[extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings (was: cold fusion warms up)

[Damien Broderick]

At 05:40 PM 1/22/2007 -0500, John K Clark wrote:

>It's largely forgotten today but soon after their notorious press conference
>Pons and Fleischmann did submit a paper to Nature, and knowing the potential
>importance of it the editors put it on a fast track for publication; and In
>just a few days they received comments from the referees. They wanted more
>data confirming the reaction, but even more important, they wanted
>clarification of the experimental setup. ... Even
>more astonishing, now after nearly 20 years, **they still haven't been able to
>find the time.**

This simply isn't the case. The canonical paper is

Fleischmann, Pons, Anderson, Li and Hawkins, "Calorimetry of the 
Palladium-Deuterium-Heavy Water System," J. Electroanalytical 
Chemistry, 287, 293, July 25, 1990.

Subsequently, as Beaudette documents at great length, a large number 
of working replications have run hotter than predicted by 
conventional theory. These technical people have had no trouble 
"clarifying the experimental setup" and devising their own variants. 
Indeed, by September 1989, an emeritus prof at U. Minnesota, Richard 
Oriani, had already submitted a report on successful anomalous power 
corroboration to Nature--which was rejected by an editor after 
referees had passed the paper. Since then, a lot of confirmatory work 
has been published, by no means all of it in marginal periodicals 
like Infinite Energy.

Could such a travesty happen? Surely it's impossible in the 
sanctified if sooty halls of science? Think Nobelist 
chemist/physicist Arrhenius--he'd barely scraped through his 
doctorate at the lowest grade, his ideas detested by the academy of the day.

Damien Broderick