FT2 take note. While Cla68 doesn't invoke Girard's Model by name, he observes the phenomenon of mimesis, whereby unsustainable and unwise practices are blithely adopted and reprised without consideration of their long-term consequences. In terms of the modern academic models of a learning organization, the largely unstructured and uncoordinated community of Wikipedians fail to learn from their mistakes, repeating them anew from one bailiwick to the next.

Ironically, the Wikipedia article on learning organization is actually a fairly well-written, referenced article.

Wikipedia exemplifies the kind of roller-coaster learning curve, full of dramaturgical sturm und drang arising from ill-advised practices grounded in tragic misconceptions and woefully incomplete mastery of appropriate managerial ethics and organizational principles.

It is not a roller coaster, it's a tilt-a-whirl.

I just finished writing a response to Carcharoth's question about what I'd do differently. Setting aside the obvious answer of not editing Wikipedia, which would certainly save a lot of trouble, I looked at the decision, commented once again on it, then buried that under specific responses of change. In the process, I looked at the references that had been cited in the finding of fact that I had edited cold fusion tendentiously. They were all pointers to evidence by Enric Naval, who had started with a laundry list of everything and the kitchen sink, including lots of stuff like "proxies for banned users" which has finally been thoroughly rejected. I'd thought it obvious! Anyway, I'd responded to Enric's original evidence, but then he had changed it all, and the new evidence is what ArbComm cited. It was all quite bad, but one pointer was totally outrageous. Remember, this is evidence presented to show that I was editing tendentiously:

The finding.

The Evidence (point 4), which, under the header of "We can't take every peer-reviewed source seriously," points to:

The Evidence Enric presented in RfAr/Fringe science.

Did the arbitrators actually read this? This was evidence presented before I had touched the article. Enric (like the rest of the Cab) was taking a position rejected by ArbComm in that arbitration; my subsequent editing was intended to fulfill the principles of that decision, which was sound, as far as it went.

I'm suspecting that the arbs voting for that finding didn't read it, they just read the header, and assumed that it was my position Enric was describing. Or I don't know what, but it makes no sense that this would be evidence about tendentious editing. I've now described this on the Proposed decision talk, but we'll see if anyone picks up on it beyond the IP editor.

Discussion started by an IP editor on the arbitration proposed decision talk page.

Cab. I've removed the "al" from the end to match the removal of the conspiracy theory from the claim of social involvement.

Will ArbComm realize that it cannot decide fact by vote? That what it rejected as unsupported by evidence wasn't what I claimed, and that what I claimed is common knowledge and was supported? Will Abd wake up and realize that none of this matters at all?

Maybe.

Hey, Mathsci! You've claimed I don't know beans about cold fusion. I've stated on the proposed decision talk page that the recent peer-reviewed sources entirely assume the reality of LENR (colloquially, "cold fusion"), and that that the bulk of peer-reviewed publication, overall, since 1989, favors the positive, i.e., there is a real anomaly, unexplained still (but with new major publications proposing theories). Can you contradict this?

I really don't get this bogus charge of "tendentiousness". People everywhere argue for their position on and off the Internet and have done so since the dawn of civilization. Only in Wikipedia would that be defined as a bannable offense.

Nobody becomes an expert on a fringe science topic by four months of home reading. Abd seems to be trying to "reinvent" himself on wikipedia. On his own admission, he is not a trained university-level research scientist in real life. No matter how much he wishes it were so, not even his favourite tooth fairy could make it happen. Anyway, as he is well aware, it doesn't matter on wikipedia.

Meanwhile back on wikipedia, amongst other things, Abd wrote this as a future promise:



This is a record that seems to have beome stuck in the same groove.

My view (FWIW) is that people are expected to advocated for their own position, but in doing so to respect others and their positions, and to eventually settle down to a compromise. Wikipedia:Tendentious editing, to me, means things like denegrating the editor as a tactic to devalue his edits, refusing to give a fair hearing to other people's positions, reopening old disputes that have previously been settled, trying to win by attrition or by out-shouting the other side, not respecting your co-workers, and so on.

There are tendentious people where I work in real life, who won't forgive old grudges, who argue their point incessantly, who belittle people lower than them on the ladder. It's not just a wikipedia thing, but it's harder to deal with on wikipedia.

Incivility is not the same thing as vigorously arguing for one's point of view. I don't know if they still have Debate Clubs in high school, but one can vigorously debate on a position without ridiculing one's opponent.

I know that and you know that. If we were the only two Wikipedia editors I'm sure we'd get along famously.

The point is that if they can't silence or marginalize you for a valid infraction, they will make one up. Among the bogus reasons I ran into, "tendentiousness" was the first and "having no interest in writing an encyclopedia" was the second. The third was having the temerity to develop course materials on managerial ethics, which Jimbo then declared "beyond the scope of the project."

I agree. But what I see on Wikipedia is that these qualities are projected onto people who aren't naturally inclined that way. How, by the way, does one "out-shout" someone else, in an on-line forum? Yes, one could literally overwhelm all comment with tons of scattershot response, but when comments are linear, in blocks, it's easy to skip them. I prefer mailing list discussion, myself, and I've thought that we should, perhaps, start up article mailing lists. And if you don't want to read what an editor writes, you just skip it, delete it, or even filter it out.

What I've been able to do, with enough time, is to negotiate compromises that stick. From initial positions that seemed impossible. But some editors really didn't like this. They were certain that lenr-canr.org should be blacklisted, after all, they claimed, it is fringe, POV-pushing, spammed, fraudulent, violating copyright, and completely useless and unusable.

However, when the issues were dismantled and examined one by one, they vanished. Lenr-canr.org is a library of information on cold fusion, much of which is peer-reviewed papers republished with permission. The site operators would prefer that it be complete and unbiased, but there is some bias due to difficulties in obtaining permissions. It's just an on-line library, really, not an advocacy site, though it does contain advocacy material. It also contains skeptical material. It contains whatever is of any notability and they can get permission.

So a paper was whitelisted for use at the article on Martin Fleischmann. I put it in. JzG edit warred to keep it out. I stopped, so it was out for a time. But I ran a process on the talk page to examine the issues in detail, and the result was consensus, complete consensus of all participating editors; an arbitrator popped by and checked it out, it was okay. Later, Hipocrite, operating on some excuse, removed the link again. It was restored by an administrator, I didn't have to touch it.

Consensus is self-maintaining, once it is established on a firm footing, without arbitrary exclusion, and is sufficiently broad. And it's possible to keep consensus open to change, without having everyone struggle over every new proposal.

But it won't happen if the community keeps banning editors who can see beyond the present limitations of our process or our articles. Or even editors who simply have an unpopular POV. It's known how to run effective consensus process, but we have avoided it because editors believe that (1) they must be personally involved and (2) it's a lot of work and they don't want to do that.

The solution is obvious, in fact.

I'd layer this, but I can't do that here. Let those read who will enjoy, let those skip who will not.



Shocked, I'm shocked.

My interest was actually very similar. My history is with consensus organizations, and, as I've been proposing for some time, NPOV depends on consensus. It's not that NPOV is a vote -- we use "consensus" in a weird way on Wikipedia -- it is that the only objective standard for NPOV is that all editors accept it. That's a measure, not a decision-maker, because it may be unattainable; still, we can maximize consensus, and text enjoying maximized consensus is more likely to be neutral.

Anyway, my long-term work is with how to scale up the kinds of consensus process that are known -- by professionals and others -- to work on a small scale, when the scale increases. You'd think that Wikipedians would be interested in this! But, in fact, per the Iron Law of Oligarchy, oligarchies always develop, and, in what's been called the Lomax effect where I've written about it elsewhere, when a collection of members of an organization have excess power, they will resist reforms that would even out the power, because they will see it as a loss, and, generally, they believe in themselves as better qualified to exercise power. They might be right, by the way, but a good system will actually preserve the better part of the oligarchy while reducing the abuse. In the end, everyone benefits from broad consensus because it then requires much less work to maintain cooperation.

It was touch and go for a while, there were lots of "we don't need your kind around here" noises.

The irony in the present RfAr is that I finally settled down to some serious work on an article. Contrary to Mathsci's blathering, I have the background to understand the issues at cold fusion. Just no degrees, because I went in a different direction. I've asked Mathsci to make himself useful, look at the math in a theoretical paper on Takahashi's Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate, my favorite cold fusion theory, because, definitely, the math is beyond me. He didn't. I have no idea if he actually understands quantum field theory, but I do know that it's an extraordinarily difficult field; what Mathsci claims to know is the much simpler approximation, quantum mechanics.

Cold fusion, though, isn't a field where theory counts for much. That will change, but what's been done over the last twenty years is to establish, in round outlines and with some specificity as well, what conditions are necessary to see the Pons-Fleischmann effect (excess heat) and then what other phenomena accompany it. Briefly, helium, at the right levels correlated with excess heat based on an idea that deuterium fusion is taking place (i.e., two deuterium nuclei fusing to form helium). But it's unlikely that this is the actual reaction. There are other pathways which would accomplish that result. And radiation.

What fooled everyone for years is that whatever reaction is taking place, there are few neutrons emitted. Which is a great thing, in fact, if a way to commercially apply this is ever found (it might not be!). There is apparently plenty of alpha radiation emitted (which is another way of saying that the reaction produces helium....) but also some very low level of neutrons, so low that recent paper published in Naturwissenschaften ascribes them to secondary reactions. The primary reaction doesn't produce them. Everyone thought that it would have to be ordinary fusion, and if it was fusion,there would have to be neutrons, and if there were no neutrons, it must not be fusion.

Probably a bad assumption. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there is more than one way to get from deuterium to helium. Such as Takahashi's theory, which predicts, on quantum theoretical grounds, that a TSC occasionally forms from two deuterium molecules, which collapse as a "condensate," which seems to be a Bose-Einstein condensate on a very small scale, i.e., two molecules, and he predicts that it immediately fuses into Beryllium-8, which immediately fissions to two helium nuclei. No neutrons emitted. But the now very hot helium nuclei can cause secondary reactions that can do all kinds of stuff.

But it's not an accepted theory yet, just a rather appealing one. Ahem.

Basically, the want to ban me because I write too much. That's the bottom line. Too much discussion. At the same time, there was a remedy that, in a burst of total silliness, demanded that I discuss changes before reverting. It's almost like the remedy-writing machine got stuck.

(Has anyone else noticed that there does seem to be some kind of split at ArbComm? So many findings and remedies are sitting close to majority, just below or just over. Bad sign, or good, I suppose, depending on your perspective. WMC blocked me during the case, some arbs claimed it was the most outrageous thing they'd seen. Others think, ho hum, I don't see what was such a problem. Didn't the community decide he should be banned from editing that page? Yet they all signed on to the principle that the appearance of bias was to be avoided, not just actual bias, while the Cab screamed that this was going to cramp their style, it was ridiculous. ArbComm, or at least part of it, is badly confused.)

Discussion is essential to finding consensus. Lots and lots of discussion, if it's a difficult problem. But if it is mass discussion, it's impossible, it gets more and more tedious. So discussion has to be broken down, with a few discussing at a time, with consensus building from there. Some people read what I write and like it and understand it. Some don't. Those who don't, don't want it to exist. Old problem.

Their solution is to ban me. I've been banned before, from mailing lists. The lists died. Not necessarily as cause and effect, rather as common cause: if they would ban me, they would ban anyone who knew how to make it through the next stages of their development.

I begged the arbs that, if they were really going to find that I had "attacked editors" and failed to substantiate my "charges," and if this referred to, as it practically must, my claims that a "cabal" exists, and they have a finding that I failed to show this, please, please, site ban me, because if there is no cabal, as I very carefully defined it, then this mass of editors who have long been calling for me to be banned, with new excuses or reasons developed for each occasion, is just a collection of independent editors, a sample of the community, a fair sample, and if I'm really pissing everyone off, it doesn't matter who is right, I'd be disruptive. QED.

But it seems they want their denial and something else. Or not. I may have finally gotten the attention of several arbs, who now want to jack up the originally proposed, and not passing, one month site ban to three months. I don't know why they bother with limits, I'm 65 and not likely to change a great deal. I can handle restrictions, that's a different matter, but change my spots, no.

To me, it's a bit reversed. Do I really want to continue to expose myself to this collection of narrow-minded self-righteous puritans, so ready and quick to judge and condemn? I see some good stuff going on, but .... really, should I stumble across AN/I, it practically makes me throw up, the manifest hatred, the assumptions of evil intent (bad faith doesn't capture it). Cla68 is right, ban discussions often feel like lynchings.

Do I really want to support a project that does this to people?

And the corruption rubs off. I see administrators burning out, admins who were once thoughtful, patient, and wise, becoming other than that.

Some wikifriends are asking me to tone it down, they want me around, but ... I'm not really sure that it's good for me, for my family, for my work, or, for that matter, for Wikipedia. I do know how to solve the so-called "governance" problem, the solutions are much simpler than most think, but there is such a barrier of assumption and ignorance to overcome, on the one hand, and, on the other, such despair even from those who might want something different, that it may be completely impossible. At least from the inside. There are other possibilities.

I haven't followed the cold fusion story since it first came out in the late 1980s. At that time, I recall a nuclear physicist from MIT published the definitive rebuttal, offering a plausible explanation for the otherwise unexplained reaction products. As I recall, it had to do with the release of gases that had been adsorbed onto the matrix when the experiment was set up.

Mathsci, what's up with this?

Do you mean this?

Thanks. Your impression would be the same as the impression of many. However, there never was a "definitive rebuttal."

My, my, where to begin?

First of all, the original report by Fleischmann only provided evidence for two reaction products: heat and neutrons. The neutron finding was bogus, experimental error.

The excess heat was never refuted; there was, in the Caltech negative replication, a speculation that they had failed to stir their cell, causing a calorimetry error. Media claims are still common that "nobody could replicate the experiment," but that is a tad deceptive, given that there are 153 peer-reviewed reports finding excess heat in the palladium deuteride system. Some of these use techniques that don't involve energy input, just gas-loading of nanoparticle palladium with deuterium or hydrogen gas (the latter as a form of control). With both gases, there is initial heat release from the heat of formation of palladium deuteride or hydride. With hydrogen, the closed cell readily settles to ambient temperature within a few hours. With deuterium, the cell settles to, in the Arata experiment widely reported and confirmed, 4 degrees C above ambient, and stays there for 3000 hours until they terminate the experiment and open the cell for helium analysis.

The MIT experiment? This would be the report of Albagli et al, "Measurement and analysis of neutron and gamma-ray emission rates, other fusion products, and power in electrochemical cells havin gPd cathodes., J. Fusion Energy 9, 133 (1990).

The submitted paper

There are two major considerations about that report (and some applies to all the "negative replications"). The effect was not nearly as simple and easy to find as the original press conference implied. Groups rushed to confirm, and most groups found nothing. And they reported finding nothing. Let's suppose that there was a real effect, but it occurred only under rare conditions. Were these negative replications exact replications? No. They were begun at a time when there was insufficient information available, and they were rushed. It's been estimated that a major chunk of the U.S. national research effort was diverted, for a short time, into attempts to replicate cold fusion. Most of these attempts failed, many were not published at all. (Some positive replications were also not published.)

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that most replication efforts were doomed. Later, the conditions necessary to show the effect were characterized, and a 2008 Bayesian analysis of the early reseach reports accurately predicts, from the experimental descriptions, which replications would succeed and which would fail. What Albagli et al did was to report no effect, and then speculate about what might have caused Fleischmann to err. "Other reaction products" weren't being asserted until later, but they would have looked for tritium and He-3, and, big surprise, either didn't find any, or did, and were then able to show it was from contamination.

Simon, a sociologist, in Undead Science, published by Rutgers University Press in 2002, writes, about the American Physical Society meeting where Pons and Fleischmann were roundly bashed to the cheers of the audience:


The MIT report abstract:


Anyone familiar with successful replications would look at this and say that they would find what they found: nothing. "10 days." To show the effect, it's necessary to get very high loading of the palladium with deuterium, better than 90% (i.e., 9 atoms of deuterium for every 10 of palladium). It takes months to get a Fleischmann-type cell to that loading ratio. Secondly, most commercial off-the-shelf palladium rods have microcracks, and won't load to such a high ratio. The replication was doomed. And if they didn't set up the reaction conditions, of course they didn't find helium or tritium or other reaction products

However, there may be another problem as well. That they were unlikely to see an effect doesn't mean that there would be no effect at all. They were looking for substantial heat. In the abstract they state "no excess power ... was detected."

I'm not going to try to prove it here -- because, ultimately, it's moot -- but their published data, it has been claimed, was altered from the raw data, which did show a modest level of excess heat. Jed Rothwell calls it a "blatant forgery." Eugene Mallove apparently resigned as the MIT Press Officer over this study. Claims of misconduct were filed, and stonewalled. It's a mess. I've seen some of the evidence of alteration, and it seems credible. The substance of their report -- finding nothing -- is correct and expected, as long as "nothing" isn't taken absolutely literally.

Basically, the MIT report, like all the negative replications, simply showed that, doing what they did, you don't get excess heat and other reaction products, because you didn't get a reaction.

Two cells? 10 days? Off-the-shelf palladium? Loading ratio below 80% (it's in the report).

Now, below is a summary from the peer-reviewed Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, published in 2008 by the American Chemical Society, the largest scientific society in the world, through Oxford University Press. It's a collection of papers, all but one original, including papers that are reviews of the field. Secondary source, peer-reviewed, academic publisher. That should be the gold standard for reliable source, mainstream.

But not against a wall of opinion like that which you expressed, Moulton, but firmly held and pushed, not merely remembered. RS standards? Piffle!


I wrote on WP talk:Proposed decision that there isn't any recent published research that is negative on cold fusion, and there is continued publication of confidently positive research and secondary source analysis. ArbComm has roundly ignored this. Sure, looking at that would be looking at content, making a content decision.

But the only way to tell the difference between POV-pushing and tendentious editing, and working for the application of reliable source guidelines and neutral content is to look at the sources asserted. My big sin appears to have been excessive discussion. In place of edit warring. I.e., instead of tendentious editing of the article. And I was faced with firm opposition, from roughly half of the editors, the most active half, excluding sources like what I quoted above, out of hand, simply by claiming that the authors were "fringe."

That's circular.

Yesterday, I posted answers to Carcharoth's questions about what I'd do differently. I didn't sugar-coat anything. And two arbitrators immediately put up a proposal for a three-month ban. That's fine with me, really, because I don't want to waste any more of my time dealing with a project that has become so totally dysfunctional, with the few sane voices on ArbComm crying in the wilderness.

I'm not tendentious, I'm persistent, I persevere through opposition, when I can see consensus behind it. It was asserted that Storms (2007) wasn't usable as a source. When there was a poll, in fact, there was no consensus, but later, the editors who considered Storms unusuable asserted, again, that I was editing "against a consensus to not use this source." It's quite what the Cab has long done: claim consensus when all that happened was that no consensus appeared against them. Raul654 pulled this trick during the arbitration, claiming confirmation in an AN/I discussion where, in fact, half the editors opposed his position. And the other half were the Cab regulars.

What I'd been able to do was persist, and present, eventually, sufficient evidence and argument, boiled down and honed through extensive discussion, that a true consensus formed. Then, later, the complexity of the process, the volume of discussion required to reach high consensus, was used as evidence that I talk too much. Cool, eh?

I'm fascinated, I'm just as fascinated by how things go wrong as how they go right; and, in fact, the only way to progress is to do more of what works, and less of what doesn't, with it being very important to understand the latter. Understanding the former is important, but ... if it's working, don't fix it. We may never understand why things work, because to find out would involve doing it wrong in some way. But if we look enough at what failed, we can infer why what works, works.

So I'm happy if I'm banned, because I can turn to better possibilities, some of which involve Wikipedia, some not. My two years as an active editor, pouring in perhaps 5000 hours, won't be wasted, but I did neglect many other projects and studies, my family, and my business.

Cold fusion may be a part of it. At the beginning of January, Moulton, I was quite like you. I was familiar with the 1989 work and the rejection, and I believed that if cold fusion was real, we'd know about it. After all, wouldn't the journals publish the positive results? And if they did, surely the media would pick up on it!

No. Not until March of this year, when the ACS held a press conference to announce their four-day seminar on cold fusion, at which the neutron findings of the U. S. Navy SPAWAR group were discussed, having been published in Naturwissenschaften, was there major penetration of popular media.

There had always been publication in peer-reviewed journals, but some major journals blacklisted the topic, totally, most notably -- with public announcement -- Science. An editorial decision, not a scientific one.

The 2004 DoE review gave no weight at all to the MIT results. By 2004, there was enough evidence that half of the 18 reviewers the DoE picked as experts considered the evidence for excess heat to be conclusive. One-third of the reviewers considered the evidence for nuclear origin to be "somewhat convincing." That finding alone is enough to redefine cold fusion as emerging science, still very controversial. However, if we look closer at the 2004 report, into the actual individual anonymous reviewer reports, we can see what happened. Some reviewers very clearly had their minds made up even before seeing the newer evidence. Bogus. Impossible. Couldn't be happening, there for it must not have happened, therefore it must be experimental error, artifact, pathological science, or fraud. Yes, fraud was alleged by one reviewer, in spite of the fact that no major cold fusion report has been successfully impeached on the basis of fraud. It's the holdover from the very strong rhetoric of 1989-1990.

And ArbComm fell for that, and refused to consider that just maybe I was standing up for core principles, not my POV on cold fusion. However, if the article were to be improved according to guidelines, it would largely be my POV, I suspect, which always includes the negative, it subsumes and absorbs it, and tries to find synthesis. I never consider any particular POV to be proven, there is always room for change and expansion.

I trust consensus process and real consensus. ArbComm and the Cab don't, they imagine that it will involve endless, tedious discussion, wearing out the majority, until the majority gives up and goes away and lets the fringe POV-pushers have their way with the article.

A serious error. What happens in reality isn't that. It couldn't, because the majority can sit back and do nothing but just revert edits, and, if it is still the majority, it can always prevail. The idea that a majority POV editor has to read all the discussion is where the problem lies. It comes from a whole series of dysfunctional habits, including the idea that one must refute every bad proposal, immediately. Or else it will take over the universe. There is a belief that silence is consent.

Not.

A "trained university level-research scientist in real life" would almost certainly have a conflict of interest, a point which has escaped Mathsci, if the scientist had specialized knowledge. If it's in another field, sure. But, then, what, exactly is the point? Mathsci is a mathematician. He may have some knowledge of quantum mechanics, which is ''theory," an approximation, not necessarily accurate in the complex environment of condensed matter, which requires the far more difficult techniques of quantum field theory.

Notice how Mathsci deflects the question into one about my personal qualifications. I'd say that he has shown no familiarity with the literature at all. He's an ignoramus when it comes to the actual experimental reports, and probably on the theoretical analyses as well, except as would relate to the theoretical rejection based on behavior in a plasma, where the two-body application of quantum mechanics is accurate. Basically, useless. The whole purpose of Fleischmann's research was to test the boundary between quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He expected the difference would be below measurement accuracy. He was wrong, and from being wrong is how science advances.

But some people are constitutionally incapable of recognizing their own error. It's unfortunate, because it makes them incapable of learning. I asked Mathsci if he knew of any counterexamples to my claim about the literature. He doesn't know any, so he blows smoke. Typical. He could try doing some research.. Go to the WP article and look at the sources. When are the negative peer-reviewed sources from?

The most recent negative paper actually isn't an experimental paper, it is merely a claim that there might be a calorimetry error from what Kirk Shanahan, a Wikipedia editor, calls a calibration constant shift. What Mathsci and others are likely to miss is that Shanahan asserts that there is a real anomaly, unexplained excess heat, and that this causes calorimetry error by generating heat at the electrode where none is expected. Okay, what's the anomay? What is the cause? Can it be verified? Is his theory falsifiable? This was, I think, 2005. His work has received no positive notice in secondary sources. He is fringe about fringe. Many different methods have been used for calorimetry and his theory would only explain some of the results, and would completely fail to explain the found helium/excess heat correlation. Unless, of course, the "anomaly" is fusion to form helium!

HIs explanation also completely fails to explain the radiation results, and especially the neutrons recently confirmed. Basically, by raising some doubt about each of the findings, skeptics have claimed that it's not been proven. However, even though doubt can always be raised about an individual finding, the weight of them becomes, at some point, overwhelming. "Some unknown artifact" gets old when there are many independent findings all converging on the same point.

And, of course, there is this tiny problem of our reliable source guidelines. If we were following them, there would have been no problem with the article. Instead, weak sources appearing to confirm what editors like Mathsci believe is the "mainstream," are allowed, and strong sources that appear to contradict it are disallowed.

The contradiction, however, is not with the primary sources, or early secondary sources, but with a synthesis in the minds of the editors. The basic assumption, rebuttable, is that all sources are valid, if they can be harmonized by interpretation. So an early negative replication is actually harmonious with later positive replications, where the conditions can be shown to be different, which is the case with the early replication failures. We know why they failed, that's what secondary reliable sources now claim.



Yup. Persistent. And I *still* promise that, even if I'm banned. It just moves off-wiki. Don't worry, I 'm not talking about sock puppetry, which is on-wiki, but rather about setting up the off-wiki structures that are necessary if Wikipedia is to change, given the power of the oligarchical control that will, my theory predicted long ago, block all efforts to become truly neutral.

My goal is neutrality, not some cold fusion POV. My POV isn't fixed, anyway. While I've seen enough that I find it unlikely to reverse again (Hopeful in 1989, though aware of the theoretical problems. Skeptical from 1990-2009, then convinced.)

No, my goal is process that can overcome participation bias, that can overcome the iron law of oligarchy. It's quite a trick if it can be done, most political scientists think it impossible. Persistent little cuss, eh, Mathsci? But what I find is that when I actually meet a political scientist and discuss it, they respond differently. Maybe it could work, they start to say and think.

This is very general. It wasn't developed with Wikipedia in mind, it's a generic organizational solution. Small efforts have been started here and there, but in most informal organizations, where it's been tried, the largest problem is that there isn't a recognition of the problem, much less the solution. There is, in fact, high recognition of a problem on Wikipedia, but no process for developing a coherent description of it, not to mention solving it. Hence the process must be set up; it's a communication and discussion process that increases efficiency. In theory it increases it vastly. We don't know in practice, because it's never been tried on the necessary scale. However, all the pieces have been tried, some on a large scale, and they do work.

So we will see. Anyone who wants to know about the project, email me; you can leave a message for me here, or use the Wikipedia email interface, as long as that works!

I have no idea how far the Cab will go. Once they have been able to get a user banned, Talk pages and other user pages tend to disappear, without MfD, usually, but sometimes with.

I'm not sure what part of the "promise" was what triggered the rapid appearance of the longer-term ban proposal. From Risker's comment, it would seem that it was that I talked about writing at length when I had a lot to say, but then covering the problem with length by various techniques that address the wall-of-text issue. And behind it all was something that Risker missed: mentor advice.

What I conclude is that there is a Rule 0 violation, because the explanations aren't sufficient to justify the remedy. Characteristic of Rule 0 violations is that vague charges are used: Trolling, disruption, tendentious editing. What's Rule 0? If I tell you, I'm violating it!

Clearly, Risker et al want me to shut up, stop writing and expressing my observations and ideas. I'm now accused of being long-term disruptive, in one conflict after another, without evidence; in prior conflicts, my position was sustained. So the crime: raising fundamental issues and finding consensus on them. A consensus which some don't like. Very much don't like. So it all accumulates as a general impression which can then be poured into a vague category. It's how the Cab works, it's not conscious coordination, it is merely natural factional agreement, back with some measure of coercive power.

Rule 0 is the set of unwritten rules that govern human social interaction. In particular, it's the rules that can't be written, because to do so would reveal too much about the parts of ourselves that we don't want to face. See User:Abd/Rule 0. It might not be there much longer unless someone moves it to WP space. It's been popular enough, but I'm sure not going to do it!

The ACS conference was at the University of Utah this year (a fact I'm proud of as a Utah chemistry alumnus). I can't believe they timed their presentation 20 years to the day after that infamous press conference.

Well, this whole thing is screwy. First you have to accept that some physical process other than simple D+D fusion is going on, because we already know from H-bombs that that produces a lot more ionizing radiation than is seen. The first H-bomb that really worked well just a dewar of liquid deuterium, and it produced lots and lots of neutrons and gammas.

Worse still, now the cold fusion people are claiming ionizing radiation, but at the lower limits of detectability. Of course.

But if there are indeed cold fusion experiments that run unattended for months as soon as they light off, like the loaded nano-palladium ones descrbed here, they should be portable. Which means you should be able to take them down in a mine or someplace with a low background muon flux and measure high energy fusion neutrons (14 Mev, etc) quite directly. Detection of such stuff clearly coming from a tube of palladium (1/r^2 distance dependence), which is unconnected to anything else, could mean only one thing. High energy neutrons are just too hard to make, otherwise. I don't even know how you could fake such a thing. You could rig it to be contaminated with isotopes that give you spallation or fission neutrons, like an alpha+Be source, but none of these would give the hot neutrons of deuterium fusion.

I have a simpler skepticism about it: if there's excess heat, they should be able to make an engine out of it. The alleged heat generated always seems to be dwarfed by the input. I find that at best useless, and at worst nothing more than experimental error.

By the way, that link has a link to a google video of the Pons & Fleischmann press conference, which I had never seen before. It makes me sad; would have been a great event for the school. At any rate, Abd, in the original conference they also claim the detection of Tritium. The whole thing was a fiasco. Attorneys dictating science. *gag*

I was skeptical of the claims when I first heard them.

The definitive review from MIT confirmed my initial skepticism and nothing that I have read in the intervening 20 years has lessened my skepticism one iota.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. To move beyond that, you might have to do a little reading. I expect Milton can handle this, though.
That's right. Almost certainly (some possibilities still remain, it hasn't been completely ruled out), the process isn't "simple D+D fusion." You just gave the primary argument: lack of "lots of neutrons" and gammas. There was a "triple miracle," the famous criticism. For the others, since I assume you know this, Milton, these are the problems

(1) Extrapolating from reaction rates at high energies, the reaction rate at room temperature would be fifty orders of magnitude too small to explain the reported heat. No mechanism was known or postulated that could overcome the repulsion between deuterium nuclei to allow them to fuse. At least this is the way it has been said. In fact, a mechanism is known: muon catalysis, which I see below that Milton is also aware of. This objection, then, might be overcome, with some other kind of catalysis, (such as electrons, maybe some way that muons behave in palladium that allows them to be more effective, an unknown particle -- as Edward Teller proposed, or something else, such as hydrinos, if they exist) but then we have the other two problems.

(2) The branching ratio. With known fusion reactions including cold muon-catalyzed fusion, half the fusions result in Helium-3 and a neutron, and half in tritium and a proton. The reaction resulting in Helium-4 is rare, one in a million, and accompanied by gamma emission. The neutrons aren't seen (Fleischmann's neutron report was way below what would have been expected if this were ordinary fusion, it's been called the "dead graduate student effect," because the neutron flux would have been fatal to the researchers)

(3) Conservation of momentum. If somehow the branching ratio were different from expected, such that helium was the predominant product, the gamma rays are missing. It was proposed that some Mossbauer-like effect allowed direct transfer of momentum to the palladium lattice, instead of through the emission of gamma rays, but the energies involved are vastly greater than the energies that allow the Mossbauer effect.

It was easy to see why the results were considered impossible. But something was overlooked. What if the reaction wasn't D-D fusion? The plot thickened in the 1990s when Takahashi reported seeing increased fusion cross-section with bombardment of deuterium-loaded palladium with energetic deuterons, with evidence of multibody fusion. I.e., more than two deuterons fusing in a single reaction. Which would seem impossible. After all, if two deuterons fusing is rare, at low energies, surely three or more would be even more rare. It may have been a failure of the imagination. Physicists were used to thinking of these particles as functioning in a vacuum, unconstrained by the environment. And apparently that's a good approximation, most of the time. "Most" does not mean "always."
No. I'd recommend reading the peer-reviewed literature, including the Naturwissenschaften report (Mosier-Boss), and prior publications from the same group in one of the European physics journals. What you've done, Milton, is confuse some of the early reports with the recent ones. Early reports, confirmed over the years, showed neutron flux above background, but close to background, close enough that skepticism was quite warranted. Some kinds of ionizing radiation are easy to detect, some not so easy. In fact, the Chinese found, in 1990, that CR-39 plastic radiation detectors, placed in a cold fusion cell, accumulated tracks characteristic of ionizing radiation. Eventually researchers started pursuing this in earnest. The SPAWAR group shows copious ionizing radiation, probably alpha particles, so much that in the areas next to the electrode, the damaged plastic is continuous, it's only away from the electrode that one starts to see individual tracks. They've been publishing this for several years, now, peer-reviewed journals. There are a lot of details, but ionizing radiation from the cells is firmly established. It's just that alpha radiation is very low-penetration, very little of the radiation escapes from the cells.

What is at low levels is neutrons. I think this was first noticed when they looked at the back of the radiation detector, and found "triple tracks," characteristic of proton recoil from energetic neutrons. The level is low. I don't have the specific figures in front of me, but they see about ten of these triple tracks on a chip, I think over a run of several weeks. They see only occasional tracks in controls (various kinds of controls have been studied). They have run these experiments many times, the results are reproducible and consistent.

Neutrons were considered the smoking gun of fusion reactions. Well, they've found neutrons, all right, but only a few. Significant, not due to background radiation. The neutrons cannot possibly explain the primary reaction; what they indicate, in fact, is a confirmation of the energetic charged particles that were first found. If there are hot alpha particles, we'd expect to see some secondary reactions. That's what the neutrons are probably from. Rare secondary reactions caused from primary reactions that produce energetic alpha particles, perhaps.
The neutrons are at too low a level. Those measurements were done earlier, down in mines, and they found neutrons in bursts, close to background. The CR-39 results, in fact, confirm these earlier measurements, but because CR-39 is an integrating detector, a low flux can be distinguished from background bursts caused by cosmic rays. Remember, the basic reaction doesn't generate neutrons! They are rare.

The nanoparticle palladium results are still a bit tricky. Arata, according to Jed Rothwell, is the grand old man of Japanese physics. He doesn't give a fig what anyone thinks; he does his work the way he wants, publishes it, then does something else. There are some confirmations of his work, but the problem is that the material he uses that is especially active is a palladium alloy, specially produced. I may be working on trying to obtain some, actually. But that's another story I'll tell later. In Japan, Arata's reputation is very high. He's done public demonstrations, ran a little Sterling engine with one of his cells. Sorry, Garwin, no tea yet. Cold fusion researchers are, shall we say, dissatisfied with the data Arata provides. I think I figured out a way to calibrate his calorimetry, though. A little original research isn't a problem for personal use! (He doesn't provide any absolute energy generation numbers, and he seems to be mostly interested in the helium, and I haven't seen his helium results.... the research is mostly published in Japanese. I should ask Rothwell about that, he's fluent in Japanese.)

What's much more readily available and reproducible is the co-deposition technique that the SPAWAR group perfected. They don't start with metallic palladium, rather they immerse a platinum cathode in a solution of palladium chloride in heavy water, and then electroplate palladium onto the cathode. At the same time as the palladium deposits, deuterium gas is evolved and trapped; what forms on the surface is basically 100% palladium deuteride, fully loaded. Excess heat and other phenomena are immediately seen.
Correct. That's why there was such a flap this year over the neutron findings. I don't know why the alpha radiation findings didn't cause a flap, but they didn't. I guess physicists could imagine things like contamination, though, really, these guys do all the right controls! I recommend reading the paper on neutrons. You might find a copy at New Energy Times, they have a number of Mosier-Boss papers under Selected Papers in the frame.

You could also look at another more recent paper: Characterization of tracks in CR-39 detectors obtained as a result of Pd/D Co-deposition . From that paper:
Read that carefully and see if you can still say "at the lower limits of detectability" with a straight face...

Milton, I suppose I could be fooled. But I don't think so. My guess from what you wrote is that you will have the background to understand this stuff. Check it out! If I've overlooked something important, please, put me out of my misery!

Just remember, though. Jed Rothwell is currently editing some more papers for Naturwissenschaften by authors who need the support in English. He says the peer reviewers there are the most knowledgeable he's encountered, they ask tough questions. It's been fascinating to read physics blogs, responding, say, to the CBS special on Cold fusion (March?) where the blogger shoots off his mouth and clearly hasn't read the literature, and just repeats the old canards from 1990 as if he's really smart and CBS was really, really stupid, and this Robert Duncan fellow was obviously sold a load of goods, because, blah, blah, blah. How embarrassing!

Like, "Where is the ash, eh? If this much fusion was happening, there would be detectable ash? How come there isn't any ash?" Etc. Of course, if you read what I put up before, there is ash. Helium, at the right amount for deuterium fusion. Multiple reports, careful research.

Except it isn't deuterium fusion, but it ends up in the same place.... at least that's my favorite theory, Takahashi went on to develop a coherent theory, backed with quantum field theory. It's over my head in details, but the general idea seems to be that two deuterium molecules (D2) transiently pack into a cubic cell; this can only happen at the surface, deuterium is dissociated inside the lattice. These molecules will naturally assume a tetrahedral configuration, i.e., the four deuterons will be in a tetrahedron. He hypothesizes what seems to be the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate; if that happens, he predicts immediate fusion to form Beryllium-8, which immediately fissions to form two alpha particles with 23.8 MeV each. Same as if it had been d-d fusion. But because of the different pathway, the triple miracle is bypassed.

I was suspicious when I was editing Oppenheimer-Phillips process (T-H-L-K-D), and ScienceApologist, fresh off his block, made that the first article that he requested ArbComm permission to edit. Enric Naval had mangled the article, that was how I noticed it, from some discussion on his Talk page. I fixed it, and Enric reverted me because my editing didn't match his misunderstanding of the source..... and Mathsci had apparently convinced him that I didn't know any physics. Anyway, SA is apparently a particle physicists and came in and made further edits to the article. It was largely unintelligible to a lay person, so we went back and forth a bit and found consensus, and, in fact, it was good, because Enric Naval then edited it some and showed that he now understood it. But why was this crucial to SA? I think he imagined that I was going to try to warp that article into some kind of pro-cold fusion piece. But I hadn't even thought of that. Until now.

What does this have to do with Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate? Well, the deuterons would assume, in the tetrahedron, a polarization, neutrons in, protons out. Under those conditions, they can approach more closely....and understanding the effect of four deuterons approaching simultaneously is ... not simple. I've not done the math, and I'm not going to... but this may help to understand that the special conditions in condensed matter (this configuration would be essentially impossible in a plasma) just might cause something previously unseen to happen. In addition to that polarization, the electrons involved would tend to shield the nuclei. It's a very complex problem, and standard quantum mechanics, definitely, doesn't cut it. Takahashi claims that three deuterons do nothing. It has to be four.

But cold fusion researchers, in general, are skeptical of Takahashi's theory. (I've asked.) They think that more Bremsstrahlung radiation would be seen. Still, it's got some peer-reviewed publication and is covered in secondary source. Including, by the way, the Mosier-Boss neutron triple-track paper, they cite Takahashi as an explanation for what the primary reaction might be, and there could also be other reactions; the TSC is neutrally charged and during its transient existence could possibly fuse directly with palladium to produce some of the other reported effects, such as Iwamura's transmutations (at the same time explaining why the transmutations involved +4 atomic number and +8 mass).

This is really cool stuff, and I'd be an idiot to trade this for editing Wikipedia! I've figured out, I think, how to make a little money from this, providing an educational service as well, with possibly more impact than anything I could do on Wikipedia, at least under current conditions. And I'd be damned if I'm going to waste the money I spent on the books....

It's making me COI, you read it here first (though you'd have had a few hours jump-start if you'd been following the Vortex list, where cold fusion researchers congregate.)

So thanks, ArbComm, for helping me to move on to something more interesting. Should I be banned, whether or not it's your loss, it's my gain. If and when I'm allowed to return, I'll not be able to edit the article, probably, because of a conflict of interest.

Goes to show. That was in no way a "definitive review." If you look at it and still think so, show me, okay? It took Pons and Fleischmann five years to get up to some significant percentage of cells that showed excess heat; they were experts at calorimetry, among the world's best. And they were lucky. Albagli tried to do it in ten days.

Later, Pons and Fleischmann ran out of the original batch of palladium that they had been using. When they bought more, they couldn't get the cells to produce excess heat. Eventually, the materials scientists figured it out.

I was reading comments on the CBS special, about the mention that Energetics Technologies and SRI were using special palladium from Italy, and someone was offended. Isn't there high-quality palladium made in the U.S.?

It's not the palladium, as such, it's how it's been processed. For bulk palladium to work, it must be free of microcracks that apparently allow too much deuterium flow, the rod won't sustain high loading. P&F didn't know this, there is a lot they didn't know. They thought that it was a bulk effect, probably because of the famous meltdown. Apparently it's not, it's a surface effect. That's why codeposition is such a reliable technique, it creates surface, fully loaded, immediately. Doing it with rods, all kinds of things happen. The rods crack, for example. I believe there are now some groups reporting 100% success with rods, but I don't know much in the way of details.

And that's why the nanoparticle work, probably. Very high surface to volume ratio.

Let me say I'm not terrible impressed with knowledgeable people -- ostensibly -- who simply say that they are skeptical without showing that they've seen and understood the literature. Sure you are skeptical. Until you have seen the evidence, you'd be an idiot not to be skeptical!

But one thing should be understood, and it's behind a lot of continued skepticism. If this is real, how come after twenty years of research, there isn't a home cold fusion hot water heater? The Japanese put a huge investment into cold fusion, and abandoned it because "the results weren't what they expected." Sounds bad, eh?

Fleischmann thought that it would take a Manhattan-project scale initiative to develop this to commercial scale. My opinion is that this might be spent and it would still fail. There is no intrinsic reason why this can be practically scaled up. It's a surface effect and it is apparently fragile.

Take the Arata work. I did some rough calculations and figured that with $100,000 worth of palladium, I could have a home hot water heater. It might still require refueling, of a sort, not because it is really going to consume much deuterium gas, but because the nanoparticles get gunked up, one would have to take the palladium and reprocess it periodically. Now, think about it. A $100,000 hot water heater? Shall we rush out and buy stock in a venture to make one? And if people know I have a cold fusion hot water heater, with $100,000 of palladium in it, well, I'd better have good locks and a security system!

I'm interested in the science, not in dreams of free energy. Maybe someone will figure out how to scale this effect up and make it reliable and sustainable. Maybe someone will figure out how to do this with nickel, or in what may not be such a wild idea as it seems, with proteins. But it could be many years, the science is primitive at this point. If it were easy to scale this up, it would probably have been done. But that has nothing to do with the science. Muon-catalyzed fusion is totally impractical. But it is accepted, and it works.

Proteins? Yeah, proteins. There is evidence, credible, peer-review published and covered in reliable secondary source, so it's notable, but unconfirmed, no independent reports, that certain bacteria or yeasts can accomplish nuclear transmutations, specifically Mn-55 has been added to a culture of deinococcus radiodurans, and then Fe-57 was found, using Mossbauer spectroscopy, where there had been none. Page on Deinococcus Radiodurans The transmutation work is by Vyosotskii, and he has written a review of his own work published in the American Chemical Society Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2008). He's been publishing this stuff for years. I've been unable to find any reports of positive or negative replications. Shame. Mossbauer spectroscopy using a Co-57 source is insanely specific for Fe-57, natural abundance 2.2%. If prior to culturing the bacterium, Fe-57 was absent at levels detectable through Mossbauer spectroscopy, and it shows up, as it reportedly does, it's difficult to think of any explanation other than transmutation -- or some contamination during the experiment..

Good thing I don't care if anyone thinks I'm a nut case....

Yes. Arata ran a Sterling engine from the heat. "Useless"? Sure. Except as a demonstration. So is muon-catalyzed fusion, a known form of cold fusion, but it's accepted.

You can say "the alleged heat generated always seems to be dwarfed by the input," and it's just not true. You really should read the literature, if you care, and if you don't care, you shouldn't make claims that are contradicted by what's in the peer-reviewed literature, and blatantly so.

I just gave an example, One, where the heat output dwarfs the input. There are many others, but suppose it was only, say, 10% over input, but way above the calorimetry resolution, and suppose the excess heat is then found to be well-correlated with helium detected in the cell. And suppose that radiation is found coming from these cells, also correlated with the excess heat. No excess heat, no radiation. Excess heat, radiation.

And those suppositions are found in the peer-reviewed experimental reports. One, you have some idea of the quality of my work, you saw it early on. Do you think I'd go so deeply into this, risking so much on it, if it wasn't solid?

As I said, if I've made a mistake, show me, please. So far, all I've seen is presumptions and suppositions and no knowledge of the actual work, the actual reports, the actual confirmations, the actual peer reviewed literature.

Did you know that Fleischmann and Pons were asked about light water controls? They were evasive, apparently. Later, they said that they had, indeed, run light water controls, but the results weren't what they expected. It wasn't a "clean baseline."

Why not? Well, for starters, ordinary water does contain some deuterium.
Tritium has been confirmed at low levels. Fleischmann has said many times that he regretted that conference; they didn't think they were ready. On the other hand, I do understand why the attorneys thought it necessary, even though it was a mistake.

Yes, science by press conference is a Bad Idea. On the other hand, what Simon points out is that both sides of this played that game. The hot fusion physicists played it better; they had the connections and they had the money, and, when they found that they (mostly) couldn't reproduce the experiment, they were seriously pissed. Which also makes for bad science!

Jed Rothwell has written An analysis of the peer-reviewed literature on the topic, based on the Dieter Britz bibliography, which classifies papers as positive, negative, and "undecided." In 1989, there were almost twice as many negative papers as positive. But in 1990, the numbers were about even, with increased total publications. After that, the total numbers of publications declined, but positive publications always exceeded negative, running roughly 20 per year, positive, during the 1990s, with few negative papers. After 2000, publication started to decline, but steady publication has continued and begun to increase again -- a little -- after the nadir in about 2005. Those charts don't reflect, for example, the ACS Sourcebook (2008), which contains 16 papers. There is another Sourcebook coming out, I understand. And it doesn't reflect where most of the work has been, conference papers.

Overall, the balance of what has been published under peer review strongly favors cold fusion. The rejection was early and not sustained in the literature. Lots of excuses have been given for this, but, in the end, that's what they are, excuses. It was a very bad idea to essentially blackball CF research and publication; while publication wasn't ever locked out, that the major journals wouldn't publish -- not even followups to what they had previously published, even though there was not any secondary source review (under peer review) of the field rejecting it -- was totally a perversion of how science works. With polywater and N-rays, there were definitive studies that explained the original findings. That happened with cold fusion with neutrons, and that's all. Not with the excess heat. Considering a replication failure as a proof of nonexistence is simply bad science.

If it is any clue, I was given a copy of the Sourcebook by the publisher, Oxford University Press. The retail price is $175, but you could get it on Amazon for $150 at one point. Later, I found used copies selling for upwards of $300. Apparently it was selling out, and demand was high. I think they have reprinted now.

In science, when one is contemplating a novel hypothesis, the normative procedure is to try like the dickens to falsify it. The proponents of cold fusion have done just the opposite. That's not doing science. That's doing faith-based wishful thinking.

Has anyone ever tried to use buckyballs to facilitate cold fusion?

Just like anthropogenic global warming!


Erm...

You claimed that it takes months to load the cells, which is also my understanding. They run this glorified voltaic cell for months, and then maybe--maybe--it produces like 50% more energy than they're continuing to pump into it (but only if they roll doubles and use the right brand of super special palladium). Useless at best, and insignificant enough to make one wonder whether something besides "cold fusion" is actually going on.

You can at least understand why most scientists think that cold fusion practitioners are chasing ghosts? Twenty years later, and they're still charging up palladium rods hoping for water to heat up slightly; sorry, but I'm very skeptical. Need something more repeatable (less "fragile," as you put it) to overturn reliable theories.

Maybe they're suppressing the newer studies on Wikipedia, and maybe these studies do describe actual rigorous results (the coincidence of heat and helium, for example). But at the end of the day, do I believe in cold fusion? No.


It's my understanding that physicists always hated cold fusionists, even before it was considered discredited, and even at Utah. Seeing these chemists run mere electronic cells and claiming to fuse deuterium apparently stroked them the wrong way.

You are correct about falsification. And that's been done, over and over, but there are a lot of people who simply make statements like yours and believe them without any evidence at all.

You've missed the point. Experimental data. Forget hypothesis for a second. What experimental data is there? Maybe it isn't fusion. What is it? Come up with a hypothesis, then try to refute it. Exactly the right procedure. What is the confirmed data?

(1) Excess heat, many experimenters, well above known measurement error. Also above known chemical reaction possibilities, under some conditions. (The common statement that the excess heat is only a few percent of input power is false as a generalization.) (Excess heat is the basic phenomenon. All published negative replications have been shown to be a result of protocol failure. No effect set up, no heat, no wonder!)

(2) Helium measurements correlated with excess heat at a Q factor consistent with deuterium -> helium fusion. No significant negative reports. (Anomalous individual cell findings exist, at least one attributed to calorimetry error). Note: a negative replication, such as MIT, finding no heat and no helium confirms this observation.

(3) Charged particle radiation. Many reports. No negative reports (i.e., finding of excess heat, if heat was measured, perhaps from calorimetric artifact, but no radiation of the kind reliably reported).

(4) Energetic neutrons at very low levels, but clearly above background, correlated with excess heat or charged particle radiation. Moulton, the MIT study you mentioned is often cited as the death knell for cold fusion, because of the decisive rejection of Fleischmann's neutron findings (an 1999 APS article on this explicitly states this). But Fleischmann retracted the neutron findings, nobody finds neutrons at those levels, the remaining debate was over very low levels. The MIT report, in fact, didn't prove there were no neutrons, it wasn't an experimental report observing excess heat and no radiation. No excess heat, no Fleischmann effect, no neutrons, no surprise.)

(5) Elemental transmutations, many reports. But if you don't accept the above as experimental reports, you aren't likely to accept the transmutations!

Okay, what are the hypotheses?

Start with: experimental error. Bad calorimetry. Deluded wishful-thinking fanatics. Nothing abnormal here, just ordinary human frailty. How would you go about trying to refute this hypothesis?

And is it normal to start with this one? Yes, individually, that is what a scientist does with his or her own work. But not with published, peer-reviewed research; the first presumption is normally that the report is accurate, and then falsification attempts begin, not of the experimental report, but of the suggested conclusions. In fact, cold fusion phenomena were seen and dismissed before, because the results were so unexpected. Mizuno reports that he was working with a grad student, creating a target for a neutron generation machine by loading palladium with deuterium, using electrolysis.
Every day I care less and less what Wikipedia says about cold fusion. The article is a joke to anyone who knows the research and the history. When I started researching this in January, I bought a pile of books and actually read them (the other major editor remaining, Enric Naval, has made noises about buying Simon, but, so far, just cherry-picks skeptical support from it, and rejects positive reports as cherry-picking). I didn't just buy books by "believers," in fact, I only bought two such books: Mizuno and Storms (2007), which was the most expensive ($50). The ACS Sourcebook was out of reach at $150, I'm subsisting on social security.

Storms is a very solid source, independent publisher (World Scientific), very positive mainstream review by Sheldon. Sure, under present conditions, what is in it should be attributed, but this clearly satisfied RS guidelines. And trying to put sourced -- and non-controversial -- material from Storms is what triggered the edit warring and the article protection and page ban and probably the later finding of "tendentious editing."

But I also bought two of the three major critical books: Taubes and Huizenga, I bought the sociological study on the fiasco by Simon (2002), and also Hoffman, 1995, American Nuclear Society, A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects, a guide for the perplexed. Hoffman is a true skeptic, not a pseudoskeptic who is skeptical of affirmations and not of negations. Some cold fusion believers think Hoffman is practically the devil incarnate (Rothwell and I have argued about this at length, I won't repeat what he's said about Hoffman. Rothwell knows the science very well, i.e., the experimental work -- he doesn't care about theory -- but he's very biased, I'd say, about the people.) But skeptics have also dismissed Hoffman, because he points out holes in the skeptical position, in fact, he skewers some of them.

What was wrong with Hoffman according to the believers? He doesn't examine the calorimetry in depth, he focuses on the nuclear effects.

I first learned about the Chinese CR-39 charged particle radiation work from Hoffman. Also I learned about a known condensed matter effect on nuclear behavior, Beryllium-7, which is stable when ionized in free space, has a finite half-life when it is absorbed on the surface of a satellite or meteor. We had, for a little while, an article on Condensed matter nuclear science, where this would be appropriate, until SA edit warred it into an indirect and JzG protected it there (and deleted the Talk page....). The skeptical position is that there is no "condensed matter nuclear science," chemical or solid states have no effect on nuclear reactions, on the theoretical ground that the distances are too far for the electronic environment to have noticeable effects. That's a belief, a hypothesis derived from theory and from negative observation, and, Moulton, Fleischmann believed it but tried to falsify it. That's what caused the whole flap. He falsified it. He was doing basic science. And you think that this is about failure to falsify? You have it backwards. The skeptics came up with hypotheses of "pathological science" and failed to try to falsify it.

Sure, some "believers" have been trying to "prove" that cold fusion exists. But the published research is full of controls, which are attempts to falsify. You ought to try reading some of it, Moulton. You might learn something.

"Cold fusion" is just a hypothesis, and currently appears to be the Occam's razor theory. Some kind of nuclear reaction. Fusion? There is some evidence that may also have other explanations. Release of energy from collapse of electrons below the assumed ground state, i.e., hydrino theory, perhaps? I don't think so, but WTF do I know? All I know is that there is are a series of unexplained anomalies if we discard something like fusion as a hypothesis. The real point is that this is science, it's not dead, far from it, and it has substantial mainstream support, contrary to knee-jerk belief.

On the calorimetry, Hoffman says this: after examining possible heat artifacts, he writes, "in general, these heat measurements are being done by very knowledgeable experimenters who know how to avoid artifacts." This is RS, Moulton. Try to put it in the article! Hoffman is not convinced the effect is nuclear in origin, in 1994, but his ultimate answer is "We don't know."

There is a wealth of material in the last three books, written by skeptics, independently published, authoritative in certain respects. And we don't cover it except with a few sentences that really don't tell the story. That's because the cold fusion article has been a battleground, and it affects all sides. If we start to tell the positive side, based on what's in reliable source, the skeptics remove it because of "undue weight." And if we start to tell the negative side, others remove it because it is also out of balance, or uninteresting, "too much detail."

Why report the details of how this massive rejection came about, what Huizenga calls the "scientific fiasco of the century," if it was all a big mistake, stupid and sloppy work? It only takes two words to say "pathological science." Besides, if we tell the real story, what is actually found in Huizenga and Taubes, and what other source exists on them and what they did, the can of worms is opened, and it will start to cast doubt on the skeptical position held by the majority of editors who have any clue at all, plus some others who don't know beans but know what they like. Like us, eh? And then there are the transient editors who actually know the research, the experts. Fanatics, die-hard believers, POV-pushers, get rid of them.

Remember, what was being done was science, not engineering. So "useless" is problematic.

What if the calorimetry is accurate? These were experts in calorimetry, the world's best. In a reply to Moulton, above, I cite what Hoffman wrote about it. Excess heat was significant. You've sarcastically dismissed what is actually in the literature. The SPAWAR group uses co-deposition, which produces excess heat immediately and reliably, and because it is such a simple (and cheap) technique, they could run many different experiments with many different variables. Come on, One, you should know enough to recognize the significance of correlation between excess heat and helium. Each measurement, independently, can be dismissed, the heat as calorimetry error, the helium as due to leakage from ambient or other contamination. But both together, quantitatively correlated? And reliably so?

In Miles' work at China Lake (US Naval laboratory), they were using Fleischmann cells, and they were getting 12/33 cells, in the series that Storms reports, with no heat. Those become the controls! They measured helium in all the cells, and they found no helium in the 12 control cells. Of the 21 remaining, they found helium in 18. It's a stunning result, One, if anyone is paying attention. It validates both the heat and helium measurements, in fact, leading us to suspect some artifact or error in three experiments; in one of those three, there was apparently reason to suspect the calorimetry. With the other two, there was a different type of electrode being used, and there are a number of possible explanations, but that doesn't matter, in fact. Even not discarding those experiments, the statistical significance is overwhelming.

Fragile is not a synonym for not repeatable. The early techniques were fragile in both senses, replication was effing difficult. I'm now starting to work to set up a company to engineer and manufacture cold fusion demonstration kits (it's never been done), and the first thing Rothwell tells me is forget about it, it's too difficult. Amateurs always fail. Rothwell is pretty cynical, having dealt with twenty years of derision. He's wrong. Amateurs have been able to replicate some of the experiments, and the company I'm designing will not depend on amateurs for design, it will, instead, nail down the protocols to some which work, reliably, guaranteed (or I lose my shirt).

The SPAWAR codeposition technique is 100% reliable. What you are doing, One, is only allowing yourself to recognize part of the evidence. The part that confirms the reasons for skepticism. I understand it very, very well. You've missed about half of what I've written. Not surprising, that's normal. You overstate the situation with Fleischmann cells. There are groups reporting high replication with them, too. They have figured out how to do it with reasonable reliability. Given that, the "fragility" I report applies to what might happen when attempts are made to scale it up. Personally, I suspect that the Fleischmann technique is an engineering dead-end; but Energetics Technologies in Israel is working on it. Michael McKubre of SRI has published (In the ACS Sourcebook), reports on exact replication of the ET work, being his own and the work of ENEA, Frascati, in Italy. That paper quotes an ET paper. For "the most pronounced excess heat results," he summarizes:
McKubre summarizes the results: "Of the fifteen experiments [using the ET protocol], eleven produced excess heat at or above the three-sigma experimental uncertainty. As far as we are aware, this level of reproducibility is hitherto unprecedented ...." And here we see what may be a political phenomenon. McKubre seems to be ignoring the work of other research groups. He Jing-Tang, in a review published in 2007 in Frontiers of Physics in China (Springer-Verlag), reports a number of research groups reaching, over the previous year, 100% success. I There are turf battles within the cold fusion community. The idea that they knee-jerk support each other is not confirmed by my observation of discussions and reports within that communityl
The issue is not whether you believe it or I believe it, you know that. As to "newer results," the Miles work was published in the 1990s. Storms reviews the literature in his book, The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, 2007, and Miles' work was debated in peer-reviewed journals extensively in the 1990s. Storms also covers the work of Bush and Lagowski (1998), Gozzi (many publications, 1993, 1995, 1998), McKubre (2000), Hagelstein (2004) , and he cites fifteen additional studies finding unexpected helium, without a report of the helium-energy relationship. And then he states what is now obvious:

"If the data are accepted, we also need to accept that somehow helium and energy are apparently being created at the same time without generating gamma emission. Or this information can be simply ignored, as it was by many members of the DoE panel convened in 2004 to evaluate cold fusion."

He's right. That panel report actually establishes clearly that cold fusion has reasonable acceptance among the mainstream (one third of reviewers considered evidence for nuclear origin of excess heat to be "somewhat convincing," at least, one-half of reviewers considered evidence for excess heat to be "convincing"), but it also shows that most of the extreme skepticism remaining isn't based on evidence, but on continued attachment to theory. The helium results were clearly ignored by many of the reviewers (examining their individual reports), and thus they ignored the single most powerful collection of evidence not only for excess heat but also for a nuclear origin of some kind. "Fiasco of the century," Huizenga's term, is accurate, but Huizenga was, as the very hostile co-chair of the 1989 panel, part of it. Cold fusion was never rejected through scientific process, it was politically rejected, and very effectively (consider yourself, and consider me up until January!) not on the basis of conclusive evidence, but only a theory of experimental artifact that has become increasingly difficult to sustain. The basic protocols of science were massively violated, and the U. Utah press conference was only the beginning of it. Scientists were pissed about that conference, but, in fact, it should have been irrelevant, it was no reason to reject Fleischmann's work, only to suspect that it was prematurely announced. Which was accurate. I doubt that the neutron findings would have made it into a mature report. Instead, we'd have had better reporting of the heat, we'd not have had the massive and totally premature efforts to replicate what people didn't even have clear reports on, rushed to publication based totally on failure, etc., etc.

The skeptics are just as responsible for this as the attorneys at U. Utah. They also had axes to grind. If cold fusion had been accepted, there would go, probably, their careers, their entire expertise, particle physics, would lose massive funding, hot fusion has been a huge money sink, with most of the money then being diverted into materials science, about which they know little.

Talk about poor payback for input energy! So far, no hot fusion experiment has generated energy payback, to my recollection. Yet billions of dollars have been and are being poured into it, sustaining entire facilities and careers. This is not without effect on opinion, One! It's like the Cab on Wikipedia, it doesn't take a "secret conspiracy," just a common POV and interest.

On the other hand, there are elements of conspiracy involved, if we read the sources, though. Suppose you are a patent examiner who has views favorable to cold fusion and you talk to the single examiner who reviews the "cold fusion" applications? You organize a conference in Washington on the topic, on your own time? There goes your job, based on very heavy lobbying from Park, then of the APS, who bragged about it. The examiner, after years of appeals, was sustained. And many more incidents show a very, very unscientific agenda being pursued with vigor, scientists impeached without cause, losing prestige, funding, and access to the crucial resource of grad student labor. And on and on. And documented in reliable source, academically published.

Really, One, I think you and some others, while very sympathetic in some ways, sometimes, have still had blinders on. I've asked for evidence showing me my errors. No evidence, just repetition of assumptions without evidence.

On-wiki, I examined the evidence presented for tendentious editing, I spent hours and hours. That evidence is preposterous, but was approved by a majority of arbs. The evidence actually included one citation that is ultimately to evidence presented by Enric Naval where he basically opposed what became the decision in RfAr/Fringe science. Literally. Enric's opinion, given before I had touched the cold fusion article, is cited as proof of my tendentious editing. In fact, it shows what I was faced with: consistent and persistent rejection of quality reliable sources based on nothing more than editorial opinion that they are "fringe." Exactly what ArbComm rejected. ArbComm should, in fact, if it were awake, be commending me, not topic banning me or worse.

I understand the argument about working with others; however, you know very well that if a group of editors has taken hold of an article, and are biasing it, and an editor arrives who tries to balance the article, and grow it, using quality sources, the group is going to reject and possibly even harass this editor. It happens. It really happens, in many places -- only the tip of the iceberg has been explored in this case -- with the Cab named, who can back it up with admin tools, and have, not just once, but many times.

People will believe what they believe, without evidence, and it can be extraordinarily persistent, I've seen this for many, many years. It's possible to punch through this (Or, more accurately, sidestep it), but it is not easy. And it has practically nothing to do, initially, with Wikipedia guidelines.
Yes. They were totally outraged, immediately. What upstarts! However, Fleischmann was world-class, a very respected electrochemist, probably the best. They couldn't just deride him from the start, they had to have a basis. So many rushed out to (dis)confirm. P&F had spent five years working on this, developing techniques, trying to figure out how to make the effect reliably appear, and with larger excess heat percentages, and weren't ready to publish. The physicists -- the APS 1999 review notes this -- had no expertise in calorimetry, Fleischmann's long suit. (The review says that part of the problem was that chemists were playing at physics and physicists were playing at chemistry.) As I noted in an earlier response, the MIT report, considered by many a conclusive refutation of cold fusion, was based on 10 days of electrolysis, and a reported loading ratio that is now known to be inadequate (below 80%; my theory is that the effect only appears, actually, at something like 200% or 400%, which is utterly impossible except as a transient state, very locally, at the surface.) The early negative replications were very sloppy science, but were featured and promoted, and then, publication in the same journals was shut down. Fleischmann was not allowed to respond.

This is the summary I've given: the chemists say this is not chemistry, it must be nuclear physics, and the physicists say that this is not nuclear physics, it must be chemistry.

Once we realize that "nuclear physics" is a field entirely based on plasma physics and an assumption that approximations that work well in plasma physics don't ever break down in the condensed matter environment, and so we gloss "nuclear physicists" as "plasma, particle physicists," what they studied and have experience and expertise with, we can see the possible solution that makes both sides right.

It's not chemistry and it's not plasma physics, it's condensed matter nuclear science. A new field. A disruptive new field, long on experiment and short on theory, as yet, that might destabilize established institutions and careers. Very hot stuff, for sure.

I'm not asking you, One, to "believe in cold fusion." Just to recognize that I'm not blowing smoke, that there are sound reasons, in the sources, for my opinions, and that, until someone actually addresses real problems with the sources, I'm justified in persisting in considering that opinion reasonable (I don't actually "hold" opinions, that is, cling to them, I merely allow opinions with a certain level of support in experience to be an operating assumption. A rebuttable one. I'm actually a skeptic, believing in nothing you can nail down.)

Exactly. The difference, of course, is that with AGW, the majority is right and with Cold fusion, it's wrong!

Let me restate this: if I make a stand for what I believe is an important truth that humanity must recognize, or it is in danger of great loss, it's prudence and responsibility and common sense.

If you take a stand for what you think is prudence, responsibility and common sense, it is "faith-based wishful thinking." There is no contradiction, because you and I are different. I am an informed, intelligent, editor and you are a POV-pusher, an ignorant fanatic.

Is this clear? Or do I have it reversed?

Seriously, we need good process which can dismantle these disputes, allowing them to be compartmentalized into resolvable questions. It's known how to do this, but what works is largely rejected on Wikipedia in favor of blocks and bans to exclude minority POV, and those who push it, whereas those who push majority POV are rewarded or at least tolerated. Wherever I've become familiar with a controversial topic, I've seen damage, ongoing damage, so I infer that it's happening in many other places as well.

And if I say that I'm intending to confront it -- which merely means stand up to it and allow the community to judge, through careful process -- this is when the calls for me to be completely banned rise to a crescendo. It's pretty normal in human society, and Wikipedia is no exception: the majority does not like its opinions to be questioned, see the article on Socrates. The problem has become totally clear, at least to me!

Whether or not you believe any of the theories about global warming, the evidence that the polar ice caps are melting is irrefutable. In the case of cold fusion, the reaction vessels don't become hot. Nuclear fusion releases a lot of heat (as we saw in the mushroom clouds).

No, AFAIK. Doubt it would work. No way to get the high packing. C nanotubes might work, maybe, creating a confinement channel. Don't hold your breath.

The problem is with the "anthropogenic" part, and with scientists trying to stifle criticism and dissent by shouting "consensus, now shut up", which is not very scientific, and which was my real point.

As far as cold fusion is concerned, if the palladium electroplating method works so well, I'd like to see the excess heat converted into electricity to power the cell. Then we'll have something to talk about.

I can see why you'd think that, but it's off-point. It depends, not merely on the reality of the effect, but on scalability and continuity as well. I'm talking about a science problem, you are looking for an engineering demonstration. Given that not all cold fusion cells have continuous power input, the whole concept is off. There are nuclear reactions that cannot be used for power generation, for practical reasons, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Co-dep works well in terms of repeatability, but probably not for the application suggested. The question is a mirror to Free Energy. If it isn't free energy, why bother? That's a practical question, not a science question.

As to AGW, yes, same problem, failure to understand the importance of open (and efficient) process for challenging consensus, real or apparent.

MastCell seems far more expert in science topics than Thatcher.

Regarding the discussion of the policy changes to WP:BAN at this link, what is the probably that we will get any momentum going again? Has Ottava Rima just handed Will Beback everything he wanted by derailing the entire discussion?

Is she a real person or is she under the control of someone with a vested interest in all of this? She is also the one that originally suggested that I was a sock master to Raul654 back in the discussion regarding my editing sanction with respect to the real life WMC. Now she may have given Raul654 exactly what he (presumably) wants in terms of keeping the policy language as it is because he can use it to ban AGW skeptic POV via Scibaby. Ironically also protecting Will Beback's apparent desire to use it for similar purposes even though she claims to oppose him on that front.

Can someone truly be that naive or stupid?

In some cold fusion experiments, the reaction vessels become hot. Sure, nuclear fusion releases a lot of heat. If you have a lot of reaction taking place, all at once.

In an operating cold fusion cell, with heat being generated (which happens, by the way, with the electrolysis current switched off, these things keep running for a time, more time than could be maintained with chemical storage), the heat is apparently coming from very small regions, tiny hot spots, at or very near the surface of the palladium. That's what's normal.

But sometimes bulk palladium cells have melted down; early in Fleischmann's work, he's reported, a cube of palladium melted, the apparatus melted, and burned a hole through the lab bench and down into the concrete floor. I wrote here about Mizuno's work. Those cells became hot.

This is the part of the work that has been very difficult to reproduce. Getting small amounts of excess heat, clearly excess heat, is simple. Or, more accurately, it's known how to do it. Massive heat, no, but because of so many reports of it happening, researchers are obviously tantalized and keep looking for how to make it happen more often. Without losing the lab. By the way, the explosions that have happened aren't from this. A researcher died at SRI when a recombiner failed and unrecombined deuterium and oxygen built up inside the cell. The researcher picked up the cell and apparently jarred it. The recombiner then did its job all at once. Bang. But that was a chemical explosion. It wouldn't have melted palladium.

Stupid, yes, you proved it. Naive, I reserve for foolish assumptions of good faith, which isn't what you were doing.

Ottava Rima isn't part of the Cab, for sure. Naive? Maybe, don't know and don't care. There's so much naivete floating around, among otherwise intelligent administrators and arbitrators, that a little extra in some editor would hardly be noticeable.

It was a comment I made to Ottava Rima when the editor was blocked for trying to help Wilhelmina Will that brought my attention to that whole can of worms. I was attacked for saying something kind to Ottava. Really? There must be something weird going on here, so I checked it out.... and there was.

The problem isn't bad editors, the problem isn't even Raul654, GoRight, though that's certainly a tempting hypothesis. The problem is the structure, or, more accurately, what is missing from the structure. It could be supplied, but it will take ...

off-wiki work. Don't hold your breath. But sometimes pigs fly and wishes are horses. How about we find out?

It is necessary for me to be banned for me to start working off-wiki. I'm not likely to do it if I'm not banned, too much trouble, too easy to get distracted by working on articles.

I think the proper "irregular conjugation" is:

I'm taking a stand for prudence, responsibility, and common sense.

You are engaged in faith-based wishful thinking.

He/she is a POV-pusher and an ignorant fanatic.

And now we've jumped to the realm of urban legend and positively unverifiable work. Golly, that could have been a cold fusion China syndrome! Plus Mizuno's ridiculous assumption that his student accidentally caused electrolyte to boil away via cold fusion in 1978 (never mind that the effect isn't replicated when they're actually trying--and only after "months" of loading). Few are so credulous, Abd.



Ottava seems concerned about this change being used against Peter Damian (even though everyone agrees that the purpose is to codify the more lenient standards that actually exist). I'm particularly confused because he supported my change early on, but I'm very much on the same page as Thatcher, Nathan, and others he attacks. Maybe Peter could weigh in on this change himself to defuse this?

The problem with these improbable stories from the annals of cold fusion is that they are not as entertaining as the ones published in the satirical Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Really? Has MastCell ever publicly stated his scientific credentials? More importantly, have I?

I first began to question AGW when I heard about 6 journal editors being hounded out of their positions for publishing a study that questioned the received wisdom of the Mann hockey stick (that's not a link to some "denier" site, that's MIT). I don't have to be William M. Connolley's dissertation advisor to see that the AGW crowd was acting more like Pope Urban VIII than Galileo*. Nor does it take a PhD in climatology to understand that when scientists publish studies based on complex analysis of large data sets, and then refuse to provide a copy of the data or details of their analytical methods to their peers, they are not acting like scientists should.

I'll admit that I would need a PhD in climatology to accurately determine for myself whether Mann's bristlecone pine tree ring series records temperature, as he claims, or rainfall, as some others claim. But I don't have to be an expert to know that forcing people to resign for publishing a paper that raises the issue is just not good science.

*Ottava explains that my view of the Pope Urban/Galileo relationship is incorrect. So consider the analogy in the loose, pop-cult sense only.

Hear, hear! 100% on the mark correct. If your facts and your conclusions are correct, they will speak for themselves and you won't need to resort to political tactics in a science debate. More importantly this whole secret data meme is 100% counter to good, reproducible science.

Thatcher has switched from CF to GW - I don't quite know why. Isn't MastCell a trained doctor?

I want to know about the company Abd is currently creating that possibly might be able to send monkeys to Jupiter for the price of a milk shake. The future of our planet is apparently in Abd's hands. I hope he has remembered the bananas.

And thus we see one of the basic problems. It's a principle of common law that testimony is presumed true unless controverted, and when experimental scientists, who are, more than anything else, rained reporters, report something, it's a hazardous undertaking to deny the very report, which is different from skepticism or even denial of conclusions.

The phenomena of unusually high heat output has been reported by many researchers; the extremes like the one Fleischmann reported are very rare. Sure, there is possibly another explanation than cold fusion, though it's hard to imagine, but.... Moulton was saying that "hot" doesn't happen, and it does, and, in fact, "hot" has become fairly common with some types of cells, just not so hot as to melt everything.

The Journal of Irreproducible Results may be entertaining, but the cold fusion field is replete with reproducible and reproduced results, and even better, correlations between independent measurements, which is golden, because it validates both sets of measurements. (Explain why excess heat measurements, allegedly unreliable, would correlate very strongly with helium measurements, also allegedly unreliable!)

Essentially, Moulton, I conclude you are blowing smoke, and it's not worth responding further. I do assume good faith, at the beginning, but when a writer demonstrates total imperviousness, making up new objections and potshots instead of addressing the previous ones, acknowledging what can be acknowledged and making the basis for any continued disagreement clear, I drop it and move on. Now I know why you were blocked, Moulton. It's obvious.

Right. It's safer to push the worst accusations out to people who are not present, "them." You know, the trouble-makers, cause of all that is wrong with the world, unlike you and me, of course, we might disagree, but that's among friends, right?

Moving beyond this can be done, and it is standard practice among professional facilitators.

Remarkable incident today. I dropped a friendly note welcoming JzG back, since he's started editing again. He did not take it well, at least that is how it seems. I thought he might laugh! Apparently, he's holding on to something. It's sad, because holding on to negative stuff is how we poison ourselves. It's his right, I'm not going to hold it against him, but ... it's still sad. In any case, I can leave Wikipedia knowing that I'm not holding on to that old stuff; I've still got stuff to process from the recent matters, but I will.

These are not urban legends, they are published by scientists, trained observers and reporters. Testimony from named witnesses, "urban legends" is blowing polemical smoke.

Summary: you're an idiot, One, so to speak. I'm not credulous, I've seen many reports of runaway heat, so it's reasonable as an operating assumption that it happens. Remember, difficulty of reproduction of excess heat was one of the biggest reasons for the wave of rejection in 1989-1990, and excess heat is now firmly established in peer-reviewed secondary source. Firmly. Yet the level of excess heat in Fleischmann-type cells is highly variable. So that sometimes it is way excess isn't terribly surprising. If we knew how to get that large excursion, it would be all over. Cold fusion would be commercially practical. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in the effort, so far, and one of the reasons the effort was abandoned was that quantitative reliability wasn't attained with high heat generation. It has been with low heat, without that major energy input, indeed, with hardly any input at all.

You didn't read carefully, One. Mizuno did not assume what you stated. He, in fact, found both explanations unreasonable, but this often happens in experimental science: there are mysterious results that are never explained. Only a few actually get tracked down and confirmed. In this case, very good chance, had Mizuno tried to reproduce the effect he saw, he would very likely have failed, unless he was lucky. Fleischmann wasn't only doing basic science, the right way, trying to falsify a theory that he accepted, he was also very lucky, just a small variation of something, slightly different palladium, and he'd have found nothing.

It took over twenty years of effort (if we count the first five by Fleischmann) to bring his technique to the point where most or all cells, depending on exact technique, show the effects.

And you have, again, been missing most of what I've written. That's okay, but don't imagine that you are rejecting it, because you don't know what "it" is. Let me repeat one statement: codeposition cells show excess heat immediately, without lengthy loading. The lengthy loading really has nothing to do with excess heat, though it raises obvious suspicions because of the energy input. It's necessary with bulk palladium because that's how long it takes to get high loading factors under those conditions. In a codeposition cell, the palladium plating is built up simultaneously with the generation of deuterium gas, so it is immediately fully loaded and it immediately -- within a few minutes -- shows the effect.

Arata cells show immediate heat. They consist of a little nanoparticle palladium, i.e., very high surface area per gram, and the cell is loaded with deuterium gas under pressure. The cells get very hot immediately, but that is heat of formation of the deuteride. Same with hydrogen and the hydride. By the way, Arata was just independently confirmed in a peer-reviewed publication, there is discussion of it on Talk:Cold fusion, and it's misguided, of course. If this were a purely primary report, the claim there that this is undigested news would be on point. But it is, in fact, a confirmation of earlier Arata publication under peer review in Japan, so it's a notch up.

Anyway, when the cell containing 7 grams of palladium is loaded with hydrogen, there is the initial heat release from forming the hydride, and then the cell settles to ambient within a few hours. When it is loaded with deuterium, there is the initial heat release, and then the cell settles to four degrees C. above ambient. And stays there. For the full run, which has been 3000 hours.

So take that "months of loading" and smoke it, if it gets you high to keep repeating it, as you have. Enjoy. I'm not directly working on Wikipedia consensus any more, so my approach is changing, as you might have noticed. My goal isn't consensus any more, it's process to allow others to find consensus.

I do live my life as if the future of the planet is in my hands, and I wish others would also do it. Because, collectively, it is. Well, maybe not the "planet," but certainly human society and the environment we live in.

Monkeys to Jupiter? The company is only about reproducing well-known effects, published already in peer-reviewed literature, at least the projects I'd personally be working on would involve that. So if there is peer-reviewed literature about sending monkeys to Jupiter so cheaply, I'd be all ears.

On second thought, I'd leave that to someone else. Sending monkeys to Jupiter, even if it can be done, has nothing to do with cold fusion, it merely demonstrates the shallow bankruptcy of Mathsci's thinking.

The trouble is that the physics of fluids which is modelled by GCMs is smack bang in the middle of Freeman Dyson's expertise. Which is why his criticisms of climate modelling have so much weight and why Wikipedia's eco-extremist tag team doesn't want their nice consensus troubled by an extremely qualified outsider.

Even though Michael Mann, of the notoriously broken Hockey Stick fame, admitted to a scientific committee that he was not a statistician (a point that all of us can agree on), nevertheless he continues to teach courses on statistics and continue to make statistical howlers in "peer reviewed" (ie by people as clueless as he is) literature.

One might wonder how Mann can be simultaneously outside of his expertise and yet allowed to pontificate within it, while Freeman Dyson is completely within his area of expertise and yet somehow outside of it.

Its amazing how far logic and reality can stretch when you're trying to defend the indefensible.

Abd's "rationalisation" and future plans

The website of his company