Talk:Cold fusion

IMPORTANT: This is not the place to discuss your personal opinions of the merits of cold fusion research. This page is for discussing improvements to the article, which is about cold fusion and the associated scientific controversy surrounding it. See Wikipedia:No original research and Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines. If you wish to discuss or debate the status of cold fusion please do so at the VORTEX-L mailing list..

This article was the subject of mediation during 2009 at User_talk:Cryptic C62/Cold fusion.

There is no "most vs small group"

"By late 1989, most scientists considered cold fusion claims dead,[7] and cold fusion subsequently gained a reputation as pathological science.[8] However, a small community of researchers continues to investigate cold fusion"

This "subsequently" attempts to extend the claimed consensus beyond 1989. NYT is not a research institute, I don't think we can use claims attributed to "most scientists" as a statement of fact. It should be in "NYT's says" format. The "small community" sounds so ridiculous the "Grand Cabal Plot" becomes entirely much to obvious. If we allow things like this on high profile science articles like cold fusion we risk exposing how Wikipedia really works.</sarcasm> 84.107.147.147 (talk) 04:49, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

There are other sources saying that a) most scientists consider the claims dead or b) that only a small group of researchers continued working on CF. Do you want me to add them? --Enric Naval (talk) 10:19, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Note the undecipherable "</sarcasm>" at the end. I'm not sure what this guy's point is.siNkarma86—Expert Sectioneer of Wikipedia
^{86 = 19+9+14 + karma = 19+9+14 + talk} 13:07, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

It was not intended as wp:bait if that is what you mean. You are however already profiling me, discussing content on my talk page and are reviewing and reverting my other contributions in response to my posting above.

• siNkarma86: comments on users go on the user talk page and are not written in the 3rd person. (The form of a verb used when the subject of a sentence is not the audience or the one making the statement.)
• Enric Naval: comments on content go on the article talk page.

You are both highly experienced editors so you can imagine it is hard for me to assume you are not doing this on purpose. Now you have me wondering if you expected me to reply to the hidden part of your message.

If so: yes, those few sentences look to me like the worse part of an otherwise very good article. I mention this because it can be hard to see what the first impression is when you worked as long on an article as this one.

If I have some how offended you I sincerely apologize. If I see room for improvement I try describe it as best as I can, maybe this wasn't a very good example of that. Now that I see you have no sense of humor I also very much regret making the "Grand Cabal Plot" joke.

It really wasn't very nice to respond to the above by opposing my contributions on unrelated articles Enric Naval. Here you are just reverting me for the fun of it. There is no other way to interpret it.

I'm going to revert it and I'm going to continue working on that article. I hope you do the same on cold fusion. Good luck! 84.107.147.147 (talk) 18:24, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I moved my reply to Talk:Debunker#.22derides.22. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:52, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

The first reference below is described by the authors: "We analyze the advent and development of eight scientific fields from their inception to maturity and map the evolution of their networks of collaboration over time, measured in terms of co-authorship of scientific papers."

It contains the quote: "Finally, nuclear cold fusion is a field that never found a solid experimental or conceptual proof of principle, and as such has never become a field of collaboration and exchange. It shows α = 1, manifesting the fact that it is mostly the product of small, disparate, and often incommensurate efforts."

• Bettencourt, Luís M.A. (2009). "Scientific discovery and topological transitions in collaboration networks". Journal of Informetrics. 3 (3): 210–221. doi:10.1016/j.joi.2009.03.001. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |laydate=, |separator=, |trans_title=, |laysummary=, and |laysource= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

The next reference is an analysis of the rapid growth and decline in the number of publishing researchers and the number of publications.

• Ackermann, Eric (2006). "Indicators of failed information epidemics in the scientific journal literature: A publication analysis of Polywater and Cold Nuclear Fusion". Scientometrics. 66 (3): 451–466. doi:10.1007/s11192-006-0033-0. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |laydate=, |laysource=, |quotes=, |laysummary=, and |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

The decline in cold fusion research has itself been a subject of scholarly study in the literature. --mikeu ^talk 21:20, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah, but how old is that? Have any such scholars noted the recent increase in CF research (since, say, five or six years ago), as evidenced by, if nothing else, researcher attendance at annual CF conferences? V (talk) 06:25, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

The first paper is from 2009, but it only lists data until 2005. However, The publication rates have not changed much since 2005. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:53, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, that could partly be due to the limited number of outlets for publication, and the preference of many journals to publish stuff other than CF articles. Nevertheless, if "not changed much" is not a decrease, then certainly nobody can continue to claim that the publishing trend is downward --and the article should reflect that modern fact. V (talk) 16:10, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, you should find sources for that fact. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:57, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Here is a quote from a more recent source: "Another phenomenon to describe is persistence of a scientific theory, despite overwhelming pressure against it. A good example is provided by the development of cold fusion (or, as the proponents would call it, low energy nuclear reactions). Even though the majority of physicists treat cold fusion as pseudoscience, there is a minority than continues to push their research, even against such formidable obstacles as lack of government funding." (Sobkowicz, Pawel (January 12, 2011). "Simulations of opinion changes in scientific communities". Scientometrics. doi:10.1007/s11192-011-0339-4. ISSN 1588-2861. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |laydate=, |coauthors=, |separator=, |trans_title=, |laysummary=, |laysource=, and |month= (help)) --mikeu ^talk 13:39, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

"Overwhelming pressure" means little if it lacks supporting facts, and honest scientists are more interested in facts than peer pressure. That chancellor in Missouri, Robert Duncan, said words to the effect he originally thought the matter had been settled in the early 1990s, while he pursued other interests, but he became a proponent of the CF experimenters after studying a lot of facts for that "60 Minutes" show. The main fact here is that CF experiments have produced anomalous heat often enough --and with respect to pressurized gas experiments, reliably enough-- that the source of that heat needs an explanation. Those who don't like "cold fusion" as the explanation should be offering a better explanation, not denying the data about anomalous heat (especially if they haven't performed the experiments!). V (talk) 16:10, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

• Rob Duncan gave a talk at the Missouri Energy Summit about a year after the CBS News 60 Minutes episode. Duncan's talk can be viewed on the Internet, along with his PowerPoint slides. He is not a "proponent" of CF, but intrigued by the unsolved mystery of the otherwise unexplained heat. He wants mainstream science to solve the mystery of the unexplained heat. His colleague, Richard Garwin, who also appeared on 60 Minutes, offered the opinion that McKubre at SRI was not measuring input power correctly (see the next section, below for more details). Duncan also refers to a mostly forgotten device called a Wehnelt Electrolytic Interrupter. That curious device bears an intriguing resemblance to the electrolytic cells used in Cold Fusion. In the next section, we'll take a look at that device and connect it to an even better known device that relies on the same physics. —Montana Mouse 19:52, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Please pay closer attention. I wrote: "he became a proponent of the CF experimenters". I didn't say he favored CF as the explanation for the experiments. But he certainly thinks the experiments deserved to be performed, and therefore the experimenters don't deserve so much bad press. V (talk) 20:43, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

• Duncan considered the possibility of muon-catalyzed fusion. But if I am not mistaken, he concludes (as others had) that such an hypothesis is not supported by the observational evidence (mainly the lack of neutrons). When I last communicated with Duncan, he was still scratching his head, looking for a valid explanation of the otherwise unexplained heat. At the time, I don't think he had in hand a mathematical model of the AC Burst Noise. Most likely he's now waiting for Dieter Britz or someone else in his circle at the University of Missouri to independently construct an AC Noise Model. He and I agree that scientists should come up with a demonstrated model to explain the "excess heat." Kirk Shanahan independently had proposed entrained mist in open cells being counted as if it had been evaporated as the source of the anomalous heat. The published energy budget model of Miles and Fleischmann assumes all the lost moisture was evaporated, and none carried off as unevaporated mist. A few other researchers also noted that deficiency in the energy budget model. To the best of my knowledge (per conversations with Dieter Britz), no one bothered to consider AC Burst Noise in cells driven by constant current power supplies. I'm still waiting for others to review that and come up with their independent analysis. —Montana Mouse 22:02, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

AC Burst Noise and Entrained Mist

Long discussion about the science behind the CF cells. No changes for article.

From the comments to the Google Knol article on Cold Fusion: More comments from Knol Entrained Mist and AC Burst Noise I recently took the time to view the CBS News 60 Minutes story on Cold Fusion and Robert Duncan's subsequent talk at the Missouri Energy Summit. My background is in Electrical Engineering, so when Richard Garwin suggested that Michael McKubre might be measuring his input electrical power incorrectly, I took the time to review McKubre's papers, published by EPRI. I was arrested by McKubre's explanation of why he reckoned only the average DC power going into his cell, and assumed there was no AC noise power arising from the fluctuations in the ohmic resistance of the cell as bubbles of evolving gas are formed and released on the surface of the electrodes. McKubre writes: "Under current control, the cell voltage frequently was observed to fluctuate significantly, particularly at high current densities where the presence of large deuterium (or hydrogen) and oxygen bubbles disrupted the electrolyte continuity. By providing the cell current from a source that is sensibly immune to noise and level fluctuations, the current operates on the cell voltage (or resistance) as a scalar. Hence, as long as the voltage noise or resistance fluctuations are random, no unmeasured RMS heating can result under constant current control, provided that the average voltage is measured accurately." McKubre assumes no AC noise power can arise, and so he only computes the average DC power going into the cell, by multiplying the average voltage by the constant current. He writes: "Voltages were measured using a Keithley 195A 5-1/2 digit digital multimeter with 0.01% DC volt accuracy and 0.015% resistance accuracy. Resolution was 1 ppm (Ω) and 10 ppm (DCV). Each 5-1/2 digit measurement was averaged 32 times before being recorded." I looked at the scope traces that were shown briefly on the CBS News 60 Minutes segment, as well as some other charts in McKubre's EPRI papers. What I found (using sophomore level AC circuit analysis) was that the AC burst noise goes as the square of the fluctuations. If the ohmic resistance is fluctuating R±r, then PAC ≈ α²PDC, where α = r/R. I don't understand how the AC burst noise power could have been overlooked, ignored, or left out of the energy budget model. AC burst noise would fully account for the excess power in McKubre's cells if the resistance were fluctuating ±22% for D2O cells and ±10% for H2O cells. With regard to my own current area of research, what's interesting to me about the cold fusion story is the comparison of the beliefs and practices of the two camps (believers vs. skeptics) and their associated affective emotional states. My first finding was that the believers were departing from the protocols of the scientific method by blithely discarding the Null Hypothesis up front, without bothering to falsify it in the manner required by the protocols of the scientific method. My second finding was that the believers were manifesting the opposite emotional state from the doubting skeptics. The believers expressed "no doubt" that CF was real D-D nuclear fusion and not explained by any mundane processes or experimental error. My third finding is that when I asked about such mundane processes as moisture being carried off as mist (rather than as water vapor), or AC noise power arising from resistance fluctuations when the electrolyte was bubbling, I was unable to find a good scientific discussion of that in the CF literature, and most of my correspondents fell curiously silent on those two questions. In the interest of rigor in the application of the protocols of the scientific method, could I call upon those attending to this topic to help focus attention on the proper review of these apparently overlooked issues? Abd, you may be interested to know that it was Robert Duncan who prompted me to look up the literature on the Wehnelt Electrolytic Interrupter. If you load Duncan's PowerPoint slides from his talk, you will see he has one slide that refers to the Wehnelt Electrolytic Interrupter. I didn't get a chance to ask Professor Duncan how he came to be familiar with that long-forgotten device from a century ago, but I believe it must have been Richard Garwin who told him about it. As you know, Richard Garwin worked on the Hydrogen Bomb, after President Truman's Science Advisory Board recommended a national program to develop nuclear energy. One of the members of Truman's Science Advisory Board was Karl Taylor Compton, who had previously served as President of MIT and President of the American Physical Society. It was Compton who, in 1910, had published the definitive study of the theory of operation of the Wehnelt Electrolytic Interrupter. Garwin almost surely knew of Compton and his illustrious career that began a century ago with his research on the electrical characteristics of Wehnelt's remarkable device. Wehnelt's Electrolytic Interrupter relies on the dramatic effect that arises when an electrode is entirely sheathed in a thin layer of gas, so that the flow of direct current is totally interrupted. We can call that a "total eclipse" of the electrode. When there are bubbles continuously forming and sloughing off, we have not a "total eclipse" but a spotty "partial eclipse" that sometimes even sparkles with visible corona discharges when the drive current is high enough. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson, following up on an idea from Elisha Gray, demonstrated how a "partial eclipse" of the electrode could produce an intelligible voice signal. The bubbling in an electrolytic cell produces not a modulated voice signal, but a noise signal that sounds like hissing, popping, crackling, or frying. In either event, these audio frequency signals carry measurable energy that audio engineers measure in decibels or volume units, which are conventionally normalized to 1 mW in telephony. The mathematical models for reckoning the characteristics of these signals date back to the early days of telegraphy and telephony. Indeed the modern unit of electrical power in these signals — the decibel (one-tenth of a bel) — is named after Alexander Graham Bell. Early in 1876, Elisha Gray came up with an idea of how to devise a variable resistance microphone that could be used to make a harmonic telegraph that could send undulating waves rather than conventional on-off clicks used in Morse Code. On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson successfully tested Elisha Gray's device, and the telephone was born. Bell managed to send a voice-modulated signal over a telegraph line by means of a metal needle dipped into a cup of weakly acidic water. The needle was attached to a diaphragm, which vibrated with the sound of Bell's voice. As the needle bounced up and down, it varied the amount of surface area in contact with the conducting water. This demonstration proved that an audio frequency signal could be transmitted over a telegraph wire by means of a variable resistance. The water microphone was not commercially practical, and was soon replaced by Thomas Edison's much more convenient carbon button microphone, which is still in use to this day. There is another way to generate an audio frequency signal in a manner similar to the one conceived by Elisha Gray and demonstrated 135 years ago by Bell and Watson. The other way is to leave the electrode submersed in a conducting electrolyte and vary the amount of surface area exposed to the liquid by letting bubbles form and slough off the surface. The easiest way to do this is to use a Faradaic current that dissociates water into Hydrogen and Oxygen. As the gas bubbles form on the surface of the electrodes the varying resistance will operate much like the water transmitter of Gray, Bell, and Watson. Instead of transmitting undulating waves carrying a voice signal, it will just be a noise signal that will sound like crackling, popping, or frying bacon. This is what occurs in Cold Fusion cells, when they are bubbling furiously from high levels of Faradaic current. For extra credit (and a shot at the Nobel Prize), can you work out a technical model for the amount of signal power in variable resistance microphones of either design? Comments? —Montana Mouse 00:43, 15 February 2011 (UTC) Sure, I'll comment. None of this matters when the power is turned off and anomalous heat continues to appear for quite a few hours afterward. And, especially, none of it applies to the other main category of CF experiment, that has not been given much attention in the article here, when electricity is not integral to the experiment, and gaseous deuterium is directly pressurized into palladium (or sometimes other) metal, and anomalous heat appears. V (talk) 06:25, 15 February 2011 (UTC) Jed Rothwell raised the so-called "heat after death" as his refutation. But the same commenter responded to Jed: Do you understand that the effect of the bubbles is to introduce perturbations in the ohmic resistance, which introduces AC noise power, which must therefore be included in the energy budget for reckoning the total electrical power going into the cell? Do you understand that an over-charged battery will self-discharge internally, after you stop charging it, and that as it discharges, the stored charge will be converted to heat? In particular, do you understand that, as the Deuterium atoms slowly bleed out of the cathode, they will combine to form D2 gas? In other words, after turning off the juice, the Deuterium atoms that had been forced into the Palladium lattice will slowly bleed out and recombine to D2 gas, releasing heat. —Montana Mouse 13:52, 15 February 2011 (UTC) That can't possibly be completely right. Consider the known fact that when palladium absorbs hydrogen (protium or deuterium makes no difference here), the absorption process is EXOthermic. That means the release process is necessarily ENDOthermic (absorbs heat). Note especially that while an electrolysis CF experiment normally must run for many hours, there is no extra external pressure supplied, in those experiments, to force more deuterium to be absorbed by the metal than it can naturally accommodate exothermically. In other words, there must be a limit to how much hydrogen at normal atmospheric pressure can be absorbed by a piece of palladium. When it is full (however-long it takes), then any process to force more into it will require adding energy, and that energy most certainly would be released when the extra force (pressure) is removed. But since normal electrolysis CF experiments only operate at normal pressure, this sort of energy is simply not part of the experiment, to become released. However, I can accept an alternate explanation involving the fact that palladium is a great chemical-reaction catalyst, and deuterium at the surface of the metal meeting oxygen in the air can be expected to catalytically react, thereby producing heat. But this can be tested by putting the chunk of deuterium-saturated palladium, right after the electricity is turned off, into a container of argon gas, and then performing the heat measurements. V (talk) 15:48, 15 February 2011 (UTC) In order to drive atomic Deuterium (or atomic Hydrogen) into the Palladium lattice, you have to dissociate the Deuterium from D2O (in the case of an electrolytic cell) or from gaseous D2 (in the case of gas loading). The models for both those processes are classic. In the first case, it's a Faradaic current; in the second case it's pneumatic energy per Sievert's Law. When you turn off the Faradaic current (or relieve the gas pressure in a gas loading cell), the atomic Deuterium bleeds out of the lattice and forms D2 gas at the surface of the Palladium returning the electric (or pneumatic) energy as the heat of formation of molecular D2 gas. A Palladium lattice can hold interstitial atomic Hydrogen or Deuterium at a ratio of 1:1. This is all classic physics. Either way, you are charging up a battery. In this case, it self-discharges and the stored energy slowly comes back as heat. —Montana Mouse 17:57, 15 February 2011 (UTC) Not necessarily true. Remember that hydrogen even in the absence of electrical assistance can permeate solid palladium almost like a sponge++, while helium, a smaller atom than even a hydrogen atom, much less a hydrogen molecule, hardly permeates palladium at all. Do you know why that is so? I'm aware that one possible explanation starts by noting that hydrogen and palladium have practically identical "electronegativity", so that when a hydrogen molecule encounters palladium, it is catalyzed to simply break apart into 4 separate particles (two electrons and two nuclei), and "alloys" itself to the metal. The electrons join the "conduction band" of the metal, and the bare nuclei obviously can permeate the solid metal with ease. Any energy needed to assist that catalysis comes from the very considerable kinetic energy of the gas molecule at room temperature. Remember that the pressurized-gas CF experiments also don't need electricity to atomize hydrogen, to get anomalous heat, so if CF can actually happen in those experiments, it means molecules of hydrogen can indeed break apart inside the metal, without assistance. ++Take two containers of equal volume and fill one solid with palladium metal. Then pump hydrogen into both containers. You can put MORE hydrogen into the solid palladium, at the same pressure, than you can put into the empty container! V (talk) 20:57, 15 February 2011 (UTC) Yes. That's Sievert's Law. The Palladium lattice allows the molecular H2 gas to dissociate into atomic Hydrogen, and the ionize. The protons, without their orbiting electrons, can now fit into the interstices of the Palladium lattice. The electrons act like any electrons in a conducting metal — they just wander about aimlessly if there is no electric field, or they create an electric current if there is a drive voltage present. —Montana Mouse 13:40, 16 February 2011 (UTC) Hydrogen ionizes in the metal lattice. Helium, being a noble gas, doesn't ionize. That's why there is no room for either Helium or molecular H2 in the interstices of the lattice. Before atomic Hydrogen can enter the lattice, it has to be dissociated, either from a water molecule (in a liquid electrolyte) or from H2 gas (in gas loading). It takes energy (either a Faradaic current or pneumatic pressure) to dissociate Hydrogen so that it can dissolve in the Palladium lattice. —Montana Mouse 22:11, 15 February 2011 (UTC) You seem to be ignoring the key point that significant amounts of hydrogen can enter a palladium lattice with NO effort required --the absorption process releases energy. I'm fully aware that the chemical reaction H+H->H2 releases so much energy that NASA once considered using it in rockets (the result is the highest Specific Impulse of any known chemical reaction). And therefore I'm also aware that, normally, you need to apply that much energy to break the molecule apart into atoms. Nevertheless, it is an observed/well-established fact palladium-the-catalyst manages to absorb hydrogen and even have energy left over, regardless of whether or not the hydrogen becomes ionized inside the metal lattice. Which is why I stated earlier words to the effect that that "energy left over" needs to be added back to get the hydrogen out of the palladium. Only if you have squeezed more hydrogen into the palladium than it can naturally absorb could you you expect energy to be released as that excess hydrogen escapes and remolecularizes. But you haven't provided any data indicating that any standard-pressure electrolysis experiment has ever actually done that excessive thing to palladium; in fact the CF experimenters routinely claim these days that only 80-90% loading (not 1:1 ratio with palladium) suffices for significant amounts of anomalous heat to begin to appear. And there is a message for you at the bottom of my Talk page, from Jed Rothwell, with some other data that you have either overlooked or never previously encountered. Enjoy! V (talk) 00:44, 16 February 2011 (UTC) Where do you get significant amounts of atomic hydrogen from? —Montana Mouse (talk) 02:59, 16 February 2011 (UTC) Good question. That's why NASA isn't actually using it as rocket fuel. I'm aware that small quantities have been made. The art may have improved since the 1960s, when the notion was being considered by NASA. Perhaps, today, it might be possible to make in quantity if you start with frozen-solid molecular hydrogen and shined a specially tuned laser on it. You want the laser frequency to be exactly the one that can break the molecular bond, with no energy left over to heat the hydrogen up.... V (talk) 07:26, 16 February 2011 (UTC) Do you now see where the hysteresis ("heat after death") comes from? Before any atomic Hydrogen or atomic Deuterium can be infused into the Palladium lattice, it must be split off from water or molecular gas. That takes energy. The atomic Hydrogen or Deuterium can then take up residence in the Palladium lattice. When the show is over, they are free to drift back out. As they emerge at the surface, they combine exothermically back to molecular gas, releasing "heat after death" which is just a variety of hysteresis, a well-known phenomenon in systems which undergo cyclic state changes. In this case, the fully charged battery just self-discharges, and all that energy that went into charging it up comes back as heat. It's not an uninteresting effect, but it's a well-known effect. One of the fun things about studying the literature of Cold Fusion is that you learn about interesting physical phenomena like the amount of electrical power in telephone noise signals and the difference between peeing away a gram of pee and evaporating a gram of sweat. —Montana Mouse (talk) 13:28, 16 February 2011 (UTC) I'm waiting for you to tell me whether or not molecular hydrogen gas spontaneously atomizes when it naturally soaks into palladium at ordinary room pressure (while helium is blocked). The conundrum that results from a "yes" is your problem to solve, not mine. Because in the electrolytic experiments, just because atomic hydrogen is produced that can more-easily enter the palladium than molecular hydrogen (meaning more energy can be released as the atoms enter the metal), the net effect is the same, you have to add energy to get the hydrogen out of the palladium, if the palladium has not been forced to hold more than is natural for it to be able to hold. V (talk) 22:32, 16 February 2011 (UTC) It's a function of the pneumatic pressure, per Sievert's Law: Hydrogen dissolved in metals at low concentrations exhibits a linear relation between the concentration and the square root of the pressure, p, of the molecular gas. This is proof that hydrogen dissociates when it enters the metal. Did you read Oriani's paper that explains Sievert's Law? There doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article on it, but you can read Oriani's paper and therein find the formula that says how much atomic hydrogen you can force into the Pd lattice as a function of the gas pressure. —Montana Mouse (talk) 01:13, 17 February 2011 (UTC) To the extent that hydrogen absorption by palladium is exothermic, the pressure matters hardly at all. I'm saying that if you put a chunk of palladium in a vacuum chamber, with just a whiff of hydrogen, after a while the whiff should disappear and the degree-of-vacuum will be enhanced, because it is energetically favorable for the hydrogen to enter the palladium and mostly stay there. (There will always be some sort of equilibrium, based on the temperature of the metal, where some hydrogens in the metal can acquire enough energy to go back out of the metal.) All this is a logical consequence of the observed fact I've mentioned before, that you can put more hydrogen into solid palladium metal than you can into an initially empty same-volume container, at the same pressure. For other metals, though, where it takes energy to push hydrogen into the metal, I have no objection to Sievert's Law. For palladium, though, as long as energy is released when hydrogen goes in, then energy is required for it to get back out. Period. At normal temperatures, a process equivalent to evaporation (an energy-absorbing process, from that room temperature) can allow a chunk of palladium to gradually lose all or almost all its hydrogen. And, of course, while that happens, palladium can catalyze a chemical reaction between hydrogen at its surface and atmospheric oxygen, releasing significant energy. But as Jed has pointed out, the quantity of energy produced that way (which, by the way, would be greater than the quantity produced by the H+H->H2 reaction), is still woefully inadequate to explain the energy released in those successful electrolysis CF experiments, after the electricity is turned off. V (talk) 04:43, 17 February 2011 (UTC) You wrote: "In this case, the fully charged battery just self-discharges, and all that energy that went into charging it up comes back as heat. It's not an uninteresting effect, but it's a well-known effect." It is also 5 to 8 orders of magnitude smaller than many of the heat-after-death energy releases, so it cannot be the cause of heat after death. - Jed Rothwell Jed, do you have any peer-reviewed citations for that? —Montana Mouse (talk) 21:24, 16 February 2011 (UTC) Phys. Lett. A, 1994. 187: p. 276 - Jed Physics Letters A Volume 187, Issue 3, 18 April 1994, Pages 276-280 M. Fleischmann and S. Pons, Reply to the critique by Morrison entitled: “Comments on claims of excess enthalpy by Fleischmann and Pons using simple cells made to boil” Abstract We reply to the critique by Morrison [Phys. Lett. A 185 (1994) 498] of our paper [Phys. Lett. A 176 (1993) 118]. Apart from this general classification of our experiments into stages 1–5, we find that his comments are either irrelevant or inaccurate or both. Jed, a dismissive reply to a critique is not a peer-reviewed paper. —Montana Mouse (talk) 04:30, 17 February 2011 (UTC) The critique by Douglas Morrison and his ensuing debate with Pons and Flesischmann can be found here. Morrison's critique has to do with heat of formation as atomic hydrogen bleeds out of the Pd lattice and recombines to form molecular hydrogen. However there is another issue with that cell which is driven to boiling dry. It's an open cell, so that all the moisture in the electrolyte is vaporized. The problem, however, is that the vapor which is carried off is not dry steam. It includes entrained mist. The energy budget model of Miles and Fleischmann assumes that all the moisture is evaporated, and none is conveyed as entrained mist in the liquid phase. For every gram of moisture that is conveyed as mist, the Miles-Fleischmann Model will falsely credit the cell with producing 2267 joules. This is like peeing away a gram of pee rather than evaporating a gram of sweat. Finally, the AC burst noise is also omitted in energy budget for those experiments. —Moulton (talk) 05:08, 17 February 2011 (UTC) Careful Moulton Mouse or you may find yourself at a grain boundry of reality and wind up in March of 1989. Wouldn't that hysteresis loop be hysterical. Seriously though, why are you wasting time arguing about excess heat measurements in experiments where an inaccurate measurement of entrained microscopic water droplets gives any crackpot in the land the latitude to engage in a 22 year bout of I know you are but what am I? Is it because you cannot be proven wrong? What good are measurements of excess heat? They are absolutely useless. Repeatable measurements of high energy particle flux and quantifiable observations of transmutation of elements now that is something that is not so easy to misreport. It is also an experimental avenue which might actually lead to useful insight into the mechanisms of this mysterious phenomenon, should it actually exist. High energy particles and nuclear transmutations can lead to insight into the mechanisms at work in these reactions whereas excess heat is mere vapor (or mist as the case may be). Also it may be wise to only use one alias per topic, Enric Naval may accuse you of being a sockpuppet. Crawdaddy74 (talk) 05:58, 17 February 2011 (UTC) The whole point of the scientific method is to posit hypotheses with explanatory and predictive power that can be proven wrong. There is good evidence for the phenomenon of entrained mist in open cells of the type used in 1993. There is undeniable evidence of AC burst noise when bubbles form and slough off the electrodes. Not only was this phenomenon observed and described in the 19th century, the underlying effect was tamed by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 to produce an intelligible voice telephone signal. These are not mysterious mechanisms. Almost everyone has enjoyed effervescent beverages and spoken into a telephone mouthpiece. I'll grant you that most people don't stop to measure how much spritz they get from a can of ginger ale or how many decibels of signal power are transmitted by a carbon button microphone, but one could learn to model and measure these effects with little more than a high school education. —Montana Mouse 11:46, 17 February 2011 (UTC) I agree with the that the whole point of the scientific method is to posit hypotheses with explanatory and predictive power that "can" be proven wrong. But why do people posit hypotheses in the first place? To explain experimental observations of course. If I claim that cold fusion is real and hand you a glass of hot water I have wasted your time and mine because the experiment I performed measured a variable 3 steps removed from the phenomenon I am trying to prove. How does a glass of hot water, even one that I know the exact temperature of help me to refine my theory that cold fusion is real? Your argument about AC burst noise may be correct, but it does not disprove cold fusion and it will never be included in the Wiki article because it doesn't rise to the required level of "reliability". I am trying to generate some interest in measurements of high energy particles generated from cold fusion experiments. These measurements are (or could be) only 2 steps removed from the phenomenon we are hypothesizing about. These measurements don't suffer from AC burst noise or entrained mist. Even if you examined every report of excess heat ever made and disproved them all using reasoning within reach of any high school graduate, the observation of high energy particles from cold fusion experiments, a much more reliable observation than excess heat, would still "invalidate the laws of physics!". Let us allow the rules regarding reliable sources and peer review to weed out the erroneous and fraudulent claims made about excess heat and Cold Fusion. In my opinion this article would benefit from the omission of any and all references to excess heat in cold fusion experiments. It is analogous to filling the article about the sun with a finely parsed discussion of exactly how much it heats up the ocean, irrelevant. If I worked at the MIT media lab, I would print out the latest SPAWAR paper, walk over to the physical science building and present the paper to the first nuclear chemist I found. That might lead to a productive discussion and subsequent revisions of the Cold Fusion article, which is what I am here to do.Crawdaddy74 (talk) 17:32, 17 February 2011 (UTC) My objective is to help Rob Duncan construct a falsifiable theory that otherwise successfully explains the "excess heat" for which there is currently no satisfactory theory. With respect to McKubre's experiments, his assumption that there is no AC noise power seems to me to be unsustainable. What's left is to model it and measure it. I wrote up a simple model using sophomore level AC circuit analysis. Dieter Britz is currently reviewing that model (and presumably refining it). Now we wait for others to report whether that model has legs (no pun intended). —Moulton (talk) 23:48, 17 February 2011 (UTC) Good luck to you. How do you plan to account for the fact that the authors report being unable to repeat their excess heat measurements using the exact same electrode and setup? Or the countless reports of irreproducibility of the experiments. Wouldn't your model necessitate that "AC burst noise" would result in "excess heat" every time the experiment was done by the experimenter? Wouldn't excess heat be observed at high current density regardless of the electrode used? I guess your model will include a detailed examination of the fluid dynamics of bubble formation during high current density electrochemical experiments and account for differences between deuterated reactants and simple hydrogen. All this for an 18 year old paper? Couldn't your considerable energy be better spent contributing meaningfully to the discussion and editing of the wiki article that this page is meant to facilitate? Crawdaddy74 (talk) 01:09, 18 February 2011 (UTC) If the AC Burst Noise Model is correct, then the excess heat should correspond to the AC Noise Power (which is directly measurable). At the same time, the measurements can be compared to the mathematical model, along the lines of the one I proposed: If the ohmic resistance is fluctuating R±r from the bubbles forming and sloughing off the electrodes, then PAC ≈ α²PDC, where α = r/R. If that model (or something like it) is sustained, it will have to wait for someone to publish results to that effect, and then someone else will have to edit the article. As you know, WP does not publish original research. Note that the ohmic fluctuation, R±r, would be expected to be about twice as great for D2O cells as for H2O cells, since D2 is twice as dense (and half as buoyant) as H2. So now we wait and see. Moulton (talk) 02:57, 18 February 2011 (UTC) "Enric Naval may accuse you of being a sockpuppet". God forbid I accuse Moulton of using IPs to bypass an indef block and a global account lock enacted by Jimbo himself, and of using sockpuppets to enact little dramatic stories. And of being unrepentant about it. And of misusing this talk page to needle cold fusion supporters. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC) The hypothesis that unboiled water left the cell was tested rigorously by several methods, in hundreds of experimental runs at Toyota, the French AEC and elsewhere. It was shown to be incorrect. Some of the methods were: 1. A careful inventory the salts left in the cell showed that only D2O left the cell. 2. Heat after death was confirmed with closed, boiling cells, using different calorimeter types. 3. Boil off events in null cells were induced with high powered electrolysis (instead of cold fusion heat), and the input power required to drive the water out agreed with textbook heat of vaporization. The cells are designed with buffers and small holes at the top to prevent unboiled water from leaving the cell. This is essential for various other reasons, such as keeping contamination out of the electrolyte. - Jed Rothwell Which leaves us with AC burst noise as the unexamined hypothesis of the moment. —Moulton (talk) 23:48, 17 February 2011 (UTC) There can be no AC burst noise during these events. A gap opens between the anode and cathode, and power input drops to zero. That is why it is called "heat after death." The cell remains hot, usually for hours, and up to ~20 hours in a recent set of events. (The ones covered by "60 Minutes," but not described there.) With closed reflux boiler cells and other types where the fluid remains, you have to cut power manually. I mentioned the boil-off simulation with electrolysis. That stops abruptly and more fluid is left at the bottom of the cell than in a cold fusion boil-off, but it is similar. Hydrogen evolution from the cathode actually takes a few weeks but if you could speed it up enough to produce the level of heat from these events, it would last 5 or 10 seconds. Since the events last for hours, chemical heat from hydrogen cannot explain them. In one case continuous heat after death produced more than 85 MJ, at ~100 W, which is more than you could get by burning everything in the cell, and the table, and all of the books in the room. That is why researchers conclude that the reaction cannot be chemical. The AC noise during electrolysis is far too small to cause spurious heat or affect the measurements significantly. This was established long before cold fusion was discovered. The balance of energy in ordinary electrolysis has been measured at zero for over 100 years. If bubbles affected this measurement, that would not be the case. Blank Pt-H cold fusion cells have exactly the same electrochemical conditions and bubbles, yet they never show excess heat. - Jed Rothwell In one case continuous heat after death produced more than 85 MJ, at ~100 W. Jed, I'm confused. If the external power has been cut to zero, what is the 100 W measuring? —Moulton (talk) 03:32, 18 February 2011 (UTC) You wrote: "If the external power has been cut to zero, what is the 100 W measuring?" Output heat. "Heat after death" refers to a situation where input electrolysis power is 0 and output heat continues. In this case (Mizuno, April 1991) it was ~100 W for 4 days, before gradually fading to zero at day 10. - Jed Jed, I searched for a citation for this event. Here is what I found: Mizuno wrote this short book about his work and personal experiences. It is the best informal account yet written about the daily life of a cold fusion researcher. It gives you a sense of what the job feels like. It is not intended to be technical. For technical details, the reader is invited to examine Mizuno’s numerous scientific papers, some of which are listed in the references. One event described here which is not described in the technical literature is an extraordinary 10-day long heat-after-death incident that occurred in 1991. News of this appeared in the popular press, but a formal description was never published in a scientific paper. Mizuno says this is because he does not have carefully established calorimetric data to prove the event occurred, but I think he does not need it. [Source: Jed Rothwell (1998), Science Mysteries, "Alternative Energy: The Cold Fusion" (from the Introduction to the English translation of Mizuno's book, Nuclear Transmutation: The Reality of Cold Fusion, English language translation by Jed Rothwell).] Jed, is that the singular event you are citing? —Churlatan (talk) 11:42, 18 February 2011 (UTC) User:Moulton (talk) 11:42, 18 February 2011 (UTC) Yup. As noted, that was not well documented. Many less dramatic heat-after-death events were fully recorded and published by SRI, Toyota, Energetic Technologies and others. Mizuno's event was described in more detail by me, here: lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTnucleartra.pdf. - Jed Rothwell There is a rather amusing discussion about the event in Sci.Physics.Fusion (2002) demonstrating that Dieter Britz, Kirk Shanahan, and Jed Rothwell can all have a good laugh over a missed opportunity. —User:Moulton (talk) 20:51, 18 February 2011 (UTC) I have to say I am with Jed on this one. Perhaps we should move on from this discussion and wait for your publication Moulton. I stand ready to add it to the article as your editor should it ever be published in a reliable source. Now can somebody please address my desire to change the article as I describe in the next section? I know that some of you probably have some issues with it. Lets come to a consensus before making changes to this controversial article. Crawdaddy74 (talk) 03:26, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Proposed changes to Helium, heavy elements, and neutrons

The first paragraph of this section is not well researched.

It begins by talking about the branching ratio's of D-D fusion and the neutrons that result from the n + tritium reaction. These neutrons are around 3 MeV in energy. The work of Mosier-Boss et al. cited in the second part of the paragraph is concerned with high energy neutrons that produce triple tracks. The energy of neutrons that produce triple-tracks in CR-39 are above 9MeV. Neutrons of this energy are characteristic of a secondary D + T reaction. The Mosier-Boss group's most recent publication quantifies the neutron energies and flux in their experiment by calibrating their results with a conventional D-T neutron source and presents strong experimental evidence of high energy neutrons close to the energy of those from the D-T reaction.

Oopsies above should read n+Helium3 sorryCrawdaddy74 (talk) 03:50, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

I propose that we change the section to reflect more accurately the experimental observations of the cited paper and include the group's latest publication quantifying their neutron energies. As I am new to Wikipedia I am having trouble figuring out the formatting of references, it would be great if someone else could do the edit.

I can try to make the changes myself but would love to calm the misgivings of any other editor who might revert the changes out of hand before I put in the effort. Crawdaddy74 (talk) 02:39, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

This is the paragraph to which I refer.

"Known instances of nuclear reactions, aside from producing energy, also produce nucleons and particles on ballistic trajectories which are readily observable. In support of their claim that nuclear reactions took place in their electrolytic cells, Fleischmann and Pons reported a neutron flux of 4,000 neutrons per second, as well as detections of tritium. The classical branching ratio for previously known fusion reactions that produce tritium would predict, with 1 watt of power, the production of 1012 neutrons per second, levels that would have been fatal to the researchers.[108] In 2009, Mosier-Boss et al. reported what they called the first scientific report of highly energetic neutrons, using CR-39 plastic radiation detectors,[109][110] but the claims can not be validated without a quantitative analysis of neutrons.[76][78]"

I propose to change it to:

"Initial experiments aimed at detecting the tell tail products of nuclear fusion, high energy neutrons, protons, and alpha particles, initiated after the Pons and Fleischmann announcement were inconclusive or gave negative results (see PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS Vol/Issue: 63 (18), Date: 1989, Pages: 1926-1929). Beginning in 2002, a research group headed by Pamela Mosier-Boss began to report qualitative observations of high energy particles using CR-39 detectors. In 2009 the group reported the observation of high energy neutrons which they claimed resulted from deuterium-tritium fusion in their electrolytic cells [109], criticisms of the qualitative nature of the results were leveled [76], and the group has attempted to address them with a more quantitative analysis (see Eur. Phys. J. Appl. Phys. 51, 20901 (2010)).

How's that for an improvement? Let me know what you think. Please discuss this edit before it is made instead of reverting it after the fact as the guidelines at the top of the discussion page advise.Crawdaddy74 (talk) 07:14, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Can someone help me figure out how to add these references? The help pages seem to be a little too basic to let me figure out how to link a reference and add it to the bibliography. Along those lines there appears to be an error in the reference list as of Enric Naval's addition of a new reference 2.Crawdaddy74 (talk) 19:21, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Initial experiments aimed at detecting the tell tail products of nuclear fusion, high energy neutrons, protons, and alpha particles, initiated after the Pons and Fleischmann announcement were inconclusive or gave negative results . Beginning in 2002, a research group headed by Pamela Mosier-Boss began to report qualitative observations of high energy particles using CR-39 detectors. In 2009 the group reported the observation of high energy neutrons which they claimed resulted from deuterium-tritium fusion in their electrolytic cells , criticisms of the qualitative nature of the results were leveled , and the group has attempted to address them with a more quantitative analysis

• Mosier-Boss, Pamela A.; Dea, J.Y.; Forsley, L.P.G.; Morey, M.S.; Tinsley, J.R.; Hurley, J.P.; Gordon, F.E. (2010), "Comparison of Pd/D co-deposition and DT neutron generated triple tracks observed in CR-39 detectors", Eur. Phys. J. Appl. Phys., 51: 20901, doi:10.1051/epjap/2010087

• Price, P.B.; Barwick, S.W.; Porter, J. D (1989), "Search for energetic-charged-particle emission from deuterated Ti and Pd foils", Phys. Rev. Lett., 63 (18): 1926–1929, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.63.1926

My first edit is ready! Crawdaddy74 (talk) 05:22, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Ugg sorry about my refs being displayed in your topic there EN...Crawdaddy74 (talk) 07:48, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

The only Mosier-boss paper that appears in sources is the 2009 paper, and only because it was announced in the 20th anniversary of CF. The new text tries to analyze and give relative weight to papers that have not been analyzed and given relative weight --> original research from primary sources. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:16, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

removed x-rays

The X-ray part only had primary sources. Looking a secondary sources, I found no mention of any X-ray detected by Fleischmann. As in no mention at all, only mentions to a "X-ray laser fiasco" by Hagelstein a few years before. Either Fleischmann didn't claim to detect X-rays, or it was a very little important claim when compared with his claims of helium, tritium and gamma rays. It doesn't appear either in DOE 1989, Not sure about DOE 2004 because archive.org is failing.

I replaced it with a cite from Bart Simon's book.

Though lacking gamma-ray detection, Fleishmann and Pons reported x-ray signals which failed to be independently replicated. Subsequent proponents continue to insist that x-rays are detected from their cold fusion cells.

• Wang, D.; Chen, S.; Li, Y.; Wang, M.; Fu, Y. (1995), "Research and progress of nuclear fusion phenomenon at normal temperature", Trends in Nuclear Physics, vol. 12, pp. 31–2 (in Chinese)

--Enric Naval (talk) 23:45, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

(Cold_fusion#Calorimetry_errors is also packed full with primary sources, but I don't recall right now any secondary source that can replace them. I'm going to leave it alone until I have looked at more sources.) --Enric Naval (talk) 00:26, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Nice job. Is there anyway you could give me hand with the edit I proposed above... I am still having trouble with figuring out the reference thing.Crawdaddy74 (talk) 02:50, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

And these two sentences look like dumping grounds for primary sources (sorry for the crude analogy):

Subsequent researchers who advocate for cold fusion report similar results.[92][93][94][95][96][97]

This type of report also became part of subsequent cold fusion claims.[101][102] --Enric Naval (talk) 03:07, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

This Article

Sorry, some of this article is just written HORRIBLY! I mean, just a mess. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.153.128.84 (talk) 02:49, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

It is indeed a mess. That is because irrational hard-core opponents of cold fusion insist on filling it with nonsensical, hand-waving objections to the research, instead of facts from the peer-reviewed literature, and an organized overview of the subject. Whenever anyone who knows about cold fusion tries to correct their nonsense, they ban that person from Wikipedia. This an acute example of the problems with the Wikipedia structure. Experts are denigrated and thrown out. Biased, ignorant fools dominate. This is true of the article on cold fusion and many other subjects I have checked. - Jed Rothwell —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.120.10.38 (talk) 00:17, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm surprised that this comment from Jed Rothwell has not been removed yet. Does it have anything to do with ScienceApologist having been indefinitely banned from Wikipedia [removed link with personal details on an editor --Enric Naval] ? Could it be that his mob has been silenced ?130.104.206.154 (talk) 11:39, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Nah, it's just that nobody cares (aka the continued existence of this comment here is not currently causing any particular disruption, tempers have cooled down since the last fights, etc. I could explain more reasons but I would fall foul of WP:BEANS). --Enric Naval (talk) 12:42, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

I am also surprised to see this remark is not been erased. The thought police must be busy elsewhere. One of them, TenOfAllTrades, deleted another remark of mine, explaining that I am a "banned user" -- an honor I was unaware of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Energy_Catalyzer&diff=421321503&oldid=421320271

I grant that remark was snide but I thought it was pretty funny. A pity Mr. (Ms.?) TenOfAllTrades has no sense of humor.

Would it be possible for me to ban Mr. TenOfAllTrades? He contrived to lock me out of that article, which is a neat trick. I do not know the rules, or why some people are given these powers and not others, but it would be fun going around locking people out for no apparent reason.

To be serious for a moment, as I see it, what happens here is none of my business. I do not feel that I have any right to complain about your rules and customs. I have no idea who is in charge here but whoever it is, they have every right to lock me and other knowledgeable people out while they fill this article with blather. I am not being sarcastic. - Jed Rothwell, Librarian, LENR-CANR.org —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.232.7.250 (talk) 17:42, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

To the extent that anyone or almost anyone* is invited to edit articles, then the articles are "everybody's business". I will agree that this article has problems, but I don't think I would call it "a mess". It simply focuses too much on all the negatives that could be dredged up about CF, and ignores the positives as much as can be gotten-away-with. I expect some more positives to become non-ignorable in the future, as more results come in from pressurized-deuterium experiments. So, I'm merely biding my time. (*an example of someone not invited to edit: a spammer. Jed, I recall you got banned partly because some idiot wanted to expand the definition of "spammer" to include folks who like to brag about themselves with their signatures. By that argument, everyone who attches "M.D." or "PhD" after their names should also be banned. The REAL person to ban should have been the idiot....) V (talk) 18:02, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

You wrote: "It simply focuses too much on all the negatives that could be dredged up about CF. . ." It is much worse than that. Looking at the section on calorimetry, for example, these negatives are not "dredged up" so much as invented out of whole cloth. They are not a bit true, and even if they were true, they would not apply to any experiment I know of. They would apply only to an experiment in which the temperature is measured at one location in the electrolyte. No one does that. Fleischmann and Pons measured with an array of sensors ~1 cm long as I recall. Most others measure outside the cell, either at the walls or with flow or Seebeck calorimetry. This section is the product of the fevered imaginations of people who know nothing about the experiments or calorimetry. I have not carefully reviewed the other sections but at a glance they are equally bad.

I also noted that some of the references say the opposite of what is claimed in the article.

When I wrote that this is filled with blather, I meant it. That is no exaggeration. I believe the main problem is the "Randy in Boise" effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Randy_in_Boise. Plus in this case the anti-science, anti-intellectual mindset of people who oppose cold fusion. However, as I said, and I sincerely meant, if that is how people here want things to be, it is none of my business. - Jed Rothwell, Librarian, LENR-CANR.org —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.232.7.250 (talk) 19:01, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Bring the evidence, and I'm sure it can be added to the article. But blaming a vast conspiracy on skeptics who are quite educated, pro-science and pro-intellectual is amusing at best. OrangeMarlin ^{Talk• Contributions} 22:46, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

The evidence can be found in the peer-reviewed literature, which you can read in any university library or at LENR-CANR.org. You will see that it contradicts the assertions made in this article. I said nothing about a conspiracy and I do not believe in one. This article is full of errors so it cannot be the product of people who are "quite educated" about cold fusion. Perhaps they are educated about other subjects.

Note that even if you do not believe in the scientific method, replication, or peer-review, and you have therefore concluded that the literature is mistaken, in a conventional reference book of this nature you would still be obligated to describe what the literature says. Not what you believe to be true, but what the experiments have revealed and the researchers have concluded. This article ignores the literature and describes only the self-published pet theories of a handful of anti-cold fusion fanatics. - Jed Rothwell, Librarian, LENR-CANR.org —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.120.10.38 (talk) 04:12, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Let me try to be a little more specific and helpful. As I mentioned, the section on calorimetry is now devoted to crackpot theories about imaginary calorimeters. I suggest that the authors of this article should read the literature and learn about actual calorimeters used in cold fusion studies. They should write conventional descriptions of these calorimeters, with schematics and sample data. They might say that a variety of different types (isoperibolic, flow, Seebeck) have been used in order to eliminate systematic errors. They might describe a few of the challenges of calorimetry as applied to cold fusion, and improvements that have been made over the years to meet these challenges. I wrote something along these lines here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

Even if the Wikipedia authors are convinced that all published calorimetric data from all ~200 laboratories is wrong, they should report what the literature describes, not what they themselves think of it. The present article describes only the authors' opinions and theories, with no description of the claims. - Jed Rothwell, Librarian, LENR-CANR.org —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.120.10.38 (talk) 13:41, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Did you find that amusing Orange Marlin? Someone who is pro-science pro-intellectual and educated would, at this point, begin actually researching the topic in primary literature. If that doesn't interest you, perhaps you should leave the article to people who actually care enough to do some work. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.58.24.190 (talk) 14:59, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

A problem now rears its ugly head, that even the pro-CF people have to work with rather than against. This is a Wikipedia Policy regarding the uses of primary sources. A FEW can be offered as references, but they can't be used as direct sources of data for an article (almost any in-depth article). The Policy is that articles must get their data from secondary and even tertiary sources, articles about other articles, that is. Thus, while there are useful articles regarding CF experiments using electrolysis, I've been waiting for something like 2 years for some appropriate articles to appear regarding the direct pressurization of deuterium into palladium. The primary articles exist, but apparently they haven't caught the attention of most folks who write the kind of articles that Wikipedia wants as sources. V (talk) 06:37, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

And it's even worse. I'm reading some sources (the kind wikipedia likes) to add more stuff into the article, and they treat pressurization of deuterium as something ludicrous. You should be familiar with the caveats they list; citing from memory: molecules in the solid are farther apart than in the gas so they should have lower fusion rates, such high pressures are unattainable by simple electrolysis, the pressures would break the palladium rod, etc. (btw, I'm not interested in entering a looong discussion in technical details, just commenting on what I read) --Enric Naval (talk) 08:10, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Enric Naval wrote: "And it's even worse. I'm reading some sources (the kind wikipedia likes) to add more stuff into the article, and they treat pressurization of deuterium as something ludicrous. You should be familiar with the caveats they list; citing from memory: molecules in the solid are farther apart than in the gas . . ."

Those are not caveats. They are facts well known to people like Fleischmann. He literally wrote the book on metal lattices. If you are suggesting that fusion occurs because of pressurization, in a brute-force "squeezing" effect, that is ludicrous -- as you say. The pressure is typically 1 to 3 atm, so there would be fusion everywhere in nature it that were a factor. Your discussion appears to be a straw man: you are casting doubt about an assertion that no cold fusion researcher makes. Gas loaded systems work because the metal absorbs the hydrogen, not because hydrogen atoms are forced together or forced into the lattice under high pressure. What you are reading has no bearing on the subject.

I suspect you are replacing facts about cold fusion with your own ideas, your own original research, and “caveats” that you mistakenly suppose the researchers never thought of. - Jed Rothwell, Librarian, LENR-CANR.org

V wrote: “A problem now rears its ugly head, that even the pro-CF people have to work with rather than against. This is a Wikipedia Policy regarding the uses of primary sources. A FEW can be offered as references . . .”

That seems like an ill-advised policy. The farther removed from original sources you get, the more distorted and mistaken the report becomes. I have learned there are a number of other ill-advised policies here; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_retention

Anyway, primary or secondary, my point is that your sources and the text should be about cold fusion, not some other subject. This article tells the reader little or nothing about cold fusion. It does not say what the researchers do, what the main instruments they use are, what levels of power, energy, tritium or helium they measure, or any other relevant details. There is no sample data, a few inadequate schematics, and nothing about key concepts such as heat beyond the limits of chemistry or helium correlated with heat in approximately the ratio as it is with plasma fusion. This article should be titled "Imaginary skeptical objections to cold fusion."

I do not understand why the skeptics feel they must hijack this article and make it about themselves, just because they do not believe the results. I am honestly mystified by that.

I am highly skeptical about creationism. I don’t believe a word of it. However, if I were writing an encyclopedia article about it, I would not devote the whole article to explaining "Why Jed thinks this can’t be true." I would leave out my opinions. As accurately as I can, I would report what the creationists say and what they think. If I asked a creationist "what is your source of information?" and she said, "the Bible" I would not say: "Sorry, that’s a primary source, we can’t include it" or "that is not a valid source of scientific information, we can’t include it." I would say: "Okay, what chapter and verse?" I would reference that verse and explain why the creationists think it proves their point. Let the reader decide whether it does or not.

If I included skeptical objections to creationism, I would also include the Creationist's own rebuttals to these objections. I would not pretend the creationists never thought of these objections, or never tried to meet them. This cold fusion article is filled with skeptical objections. Most are physically impossible and irrelevant, like the nonsense in the calorimetry section. There are a few genuine issues, but the article does not point out that the researchers themselves knew about these issues, and addressed them in 1989. For example, the article mentions recombination: "Several researchers have described potential mechanisms by which this process could occur and thereby account for excess heat in electrolysis experiments." It should also say that in every actual experiment on record, these mechanisms have been ruled out by using closed cells with recombiners, by measuring the gas flow, or by assuming complete recombination occurs and counting only the heat above the limits of recombination. The text as written gives the reader the false impression that this objection applies to real experiments. That's either a stupid error or it is disinformation.

As I said, the whole article is like this. Nearly every assertion is either factually wrong or distorted. The only mention of tritium says that it was not replicated. It was replicated in over 100 labs, at levels ranging from ~40 times background to millions of times background. Again, whoever wrote that is either grossly ignorant, or he knows the facts and he is writing anti-cold fusion propaganda.

Anyway, I am glad I have nothing to do with this article. I know hundreds of cold fusion researchers. They seldom agree about anything, but all of the ones who looked at this article agree it is outrageous nonsense. Not only is this nonsense, it is not very good at what it sets out to do, which is to discredit the field. McKubre and I have both said we could write far more damning critiques of cold fusion than any skeptic. I have done that for several experiments, which is why I have some prominent enemies in the field. The authors here invent imaginary problems. I know of many actual, real weaknesses that the authors of this article have never dreamed of. The papers at LENR-CANR describe them; the skeptics have not even bothered to read papers that support their point of view! I just uploaded one yesterday. - Jed Rothwell, Librarian, LENR-CANR.org —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.120.10.38 (talk) 17:18, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Regarding these items posted by two different people: "molecules in the solid are farther apart than in the gas" and "Gas loaded systems work because the metal absorbs the hydrogen, not because hydrogen atoms are forced together or forced into the lattice under high pressure." Actually, if fusion actually happens, it is at least partly because inside the metal, the hydrogen does not exist as molecules or as atoms. The absorption process causes the gas to dissociate into electrons and nuclei. Even without fusion, such dissociation is the only way to explain why hydrogen can permeate palladium like a sponge, when helium (a smaller atom!) can't. So, in an electrolysis experiment when absorption takes place at atmospheric pressure, it can take a long time for enough bare hydrogen nuclei to get into the metal, for fusion to have a chance of occurring, while in a pressurization experiment, getting enough loose hydrogen nuclei into the metal is relatively easy. This is just simple logic and, as I've written before on this page, I'm pretty sure that every pressurized-deuterium experiment, with palladium, has produced anomalous energy. Talking about molecules inside the metal simply distracts from the observed facts (easy permeation, for hydrogen only, being one fact that nobody argues about). V (talk) 19:16, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

(My mistake, I keep using "molecules" for everything....)

Fleischmann did not "literally wrote the book on metal lattices". Let's not distort reality to make some authors look more authoritative than they really are, please. A couple of RS say that he didn't appear to have read the literature on the topic before starting, and that the phenomena inside lattices was well understood before Fleischmann started studying it (again citing from memory, btw). --Enric Naval (talk) 09:01, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

DIA document

Freelion thinks a certain DIA document should be discussed in the article [1]. This DIA document appears to be leaked, not published, which means that according to [2], it should not be used as a source. Is there something I am missing? (See also [3]) Olorinish (talk) 01:47, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

What you are missing is the fact that the Defense Intelligence Agency e-mailed hundreds of copies of this report to scientists worldwide, as well as a copy to Rothwell with permission for him to upload it. It may thus quite reasonably be considered official, and a valid source as far as Wikipedia is concerned. Brian Josephson (talk) 20:04, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

That's interesting Olorinish. I guess we could remove the source but what about the statement - is it contestable? Could I re-word the statement (as it is general info) and put it back into the intro without the source? Meanwhile, just for the record, can we consider www.lenr-canr.org as a reliable source? Freelion (talk) 05:03, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

The recent work and support is already described by other, sourced, statements. Regarding the question of whether lenr-canr.org is a reliable source, it depends on what the statement is. Olorinish (talk) 12:00, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Editors here may be advised to review Jed's comments at Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_72 with regard to the website he promotes. LeadSongDog come howl! 19:00, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Are you following me LeadSongDog? You're very busy aren't you. Do you think you could find the time to answer my question at Talk:Nirmala Srivastava#2011 proposed rename of article? Thank you for the internal link on lenr-canr.org, that's helpful, thanks.

Olornish, the DIA reference does contain additional info about international experiments sponsored by state or major corporations which aren't mentioned in the article. Brian Josephson (talk), do you have any evidence of the DIA releasing that report? Freelion (talk) 00:06, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to Leadsongdog we have an internal link to a conversation including the librarian of lenr-canr.org. He declares that he has permission to host all of the documents on the website. That means he has legally published these sources, which fulfills the requirements of WP:RS. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Freelion (talk • contribs) 00:37, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Just to clarify, it's previously been shown that LENR-CANR may contain copyright violations: not all of the material is potentially a copyright violation, but some material hosted is included through under the permission of the author, not the copyright holder (the journal). Thus although LENR-CANR is no longer black listed, external links to articles on the site need to be checked to confirm that they meet the copyright policy. - Bilby (talk) 00:55, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

In that case I believe the DIA reference is OK. Jed Rothwell says that he has permission to host that report and as he says, all the copyright holders of all the reports he hosts have the opportunity to remove them. The DIA report is one he mentions. He says the DIA knows that he is hosting it and even cites his website as one of its references. This DIA report has been on his website for quite a while as is evident by a Google search - many other websites also link to the report on lenr-canr.org. So the DIA has had ample opportunity to ask him to remove it if it is in breach of their copyright. We can take it in good faith that this report is being published with the owner's permission so we are not knowingly breaching any copyright as per copyright policy. Freelion (talk) 03:04, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

I do not know the copyright status of that article. However, just in the hope of clarifying the general situation, it doesn't really matter how long an article has been hosted on a site, as the copyright holder may simply be unaware that the article is there. More importantly, though, whether or not it is legally hosted, this isn't a reason for not using the article - it is only a reason for not linking to the article. The question as to whether or not the article has been formally published, or has been leaked, is a separate issue - a leaked document may not be a verifiable reliable source, but this isn't a copyright concern per se. - Bilby (talk) 03:14, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

My previous comment argues that it is fair to assume this report has not been leaked and does not breach copyright. Freelion (talk) 03:40, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

My two cents: I'm almost certain that anything/everything published by the U.S. Government is considered to be Public Domain (even when it's "classified" and kept secret). That's because of the "work for hire" rules associated with copyright ownership. Someone who pays someone else to create something can be the copyright owner. In the case of the U.S. Government, all its employees are paid by the U.S. Public. So, works produced by the U.S. Government are Public Domain. V (talk) 05:49, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Though there's a lot of discussion of the copyright status of the document above, I don't see that anyone has addressed Olorinish's central point, the question of whether this is a WP:RS per Wikipedia standards. Has this document been published anywhere, or is there a reliable secondary source that discusses it? Private correspondence that is not remarked on by other sources does not meet our sourcing standards, even if it can be shown to be authentic and not encumbered by copyright. --Noren (talk) 13:03, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

BAD assumption, Noren. The DIA document is not primary data generated by researchers in the field; it is a secondary source describing various primary sources, and therefore it doesn't need tertiary sources describing it. I will agree, however, that its status as a "publication" needs to be clarified before it can be used as a WikiPedia source-document. V (talk) 05:48, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Just above it was mentioned that this was mass-emailed to outside scientists by the department itself. That constitutes publishing. Kevin Baas^talk 22:45, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Actually, it sounds more like an emailing than a publishing. Is emailing reports the standard way of distributing them? I would guess that when they really want to publish a report, they put in on a web site or something. Olorinish (talk) 00:30, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Maybe if they REALLY REALLY want to publish it. That would definitely be something politically motivated. I've never heard of or seen that done before. Kevin Baas^talk 16:48, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Well it has been published - on the LENR-CANR website. As mentioned above, the DIA has had ample opportunity to ask Rothwell to remove it if it is in breach of their copyright. We can take it in good faith that this report has being published with the DIA's permission. They even use this website as a reference. Freelion (talk) 01:47, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Is there any objection to using this report in the article now? Freelion (talk) 09:55, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

I still object to using it, since the DIA did not publish that report, which means that it likely does not represent the DIA's official position. Keep in mind that a very likely reason for not publishing such a report is that the evidence for cold fusion is still weak. If that changes, many organizations like the DIA will publish descriptions of it, after which this article should discuss it. Wikipedia isn't going anywhere. Olorinish (talk) 11:44, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

That doesn't fit any reasonable definition of "being published by DIA". Bilby's comment above would also apply. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:32, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Regarding "likely reason for not publishing...evidence is weak": note this article: [4] which has been widely published, and the evidence is much thinner and more tenuous than that for cold fusion. From a statistical perspective, in fact, the evidence is quite dismal. So you that assertion, "likely reason for not publishing...evidence is weak", is baldly contradicted by empirical evidence. And furthermore, in such cases, we don't even think to question the "publishability". Kevin Baas^talk 12:54, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

This in fact alludes to a more fundamental point: that historically speaking, strength/weakness of evidence, even plausibility, has not been a significant factor in decisions about information dissemination. But we have only to look at politics and religion to see that... Kevin Baas^talk 12:46, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

The attitudes of some folks around here is hilarious. Remember the "Pentagon Papers"? Where were the claims that those documents were forged or did not originate in the Pentagon? Why is it, just because this document is about Cold Fusion research and positive, its origin is questioned? What if it had been negative? I bet the detractors wouldn't waste two seconds getting it into the article and trumpeting such negative points! V (talk) 05:52, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Letter to editor in bibliography

This was added to the bibliography, as "published in Nature". However, this is not an article but a letter to the editor. We shouldn't give it a place in the article unless a secondary source says that this specific letter was important for some reason.

• Gryziński, Michał (27 April 1989), "Cold fusion: what's going on?", Nature, 338: 712, doi:10.1038/338712a0

--Enric Naval (talk) 11:09, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

I tried the link and the text is behind a paywall. It doesn't make sense to me that a "free for anyone" encyclopedia should link to sources that only people who have money can access. OTHER than that, though, the text could have been important if the Editors of Nature had replied to that letter. They represent a significant voice in the scientific community, see, especially in terms of mainstream thinking at the time such a reply was (if it was) published. V (talk) 17:24, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

Disambig

Now the artist is said to be only about the Fleischmann–Pons set-up. Although the start of the history section is somewhat more general. Perhaps we should spin of the Fleischmann–Pons part to it's own article an keep this as a page about cold fusion in general. // Liftarn (talk)