response: "We did that twenty years ago and you charlatans won't give up." Obviously, there is something going on that isn't science and the scientific method. And there is something going on here that isn't about NPOV and RS. By the way, Simon notes (RS!) how Brockris was abused, how the research was starved of the labor it needed because graduate students were told that if they worked on Cold fusion, they would have no career, and the Teleyarkhan story has yet to be told here in proper depth as well, but .... I haven't specialized in those yet.

Tell me, OMCV, how you would explain that Mossbauer spectrogram? --Abd (talk) 03:53, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I added my comments on Mossbauer spectrometry above, Talk:Cold_fusion#Living_organisms?. As for Storm and Brockris it clear they are having breaks with the mainstream science if not reality. Its not as if this break is only along the dimension of cold fusion. These guys just got wacky regardless of the quality of work they did when they were younger. Spontaneous combustion? Seriously? The fact that Simon's heart goes out to Brockris reflects poorly on Simon. Borckris was losing his head back in 1982 well before cold fusion when he was talking up his "secret catalysts" that could split water without energy or his 1984 material that could convert light into electricity perfectly. Borckris was lucky that these "discoveries" were attributed to errors and not fraud. I think most of his luck was due to politics, people wanted to sweep him out as quietly as possible.--OMCV (talk) 04:38, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that we have hundreds or thousands of peer-reviewed papers and other reliable source that breaks with the mainstream science." Cold fusion was claimed to be "dead." However, again, the sources show that what is being alleged to be mainstream science is dead, i.e., not showing signs of life by normal review of experimental claims that contradict the prevailing view. So it's a prevailing view, all right, and our article should show that, but it isn't represented in recent reliable source. So, yes, there is entrenched opposition, and we haven't adequately told that story. It's entrenched, like unquestioned orthodoxy anywhere can be entrenched. Do we tell the story of Brokris in adequate detail (not necessarily in this article)? OMCV, Simon is also reliable source, and skeptics and critics use him in the article whenever it suits them. OMCV, your POV is showing through the rhetoric. Showing "heart" reflects poorly? It's "clear that they are having breaks with reality?" A sentence of speculation isn't a break with reality, it's a speculation. I went and read the article on spontaneous human combustion and it seems that there is something there we don't know. When we don't know, we, very properly, speculate, and anyone skilled at problem-solving knows that speculation isn't confined to "reality," i.e., to what we know. It must step outside that, and being able and willing to do so is a sign of mental health, not of being "wacky." Enough. I'm working on the article. All are welcome to help. If that change doesn't stand, it could be messy, because, unlike what I put in, there are a farrago of reliable sources to be asserted. Storms was neat and organized, so I expect I'll be putting in many tidbits of theory from many reliable sources. Simon, to give a little example, covers Mills' hydrino theory. There are many more theories published in reliable source, not reviewed by Storms.

This is the principle: balance is determined by the weight of reliable sources, with preference being given to peer-reviewed reliable source. Sources are not to be excluded on the basis that they are seen as "fringe." If you want to note that some claim is reliable source is "not mainstream," you will need a reliable source for that, but you can't take it out of the article if it's relevant and reliably sourced, though, occasionally, you can move it to a different article that is more specialized. We actually have an article that could hold much of that, Condensed matter nuclear science. It was protected into a redirect to Cold fusion by JzG, and that's one of the claims against him before ArbComm right now.... if there is any sentiment to reopen that article and put the more general theoretical stuff there, with summary here, that would be just fine with me! --Abd (talk) 13:40, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

As I commented a few days ago, Storms' book was only reviewed by the Journal of Scientific Exploration (which works as a journal to allow fringe theories to be published somewhere) and it was apparently not being cited by anybody. So not only the book is at odds with mainstream, but it doesn't seem to have had any real repercusion in science.

Also concerns about conflict of interest. Notice he is also mentioned in the "sourcing" section above as working for "Lattice Energy, LLC", and it appears that he is "[conducting] LENR research as an employee, senior scientist, and minority owner of a privately held company named Lattice Energy, LLC (...) Dr. Storms was a consultant to the company in 2003, became a senior scientist to the company in 2004, and continues to conduct laboratory experiments for the company on a full-time, exclusive basis." [52]. It appears that this company wants to commercialize cold fusion products, and that Storms wrote and published his book while working full-time for them, so there's a huge conflict of interest there in making cold fusion look viable.

So, it represents fringe views, it's not notable, it's not reviewed by any journal apart from a journal dedicated to fringe, it's not cited by other scientists, and it also has a COI. So, it can probably be used to represent the view of cold fusion proponents on the experiments, but it shouldn't be given much weight, and certainly no weight at all regarding the current state of the art in science, as being a fringe and probably biased source.

We already have RS talking about how CF scientists made their own journals and conferences to publish their own stuff away from mainstream because they weren't being accepted. This seems to be one of these cases. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:01, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) Enric, most scientists are employed in their field of research. If the book were self-published, or published by the company, the argument would be cogent. But it wasn't.

This is the publisher's list of works on physics: http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/nppp.shtml This is not some fringe publisher. This is the publisher's blurb on the book: http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/6425.html Storms is listed as "(retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA)"

Yes, we have RS on the point about publication within the field, but the tenor of it isn't as is implied. It is about the effective blacklisting of research in the field, where the normal peer-review process is interrupted. In any case, you can suit yourself. If Storms lists a paper, it shows notability within the field, and I'll stand on that one. Storms is cited, but it's quite recent. Book publishing is slow. These arguments are typical coming from anti-fringe editors, who too often seek to exclude what would ordinarily be considered reliable source by any objective standard. However, I'll start, if we don't get Storms back in, or something better, by adding theories and discussion of theories from other reliable sources. As I wrote, it will be messier. It's about time that editors here start seeking consensus on the basic issues around the presentation of cold fusion in this article. I, for one, will start by asserting that reliable sources are reliable sources, and that text supported by reliable source shouldn't be removed based on editorial POV about "fringe." That's been rejected by ArbComm, quite clearly. So, now, we, as free and independent editors, will work out the consequences of that decision. --Abd (talk) 18:51, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I think you are missing the point Abd. The question is whether Storm and Simon are RS for main-stream science or even some form of fringe-science. Storm is seriously discussing spontaneous human combustion and Biological transmutation while he is totting cold fusion with a potentially serious financial conflict of interest. Even if he published a book though main stream channels should his scientific opinion be taken seriously? Even if he can "cite" evidence for these claims its not impressive. Anyone can come up with two three peer-reviewed sources to support any claim they wish. The peer review process isn't perfect, which has already been pointed out by both sides. Is Storm really the best that the pro-cold fusion have to offer? Moving on to Simon, he apparently sympathizes John Bockris a nut case in a bunch of different ways and likes the Mills' hydrino junk which is obviously fraudulent. I don't think Storm and Simon are appropriate RS for a scientific discussion even if they are perfect examples of most of the pro-CF community.--OMCV (talk) 21:29, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Strawpoll

Link to diff - [53]

Abd's version provides too much weight to a single, unreliable source

1. Hipocrite (talk) 04:38, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

   Hey, who says the source is unreliable? Does that "who" understand that there are different sorts of unreliability? For example, Isaac Newton could probably be considered a Reliable Source regarding descriptions of various physical phenomena. However, Newton also put a lot of effort into thinking about various religion-oriented notions. It is likely he would not qualify as a reliable source in that field. So, with respect to cold fusion of deuterium in palladium metal, a particular Source could be very reliable about that, while simultaneously being unreliable about other matters that have nothing to do with this article. V (talk) 05:30, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

   V is correct. Actually, though, Newton would be a kind of RS in the other fields, as a notable individual whose opinions might be relevant; but his work or claims in the other field are irrelevant to his work or claims in the field of his recognized scientific expertise. Storms is widely recognized, published in peer-reviewed journals, as an expert in the field of low-energy nuclear reactions. The book is RS. Because of the nature of the field, claims regarding it must be attributed, they cannot be reported as simple fact, though some of the CF claims are rising to that point (but are not there yet). In this case, though, the article is setting out to describe the theories that have been advanced; at that point, it's necessary to describe theories that might be fringe, even wild, if they are notable, and that Storms discusses them is prima facie evidence of notability. Discussion in RS is the standard, period. There are other theories discussed in other RS, which should be added. Claims about the persons involved, alleged conflict of interest, all this is irrelevant to the basic determination of RS, only to possible balance, and balance is not reached by removal of RS material from one perceived side. Which is what is happening here. --Abd (talk) 11:07, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

2. I agree with Enric's assessment. Verbal chat 09:22, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
3. Any significant scientific discussion derived from the Storm or Simon book is unreliable. Agree.--OMCV (talk) 11:23, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
4. Support. Storms has some notability in the field, and may have something important to say, but adding all this text in the article gives an incorrect impression of the field. It is also partly redundant with the rest of the article. Remember that wikipedia is a service to readers who typically know very little on a topic, so we need to be careful to present the field accurately. I should add that Abd saying (in an edit summary) that he is unable to trim the length of the five paragraphs does not seem helpful. Olorinish (talk) 13:46, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

   The problem, Olorinish, is not that I can't trim them, it's that I can't trim them much without damaging the report. If a source states that there are N necessary characteristics of a theory, for example, the list can't be shortened to N-1 items without distorting the report. I definitely can still shorten the section, but without any confirmation that any of this would be accepted, why should I bother? I'll still try, a little, but ... I also have lots of other stuff to do, an ongoing RfAr, and kids to take care of.... --Abd (talk) 15:42, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

5. Support limitation. While Storms is certainly notable in the field, nothing we've seen yet by reviewers from outside of the believers' circle implies that his analysis is objective and critically balanced. (I use "believer" advisedly as an antonym of "skeptic". "Proponent" is the antonym of "opponent" and has been misapplied in this discussion for too long.)LeadSongDog come howl 14:06, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

   Thanks, LSD. I still claim that we "limit" undue weight by balancing, not by excluding what is in reliable source. "RS" doesn't mean only that a source can be used without balance, lots of RS requires attribution for various reasons. However, Storms' report is mostly quite plain as a neutral statement, and it's fairly easy to establish that. (Consider his very plain statement, "No published theory has met all of these requirements." That includes what appears to be his favorite theory.) It's simply a lot more complicated to get there. --Abd (talk) 15:42, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

6. As I argumented in the section above. --Enric Naval (talk) 08:43, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
7. As Enric ecellently argued in the section above. ;-) --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:26, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

   Apart from removing tons of relevant and significant - and completely neutral and balanced - info - for no apparent reason. Kevin Baas^talk 14:12, 6 May 2009 (UTC) Opps - had it backwards. Kevin Baas^talk 16:40, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

   Notice that he didn't remove any actual info. The diff puts the text in red because of how it calculates what text was removed, it's still all there. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:55, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd's version should be used but balanced

1. "My" version over-uses a single source meeting WP:RS, but the remedy is not to remove RS material, but to balance it with other RS material, if that is available. The balancing could be in either direction; the sourcing for CF theories should be extended to show additional RS or more specific reference from within Storms, or if the Storms material does not cover criticism of CF theories, that should be added from RS. The repetitive removals are removals of reliably sourced material in violation of the ArbComm decision at Fringe_science#Prominence and Fringe_science#Advocacy. If balancing material is not available in RS, the claim that the apparent view of a source is not mainstream is questionable. --Abd (talk) 11:00, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
2. I will agree that regardless of how overweighted is the data that Abd used, the proper solution is to find RS data that balances it. Why don't those who think there is a problem here realize that IF THE DATA CANNOT BE BALANCED, then the data may be more true than not-true??? (And therefore there would be less need to strike a balance. Does the article on Relativity include contradictory data? If it doesn't, shouldn't it???) V (talk) 18:25, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

   Ironically, there's a whole bunch of relativity deniers. They are not mentioned in our article about relativity, though they have their own little corner of nuttery at Status_of_special_relativity#Alternatives_to_special_relativity. They have their own little journals and are absolutly certain that special relativity is bunk. Oh - and there's no recent peer reviewed paper refuting them, but they're still totally ignored in the article on Relativity. Hipocrite (talk) 18:39, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

   Yeah, but how much RS is there on this bunch? And especially peer-reviewed publications? The article you cited is totally unsourced on any side. It's a very serious mistake to lump Cold fusion in with ordinary fringe, it's quite an unusual case, it looks less and less like Polywater or N-rays every year. --Abd (talk) 03:27, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

   The references are in the target articles: emitter theory has two papers from Am. J. Phys., Aether drag hypothesis has one from Eur. Phys. J., and Lorentz ether theory has a ton of sources from many dutch, german and american RS. --Enric Naval (talk) 08:40, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

   I suppose I should say something about my question above being somewhat rhetorical. There is a reason why the relativity article doesn't have much contrary data: there simply isn't a lot of contrary data. Well, in the CF field, most of the contrary data is about 20 years old, and it has since been mostly explained in terms of insufficient loading of the palladium with deuterium. Also, some of the newer evidence might be called "startlingly compelling" --I hope you folks saw that video linked above, where the Robert Duncan who appeared on the 60Minutes broadcast was able to show some of the data gathered at that research facility in Israel. That "erupted palladium" image is awesome, with its microscopic spots of melted palladium (m.p.= 1554.9°C or 2830.82°F) (Hey, Kirk Shanahan! How does CCS explain that picture?) V (talk) 13:08, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

3. Kevin Baas^talk 16:40, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

The elephant in the living room: What "proposed explanations"?

Above is a straw poll, proposed by Hipocrite, about the section revision I made that actually described the challenges that cold fusion theories would have to face, the experimental findings considered within the field to require theoretical explanation, and some actual explanations as found in RS, and, sorry, Storms is RS. You may argue that other RS is of greater weight, but not to a ridiculous extent that RS is excluded. I could rewrite the section using more sources, to be sure.

Please read Cold_fusion#Proposed_explanations and see if you think what's in this section is in any way adequate to address the section topic, besides being an extraordinary example of poor writing, including redundancies. I see no proposed explanations there, beyond a brief mention of Preparata, i.e., that some explanation by Preparata exists. (That's quite old, by the way, though of historical significance at least; Preparata predicted that He-4 would be the predominant nuclear ash, which matches experimental results).

If there are "explanations" of the reported phenomena covered by this article, available in reliable source, we should cover them, and excluding them amounts to violation of the ArbComm ruling at WP:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science. What the article does over and over is point out that no explanation has been generally accepted, and then this gets glossed as cold fusion being unexplained, which isn't correct.

In the field, it's a common observation that the problem isn't lack of explanation, it's too many explanations, with insufficient evidence to decide between them. Cold fusion researchers tend to not be experts in quantum electrodynamics, which could be the necessary field. And it's a difficult field and application to what turns out to be the highly complex environment of the surface of palladium in an electrolysis experiment, or the surface of palladium nanoparticles as in the Arata experiments, quite diffcult, perhaps beyond present state of the art in the field. (Preparata proposed a QED explanation, and Fleischmann himself said that he was looking for examples of experimental behavior where quantum mechanics, which the nuclear physicists mostly use, would be inadequate to explain experimental results. He thought that he'd be lucky to see some tiny effect, that mostly likely the differences would be below experimental resolution. He found more than he sought. In other words, his work was, from the beginning, an effort to explore the "fringes" of science, a place where common theory was known to be an approximation. We don't tell this story here, AFAIK, and the source that tells his memory of the history has been excluded. It's not ordinary RS, it's a conference paper, but being by a notable expert, it should be usable if attributed as his report.)

Back to the point here, making a judgment of a section as unbalanced and removing the material, if the section without the material is more unbalanced, makes no sense. Below, please note under each section which version of the section on Proposed explanations is better. You can !vote for more than one, presumably if you think that they are equally acceptable, within range. The third section refers to "the current or other version," which may be different from the two versions I present first, and I ask for permission to put a link with your comment, should you comment there, that shows the version as of your edit's time, if you don't do that yourself.

So.... I'm setting up a new local poll that asks a more relevant question. If we can't find consensus directly, we can then work on a content RfC to get help.

Which is better?

Please choose by signing. Choosing more than one may indicate that more than one version is an improvement over the ones not approved. "Better" means that the encyclopedia is improved by that version, over the others. It certainly does not imply perfection or completion of our process. --Abd (talk) 16:23, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Version based on Storms, largely

Proposed explanations, version 1

1. Abd (talk) 16:23, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

   This has been rejected above already. Hipocrite (talk) 16:33, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

2. Much more informative. Addresses issues that the reader would be interested to know. Kevin Baas^talk 16:41, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
3. There are some things in this version that I think are not appropriate. The Item 2 that includes this text "heavy isotopes with very high Coulomb barriers" --that has nothing do with this article (says at top of article "about the Fleischmann Pons experiments"); we only need to discuss hydrogen and helium isotopes here. Not to mention that there is far less RS available regarding nuclear reactions of other isotopes inside palladium; a hypothesis that explains hydrogen fusion does not automatically have to be able to explain other reactions, even though Storms states that it should. Next, I suspect that this whole section, or the parts of it we keep, should follow something of the original text, in which it is mentioned that Storms reviewed the field in 2007. Next, some of the "observations needing to be addressed by theory" are already described in the first part of the Discussion section; there is no need to repeat it. Next, I don't recall ever seeing anything before about very high detection of tritium. If that was true, then regardless of a mechanism describing its production, its presence should have been, for years, a "red flag" for all detractors, that something interesting has been going on in CF experiments. So I wonder about the actual truth of that claim, since many detractors are as vitriolic as ever. Next, in the Sun the H+D reaction yields helium-3, and while Storms talks about H+D reactions, he seems to be focussing on tritium production instead. Why? (I ask that because it is not reasonable; when tritium does its radioactive-decay thing, it becomes helium 3, so there is no reason, energetically speaking, for the production of tritium to be favored over helium 3, when the H+D reaction happens. Not to mention that the Weak Nuclear Force would have to be involved to convert a proton to a neutron in that reaction, and if it was THAT willing to get involved, then it should be willing to get involved in the H+H reaction that yields deuterium --and that does not seem to be happening in CF control-experiments.) Well, that's enough commentary for now; I recommend the Storms stuff be pared down so that only the hydrogen-fusion parts are kept, and all the other transmutation stuff not kept. V (talk) 20:01, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Version resulting from removal of Storms material

Proposed explanations, version 2

This removal was already covered by "Abd's version provides too much weight to a single, unreliable source" section on the straw poll above, which is probably why nobody !voted anything here.... --Enric Naval (talk) 15:47, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Current or other version

Proposed explanations, current version (Please edit to show current version section header if it changes)

1. The whole section lacks any reliable sourcing and should be deleted from the article. In the absence, mentioning anything that Storms says as anything other than his reasonably non-notable opinion is providing undue weight to his reasonably non-notable opinion. Hipocrite (talk) 16:33, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

   permanent link to version current as of Hipocrite's comment, the same as Version 2 above. Hipocrite then edited the article to produce [54], which I assume is thought an improvement over Version 2. --Abd (talk) 20:27, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Other comments

This poll was set up to make an initial estimation of consensus, on a question more relevant than the previous set-up, by --Abd (talk) 16:23, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Note that the version from Storms is only referenced to Storms at this point (in the bulk of it). However, much of what Storms (a secondary source) states can be sourced from his sources, as well. The complication is that sometimes Storms is citing, as a reviewer of a field can do (and often will do), sources such as conference papers that aren't peer-reviewed. My point here is that there is other reliable source on this topic and that the Storms material was used as a secondary source showing notability within the topic of our article, and to organize the material. The "Storms version" still needs work, no doubt about it. --Abd (talk) 16:23, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Response by Abd to misleading comment from Hipocrite

Hipocrite has commented that the Storms version was "rejected above already." However, that process is not complete and the result was mixed and the wrong questions were asked. Note that Hipocrite asked two questions. "My view?" or "Abd's view," to summarize. Abd did not endorce the supposed Abd's view, because it was false and not asserted by me. I acknowledged that the version I put up was imbalanced in some ways, but I assert that the version that was there, which Hipocrite reverted back, was more unbalanced in the other direction, that the Storms text improves the article, and that the way to deal with imbalance is to balance, not exclude. Hipocrite has now removed more of this section, which I'm not challenging since I want to revamp the whole section anyway, why bother with touching up the lipstick on a pig? Hipocrite imagines that he gets a consensus by asking biased questions and looking at short-term results. No, Hipocrite, consensus is negotiated and is not based on !voting. The poll I initiated here is not for the purpose of making a decision, it is for the purpose of guiding negotiations, and it simply begins the process. What you found was simply what we already knew: most editors who regularly edit this article take a fairly strong skeptical position and are likely to demand very strong sourcing for material that isn't skeptical. However, most of them are reasonable and will shift their opinion with discussion. I asked the WP:IAR question which trumps all the others, it even trumps RS details (though not WP:V). In this case, Storms is being used to assert opinion within the field of cold fusion, not overall opinion among scientists, which is something that is, on this topic, quite difficult to assess. The 2004 DoE review has been analyzed (I think well), to show a 2:1 position in favor of the basic experimental finding of Pons and Fleischmann as having, behind it, now, convincing evidence. That was done by excluding the four or five reviews clearly written by nuclear physicists, who have, shall we say, as a group, a conflict of interest, a strong reason for bias. Cold fusion is a topic which crosses fields, and what we appear to have is a good majority of chemists saying "This is not chemistry," and a stronger majority of nuclear physicists saying "You haven't proven that this is physics," with many of them believing that cold fusion was proven wrong in 1989-1990, which isn't supported by peer-reviewed reliable source, not back then, and not since. It's a "popular conception" among scientists and others, that's all. (From another source I was just reading, the CBS 60 minutes report), I might roughly estimate that chemists who briefly review the topic think it's not chemistry by roughly two to one or so, maybe more, and nuclear physticists without review think it's not nuclear physics by roughly ten to one, but it's very difficult to assess at this point.) What chemists in general think based on simple opinion without review is possibly the other way, toward majority opinion that the topic was closed twenty years ago, but that's not clear. In the CBS report, a physicist was found and supported to examine the evidence; a reputable physicist who was initially skeptical. He became convinced. How many other physicists would become convinced if something moved them over the hump of spending time reviewing material in a "dead field," supposedly "junk science"? Storms is RS by WP:RS standards. The use of extraneous arguments, which might apply to questions of conflict of sources, to simply exclude material, is a hallmark of pseudoskeptical editors, dedicated "fringe-fighters." There is, in fact, on the level of peer-reviewed academic sources, no support for the position claimed by Hipocrite as to the current mainstream opinion, and, if we look at the 2004 DoE review, the only general review of the field in the last five years, deficient as it was, but designed to be to some degree "neutral," we see that scientific opinion was divided then. I can sympathize with attempts to keep fringe theories from being presented out-of-balance, but Cold fusion is a quite unusual case, there is evidence that can be asserted that this isn't fringe science at all, it's just science in a field that, because of the enormous possible implications, and because of the difficulty of some of the work, remains very controversial. Hipocrite confidently asserts that this is fringe and junk, but the American Chemical Society doesn't devote a four-day session to recent work in the field, making it very visible with a press release, for a fringe science. That's indirect evidence, but we can look at the 2004 DoE review itself. The DoE doesn't convene panels to consider true fringe science, though I could believe that a government agency might convene a panel to examine some phony-baloney if there was a large political constituency for it. But there is no such political constituency for cold fusion. It's still a largely rejected field; the problem is that the rejection is based on popular opinion and the opinion of scientists who are almost entirely ignorant of the work of the last twenty years. I've talked to some: their first impression is, "Wasn't that proven wrong twenty years ago?" No, it wasn't. What happened was that certain of Fleischmann's findings with respect to radiation were incorrect -- and this represents consensus within the field. Fleischmann found neutrons, he thought, and he was wrong. Then, with respect to neutrons, there was research back and forth for years, some research finding no neutrons, some finding low levels near background. The latest work, which made a huge flap this March, shows that, yes, Virginia, there are neutrons, but at such low levels that, even though careful controls show that the radiation is associated with the creation of high-saturation palladium deuteride -- which should show, by classical theories, no such effect -- the level is so low that it has little to do with whatever produces the excess heat, it is probably some kind of side-reaction, and that it is a side-reaction, and at such a low level, explains the negative findings and the near-background positive findings. The neutrons are theorized by Mosier-Boss to come from a classic, normal reaction, one of the predominant reaction pathways, not the normally rare d+d->He4 reaction that has been one of the classic cold fusion hypotheses. Hot fusion. So what is hot fusion doing in a cold fusion cell? We now have quite a bit of secondary source on the significance of this research. But, at this point, references to this are being reverted as giving undue weight to "non-mainstream" opinion. The perception of undue weight comes from what is easy to find in older media sources and other popular, non-peer reviewed sources, plus some recent media off-hand, unsourced comments that are easily considered to reflect common media habit: don't investigate, just report what's been reported before, you can quickly get it from the files. (Such as "The Pons and Fleischmann work was never replicated," a highly misleading statement, given that there are 153 peer-reviewed papers showing excess heat in the palladium deuteride system. Some of this work is acknowledged to be of poor quality by both "believers" and "skeptics," but ... Hoffman, a skeptic, writing in 1995, when there was much less work available, noted that some of the excess heat work was being done by experts in calorimetry, familiar with possible artifacts, and that much of the work was careful; Hoffman, actually, didn't examine the excess heat evidence in any detail, but focused on the nuclear evidence, which was, at that time, relatively weak. In hindsight, we can see what was later replicated, there was good early work, lost in the noise.) This is the irony here: normally, with fringe science topics, it's popular media reports showing some support for fringe opinion or at least for the notability of it, against peer-reviewed academic publication showing very little, if any, support for fringe. In the present case, it's the opposite, and to scare up "mainstream" opinion against cold fusion from peer-reviewed source, it's necessary to do quite a bit of synthesis. What has happened is an entire field of research has been considered "fringe," but it's quite reasonable to think that, for example, the view that there is excess, unexplained heat from palladium deuteride is probably the majority opinion now among those who look at the evidence, at least minimally. That is shown by the 2004 report, and it took another five years before the ACS devoted more than an occasional one-day seminar to cold fusion, this year a four-day seminar, which shows an increase in credibility. Simon (2002) quite clearly acknowledges that cold fusion was "dead." That general opinion was that the case was closed. But he calls cold fusion "undead science," hence the title of his book. What he documents quite thoroughly is the mechanisms by which the "death certificate" was issued, and it wasn't about scientific process, it was about intense use of media, press conferences, pronouncements of "pseudoscience" and "junk science" and popular books designed to push a point of view (Huizenga, Taubes), and how what little was known about the work was presented and framed. And he notes that research continued, some of it being published in peer-reviewed journals (the "blacklisting" wasn't universal), with conferences and proposals of theory, and that competent researchers were involved, in spite of the serious cutoff of funding. Richard Garwin, the prominent physicist and (I think) member of the 1989 DoE review panel who has remained a dedicated opponent of cold fusion, says that he's not going to be satisfied until the cold fusioneers can brew him a cup of tea, he drinks it, and then they brew him another. There is great video of him saying this in the CBS report that just aired. (See: [60 minutes text]). (Can you spell "smug"?) What this reveals is definitely not skepticism, it's the opposite: it's attachment to an idea. He's skeptical of the ideas of others, but credulous with regard to his own. Cold fusion isn't about solving the world's energy problems (though maybe it could do that), and it is quite possible that the phenomenon could exist and be real and all that, and no cups of tea get brewed, just as we can't brew cups of tea with an accepted form of cold fusion: muon-catalyzed fusion. The first question to be asked, scientifically, is "what are the experimental results, what artifacts might be causing these results, instead of there being some new phenomenon; how can we determine, through controlled experiment, whether the results are artifact or substantial," and on through a process that normally proceeds through back-and-forth peer-reviewed publication and through interaction between theorists and experimental scientists. However, what happened with cold fusion was that a decision was made by a few, such as the late editor of Nature, that "Cold fusion was dead," and there was no use wasting the time of a peer-review panel. Scientists who had negative findings to report also found it difficult to get their reports published, they were rejected just like positive ones, but the most serious impact was that poor negative research that was published before most publication shut down was never challenged within the same publications, which is normally what happens. Examples abound, in fact. It's quite a story, quite worth telling no matter what the ultimate resolution is with regard to low energy nuclear reactions themselves. Here, it is an example of how article quality can greatly suffer whenever there are dedicated factions of editors promoting opposing views. If the faction supporting a popular or "mainstream" view prevails without actually finding consensus, we get an article that might be supportable from sources, but which is boring and incompletely informative and which can, in some cases, misrepresent what peer-reviewed reliable source can show. If the alleged "fringe" faction prevails, we get an unbalanced article that is obviously defective. In my view, while both outcomes are poor, the former result is actually worse, because we then have reinforcement of popular vs. informed opinion, which creates and fosters the entrenchment of shallow thinking, and I know of at least one other major example where an alleged consensus was imposed on a field and stood for roughly thirty years before a more comprehensive view began to break through, with the present situation being that views which have actually been discredited by recent research are still being pushed through the popular media by "experts" who are not following the academic work, they simply work in the field and teach what they were taught. The other side of this model is also bad, obviously, but is much more easily fixed, it's blatantly obvious, and, by definition, it bucks the majority view among editors, who are, more or less, a sample of the population. --Abd (talk) 19:59, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

moved from the Version 2 section above. --Abd (talk) 20:03, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
REGARDING VERSION 2 ABOVE, this is a complaint. Why are the texts of the two subsections, "Fusion-related processes" and "Other theoretical interpretations", so similar? For that reason alone this wording is not good-quality. V (talk) 19:37, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

There is no doubt that Version 1 needs improvement; the question was only whether the removal of Version 1 in favor of Version 2 was an improvement or not. I think not, obviously, or I wouldn't bother with this! Yes, there is redundancy; however, my sense was, in writing this, that having the theoretical considerations present in a focused way before presenting theories would be of great value, and thus we might deal with redundancy by eliminating the other material, making sure that the substance is represented here. As part of that process, the section would become more balanced. Storms, it seems to me, attempts to present the issues in a balanced way, and even what might be seen as way-out wacko (biological transmutation?) isn't, to those who know the field. There is no claim here, in my version, that biological transmutation is real, but only that a theory which explains or allows it might be useful. Storms does not expect that a good theory will explain all the observations, and one obvious reason is that there are thousands of observations in cold fusion experiments and some of them are almost certainly artifacts. A good theory would explain as much as possible, that's all. If CF is possible in the palladium deuteride system, there is no intrinsic reason that some protein can't arrange matters to cause transmutation. It just seems awfully unlikely, doesn't it? But those experimental results that show BT are a bit hard to explain away except by knee-jerk rejection (a la OCMV). Which is quite what the scientific method, in its entirety, is an attempt to get away from. --Abd (talk) 20:39, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Condensed matter nuclear science

Some of you may be aware that we had an article on Condensed matter nuclear science. It was redirected here by ScienceApologist (now topic banned from fringe science articles and presently blocked), edit warring appeared, and JzG reverted it to a redirect and indef protected it, which is, all by itself, quite an unusual response to a single bit of edit warring. This action is one of the actions underlying the present RfAr regarding myself and JzG. Be that as it may, much of the research that is going on can't be stuffed into the category of Cold fusion, the subject was called "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" by the 2004 DoE panel. Most presentations at the International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science are indeed about what we might call "Cold fusion," but most researchers no longer even mention the word "fusion," rather they report on "anomalous heat production," or "the palladium deuteride system." Given that there are only two kinds of nuclear reactions: spontaneous decay and some kind of "fusion," it's technically true that "low energy nuclear reactions," which almost always involve some kind of induction of a reaction, it's not "spontaneous" like radioactive decay or fission, can be at least loosely covered by "fusion." Except that we don't really know what's going on in there, so calling it "fusion" makes assumptions that could, possibly, turn out to be false. There are excess heat observations, well-established. Are they caused by fusion? Some opinion in the LENR field, notably Krivit, as shown in recent media sources, is that it isn't fusion at all. It's something else.

I'd like the opinion of editors here about unprotecting that article and beginning to develop a more general approach there. In particular, I have in mind the work of Vysotskii, for starters, since what he reports is elemental transformation, and some kind of catalyzed fusion is simply one speculative interpretation of what might be happening. Vysotskii has also reported acceleration of radioactive decay by bacteria, and that isn't fusion. Probably.

Unprotecting the article doesn't mean that it would necessarily not continue to be redirected here, but only that we can make the decision by ordinary editorial process. Ultimately, what I see would be that there would be at least two articles, one about the science history, sources being media and other secondary sources, including work by sociologists (quite a number of whom have examined the Cold fusion affair), and one (or more) about the science, where peer-reviewed academic publication would be the standard for sourcing. A science article and a history article. The researchers in the field call it Condensed matter nuclear science. So should we, I'd say, with a redirect from Low energy nuclear reactions to it. None of this means setting up a POV fork, but simply recognizing that there are two topics here, and mixing them does justice to neither. Each article would summarize the other in a section under summary style. --Abd (talk) 01:51, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Vysotskii and biological transmutation

Right now, biological transmutation isn't mentioned in Cold fusion and a See also link was just [removed by Enric Naval]. (He removed several things, all of which are okay except this one, so I'll put it back.)

(If biological transmutation isn't "Cold fusion," what is it?)

In any case, the most common researcher name that comes up connecting cold fusion and biological transmutation is Vladimir I. Vysotskii, who in 1997 was associated with Kiev Shevchenko University, Radiophysical Faculty, Kiev, Ukraine. So I thought I'd comment on what sources I find about him and his work.

[55] is a peer reviewed (mainstream journal) 1998 paper that might not, at first glance, seem to have anything to do with cold fusion. Except that the abstract begins with:

A general theory of controlling and changing the spontaneous nuclear γ decay is proposed. The phenomenon of nuclear decay controlling is a result of the interaction of the excited nucleus with zero-energy electromagnetic modes, which in turn interact with the controlling screen. In the general case the spontaneous decay probability with the presence of adjacent material bodies always differs from the corresponding probability for free space.

I was sensitized to this by a comment in Hoffman (Dialogue, 1995) pointing out that Be-7 is stable in free space and yet has a short half-life when absorbed on a surface. Hoffman points out that "If changes in charged particles orbiting around a nucleus can cause major changes in events within the nucleus, then there are chemical effects on radioactivity."

Vysotskii is proposing in his paper theory regarding the influence of chemical environment on radioactive decay. This is very much a Condensed matter nuclear science topic, but has nothing to do with fusion, directly.

So, we find Vysotskii presenting conference papers at ICCF conferences, for example: ICCF10 (2003): http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/VysotskiiVsuccessful.pdf Successful Experiments On Utilization Of High-Activity Nuclear Waste In The Process Of Transmutation In Growing Associations Of Microbiological Cultures

There are twelve conference papers in the lenr-canr.org bibliography by Vysotskii, or papers published by Infinite Energy which I'm not prepared at this time to assert as reliable source (!); the earliest I saw was presented at ICCF4 in 1993: On Possibility of Non-Barrier DD-Fusion in Volume of Boiling D2O During Electrolysis In 1996, an article appeared on Infinite Energy: Experimental discovery and investigation of the phenomenon of nuclear transmutation of isotopes in growing biological cultures

And at the recent ACS seminar in March, 2009: [56] Nuclear transmutation of isotopes in biological systems: History, models, experiments and perspectives (page 3 of the document with presentation summaries).

There is no doubt that Vysotskii's work is highly visible in the cold fusion field, thus it is no wonder that Storms would consider this prominent enough to include in a list of reported phenomena that a LENR theory should attempt to explain. Vysotskii isn't an isolated researcher, he appears to be a physicist and most of his papers have co-authors who are also academics.

The lenr-canr biblography page for Vysotskii is at http://www.lenr-canr.org/PDetail12.htm#3345.

Vysotskii appears to have done research sponsored by the U.S. goverment, see [57].

A book has been published, Nuclear Fusion and Transmutation of Isotopes in Biological Systems By Vladimir Vysotskii and Alla Kornilova author-provided description, Moscow, "MIR" Publishing House, 2003. The book is available though Infinite Energy's online store. Now, what is "MIR" Publishing House? This seems to be Mir_Publishers. This looks like it could be reliable source, though, obviously, the topic is controversial. And I'm not finding independent confirmation. Note, though, that there is earlier work reporting biological transmutation, by Kervran and Komaki; Vysotskii may be a more sophisticated confirmation of that earlier work.

Vysotskii is a heavily cited author at [58].

And, I shudder to note (antifringe editors, please avert your eyes), Vysotskii has written about possible physics behind Water memory.

mmmm... Here is a googlebooks result: [59] Metal Ions in Biology and Medicine - 1998 By Peter Bratter, Philippe Collery, Virginia Negretti De Bratter, Lylia Khassanova] The chart shown here is the same chart as is shown in Storms. This is Vysotkii's paper, and gives much more experimental detail than Storms reported (worth reading for those who have criticized Storms's report of this work). This was a collection of papers given at International Symposium on Metal Ions in Biology and Medicine organized in Munich in May 1998. There appears to have been some kind of review process for papers, but how deep that would have been, I could only speculate.

So: what do we have? We have some very remarkable reports, considered notable by Storms, and an apparently competent researcher, albeit one willing to challenge norms, working with established academic institutions. I'd say we have enough to include mention of biological transformations as an aspect of our topic, which was done in the material recently removed by Hipocrite, and to justify a See-also to Biological transmutation. Beyond that, the lack of independent confirmation makes it difficult to do more than mention the existence of the research.

The credibility of this research rests politically on the credibility of cold fusion research in general. While at first I was inclined to be extremely skeptical of the concept of biological transmutation, on reflection I've concluded that if CF can be pulled off by a surface effect with a palladium lattice, where it isn't actually the bulk palladium that manages the trick, and if CF effects take place with other systems (which apparently it does), it wouldn't, then, be so surprising at all that a biological mechanism could evolve, proteins can pull of some amazing tricks. My guess is that within a few years we'll have much better information all this. --Abd (talk) 08:10, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

There is no source for the biological transmutation thing apart from Storms, who only dedicates it a one-liner. The lack of relation to CF was discussed in the "Living organisms?" section above, and the problems with using Storms as a source are discussed at "Removal of Storms material." section above.

The biology book is about transmutation of Fe⁵⁷ and not about deuterium or lattice, and it makes no reference to cold fusion. You need to provide a source making a direct relationship between biological transmutation and cold fusion (one that is not Storms) if you want it mentioned in the article. --Enric Naval (talk) 10:58, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Enric, you seem to have missed something. Storms devotes more than a one-liner to this. The "one-liner" is where he cites explanation of the possibility of biological transmutation in his list of observed phenomena that a theory of cold fusion would profitably address. Elsewhere, he gives almost two pages to it, pp. 141-142. The research he gives the most ink to, reproducing the Mossbauer spectra, is cited above. Then there is the book published by MIR, which is a major, established Russian publisher. Then there are myriads of conference papers, not just Cold Fusion conferences. Then there are many non-CF related peer-review published papers by Vysotskii, and he's widely cited for these and they go way back. And from all this, I'm only suggesting that there is a relation between biological transmutation and cold fusion, which, by excluding having an article on Condensed matter nuclear science, which any biological transmutation would be, we force to be in this article. Do you get my drift?

Absolutely, in now way should we treat biological transmutation as an established fact. But there are books on it that predate 1989. It exists as an obviously fringe field, with a typical fringe phenomenon: because the possibility is considered preposterous, the research reports are not taken seriously, and neither refuted nor confirmed. There is enough to treat it as notable, and it's even notable enough to have its own article (which is more notable than necessary for a mention). How can you argue that Condensed matter nuclear science stuff belongs here, but Biological transmutation doesn't deserve a See also? --Abd (talk) 11:13, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

In that both are examples of pathological science perpetuated by fraud and bad experimental procedure? I kid. No, it does not. Hipocrite (talk) 11:59, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Since you are so concerned about fraud and bad experimental procedure, perhaps you can find some reliable source on significant fraud with respect to Cold fusion or the work of Vysotskii? Cold fusion is a field which, because of the huge potential market for inventions, is going to attract all kinds of parasites, and you can find quite a bit on hucksters on New Energy Times; as to "bad experimental procedure," again: researchers make mistakes and the normal publish/response cycle cleans it up. That cycle was interrupted, such that bad experimental procedure and interpretation, in 1989 or 1990, got published, and the responses were suppressed, normally considered a very, very rude thing for a publisher to do. Hipocrite, it seems you think you are supporting a scientific point of view, but you aren't. You are, instead, supporting non-science, i.e., uninformed opinion. I will be asserting, first here in Talk, a series of reviews of cold fusion, both in peer-reviewed publications and in media sources, showing the evolution of the field. But we could start with both DoE reviews. I presume you have read them? --Abd (talk) 13:53, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

If you cannot remain civil, I will not discuss this with you, except to say that consensus above states that your proposed sources are unreliable. Hipocrite (talk) 14:11, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

I shall "call" you on that claim. The straw vote was about this statement: "Abd's version provides too much weight to a single, unreliable source" --the people who voted in favor of that are not necessarily all claiming that both parts of the statement are true. One part is about too much weight to a single source, and the other part is about the reliability of the source. Any crooked politician can tell you about wording something so that something bad for everyone can get included with a bunch of things that are good for most everyone. That's why when I saw the statement I immediately focussed on YOUR claim that the source is unreliable, when that is too broad; all we need is reliability with respect to Cold Fusion involving palladium and hydrogen only. Shall we have another straw poll SPECIFICALLY about that, just to see how right or wrong you really are, about Storms and Pd/H/CF? V (talk) 15:55, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Eh? Uncivil? Where? As to the alleged consensus, can you point me to it? Your version of the poll asked if my edit was unbalanced, and I agreed it was unbalanced, in fact, though not as to degree and comparison with your edit. You did not ask the single question of whether or not Storms was RS, so it cannot be determined if the answers were to that part of the question or the other, and it would be difficult for a mere poll, without adequate discussion, to determine that a book published by a major publisher is not RS, this cuts to policy and guidelines. Further, only Storms was considered, above I assert Vysotskii's book published by MIR. Where was it found that this wasn't reliable? In your imagination? Can you document that? --Abd (talk) 15:34, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

By the way, examining the comments with the !votes shows division on the RS question; the principal question answered was balance, which was actually a moot question. As to current status of the two polls: With some pile-on of editors who agree with you, with very recognizable names that would be expected to do so from consistent edit history: 7:3 in "your" favor (with similar predictability on "my" side. And "my side" is actually what guidelines suggest for the situation, what does that tell us?

However, the more to the point and simpler question I then asked, the !vote is 3:1 that your edit made the article worse, all things considered. And what does all this mean? Not much. I don't see enough support to assert my position with article edits, at least not yet. Rather, I will explore the issue in detail, make other compromises, use wider sourcing for basically the same thing, because it exists, etc. It's just more complicated and takes longer. --Abd (talk) 15:45, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Everyone who signed the "Abd's version provides too much weight to a single, unreliable source" called your source "unreliable." That your second confusing poll has failed to draw responses is because you can't phrase things that are easy for people to understand.

You are incivil when you call people "uninformed," or that they are supporting "non-science." Do not repeat this behavior.

If you intend to use Vysotskii as a reliable source to anything other than Vysotskii's tiny-minority opinion, I suggest you seek editiorial opinion on that, perhaps by having a clear strawpoll so that you can, yet again, be shown that your proposed content changes have no support from the vast majority of editors, and, in fact, aside from one editor, are supported only by what are now effectively single-purpose accounts (that would be you and Objectivist.)

Since you agree that edits you make are unbalanced, I suggest you review WP:NPOV. Making edits that are knowingly in violation of our core policies is a problem.

Finally, please attempt to stay on topic. Your stream of conciousness responses are dificult to follow and I will not continue to do so much longer except to say that any edits you make to the article should be proposed on the talk page before they are made. Hipocrite (talk) 15:57, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

mmm... and you? My "knowingly unbalanced" edit would have required twice as much work to balance, and it was more balanced than what it replaced. You, Hipocrite, removed reliably sourced material without adequate discussion. Your positions will ultimately have no support overall, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Not worthy of further response. No, straw polls are not necessary before asserting edits. Etc., etc. --Abd (talk) 17:02, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

As Hipocrite points out, the second poll covered the same point as the first one, which is why people didn't !vote there. To all effects the second poll is 3:7:1. It's only 3:1 if you refuse to take into account the results of the first poll. --Enric Naval (talk) 15:51, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm certainly not refusing to take into account the results of the first poll, but that poll suffered from a severe POV slant in the questions, such that even I didn't support the first poll alternate option, and had to create a third option. Nobody is questioning that the text based heavily on Storms is out of balance, the real question is whether or not it was out of balance more than the alternative of its pure removal, i.e., Hipocrite's action. Hence the second poll. The third poll is pure disruption. Do you support that, Enric? By the way, the result that you synthesized (essentially 7:3) was also stated by me, above, so how could you claim that I refused "to take into account the results of the first poll"? --Abd (talk) 16:34, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Reliability of sources

(This poll was set up by Hipocrite)

Setting up a poll every time someone disagrees with you, without any new edit in controversy? This is disruption! --Abd (talk) 17:17, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

I am confused. Is this section a request for comments about the reliablility of these sources? If so, then it is a waste of time. The talk page is intended to be used for discussing EDITS TO THE ARTICLE. If you don't want to discuss edits to the article, the honorable thing to do is to refrain from editing this talk page. Those discussions should take place somewhere else. Olorinish (talk) 20:44, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

It looks like that to me, Olorinish. The first poll was set up by Hipocrite when I started discussing his revert of my addition of material on "proposed theories" from Storms, who is probably the most reliable source we have on what theories are proposed, aside from the pure experimental error that some seem to think is the only allowable theory. The questions asked were, in my opinion, if we are going to poll -- which is utterly unbinding, particularly when not preceded by adequate discussion, but which can sometimes be useful -- the wrong questions, stated to attract !votes in a certain way, so I first added a third option that represented the actual opposing view, not Hipocrite's straw man, which nobody supports, and then I added a poll that asked the fundamental question. Hipocrite had framed the issue as, essentially, "does Abd's edit have faults?," when the practical question should have been "was reverting this edit an improvement? or "is some other version even better?" So poll number two asks a real question that could give real guidance as to how to proceed. Then, when I began discussion of an issue raised as part of the discussion of Storms, and, only in Talk, pointed to some information on biological transmutation, which has, to my knowledge, two recent sources showing notability of the claims, Hipocrite opened up this third poll which wasn't based on any edit and was an attempt to establish source unreliability in the abstract, a doomed exercise. Source reliability is dependent on the text cited and the context of usage, once sources are within certain very broad categories. Abd (talk) 01:16, 9 May 2009

Storms

RE: Storms, Edmund (2007), Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction: A Comprehensive Compilation of Evidence and Explanations, Singapore: World Scientific, ISBN 9-8127062-0-8

A reliable source for scientific fact

1. Abd (talk) 17:17, 8 May 2009 (UTC) Sometimes. Depends on the text asserted. Inferior, generally, to source that is independently peer-reviewed.
2. Looks like more distorted wording to me. CF is not widely considered to be scientific fact, after all. However, as a source of DATA in the CF field (and only with respect to CF involving palladium/hydrogen, which is all that matters in this Wikipedia article), I would say that Storms is careful enough. V (talk) 19:48, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

A reliable source for notable minority opinion

1. Abd (talk) 17:17, 8 May 2009 (UTC) Absolutely.
2. I can agree with this, without reservation. V (talk) 19:48, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

An extremist or fringe source

1. Hipocrite (talk) 16:02, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
2. OMCV (talk) 03:41, 9 May 2009 (UTC) in terms of scientific material, fact and theory.
3. Enric Naval (talk) 15:44, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Vysotskii

Re: Vysotskii, V., et al. "Successful Experiments On Utilization Of High-Activity Waste In The Process Of Transmutation In Growing Associations Of Microbiological Cultures". in Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion. 2003. Cambridge, MA

An extremist or fringe source

1. Hipocrite (talk) 16:02, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
2. OMCV (talk) 03:41, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
3. Enric Naval (talk) 15:41, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

A conference paper, not peer-reviewed

1. This source is not usable except for discussion in Talk, whether extremist, fringe, or whatever. Nobody has asserted this paper as a source for an edit, Hipocrite is wasting our time. --Abd (talk) 17:17, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
2. I can agree with Abd here, because the topic is not related to the Fleischmann-Pons experiments. V (talk) 19:50, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

   A technical point: this paper would be related to Low energy nuclear reactions or Condensed matter nuclear science. The latter is an article that was basically salted by JzG, it's protected as a redirect. There is, I believe, plenty of material for an article on the general topic of research into the possibility of differences of behavior in the condensed matter environment from behavior in a plasma or free space and there are known and accepted differences; Hoffman points out, for example, that Be-7 is stable in free space, with infinite half-life, but decays by electron capture when in chemical relationship; there is a page on this: [60]. The recent Vysotskii papers have been, in fact, on the use of bacterial cultures to accelerate decay of radioisotopes. While it sounded totally nutso when I first read the titles, the Be-7 example shows that something might be possible like that. Unfortunately, I know of no recent replications. (Vysotskii can be seen as a confirmation of earlier work, but those experiments were different, and I, for one, would be quite content with replication of the fairly simple and well-documented work that Storms cites, using Mossbauer spectroscopy. As far as I've seen, though, no replications have been attempted.)

   But as long as these articles are redirected here, the notable facts belong in this article, and we determine notability by independent publication. Storms isn't the publisher of his book, nor is Vysotskii the publisher of his book (Hipocrite did not pick the stronest source, big surprise), and both of these are general academic publishers; the books are both technical, academic works. If editors of this article want to fork off the more general field of CMNS, I'm sure it can be fairly easily done. --Abd (talk) 01:39, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm dropping work on the version of the article here

[61] reverted another effort to add actual material on "Proposed explanations" for cold fusion. These removals are reaching the point of violations of rulings in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science; they amount to exclusion of reliably sourced material on the claim of "fringe."

I urge review of the material reverted, with comparison to the text that was returned by Hipocrite.

However, it's impossible to work on this article under the present conditions, and there is insufficient support from other editors to deal with the disruption without creating more disruption. I will, therefore, begin to work on a fork of the article in my user space, I am not going to roll a boulder up the hill more than once. It takes a community to create an article, but if the community is dysfunctional, it won't happen. I will invite other editors to support this drafting of an alternate version, so that, ultimately, the community can consider which to choose. --Abd (talk) 03:37, 11 May 2009 (UTC)