parallel wrote:I don't think there is much doubt that the hot fusion folk were deriding cold fusion and did their share of dirty deeds shooting down P&F in 1989.
I've read the story of MIT altering the results they found doing the replication, to hide the anomalous heat, and the party afterwards.
I recall reading something about the MIT report, but I wasn't aware till now that the report was conducted by the Plasma Fusion Center, nor had I heard of the "Wake for Cold Fusion" held just over three months after Pons' and Fleischmann's announcement.
Source. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it appears to me from this source that the MIT folks acted with unseemly haste and bias. I would be interested to know if MIT or the scientists involved ever attempted to defend themselves from Mallove's allegations.
parallel wrote:You judge things on credibility yet don't seem to recognize that when $ billions are at stake funny things do happen. My guess is that Josephson found it too dangerous/undesirable to be more specific. I have no reason to doubt that he has heard "rumors."
Fortunately or unfortunately, I really don't have much credibility to worry about, but I'll grant that I am often cautious, perhaps sometimes to excess. I recognize that, if cold fusion researchers cared much about credibility, they would have quit what they were doing twenty years ago, and also that, from their point of view, Rossi's claims are unusual only in the amount of excess heat he claims to be generating, so perhaps their credibility is not my concern.
But excess caution is not my only fault. I am also curious, sometimes recklessly so (Hey, I didn't say I was
always cautious.
), and am rather fond of the free flow of information. Which is probably why my priorities are so screwed up.
I wait for the latest report from Lawrenceville Plasma Physics with breathless anticipation, but when someone tells me that I'm not aware of the important implications of Rossi's discovery, I have to roll my eyes. I may be relatively young, but I was literate in 1989. Implications are not news. What would be news, in my opinion, is 1) a theory for excess heat from H/Ni or D/Pd devices that is being tested, or (better yet) has been confirmed, 2) a thorough explication of the functioning of Rossi's device, including the catalyst, or 3) that such devices have been sold (or leased, rather) to customers and are working as advertised. In the meantime I will hold on to my Schrödinger's cat metaphor.
Anyway, back to the skullduggery, funny things can happen when large sums of money are at stake, but that kind of thing can work both ways, and I'm not one who knows what's going on behind the scenes. I have no reason to doubt that Dr. Josephson heard such rumors, if only because he is, I imagine, fairly well-connected with the cold fusion community and, from my reading of cold fusion websites over the past few months (not to mention my reading of hot fusion websites over the past year or so),
I could easily have supplied him with the allegation if I was more aware of the Wikipedia page. Even if what Dr. Josephson alleges happened or is still happening, I think it was a big mistake to make that allegation public before he bothered to find out for himself if there was any substance to it, for two reasons: first, if an editor can be demonstrated to have a connection to ITER, it puts that editor's contributions (using the term loosely) in perspective; second, if an editor
can't be demonstrated to have a connection to ITER, making such an allegation is at best useless, at worst damaging to the one making the allegation. If the editor is perfectly unidentifiable, his or her contributions can only be judged on their own merit, which means that the usefulness of the allegation is
completely dependent on the merit of the editor's contributions. I think it would have been better to just wryly observe that the article seems to have attracted an unusual number of frivolous edits (and perhaps new editors as well), for some reason, but maybe that's just my style.
One doesn't need to demonstrate a motive to criticize an action.
Temperature, density, confinement time: pick any two.
