User talk:Navy Physics Geek
Welcome to Wikipedia. You ask this. I can't answer you there at the moment, I'm topic banned like quite a few others who tried to make that article complete and accurate. Don't worry, it's a momentary speed bump and freed me up for Other Stuff, it will be over soon. Anyway, the reason is that the neutron finding had so much media notice that the editors sitting on the article couldn't ignore it. There is, in fact, sufficient secondary source that the charged particle detection should be there too. But it's been difficult to get the simplest and most blatant and thoroughly sourced stuff into the article; one fact at a time. Thanks for the pointer to the erratum, it's useful as a citation of Widom-Larsen theory, that helps make it notable.
Right now, the article claims that all theories of cold fusion are "ad-hoc," based on old tertiary source, very weak, and, while the exact cause of my ban is a tad mysterious, it wasn't actually stated, there was edit warring to keep out the Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate theory of Takahashi (which is stunning, in my opinion, it much more clearly explains all the experimental results than any other), which is cited in the 2009 Naturwissenschaften paper by the SPAWAR group (Mosier-Boss et al), and hydrino theory. I'm not at all sure, because I don't have a copy of the recent Kim paper in Naturwissenschaften on Bose-Einstein condensate theory, but I think that the TSC theory is a variation on it.
So we have a section on proposed explanations that doesn't give any, except for "experimental error." Cool, eh?
We also have a section on the association of excess heat and helium that doesn't show any association at all, the only experimental result given is a mangled report from the 2004 DoE report that was a blatant misunderstanding of the Hagelstein review paper, that actually, were it correct, would show no association, i.e., probably no correlation at all. In fact, there is high correlation, both as shown in the body of the Hagelstein paper, and, a bit more thoroughly, in Storms (The Science of Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction, 2007). Actually, stunning and conclusive correlation, as those things go, at the right energy for deuterium in, helium out. But we have a very active editor who literally doesn't understand what "association" means. Ah, so many details, so little time!
I think it's really funny. SPAWAR finds copious radiation, almost certainly alpha particles, every time they run a cell with CR-39. It's been confirmed by others, and, in fact, the radiation was first reported by the Chinese in about 1990, also using CR-39. Helium is found, same difference, actually. Correlation with heat nails it. And nobody notices. (Fortunately, not exactly nobody, or there would be no hope for this on Wikipedia.) But a handful of neutrons, maybe ten total per chip, for weeks of electrolysis, big uproar! Of course, it is, in fact significant, because that's ten times background, and it shouldn't be there at all if there are no nuclear reactions taking place. But it wasn't a new finding, since low levels of neutrons have been reported by many groups; it's just that the SPAWAR findings use such a simple method that it's quite difficult to ascribe it to artifact, as could be done with the previous low-level findings that used more cumbersome methods. Sometimes cheaper is better. --Abd (talk) 21:13, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
About the cold fusion article
[1]. We don't have coverage of charged particle detection only for political reasons. Besides there being ample primary source, peer-reviewed papers, we have multiple reliable secondary sources on it, but, in general, any sources which appear to support nuclear phenomena in palladium deuteride, or other low-temperature environments, are vigorously opposed as "fringe." Even though this is becoming increasingly preposterous. Even though there is no contrary peer-reviewed source, primary or secondary, beyond Kowalski, who is strange and who does, in any case, generally confirm the CR-39 findings, but simply asserts an origin for CR-39 pitting that isn't as described, and in apparent ignorance of the controls (which he didn't test, he is working in a private lab without much in the way of resources). He simply asserts certain possible contradictions in his own experiments, which were answered in back-to-back publication with Kowalski's critique. In any case, I'm at ArbComm now over my ban from Cold fusion, see Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration#William M. Connolley (2nd). --Abd (talk) 16:52, 12 July 2009 (UTC)
Cold fusion
It's no secret that cold fusion has been very controversial. I hope everyone is able to rise above the controversy. Navy Physics Geek (talk) 22:06, 12 July 2009 (UTC)