Talk:Cold fusion/Archive 30

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Living organisms?

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

I did a double-take at this part:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for a copy of one of the Vysotski papers, I came across an interesting article that makes an analogy between newspaper and other reliable source coverage of the Titanic disaster and that of cold fusion.[1]. Obviously, it's not on this specific point, but I write here for those who, in order to be able to assist with editing the article, want to understand the background. --Abd (talk) 15:05, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

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

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

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

Here is a book review of interest on biological transmutation. The review is CF-era, the book was published in 1980, reprinted 1998: [2]. This is stuff that belongs in a CMNS article, actually, or, of course, the article on Biological transmutation. --Abd (talk) 20:48, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

There are also some sources linked at [3]. Vysotskii presented a paper at the ACS conference in Salt Lake City this March: (must have left that edit sitting in my other computer, will fix later). --Abd (talk) 12:13, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

or muons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Condensed matter nuclear science

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

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

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

NPOV - Undue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe that usually, for science topics, due weight is based (if possible) on sources such as peer-reviewed review articles, and not on the media. For this topic, due to its controversial nature, possibly some weight on media is warranted. However, I think the main due weight for determining NPOV should be based primarily on three sources: the 2004 DOE report; and two peer-reviewed review articles: Biberian (2007) [4] International Journal of Nuclear Energy Science and Technology, and Hubler 2007 [5] (Surface and Coatings Technology). (I believe these are peer-reviewed papers in regular journals not devoted to cold fusion.) Have I missed any important good-quality sources? Reporting of more recent events and results can be guided by other secondary sources. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 01:43, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a) thanks for striking that b) WP:PARITY is part of the WP:FRINGE content guideline c) WP:PARITY applies because mainstream has not made serious studies of cold fusion since DOE 1989, with the exception of DOE 2004 and a few comments from individual scientists (like Goodstein or that Sci. Am. article on the 10th aniversary) d) many sources presented here were from the walled garden of cold fusion supporters who formed their own publishing circles when mainstream started rejecting publication e) other sources presented, like Biberian, had very little weight or repercusion outside of that circle f) the cold fusion arb case had a finding saying "Encyclopedias are generally expected to provide overviews of scientific topics that are in line with current mainstream scientific thought." g) the DOE reports had a lot of weight on what mainstream thinks now, so they would have to be given a lot of weight also here h) sources outside the walled garden give very little importance at the individual experiments since they discard all of them, so we shouldn't expand at length on them and we should mention the notable ones.

My proposal was breaking the text into sections that use the DOE reports as divisions, but I'm not sure that it would look well. I fear it would create too short sections. --Enric Naval (talk) 03:48, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is better?

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

Version based on Storms, largely

Proposed explanations, version 1

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

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

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

Version resulting from removal of Storms material

Proposed explanations, version 2

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

No it wasn't. The correct response to something that does not have enough sources is to add more sources, not to remove the material. The questions differ significantly in both substance and consequence. If anybody's so stubborn that they can't acknowledge that and thus refuse to vote, well, they're just throwing away this offered opportunity to have their opinion counted. Not the most prudent emotional response, IMO, but it only harms themselves, so I suppose it's no matter. Kevin Baas^talk 15:22, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Current or other version

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

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

   permanent link to version current as of Hipocrite's comment, the same as Version 2 above. Hipocrite then edited the article to produce [6], which I assume is thought an improvement over Version 2. --Abd (talk) 20:27, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

2. This is also fine for now, maybe even better, it greatly reduces the material, but leaves, at least, two of the most important theories. Storms is RS for "proposed explanations," it's preposterous to think that only CF explanations found in "non-fringe" sources can be shown, because the argument is circular. How can we have an article on a supposed fringe science if we can't state what the "fringe science believers" think, even when they manage to get a major independent publisher to print it? When the fracas settles (edit warring going on now), I'll add in other sources, such as the J. Front. Physics China review, the review in Fusion Technology, etc. Recent reviews take precedence over older, less comprehensive ones. But, hey, if you find contradiction of sources, among reliable sources, you are welcome to compare them and assert them with attribution, and you won't find me claiming we should exclude even old, obsolete, peer-reviewed papers and Nature editorials from twenty years ago. In fact, if that Nature editorial isn't mentioned in the article, I'd intend to put it in, it's an important part of the history, it represented the lowering of the curtain, the end of Act 1, where the nuclear physicists routed the electrochemists and dramatic tension was heightened. Act 2 was a story about how that intrepid band managed to barely survive, wandering in the wilderness, without funding or graduate students to carry water for them. Act 3 seems to have begun, we could only begin to report on it from media sources, of which there is now plenty. Act 4? Well, I wouldn't want to spoil the story. But I'll suggest that it might involve one of the two things: A Nobel prize, or a true closure when the science world finally figures out what, exactly, went wrong in those experiments, not just the stuff where everyone agrees it went wrong, but that pesky excess heat, and the helium associated with excess heat at roughly 25 MeV, and the alpha radiation and, yes, those stubborn little neutrons that just wouldn't go away until the world noticed them.

   Until the edit warring and stubborn removal of sourced material stops, though, it would be silly for me to try to improve the article, so I won't, beyond assisting other editors and maybe adding a few convenience links, easy stuff. --Abd (talk) 21:00, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Other comments

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

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

Response by Abd to misleading comment from Hipocrite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I certainly prefer SmackBot's version. There's just more information in there. The choice is obvious. Kevin Baas^talk 15:12, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Removal of Storms material.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also concerns about conflict of interest. Notice he is also mentioned in the "sourcing" section above as working for "Lattice Energy, LLC", and it appears that he is "[conducting] LENR research as an employee, senior scientist, and minority owner of a privately held company named Lattice Energy, LLC (...) Dr. Storms was a consultant to the company in 2003, became a senior scientist to the company in 2004, and continues to conduct laboratory experiments for the company on a full-time, exclusive basis." [8]. It appears that this company wants to commercialize cold fusion products, and that Storms wrote and published his book while working full-time for them, so there's a huge conflict of interest there in making cold fusion look viable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

–—I can't believe that you refer to Bockris as a nut. He is a giant in the field of electrochemistry. Also, in 1993, in my opinion he wrote one of the best written papers on the experiments and theory of "cold fusion". I don't have the reference right now, I will add it later. Also, he is a more reliable source than DOE or Scientific American. They have their own agenda's, and commenting on research is creating new data so it should also be treated as adding original thought, so it violates adding new research and the NPOV.Minofd (talk) 13:03, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Let me use an analogy. Just because someone is a police person it doesn't mean they can't brake the law or become corrupt. Borkris made substantial contributions to electrochemistry but his name is severally tarnished. This is not a minority opinion. Look to his work on secret catalysts and transmutation work to understand my position. An academic commite deemed some of his work on cold fusion incompetent rather than fraudulent but I'm not sure which would be worse.--OMCV (talk) 13:18, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Strawpoll

Link to diff - [9]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abd's version should be used but balanced

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vysotskii and biological transmutation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And at the recent ACS seminar in March, 2009: [11] Nuclear transmutation of isotopes in biological systems: History, models, experiments and perspectives (page 3 of the document with presentation summaries).

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

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

Vysotskii appears to have done research sponsored by the U.S. goverment, see [12].

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

Vysotskii is a heavily cited author at [13].

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

mmmm... Here is a googlebooks result: [14] Metal Ions in Biology and Medicine - 1998 By Peter Bratter, Philippe Collery, Virginia Negretti De Bratter, Lylia Khassanova] The chart shown here is the same chart as is shown in Storms. This is Vysotkii's paper, and gives much more experimental detail than Storms reported (worth reading for those who have criticized Storms's report of this work). This was a collection of papers given at International Symposium on Metal Ions in Biology and Medicine organized in Munich in May 1998. There appears to have been some kind of review process for papers, but how deep that would have been, I could only speculate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You were saying that the polls made different questions, and that the 3:1 result showed that Hipocrite's edit was making the article worse. So, yeah, you weren't taking into account the result of the first poll. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:12, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Presenting contrary evidence is not the same as "not taking" other evidence "into account." The first poll presented two options, with the first option combining two independent questions, and without sufficient evidence being presented for people to base !votes on, plus no independent, neutral editors have been solicited. Later, that can be arranged. The second option, then, asserted a position that nobody was asserting, a straw man. That's an excellent example of an abusive poll, designed to produce a result. Enric, we've worked together long enough for you to know better. The first poll did not answer the question of whether or not the edit made the article better or worse, and that is, in fact, the ultimate question about a revert. If the revert made the article worse, it was out of line. If it made it better, it was proper. ("Worse" or "Better" are overall judgments that understand that defects exist in all text and, further, that content guidelines are not fixed rules but merely helpful general principles, to be applied with discretion by editors seeking consensus.) By asking about specific defects instead of the overall issue -- improvement of the article -- our process has been reduced to wikilawyering over source reliability, not the substance of the article, which was, and remains, missing any solid material on theories advanced to explain Cold fusion. Hence, indeed, I will largely ignore the polls, but see in them sufficient support for my position that I'm certainly not dropping it. I'm merely waiting for the day when conditions are right to clean up the mess. I'm not going to try to clean it up when more mess is still being made. --Abd (talk) 17:07, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Some News of work with superdense deuterium

Discussion of some possible fusion claims by chemists working with superdense deuterium. Collapsed because it doesn't discuss improvements to the article, per WP:TALK
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Here's some news coming out of a university chemistry department, the essence of which somehow reminds me of the original Fleischmann & Pons news.... http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/05/university-of-gothenberg-making.html Enjoy! V (talk) 21:45, 11 May 2009 (UTC) How does that in any way remind you of Cold Fusion? Hipocrite (talk) 21:58, 11 May 2009 (UTC) Duuhhh, chemists talking about nuclear fusion. I suppose you will now completely ignore their data and automatically call them "fringe". V (talk) 16:01, 12 May 2009 (UTC) I see a few differences. It's laser driven nuclear fusion, not electrolysis driven. The end result is "dense deuterium", not excess heat. The energy is supposed to get stored in the material, not released, and it gets released again by applying another laser. I'm not even sure that it can be called "cold fusion", more like "high energy fusion" because you pump lots of energy through the laser. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:18, 12 May 2009 (UTC) It seems to me they are carefully not saying enough for anyone to be sure what they are talking about. For example, what if they are making hydrinos? If that stuff could be made, then of course hydrogen could get quite a bit denser than normal. On the other hand, they say they are applying energy to make their dense hydrogen, and hydrinos are claimed to be associated with energy-release, when/if they form. Then there is the fact that laser energy need not be associated with HEAT; it can be associated with other things. One of the things talked about in the linked article is "Rydberg matter", which if memory serves has something to do with ultra-cold temperatures and nearly-ionized atoms. So, start with some ultracold deuterium and apply a laser to pump electrons to a very very high orbit. If it's cold enough for such things as a Bose-Einstein Condensate, a high density of the deuterium might well become possible. (And I know of at least one speculation about "BEC Fusion" happening if those deuterium nuclei can be considered very close together in a Condensate.) V (talk) 17:59, 12 May 2009 (UTC) Please consider my comment again, their setup has nothing to with a typical cold fusion cell or with any cold fusion cell ever. The only things they have in common is that both use deuterium and that both claim to achieve nuclear reactions (not even the same reactions). About calling it "cold fusion", I'm sorry, I meant that it can't be called a "low energy nuclear reaction (LENR)" because it's a high energy reaction. Basically, they use a pulse laser that provokes Coulomb explosion which have as signature a "high kinetic energy release (KER)" of 630 eV, which I think has never been observed in any cold fusion cell ever. I suspect that the laser they use has quite a lot of energy (let's not confuse heat with energy). This needs a RS making the link between this experiment and CF (and explaining the link in detail, if possible) --Enric Naval (talk) 01:18, 13 May 2009 (UTC) Enric, please re-read my original post in this Section. It says, "somehow reminds me of the original Fleischmann & Pons news" --notice I did not use the magic words "cold fusion" there, and there was a reason for that. I'm fully aware that these guys are running a very different experiment. But STILL, they are members of the Chemistry Department talking about nuclear fusion. I had no intention of suggesting anything about this needs to go into the main article here; I just thought this piece of news was interesting and sharing-worthy. CF, after all, is supposed to be about nuclear fusion happening in an environment more typically suited to chemical reactions (and in which palladium is more often a catalyst than a reactant). Why IS a Chemistry Department reporting news like that, anyway? Because it's been done before, maybe? Heh! :) V (talk) 03:16, 13 May 2009 (UTC) Oh, doh, well, sorry if I was a bit obtuse :( if I see someone post something here then I expect that the poster wants it to go into the article, or wants to make a change to the article using it. I don't expect people to post stuff just to talk about it :-/ --Enric Naval (talk) 16:24, 14 May 2009 (UTC) No real complaint. On another hand, such data as this MIGHT in some oddball manner be related to CF. What exactly is "Rydberg matter"? Ah, I see we have an article about it. Hmmm.... What if some variant of it happens to spontaneously form inside a small region of a palladium metal lattice, say, because hydrogen and palladium have practically identical electronegativities? Sure, we couldn't talk about any such thing in the article NOW, but if the editors are kept up-to-date on developments, however remotely related those developments might be, the article will eventually benefit from it, one way or another. And with less arguing between editors, too! V (talk) 21:20, 14 May 2009 (UTC) If it doesn't remind an editor of cold fusion, that just goes to show. Sure, it's not the same. However, the really striking claim is this: we believe that we can design the deuterium fusion such that it produces only helium and hydrogen as its products, both of which are completely non-hazardous. Read my lips: b r a n c h i n g r a t i o. "Design" fusion? The major opposition to cold fusion was that the reaction apparently didn't match normal branching ratios, and these researchers are now claiming that they can arrange things so that there is some different branching ratio. They are working with condensed matter, and thus the behavior maybe quite different than in plasma. This may not be cold fusion (looks more like hot fusion), but the claim is looking like it in that the condensed matter state must somehow influence the branching ratio or possibly induce new kinds of reactions. Alternatively, though, they might be controlling the branching ratio through tuning the laser or other qualities of that excitation. The paper: [15] I don't know what you will see, I was able to read the whole paper. It's doi:10.1016/j.ijhydene.2008.10.024. The paper talks about High-density atomic hydrogen, which is believed to be a quantum liquid, can be formed by heterogeneous catalysis at the surface of hydrogen-transfer metal oxide catalysts. And then it goes into even denser forms of hydrogen. "Catalysis at the surface" really is reminiscent of palladium deuteride cold fusion: the reaction appears to take place in what Storms calls "NAE," nuclear active environment, which is only very small regions at the surface of the palladium lattice. The reaction doesn't take place deeper in the palladium, from various evidences, even though the palladium has soaked up deuterium and is essentially saturated with it, to the point of being very high density compared to deuterium gas. The required hydrogen density for laser-induced “fast ignition” fusion is estimated to be >0.3 kg cm−3 [14] and [15]. Using the bond distance of 2.3 pm for the dense atomic hydrogen (deuterium) material described here, its close-packed density is found to be >130 kg cm−3. In reality, the material may not be so dense due to filaments or fractal shapes of this quantum liquid. This ultra-dense material is however much denser than what is considered to be necessary for “fast ignition” laser-driven ICF (inertial confinement fusion). In the case of muon catalyzed fusion the average distance between the protons is approximately 0.5 pm. Thus, the deuteron–deuteron distance of 2.3 pm in the ultra-dense deuterium material described here is larger but comparable to the distance known to give spontaneous fusion in the muon catalyzed fusion process. The article even mentions cold fusion: Alternative approaches involving absorption of hydrogen as atoms in dense metals (so called cold fusion) have not been able to demonstrate fusion in the generally accepted sense. Of course, what do those approaches demonstrate? We know it's not fusion in the "generally accepted sense," that's been obvious from the beginning; the physicists essentially said, "This isn't fusion as we know it." Which was correct. --Abd (talk) 02:05, 12 May 2009 (UTC) Near the bottom of the article they say that by "ultra-dense deuterium" they mean a (theoretical?) Rydberg matter state they call D(-1) -- the "inverse" of D(1). Kevin Baastalk 20:43, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Reliability of sources

(This poll was set up by Hipocrite)

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

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

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

Storms

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

A reliable source for scientific fact

1. Abd (talk) 17:17, 8 May 2009 (UTC) Sometimes. Depends on the text asserted. Inferior, generally, to source that is independently peer-reviewed.
2. Looks like more distorted wording to me. CF is not widely considered to be scientific fact, after all. However, as a source of DATA in the CF field (and only with respect to CF involving palladium/hydrogen, which is all that matters in this Wikipedia article), I would say that Storms is careful enough. V (talk) 19:48, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
3. What i have seem from storms have been compendiums, and pretty comprehensive ones at that. Kevin Baas^talk 15:08, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

A reliable source for notable minority opinion

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

An extremist or fringe source

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

Are you saying that theory based on well-accepted fusion observations under certain physical conditions must always, absolutely, apply everywhere and all the time (all other physical conditions)? That any data that hints otherwise must automatically be discarded, even after a hundred replications? V (talk) 13:39, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

1. Enric Naval (talk) 15:44, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
2. Verbal chat 21:04, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Vysotskii

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

An extremist or fringe source

1. Hipocrite (talk) 16:02, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
2. OMCV (talk) 03:41, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
3. Enric Naval (talk) 15:41, 9 May 2009 (UTC) To explain a bit: notice that Biological transmutation is a fringe field itself, that this is an unpublished primary source, and that the source making the link with cold fusion (Storms) is also a fringe source. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:13, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

A conference paper, not peer-reviewed

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

   A technical point: this paper would be related to Low energy nuclear reactions or Condensed matter nuclear science. The latter is an article that was basically salted by JzG, it's protected as a redirect. There is, I believe, plenty of material for an article on the general topic of research into the possibility of differences of behavior in the condensed matter environment from behavior in a plasma or free space and there are known and accepted differences; Hoffman points out, for example, that Be-7 is stable in free space, with infinite half-life, but decays by electron capture when in chemical relationship; there is a page on this: [16]. The recent Vysotskii papers have been, in fact, on the use of bacterial cultures to accelerate decay of radioisotopes. While it sounded totally nutso when I first read the titles, the Be-7 example shows that something might be possible like that. Unfortunately, I know of no recent replications. (Vysotskii can be seen as a confirmation of earlier work, but those experiments were different, and I, for one, would be quite content with replication of the fairly simple and well-documented work that Storms cites, using Mossbauer spectroscopy. As far as I've seen, though, no replications have been attempted.)

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

3. I'm not familiar w/this source, but if this question is here and it has a good fraction of votes on it, chances are it's a conference paper that hasn't been peer-reviewed, and I see no risk in calling a spade a spade. Kevin Baas^talk 15:29, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
4. The Vysotskii paper cited in this question was a red herring. Most of Vysotskii's work on biological transmutation has been published as conference papers that are probably not usable as reliable source except under very narrow conditions (which don't apply here.) However, there are quite a few exceptions, just not this one. Storms cites 6 Vysotskii documents, including conference papers and one published book, apparently. Storms is a secondary source, a review of the LENR field. Sources like this are the gold standard, except for one fly in the ointment: Storms is arguably not "mainstream." So if Storms is contradicted by "mainstream" reliable source, we must only use Storms with attribution and caution. So the question becomes, where is the contradiction? I haven't seen it, but I would not insist upon RS for it; rather, what I insist on is that we can use sources like Storms according to RS guidelines, and I would not object to text noting that this work hasn't been confirmed or accepted, even if that is not sourced. I looked extensively for confirmation of Vysotskii's work and I could find nothing either confirming or rejecting it (which is, to me, little short of tragic, but that's a tragedy that won't be fixed here). But it's notable, as Storms shows. There is all kinds of cockamamie stuff asserted at ICCF conferences, though I don't think most of that makes it into the proceedings. As Simon notes, once you are shoved outside the mainstream, you become much friendlier to all kinds of fringe stuff, since you now know what it's like to be unfairly rejected. Cold fusion researchers are acutely aware of the problem, but many of them don't want to imitate the mainstream a priori rejection of the previously unknown and unexplained, so they give these people a hearing. Vysotskii, however, is (or was) a mainstream scientist, reputable and widely published on other things. If the paper which is the subject of this poll were the one presented at ICCF11, instead of the ICCF10 one, I'd be bumping it up as "notable minority opinion." See how important the questions are in polls? In standard deliberative process, no poll is taken until a supermajority (typically two-thirds) has agreed that the question is in final form and that it's time to vote. --Abd (talk) 18:19, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

What is this, a vote?

Is this a discussion or a vote? Come on, people: you clearly know something about these sources, so please share your knowledge. Tell me about this Storms book, for example. What kind of publisher published it? What's the education, experience in the field and other credentials of the author? How extensive is its bibliography? To what extent are statements in the book based on the bibliography, with speculation indicated as such, and to what extent does the author present his opinion as fact? Are there reviews or citations of the book, and what do they say? What other criteria can it be evaluated by? How does the book rate according to the criteria at WP:RS? How does it compare for reliability with other books on the topic? Let's have some real information here; NPOV is not something that's determined by majority vote. If this information is given somewhere else on this page, please give a pointer to it. (This is not intended as a criticism of the person who started the poll, but as encouragement to participants to provide more useful information to the discussion.) ☺Coppertwig (talk) 22:41, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

The Storms book is a recent compendium of pro-CF references. Unfortunately it is biased. As noted in the D. Britz book review in J. Sci. Explor.: "There are some weaknesses...Some expert criticism of Storms' calorimetry (Shanahan, 2006) is not mentioned" And I might add, the book states that the Shanahan criticisms have been addressed, with the preceding paper by Storms which the missing 2006 Shanahan paper rebuts being used as the primary evidence of that. Not so. Further, the paper by Clarke on air leakage into cold fusion apparati still present in 2002-3 work is also not mentioned. Yet, excess heat and He-4 detection are chosen as the two most significant evidences of CF. The Shanahan 2006 paper rebuts any attempt by Storms to discredit the Calibration Constant Shift, and the Clarke paper proves CF researchers (McKubre in particular) _still_ can't keep air (and thus He-4) out of their apparati (a concern of the 1989 DOE review). So, as a listing of pro-CF papers Storms is a good reference, but as an unbiased overview of the field, it fails miserably. You decide if the book should be used in the article. KirkShanahan (talk) 12:05, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

From above, where I wrote, about Storms: This is the publisher's list of works on physics: http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/nppp.shtml. This is not some fringe publisher. This is the publisher's blurb on the book: http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/6425.html. The introduction can be read there, there are also some radio interviews with Storms.

The book in question is Edmund Storms, The science of low energy nuclear reaction, a comprehensive compilation of evidence and explanations about cold fusion, World Scientific, 2007 (reprinted 2008). It's a scholarly work, heavily referenced, with 1394 citations. It's the only recent comprehensive review of the topic, and I'm not aware of any earlier review on this level.

Storms is a secondary source, a review of primary sources, secondary sources are highly desirable for referencing articles.

Wikipedia:RS#Scholarship

Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tertiary_sources

Note that source reliability refers to the publisher, not so much the author.

No unreliable statements have been identified in what was removed from the article. The statements did not contradict what other material we have from reliable source, beyond gross summarization as passing mention in books not on the topic of cold fusion (ie., Bird (1998) and Derry (2002); the former writing in Philosophy of Science, the latter is a superficial tertiary source, What Science Is and How It Works.

We also have Jan Marwan and Steven Krivit, editors, Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, Oxford University Press, August, 2008. This latter book isn't a comprehensive review, but does include some reviews; it's a compilation of significant papers. The blurb from the publisher:

This book is a summary of selected experimental and theoretical research performed over the last 19 years that gives profound and unambiguous evidence for low energy nuclear reaction (LENR), historically known as cold fusion. In 1989, the subject was announced with great fanfare, to the chagrin of many people in the science community. However, the significant claim of its discoverers, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, excess heat without harmful neutron emissions or strong gamma radiation, involving electrochemical cells using heavy water and palladium, has held strong.

I mention this here because a paper by Vyosotskii is included, see a list of the contents at [17]: Vysotskii, Vladimir I. [1], Tashyrev, Alexandr B. [2] and Kornilova, Alla A. [3], "Experimental Observation and Modeling of Cs-137 Isotope Deactivation and Stable Isotopes Transmutation in Biological Cells," [1]Kiev Shevchenko University, Kiev, Ukraine, [2] Kiev Institute of Microbiology, Kiev, Ukraine, [3] Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia.

Further, the Sourcebook is "Sponsored by the ACS Division of Environmental Chemistry, Inc., American Chemical Society, Washington, DC" Unfortunately, this book is very expensive, I can't afford to buy a copy.

It is getting a tad oversimplified to claim that cold fusion is out of the mainstream. It's clearly still quite controversial, but acceptance is also obviously spreading. In prior years, there have been occasional one-day seminars on cold fusion at ACS conferences, and a scattered few at American Physical Society conferences, but this year it was four days at the ACS conference in Salt Lake City, with the ACS issuing a press release on research featured there and holding a televised press conference.

I'm not claiming that Storms should be used without caution; however, that research is cited in Storms shows notability within the field; likewise coverage in the ACS LENR Sourcebook. There are thousands of papers written on topics related to cold fusion; Storms and Marwan and Krivit didn't include or cover papers they did not consider notable; and it is on judgments like these that we based our inclusion policies. What's crucial is independent publication.

Storms was being used to source "proposed explanations" of cold fusion. The only proposed explanation that was allowed to remain in the article by Hipocrite was "experimental error," and gross generalizations from the 1990s, never accurate even when formulated, are being repeated as fact, because they are found in some shallow coverage in a book on, say, scientific controversies, like Derry. --Abd (talk) 02:51, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Undue Weight

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Discussing "Proposed explanations" for Cold fusion by reference Edmund Storms is providing undue weight to a fringe source. If Storms/Takahashi is a notable minority source, feel free to provide him weight in proportion to his notability. However, he cannot be used to say that things are true, accepted, or widely believed. The edit that Kevin reverted included Takahashi being used to source "our deuterons condense to make ⁸Be, which quickly decays to two alpha particles, each with 23.8 MeV." This, of course, is nonsense. The edit that Kevin reverted included Storms being used to soure "It is postulated that some atoms with an appropriate available energy level can catalyze the transition of electrons to this state." This, of course, is nonsense. Please don't attribute fringe nonsense to fact or theory. Thanks. Hipocrite (talk) 15:32, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Four neutrons, not "our neutrons," and this is reported as a "proposed explanation," not as a fact. What part of it is "nonsense."? Basically, I'd have to guess, the fusion part, because if, somehow, four deuterons did fuse, the rest would follow naturally and would explain the well-known experimental results. Thus instead of the "triple miracle," there would be only one. How in the world would four deuterons fuse? Why not two or three? I can think of ways, but I'm not a quantum physicist, I just know one. Nevertheless, I'll say it. The lattice creates a kind of channel at the surface, where deuterons congregate, so to speak. It confines them. Storms claims that the lattice cannot overpack deuterons, the chemical bond strengths don't allow it, but this analysis doesn't prevent transient effects from occuring. If two or three deuterons are found in a "channel," nothing happens. But with four, even though for a very short time, the fusion rate starts to go up. The rate is still very low. Fortunately! Highly unlikely that this is the story, but the point is that we don't know what is possible, we only know what has been observed, and we can develop theories to predict observations; when the theories successfully make new predictions as well as explaining prior ones, we begin to place some trust in them. However, that trust, in real science, never becomes absolute, such that experiment is out-of-hand rejected if it doesn't match theory. At some point, a theory is well enough established that isolated reports of some experimental anomaly won't receive much attention, but the phenomena involved in cold fusion have gone way beyond "isolated reports." That's why, even with a huge bias among nuclear physicists in general, the 2004 DoE panel was evenly divided on the reality of excess heat, and was roughly 2:1 against evidence for nuclear reactions being strong. Given work since then, plus better knowledge and analysis of what had been done before 2004, my opinion is that an overall panel review today would come out quite differently. However, what must be noted is that it is still possible that there would be no recommendation of massive funding. Just because there is a nuclear effect doesn't automatically mean that money should be thrown at it. This is, apparently, a fragile effect, difficult to control, it's taken almost twenty years to figure out how to do it reliably to show even small amounts of excess heat. Personally, I'd recommend better funding, but still not the Manhattan-scale project that Fleischmann opined it would take to make this commercially successful.--Abd (talk) 18:06, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

"Discussing "Proposed explanations" for Cold fusion by reference Edmund Storms is providing undue weight to a fringe source." --that is unsupported opinion. Do you know that there are "sources" and then there are "sources"??? If you don't, let me spell it out: A primary source is Original Research. A secondary source is a reporter. Into which category does Storms better fit? A reporter writing about something on the fringe is not inherently part of that fringe. Now, I agree that such a reporter cannot claim that something is true just because the Original Source made that claim, but the reporter CAN say that the Original Source made such-and-such a claim. And we editors of this article can make such statements, too, especially after someone like Storms said it first. That is, if Storms says that so-and-so claimed such-and-such, and we can verify that so-and-so did indeed claim such-and-such, then, to the extent that Storms was consistently correct, then Storms is RS for this article. All we have to do is ensure that various claims that are included in the article are properly labeled as being claims --and then only until enough other RS agree that the claims qualify as facts. (And should that day never arrive, the article will be fine, so long as claims remain marked as claims.) V (talk) 13:45, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Consensus on this talk page is that Storms is an advocate of Cold Fusion and an unreliable source for scientific fact. He may be a reliable source for his personal opinion, and that opinion may be notable. Because storms says x says y does not make either the x or the y notable or true. See WP:RS, specifically "Extremist and fringe sources." While storms may or may not be an extremist or fringe source (talk page consensus here appears to be that he is), many of the sources he references unquestionably are. You cannot backdoor hydrino fraud into this article because someone mentions it. Hipocrite (talk) 13:51, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

You have twisted what I wrote into an irrelevant direction. It doesn't matter how convinced Storms is that CF is real. What matters is his reporting . If he consistently did the type of job I described above, properly indicating that so-and-so claimed such-and-such, and we can verify that so-and-so did indeed claim such-and-such, then his report qualifies as an appropriate secondary RS source for this article. If he slipped up here and there, that could be understandable in terms of "flow of text" (it is possible to over-use a word such as "claimed"). If he mostly didn't describe claims as claims, then I will withdraw my objection to excluding his reports. The rest of my argument is below; you need not reply at both places (thank you). V (talk) 16:14, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

From what you write here, it appears to me that you are getting your opinion mixed up in the wikipedia editing process. Please review WP:NOR and WP:Verifiability. also note that the text abides by proper attribution of opinion as stated in WP:NPOV, contrary to what you say above. Also keep in mind that I did not write the material that you removed. I do not appreciate you accusing me of things that I am clearly not responsible for, and that - in fact - did not happen at all - as a review of the text and wikipedia policy of the text will show.

Now if you have more material to add on the topic of proposed explanations - which is a rather key aspect of the topic "cold fusion" - feel free to add them. If you feel that undue weight is given to anything, please discuss it on the talk page w/the other editors, focusing on the content and not the editors. And try to refrain from making bold, vague, and far-reaching claims like "fringe" and "nonsense". Such appeal to ridicule does not shed light on anything or aid discussion. Kevin Baas^talk 15:43, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

You're responsible for the changes you keep reverting in, regardless of who wrote them. I'm fully on board with WP:NPOV, especially the section on Undue Weight. Please review it. There's a whole strapoll up there about your edit and your sources, which basically rejects them. Please don't continue reinserting unbalanced material in the article and telling other people to balance it, thanks. The vast majority of notable opinion on explanations for Cold Fusion, as shown by the mainstream sources that discuss cold fusion is that its "experimental error or fraud." This article does not weight that opinion nearly enough as it yet, let alone with the addition of massive inclusions of tiny minority "explanations." Hipocrite (talk) 15:48, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually, the straw poll wasn't about Kevin's edit, it was about a much longer previous version. The version Kevin reverted back in was boiled way down to satisfy the concerns of some editors about undue weight. Now, be nice, Hipocrite. --Abd (talk) 21:04, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

In this diff you can see the differences between the diff shown at the first poll and the version reverted by Kevin.

The version reverted by Kevin still gives a lot of weight to Storm's book by placing it at the very first paragraph, and then citing it again to add Takahashi's theory of ⁸Be and Mill's hydrino theory. Both theories have failed to gain any sort of traction in mainstream science, and they weren't even mentioned at DOE 2004, so it's also giving undue weight to fringe explanations when compared to the weight given to the maintream explanation of experimental error. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:16, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

From what I've seen, that "vast majority of notable opinion on explanations for Cold Fusion, as shown by the mainstream sources that discuss cold fusion" are simply repeating conclusions that were reached almost 20 years ago, and except for recent news, have deliberately kept themselves ignorant of research that followed --at least some of which took to heart early criticisms. What is a valid basis for thinking that OLD data is superior to NEW data, when it is possible for new data to be associated with better tools (and a larger suite of tools)? What side of this issue really has "undue weight" given to it? V (talk) 13:16, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not the place to right great wrongs. If the bulk of reliable sources are failing to accurately report something, Wikipedia will, as well, fail to accurately report something. The way to fix that is not to fix Wikipedia, it's to fix the sources. Thanks. Hipocrite (talk) 13:36, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

What I wrote is not about "righting great wrongs"; it is about Wikipedia editors acting as if Generally Reliable Authority is identical to Always Reliable Authority, and that only the things they say can be included in articles here. It will seldom hurt an article to include off-the-wall claims that are marked as claims. --and inclusions of such, perhaps in their own section, could make an article more interesting to casual readers. That's because all sorts of History are about people, not just facts, and most people typically find the foibles of other people to be interesting. Is there no guideline anywhere about that? That is, is Wikipedia supposed to be "dry" or "interesting"? Or, from another angle, consider the cliche that "knowledge is power", and its logical corollary that ignorance is slavery. Thus those who would limit the spread of knowledge, in whatever manner, are in effect claiming some kind of right to have power over those who they would keep uninformed. It is therefore extremely important, in an encyclopedia , to include as much relevant data as possible. For example (I haven't looked yet as I write this), articles on Moon Landings can include claims/data/logic by those who say the events were staged and not real--and counter-logic can be included, too. The readers, of course, should be free to make up their own minds --and they should have the data that allows them to do it. Does Alexander of Macedon really deserve to be called "Great" when his actions appear to have consisted largely of large-scale theft of other rulers' territories? Winners may write the history books, but an encyclopedia (I haven't looked at that article either) doesn't have to restrict itself to the POV of the winners. I'm still waiting to hear about somebody on a witness stand, having sworn to tell the whole truth, object to the Judge that one of the attorneys is interfering with his/her ability to fulfill that oath. Well, with respect to CF, the "whole truth" includes a lot of claims that are not Officially Reliably Sourced. You do not deny that fact, do you? Yet your actions appear to be describe-able as attempts to suppress parts of that whole truth. Why? V (talk) 16:04, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Please remain civil. Examples of incivility are things like the in-genuine "thanks" you use. And again, it is not "my edit" and they are not "my sources". I only noticed your removal of material from the article when someone mentioned it on the talk page, and reverted it as I thought it unjustified. I did not contribute the any of that content, and I don't know - or care - who did. Please try to remember this so you do not continue to repeat the actions that I just told you I do not appreciate.

And no, I am not responsible for other people's actions, only my own. That is how responsibility works. If people would go to jail for other people's crimes by design, needless to say, we would have much bigger problems to worry about than this article.

Any ways, I'm not really interested in discussing this content - it's not that important to me -, and so far it hasn't been very productive anyways. I seem to be a distraction for you from discussing the content, anyways, so I'll leave this and let you discuss it w/others. Kevin Baas^talk 16:02, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, enough Talk. I'm not going to work to add material until the environment makes it reasonably safe, but that doesn't mean that I can't support other editors. Pudding. Proof. --Abd (talk) 18:21, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd be able to put together additional sources for the Storms material, and additional material on "proposed explanations." For example, looking at the material on ultradense hydrogen mentioned above, the same journal had a Mills paper on hydrino theory, [18]. Given this paper, and Storms' description of prior work by Mills, can it really be claimed that this isn't notable? Storms is a secondary source, independent from Mills. In fact, Storms appears to be a critic of Mills, see http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg25595.html. Krivit, likewise, has published criticism of Blacklight Power, Mills' company.[19].

But I'm not going to put more work into actual article editing until we have some spirit of cooperation going here again. It's too frustrating to work for hours on a piece and see it ripped out without any attempt to find consensus on it, to improve it, to balance it, etc. --Abd (talk) 02:37, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Those sources have already been considered and rejected as not reliable. Hipocrite (talk) 02:43, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Hmmmm...so YOU say. Care to prove it? Also, please specify precisely in what way you are using the phrase "not reliable". Thank you! V (talk) 13:25, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Hipocrite mistakes his POV for consensus. There is no closure above; what's visible, if we set Hipocrite aside, is the existing camps of editors, !voting rather predictably, in dispute without resolution. There was, however, an operating consensus that was proceeding, slowly, with article improvements. My addition of Storms was intended as a contribution to this process, and I expected it to go back and forth, settling on agreed-upon improvements, as we have been doing for some time. Hipocrite entered with an outside agenda, quite clearly, and destabilized the situation, asserting, without restraint, an extreme anti-fringe position that is directly in contradiction with Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science, and his opposition to that decision is already well-known. I'm a tad occupied at this point, what with being a named party in an arbitration myself (going well, thank you very much), but I will support other editors as I see appropriate. When I have time, if someone doesn't beat me to it, the problems here will go to Arbitration Enforcement, for efficiency. What we are seeing is blatant exclusion of material from ordinarily reliable source based solely upon opinion that it's "fringe" and "extreme." In this case, what was being sourced was "proposed explanations," and to only source such proposals from critical sources, while excluding sources that might be friendly to them, solely on the latter basis, will maintain article imbalance. No specific errors have been alleged in Storms. When reliable sources are in conflict, we will typically report the conflict using attribution and framing ("due weight"). Storms is a cold fusion researcher and reputable scientist before that, as have been many CF researchers. His 2007 work is published by an independent publisher of science texts, not some fringe publisher. We have a similar work published (2008?) by the American Chemical Society and the only reason I haven't been sourcing from that is that I don't have access to a copy. Storms is, by objective measures, a reliable source. That doesn't mean that his material can't be impeached, but you will have to show contradiction, and no contradictions have been asserted that will hold up on examination. Instead, behind Hipocrite's objections is a belief that cold fusion is based on fraud and pure error. That is obviously a controversial position, given the level of ongoing peer-reviewed publication in the field, and a great deal of media attention recently showing respect for the research. The claim that cold fusion is a rejected field, to be given little weight in comparison to "mainstream scientific opinion," is based on old sources and persistence of popular opinion, and scientists, unless they specialize in a field, are typically reliant on media for their opinions on matters like this. Last time I noticed, the American Chemical Society was representative of the mainstream, it's the largest scientific society in the world, and the ACS clearly considers this a legitimate field of inquiry. (That's not equivalent to considering cold fusion a proven phenomenon, merely that a shift of opinion has taken place, the question is no longer considered closed.) --Abd (talk) 16:55, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

That's a very interesting take on the ACS position. Inferring from their willingness to listen that there is actually something worth listening to. I'm prepared to believe that someone performing death metal-gangsta rap-salsa fusion on the harpsicord might have novelty value, but that doesn't mean it will be good by any reasonable standard.LeadSongDog come howl 21:58, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

It's called Wikipedia:Notability. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 12:33, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

That's right, Coppertwig. LSD, one may infer "novelty value," or, perhaps, "collegial respect for the quirky thinking of minorities," from the occasional one-day seminars, hidden in a corner. Not from the four-day seminar, with a press release/press conference, announcing some historically significant research, the SPAWAR group (Mosier-Boss et al) finding of energetic neutrons, which were the original holy grail of both cold fusion researchers, and of the critics. What the SPAWAR group did was to confirm earlier reports of very low-level neutrons, with controls such that it can be concluded that they are not artifact, they are coming from what is happening in the cell, but the levels are so low that the predominant reaction must not produce them. Thus the findings explain (not without leaving behind a great mystery, what is the primary reaction?) why so many groups found no neutrons and concluded that nuclear reactions were not happening, since plasma branching ratios predicted copious neutrons. What I'm suggesting is that we start paying attention to current reliable source, and understanding that what is in reliable source twenty years ago about a scientific controversy isn't necessarily so reliable any more, it is of historical interest, but dangerous when used to determine "due weight." --Abd (talk) 13:27, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

With regards to the March 22-26 ACS national meeting sessions on cold fusion, first off the claim it was ‘four days long’ is erroneous. The program does list sessions for four days, but the ‘session’ on Wednesday was in fact an announcement of a single poster in the Wednesday night poster session. (One wonders where all the other author’s posters were. Normally, presenters will have posters too.) Examination of the Tuesday PM session indicates it had nothing to do with cold fusion. George Miley, a CF researcher, did present a talk, but it was on borohydride based fuel cells, not CF. Vysotskii presented a paper on memory effect in water (another pseudoscience field), and two potentially ‘normal’ talks were given. So, in actuality we have 2-1/2 days of talks, which could have probably been reduced since Steve Krivit gave two talks, and he is just a journalist (per his own abstract) and did not contribute new information (P.S. Krivit’s claim in his first talk’s abstract (“has engaged proponents and opponents alike”) is false as he has only had cursory contact with me and therefore has not seriously dealt with the primary outstanding criticism of excess heat.). Several ‘reviews’ were presented (Miles, McKubre, Gordon, Srinivasan (x2)), which in a scientific session such as this is somewhat suspect, as normally new research is presented (if the field is dynamic and growing). (The introductory one by Marwan would be considered normal.) A number of the other talks were not on ‘cold fusion’ per se. Bezhotov talked on ‘Erzions’, whatever those are. Vyotskii gave a talk on biological transmutation, which is CF only by a severe stretch of the imagination. Shestopalov talked on what is known as ‘fractofusion’. Stringham talked on what is known as ‘sonofusion’, as did Taleyakhan. Together these add up to at least a day’s worth of presentations, so the ‘new’ information presented here was really about 1-1/2 to 2 days worth of material tops, not significantly more than found in an ICCF. As well, it’s all the same folks that present at ICCFs, so I suggest that this ACS session is no more reliable than a typical ICCF, which are generally considered 'not reliable'. KirkShanahan (talk) 14:58, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Nice to see you stop by, Kirk. Did you see the video linked above, in the "Lecture by Robert Duncan" section? How does CCS explain several megajoules, boiled electrolyte, and melted palladium? V (talk) 16:47, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

(ec with below) "Careless Clumsy Scientists"? I'm more interested in those neutrons. I'm also more interested in how CCS can explain the very strong correlation between excess heat measurements and helium, specifically what Storms claims as 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4. How, in an extensive series of P-F cells, set up and measured in the same way, helium was only found in the cells that also generated excess heat. No matter how many of these findings are developed, critics like Shanahan find ever-more-preposterous ways to explain them away. Shanahan, however, is practically alone at this point, the only scientist who is making specific criticisms, at least we have to give him that -- at least with regard to calorimetry. Nevertheless, the stretch gets greater and greater. For example, the long-maintained 4 degree C. temperature rise after the formation of palladium deuteride in the gas-loading experiments of Arata. I believe that McKubre has confirmed that. This is not an electrolysis experiment, there is no supplied energy, and only the natural heat of formation of palladium deuteride is involved: hydrogen shows the expected generation of heat as the gas is admitted to the cell, which then settles down, within hours, to ambient temperature. Deuterium shows the same kind of initial release, but then settles down to a steady generation of heat for thousands of hours, showing no sign of lessening.

Absolutely, skeptics should give this every shot, but ... at some point skeptics need to do some experimental work themselves. N-rays were debunked through careful experiment that showed the origin of the "effect." Likewise polywater. That was never done with Fleischmann's excess heat, and, indeed, the excess heat has been verified in 153 peer-reviewed papers, I'll provide a link to a list of them. Many of these reports are not just selected experiments, only showing "success": they show a series of experiments, reporting "failures" as well as "successes." Where Fleischmann screwed up was in reporting neutrons. What we now know, quite conclusively, is that neutrons are rare, not normally produced in these experiments at levels sufficient to be considered anything more than a by-product (unless somehow they are efficiently "used"). What is produced is plenty of alpha radiation, starting with a Chinese group in 1990, and, again, how does Shanahan explain that?

Here is the press release: [20]. Low-energy nuclear reactions could potentially provide 21st Century society a limitless and environmentally-clean energy source for generating electricity, researchers say. The report, which injects new life into this controversial field, will be presented here today at the American Chemical Society's 237th National Meeting. It is among 30 papers on the topic that will be presented during a four-day symposium, "New Energy Technology," March 22-25, in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the first description of cold fusion. Krivit received a lot of attention for his presentation, his comments were widely reported in the media. Journalists can be considered experts, though in a different way than scientists, as such. Shanahan's view of the field is highly biased. It's notable because it has been published, at least parts of it have. Some of the criticisms he makes are odd. The general field isn't "cold fusion," it is more commonly called "low-energy nuclear reactions," and Vyosotski's work with biological effects, which involve two different kinds of nuclear transformations, have long been of interest to LENR researchers as shown by the notice that Storms takes of it. (The forms are transmutation, as has been described above to some extent, and acceleration of radioactive decay, which is roughly possible in theory, i.e., chemistry is known to be able to affect decay rates under some circumstances.) I'm not surprised to see a session focused on reviews, because the goal of CF researchers there would be, not to present new research, unless it is truly striking as with the SPAWAR neutrons, a subject Shanahan notably avoids above, but rather overviews to "spread the word" to other chemists. The new research would be more likely to be presented at ICCF conferences.

No suggestion is made that the papers presented at this conference are "reliable source," in themselves, that is, they are not peer-reviewed, nor are they, by virtue of presentation, "published." Rather what was the subject of my comment was the notability of the conference, due to media coverage and due to the obvious increase in attention paid by the ACS. Conference papers are primary source, occasionally they are useable, more often not, unless they are cited in a reliable source, in which case the full reference would include the citing source as well as a primary reference. --Abd (talk) 17:50, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

The only notable point about the ACS meeting is that it is another tick mark n support of the comment "The field continues to be pursued by a band of dedicated fanatics' KirkShanahan (talk) 18:08, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Line-by-line response to Abd's silliness on my talk page. KirkShanahan (talk) 19:56, 18 May 2009 (UTC) - That's this talk page please - Kirk shanahan (talk) 19:59, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

The same it does the Letts-Cravens effect, which is the same way it does for any apparent excess heat signal. You should know that, you claim to understand the CCS enough to discredit it. I might throw in the problems Scott Little mentioned in measuring ultrasonic power input when he investigated the similar Russ George claims several years ago, which by the way, explain the 'melting' too (think 'cavitation jet'+'power mismeasurement'). KirkShanahan (talk) 17:34, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh and P.S., this isn't the place for your comment. Comments here are to be directed towards improving the article, as mine was. KirkShanahan (talk)

Kirk, I'm pretty sure it takes actual heat, not apparent heat, to melt palladium and boil the electrolyte out of an electrolysis cell. So, if CCS can't explain boiled electrolyte and that picture of melted palladium, then any mention of CCS can be moved to the "mere speculations" section (which if doesn't exist under that or an equivalent name, should), improving the article thereby. That's pretty simple logic, and should suffice to deal with Hipocrite's remark below. V (talk) 21:21, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Patently ridiculous claims, based on a total lack of understanding of mainline explanations. Also, not relevant to the article. Please stop this V. KirkShanahan (talk) 13:00, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

If it hasn't been done already, I'd like to see mention that Robert Duncan video (a presentation by a University counts as RS, doesn't it?) in the article. V (talk) 01:52, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

The video was taken down by the university, reasons still unknown. See [21]. In the video, Duncan talks about receiving an angry phone call from a physicist who called him a charlatan. I'm suspecting a great deal of pressure has been brought to bear. For some people, their beliefs become religious, and not in a good sense. --Abd (talk) 02:33, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

This all has nothing to do with improving our article. If you all want to chat about Cold Fusion, could you take it elsewhere? Thanks. Hipocrite (talk) 17:55, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

H, please see my comment immediately above yours here. The relevance to the article is in my prior comment, pre-V response, which is an explanation of why the ACS session is non-RS. Now, the bit V brought up isn't related I agree, so to honor your request, I will not respond to any non-article related point subsequently. KirkShanahan (talk) 18:03, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Hipocrite, Shanahan is a published expert, and his opinions are important. I'm very much interested in his views on the matters raised, with a goal of improving the article. I happen to think that it's impossible to work intelligently on a science article without some understanding of the science, so some level of discussion of the science is necessary. Don't want to read this, don't read it, there is no obligation. --Abd (talk) 18:11, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Tha's rich Abd! Wow! I can't believe you wrote that! For those following this, see my Talk page section 15 for more details. Kirk shanahan (talk) 20:06, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I can't agree to that. This talk page is for discussions surrounding the article, not chatting about science. There are multiple other fora people can use to chit-chat about cold fusion. It needs to stop happening here. I'm blad Kirk has agreed to focus on improving the article. You should do the same. Hipocrite (talk) 18:23, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.