Abd-William M. Connolley, The Cabal strikes back Options

[Grep]

Some of the more hilarious rhetoric, most but not all in the pot-kettle department

WMC

• "my attention was drawn to CF"
  (we used to call it stalking)
• admits to protecting a page version for amusement value
• "A often seemed confused about the terms of the ban"
  (that would be "an indeterminate period of approximately a month" which "remains, to be reviewed in approximately another month" )

Enric Naval

• "Abd believes that he knows better than other users"
  (of course, it's Enric itself who knows best)
• "Abd says that hoaxes should not be deleted, and hoaxers tolerated"
  (Abd said that hoaxes should be blanked by any user instead of deleted by admins)
• "Abd assumes the existance of bad-faith cabals"
  (I wonder where he gets that idea from?)
• "Abd performs experiments with democracy"
  (outrageous)
• "Abd sees no problem at all with his very long posts"
  (subheading 25 out of 27 total in Enric's evidence)

Mathsci

• "Abd has made unfounded statements about William M. Connolley" / "WMC is part of some covert off-wiki conspiracy." / "Since this case began he has written that WMC has been "coddling" me."
  (Such as by blocking people who annoy Mathsci, whom WMC meets for drinks IRL)
• "Abd claims to have scientific expertise"
  (Mathsci claims to be a scientist but his expertise is in pure mathematics)
• "Abd appears to be supported by a small tag team"
  (Mathsci's being a little larger)
• "My brief involvement on Talk:Cold fusion has been minimal and constructive"
  (16 edits, including "Abd's contributions here seem to be extremely skewed." "In view of his poor namespace editing record, my advice to Abd is to attempt to edit a non-controversial article on science in order to get more experience in handling scientific sourcing in a completely neutral context. That might be a valuable eye-opener." "Abd is not the person to lead discussions here.")

[Grep]

There are certainly a number of serious issues here, as well as all the hilarity. There are several issues over Cold Fusion which seem to me to be obviously separate, but which get persistently confused. One question is: "Is Cold Fusion a real phenomenon in the physical world?" -- "Is the science of Cold Fusion as currently practiced good science or bad science?" -- "What is the nature of the sociological phenomenon underlying the Cold Fusion debate?".

There is a party whose beliefs go something like "Cold Fusion is not a real phenomenon" -- "Cold Fusion science is bad science" -- "The only sociological phenomenon consists of people refusing to take the word of the experts who know best"

There is a party whose beliefs go something like "Cold Fusion is probably real, and I really wish it were true" -- "Cold Fusion science is about trying to make a free energy source" -- "So-called experts are at best blinkered stick-in-the-muds and at worst stooges of the oil companies".

Each party is arguing past the other on all three questions.

[Abd]

There are certainly a number of serious issues here, as well as all the hilarity. There are several issues over Cold Fusion which seem to me to be obviously separate, but which get persistently confused. One question is: "Is Cold Fusion a real phenomenon in the physical world?" -- "Is the science of Cold Fusion as currently practiced good science or bad science?" -- "What is the nature of the sociological phenomenon underlying the Cold Fusion debate?".

The cabal wants Wikipedia to take a stand in favor of the "mainstream" view, but they don't define what that means. Those questions involve POV, and we are properly quite limited. We cannot answer those questions, and, in fact, the questions aren't even well defined enough to answer, and there is no one answer. What is "cold fusion?" The name implies that there is nuclear fusion, but nobody really knows for sure what's going on. The theories are a mess; it's quite possible that one of the proposed explanations is more or less accurate, but, so far, most theories explain only part of the experimental phenomena. There have been, indeed, theories that made predictions before experiment verified them. Preparata predicted, using quantum field theory, that helium would be found correlated with excess heat measured, and then it was. That correlation, by the way, is pretty solid as a confirmation that fusion explains the excess heat, but it does not prove that the reaction is straight deuterium-deuterium fusion, there are other possibilities that were mostly overlooked in the early days.

"Cold Fusion" is an idea, a hypothesis. What's real is the experimental results. What are they? What's been covered by peer-reviewed secondary source? We can start to assert that as real, and, I can assure you, we would not from those sources state that "Cold fusion is a real phenomenon in the physical world." We would state, at this point, that "Unexplained heat from high packing of deuterium into palladium, under some conditions, is a real phenomenon." In 2004, the DoE panel that re-examined the issue came up 9:9 on the issue of excess heat, half believing that evidence was "convincing" that the heat was real, and the other half that it wasn't "conclusive." ("Not conclusive," in my book, is a middle position, not equivalent to "false.") And they only had a day meeting to consider it, and there is no way that the vast body of evidence could be fully addressed and understood in a day. Nuclear physicists, in general, have been inclined to believe that, since it's impossible from accepted theory (though there is no fundamental problem, merely no expected mechanism), there must be artifact, but that is simply a belief, not something demonstrated. Electrochemists, the competing specialty here, are well-convinced that the heat is real. The other result from that review was that one-third of the reviewers felt that evidence for the heat being of nuclear origin was "somewhat convincing." Now, if you don't believe that the evidence for the heat is strong, you certainly aren't going to believe that nuclear origin is likely! So the way I parse this is that two-thirds of those who accept the excess heat consider the origin to be, quite possibly, nuclear, and it's the simplest explanation. Exact mechanism unknown.

I follow physics blogs on this, and it's amazing how ignorant most of those commenting are. They will say, referring to Fleischmann's work, "it wasn't confirmed." It was. They will say it wasn't reproducible. It was, or, more accurately the original experimental design wasn't optimal, in fact, it was practically a miracle that it worked at all. But there are techniques now that work 100% of the time, and they have been replicated and published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals. They will say, "If it was fusion, the neutrons would have killed the researchers," which assumes -- doesn't it? -- that there is only one kind of fusion. Takahashi's theory is that under fortunately unusual conditions of confinement in the palladium lattice, two deuterium molecules can form a Tetrahedral pattern (one deuteron at each corner of a tetrahedron) and that this collapses to form a "condensate," which seems to be a Bose-Einstein condensate, which, within a femtosecond or so, he calculates using quantum field theory, fuses to form Be-8, which then decays immediately into two alpha particles, 23.8 MeV of energy each. No neutrons are emitted from the four-body fusion. The idea that fusion must necessarily produce copious neutrons is just that, an idea, an expectation, based on a narrow view of what might be happening. Whatever is happening in "cold fusion" cells, it does not produce many neutrons.

However, neutrons have been conclusively shown to be generated within the cells, at about ten times background, and consistently. It used to be said by the critics that if neutrons were conclusively demonstrated, that was proof, it was fusion. Well, they have been shown, published in Naturwissenschaften in January 2009, paper by Mosier-Boss, working for the U.S. Navy SPAWAR group, called "Triple tracks...." And there are other papers. The levels are way below what would be expected from simple deuterium-deuterium fusion, and they speculate that what is happening is perhaps the Be-8 theory of Takahashi, and then those energetic alpha particles cause a few secondary reactions, hot fusion, which generate neutrons. But nobody knows, except that the evidence for nuclear reactions, since 2004, has become overwhelming. Fusion? Some think so, some don't.

There is a party whose beliefs go something like "Cold Fusion is not a real phenomenon" -- "Cold Fusion science is bad science" -- "The only sociological phenomenon consists of people refusing to take the word of the experts who know best"

There is such a party, that's easy to show from reliable source. However, there is a lot of contrary source as well! We shouldn't confuse the opinions of scientists who aren't informed about recent research, who depend on memories of their opinions twenty years ago, or on media sources, with "scientific consensus." Science means knowledge, and old knowledge is still valid, if the age is considered. But recent knowledge trumps it, because it includes the old knowledge and more.

There is a party whose beliefs go something like "Cold Fusion is probably real, and I really wish it were true" -- "Cold Fusion science is about trying to make a free energy source" -- "So-called experts are at best blinkered stick-in-the-muds and at worst stooges of the oil companies".

Yeah, those people exist too. But that's not the view of the serious researchers and analysts. Who, by the way, are also experts, many of them highly-credentialed. Several Nobel Prize winners have supported cold fusion and worked on theoretical explanations.

First of all, I'm convinced that low-energy nuclear reactions are real. But that doesn't automatically mean "cheap" energy, and certainly not "free" energy. There is a technique used in Japan by Arata, a very well-respected physicist, who loads nanoparticle palladium with deuterium gas. It works 100% of the time. A cell with 7 grams of palladium in it, pressurized with the gas and sealed, heats up initially (heat is generated from the formation of palladium deuteride), but then the temperature rapidly declines to a constant level, it maintains its temperature at four degrees C. above ambient, for thousands of hours, with no sign of decline; I've seen the charts out to 3000 hours, when they terminate the experiment and open the cell to analyze for helium. (I haven't seen the helium results.) (When hydrogen is used, same initial heat, but the temperature rapidly declines, the same at first, but it settles to ambient within a few hours). Okay, suppose this works. I figured that with a modest investment of about $100,000, mostly for the palladium, I could run a cold fusion hot water heater in my house. Is that "free"?

Maybe more efficient methods can be found; there is work with nickel electrodes. But there have been quite a few companies working on the problem over the last twenty years, and most of those efforts terminated. The reason? Not that there were no results, but there was no progress toward commercial levels of heat generation. (There are other companies now, and some claims of possible progress, and much skepticism. No public proof of commercial application yet; one company, claiming generation of heat, not from cold fusion, but from hydrino theory, which is either the most brilliant scientific work in a long time, or totally bogus, has claimed a reactor which generates significant heat, and there is a claim of a confirmation, and enough media source on this that it belongs somewhere in the project, but ... it's nothing conclusive yet and it could be one very sophisticated scam.)

Each party is arguing past the other on all three questions.

Look again. You are assuming what the arguments are. You've got the negative arguments fairly right, but, in fact, that's all irrelevant. What matters for Wikipedia purposes is what is in reliable source, and for the science, what is in peer-reviewed reliable secondary sources. If we followed the RS guidelines and the principles made clear in RfAr/Fringe science, we'd be fine, and we would have a much better article, but the cabal, through a few active editors, has made sure that most of the story available isn't being told. It's pretty stupid, actually.

Give you an example. The triple-track paper on neutrons was published in Naturwissenschaften. In the RfAr on Cold fusion, that was called a "biology journal." Serious error. Because the recent paper on neutrons was amply covered in the media -- it was pretty big news in March -- we have a reference to the paper now, in the article. An editor inserted "life sciences journal." Naturw. is Springers "flagship multidisciplinary journal," it's rated just below Scientific American for impact factor in the multidisciplinary category. (I think SciAm was number 49, Naturw. was number 50.) Anyway, that question was the first one resolved at the mediation. Basically, if you can get editors to sit down and discuss something with sufficient thoroughness, consensus can be quite different from the original "majority opinion." It was decided that calling this a "life sciences" journal was misleading. The implication was that they wouldn't know a neutron from a bacillus. However, Naturw. is produced by the Max Planck Society, which is highly reputable and which has access to the best possible expertise for any scientific field. This is mainstream.

Cold fusion was called "pathological science" in 1989. By nuclear physicists, facing the possibility that much of what they had believed was obsolete, and who didn't have the expertise to reproduce experiments in a few months that took Pons and Fleischmann five years to develop. And the effect was very poorly understood, Pons and Fleischmann didn't think it was ready for publication, but the University of Utah, for patent reasons, pushed them to announce it, there was worry that competing work by Stephen Jones was going to outflank them. Later, when Pons and Fleischmann ran out of the batch of palladium that they had been using, they couldn't reproduce it either, until techniques of preparation of the palladium were found that worked. They'd been lucky. (In other words, you can't blame those physicists for failing, they didn't have enough information.) On the other hand, the Caltech work that resulted in the famous meeting of the American Physical Society where there was practically a riot of derision against Fleischmann, has later been more carefully analyzed. There was, apparently, excess heat shown, but missed. The experimental data was good, though the levels of excess heat were lower than expected from the Fleischmann results, probably because of the palladium quality, and thus this experiment was reported as negative. Same with MIT results, there was apparently some monkeying with the baseline in a chart that, from the raw data, shows modest excess heat; the baseline was shifted to make that appear to be zero excess heat. It's a mess, and much of this is in reliable source, there is material for many articles, if we simply start using the sources that exist without pushing an anti-CF -- or pro-CF -- agenda. Tell it like it is, and "is" doesn't refer to "reality" or Truth ™ but to what is in reliable sources. Where there is conflict of sources, we show that, but the cabal asserts conflict when, in fact, there is none. A negative result in one experiment does not negate a positive result in another. Something was different. An unresolved mystery is not a conflict. In any case, experimental reports are primary sources and only useful as historical documents, proof of their own existence, certainly not for conclusions!

Does a peer reviewed secondary source from, say, 2007, showing the results of research over the last decade, contradict an editorial or media source from 1990, say, that says "it hasn't been confirmed"? I say no. The 1990 source was reporting the situation in 1990 and the 2007 source, the situation in 2007. And this is what they want me banned for. I've been "pushing" for us to follow guidelines. That, in fact, is what Pcarbonn did, before he was essentially framed.

He should have been restricted, and it's quite possible I should be restricted, it's my position that experts, in general, should only edit articles when it isn't controversial. Experts are almost always not neutral! (I'm not an expert, compared to someone who has studied the field for twenty years) but I now have a strong POV, from my research over the last six months.) Experts, however, should be able, like any COI editor, to edit Talk pages. That's where they screwed up with Pcarbonn.

[Milton Roe]

First of all, I'm convinced that low-energy nuclear reactions are real. But that doesn't automatically mean "cheap" energy, and certainly not "free" energy. There is a technique used in Japan by Arata, a very well-respected physicist, who loads nanoparticle palladium with deuterium gas. It works 100% of the time. A cell with 7 grams of palladium in it, pressurized with the gas and sealed, heats up initially (heat is generated from the formation of palladium deuteride), but then the temperature rapidly declines to a constant level, it maintains its temperature at four degrees C. above ambient, for thousands of hours, with no sign of decline; I've seen the charts out to 3000 hours, when they terminate the experiment and open the cell to analyze for helium. (I haven't seen the helium results.) (When hydrogen is used, same initial heat, but the temperature rapidly declines, the same at first, but it settles to ambient within a few hours). Okay, suppose this works. I figured that with a modest investment of about $100,000, mostly for the palladium, I could run a cold fusion hot water heater in my house. Is that "free"?

No, but suppose this works. It requires us to now believe in human beings acting stupidly or crazily. Any non-crazy physicist who could do this, would make up a dozen or so preps in inert material cylinders (like little CO2 gas cartridges) and just send them to skeptics with a note:

This contains no radioisotope. You don't believe in cold fusion? Put this on your desk for a month or carry it in your front pants pocket, and then do ordinary calorimetry on it every week for the next few months. When you get to total heat outputs greater than 30 kcal/gram or so (i.e., clearly beyond chemistry), let me know, and we'll talk.

Now, I'm sure there are stories about why this isn't happening. The guy isn't sending them out because he's about to commercialize it (I've heard this one for nearly 20 years). Or he claims he sends them out and the warm cylinders are returned by scientists who have their fingers in their ears and eyes tightly closed (but no names are given of people who've returned samples). All very conspiratorial, and with nobody acting like *I* would act, no matter which side of this debate I was on (whether I could make these things, or whether I was to be the recipient).

That is how you know this is a crazy story.

Would this Arata guy send ME one of these things? No. There will be all kinds of complicated reasons why not. But ultimately, I predict, no. Perhaps it has to be in a special glass and is specially fragile and they can't move it. Whatever. For some reason, no.

I'll take one. I have access to a calorimeter. I have the perfect right to call "bullshit" until he's willing to send me one. Pass this along, and if he agrees, I'll send contact info.

Milton

[Abd]

I figured that with a modest investment of about $100,000, mostly for the palladium, I could run a cold fusion hot water heater in my house. Is that "free"?

No, but suppose this works. It requires us to now believe in human beings acting stupidly or crazily. Any non-crazy physicist who could do this, would make up a dozen or so preps in inert material cylinders (like little CO2 gas cartridges) and just send them to skeptics with a note:

This contains no radioisotope. You don't believe in cold fusion? Put this on your desk for a month or carry it in your front pants pocket, and then do ordinary calorimetry on it every week for the next few months. When you get to total heat outputs greater than 30 kcal/gram or so (i.e., clearly beyond chemistry), let me know, and we'll talk.

Mmmm... I don't have figures on the heat output off the top of my head, and I don't do research into sources for Wikipedia Review, but I do know that there are sufficient reports showing energy output greater than known chemical processes can explain. According to the chemists who are experts in measuring heat. The Arata experiments are not intended as commercial applications and what they show doesn't show commercial application. From the heat of formation of palladium deuteride, and the heat profile, assuming the initial heat is from p-d formation, one could estimate the conductivity of the capsule to the environment. The photographs show the capsule insulated with styrofoam, but the heat of formation and the capsule construction (double layer, three temperatures are recorded: inner chamber, isolating chamber, and ambient; basically the two temperature differentials are about equal, 2 degrees C each).

Your theory as to what the physicist would do assumes that he gives a fuck about other's opinions. You don't know this guy. He's the grand old man of Japanese physics, about 86 years old. Everything he does is being published under peer review in Japan. Yoshiaka Arata, small Wikipedia article on him.

The work described is recent, something like 2008. I wouldn't necessarily put this in a Wikipedia article, but, there are other gas-loading reports. One of the problems with cold fusion research is that there is little exact replication. Most researchers are trying to figure out how to get reliable heat output, or some new and conclusive finding, there is no money and no glory in doing what someone else did. To change that would require substantial academic funding, which was almost completely cut off by 1990. The U.S. Navy continued working quietly on cold fusion, publishing papers under peer review, with very little funding, the researchers worked on their own time, but they did get departmental support, and it appears that funding through the Navy is being ramped up, probably because of some of the recent relatively spectacular findings.

What's much more interesting to me is correlation between excess heat and helium. There is plenty of confirmation that measurement of helium is correlated with excess heat at what Storms (2007) reports as 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4. That's a magic number, Milton, as I'm sure you might recognize. It's what you get if deuterium is converted to helium, mechanism unknown (23.8 MeV, actually).

Now, I'm sure there are stories about why this isn't happening. The guy isn't sending them out because he's about to commercialize it (I've heard this one for nearly 20 years). Or he claims he sends them out and the warm cylinders are returned by scientists who have their fingers in their ears and eyes tightly closed (but no names are given of people who've returned samples). All very conspiratorial, and with nobody acting like *I* would act, no matter which side of this debate I was on (whether I could make these things, or whether I was to be the recipient).

That is how you know this is a crazy story.

No, it's not crazy, it's simply pure speculation posing as sensible analysis, and is possibly a little higher quality than the usual I see on physics blogs. I have no idea what it costs him to produce that 7 grams of nanoparticle palladium. But I do know someone who knows Arata, and basically the guy just does his work and publishes it, and when I said he doesn't give a fuck what others think, that wasn't just speculation. Lots of people in the cold fusion community would like more details, for sure. Remember, this is recent work. What he does is to send the cylinders off for helium analysis when he's done. He hasn't published those results, AFAIK, but he's known for earlier helium results, using other CF techniques.

Would this Arata guy send ME one of these things? No. There will be all kinds of complicated reasons why not. But ultimately, I predict, no. Perhaps it has to be in a special glass and is specially fragile and they can't move it. Whatever. For some reason, no.

I'll take one. I have access to a calorimeter. I have the perfect right to call "bullshit" until he's willing to send me one. Pass this along, and if he agrees, I'll send contact info.

You imagine I have influence with Arata? In a few months, I have developed enough trust with the people in the field that I can ask questions and get answers from experts, but .... Arata is in a category of his own.

You have the right to call anything bullshit, but ... that means nothing on Wikipedia, if we were following the sourcing guidelines. Perhaps you should watch the recent CBS Sixty Minutes documentary, if you haven't, and check out the seminar Robert Duncan ran at the U. Michigan, I think it was April or so.

The documentary featured the work of Energetics Technologies in Israel, where Duncan, a skeptic, was sent to study what was being done. Duncan turned around. The American Chemical Society published a peer-reviewed Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook in 2008, and in it is Michael McKubre's paper on an exact replication of some ET work. Apparently it works. Reliable source, Milton.

Sure, bullshit. Peer-reviewed, independently published, carefully researched and written, bullshit. Published by the well-known fringe lunatic publishers, the American Chemical Society and Oxford University Press. At this point, I'd say, we start looking how to use this bullshit.

If we look at the overall body of research, it's starting to look like the skeptical position is becoming fringe, with the weird situation that the "fringe opinion" is quite possibly the opinion of the "majority of scientists." Not the majority opinion of the peer reviewers, nor of experts who have actually gone over the research in detail, instead of just sitting back and

bullshitting.

I'm telling you what I know, not what I'd put in an article, what I know is, as usual, when I've spent some time with a field, ahead of what is in RS. This is the case with many subjects, sometimes it takes the peer-reviewed publications years to catch up with what is common knowledge in on-line discussion among experts. And that's the breaks. Wikipedia as it is depends on reliable sources for notability decisions; the basic non-negotiable policy, WP:V, is actually much more easily satisfied, but not notability.

This post has been edited by Abd: Fri 24th July 2009, 2:21am