Wow, after almost a week of goin at it, this exchange has proven a lot more entertaining than I expected. There have been loose accusations, even looser conjectures and a whole lot of "excess heat" with or without "cold fusion".
I can't pretend to have read it all, but a few observations are clear:
1) if you are a detractor, then please offer either an answer, or a clear path to an answer, to the apparent fact that a control experiment with only hydrogen gives rise to NO excess heat. Do the "same" experiment with deuterium and you get the excess heat. Other similar challenges can be cited for the problem of "whare are th' dang neutrons", and the He4 "ash".
2) if you are an experienced proponent, then please fill in some real observations and peer reviewed literature (yes I think there is some) that discuss how well the calorimetry is truly done, viz, what are the limits of precision, are these units supported by NIST traceable calibrations, etc. What techniques in mass spectrometry can distinguish the He4 ash from a residual deuteron?
3) if you are a theorist, then please step up to the plate and tell us if anyone in the game can show why it is impossible for a collective lattice mode to provide momentum balance to a d-d fusion event.
This list of good questions can easily be expanded, but it's a start. I don't think I'm real sure of this fusion claim myself, but I am sure the question is refutable or verifiable. Moreover, the louder or more strident the argument on either side, the less I tend to buy into it.
Dr. Richard Garwin's comment in the TV program was rather unfortunate. By claiming that the cold fusion researchers failed to measure the input energy correctly, for 20 years, he totally destroyed his own credibility, regardless of his background. The total input energy is simply voltage times current, integrated over time. You do not need a Ph. D. to measure it correctly. An elementary school student can do it correctly. If Garwin claimed that all the hundreds of researchers in cold fusion had conspired for 20 years to hoax the whole world he would have been a little bit more credible than claiming that the input energy was measured wrong.
Let's face it, cold fusion is a science of EXPERIMENTAL research, not theoretical research. There are crackpot theories, but there is no such thing as a crackpot experiment. If all the instruments are working and the measurements are done properly, and they indicate that excessive heat is emitted in quantity far exceed what could be explained by input energy or any possible chemical reaction, and high energy neutron is detected, then there ARE nuclear reactions going on. Exactly what is going on, is the job of theorists to try to come up with a possible explanation. But it is definitely nuclear.
All your cold fusion bashers will have to answer one question: Why over the 20 years, more and more researchers, many of them skeptics to start with, joined the cold fusion research effort. There is virtually no public funding support. They put their own science career at risk, and they are ridiculed by their peers. What is the motivation that they persisted in the research, if it were not for that there are indeed something very real that they see!
To denounce the 20 years of cold fusion reseach efforts, you would have to reduce yourself to name calling and pronouncing all these researchers as mentally ill, or stand to gain from a giant conspiracy. That would be absurd. It would be easier to accept that cold fusion is indeed a real physics phenomena.
Thank you, balok015, for #3. I was wondering if they could legitimately claim an alternate reaction product from what is expected in hot fusion. Now I understand: there are no available states it could decay to for the energy to be released as something other than a gamma ray. This further supports my claim of false assumptions and a poor grasp of the fundamentals needed to do this research correctly. I guess I should expect this from an electrochemist trying to do nuclear physics.
In addition to the already-noted conflict of interest (to say the least) that Graham Hubler had regarding his "critique" (sic) of McKubre's results, and how 60 Minutes somehow managed to fail to do the 30-second Google search that would have revealed it, there are a couple of other points that the report failed to make.
1. When McKubre said that "we could have used our apparatus to make tea, but didn't," that should have been a really, really, big hint that something is wrong. The simplest proof of the reality of the phenomenon would be to unplug the apparatus from the wall and to use the energy generated to run the apparatus. So far, no "cold fusion" advocate has been willing to do that.
2. Why didn't they interview Steven Jones?
3. What Garwin should have said, but didn't, was that "Cold Fusion" as shown in McKubre's animation is physically impossible. D+D fusion does *not* produce significant amounts of 4He -- even at room temperature -- but rather a 50/50 mixture of T and 3He, with only a tiny fraction of it going to 4He. And even if by some miracle, the eV-level interactions in the lattice could affect the lifetime of the 24 MeV 4He* excited state, there are no intermediate states through which it could decay in a way to give up its energy as heat rather than as a gamma ray.
4. The report failed to mention that the so-called "replications" fail to replicate each others' results. Some people see neutrons, some people don't, for example. If the results aren't the same, it's not a replication.
5. I can understand why Scott Pelley would not want to be confrontational with Martin Fleischmann. Nonetheless, it has to be pointed out that after their initial publication, Fleischmann and Pons did publish a couple more papers about so-called Cold Fusion, and they were travesties in terms of how poorly done they were. Not only that, as Garwin implied, Fleischmann and Pons claimed in 1989 that they had a *working* CF water heater. No one has seen that heater since. Also, Fleischmann and Pons weren't exactly "hounded out of science." Pons had tenure at the University of Utah, and they would have been willing to let him stay on, except that he failed to turn up to teach his classes at the beginning of the next semester, and Fleischmann was a big enough name that if he had gone back to his earlier research, people would have let him. At least initially, Toyota was funding them at a lab in the south of France -- nice work if you can get it.
windulum2: Sorry if I wasn't clear on this before.... I have no doubt that they are measuring excess heat. If this is all they do, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing these measurements correctly. Garwin doubts the measurements are done right. Duncan doesn't. I am arguing that they have not convincingly correlated the measurements to any sort of fusion event.
I haven't talked to the scientists, but I have read some of the literature, and I guarantee you I understood more of it than you would. I am not convinced. Some of the data looks fine. Other times, the data is acquired in such a way that they shouldn't be drawing conclusions from it (but they do anyway). I've also seen them make assumptions, either implicitly or explicitly, that they shouldn't be making. This is why I'm not convinced.
The problem is, CBS ends this segment showing the skeptic converting to a believer (add to that the sob story they gave us about the scientists who ruined their career over this), and suddenly everyone is made to believe this cold fusion nonsense is a reality, when it's far from it. Make no mistake, Duncan is not the caliber of scientist that Garwin is. The reason Duncan is Vice Chancellor of research at the University of Missouri (not the most renown research institution by a long shot), is because he just won't cut it in a lab, so they gave him a desk job. Garwin was a student of Enrico Fermi for crying out loud. It's a shame that he doubts the measurements were done correctly, because he will just passively ignore it, rather than actively seek to disprove the hypothesis and contribute his expertise to the discussion.
If they could repeat it, that would tell me that their hypothesis may be right, since they would be using it to get the same results. But the problem is, nothing is ever the same. And just saying that the ONLY place the excess heat can come from is fusion will catch them a lot of flack. Just because they account for resistance doesn't mean they have accounted for all possible sources of heat. There is the potential for A LOT of chemistry to be taking place here, and they have not addressed any of it in their literature as a potential source of this excess heat.
I'm a damn good scientist, and I did all this thinking on my own, just as always. I didn't let Garwin or Duncan or anyone draw conclusions for me. I've never been a stellar student, but when it comes to experimental practice in the laboratory, I am rarely wrong.
windulum2 wrote: "Wegener was horrendously vilified during that gentle-sounding "long time to be accepted," and that is not so much of an exception as you portray. Velikovsky was crucified for observing [...] while the late S.J. Gould gets credit [...]. Luis Alvarez [...] had to fight tooth and nail [...], and now, even in acceptance, he and Shoemaker get credit for impact theory without acknowledgment to Velikovsky."
The vague similarities of successful theories to Velikovsky's weird ideas hardly represent vindication. While resistance to Alvarez's ideas appear to have been caused by scientific inertia, again it is in a field that yields definitive data greedily, and even then it took less than a decade for acceptance, while CF has been around for more than 2 decades. If these are your best examples, then that supports my claim that in the past century, examples of dogma stagnating science are the exception, and this is particularly the case in bench-top physics experiments, the class to which CF belongs.
The truth is, in spite of healthy skepticism, scientists are by and large eager to embrace new and revolutionary ideas, for it is well known that in that direction fame and glory lie. A new theory brings with it a lot of low-hanging fruit, which is why in so many physicists from the few decades during the emergence of modern physics have household names.
I'd like to know of an example of a bench-top experiment in the last century, in which all the parameters can be controlled, where the results were widely discredited, debunked, and disbelieved over a period of decades, and which in the end turned out to be right. There are counter-examples like N-rays and polywater in which the results were and remain discredited, and of course discredited paranormal claims never seem to die, but are never vindicated either. In areas more difficult to control, like medicine, entire industries have grown around discredited claims, and there doesn't appear to be an end to that in sight for that either.
windulum2: "Quantum mechanics benefitted from rapid repeatability that produced a bounty of results that drove theory to explain. And this occurred in an era of much greater freedom to pursue pure research without a specifically funded, profit-oriented agenda."
If you're going to use historical examples to support your argument, you can't dismiss other historical examples because it was a different era. In any case, major physics discoveries or theories didn't stop with QM. The big bang, quarks, the electroweak theory, superstring theory are a few examples of theories that have not been slowed down at all by dogma. Even string theory, which does not lend itself to experimental verification, but offers some enticing elegance to fundamental theories, has been well-supported, even if it is has been controversial. Other new ideas like dark energy are not dismissed out of hand, but are carefully considered. Physics is a long way from a dogmatic, and stagnant discipline.
windulum2: " Even so, its counterintuitive and contradictory findings were hard pills to swallow and still require acceptance without physical understanding. Einstein himself died still opposing a dice-playing God and spooky action-at-a-distance."
It's true that Einstein was never satisfied with QM, but
1) as he says himself, he earned the right to make his mistakes, 2) this was most certainly not motivated by inertia or dogma, but by a real scientific curiosity about its interpretation and implications, particularly entanglement, and 3) in spite of the great man's objections, and in spite of its strange implications, and against scientific intuition and dogma, QM was quickly, and almost universally accepted in the greater physics community, and (the relativistic version) has turned out to be spectacularly successful.
All of this is in direct contradiction to your thesis that progress is stagnating because of dogma.
windulum2: "Cold fusion is clearly less repeatable and its cause remains a deeply buried mystery but the evidence is overwhelming of a very real phenomenon."
Maybe, whatever that means, but evidence of nuclear reactions is spotty, evidence of fusion even more so, and evidence of clean, limitless energy, completely absent.
windulum2 wrote: "People did make it work as advertised and still do."
Clean, nearly limitless energy was advertised. This has not been delivered.
Even if you restrict "working" to producing excess heat, the best you can say is that some people claimed to make it work, sometimes. If the best labs on the planet repeat the experiment as described and do not observe any evidence for excess heat, then it doesn't work as advertised.
windulum2: " To hold nature to our demand for repeatability "or else we refuse to believe in you" is myopic folly. "
What you call folly, the rest of the world calls a hallmark of the scientific method.
windulum2: "We should be beckoned by the mystery of irregular results. "
This may sound good, but in simple experiments, if the results are irreproducible, experience has shown that it is most likely because they are marginal in nature.
I'm at a loss to think of a major advance in physics that resulted from the pursuit of irreproducible experiments. And don't confuse irreproducibility with statistical improbability. Rutherford's scattering of alpha particles from gold only occasionally produced large deflections, but everyone who did the experiment got the same probability of large deflections.
windulum2: "If cold fusion had not been so quickly and deliberately discredited and instead funded and given the huge attention and effort quantum mechanics was, we would likely have working success by now."
It's nice to see an admission that success has not been achieved.
CF is a single, relatively simple experiment, involving calorimetry and electrolysis. QM was a proliferation of rather more difficult experiments involving vacuums, spectrum analysis, electric and magnetic fields, particle detectors, and high voltage, among other technologies.
CF is unreliable or irreproducible, and doesn't have a theory to explain it when it "works", even after 20 years. The QM experiments were highly reproducible, in essentially every lab that tried them, and a nascent theory was evolving to explain them. There was incremental progress to encourage incremental funding for a vast range different experiments. In little more than CF's two decades, two independent QM formalisms were developed in detail to explain literally dozens of effects. There really is no comparison.
For the scale of the experiment, CF was exceptionally well funded to the tune of tens of millions from Utah, Toyota, and the Japanese government. Regardless of what the effect is, if it is so marginal that after 20 years and 20 million dollars plus, it is still not reproducible, then skepticism is warranted. I very much doubt that any single bench-top experiment in QM received a fraction of that kind of funding before the results could be reproduced.
And CF did get a lot of attention, certainly much more than Planck got when he suggested E=hf. If the interest didn't last, it's because the phenomenon didn't deliver, not because of a ridiculous conspiracy. I remember the atmosphere shortly after CF. It was electric; everyone wanted it to succeed. There is no way it could have been held back by will, while millions were being spent on it, even if you can believe the ridiculous notion that every lab that failed to reproduce was falsifying their data.
Anyway, the contrast you draw to the acceptance and support QM seems to be a concession that CF is not held back by resistance to new phenomena that contradict dogma and intuition. QM is nothing if not that.
Since you made your unsupported statement of faith, here's mine: If electrolysis of D2O on Pd produced excess heat in quantities that enabled virtually unlimited clean energy, then given the attention lavished on the topic, and the millions poured into its development, we'd all be driving our cars on water by now.
I wish I could edit here my postings here I make a lot of errors. Where I say "It would not be so astounding if they were not suspenseful physicists and or mathematicians. " I meant _successful_ not suspenseful.I wont even bother to point out all the other errors.
Probably might be interesting to point out that the idea of using a mass driver triggered fusion reactor might still be useful for space propulsion even if it turns out that a 8000 mile paper thin mass driver might be required. You can probably forget about truing to steer a 1 mg mass traveling a fraction of light speed so such a hypothetical mass driver is probably going to be required to be straight with no turns so its not something that's probably going to be easily built here on earth. But its all speculation for now anywise but it has the potential for some very interesting hypothesizing.Great math and materials sciences challenges etc.
Hi windulum2 I kind of agree with you. I have a saying that the value of truth is more determined by the scale and quality of its marketing department than by its actual measure of truth Look at churches. Wasn't it Plank that said something along the lines of waiting for the old guard to die before a new idea will gain acceptance.
I see a lot of that on the sci.physics forums. Even had some very smart individuals actually believing that by understanding the math they could actually understand the actual cause of gravity.That's astounding to me.It would not be so astounding if they were not suspenseful physicists and or mathematicians. Seams they are not able to be objective about their own ideas.It appears that you can try to be so objective that you are no longer objective at all.We all being human will all have to be careful not to fall into that trap. When I first developed my alternate theory's I believe had actually spent more time trying to disprove the idea than on trying to prove it. Never got much help with that on Usenet postings as it seamed if they could not find fault they just ignored.But I can understand that for then there was little to gain by opening agreeing with the theory but had a lot to lose in credibility if it turned out wrong. So its still ignored and that's a pity because those that would have accepted it could so easily have made advances of their own.
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I can't pretend to have read it all, but a few observations are clear:
1) if you are a detractor, then please offer either an answer, or a clear path to an answer, to the apparent fact that a control experiment with only hydrogen gives rise to NO excess heat. Do the "same" experiment with deuterium and you get the excess heat. Other similar challenges can be cited for the problem of "whare are th' dang neutrons", and the He4 "ash".
2) if you are an experienced proponent, then please fill in some real observations and peer reviewed literature (yes I think there is some) that discuss how well the calorimetry is truly done, viz, what are the limits of precision, are these units supported by NIST traceable calibrations, etc. What techniques in mass spectrometry can distinguish the He4 ash from a residual deuteron?
3) if you are a theorist, then please step up to the plate and tell us if anyone in the game can show why it is impossible for a collective lattice mode to provide momentum balance to a d-d fusion event.
This list of good questions can easily be expanded, but it's a start. I don't think I'm real sure of this fusion claim myself, but I am sure the question is refutable or verifiable. Moreover, the louder or more strident the argument on either side, the less I tend to buy into it.
Cheers,
Bob Terry
Let's face it, cold fusion is a science of EXPERIMENTAL research, not theoretical research. There are crackpot theories, but there is no such thing as a crackpot experiment. If all the instruments are working and the measurements are done properly, and they indicate that excessive heat is emitted in quantity far exceed what could be explained by input energy or any possible chemical reaction, and high energy neutron is detected, then there ARE nuclear reactions going on. Exactly what is going on, is the job of theorists to try to come up with a possible explanation. But it is definitely nuclear.
All your cold fusion bashers will have to answer one question: Why over the 20 years, more and more researchers, many of them skeptics to start with, joined the cold fusion research effort. There is virtually no public funding support. They put their own science career at risk, and they are ridiculed by their peers. What is the motivation that they persisted in the research, if it were not for that there are indeed something very real that they see!
To denounce the 20 years of cold fusion reseach efforts, you would have to reduce yourself to name calling and pronouncing all these researchers as mentally ill, or stand to gain from a giant conspiracy. That would be absurd. It would be easier to accept that cold fusion is indeed a real physics phenomena.
http://stockology.blogspot.com/2009/04/true-rationale-of-commodities-supply.html
1. When McKubre said that "we could have used our apparatus to make tea, but didn't," that should have been a really, really, big hint that something is wrong. The simplest proof of the reality of the phenomenon would be to unplug the apparatus from the wall and to use the energy generated to run the apparatus. So far, no "cold fusion" advocate has been willing to do that.
2. Why didn't they interview Steven Jones?
3. What Garwin should have said, but didn't, was that "Cold Fusion" as shown in McKubre's animation is physically impossible. D+D fusion does *not* produce significant amounts of 4He -- even at room temperature -- but rather a 50/50 mixture of T and 3He, with only a tiny fraction of it going to 4He. And even if by some miracle, the eV-level interactions in the lattice could affect the lifetime of the 24 MeV 4He* excited state, there are no intermediate states through which it could decay in a way to give up its energy as heat rather than as a gamma ray.
4. The report failed to mention that the so-called "replications" fail to replicate each others' results. Some people see neutrons, some people don't, for example. If the results aren't the same, it's not a replication.
5. I can understand why Scott Pelley would not want to be confrontational with Martin Fleischmann. Nonetheless, it has to be pointed out that after their initial publication, Fleischmann and Pons did publish a couple more papers about so-called Cold Fusion, and they were travesties in terms of how poorly done they were. Not only that, as Garwin implied, Fleischmann and Pons claimed in 1989 that they had a *working* CF water heater. No one has seen that heater since. Also, Fleischmann and Pons weren't exactly "hounded out of science." Pons had tenure at the University of Utah, and they would have been willing to let him stay on, except that he failed to turn up to teach his classes at the beginning of the next semester, and Fleischmann was a big enough name that if he had gone back to his earlier research, people would have let him. At least initially, Toyota was funding them at a lab in the south of France -- nice work if you can get it.
Sorry if I wasn't clear on this before.... I have no doubt that they are measuring excess heat. If this is all they do, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing these measurements correctly. Garwin doubts the measurements are done right. Duncan doesn't. I am arguing that they have not convincingly correlated the measurements to any sort of fusion event.
I haven't talked to the scientists, but I have read some of the literature, and I guarantee you I understood more of it than you would. I am not convinced. Some of the data looks fine. Other times, the data is acquired in such a way that they shouldn't be drawing conclusions from it (but they do anyway). I've also seen them make assumptions, either implicitly or explicitly, that they shouldn't be making. This is why I'm not convinced.
The problem is, CBS ends this segment showing the skeptic converting to a believer (add to that the sob story they gave us about the scientists who ruined their career over this), and suddenly everyone is made to believe this cold fusion nonsense is a reality, when it's far from it. Make no mistake, Duncan is not the caliber of scientist that Garwin is. The reason Duncan is Vice Chancellor of research at the University of Missouri (not the most renown research institution by a long shot), is because he just won't cut it in a lab, so they gave him a desk job. Garwin was a student of Enrico Fermi for crying out loud. It's a shame that he doubts the measurements were done correctly, because he will just passively ignore it, rather than actively seek to disprove the hypothesis and contribute his expertise to the discussion.
If they could repeat it, that would tell me that their hypothesis may be right, since they would be using it to get the same results. But the problem is, nothing is ever the same. And just saying that the ONLY place the excess heat can come from is fusion will catch them a lot of flack. Just because they account for resistance doesn't mean they have accounted for all possible sources of heat. There is the potential for A LOT of chemistry to be taking place here, and they have not addressed any of it in their literature as a potential source of this excess heat.
I'm a damn good scientist, and I did all this thinking on my own, just as always. I didn't let Garwin or Duncan or anyone draw conclusions for me. I've never been a stellar student, but when it comes to experimental practice in the laboratory, I am rarely wrong.
"Wegener was horrendously vilified during that gentle-sounding "long time to be accepted," and that is not so much of an exception as you portray. Velikovsky was crucified for observing [...] while the late S.J. Gould gets credit [...]. Luis Alvarez [...] had to fight tooth and nail [...], and now, even in acceptance, he and Shoemaker get credit for impact theory without acknowledgment to Velikovsky."
The vague similarities of successful theories to Velikovsky's weird ideas hardly represent vindication. While resistance to Alvarez's ideas appear to have been caused by scientific inertia, again it is in a field that yields definitive data greedily, and even then it took less than a decade for acceptance, while CF has been around for more than 2 decades. If these are your best examples, then that supports my claim that in the past century, examples of dogma stagnating science are the exception, and this is particularly the case in bench-top physics experiments, the class to which CF belongs.
The truth is, in spite of healthy skepticism, scientists are by and large eager to embrace new and revolutionary ideas, for it is well known that in that direction fame and glory lie. A new theory brings with it a lot of low-hanging fruit, which is why in so many physicists from the few decades during the emergence of modern physics have household names.
I'd like to know of an example of a bench-top experiment in the last century, in which all the parameters can be controlled, where the results were widely discredited, debunked, and disbelieved over a period of decades, and which in the end turned out to be right. There are counter-examples like N-rays and polywater in which the results were and remain discredited, and of course discredited paranormal claims never seem to die, but are never vindicated either. In areas more difficult to control, like medicine, entire industries have grown around discredited claims, and there doesn't appear to be an end to that in sight for that either.
windulum2: "Quantum mechanics benefitted from rapid repeatability that produced a bounty of results that drove theory to explain. And this occurred in an era of much greater freedom to pursue pure research without a specifically funded, profit-oriented agenda."
If you're going to use historical examples to support your argument, you can't dismiss other historical examples because it was a different era. In any case, major physics discoveries or theories didn't stop with QM. The big bang, quarks, the electroweak theory, superstring theory are a few examples of theories that have not been slowed down at all by dogma. Even string theory, which does not lend itself to experimental verification, but offers some enticing elegance to fundamental theories, has been well-supported, even if it is has been controversial. Other new ideas like dark energy are not dismissed out of hand, but are carefully considered. Physics is a long way from a dogmatic, and stagnant discipline.
windulum2: " Even so, its counterintuitive and contradictory findings were hard pills to swallow and still require acceptance without physical understanding. Einstein himself died still opposing a dice-playing God and spooky action-at-a-distance."
It's true that Einstein was never satisfied with QM, but
1) as he says himself, he earned the right to make his mistakes,
2) this was most certainly not motivated by inertia or dogma, but by a real scientific curiosity about its interpretation and implications, particularly entanglement, and
3) in spite of the great man's objections, and in spite of its strange implications, and against scientific intuition and dogma, QM was quickly, and almost universally accepted in the greater physics community, and (the relativistic version) has turned out to be spectacularly successful.
All of this is in direct contradiction to your thesis that progress is stagnating because of dogma.
windulum2: "Cold fusion is clearly less repeatable and its cause remains a deeply buried mystery but the evidence is overwhelming of a very real phenomenon."
Maybe, whatever that means, but evidence of nuclear reactions is spotty, evidence of fusion even more so, and evidence of clean, limitless energy, completely absent.
Clean, nearly limitless energy was advertised. This has not been delivered.
Even if you restrict "working" to producing excess heat, the best you can say is that some people claimed to make it work, sometimes. If the best labs on the planet repeat the experiment as described and do not observe any evidence for excess heat, then it doesn't work as advertised.
windulum2: " To hold nature to our demand for repeatability "or else we refuse to believe in you" is myopic folly. "
What you call folly, the rest of the world calls a hallmark of the scientific method.
windulum2: "We should be beckoned by the mystery of irregular results. "
This may sound good, but in simple experiments, if the results are irreproducible, experience has shown that it is most likely because they are marginal in nature.
I'm at a loss to think of a major advance in physics that resulted from the pursuit of irreproducible experiments. And don't confuse irreproducibility with statistical improbability. Rutherford's scattering of alpha particles from gold only occasionally produced large deflections, but everyone who did the experiment got the same probability of large deflections.
windulum2: "If cold fusion had not been so quickly and deliberately discredited and instead funded and given the huge attention and effort quantum mechanics was, we would likely have working success by now."
It's nice to see an admission that success has not been achieved.
CF is a single, relatively simple experiment, involving calorimetry and electrolysis. QM was a proliferation of rather more difficult experiments involving vacuums, spectrum analysis, electric and magnetic fields, particle detectors, and high voltage, among other technologies.
CF is unreliable or irreproducible, and doesn't have a theory to explain it when it "works", even after 20 years. The QM experiments were highly reproducible, in essentially every lab that tried them, and a nascent theory was evolving to explain them. There was incremental progress to encourage incremental funding for a vast range different experiments. In little more than CF's two decades, two independent QM formalisms were developed in detail to explain literally dozens of effects. There really is no comparison.
For the scale of the experiment, CF was exceptionally well funded to the tune of tens of millions from Utah, Toyota, and the Japanese government. Regardless of what the effect is, if it is so marginal that after 20 years and 20 million dollars plus, it is still not reproducible, then skepticism is warranted. I very much doubt that any single bench-top experiment in QM received a fraction of that kind of funding before the results could be reproduced.
And CF did get a lot of attention, certainly much more than Planck got when he suggested E=hf. If the interest didn't last, it's because the phenomenon didn't deliver, not because of a ridiculous conspiracy. I remember the atmosphere shortly after CF. It was electric; everyone wanted it to succeed. There is no way it could have been held back by will, while millions were being spent on it, even if you can believe the ridiculous notion that every lab that failed to reproduce was falsifying their data.
Anyway, the contrast you draw to the acceptance and support QM seems to be a concession that CF is not held back by resistance to new phenomena that contradict dogma and intuition. QM is nothing if not that.
Since you made your unsupported statement of faith, here's mine: If electrolysis of D2O on Pd produced excess heat in quantities that enabled virtually unlimited clean energy, then given the attention lavished on the topic, and the millions poured into its development, we'd all be driving our cars on water by now.
Where I say "It would not be so astounding if they were not suspenseful physicists and or mathematicians. " I meant _successful_ not suspenseful.I wont even bother to point out all the other errors.
Probably might be interesting to point out that the idea of using a mass driver triggered fusion reactor might still be useful for space propulsion even if it turns out that a 8000 mile paper thin mass driver might be required.
You can probably forget about truing to steer a 1 mg mass traveling a fraction of light speed so such a hypothetical mass driver is probably going to be required to be straight with no turns so its not something that's probably going to be easily built here on earth.
But its all speculation for now anywise but it has the potential for some very interesting hypothesizing.Great math and materials sciences challenges etc.
I kind of agree with you.
I have a saying that the value of truth is more determined by the scale and quality of its marketing department than by its actual measure of truth Look at churches.
Wasn't it Plank that said something along the lines of waiting for the old guard to die before a new idea will gain acceptance.
I see a lot of that on the sci.physics forums. Even had some very smart individuals actually believing that by understanding the math they could actually understand the actual cause of gravity.That's astounding to me.It would not be so astounding if they were not suspenseful physicists and or mathematicians.
Seams they are not able to be objective about their own ideas.It appears that you can try to be so objective that you are no longer objective at all.We all being human will all have to be careful not to fall into that trap.
When I first developed my alternate theory's I believe had actually spent more time trying to disprove the idea than on trying to prove it. Never got much help with that on Usenet postings as it seamed if they could not find fault they just ignored.But I can understand that for then there was little to gain by opening agreeing with the theory but had a lot to lose in credibility if it turned out wrong.
So its still ignored and that's a pity because those that would have accepted it could so easily have made advances of their own.