This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

I have obtained a copy of this book.

Be that as it may, there is a Foreword in the book that should be noticed, given what some have said about this source:

The ACS Symposium Series was first published in 1974 to provide a mechanism for publishing symposia quickly in book form. The purpose of the series is to publish timely, comprehensive books developed from ACS sponsored symposia based on current scientific research. Occasionally, books are developed from symposia sponsored by other organizations when the topic is of keen interest to the chemistry audience.

Before agreeing to publish a book, the proposed table of contents is reviewed for appropriate and comprehensive coverage and for interest to the audience. Some papers may be excluded to better focus the book; others may be added to provide comprehensiveness. When appropriate, overview or introductory chapters are added. Drafts of chapters are peer-reviewed prior to final acceptance or rejection, and manuscripts are prepared in camera-ready format.

As a rule, only original research papers and original review papers are included in the volumes. Verbatim reproductions of previously published papers are not accepted.

ACS Books Department.

The material is all copyright 2008 by the American Chemical Society. The title page says that it is "Sponsored by the ACS Division of Environmental Chemistry, Inc." Is that mainstream enough? The book is distributed by Oxford University Press, the well-known fringe publisher.

If anyone has questions about what's in the book, "Abd" means "servant" or "slave." Ask, if it pleases you. Otherwise, there will be, I suspect, some material sourced to this book appearing in an article near you. It might even survive more than a few minutes....

List of Papers

Contributing authors and papers

Any questions? -- Abd ( talk) 00:17, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't have a question, but I will repeat my request: Please stop posting so much unless you are discussing a particular proposed edit to the article. Talk pages are intended for discussion of how to improve wikipedia articles. Olorinish ( talk) 01:11, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Just ignore everything 'till someone writes a brand new section that proposes a specific change to the article. I am. Hipocrite ( talk) 14:39, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Great idea, Hipocrite. Too bad you don't take your own advice, it would be better if you did.

Ignoring Talk is perfectly legitimate and does not adversely affect editor rights. The only exception would be edit warring to maintain text or remove text when there has been recent unanswered discussion against that action, and if that discussion is tl;dr, one has a perfect excuse. Waiting to see edits is quite appropriate, if one is not interested in the discussion. Trying to prevent others who feel differently from discussing, however, is chilling to our best process, whereby a few editors explore possibly difficult issues in depth, then present results to a broader group having defined the issues and collected evidence. Some of this can take place on Talk pages, perhaps, but where it seems that the issue isn't editor behavior, but substance of the topic and the sources, I think it belongs in Article talk. Talk can be refactored to make it more accessible, and this is where I see effort increasing over coming years. We need backstory that explains how the text came to be what it is, so that future editors can be integrated into a standing consensus, and understand where it might be possible to change it. -- Abd ( talk) 17:58, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

If you feel that something I have written here isn't sufficiently useful, or is too long, you may collapse it. I will title the collapse section if it isn't neutrally and informatively titled (i.e., you don't necessarily have to read the whole thing to collapse it.) Don't use an archive template, please, because it should still be possible for others to comment within the collapse. Just use {{collapsetop|title text}} and {{collapsebottom}}, please. Or you can ask me to collapse it.

However, I'm using the Talk page to improve the article, the whole article, not just a particular proposed edit. I don't think we have a WikiProject Cold Fusion, or do we? I also use it for specific edit issues, as can be seen above. If you believe that what I'm doing here violates Talk page guidelines, I assume that you understand how to approach this issue. -- Abd ( talk) 03:22, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

{unindent}Ok – suggestions:

A.) Include:

1.) that the CCs potentially increase ‘excess heat’ error bars tremendously,

a.) implying all known reports may be explained by it

b.) requires CF reearchers address the issue directly, which hasn’t happened

2.)that Clarke, et al 4He results, coupled with DOE report(s), and Paneth and Peters experience

a.) suggests all 4He results are potentially false

b.) requires CF researchers disclose all methods, calibrations, etc. for He measurements, which hasn’t happened

3.)that ‘contamination’ concerns extend to heavy metal transmutation claims

a.) note such in S. Little’s RIFEX report (single specific use, meets RS)

b.) note Mizuno replicated Iwamura, but identified S contaminant insetead of Mo

c.) note BHARC replicated Bockris carbon-arc results but showed they came primarily from dust

d.) note that SIMS, XPS, etc are being misused by CF researchers

4.) that light water cold fusion has been observed and is of the same magnitude as heavy water CF

a.) note that this negates the whole “D + D -> He + 23.8 MeV” limitation to CF theories

(which should be obvious from D. below)

B.) Drop

1.) CR39 stuff, esp triplet stuff, as too recent, too suspect

2.) hydrino theory mention (hydrino theory is even wilder than CF)

3.) calling muon catalyzed fusion “cold fusion”

4.) legitimizing the name change to ‘LENR’, point out this is strictly to avoid ‘associations’ with CF

C.) Add section “Is it psuedoscience or not?”

1.) point out Storms omission of final Shanahan pub in his book

2.) point out Hagelstein, et al’s omission of Clarke et al 4He work on SRI samples

3.) point out conformances to Langmuir’s criteria

D.) Move stuff on conventional theory (the ‘miracles’) to a side article, noting that all sides agree CF is not constent with conventional theory Kirk shanahan ( talk) 16:03, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd writes in his edit summary "Please negotiate consensus in Talk." I think that editors who are not Abd and aren't challenging the validity of WP:RS on this article have come to a consensus that Storms and Front. Phys. China were not reliable sources. If anyone disagrees with this (aside from you, Abd, I know you disagree, and you Objectivitst, I know you have stated that WP:RS is depreciated on this article), I'd like to know why, exactly, they consider these sources reliable. Hipocrite ( talk) 17:14, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Hipocrite mistakes an unclosed discussion, with very low participation, for a "consensus," and neglects other discussions that approached the issue more objectively. Storms (2007) is published by World Scientific. Front. Phys. China is published by the largest publisher in China, Higher Education Press, one of the largest in the world (45th largest), in cooperation with Springer-Verlag, and is peer-reviewed. Further, these sources are not being used to claim scientific fact, but only claims, i.e., "proposed explanations." Hipocrite, you are on thin ice, and someone following you should be aware of the history. It will come out. V. didn't state what you claim, but if he did, he'd have been wrong. WP:RS applies, not your opinions and point of view. -- Abd ( talk) 17:27, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, Abd. Hipocrite, what I've previously written here are words to the effect that strict-RS is an inadequate rule for this and other articles. And you have consistently failed to specify why, if this article can contain statements that are marked as being claims, those claims can only come from strict-RS material. Also, with respect to speculative explanations for CF, since practically none exist in strict-RS material, you have failed to explain why such speculations must be excluded. What makes an "RS" speculation superior to a non-RS speculation? By definition, BOTH are just guesses! V ( talk) 15:29, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

An RS speculation has been validated as notable in some way, a non-RS one hasn't. However, if it's been quoted in a reliable secondary source, it's been validated as notable. Sometimes, however, we can point to sources not normally considered reliable to attribute claims or opinions. The usual requirement is that the person expressing the opinion is notable in the relevant field. In the case under discussion, Storms is certainly notable in the field. But he is also RS, and claims that he isn't are essentially proposterous, and are based on the kind of anti-fringe judgment that ArbComm has rejected, and Hipocrite knows that, and I believe that he does not respect that decision. Or does he? He's welcome to tell me I'm wrong. It's preposterous to have an article on cold fusion, and a section on proposed explanations, i.e., how those working in the field explain the results, and not mention any of the explanations because they are allegedly "frimge," but only source secondary comment that the explanations (what explanations?) are "ad-hoc." And the only reason that Storms would be deprecated as reliable source would be a claim that he's fringe. The publisher is independent, and not a dedicated fringe publisher, it could be much worse than World Scientific and Storms would still be RS. -- Abd ( talk) 03:43, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Storms is neither notable nor reliable. His bald speculation is not verifiable for the purposes of our articles. Hipocrite ( talk) 03:48, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Prior discussion of the FPC paper: Talk:Cold_fusion/Archive_24#Holy_Grail_Found.3F_--_2007_Review_article. -- Abd ( talk) 18:03, 21 May 2009 (UTC). There was certainly no consensus there. Further, discussion of a source without actual text being backed by it is exploratory, preliminary, and of no conclusive value, even if there had been consensus. -- Abd ( talk) 18:12, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

To make the point clear, relative quality of reliable sources only comes into play, for balance, when there is contradiction of sources. What reliable source contradicts the information provided in the text Hipocrite has been edit-warring, with blind reverts, to take out? Is there reliable source claiming that these explanations aren't being proposed? I don't think so! Is there reliable source rejecting the proposals? Then balance the text and cite it! Otherwise, this is all just an attempt to exclude reliably sourced material (by objective standards) from Wikipedia based solely on the claim that it is from a fringe source, and following a clear POV agenda. Which is not allowed. -- Abd ( talk) 18:17, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

By my count, both of us are at 3RR on the section sourced to Storms and He Jing-tang in Front. Physics China, so it's time for other editors to make this decision, ad hoc. And if we can't settle, we can look forward to the pleasant vista of dispute resolution, though there is the possibility of Arbitration Enforcement on this. There really are two disputes: a long-term one with editors like Enric Naval, where ordinary DR is likely to find consensus, and a short-term one with Hipocrite, who arrived here quite recently with no experience in this topic, based on politics elsewhere, and began asserting an extreme anti-fringe position, the kind ArbComm has rejected. -- Abd ( talk) 18:44, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Wow! Do you realize what you just did right above Abd? You painted a perfect picture of yourself. The only difference is that for Hipocrite we talk about 2-3 weeks, while with you we talk about 2-3 months! ROFL!

For the record, the Storms book is an impressive listing of positive 'cold fusion' results, with two glaring ommssions of recent negative comments/results. It is clearly biased, but could be used by Wiki readers advantageously if they were alerted to the bias. I agree the Jing-tang paper is not useful. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 19:05, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh and one other thing, Storms does not assess the quality of the papers he cites. He just cites everything. He carries this problem into his data tables as well. What this does is mark his book as a second-class review. First class reviews always try to bring sense to a field by pointing out the best work and the not-so-good stuff. That argues against inclusion again, but adequate warning could overcome that. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 19:31, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that's the main problem I have with Storms. He uncritically lists everything, from reasonable to crackpot without making distintions. He can't be used to decide what is relevant. I'd agree on a brief mention that makes clear that a) it doesn't represent mainstream b) it represents the viewpoint of the small group that continues holding that the evidence is good against the majority opinion that it has lots of deep flaws. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 22:23, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Enric, you are utterly unqualified to determine what is crackpot and what is not. Further, you confuse popular opinion among scientists -- who get their news from fields in which they don't specialize from the media, just like the rest of us -- with expert opinion. We have no good guide to current scientific opinion among those qualified to judge the matter. For 2004, we have the DOE review, which does not support the kind of extreme view that Hipocrite has been pushing and that you have been supporting. "Small group." How large? Wikipedia doesn't care, we do not assess scientific consensus by taking polls. We rely on reliable sources, with preference given to peer-reviewed reliable source and other academic sources. We know due weight by the weight of publication. You are rejecting sources that are reliable on the face because of allegations of "fringe." And that is circular. It's fringe because there is no reliable source supporting it. And if you reject any source that supports it as fringe, well, there you have it. Now, there is media source that cold fusion is generally rejected. But there is also recent media source that the topic is "hot" again. "A funny thing happened on the way to oblivion," the announcer said in the recent CBS Sixty Minutes documentary. I'm not asserting that cold fusion isn't generally rejected, so our article needs to be clear that cold fusion is not generally accepted. But treating it as proven to be experimental error? That's way beyond the pale. That's not supported by the DOE reviews, especially the 2004 review, where we have more detail.

In order to impeach a reliable source, there must be contradiction with other reliable source. In rejecting Storms as a reliable source, you have not shown one single contradiction in anything sourced from Storms. Rather, you simply reject it out of hand, which totally subverts Wikipedia's method of gauging balance. You are excluding fringe instead of reporting it neutrally and in a balanced way. What's "crackpot"? I can think of two things that you might have in mind: hydrino theory and biological transmutation. How do you know that hydrino theory is crackpot? It certainly does challenge existing theory, but that doesn't make it crackpot, in itself. I think perhaps you should read the sources. Myself, I have no idea if Mills is a genius, an innovator who saw beyond the limitations of existing theories, or an expert con artist. I've been thinking of trying to visit Blacklight Power, they aren't far from me. But would I know the difference? (If they even let me visit, they are very secretive, which is an absolute necessity in what they are doing, since the U.S. Patent Office refuses to grant patents in the field. Think about it.) All I know is that the theory is widely known and considered to be one possible explanation, and it seems Storms may favor it. And, no, he doesn't work for them!

I'd like to interject a remark regarding my first impressions when I first encountered "hydrino" descriptions. I was aware that in Quantum Mechanics electron orbits are "mapped" in terms of whole numbers; the circumference of the lowest orbit is basically equal to one wavelength of the electron; the circumference of the next-lowest orbit is equal to two wavelengths, and so on. Well, if hydrinos are real, the only way it could make sense in terms of QM (to me, anyway) is if the first orbit smaller than the QM-standard-lowest-orbit was such that twice its circumference equalled one electron-wavelength; in other words, the electron orbits twice while doing one "vibration". Obviously the next smaller orbit would have the electron orbiting three times while doing one vibration, and so on. The PROBLEM I have with that is an orbit is itself a type of vibration (cyclic); we would be saying that the electron can do two or more orbit-vibes at the same time it is doing one (ordinary) vibe, and there is something contradictory about that. So, I cannot much support the hydrino hypothesis, until that contradiction is resolved. But I can keep a somewhat-open mind about it, on the off-chance that the contradiction has been resolved in a way about which I am simply currently ignorant. V ( talk) 15:43, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

The other possible "crackpot" idea would be biological transmutation. Why is this crackpot? Well, it just seems impossible! But how do we know it is impossible? Well, because nuclear reactions take energies that couldn't be managed by a biological organism. Er, wait a minute. If a palladium lattice could manage to do a little nuclear stuff, why not a protein? Sure, not necessarily! But if you are a cold fusion researcher, you've seen heat-after-death other effects, time and again, you aren't quite so skeptical about other possibilities. I winced, myself, when Storms speculated about human combustion. But it seems to come with the territory, Simon writes about the phenomenon in Undead Science. Since you and everything you work with has been rejected and considered pseudoscience or worse, you aren't quite so ready to reject other strange ideas. But the biological transformation work has come to the attention of cold fusion researchers through the steady and persistent work of Vyosotskii, who seems to be quite an established scientist, with a long history of publication in many areas (not just weird stuff). And the evidence that Storms shows for biological transformation is actually spectacular (and it's clearer in the original paper, which I've seen). This is work that is crying out for replication. So why hasn't it been replicated? I think that's a really good question; all I know is that I've looked for any sign that anyone has even been trying and found nothing. It should be a cheap and easy experiment.

However, Storms notes it. Sorry, Enric. That's a reliable secondary source (reliable because independently published by a reputable publishing company) reporting on a primary source (Vyosotskii). That makes it notable and usable. How it's used is another question. "Not accepted by mainstream science." Sure. But that doesn't mean that we don't report what is in reliable source, with proper attribution and framing.

And Storms was not the only source cited in what was reverted by Hipocrite today. Takahashi's Be-8 theory was also described by He Jing-Tang. I think it's in other reliable source as well, but I had He Jing-Tang handy. There is no way that this paper isn't reliable source, and He Jing-Tang isn't some fringe lunatic. The paper is weird, to be sure, but it's a secondary source, showing notability, and it was in a peer-reviewed journal. Sure, you can claim that this is a journal of lesser quality, perhaps, but ... that only matters if there is contradiction. What contradiction? Show something from a better source that it contradicts!

You seem to have missed, Enric, that these sources were simply being used to show two theories that have been proposed. Do you disagree that they have been proposed? What do you require, if these sources aren't adequate? -- Abd ( talk) 05:09, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

I already gave my arguments, others added other better arguments, and you don't seem to remember them. Or, rather, you discarded them completely. I think that your suggestion to go to mediation is good. However, before spending a sizable effort in compiling the arguments in one place, I would like you to reply to my question here. I want to have assurance that we don't find ourselves in the same situation after the mediation, with you discarding the result of the mediation. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 20:20, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Mathsci kindly provided me a way to read a review of Storms, The Science of LOw Energy Nuclear Reaction, World Scientific, 2007.

E. Sheldon, An overview of almost 20 years’ research on cold fusion, Contemporary Physics, Vol. 49, No. 5, September–October 2008, 375–378.

Some editors, above, had been claiming that Storms had attracted no attention from the mainstream. The review shows otherwise. From the review:

... this timely ‘compilation of evidence and explanations about cold fusion’ as the first such detailed synopsis of nearly 20 years’ intensive experimental and theoretical research worldwide to provide a comprehensive up-to-date overview. Within its 312 pages the book features, among its 16 tables, a nine-page summary of experiments (up to 2004) as Table 2 on pp. 53–61 that lists some 181 studies reporting anomalous power production on various systems; the text concludes with a 77-page bibliography which cites more than 1060 publications, followed by a fairly detailed seven-page index, to make this a worthwhile, informative acquisition.

[...]

Storms writes in an informal style devoid of polemics or gullible advocacy, although a degree of caution is advisable in regard to uncritical acceptance of some results and hypotheses in his compilation.

[...]

Whatever is to be the outcome of objective professional consideration by protagonists and antagonists of ‘cold fusion’ phenomena there is no doubt that the latest descriptive accounts, including especially Storms’ book and the Web site, offer an inducement to re-examine the extensive experimental and theoretical writings with an open mind. As for myself, I remain sceptical: I cannot accept the notion of the process to be any form of true ‘fusion’ and am even unable yet to accede to its being dubbed a ‘nuclear reaction’ – I’d be much more at ease to designate this as an ‘unclear reaction’.

Yes, Sheldon writes what was stated about hydrino theory, and this merely establishes more notability for it. The reference was not to Storm's citation of the theory, but was Sheldon's own recounting of his history with cold fusion, and was in reference to Mills' 1991 paper, with only a passing reference to the 2007 theoretical tome written by Mills, with no detail at all on the latter.

So, once again, thanks, Mathsci, this source establishes, clearly, notability for Storms, which was already reliable source, usable with appropriate caution. (As Sheldon notes in what I quoted above.)

As to Sheldon's expressed skeptical position, it's quite understandable, but many physicists started to revise their opinions this year, as the Mosier-Boss neutron results came to be widely known. I'll see if I can contact Sheldon, I live in Massachusetts. -- Abd ( talk) 15:19, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

By the way, the "web site" mentioned is lenr-canr.org, currently blacklisted at meta. Real physicists who have taken the trouble of becoming a bit more knowledgeable than the norm, on this topic, seem to have a different opinion of that web site than non-physicist editors and pseudoskeptics, ready to shout "crackpot!" and "kook!" at the appearance of something they don't understand. -- Abd ( talk) 15:23, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

The review is actually an essay by a retired physicist, trying to be impartial and keep an open mind, but neverthless concluding that the explanations for lenr involving physics are unconvincing. Instead of "nuclear physics", Sheldon suggests "unclear physics". The article dismisses hydrino theory completely, as stated before. It's interesting that Abd is planning to contact Eric Sheldon to see whether he has changed his mind. I had no idea that was how wikipedia articles on science are written. Mathsci ( talk) 22:45, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Mathsci, you haven't a clue about this field and what's been happening over the last couple of years. I'm not personally interested in hydrino theory, and Sheldon's mention of it in the review -- which had nothing to do with Storms -- didn't add anything that we didn't already know from other sources. Sheldon's objections to LENR probably have a basis which has recently been undermined, and I'm interested in contacting him for personal reasons, though I would indeed, like to hear his reaction to certain recent work, particularly the Mosier-Boss neutron findings. Interesting about how Wikipedia articles are written. Maybe this is part of the problem. Used to be, writers and editors at encyclopedias would talk to experts in the field. Now, apparently we don't. I know what happens when newspaper writers don't discuss a topic adequately with those who know it: garbage. Certain facts may be right, but it gets put together in a way that shows a lack of understanding, and which simply confuses the reader, if the reader doesn't know enough to take it apart and put it together. Come to think of it, I have noticed this in some articles. Such as this one. I've still been unable to get Cold_fusion#Reports_of_nuclear_products_in_association_with_excess_heat to show "association." The picked example doesn't show association of any strength. (That is a blatant error in the DoE report, the result of a misunderstanding of the McKubre report they considered. I'll examine this in its own section, since I just figured out what happened, where the error came from.)

"Unclear physics" is a reference to what we've been saying: there is no clear, coherent theory that explains all the experimental work.

In any case, the Sheldon review shows nothing but respect for Storms and his book, and validates this as a reliable secondary source, something that other editors here were objecting to. In other words, Mathsci, your generosity in providing that source sped up the process of acceptance of Storms here. -- Abd ( talk) 00:49, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

The book of Storms is not a secondary source. It contains highly speculative material on possible theoretical physics explanations of experimental observations that are not properly understood. Sheldon dismisses some of these physical explanations, including hydrino theory. I understand that your stance is to rebrand lenr as an "emerging science". At present, much of it is misunderstood and speculative science that is not ripe for inclusion in an encyclopedia. At some stage Krivit's OUP book should be reviewed in the mainstream literature by heavyweight academics. It might be worth waiting until then to add further content, while secondary sources are so thin on the ground. BTW Sheldon used "unclear physics" to describe the current state of the subject: I don't believe he was referring to me. Please look for further secondary sources. Mathsci ( talk) 09:17, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

This is the relevant policy: Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tertiary_sources. Secondary sources may contain "highly speculative material." To quote the policy:

Secondary sources are at least one step removed from an event. They rely for their facts and opinions on primary sources, often to make analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative claims.

Storms, The science of low energy nuclear reaction, World Scientific, 2007, is almost entirely secondary source. An exception could be Storms' autobiographical details, one chapter, which aren't relevant here at this point. There is no requirement that reliable secondary sources be reviewed to be usable, this has been made up by Mathsci in pursuit of an obvious agenda. We are not competent to judge, here, who is "heavyweight" and who is not, and to require this would make the editing of articles so cumbersome and contentious as to be impossible. We should, quite simply, follow WP:RS.

As to "emerging science," it is clear that from the beginning, there never was a scientific closure, but only a very successful political campaign to make it appear closed. Scientific RS in the fields of physics and chemistry never showed the topic as closed, nor did the DoE reviews in 1989 and 2004; but they have been widely framed as having done so. It's impossible to read the individual reviews in 2004, and the summary report, and still hold a rational opinion that this is a closed topic by scientific consensus (as distinct from individual opinion), as would be the case with pseudoscience, and the level of respect shown in the 2004 report is such that, yes, it is probably more reasonable to consider this emerging science. However, we face the fact that there is still wide opinion among "scientists" -- not necessarily those informed about the current research -- that cold fusion was debunked twenty years ago, hence it is still necessary to report research in this field maintaining that context.

Mathsci seems to look for reasons to disagree. Yes, Sheldon used "unclear physics" to "describe the current state of the subject." That's what I said, writing, "There is no clear, coherent theory that explains all the experimental work." "Unclear" doesn't mean "rejected." It means, "Not understood." That's characteristic of emerging science, and the solution, as recommended by the DOE both in 1989 and in 2004, is more research. Because there is no clear evidence that cold fusion will ever be a practical power source, even if what is happening is actually fusion, there has been no recommendation of a massive program, only work to clarify the science; but that recommendation makes no sense with fringe science or pseudoscience. -- Abd ( talk) 14:04, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that Mathsci wanted to mean something like "is not a reliable secondary source (so it shouldn't be used as a secondary source in the article)". -- Enric Naval ( talk) 15:35, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

You can gloss it that way, but that's not what he said. How do we determine what is "reliable secondary source," such that we can use it in articles? I'd say we follow WP:RS! We use the existence of independent publication from a standard publisher (as distinct from a publisher who can be alleged to be fringe, such as Beaudette's publisher). Storms meets that. If sources are to be rejected on simple allegations of "fringe content," we have a circular definition, because it's fringe if there is a paucity of reliable source, but we have excluded the reliable source because it's allegedly fringe. Further, there is a middle ground between "not usable" and "fully reliable." That is, use with attribution, and that is what would be suggested in this situation. Attribution should be an easy solution to much of this, but some editors seem hell-bent on total exclusion, which clearly violates WP:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science. The fact is that material even from fringe publishers can be used with attribution, if there is some evidence of notability. -- Abd ( talk) 16:19, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd's contributions here seem to be extremely skewed. Any source that is actively promoting a universally rejected pseudophysics theory, like hydrino theory, is primary and questionable. 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. Mathsci ( talk) 21:34, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Eye-opening is definitely something you need, Mathsci. Hydrino theory is not "universally rejected," and if you can't write sound text on ordinary subjects, where the facts are easily and plainly verifiable, how in the world would you be expected to write on complex subjects? WTF are you doing here? I haven't noticed any article writing.

Storms does not "promote" hydrino theory. However, have you noticed that the section that was kept by Hipocrite was the one on hydrino theory? Have you wondered why? Could it have to do with the fact that there is plenty of reliable source on it? It strikes me that you are searching for criticisms to make. It's transparent.

Enough. -- Abd ( talk) 04:00, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Would you please provide a source for the document that purports to be the individual reviewers' DOE 2004 comments? It is inconsistent with the official report, and the only source it of which I am aware is the personal website of banned user JedRothwell. -- Noren ( talk) 01:25, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

You are right that it is inconsistent with the official report, but that's actually not the core of this. The official report is inconsistent with the document that was reviewed, and that document was published by the DoE together with the report, so we don't actually need to see the intermediate documents. The individual reviewer documents were, however, made available to McKubre et al, and that's how we came to have copies available. At least that's what I recall reading. There is a comment that they were published on a DoE site that doesn't have them any more, you can find it in the lenr-canr.org document linked below. Basically, we have Summary <> Reviewer <> McKubre paper. You can take the middle out of that, it's still the same inequality.

That isn't a mere "personal website," it's actually a reputable document repository, its entire reputation, which is considerable in the field, is based on its reliability. We don't use it as reliable source, itself, because it has an associated POV, but there is no evidence at all for document forgery. But I think there is a corroborating source. First of all, the lenr-canr overall page: http://www.lenr-canr.org/Collections/DoeReview.htm and then there is, cited from there, http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEtheusgover.pdf published in 21st Century Sci. & Technol., 2005, by Storms. Which refers to lenr-canr.org for copies of the individual reviews, thus validating that those copies are there, in a published source. You are welcome to challenge the reliability of that source, but do consider this: if lenr-canr.org was hosting altered copies or forgeries, don't you think it would have been noticed by now?

The documents are also available at http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/government/DOE/DOE.shtml . That's not the "personal website of a banned user."

Speaking of banned user, do you really want to get into that here? I'd be happy, but this isn't the place. That has nothing to do with this information and its reliability -- Abd ( talk) 04:00, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

The pdf with the individual reviewers was put in the DOE website at the same time as the final report. Someone should ask Jed about the original URL of the document so that we can retrieve it from archive.org -- Enric Naval ( talk) 20:41, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

How about you ask him, Enric? Look, I've taken a lot of flak, and do I remember correctly that some of it was from you, over communicating with Rothwell and Krivit? So I'm tempted to let you be the one to convince him that he should respond to your request. I think you have a long history of insulting him and working to exclude his simple comments from this Talk page. You could try apologizing. It might work.

I'll ask him if we need it. We don't. You can read them if you want, or not if you don't want. I believe that they are accurate, there is no evidence ever of lenr-canr.org altering a document in any fraudulent way. You know this, we've discussed this at great length. I will say this: I looked at the last archive.com scrape of the DOE site before the whole thing disappeared. The panel report was there and the Hagelstein paper and some other documents were there (the charge letter, in particular, maybe something else). The individual reviewer comments were not linked there. -- Abd ( talk) 23:17, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

I did ask him, before he was blocked, and received a sarcastic and non-informative response. As to the DoE site, I did look around the DoE site while it was still up... several times, in fact. It did not contain that document that purports to be individual reviewer comments any of the times that I checked it. What is the basis for your claim that it was there, Enric? -- Noren ( talk) 03:15, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the reference to Rothwell's response. Yeah, classic Rothwell. I'd have pushed him to answer the question. His sarcasm was a tad justified, given several factors: lenr-canr.org is pretty badly described as "Jed Rothwell's personal web site," though he does manage it. It seems it was pretty much Storms who put it together. And you were effectively accusing him of fabricating documents. I might have taken it rather badly too.

I've seen the same thing that Enric has seen, I might even have written about it above somewhere. One of the reasons I write so much is that I can't remember anything if I don't write it down.... One of the sites, lenr-canr.org or newenergytimes.com, both of which host copies of this material, appears to claim that the documents came from the DoE web site. By the way, that answers your question about personal web site. NET isn't Jed's personal web site, and both Krivit and Rothwell have strong connections with the players and would have been able to get their own copies from them (Somewhere it says that the DoE provided copies of the reviewer comments to the researchers who presented, which would seem to be ordinary courtesy.) My conclusion is that the comment about the web site was referring to all the other documents: the charge letter, the review itself, the list of papers, and the review document, i.e., the Hagelstein paper, but not the individual reviewer comments. It is possile that there was some non-linked URL for a time. In any case, this is the kind of thing that I think Krivit in particular can be trusted for, accuracy of reportage, uncovering scandals and misrepresentations in the field, con artists, etc., is his forte and penchant. The idea that there isn't criticism within the field is preposterous if you've looked. And I've seen nothing that would remotely resemble fabrication of documents from either lenr-canr.org or newenergytimes.com. They have editorial viewpoints, to be sure, but they also have journalistic integrity. Noren, Rothwell was telling you that he didn't make up the documents, and that it was preposterous to imagine that he might have, or, in fact, that anyone might have. They'd have been exposed, there is a substantial group of people who had access to those documents, plus the reviewers themselves, eighteen of them. -- Abd ( talk) 04:49, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Based on Abd's description and the above excerpt from a book review, my opinion is that the Storms (2007) book is a solidly academic reference and a secondary source and can be used to describe the pro-cold-fusion POV and to establish notability of subtopics; it seems to me that this article (or subarticles, if split) could likely benefit from extensive citing from this book, which from the descriptions may be the most comprehensive academic book on this topic. (Reliable sources and academic sources can have POVs.) In general, however, given the current status of the field within the scientific community in general, pro-cold-fusion information can't be presented as fact. I'm under the impression that Storms considers himself a skeptic, given the title of his talk "An Informed Skeptics View of Cold Fusion" at a seminar yesterday ( [2]). ☺ Coppertwig ( talk) 17:41, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what Storms meant, I think you may have seen the talk, Coppertwig. There are skeptics and there are skeptics. The most important kind of skepticism is an approach, not a conclusion. But we also use the word "skeptic" to mean someone who has firmly concluded that some idea is bogus. This is not scientific skepticism, it is almost the opposite. Storms, if he's a skeptic, is the first kind. If he's the second kind, he'd be skeptical, in that sense, of the rejections of cold fusion. Clearly, he operates on the assumption that it's real, probably, like most researchers in the field, he saw one (or more) of those "miracles" which were so hard to come by initially. If you'd been Mizuno, pouring water in a cooling bucket every few hours to keep a shut-down cold fusion cell cool because of what later has been called "heat-after-death," you might also be convinced. It's a simple human reaction. This is why it is so important, for the advancement of science, to trust experimental reports and even anecdotes. That does not mean not being skeptical as to conclusions. It simply means, "Hmmm... maybe there is something to look into here." And if one has the time and resources, maybe this skeptic does investigate. Most won't, and that's okay. One must set priorities, and the theoretical concerns about cold fusion were very strong. There may come a point, however, where attachment to theory takes the place of the skepticism that should remain about all theories, and, if this happens, the theory has become a fixed belief and the individual is no longer functioning, in this area at least, as a scientist. -- Abd ( talk) 16:52, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

It seems that Hipocrite wants me to select a specific edit to discuss, and to make a suggestion. OK, here goes: The 1st paragraph as written is misleading, per my suggestions above. I propose the following, appropriately tagged, etc.:

Cold fusion is a term originally used to describe muon catalyzed fusion. It refers to the fact that muon catalyzed fusion occurs at room temperature, instead of the millions of degrees normally required for ‘hot’ nuclear fusion. In 1989, two electrochemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, presented evidence during a press conference that purported to show another method for obtaining room temperature (‘cold’) fusion reactions. Even though Prof. Steven Jones also claimed to have found evidence for such an effect, in the popular literature the term ‘cold fusion’ has come to be nearly exclusively associated to the Fleischmann and Pons claims. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 13:38, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Paragraphs 2 and 3:

Today, the field is viewed as a ‘pariah’ field by mainstream science. But a persistent band of scientists refuses to accept this verdict and continues to attempt to advance the state of knowledge about the field. A variety of effects have been observed and are claimed to support the contention that room temperature nuclear reactions have occurred in their apparati. Because of the pariah status of ‘cold fusion’, advocates have taken to calling this field “Low Energy Nuclear Reactions” (LENR) or “Condensed Matter Nuclear Science” (CMNS) in an attempt to avoid the negative connotations of “Cold Fusion”. A recent book by E. Storms summarizes these claims with great detail. However, current objections to these claims are not as well treated.

Originally the FP claims focused on D + D fusion, which is known to occur at high temperatures. However, early mistakes coupled with lack of reproducibility and the fact that ‘CF’ has now been observed at roughly similar levels in light water FP-type cells has led to a general admission that the physics at work is completely unknown, and probably inconsistent with high temperature nuclear fusion.

Enough for now. You get the drift. Additional facts currently included in the Intro section can be added in later paragraphs if necessary. Let's discuss. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 13:56, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Starting with the 1st para first, are you sure that it was initially used to describe muon cat fusion? Also, I'm not sure if that should be the first para - perhaps the 2nd, moving the intro to something like:

Cold fusion refers to a postulated nuclear fusion process, widely considered to be pathological science, offered to explain a group of disputed experimental results first reported by electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. Supporters of Cold Fusion also refer to it as sometimes as low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) studies or condensed matter nuclear science

Cold fusion is a term originally used to describe muon catalyzed fusion. It referred to the fact that muon catalyzed fusion occurs at room temperature, instead of the millions of degrees normally required for ‘hot’ nuclear fusion. In 1989, Fleischmann and Pons, presented evidence during a press conference that purported to show another method for obtaining room temperature (‘cold’) fusion reactions. Even though Prof. Steven Jones also claimed to have found evidence for such an effect, in the popular literature the term ‘cold fusion’ has come to be nearly exclusively associated to the Fleischmann and Pons claims."

Interjection: There is a grammatical inconsistency between "originally used" and "refers". Since the past tense is correct, "referred" is a better word there. I'd also like to point out that the part about Prof Jones is a bit unclear. What experiment did he do that was different from the P/F work? Did it involve deuterium-saturated metal? If so, then technically there is little significant difference; today "cold fusion" is basically the description of a proposed explanation for the apparent appearance of heat in experiments that involve deuterium-saturated metal. Believers, of course, think that the heat is real and the proposal is the correct explanation. V ( talk) 16:03, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

I have changed the referred per your advice. I cannot speak to Jones vs. PF. Hipocrite ( talk) 16:24, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

No, change 'It' to "Cold" in quotes and it retains the point that it is still so today. Please don't edit until consensus is achieved, even if it is just in the Talk pages..

It amuses me that estwhile editors of the article don't know the history of the affair. Jones and F&P were involved in semi-parallel research efforts. They both submitted proposals to a DOE office, and the DOE person in charge noted the similarities. He then advised each of the other's work. The rest is history as they say. Read the Kowalski ref below for a good angle on it. Many books from the early days detail this also. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 16:29, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Kirk, you have said something that does not make adequate sense across multiple posts. If Jones' work is so similar to the P/F work, then there is no reason to say that the DEFINITION of "cold fusion" is associated with the P/F claims; the fact is, the definition is associated with CLAIMS, regardless of who made them. V ( talk) 18:11, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

The definition of cold fusion that should be used is the one that causes the least con-fusion. As can be seen from the lack of information regarding the Jones version of CF in the article, the term has come to mean the F&P type cells, AND the stuff they are now lumping in with it, i.e. the Pd-CaO-Pd samdwiches, etc. (these are all the things mentioned in Storms' book). At the beginning, the similarity was that two separate research groups were claiming a new way to fuse D at room temp. Jones' claim was based on weak neutron signals, signals that were several of order of magnitude weaker than what would be expected based on F&P's claims. Jones' work was primarily derived from studies on Earth core simulants as I recall. In the end quite different set-ups. Also, Jones recognized his claims were not compelling, while never giving up belief in them, so he didn't fanatically push his ideas like F&P and the associated crowd. Jones never developed groupies like Rothwell either. In the end (i.e. today) his claims have been all but forgotten while F&Ps are still being pushed. 'Cold fusion' today means F&P-type cold fusion, and any other definition will confuse the Wiki reader. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 18:55, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree about avoiding confusion. That means any reference to either Jones or P&F can wait for later in the article, because the definition is not about people or events. So, try this on for size, as a first paragraph:

"Cold fusion" is a term originally used to describe muon-catalyzed fusion. It referred to the fact that MCF can occur at room temperature (and even much colder, such as in liquid hydrogen), instead of the millions of degrees normally required for "hot" nuclear fusion. But few knew of that definition in 1989, when the news media reported widely on a completely different discovery, so the phrase acquired a new definition. "Cold fusion" now typically refers to the idea that deuterium nuclei can fuse while inside solid metal. However, that idea has yet to be indisputably proved true; it is controversial, and even if true no one yet knows the details of just exactly how cold fusion could happen. This article will describe the 1989 discovery (among others), the controversy, and related information. V ( talk) 07:38, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

(Interjecting to respond to the above suggestion)As I have pointed out, protium is also claimed to produce the effect. Restricting the definition to deuterium is incorrect. Further, the 'evidence' for D-D fusion is not compelling. The suggested version is technically incorrect. We may need to clarify in the original version that we are talking about all F&P type experiments. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 12:40, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion; I think there are some good ideas there. However, "has yet to be indisputably proved true" seems to me to give too much weight to the pro-cold-fusion POV. "inside solid metal" ignores the theory, widely accepted within the field I think, that the effect occurs on or very near the surface of the electrode. Also, I think Pons and Fleishmann should be mentioned in the lead, being very notable with respect to this topic. How about ""Cold fusion now typically refers to the controversial hypothesis that fusion of deuterium nuclei is responsible for the excess heat reported in the Fleischmann-Pons effect". (Except that we can't wikilink "Fleischmann-Pons effect since I don't think we have a separate article for that, leading to a circular definition.) ☺ Coppertwig ( talk) 19:05, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

"[Fleischmann] told Pelley he has two regrets: calling the nuclear effect "fusion," a name coined by a competitor," [3]. I suppose that he refers to Steven Jones. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 15:27, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

A couple nights ago I replied to Coppertwig, but the message seems to have vanished completely (it's not even in the History). I suspect a systemic restore-from-backup due to some badly garbled Wikipedia pages I saw the next day. So now I need to try to reconstruct my vanished message, and reply to 2 other messages as well.

Coppertwig, can you clarify how the phrase "has yet to be indisputably proved true" is pro-CF POV, when in my mind the phrase "has yet to be indisputably proved false" would most certainly be pro-CF POV. I can try to explain a thought I had as I wrote that: Simply to say, "yet to be proved true" is inadequate because in the minds of CF believers, it IS proved true. Perhaps the best solution is just to drop that phrase and change the encompassing sentence to: However, that idea is controversial, and even if true no one yet knows the details of just exactly how cold fusion could happen.

Next, regarding the near-surface of the metal, your statement does not seem supported by those pictures of melted (erupted!) palladium that Robert Duncan showed in that "importance of doing Scientific Method" video. The data I've seen seems to me to indicate that near-surface events may be associated with stuff like CR-39 tracks, but heat production at greater depths in the metal is not. The implication is that the CF effect can occur throughout the metal (with different results in different places). If you think the phrase "inside solid metal" implies depth, then how about, "inside a piece of metal"?

Kirk, please note the proposed paragraph I wrote specifies "typically". It is certainly true that claims of heat production, when ordinary water is used, are rather rarer than claims of heat production when heavy water is used. I have no objection to mentioning all sorts of details in the main article, but the lead paragraph does not need many details. Next, whether or not something is "not compelling" depends on who you ask; remember the individual remarks behind-the-scenes of the 2004 DOE report. Saying that the idea is controversial should be adequate in the lead paragraph. And I disagree that electrolysis experiments should be stressed in the lead paragraph; there are enough reports of excess heat generation, when deuterium gas is brute-force pressurized into metal (not just palladium), to warrant more generic phrasing in the lead paragraph (which is what I did).

Enric, despite what Fleischmann said, when you play with deuterium looking for nuclear events, a very likely candidate event is fusion (deuterium simply doesn't have a lot of options!). I can agree that talking about fusion without more evidence (or even more-repeatable evidence) certainly led to a lot of still-persisting trouble with the Physics community. But I doubt he could have said "nuclear effect" without anyone jumping to "fusion". V ( talk) 16:02, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Today, the field is viewed as a ‘pariah’ field by mainstream science. But a persistent band of scientists refuses to accept this verdict and continues to attempt to advance the state of knowledge about the field. A variety of effects have been observed and are claimed to support the contention that room temperature nuclear reactions have occurred in their apparati.

Originally Cold Fusion claims focused on D + D fusion, which is known to occur at high temperatures. However, early mistakes coupled with lack of reproducibility and the fact that Cpld Fusion has now been observed at roughly similar levels in light water cells has led to a general admission that the physics at work is completely unknown, and inconsistent with modern physics.

Thoughts? Hipocrite ( talk) 14:06, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=6345322 ref to paper by Jones and Rafelski entitled "Cold nuclear fusion". It discusses muon cat. fusion. I have no objections to your other changes. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 14:49, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Also see http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=5628318 ref to a paper by E. P. Palmer on muon-catalyzed cold fusion, 1986. refers to S. Jones work. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 15:25, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

In the 9/17/08 version of the article, a ref is cited for the coining of 'cold fusion'. It is unpublished ( http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/131history.html) but it seems to suggest that the 1986 ref I give above is probably the earliest RS for it. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 15:36, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Much of this looks good, though I haven't compared, but there is one problem. And here is why I want to work on a rewrite. The present article is based on a background assumption of general rejection, reflected by "pariah field." It's clear -- we have plenty of source -- that it was so, though it's not quite clear that this indicated scientific consensus, but rather a dominant majority opinion that was able to enforce itself. As I've shown elsewhere, the publication ratio was 2:1 against cold fusion in 1989, about 1:1 in 1990, and positive papers exceeded negative papers every year after that. Total positive papers exceed total negative papers. Recent work is almost completely positive. "Pariah" reflects a very active and strong prejudice that represses work in the field, and we have source on this: how, for example, a graduate student who worked with Brokris was harassed and intimidated. But what is the situation now? There is quite a bit of recent source which shows a shift. "Cold fusion hot again" is the title of the CBS documentary. And now I'm reading the American Chemical Society LENR Sourcebook. Storms was somewhat of a turning point, as a major scientific publisher committed to a major review of the field, in 2007. The ACS Sourcebook, 2008, is even more. Many of the papers published in it are reviews of the field, detailed. Nothing like this existed before. The ACS is mainstream. For them to host an occasional one-day seminar, as they did previously, is one thing, but the publication of the Sourcebook last year, working with Oxford University Press, and the four-day seminar this year, with a press release calling great attention to it, this is new.

I'm certainly not proposing that cold fusion be presented as having been accepted by the mainstream, but we have to start discriminating more closely. Mainstream what? Mainstream physics? Mainstream chemistry? Mainstream media? -- Abd ( talk) 04:27, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Abd, do you have any idea what "being decalared a pariah field" means in relation to RS? It means there won't be any past the declaration point. Why? Because it's a pariah field, and people who work in a pariah field are pariahs. No normal scientist wants to be labelled a 'pariah'. It means loss of funding and therefore often loss of job. So, no normal scientist continues to work in the field! No workers in the field means no papers! I.e. no RS!! However, in 20 years the CFers could have produced something to change that designation, if they participated in the normal scientific process. They didn't (as Goodstein noted). They circled their wagons and formed their clubs and carried on, all while ignoring standard scientific practice. So, normal scientists just had to look at that and say "Well, they're still at it." to justify not revisiting the issue. But, this also means the mainstream basically forgot about CF. The most normal response I get about this is: "Wasn't that resolved (badly) a long time ago?" So, the 'strategy' of renaming the field 'LENR' is paying off, because reviewers don't recognize they are dealing with cold fusion.

So, do you get the point? There literally is no RS past c. 1994-5, with a couple of specific exceptions. No mainstream workers meant no mainstream RS. The loss of critical review from CFers means no RS from their circles. And I will make the case that when a CFer publishes in a mainsteam journal, there is still an RS issue around the fact that the reviewers are likely uninformed on the field and thus not capable of critically reviewing the work. The only possible way I can see to get RS past 1994-5 is to present negative results that are fully conventional. Then, the reviewers are likely able to understand and follow the work described. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 12:33, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I get much more than you realize, Kirk. You have clearly defined the problem with "pariah." It's a POV, a very strong one. We can report that POV when it's in reliable source, but that does not mean that we report it as fact, and especially that we report as still being true. Note that some researchers have participated in the normal peer-reviewed publication process; these tended to be better-funded and supported. Shanahan tries to lump them all together, that's part of his approach. Yes, Shanahan, the response you get is quite normal. What's of interest, though, is what happens next, when these people become aware of the continuing work. That's why we rely upon peer-reviewed reliable sources, not non-reviewed secondary sources making conclusions about "pariah" or "fraud" or "pathological science" or "dead" or any of the rest. This is a science article, and, where it is reporting on the science, we place less reliance on non-peer-reviewed sources, which is where the "pseudoscience" label is found. Because these other sources are still reliable source, we don't exclude the opinions, but we place them in context and we don't attach to them.

What you are doing is making hosts of personal assumptions, such as a claim that, effectively, the review panel for Die Naturwissenschaften, which is put together by the Max Planck Society, somehow doesn't have experts available to review the papers. Read the article on the Society! Your approach would leave us with nothing but unsupported editor opinion by which to determine RS, with research required to research the research. And no consensus would ever be found, so edit warring and other pathologies would continue. We can and should present "negative results" that are present in peer-reviewed journals, with appropriate weight, and how do we determine that weight? By the weight of publication in peer reviewed journals! (And by consensus.) And the fact that there is very little "negative" publication beyond 1994 (beyond 1990, when negative and positive papers were equal in number, positive papers, every year, outnumbered negative ones, entirely setting aside conference papers. The numbers declined until the middle of the first decade of this century or so, they have been increasing since then, a little, with some very high-quality work being published.

When there is contradiction of sources (which is actually rare with peer-reviewed sources, they are pretty careful, normally, so you may disagree with their conclusions, but when they say that they measured such and such, and, according to their instruments and how they interpreted them, they found this or that, it is normally trusted that it's true. And then we can look at possible mistakes. I.e., some artifact may have caused the results. The later report doesn't actually contradict the earlier report, except as to conclusions, perhaps. The experimental reports themselves are not generally impeached, and when they are, in a serious way, that's it for the career of that scientist. It's like editors here misrepresenting sources, that is a quick way to get banned. It's very serious, because it can cause a great deal of harm. -- Abd ( talk) 16:22, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

P.S. I have commented before that calling the ACS session a 'four-day' session is incorrect. At best it was a two and one-half-day event that was really a stetched 1-1 1/2 day event. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 12:45, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

If I'm correct, the press release and the press reports called it a four-day session. You might be right, Kirk, but it's beside the point. Previous sessions were one day or maybe even part of a day, I'm not sure. This was more than a token, and put it together with the publication by the ACS of the Sourcebook, there is now evidence for a shift, in spite of how hard you are pushing for it to be a myth, based on your own POV and personal arguments not rooted in reliable source. I defend your right to do that here, so far, but I also recommend that you understand our guidelines and accept them, it will be more efficient. You do come up with good points, and that's why I want your participation. -- Abd ( talk) 15:39, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Response to Hipocrite's suggestion of 14:06, 29 May 2009: I don't think "lack of reproducibility" is NPOV. Many labs have reported reproducing the excess heat results and some other results (helium, neutrons) have also been reported as reproduced at more than one lab. Maybe you mean that reliable methods of predicting or controlling the effects have not been developed; this would need to be made more clear, and also may not be NPOV, as I think a couple of labs have said something about having developed recipes with 100% reproducibility (or something like that), e.g. SPAWAR's codeposition method.
It may be OK to say that there's a general acknowledgement that the physics at work is unknown but I don't think it's NPOV to say that it's inconsistent with modern physics. A lack of explanation is not the same thing as a contradiction of laws of physics, per Goodstein: "It proved that there are still genuine surprises waiting for us that, once understood, don't violate conventional physical laws." [4]. Also I wouldn't say "completely" unknown, since the idea of combining D + D and getting energy out is in itself understood.
What's this about it being observed at similar levels with light water? Could you provide a source, please? The graphs I saw had controls using light water producing no excess heat. At Friday's seminar someone mentioned Tritium, I think, produced in a cell with light water, but in much smaller amounts than in the cell with heavy water, and they explained this by pointing out that there's some deuterium in ordinary light water. ☺ Coppertwig ( talk) 23:39, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Go to the Dieter Britz Cold Nuclear Fusion Bibliography ( http://www.chem.au.dk/~db/fusion/biblio.html). Select the journal articles with abstrat link, then search for 'nickel' in that. You will end up with at least 5 or 6 sources, and note Dieter only lists peer-reviewed publications. All RS. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 11:45, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Shanahan is correct about this, generally. "Cold fusion" isn't a scientific term, it's not what the researchers usually use, except colloquially, and it's not what the 2004 panel called it. There are results with ordinary water and metals other than palladium. However, as to heavy water vs light water, with palladium, it's well-known that F and P did do light water work and found, to their surprise, a little excess heat, and they held off on publishing this, it was apparently a mystery to them. However, ordinary water does contain some deuterium, and that might possibly explain the results, though that leads to other mysteries with other experimental results, such as the poisoning effect found with a little ordinary water added to the heavy water in a cell that otherwise would generate excess heat. But it's also possible that hydrogen does fuse in condensed matter, and, basically, we can't rule it out; i.e., once one has established that it rains pigs and fishes, it wouldn't be surprising if it also rained squirrels or even polar bears. Light water controls are still used, as with the Mosier-Boss work, because, even if some fusion takes place with light water, the levels are way below that found, with heavy water, in a palladium-based experiment, so it's still a form of control. Simply not an absolute baseline.

Shanahan is also right about Dieter Britz. We used to link to that archive, and there is no reason not to do so now. I believe that it was taken out on the theory that anything to do with cold fusion was fringe, necessarily, and therefore biased, and therefore contrary to some interpretations of WP:EL policy. Though, in fact, it satisfies EL policy, quite handily. It's really almost the same as the lenr-canr.org bibliography, they cooperate and share new sightings. Both of them aim to be complete, but only lenr-canr.org also hosts actual papers when he can get permissions. Britz, on the other hand, also puts up his brief summaries of the content, which I've always found useful. He's an electrochemist, he knows what he's doing.

Notice that in describing Dieter's archive, Shanahan considers everything there RS, but the same papers, here, he denies it. What this implies is actually sad. Rothwell's chart of peer-reviewed publications is an analysis of Dieter's classifications. Rothwell then criticizes the classifications a bit, and that's more debatable, though he makes a good case. I'll put that link here if anyone requests it. -- Abd ( talk) 16:40, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Ah, a fish to the bait…Abd caught my little innuendo, although I don’t think he knew what it was. So let me be clear. We are spending inordinate amounts of time debating pointless topics here. Is so-and-so RS, is such-and-such? Why don’t we work on producing an article that the average Wikipedia reader would like to read. One that points out, simply, what cold fusion is, gives a little history, makes clear there is a controversy around it, and presents _both_ sides of the controversy fairly. I can make a good case, using Wiki policy and the sources that have been accepted by both sides, that most CF claiming papers are not RS, even if they have been published under a peer-review system. This is because the peer-review system is a) lenient, and b) flawed. But would that led to a good article? Hardly. Likewise, Abd’s voluminous writings do not significantly contribute to the article yet he won’t stop. I have taken to the tactic of Hipocrite, where I condense things that don’t contribute. Neither do I care if Abd doesn’t like my condensing comments. The vast bulk of what he (and V) have written do not contribute. Let’s focus on the article folks. Storms is good for it because he gives us a framework for the CF case to work with. I haven’t even read Krivit’s book, and I don’t think I will, it will only present more of the same. If there was any earth-shaking information in it, we would have heard the CFers trumpet it loudly. So, I say no on it for the article. It adds nothing of import.

Let’s also remember the CFers have a vested interest in promoting their POV, and they have routinely ignored what they don’t like. Light water cold fusion, cold fusion with platinum (which does not hydride, meaning it MUST be a surface reaction), the ‘best’ lab of the bunch having samples of air where they thought they had hydrogen with helium, etc. Let Abd and V (and PCarbonn) make their case, but let the oppositionmake its case too. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 17:41, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Kirk shanahan ( talk) 13:20, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Protected, again. Ah well. Complain here William M. Connolley ( talk) 20:48, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

No complaint. Possibly not necessary, since both editors engaged in reversion said, before the protection, that they were stopping. But it's gone in a week, nothing in the long view. Naturally, Bill, you protected the The_Wrong_Version. (Seriously, the version you protected was one where my last edit was reverted, but that meant that half of the important stuff I'd put in was left, so this was progress over the pre-revert-war version. What had been done with that, by the other editor was to balance it, after having taken it all out twice, which is what I'd been suggesting our policies would require instead of blindly reverting out material sourced to publications meeting WP:RS. I took a certain risk, a risk that I almost never take. As far as I recall, the last time I hit 3RR was in 2007.) -- Abd ( talk) ( talk) 21:36, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Gone in a week? It seems to be June 4th, and it is still protected. Titanium Dragon ( talk) 02:23, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

It was gone in a week, then an editor repeated his edit warring and it was protected again. See the protection log. See also discussion below, [ [6]]. I complained about this to no effect, so far. If I really cared, I'd be compiling diffs for reports, etc. But I'd rather work on background and developing consensus here, and I can do that with protection in place, and I didn't see anyone else trying to get the article unprotected. Care about it? Do something about it, or help those who are trying to do something about it! -- Abd ( talk) 03:28, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I've fully protected this page again, this time for two weeks. I hope you guys can use the time to either sort out this dispute, and failing that, find it in yourselves to stop using reverting as an editing technique. After this protection is lifted, it will not be protected again, and disruptive editors will be blocked. Use dispute resolution. Thanks, -- causa sui ^talk 03:53, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Ryan. Please. -- Abd ( talk) 04:00, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Two reverts is an edit war? This isn't on article probation as far as I can see. Now I remember why I stopped editing here. GetLinkPrimitiveParams ( talk) 04:43, 1 June 2009 (UTC) (sock of User:Nrcprm2026 -- Enric Naval ( talk) 16:23, 25 June 2009 (UTC))

No, it's not. But maybe it should be. -- causa sui ^talk 05:07, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually, Ryan, there was edit warring here about a week ago. This time it hit 3RRfor Hipocrite. What's been going on is that Hipocrite has been using bald reverts as an "editing technique." He's been doing it for some time, to the point that I said I wasn't going to edit the article substantially until the situation cleared, because I'd spend several hours researching and writing and formatting references and it would simply disappear in a minute. And I mostly have done little since then, except to modify text he'd been removing to satisfy his stated objections about sourcing. So a bit more than a week ago, I replaced text he'd removed, with additional reliable source, he removed it, and we ended up each hitting 3RR, and if my first edit -- which was not a revert, in my opinion -- is considered a revert I was at 4RR. In fact, some progress was being made, some text and changes were accepted. The article was then protected. This time, Hipocrite hit 3RR, nobody else did more than 2RR, there were multiple editors with Hipocrite alone against them all. I didn't do any reverting this time, though I was quite tempted, he's basically trolling for it, it looks like to me, with the edit summaries and other behavior. He hit 3RR, then massively modified the lead, not with consensus, just before you protected. I think that a review of his editing will show consistent edit warring here, and it's just been the restraint of others that made it appear that there wasn't edit warring. This article wasn't nearly as contentious before he showed up, though there were certainly problems, but it was possible to negotiate text. Hipocrite showed up here after ScienceApologist was banned, and appears to have considered it some kind of obligation to carry on SA's work. For which he was banned. Hipocrite's edits here are consistently violating Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science by attempting to totally exclude alleged fringe sources, even when the publishers clearly meet RS requirements. -- Abd ( talk) 06:05, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

See comment in above section. Krivit's book is not RS. Nor is Storms' really. I recommend it only because it lists a lot of non-peer-reviewed sources, which the CFers use liberally. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 11:51, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Given ArbComm's related ruling on Fringe science, which was partly about editors active with this article, it's not going to be enough to simply assert that a source isn't reliable. Rather, decisions about reliability will have to be made objectively, and, in the absence of issues of contradiction of sources, a source is then either reliable or it isn't. That still doesn't make a fact stated there true, but it does make it notable and usable for verification, even if attribution is needed. I could take the position that if there is no contradiction of sources, attribution isn't needed, but, hey, this is a wiki and we must work to get along. Attribution is often a simple way to move beyond POV conflicts, when editors are reasonable. After all, Storms did say what was attributed to him. It's verifiable, it's notable, and it violates policy to arbitrarily exclude it, or to exclude it on the grounds that it is fringe. -- Abd ( talk) 15:56, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

As notification, I should put this here. permanent link for ease of reading diffs, etc., and for seeing response. I've informed the protecting administrator of the circumstances around the protection, which should not be discussed here, I suggest, this isn't about the article, or even the topic, it's about editorial behavior. -- Abd ( talk) 16:55, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

You may add simple history links along with a short description of the article you suggest. If there is some sort of hybrid version (prior protected version with paragraph x from current version), then please try to be clear an succinct about it. Try to avoid adding links that are obviously unacceptable to the "other" side, like ones that call Cold Fusion a pathological science or include explanations about 4body fusion, regardless of how absolutely correct that version might be.

Prior protected version

[7] Hipocrite ( talk)

Acceptable

1. Hipocrite ( talk) 14:39, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
2. Verbal chat 15:28, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
3. Krellkraver ( talk) 01:30, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Not acceptable

Discussion

Prior protected version with some seemingly innocuous changes

[8] Additonally, changes in this diff are included. Suggested by Hipocrite ( talk)

Acceptable

1. Hipocrite ( talk) 14:39, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
2. Verbal chat 15:28, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
3. Krellkraver ( talk) 01:32, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Not acceptable

Discussion

I don't object to either of the two earlier versions. I do think the lead paragraph should be more about the definition and scope of the article (as I suggested/proposed/wrote on this page some days ago), than about conclusions, primarily because the topic is, indeed, controversial. V ( talk) 18:09, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

No objection to either of these earlier versions. Both are clearly preferable to the current protected version. Krellkraver ( talk) 01:34, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Discussion on the poll

I object to this new poll as splitting and confusing work on this issue. This poll entirely duplicates the poll above. I will add the prior protected version to the poll above. (But when it comes time to assay consensus on versions, !votes from here might be integrated with what is above, it's easy to do that by considering support here, unless there is a more refined vote from the same editor above, as if it were a 10 above, and specific opposition to a version, or easily inferred opposition, as a 0. Hipocrite caused the protection first by edit warring, by requesting protection, and then mangling the lead while he knew protection was pending. Above, I proposed as v1 the version that he had accepted, except for tags he added after making huge changes to the introduction that he must have know wouldn't be acceptable, and he doesn't even propose his own final version here, and it is the current protected state. -- Abd ( talk) 15:01, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Your unique methology and percieved vote tampering (I decline to comment on the accuracy of that perception) has depreciated your odd experiment in polling. Hipocrite ( talk) 15:03, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

And I told you above not to put words in my mouth. I accept nothing. My self-revert of a misclick should not be read to include me as accepting anything. Hipocrite ( talk) 15:04, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

(ec with below) It may seem like an experiment to you, Hipocrite, but this is only slightly more sophisticated than Approval voting, which I've seen used to rapidly find consensus in real life. Your edit record showed that you reverted an editor, immediately, next minute, then undid it two minutes later and did not remove the same material (had you not self-reverted, you'd have been at 3RR and much more likely to be dinged by an RfPP admin) and then you made massive non-reversion (?) modifications to the lead, pending protection, and then you added tags. Basically, v1 above undoes what you did after you requested protection. Didn't accept the changes that you tagged? If you had merely tagged, instead of editing in a way that you clearly know, from your comments above, would be provocative and unacceptable to most editors, you'd have your tags, even protected in, and we wouldn't be going through this exercise. Yes, there was "perceived vote tampering," but, remember, this is a wiki and all changes are visible, I apologized and clearly was attempting to handle the editor's vote according to the editor's intention. It's moot now; I hope the editor reconsiders and expresses an opinion. "I accept nothing." Interesting. Explains a lot. -- Abd ( talk) 15:36, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

You're going to have to try working with me, as opposed to against me on this, Abd. Please try to find a solution that everyone will be happy with - for instance, you suggest above that we revert to your preferred version, though you are fully aware that a score of other editors would be dissatisifed with that. I don't propose we revert the article to my preferred version (in fact, the article has never touched my preferred version), because I'm not trying to win a conflict with you, I'm trying to fix an encyclopedia article. Please try to refocus on the article, as opposed to your consistant drumbeat of discord against me. Thanks. Hipocrite ( talk) 15:44, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Your personal position on that material isn't consensus, Hipocrite. I picked that one version because (1) if you had sincerely requested page protection to stop edit warring, you'd not have made massive new changes. That edit is the page as of your request for protection, just before your edits making changes you knew would be unacceptable. Sure, it's my preferred version of all the versions listed. You are trying to "fix" an article that reflected, when you started, a developed consensus that was still in process. You used reversion as an editorial tool to prevent the addition of sourced material to the article, asserting "unreliable source" for sources that do meet WP:RS, quite clearly, and without the kind of conflict between sources that would justify weighing source details, appealing to content judgement of sources; and you were clearly willing to edit war to maintain your position; the only thing that prevented earlier edit wars from arising was that other editors didn't oppose. They, including myself, started to insist, hence the two edit warring episodes. You misrepresented it at RfPP, I wasn't edit warring with you at all on June 1. An editor who hadn't been active here did hit 2RR, and if you had insisted on the 4-d fusion matter, you'd have hit 3RR, that's the only thing that stopped you. You gamed the system, it's blatant, and it's been seen and acknowledged. There is nothing wrong with me proposing that version; it's up to the community of editors rate it. It's not being pushed, my poll was deliberately designed to avoid debate and to focus on simple comparisons. This has gone beyond the pale, Hipocrite. I think you know that, and I think you don't care.-- Abd ( talk) 17:08, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Since a number of editors have objected to "Abd's poll", this one seems superior for many reasons. Verbal chat 15:32, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I've integrated them, above. You prefer to !vote here, your privilege. Polls will be interpreted by an admin deciding to look at editor consensus. -- Abd ( talk) 15:36, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Admins don't rule on content, Abd. Hipocrite ( talk) 15:40, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

That's right, Hipocrite. They can interpret polls, though, judging consensus is indeed what an admin does in reviewing a request to edit an article under protection. -- Abd ( talk) 16:08, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

No admin is going to accept a {{ editprotected}} that doesn't have all of the principal actors on the same page. Please try to come to some sort of agreement with the rest of us in a format we can understand, without cluttering things up too much. Thanks. Hipocrite ( talk) 16:13, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Please don't jump to conclusions. I'm doing nothing to stand in the way of agreement. I accepted your proposal on temporary topic ban, you did not acknowledge. I wasn't involved other than making a single new edit in the last edit warring, Hipocrite, and the other editors who were haven't shown up yet. Give it some time. Your proposed versions are included in my version of the poll, so what is the problem, exactly? You don't like my poll, you can ignore it, editors can make their own choice. Or they can !vote in both. Doesn't matter. I think your starting a separate poll was disruptive, and that's, again, how I will proceed. But I'm not in charge. -- Abd ( talk) 16:57, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Is it too much to ask to post a diff between the two versions? Kevin Baas ^talk 15:38, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

What diff would you like? Between what and what? Hipocrite ( talk) 15:40, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

All the diffs between all six proposed versions are above in the original poll section, in the subsection Matrix for comparison of versions. -- Abd ( talk) 16:52, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I just want to say that I am abstaining from any polls unless one can be produced which is MUCH simpler to understand. In particular, it is confusing that there are so many differences between the versions in the table above. I am not saying I don't have opinions; rather I am saying I have no confidence that complicated polls like this will help build consensus. Olorinish ( talk) 17:04, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Olorinish. In my section, you can just vote 10 for any version you prefer -- pick one or more! -- and 0 for any version you don't like. And you can abstain from any version you don't want to consider. It's complicated because editors suggested old versions, where the diffs are outrageously different. I'd have kept it much simpler, to just two or three recent versions.... but I was duty-bound to include whatever suggestions were made. You may just want to consider the four recent versions, in my scheme these are versions 1, 2, 5, 6. If a little more time passes, and there is no more support for 3 and 4, I might, with consent, eliminate those, which would make it all much simpler. Let me point out that this isn't an RfC. This is intended as a quick process to pick a version to revert to, to deal with the mess from the edit warring. It's gotten much more complicated because Hipocrite set up a separate poll. You could, if you like, ignore the table above. You could just !vote on the versions Hipocrite suggested, or any others. In my section, I voted on the Hipocrite versions, they aren't bad, so if people want to seek consensus here, I'm certainly not standing in the way. The Hipocrite versions simply lose a little work, that's why they aren't tens. What I'm really seeing here is that versions 5 and 6, which was the status quo before Hipocrite started edit warring again, have strong support. Nobody supports the version that Hipocrite created while waiting for RfPP to do the deed, so nobody supports the current version. Doesn't matter. Pick one, pick many, pick all.

In fact, I'm going to strike versions 3 and 4. No support has appeared for them, except for the withdrawn transient support from Woonpton. If someone disagrees, they are welcome to revert me. -- Abd ( talk) 17:22, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

The withdrawal of my vote did not indicate a withdrawal of my support for version 3; it indicated a withdrawal of my support for the poll itself and my faith in the possibility that the poll could yield a valid measurement of consensus, the way it has been conducted. I won't revert the removal of the option I voted for; I don't intend to get in an edit war over this, but I think it shows something about the process that the option has been removed as gathering no support, a mere day after it was added. I wish you all well with the mediation. I will not participate further here; I just wanted to register a final objection to this poll as deeply flawed. I hope that objection will be noted when an independent observer judges the consensus or lack thereof. Woonpton ( talk) 21:31, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

It indicates whatever Woonpton thinks it indicates, but it does not, withdrawn, indicate to the rest of us any support for that version. I was the one who put that version in the poll, just trying to be complete and be accommodating to Shanahan. It was a mistake, it's very difficult to compare the old version with the recent ones because of massive reorganization of the article. Further, when I examined it in detail, it's an utterly unacceptable version: it was Shanahan before he stopped editing because of his COI, and he was massively promoting his own work, unsourced, with quite controversial statements without sources. So, with the withdrawn !vote, there was no expressed support for it in the poll, so I collapsed it. It could be brought back, but it would just confuse matters here and I recommend against anything that makes this more complex than it already is. We now have four versions, including the current protected version that nobody is admitting to support, not even Hipocrite, who made it happen. All the other three are acceptable to some degree, and all three are preferred to the protected version, as can be seen by the !votes in the original poll and this one. With a bit more opportunity for editors to make a choice, I think it will be reasonably clear how to proceed. Hipocrite has pretty much declared "over my dead body" over the Be-8 section; only problem is, that section was supported by three reliable sources: one primary reliable source, the Takahashi paper itself, a fresh publication in the ACS sourcebook, which is peer-reviewed, by the secondary academic source Storms (2007, World Scientific), and by the peer-reviewed usage of the theory in Naturewissenschaften (Mosier-Boss, 2009). The latter paper was already accepted as reliable source for this article, and the only basis for rejection of the first two sources is quite clear to me as POV argument from conclusions. But there is no emergency about this, so what happens with regard to how much weight we put on the heels-dug-in position -- which is what led to edit warring and protection -- may depend on the status of the editor at that point.

Meanwhile, possibly to avoid an immediate block (suspicious interpretation) or in an effort to resolve the dispute quickly (AGF interpretation), Hipocrite offered to agree to, on the face, a mutual topic ban on editing the article. I accepted this, but Hipocrite has not replied acknowledging clarification of conditions, see User:Abd/0rr so I'm left with no clear idea if there is a topic ban or not, Hipocrite has not responded to questions about this, and does not allow me to edit his Talk page, and this is why I tend away from the AGF position. The idea of this was to assure unprotecting admins that edit warring wasn't going to break out again. It's a mess, folks. (I don't really need to edit the article. I don't edit war -- normally, try to find another example -- and I can efficiently propose content in a way that is described on my Talk page discussion of the mutual ban). Any banned or COI editor could do that. -- Abd ( talk) 22:50, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I have reported votes from this poll in the other poll, which compares not only the two versions above, but also the version at the point where Hipocrite requested protection, just before editing the lead, probably the most "advanced version" with some improvements accepted, and the version as currently protected, restored from May 14 by WMC at GoRight's suggestion and Hipocrite's consent. I have not, however, reported any !votes from that discussion, which was separate, meaning that we had three separate discussions going on the same topic, a tad irregular. -- Abd ( talk) 01:31, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

I have been asked to mediate this content dispute. I have set up a separate page for this mediation here. -- Cryptic C62 · Talk 19:23, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I've responded to the page, but when I finally looked at the request, it wasn't for mediation on a content dispute, and the level of content dispute that we have is small, actually, above there are two polls and right now they show a tentative consensus for reverting to the version of May 31. The request was for Cryptic to "mediate a discussion what method we should use to determine what stable version we can come to agreement on on the talk page."

This is mediating over transient process. It's possible that the purpose of the mediation will change and that it could become useful, but spending more time dealing with how to decide how we decide? We currently have enough consensus to choose a version, and an admin could immediately implement that. From a shallower and quick discussion below, we are now at a version better than the originally protected one, but some substantial work has been lost. I see one possible purpose: to find a method for continuously gauging consensus on the article.

I'm going to modify my poll to reflect the new present version, so comparisons can easily be made and polled. The poll was designed to do that, it could even serve as a standing poll. So maybe we will mediate over this general question, which would then be worthwhile. -- Abd ( talk) 00:30, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

I have reported the vote-moving incident to AN/I. Woonpton ( talk) 19:57, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

(started section -- Abd ( talk) 03:30, 1 June 2009)

The patent issue

• [9] (Further developments: Absolutly not - OR by synth)

The edit reverted is almost a direct quote from the patent. What it shows is, indeed, a contradiction to the claim about the patent office, but it doesn't actually contradict what the article states, because the office may intend to reject claims but overlook that one claim (and a similar one before in a patent from the same inventors in 2004 that is referenced in the NET article). I'd say that explanation is a bit thin because the two patents were four years apart, and if the first patent was an oversight, someone surely pointed it out. However, the essential source here is the patent itself, and this is an example of how to deal with apparent contradiction between a secondary and primary source. Contrary to what Hipocrite asserts, this wasn't synthesis. Synthesis would have been to state a conclusion of contradiction, for example. We don't; instead, we present the evidence and let the reader decide. The article says what it says, and the patent says what it says. There may not actually be a contradiction.

The edit above was in response to an edit that Hipocrite had just reverted from another editor, which mentioned the patent in the edit summary, removing the sourced text, which wasn't proper. But the intention of that other editor should have been respected, and that's what I did. -- Abd ( talk) 03:30, 1 June 2009

Interjection here because the comments at this point are extensive and I simply want to note that Abd seems to feel it is OK to edit the article without getting consensus first. Please stop this Abd. Propose your changes on the Talk page and we will discuss. If a consensus can be reached an edit can then be made. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 13:53, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

P.S. What does noting the patent office issued a patent for a 'disguised' cold fusion gizmo add to the article? I suggest nothing, and therefore my vote would be to not add such comments to the article. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 13:57, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

As the other editor in question, I replaced the deleted text. As it's entirely sourced and only reports on the language of the patent claims, I don't see how it could be either OR or a synthesis. GetLinkPrimitiveParams ( talk) 03:33, 1 June 2009 (UTC) (sock of User:Nrcprm2026 -- Enric Naval ( talk) 16:23, 25 June 2009 (UTC))

It's OR by Synth because the patent, a primary source, does not mention Cold Fusion at all, and because longstanding agreement across the encyclopedia has determined that patents are not reliable sources for anything, including what the patents themselves claim to be true. Hipocrite ( talk) 03:39, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

That's a total misunderstanding of what can be sourced from a patent. In this case, the patent itself is the subject, i.e., we have on the one hand a claim that the Patent office doesn't issue patents that claim cold fusion, and this is actually a common assertion, but there is also quite a bit of discussion in the field that Miles has managed to get around this. And there are two patents that do exactly that, one in 2004 and one in 2008. I'd actually thought that they simply didn't mention cold fusion, as with another Navy patent issued to Spzak in the 1990s, and certainly they didn't mention it by name (and their long list of peer-reviewed publications also don't mention "cold fusion," nor do most publications in the field), but when I looked at the patent, there it was, i.e., energy production from palladium and deuterium. We should let our readers do the same. What does this mean? I don't know, but I could probably find some secondary source on it, but it might be New Energy Times. That's what they do, report on the news in the field, and that may be where I read prior discussion of this issue.

The newspaper article is secondary source, the patent is primary source, and this kind of apposition is exactly how we handle contradictions between reliable secondary source and primary source. Primary source clearly satisfies WP:V for non-synthetic statements about what's in it. What it doesn't do is establish truth of claims. The patent does not -- at all -- establish that energy can actually be generated from the apparatus, but only that this was claimed. That it was claimed, though, does say something about the confidence of the Navy researchers, that they would risk rejection of the patent for this. But I certainly wouldn't say that in the article, that would be original research. Note that I did not state in the edit that the patent "mentions" "cold fusion." It mentions energy generation from palladium and deuterium electrolysis. If that's not "cold fusion," sure, but we will need a new article to cover what it is. Not a bad idea, actually. -- Abd ( talk) 03:56, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

What other articles where patents were used as sources have you edited, Abd? My understanding from, you know, having edited a lot of articles is that they were not acceptable. If you have some counter example, that would be great. Hipocrite ( talk) 03:57, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

"Cold fusion" is a colloquial term. The text of the patent says it's a method of generating heat by the electrolysis of heavy water on a palladium-plated cathode. If you don't think that fits the description of cold fusion, why not? And for what reasons are you claiming that the text of the patent is an insufficient source for the claim that the patent office issued it? You haven't explained how your edit summary "OR by synth" could possibly apply. GetLinkPrimitiveParams ( talk) 04:36, 1 June 2009 (UTC) (sock of User:Nrcprm2026 -- Enric Naval ( talk) 16:23, 25 June 2009 (UTC))

There are tons of sources saying that the USPTO rejects cold fusion patents. I can cite, for example, " How to write a patent application" by Practising Law Institute in 1992 and Patent law essentials by Professor of Law Alan L. Durham in 2004. Also, as a curiosity, a self published book from Cosimo editorial featuring an interview with Storms [10] published in 2004.

See, I remember some source saying that cold fusion patents slip through the cracks by not mentioning cold fusion anywhere and obfuscating the jargon. That's the source that should be used (so I'll have to search for it again...).

Some notes: Dardik, the guy who later theorized Super Waves, tried to patent a cold fusion cell shortly after F&P announcement, the USPTO "denied 'because there is no evidence that cold fusion is a reality, [therefore] no patents will be granted.'" [11]. Patterson also got two patents, but he always distanciated himself from cold fusion to avoid the stigma [12], I suppose that his patents also avoided any association. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 22:17, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

What's your point, Enric? There is no controversy over there being reliable source that the U.S. PTO rejects cold fusion patents. However, it is also true that the Miles patents say what they say, which is blatantly a claim that the device is useful for cold fusion, though it's arguable that we can't -- based on the patent -- state that, as such, because it involves a level of synthesis. But we can quote the patent, for sure. It's a patent from a well-known LENR researcher. And I believe I've seen discussion of this patent. So they reject patents, as a rule, and then researchers with commercial interests, and many have these, follow the alternative, which is to keep work secret, thus hindering the resolution of the whole field. Be that as it may, they do deny some patents, apparently, and we can report it, and I think it is pertinent as part of the history of cold fusion, as are the patents that have been granted which blatantly mention cold fusion, as the Miles patents do. There is a Spzak patent from the 1990s that doesn't mention an energy generation claim. If we can find secondary RS which discusses the contrast between the alleged policy and the reality, that would be great. As it is, we can source to any one or more of the RS mentions of the Patent Office stated policy (or, more precisely, who said that, how do we know it's true, or was it just a statement that got blown out of proportion and reported from one source to another. Which happens, you know.) and we can cite exact text or allowed minor synthesis (that's what I did) from the patent; basically, normal Wikipedia rewording that doesn't change meaning or implications. The patent is a primary source, and can be used if it's done without synthesis. The 2004 and 2008 Miles patents, however, did *not* avoid association with cold fusion, they openly stated the claim, they just didn't call it cold fusion and, in fact, in their research papers, they don't call it that, either. Nobody does. Take that literally? Sure, they reject cold fusion patents, but they accept patents claiming energy generation from loading palladium rods with deuterium using electrolysis. Do they do this generally or were these two patents a fluke? I'm guessing that it wasn't a fluke, because if it was an error in 2004, I'm sure they took flak for it, and they wouldn't make the same mistake in 2008. No, what I think is likely is that our reliable sources have misunderstood what's going on at the Patent Office. But I surely don't know. -- Abd ( talk) 23:12, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

None of the patents (7381368, 6753561, 5928483) describe fusion processes, so they should not be mentioned in this article. Olorinish ( talk) 01:05, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Lots of matters relevant to cold fusion don't "describe fusion processes," but are relevant to some aspect of what we've stuffed into the article (the whole field of condensed matter nuclear science, for a start). If we have a statement that the patent office doesn't grant "cold fusion patents," or whatever wording we use, then we can have a statement that a patent that claims what amounts to the Pons-Fleischmann effect -- the generation of heat by electrolysis of heavy water with a palladium electrode -- has been granted, and, in fact, Miles has two of them, one in 2004 and one in 2008. -- Abd ( talk) 11:19, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

The patents describe fabrication processes and, as they put it, "electrochemical processes" but no nuclear processes, and do not assert that fusion is taking place in the devices. Yes, they are related to fusion, but since they do not describe fusion, the fact that patents were issued indicates nothing about the USPTO policy toward cold fusion. Therefore, including them in the present way gives the patents undue weight.

Perhaps those two sentences could be replaced with "However, cold fusion researchers have been granted patents describing materials used in their experiments." Olorinish ( talk) 11:45, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

The two patents do more than that. The first patent, by Spzak, in the 1990s did that. This patent has Claim 14:

A method of generating energy comprising the steps of:

Providing the electrode of claim 13,

Connecting the electrode to a cathode,

Immersing the electrode and the cathode in water containing deuterium, and

Applying a current to the electrode and a cathode. [13]

Sure. It doesn't say "cold fusion." But that's what it would almost certainly be if it "works." If not for cold fusion, this procedure wouldn't generate energy, it would just move it about, from electrical energy to Joule heating or to chemical potential energy in the evolved deuterium and oxygen gases, or other forms of chemical potential energy. This could possibly be energy storage, but not generation.

The 2004 patent was a bit less bold, but still referred to cold fusion, very clearly, though not in the actual Claims:

Further, the demand for energy increases each year while the world's natural energy sources such as fossil fuels are finite and are being used up. Accordingly, the development of alternative energy sources is very important and a number of potential new energy sources are under study. Although there have been many attempts to develop a palladium compound which can be utilized in processes to generate heat, such as through the introduction of aqueous deuterium, none of these attempts have been successful or repeatable, and there is thus a distinct need to develop palladium alloys which can be utilized for the generation of heat as a potential energy source. [14]

To the point, we could say that "However, cold fusion researchers have been granted patents describing materials used in their experiments[ref Spzak], or claiming the generation of energy using the materials, without using the words "cold fusion."[cite Miles, both patents]-- Abd ( talk) 17:23, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

OR by synth. Hipocrite ( talk) 17:25, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Abd said "If not for cold fusion, this procedure wouldn't generate energy..." This is not true, since this device would generate heat energy, which is a widely considered to be a form of energy. The patents do not teach how to create nuclear reactions, and do not include nuclear reactions in the claims. This is why the USPTO did not reject the patent for, in their terminology, "enablement" problems. Any implication in this article that the USPTO granted a patent on cold fusion would be POV-pushing. Olorinish ( talk) 17:49, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Tricky, actually. You are correct that we can't say "The USPTO granted a patent on cold fusion." That would be synthesis. However, could we say that the USPTO granted a patent that "claimed the generation of energy through electrolysis of water containing deuterium, using a palladium electrode?" I'd say we can, without synthesis; this is exactly what they did in the 2008 patent, quite explicitly, and a little more indirectly in the 2004 patent. The argument re generation of heat energy from electric energy is bogus, because all usage of electric power, if it doesn't result in forms of potential energy (such as battery storage, or elevation of a weight or the like), generates heat. Does the patent "teach how to create nuclear reactions?" Well, it does say what to do to create one, if cold fusion is real, though lots of details are missing, and if it isn't real, what it teaches wouldn't be "generation of energy," my electric heater does it and nobody would say that it "generates energy," though it certainly generates heat from electrical energy. It seems that some are going to great lengths to exclude what should be an uncontroversial fact from the article. It's verifiable from primary source, and the notability arises because of the apparent contrary claim in some reliable sources. We should always note when a claim from reliable source is verifiably contradicted. If a reliable source shows someone was born on a certain day, and someone looks at the birth certificate and finds that it gives a different day, we would report this, assuming that we trust the report, because the date on the birth certificate is verifiable. (And if a Wikipedia editor lies about what's on the birth certificate, there goes that account.) We would not report that one report or the other was the true one. Birth certificates can contain errors. So can any reliable source. Ideally, we find a later secondary source that looks at both facts and finds an origin for them, that explains both. Or that confirms one of them from independent evidence, such as a review of hospital records, which would ordinarily trump a birth certificate if the child was born in a hospital!

I delivered quite a few babies that were registered later, by the parents, we arranged that, by agreement with the Health Department, because our midwifery was quasi-legal, and if we had filed a lot of birth certificates, we could then have been prosecuted, as "habitual" unlicensed midwives, under the law at the time in Arizona; in the end, my wife got licensed, so did others; I didn't and I stopped assisting deliveries because there were now plenty of people with more training. My point: mistakes could have been made, we didn't have clinical records for these births that would be as time-critical as hospital records. Our primary concern was health of the mother and child, and we were not professionals at that point, we were not paid. Wikipedia isn't the first project I've volunteered for and served without compensation! We report what we find in reliable source, and when there is contradiction of reliable source, we report the contradiction without any more impeachment than the sources directly support without our comment. If there is no standing controversy, we can go with what has become non-controversial, we don't have to report every error that has been made on a topic, nor should we, unless the error became notable, in which case we do report the resolution.

-- Abd ( talk) 19:36, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

You are wrong about birth certificates - see WP:BLP - "Exercise great care in using material from primary sources. Do not use, for example, public records that include personal details—such as date of birth, ... unless a reliable secondary source has already cited them." I don't see how your argument has any relevence given that you misunderstand how we apply primary sources in other articles. Hipocrite ( talk) 20:10, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I would not use a birth certificate to establish a birth date for an article, but if a reliable source cites the date of birth, and it came to my attention that this contradicted the birth certificate, and there was no source covering the discrepancy, and I had access to the birth certificate and so did the general public (if they go to the trouble), I would, indeed, cite the birth certificate; but it is quite possible that there is some exception that has been carved out for BLP policy. Birth certificates do include confidential details, but these would not be revealed in citing a birth certificate, and we would not link to some web copy of the birth certificate; this is the kind of thing that would be a matter of editor testimony, as with any obscure source, or by reference to reliable source, in which case we'd cite the reliable source. What I wrote was general about WP:V and the use of primary sources, which sometimes can be difficult to access. If birth certificates are confidential (I've never tried to obtain one that wasn't mine or that of my children!) then what I wrote would be incorrect, because, then, any reader could not verify the information. This, then, would be a wrong example, but not a misunderstanding of WP:V and how we apply it to primary sources.

Let's take this out of BLP territory, since that not where our question is. The person in question has passed on, maybe they live a hundred years ago. One sees a birth date in a reliable source, but happens to see the original birth certificate, available to the public. What, then?-- Abd ( talk) 22:49, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

a secondary source for how some CF patents are granted

I found the source, it's from Simon's "Undead science": "Alternatively, the research may be more visible but not identified as "cold fusion." The scientist might instead be studying 'anomalous properties of deuterated metal hydrides.'¹⁹" page 193 (see footnote 19 below)

"19. This is a basic strategy for CF researchers seeking grants and patents for their work. In the United States, the strategy seems to have met with little success. In the case of patenting, the very claims that make the research patentable in the first place are the ones that identify it as being related to cold fusion. For legal reasons most of these patents must mention Fleischmann & Pons's 1989 paper, and this serves to tip off the reviewing patent officer." [15] (footnote 19 of chapter 6, page 233)

I propose this text:

Some researchers have obtained patents on some CF processes by avoiding any identification with "cold fusion" and using descriptions like "anomalous properties of deuterated metal hydrides", although some patents can't avoid mentioning Fleischmann and Pons' original research for legal reasons.^{Simon, 2002, pages 193, 233 (footnote 19 of chapter 6)}

-- Enric Naval ( talk) 18:19, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

That's not bad. Good find, Enric. The text proposed above, which really says much the same thing, though without the secondary source detail from Simon (which is quite a good source for this, Simon heavily researched the field and talked or corresponded with most of the major players). But Simon is only talking about strategy of cold fusion researchers, and not about the actual existence of patents which do make a claim quite equivalent to cold fusion. The"Anomalous properties" articles generally don't claim fusion, they claim experimental results that might require fusion to explain. This isn't what is done in the patent case ("anomalous properties" isn't found in the patents, I think). In the patents we know, what is being patented is not exactly cold fusion, but something useful for cold fusion. The fact is that such an invention is useful and marketable even if cold fusion doesn't work, because it could be sold to people who are researching cold fusion; perhaps it more reliably shows the elusive Pons-Fleischmann effect that even our resident skeptical scientist, Shanahan, considers real. But not fusion. Patenting the electrode, how the electrode is fabricated, need not reference Fleischmann, just as if I figure out how to make better glass for incandescent lights, I don't have to mention Thomas A. Edison. I do believe we will come up with something interesting on this for the article, with complete consensus from all editors interested in the best possible article.

Just to follow up on one idea, someone could patent a material, claiming use in research into "anomalous properties of deuterated metal hydrides." That use doesn't depend on cold fusion "working." At all. It would be useful for debunking cold fusion, don't you think? It would probably have to show an appearance of excess heat in some way, perhaps by making Shanahan's explanation reproducible and verifiable. -- Abd ( talk) 18:59, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

The proposed explanations

• [16] (rv to coppertwig, this has been discussed and rejected scores of times)

What has been rejected?

This is discussed above. Rather than split this up, discussion should continue there. These discussions had been collapsed by Hipocrite. [17] (If there was a rejection of proposed edits there, as he seems to be claiming, why did he collapse it on the claim that this didn't have to do with edits to the article?) Before making the edit, I uncollapsed that part.

See Talk:Cold_fusion#Proposed_explanations for the intro to the section sourced from Storms.

See Talk:Cold fusion#Theory of 8Be intermediary, not simple d-d fusion where some level of consensus was found for including this theory. I also added new source, because there is a detailed Takahashi paper on this theory in the ACS LENR Sourcebook. Discussion of this should continue in the previous section. -- Abd ( talk) 03:30, 1 June 2009

What's been rejected is using the primary sources complied in that handbook to state that specific theories are notable at all. But, of course, you know you're not just edit warring that back in - you reincluded your Storms paragraph also. Hipocrite ( talk) 03:39, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

That is preposterous, Hipocrite, a shallow rationalization pretending to be an argument. The Sourcebook wasn't there before, so it couldn't have benen rejected before. What was there before were two secondary sources. The primary source in the Sourcebook was added because its inclusion there shows a kind of additional notability due to its selection for the book, which is the first totally clear mainstream coverage of the field in depth, if we somehow think that World Scientific publishing Storms wasn't mainstream. You've picked the wrong battle here, Hipocrite, you are effectively anti-science now. This isn't homeopathy, not even close. Putting pseudoscience or pathological science in the lead? Come on! That's been rejected by consensus here for a long time. Because of widespread opinion, it's still possible to claim Cold fusion is fringe with a straight face, but rejecting sources because they are fringe because there are no mainstream sources because any source that supports cold fusion can't be mainstream is circular. -- Abd ( talk) 06:34, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

"No objection was raised in Talk to this. This shouldn't be controversial." [18] Abd, hum, are we reading the same page here? Remember this discussion about giving a lot of weight to Storms by placing him at the start of the "proposed explanations" section [19]? You already edit warred about that same paragraph in the same place with the same wording [20], how can it possibly be said that it "shouldn't be controversial". -- Enric Naval ( talk) 23:19, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

The issue of Storms' reliability, particularly in comparison to other sources, is separate from whether or not we cite him as a source for his statement on the general status of cold fusion theories. The statement he made is not controversial, and nobody has asserted, here, any contradiction to it, and unless and until someone has a notable theory to propose that contradicts it, that situation will remain. Enric, you are confusing substance (what we say in the article, the fact) with process (whether or not we agree on inclusion). The fact is not controversial. Weak sources may be used for non-controversial facts and, in fact, they can be included, sometimes, even without sourcing, though sourcing is preferred. It seems to me that we have editors, here, fighting old battles without looking at the present situation. I.e., someone thinks Storms isn't "reliable," even though he is thoroughly reliable on the point of what cold fusion researchers believe or think, so they want to keep anything related to Storms out. "Undue weight" isn't an argument to exclude a non-controversial statement from a controversial figure, unless it implies some undue conclusion. That is not the case with this edit. No undue conclusion is implied. -- Abd ( talk) 13:12, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

The section on theory should include an overview. If not from Storms, where from? The only recent RS with an overview of theory in the field is like Storms. The sources cited below with, for example, the "ad hoc" comment, is ten years old, weak, and prejudicial. There has been twenty years of work on theory in this field, ten or almost ten since those sources, and I'm not sure what "ad hoc" means here, but it surely does not apply to the Takahashi work, for example, in the ACS Sourcebook, which predicts 100% fusion to Be-8 on theoretical calculations in the event of double D2 confinement by the lattice, and that does, indeed, satisfy most of Storms' criteria, though, still, not necessarily all. (Basically, the high-energy alpha particles resulting from prompt Be-8 decay might be expected to generate more secondary reactions than are reported, this is the objection of Storms himself -- expressed elsewhere -- but that is completely unclear, I've seen no careful analysis of this. It's possible that the reported level of elemental transmutations, X-rays, etc., are about right.) Further, Takahashi's theory hasn't been generally accepted, nor have other theories, some of which are also not "ad hoc," but have developed theoretical foundations (even if some of them involve new physics, and are quite controversial, such as hydrino theory). It's not at all clear to me that Takahashi's theory involves any new physics, by the way, merely a more sophisticated analysis than what was done before, on a possibility that was previously neglected, the effect of the lattice on deuterium molecular confinement. If I'm correct, Takahashi also predicts practically no fusion from double or triple deuteron confinement. More about this, perhaps, in the relevant discussion section on the Be-8 proposed explanation. -- Abd ( talk) 13:26, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Only that you weren't using Storms to source the opinion of cold fusion supporters, you were using it to make a blanket statement about the state of the art at the very start of the section, as if that was the main view about the field.

Goodstein made an overview, and so did Park, Huizenga, Close, Simon, etc. And I mean an actual overview of state of the field, not a compilation of unconnected theories. Several media have done overviews of the field Wired [21] and Physics World [22], and some made new overviews in the 20th anniversary, like Wired, a blog in Scientific American [23] and others that were cited here and are now lost in a sea of verbiage. Also, I'll link for the Nth time here and here where I list like two dozens of mainstream sources, including frigging six university press books, written by people who, unlike Krivit or Storms, are either Professor Emmeritus of Physics, or Director of Public Information of American Physics Society, or received (several) scientific awards and medals, or been Fellows in (several) universities and/or scientific societies, or founded scientific journals, or been made board director of scientific journals, or made didactic work divulging science, or several of the above along their carreer. So pick one of those overviews. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 15:12, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Addition of the American Chemical Society Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook to the bibliography

Hipocrite, with the revert above ( [24] ) also reverted this addition. This is the most important recent publication in the field, though Storms (2007) is a more comprehensive overview. It's important because the American Chemical Society is as mainstream as it gets, the book was peer-reviewed (see the discussion above that was also claimed to have nothing to do with the article), and it's very recent, last year. This book has not been rejected by consensus, there has been hardly any discussion of it at all, except for the brief one above. The discussion of that book should continue in the section above on it.

See Talk:Cold_fusion#American_Chemistry_Society_Symposium_Series:_Low_Energy_Nuclear_Reactions_Sourcebook -- Abd ( talk) 03:30, 1 June 2009

There's been no discussions of it at all because you can't express yourself concisely so anyone can understand anything you want done to the article till you and your tag-team editwars it back and forth. Hipocrite ( talk) 03:39, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Tag team? Pot calls the kettle black. The only one edit warring today was you, Hipocrite, with outrageous edits not supported by consensus. There doesn't have to be a discussion to add a source to the bibliography, but this one was discussed, and not at impossible length. The source itself explains its importance, you shouldn't remove a relevant text from the bibliography, even if you hadn't seen the discussion. It's notable and reliable on the face. -- Abd ( talk) 06:21, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, lets's look at that section Abd. It says: "to provide a mechanism for publishing symposia quickly in book form". "Symposia" = "Conferences". "Publishing symposia"="Publishing proceedings". In conference proceedings accuracy and fact-checking are done by the editors, i.e. Krivit and associates. Per Goodstein, they stopped doing critical review a long time ago. Conclusion: The referenced book is not RS. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 11:48, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Yup. It says that. But you omitted what else he says, and if this is how you use sources, you should be out of here, quickly, your expertise would be, then, dangerous. We have lots of stuff in the bibliography that isn't "reliable source," technically, that is just the opinion of an author, notable only because it was published, sometimes not even indpendently, as these were. For example, Goodstein, which you just quoted. Goodstein is a good source, but that was hardly a peer-reviewed journal.

What did the "section" say, in addition to the quote that Shanahan proceeds to OR into his apparently desired conclusion?

Before agreeing to publish a book, the proposed table of contents is reviewed for appropriate and comprehensive coverage and for interest to the audience. Some papers may be excluded to better focus the book; others may be added to provide comprehensiveness. When appropriate, overview or introductory chapters are added. Drafts of chapters are peer-reviewed prior to final acceptance or rejection,

What part of "peer-reviewed" is hard to understand? And why did the ACS decide to publish a sourcebook on low energy nuclear reactions, if the field is truly a pariah field? Pseudoscience? Pathological science? Fringe? Indeed, why did the DOE in 2004 go to the trouble of putting together a review panel, if the matter was closed? And that review panel certainly did not conclude that it was closed, so where does the idea come from that that old conclusion stands? Where was that conclusion made? I can think of only one body, and, as we know, there is quite a bit of reason to believe, and reliable source on it, that the majority on the body that probably did, indeed, conclude that there wasn't any evidence -- but didn't actually say that in the report -- made that conclusion prematurely, before there was time to actually gather the evidence on what Ramsey noted could be a rare, elusive effect, as it turned out to be until how to find it was much better understood, which took years.

Goodstein doesn't cover Krivit, for sure, and probably not Marwan. Krivit I know had no involvement in cold fusion at that time. What Shanahan is doing is what he's been consistently doing, he's got a "they" in his head which defines everyone involved with cold fusion as being some kind of nutty monolith, closed-minded, ignorant, and stubborn. -- Abd ( talk) 15:51, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Who do you think peer-reviewed it Abd? An unbiased crowd of people who had no preconceptions about 'cold fusion' or the typical crowd of CFers? Who picks the reviewers do you think? The editor of the volume maybe? The organizer of the Symposium? Or an uninvolved but competent scientist on the staff of the ACS publications organization? Get real.

Goodstein is just the icing on the cake so to speak. We have numerous books from that period declaring the field a 'fiasco', etc. We have the abrupt change in the makeup of the ICCF conferences between ICCF4 and 5, where, suddenly, all the negative publications vanished. Mainstream science setermined c. 1995 that CF was bad science, and the rest follows naturally from that. There is no evidence that that has changed. And my personal experience confirms the pathological, psuedoscience stigma that goes with the field.

The DOE went to the trouble because Eugene Mallove and friends got their New Hampshire Congressman to pressure DOE into it. I firmly believe that's why they did such a poor job. It was just for 'show' to satisfy the Congressman. That's also why they concluded essentially the same thing they did in '89, to point out that no progress has been made since then. Unfortunately, if they had done a better job, they could have really coame down on the CFers. Instead, we have another 20 years to look forward to.

"We have lots of stuff in the bibliography that isn't "reliable source,"" - You're just figuring that out?? Kirk shanahan ( talk) 17:01, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I was not born yesterday, Shanahan. World War II had not ended. It would be another year. Self-published material, for example, isn't generally reliable source. I was speaking generally. However, some publications that aren't generally reliable can be reliable for certain purposes; a self-published document by a notable expert, in the field of notability, as an example, can be considered reliable for showing the opinions of that expert. Attribution would generally be necessary. Kirk, lots of stuff has been tossed at you by wikilawyers who wanted to get rid of something from you, or by good-faith editors who didn't explain the rules completely. The rules make much more sense than you might think. If you spend a couple of years meditating on how Wikipedia might run, practically, as a user-edited encyclopedia with some necessary standards, you might realize that the theory is quite good, it's not as stupid as it might seem. But there are practical issues of implementation that are still unresolved. Gradually, we get there.

I predict the demise of mainstream resistance to the cold fusion experimental results, within a year or so. It's really already ended, but the news hasn't spread. That's why we have increasing reliable source that is positive. 2004 was the tip of the iceberg, showing what happened when you got a representative panel together and showed them the research. Given how brief it was, that the Hagelstein/McKubre presentation wasn't the best designed, that as many were reasonably convinced as actually were is striking. (I'm starting to think, it was too academic, actually, too much dependent on normal academic assumptions, i.e., that reviewers would actually check out sources, and actually absorb what was stated, instead of depending on memory biased by prior judgments; McKubre et al didn't sufficiently factor for how brief the actual meeting would be. One day isn't usually enough to change deep-seated beliefs, I'd have been shocked at such a change in 2004, the ground had not been prepared. I'd have tried to postpone the actual meeting, have some round of communication before, so way to establish time to think about the stuff, and probably a longer meeting. What was expensive was getting the experts together in one place (the nine?). Extending it to three days, say, would have been relatively less expensive. And the result might have saved the world a lot of money, in the end. Or not. At least we'd have seen a deeper review. Then, the final reports should have been subject so some kind of back and forth, so that the blatant errors, like the one I found and report on above, would have been caught, and maybe even more subtle errors of interpretation. And, yes, your POV should have been better represented. That could have been done by having a period of public comment and a report prepared condensing it.

However, my predictions are only for the purpose of disclosing the opinion I have formed from almost five months of researching this topic, buying many of the major books (including those by critics and skeptics); I read every day on this. I would never put this in the article. And I pay attention to what critics say, like Shanahan. And if I don't understand it, perhaps it hasn't been well enough explained? Or perhaps I'm dense. My friends tell me otherwise, but maybe they are just trying to make me feel good. I hope not. Friends, if I'm dense, help me out, don't let me live in a dream world without warning. - Abd ( talk) 17:35, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

A POV-pusher manifesto if I ever saw one. And based on 5, count 'em, 5 *months* of light reading. On the other hand, I've spent 14 years *studying* the issue, and _I'm_ a kook. Right... Kirk shanahan ( talk) 11:39, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Tempting. The 5 months of (heavy) reading, plus my early education in physics ( Richard P. Feynman) and chemistry (Linus Pauling]], both of them in person, both of them mavericks who didn't accept the status quo as authoritative, plus debate and discussion with others, some of whom (as to off-wiki discussion) are world-class experts on the topic, recognized as such (Shanahan is not so recognized, and his opinion outside calorimetry is of no notability at all, and his narrow calorimetric work is of questionable application, but PR published and therefore notable), places me, probably, among the most knowledgeable Wikipedia editors on the topic. And with that and twenty-five cents, I could get a ride on the subway, back when. -- Abd ( talk) 16:52, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

You have real credentials in Physics and or Chemistry, or you were just an undergrad when they were teaching, insulting people with, you know, actualy phD's as being not "experts?" Wait, don't answer that. Hipocrite ( talk) 16:55, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I have no credentials in Physics or Chemistry, just personal contact with the two mentioned. Freshman and sophomore physics with Feynman, plus he visited Page House and told the stories that were later published. Freshman Chemistry with Pauling. I remember Feynman much more clearly, and his attitude is what stuck with me. I've had some similar experiences as he did. As to "experts," that must refer to Shanahan, and I haven't insulted his expertise and I've repeatedly referred to him as an expert. Here is what I see, Hipoocrite. You can't see what's in front of your nose, but you presume to judge what others can see. Sorry, too late. If you don't want me to answer some of your brief but intensely biased ravings, don't post them. When you write that "don't answer that," take it as a sign you should close the window and not save it. -- Abd ( talk) 11:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

(can't resist...can't resist...) he must of got his science by osmosis... Kirk shanahan ( talk) 16:06, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

If I gt this straight, the book is a collection of unpublished papers and conference papers? And we don't know who peer-reviewed the papers? -- Enric Naval ( talk) 23:25, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Not straight. Generally, like most review publications from the ACS, and, in fact, like most peer-reviewed publications, it is a collection of papers not previously published, and it is peer-reviewed. As is common, we don't know who the exact reviewers are. (Sometimes we know the "review panel" for a journal, for the 2004 DoE panel are anonymous, and I've never seen "so-and-so reviewed this paper." What we have is the clear statement from the ACS that the papers are peer-reviewed as part of the selection and editing process. There are one or two papers, I forget, in the book, that were previously published as conference papers; their inclusion in the book moves them from the class of "conference papers" -- which isn't any kind of negative, it merely means that they haven't yet been peer-reviewed -- to "peer-reviewed papers," for our general purpose. Lots of junk gets presented at conferences, and also lots of very good and careful work, work likely to pass a fair peer review. What's been happening for almost twenty years is that papers would be rejected without being submitted to peer review, because the entire field was effectively blacklisted. This isn't a wild claim, and it affected negative work as well as positive. We should mention this in the article, I'll dig up some RS for it. -- Abd ( talk) 11:30, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I believe, but might be wrong (anything in the book to contradict?), that the 'peer-review' is set up by the editors. Both are confirmed cold fusioneers, and I have serious doubts about them getting anyone but other confirmed cold fusioneers to do the reviewing. This is *standard* with conferences and symposia. The papers usually get circulated to the conference participants for review, and there is often time pressure to get the review done quickly (don't know if that's true in this case). That's why in the hierarchy of things, 'proceedings' are not considered as significant as regular journal articles. Now, one problem with psuedoscientists is they don't participate in the normal scientific progess. The extreme of that is some guy who hides out in his garage and then rants and raves from there. A less extrme form is evidenced by the cold fusioneers, in that they have set up their own journals and conferences, and they don't hold to the same standards of how to do peer review. As Goodstein wrote, they have stopped any critical review, and that's what peer review is supposed to be. So, unless there is evidence to the contrary, we should assume the book in question was 'reviewed' in this fashion, i.e. inadequately. RS policy seems to me to require critical review, not a non-critical review. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 11:49, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

What is missed here is the role of the publisher. The publisher approves whatever role there is for the editors. I agree that the publication process is not exactly the same as with, say, a peer-reviewed mainstream journal. However, it is close enough, and the details obscure enough, in both cases, that we must consider this as reliable source. Note that "reliable source" isn't equivalent to "unbiased." It is still subject to general comparison with other reliable sources for balance and due weight, but we have clear guidance from ArbComm that the balance should not extend to exclusion of reliably sourced content, and the book is definitely reliable source in this extent. "Reliable" in "Reliable source" doesn't mean that citation to the source proves a fact, where there is controversy, it should not be confused with the ordinary meaning of "reliable," we are using a technical Wikipedia meaning here. Shanahan is probably correct that peer review is set up by the editors. Is this not true for any peer reviewed publication? The publisher selects or chooses or accepts the editors, just as a standard book publisher does the same with authors. That's why I've been saying that the nature of the publisher is critical in any determination of "reliable source." -- Abd ( talk) 12:29, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

That's not what Wikipedia:RS#Scholarship says. Hipocrite ( talk) 12:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Let's look at that guideline. Citing a guideline without going into detail as to exactly what part of the guideline applies and why is a classic POV-pushing technique. Here is the guideline text cited: My comments are in italics, interspersed:

Further information: Wikipedia:Verifiability § Reliable sources

Many Wikipedia articles rely on scholarly material. Academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources when available. However, some scholarly material may be outdated, superseded by more recent research, in competition with alternate theories, or controversial within the relevant field. Reliable non-academic sources may also be used, particularly material from reputable mainstream publications. Wikipedia articles should cover all significant views, doing so in proportion to their published prominence among the most reliable sources. The choice of appropriate sources depends on context and information should be clearly attributed where there are conflicting sources.

So far, so good. This is confirming what I've been saying. What is below actually doesn't deal with reliable source, but with how to handle balance, in the event of conflict of sources, so it begins to discuss relative reliability.

• Material that has been vetted by the scholarly community is regarded as reliable; this means published in reputable peer-reviewed sources or by well-regarded academic presses.

Here the guideline confirms my claim, that the identity of the publisher is very important. If we are addressing conflict of sources, then we look to indications of the quality of the source, and they point, first, to the kind of publisher. How about Oxford University Press and the American Chemical Society as publishers? And we can also ask if World Scientific is a "well-regarded academic press." I really don't know, but I do know that unless we have conflict of sources, it's disruptive to make wild claims -- or even reasonable claims -- that are really about relative source reliability.

• Items that are signed are preferable to unsigned articles.

Example of unsigned source: the individual reviewer comments and the summary issued as the 2004 Department of Energy report on low energy nuclear reactions. Again, it's clearly notable, but if there is a problem with conflict of sources, we need to be very careful about how we use it.

• The scholarly acceptance of a source can be verified by confirming that the source has entered mainstream academic discourse, for example by checking the number of scholarly citations it has received in citation indexes. A corollary is that journals not included in such indexes should be used with caution.

Again, we look at this if there is contradiction. When a source is attributed, contradiction issues actually don't arise directly, but do remain important as to balance and due weight, which balance does not extend to exclusion of reliably sourced information but only to how we balance it.

• Isolated studies are usually considered tentative and may change in the light of further academic research. The reliability of a single study depends on the field. Studies relating to complex and abstruse fields, such as medicine, are less definitive. Avoid undue weight when using single studies in such fields. Meta-analyses, textbooks, and scholarly review articles are preferred to provide proper context, where available.

Once again, this substantiates what I've been claiming. "Isolated studies" would refer to studies that haven't been confirmed, or that haven't seen secondary review. Storms and Marwan are secondary sources reviewing primary sources. They are, where they are analyzing work in the field, are the kind of sources we should prefer. Because the field remains controversial, my present position is that what they report, if a reported fact is controversial, we should still attribute and report any balancing information, if available in other reliable source of similar (or better) quality, being careful about how we handle conflicting sources of lower quality. I'm not convinced at all that a 1998 secondary or tertiary source, originally qualifying as RS, making claims that can now be seen as obsolete, should now be cited at all, unless we are covering the history and the source is important to that, when we have much more recent source that is based on wider information, not available when the earlier review was written.

As an example of unconfirmed studies, Vyostoskii's work on nuclear transmutation has not been confirmed. Its inclusion in the Sourcebook shows notability and interest in it, but how this would be reported in an article would require great caution to not imply that the work is valid. It's of interest, and I believe we should note that it exists, but not with any implication that, for example, biological transmutation is real, unless we can find more extensive sourcing (it's possible; Vysotskii wasn't the first to report biological transmutation, but I'm simply saying what we can do based on Vyosotskii's paper in the Sourcebook. Its inclusion means that the work appears interesting, probably worthy of replication efforts, on the face, but isn't enough, at all, to consider the results to be factual, only the existence of the paper, its text for reference, its conformance with basic standards (they would not include pure junk or nonsense-on-the-face, which would needlessly damage their reputation; rather, I conclude they felt more or less forced to include the paper because Vyosotskii submitted it, is a well-known scientist, the conclusions seem reasonable from the experimental evidence presented, and the only reason to exclude it would be political, and these people are understandably averse to that, they have all suffered from it), and its notability are established by the Sourcebook.

-- Abd ( talk) 18:32, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

The base problem Abd, is that the CFers have withdrawn from participation in the normal scientific process. They have difficulty getting their pubs past knowledgeable reviewers in the journals that traditionally deal with 'CF' issues, so they go places where they have never gone before and rename their field to hide what it is from the novice reviewers (in CF technology) in the previously untouched journal they are now trying to get to publish their work. Or, they just self-publish (as a group), as in the proceedings of such-and-such CF conference. The Wiki RS guideline is supposed to be applied using common sense. The 'common sense' of this field is that CF is pariah science, bad science, pathological science, and anyone claiming to have discovered 'proof' of it must necessarily be subjected to extremely close scrutiny. There are clear signs the CFers don't do an adequate job of conforming to base scientific standards, thus all their publications are suspect, *especially* when a layman to the field tries to interpret them, such as you do, because they are psuedoscientists and *their work _looks_ like real science to an untrained eye*. In order to present both sides of this controversy fairly, we will have to allow a bit of questionable material in, but not the scads of stuff you want AND you also must let some of the mainline points in as well, and not Wikilawyer them to death, as you have been doing. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 20:01, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Kirk, I've considered you an expert, and would generally defend your participation here, it can be quite valuable. But much of what you say is highly misleading and not based on your expertise, and this is a real problem. The "CFers" have not "withdrawn from participation in the normal scientific process." Rather, those standing at gateways in that process decided, in 1990 or so, to exclude anything on the topic. Yes, this damaged the field, because without that process, and the vigorous back-and-forth debate that it encourages, the quality of the work suffers, because negative work can't get published either, and positive work, even though it answers the previous objections, doesn't even make it into peer review. However, some researchers did, steadfastly, pursue publication in peer-reviewed journals, most notably and effectively, the SPAWAR group, whose work you have most noticeably avoided mentioning. Your "common sense" is simply your personal opinion and is not supported by recent reliable source; what reliable source we have on it is not peer-reviewed review of the field, at least as far as anything I've seen. If you want us to rely on this, you will need to assert reliable source for it, and the only reliable source that I know on this is non-peer reviewed non-academic source; for example, newspaper reports of the massive rejection by physicists at the notorious 1989 APS meeting, where the tradition of academic courtesy was totally abandoned. On the other hand, we have plenty of recent reliable source, both popular and peer-reviewed or academic, that treats low energy nuclear reactions as a viable field, with active research and publication in mainstream peer-reviewed journals, a notable example being Naturwissenschaften, and as to book publishing, most recently (and therefore most authoritatively!), World Scientific and Oxford University Press and the American Chemical Society. Indeed, the older 2004 DOE review also treats it this way, quite clearly. Sorry, but your "common sense" flies in the face of what we have as reliable sources.

In spite of the strength of this, I have done nothing to exclude the alleged mainstream position that was asserted in sources long ago. Please show one example of my action to exclude something reliably sourced, other than possibly as a transient effort to find balance. (I can think of an example you might claim: in the section on Proposed explanations, we have text on about cold fusion theories that claims that all such theories are "ad hoc," or the like. That is an old source, and it can be argued that it might have been true when written (though I think not, Preparata's work wasn't "ad hoc," and the original Fleischmann work did have a theoretical basis for investigation, it wasn't a total stab in the dark, though Fleischmann though that the reality would turn out to be so close to classical quantum mechanics that the difference would be undetectable, that part was a long shot, and he knew it), but it clearly doesn't apply, for example, to Takahashi's work on the Be-8 hypothesis, which starts from studying, mathematically, the behavior of deuterium molecules at the edge of lattice confinement.) (Behavior inside the lattice would presumably be the same, except that deuterium dissociates inside the lattice, and exists only as deuterons there.) Still, I only took that out once, I think, then left it in, because I believe that the priority at this point is getting what is reliably sourced, from academic peer-reviewed publications, into the article, not taking out negative material that might be reliably sourced, but that is weak or obsolete by comparison.

I'd like to point out that there is nothing necessarily wrong with the standard approach to peer review of conference proceedings described above by Kirk. Yes, the reviewers are typically drawn from the conference participants (and especially from those who have themselves submitted a paper for review), but this group is also highly likely to have knowledge of the field, its practices, and the relevant literature. I have certainly needed to rework conference papers based on the comments from the referees, and that is as it should be. The smaller referee cohort and the generally more limited length of such manuscripts means that quality results will likely ultimately go on to publication in relevant journals, and as sources those journal publications are superior and supercede any preceding conference publication. Nevertheless, there is (and should remain) a presumption that peer review of conference proceedings makes those sources reliable. The problem which Kirk describes arises because any presumption can be rebutted. Conference publications become unreliable if the integrity of the peer review process is compromised, such as when the conference organisers deliberate shun the mainstream, or deliberately seek out sympathetic referees. As Kirk noted, in such situations the review becomes inadequate and the presumption of reliability becomes unwarranted. In an area where there is considerable controversy, any conference proceeding where it is unclear that both (or all) sides were represented at the conference (and thus amongst the referees) automatically raises questions of reliability. EdChem ( talk) 12:52, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

(ec) It's a false assertion that "the publisher determines whether a source is reliable". Storms is banned from the Cornell arxiv. That is a problem; fairly rare for a retired academic formerly attached to the institute where the archive was originally hosted. Storms' theories have been criticized in print by Kirk himself. And World Scientific has a patchy publication record: in my own subject they have published encyclopedic tomes on operator algebras which are by total unknowns. These publications could not be recommended; a fortiori they could not really be used as principal references for a wikipedia article. How many times does Abd be need to be told these things before it sinks in? Dogged persistence in repeating the same false arguments will not him an argument (cf his endless comments on the whitelist page, until he was trumped by a sock of Jed Rothwell). Mathsci ( talk) 12:58, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

The ban says more about how the cold fusion work was moved outside the mainstream and set up as being in apparent opposition to it, and I'd say that if we have reliable source on the ban, we should report it in the article. But that is irrelevant to WP:RS determinations, and this is well-established. Likewise any publisher may have published something that was later found to be totally bogus; the source remains WP:RS and would be used in an article, if sufficiently notable for the topic of the article, which is a topic by topic consideration, it would then properly be balanced by other RS. If the bogus work is no longer controversial, then it's probably not notable except in a report on the history. That Mathsci is strongly opposing this shows merely that this editor hasn't accepted the fundamental basis on which Wikipedia RS is established, reliance on decisions by responsible publishers, who have a stake in publishing what is notable, because if it isn't notable, they will lose money and reputation. We depend on the mass of those decisions; our judgments of reliability and notability should not be our own synthetic conclusions, and Mathsci's position, if confirmed, would create mass chaos on Wikipedia, as editors debate each source from their own POV. It happens, to be sure, but this is almost all actually in violation of WP:RS. WP:RS determines inclusion, and we should confine our debate to balance, which should not involve exclusion of fact based on reliable source, but rather the placing of such fact in context, with emphasis on the mainstream.

So what's the mainstream view? Is this something that we determine by how many editors are on one side vs. the other? No. It's determined by the weight of reliable source; if a view is not mainstream, it will not be reflected in most available reliable source. For a science article, we rely on the scientific mainstream, which is, again, found by examining what is in peer-reviewed publications and other academic source (by which I mean publication where the audience is itself academic, not what are popularizations and tertiary sources, intended for general readership, non-technical, and where gross generalizations may be made for simplicity, and which happen to have been published by some academic institution; these publications, like print encyclopedias, may reflect a general consensus that existed much earlier. They may still be reliable source, but only as to the consensus at some earlier time). With academic sources, in cases of contradiction, later sources should trump earlier ones, because later sources will generally show the current state of the field. Outside, just as with Wikipedia, consensus changes.

As an example of conclusions that were published, and which were rejected and which are no longer controversial, we need look no further than Fleischmann's original radiation report. It was experimental error, Fleischmann retracted it, it was widely lambasted, and nobody is defending it. He was wrong; it was an easy mistake to make, though, because his excess heat work was solid and everyone, including him, expected that if the excess heat was real, there would be very significant radiation of that kind, so when measurement later shown to be defective showed it, he reported it. It's quite clear that the P-F effect, whatever is causing it, doesn't produce much radiation, beyond alpha radiation which was not detectable using external detectors because of the short range, until experiments were designed that specifically looked for this. Nobody expected significant alpha radiation because the theoretical basis hadn't been developed; the known reaction d + d -> He-4 plus gamma would have produced massive gamma radiation unless some new mechanism of lattice absorption were hypothesized, and the field hadn't gotten to that point at the time. The known hot fusion branching ratio predicted 50% of the fusions would produce neutrons, and only a tiny percentage, nearly insignificant, would produce gammas. That level of neutrons, as expected from the reported heat, would have produced the "dead graduate student" effect. Nobody thought of, for example, double-deuterium molecular -> nuclear fusion caused by lattice confinement at the surface, which, indeed, would predict He-4 generation at levels commensurate with the excess heat, heavy alpha radiation, the helium being generated at the surface, not deep in the bulk palladium, the absence of neutrons except at very low levels resulting from secondary reactions from hot alpha particles (i.e., hot fusion), and many other aspects later found and confirmed, and the work to validate this specific theory, probably by measuring exact alpha particle levels and energies, has yet to reach publication, to my knowledge, except that Mosier-Boss ( Naturwissenschaften, 2009, does some level of work on this, and this is, with respect to that theory, a reliable secondary source. -- Abd ( talk) 14:04, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Techhnically, we are discussing Krivit's book, but your confusion is understandable, as the Storms book has a similar problem. In that book's case, we have a single author who has convinced a publisher to publish it. It is a compendium of results, with the problem that no quality assessment is done on those sources. My quick perusal of the references of one chanpter (over 600 refs there) showed about 60% were to 'Proceedings of the xth ICCF'or an equivalent type of conference. Further, his misrepresents my work, concluding he has rebutted it when in fact I rebutted his rebuttal point by point, and he knew this. And, he ignores the Clarke, Oliver, Bos work that shows He measurment is still unreliable in this field. That makes his book 'unreliable' in the scientific sense. For Wiki, in the end, it seems to be consensus. As I've said before, we should/could use Storms because it is a compendium of non-peer-reviewed stuff (which implies inadequate peer review of most CFer conference proceedings) and it provides a framework for discussing the claims for the CF article. However, the Krivit book adds nothing new, therefore we shouldn't use it. 13:42, 2 June 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kirk shanahan ( talk • contribs)

This has, unsurprisingly, been driven wildly off-topic. The discussion was the reliability (or lack there-of) of the Steven Krivit conference proceedings. I believe that the commens were wildly in agreement that the source was not reliable. Is that an accurate read of everyonebutAbd? Hipocrite ( talk) 14:11, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

• Not conference proceedings. Published book by major mainstream publisher, collecting edited and reviewed papers, only one of which was previously presented at conferences (Fleischmann, 2003, ICCF10, published by World Scientific, 2006), and which we'd be able to cite anyway because of the notability of the author (we have actually cited a less well written paper presented a previous year, this one is more definitive). The other 15 chapters or papers are original, copyright 2008 by the ACS.
• Lead editor is Jan Marwan. Krivit is co-editor, and contributed an overall review of the field as the first chapter, Introduction and Overview.
• WP:NOTAVOTE. The claim of unreliability has only come from yourself, with all that this implies, and from Shanahan, who is COI on the topic and highly biased. As to Shanahan -- and yourself, probably -- the "Reliable" in Reliable source has been confused with the ordinary meaning of the word. RS doesn't establish freedom from bias, it establishes notability and verifiability of properly attributed text. Other editors have asserted or accepted that Storms is RS, we have many other references to Storms, which were generally accepted until you arrived, and this book is even more solid. I don't accept claims that World Scientific is a shoddy publisher, they are irrelevent, but, even if we accepted that, a book published by the American Chemical Society, the largest scientific society in the world, has been accepted as worthy of discussion by the mainstream, just as the longer seminar held in 2009 by them shows exactly the same thing. -- Abd ( talk) 16:42, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Jan Marwan... Has he ever even been a professor of anything, anywhere? I'm interested in hearing from the people who haven't already expressed themselves, though, Abd. We know you can drown us in text. Hipocrite ( talk) 16:45, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Go to Google Scholar and do a search on "jan marwan". Seems he was at Univ of Southhampton (Fleischmann's old stomping grounds in 2003, from then till ~2007 he was at U. of Quebec, then he seems to have become self-employed and set up his current situation. No guarantees this is exhaustive. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 19:21, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Totally irrelevant. Publishers choose editors based on their own lights. I'm interested in hearing from others as well, and I'll take steps to make sure that all of us have the opportunity to see that: me, other editors here, and, especially, you.

However, Oxford University Press says about Marwan:

Jan Marwan, who built up his own research laboratory in Berlin, Germany, to deeply investigate cold fusion processes, is a specialized electrochemist and focused his research on the electrochemical properties of metal hydride systems.

There is a self-bio at: [25]

Krivit is a journalist, editor of New Energy Times, widely noticed because of major media reports, quoting him, about the recent ACS seminar.

I'm not asserting professional notability for Marwan. Krivit is actually more notable, as a journalist covering the field, who has interviewed most major involved figures, including as many critics as were willing to talk with him, and who has been noticed by major media.

-- Abd ( talk) 17:06, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

"The claim of unreliability has only come from yourself, with all that this implies, and from Shanahan, who is COI on the topic and highly biased" [26] Erm, you are forgetting other people that have expressed doubts about the reliability of this source, namely myself [27] and EdChem [28]. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 20:43, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

(noindent) Abd seems to be in a minority of one about these sources. He doesn't appear to take any notice of what anybody else says, particularly academics. It is indefensible that he pushes Krivit as notable: what is true is that Krivit has some notoriety in making defamatory statements on his website about scientists; otherwise he has no scientific notability at all (which is what is relevant here). Likewise Abd is desperately trying to push Storms as a mainstream scientist, which is evidently not the case, because of his lack of government funding. If this disruptive "last stand" by Abd continues, it might be an idea for a topic ban. I can see why Kirk Shanahan can speak here with some authority; this does not appear to be the case with Abd, despite the disproportionate number of kbs he contributes here. Mathsci ( talk) 21:09, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Academics aren't editing here, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure I'd consider Shanahan an academic, though he has a PhD, apparently, and has, indeed, published, several papers or replies on cold fusion calorimetry in Thermochimica Acta, outlying analysis, unconfirmed. It appears that he is or was employed by the United States government, at Savannah River National Laboratory.i.e, he is part of the U.S. Department of Energy establishment. [29]. From googling his name, I see that he's been active in opposing Cold fusion for quite a while, possibly a decade or more. I found an interesting page at [30], which refers to an attempt to measure excess heat from "Kirk Shanahan's beads," the linked heat record has a date of June 30, 1996. This is a 1996 report by Shanahan, on some cold fusion work. Mentions Rothwell. And this appears to show that he's been promoting his "bubbles" since 1995. (I.e., the theory that his calibration constant shift is caused by bubbles of deuterium gas that oxidize at the surface of the electrode, causing a hot spot.)

Now, as to editors supporting Storms or Marwan as reliable source, see Objectivist (V), Kevin Bass, Coppertwig, and, of course, myself and Wikipedia guidelines on reliable source. Now as to the other barrage of cheap shots -- it takes a few words to fire off a cheap shot, and many words to refute it, which is why, in the end, sometimes we topic ban editors who debate as Mathsci is, it stimulates huge amounts of wasted text and time -- nobody has been asserting here, what "academics" say in reliable source, except for me; for example, Mathsci kindly provided an academic source that describes Storms in detail and recommends the book. That academic remains a skeptic, but that is irrelevant, and the skeptic seemed to me to be maintaining an open mind. He's not going to be knocked over if it turns out that cold fusion is real. Mathsci, apparently, will, I suggest sitting down when reading recent reliable source on the topic. I DGAF, what I care about is hewing to balance as determined by what's in reliable source, and as interpreted by ArbComm in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science, which I suspect, with some evidence I could provide, that a few editors here have not accepted. What does government funding have to do with the definition of "mainstream science"?. Scary if it did, I'd think. However, most some of Storms original work was indeed governmentally funded, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory. As to Krivit, I assert he is notable, not for the reasons Mathsci claims, but because (1) he's described as an expert on the topic in plenty of media source in March of this year, (2) his on-line newsletter, New Energy Times, is given as a resource in reliable source, and because I personally find that resource invaluable for finding stuff on the topic. I can even read some content there for free that I couldn't read elsewhere, because he's bold enough to host a few recent and important papers under a claim of fair use, which he can do, probably legally, i.e., without legal consequence, as a nonprofit, he simply has to take it down on request. We can't link to those papers by our policy, but, nevertheless, it's been quite useful to me. He has also been nice to me, which is more than I can say for the other side, here. So I'm prejudiced, get over it. I'm not asserting anything outside of propriety, and that a subject has been nice to an editor doesn't establish a COI. Indeed, we should encourage good relationships with outside experts, we need much more of this, from all sides. Could anyone get Gary Taubes to post here? It would be fabulous, I certainly have a lot of questions to ask him. -- Abd ( talk) 00:22, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Storms was not funded by LLNL. He worked for Los Alamos Nat'l Lab. for many years. He did his first CF work there during the '89-'93(?) timeframe. He retired c.'93 or '95, (can't quite remember) and retired under their first big retirement push. Krivit is a journalist, and any referenceing to him should be only on this basis. No different from any other journalist. NET is a pro-CF magazine, not reliable. (potentially useful, as I and others have noted, but not RS). Kirk shanahan ( talk) 16:46, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

P.S. Go to Google, enter "Google Scholar" , enter "Kirk Shanahan". read and enjoy. Kirk shanahan ( talk) 16:52, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

<off-topic> You've written a lot about Kirk Shanahan. Do you have a Ph.D.? I'd assume Verbal is an academic with a Ph.D., like me. I know Cliff Taubes, Gary's brother, but why should Gary have any interest in interacting on the internet with someone like you? </off-topic> Mathsci ( talk) 09:02, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I've written less about Shanahan than he has written about me, and I finally decided to look him up. No, I don't have any advanced degree, I dropped out of Caltech as a junior to pursue other interests. Maybe it was because Feynman only taught undergraduates when I was a freshman and a sophomore. As to Taubes, he wrote a major book on the topic, heavily researched, still quite valuable because of the depth of his research, apparently quite reliable on facts and awful when it comes to his inferences about people's motives, but it enabled him to tell a compelling story. Much more interesting than Huizenga, though Huizenga is deeper on some of the pure science stuff, I think. Haven't read all of either. We also have quite a bit of source about how Taubes did the work, and he seemed to have assumed that some of the research was fraudulent, and he is the one who stirred up the probably false misbehavior charges against Brockris. Basically, the assumption would have come from a belief that cold fusion was impossible, therefore the evidence indicating it must be fraudulent if not experimental error. Understandable, but very mistaken. He's written a totally excellent book, Good Calories, Bad Calories on another major scientific error that arose in the 1970s. Maybe he'd see the similarity. As to why he'd want to communicate with me, that would, obviously, be up to him, but I find that the smarter people are, the easier it is for them to understand what I'm saying and to either get it and agree, or tell me exactly where I'm wrong. Sometimes it takes two words from such a person, and I go "Oops! You're right, why didn't I think of that?" In person, sometimes all it takes is a glance. "Magnetic deviation." Ask me on my Talk, and I'll tell you the story. Already too much for here. -- Abd ( talk) 11:21, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

• It probably won't help much, but in my experience, in academia journal papers in top tier journals are considered the most reliable sources, due to the extensive peer review process that is generally followed. (anyone who's looked into the submission process for a top tier journal would know how difficult it can be). Other peer-reviewed journals come next, followed by conference proceedings using double-blind peer review. So conferences can be high, but only if the peer review process is considered satisfactory, and that relates to both process and the quality of the reviewers. Collected papers are a bit more iffy, but are probably rated above non-peer reviewed conferences. The problem there is the peer review process, which tends to be more narrow than the bigger conferences, and depends a lot of the publication of the review panel and the standing of the authors (Krivit would be quite low on this side, but Marwan would certainly be of higher standing, academically). Books and non-peer reviewed (or "by abstract") conferences are down the bottom in most fields I've worked with, because of the lack of peer review, but I know a few fields which rate books a tad higher (such as archaeology and philosophy). The point being, I guess, that it isn't a matter of saying "conferences are bad" or "the publisher is the main determining factor". I'd rate Storms pretty low, on that scale, as it is a non-peer-reviewed work, but the sourcebook would be higher. - Bilby ( talk) 14:59, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

• It won't hurt. Yes. I agree with all of this, except maybe "Storms pretty low," but that's actually moot. He's lower on the scale than Marwan and Krivit, but because the ACS is probably a more reputable publisher. On the other hand, Storms is highly knowledgeable and credentialed, highly experienced. If you read the actual book, it's quite solid, with some speculation in it that is clearly set off as such, not reported as fact. "Most reliable" is a comparative rating, and only comes into play for Wikipedia for source conflicts, or for otherwise unknown and extraordinary claims with no extended support. For general Wikipedia purposes, the basic determination of source reliability is made based on the publisher, not the author; the author may be, for example, otherwise unknown, not notable. If the publisher is independent and not some fringe focus publishing house, the publication becomes reliable source. But that doesn't mean that it would stand against, say, a peer-reviewed journal in a conflict. The problem, Bilby, is that "unreliable" is being asserted here for publications that would routinely be considered reliable and without there being source conflict. The sources are being asserted as unreliable based on the content, that's blatantly clear, and it is that which is directly contradictory to what Arbcomm has ruled with regard to fringe science. The very determination that cold fusion is fringe science is contaminated by failure to hew to the best sources, which show, not fringe science, but a highly controversial field, one clearly with some level of respect in academia, as well as a lot of rejection that, itself, is largely based on old opinion, and not on review of recent work. I'm not claiming that cold fusion has been "accepted" by the mainstream, but I'm really not clear as to how we'd determine that. That it was rejected twenty years ago, we have plenty of source on that. (Not, by the way, peer-reviewed reliable source, but sources of lower quality, but still reliable source for our purposes, such as media sources.)
• So what do we do if we have sources of low relative quality from 1990, say, that on the face show a contradiction as to the present state of the field, with sources from 2009 that show an emerging science, beginning to gain recognition. The guidelines are actually fairly clear, in general, but they don't make specific decisions. We do. The overall weight of publications in peer-reviewed journals shows support for cold fusion: further, the recent publications, though definitely reduced greatly in number, show an increase over the last five years and the weight is almost unanimously support of cold fusion. Normally, we'd use the weight of such publication to gauge due weight. These are publications, many of them, in mainstream journals, such as Naturwissenschaften. Why should we make an exception here? It's a question, not rhetorical. I'm quite willing to allow the article to continue to show a general rejection of cold fusion, because I think that is still true. But I'm not sure how much this affects the science we report. That general rejection is a social phenomenon, not actually a scientific one, where it is the opinions of those familiar with the research that would count, not "scientists in general." -- Abd ( talk) 16:17, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I think the book should be included in the bibliography. Wikipedia presents all significant POVs; it doesn't mean Wikipedia endorses those POVs. The book contains extensive information on the cold fusion topic. I see no reason for excluding it except the argument that its POV is not mainstream: not a valid reason, since the collection of POVs to be presented in the article depends on what's in the reliable sources, and not the other way around. This is an article about a topic which is not mainstream, so non-mainstream sources need to be used to describe it. The book is published by a respectable publisher and peer-reviewed; there's no reason to exclude it. Steven Krivit has been called an expert in the field in the press release from the American Chemical Society in March. ☺ Coppertwig ( talk) 18:18, 6 June 2009 (UTC)