Talk:Cold fusion - Misplaced Pages

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Suggest you solicit information from the cold fusion researchers

I work as an editor and translator for a group of roughly 200 retired scientists and university professors who are working on cold fusion energy. I maintain a web page on the subject:

http://lenr-canr.org/

The article here in Misplaced Pages on cold fusion is generally good, but contrary to your published policy it does express some strongly partisan points of view. This is probably unavoidable. Cold fusion is a very contentious field, and most professional scientists believe the effect does not exist. Although your article is more open-minded and comprehensive than statements published by the Scientific American and some other mainstream journals, cold fusion researchers who have evaluated it tell me they feel it is biased.

Some of my colleagues have attempted to change the article, but these changes have been deleted by skeptics. I understand that you can "lock" articles, making them read-only, and you can impose a measure of informal editing or peer-review. Because cold fusion is so controversial, and there is such hostile skeptical opposition to it, and because those who support it are a small minority in the scientific community, I suggest you lock this article. Mr. Brooks tells me articles are seldom locked, and it would require of contentious debate before a decision to protect one can be made. That is fine. There is no rush. I suggest you consider the matter for as long as you feel necessary.

I am in contact with all of the major researchers in this field, including the discoverer Professor Martin Fleischmann. If you can offer reassurances that contributions written by these researchers will not be erased or defaced, I would be happy to write material and solicit material from them directly that would represent their research more accurately than the present article does. I also have a large database of 3100 papers in EndNote format, which makes it easy for me to produce a well-documented review. Here is what I propose to do:

I will write a revised version of your article, but before I upload it, I will circulate it to the researchers whose papers I cite in the footnotes, to confirm that I have accurately described their work.

I will not delete any of the skeptical comments now in your article, although I may modify them slightly for clarity and to indicate that they are, in fact, skeptical. I would be happy to circulate the draft to whoever wrote the skeptical comments to be sure their point of view is accurately represented.

This would be a lot of work. Frankly I am not inclined to do it unless a consensus emerges here that it would be a good idea, and the Misplaced Pages powers that be agree to . You cannot expect someone like Fleischmann to submit comments that might be trashed or erased.80 year-old retired professors do not operate by those rules -- if you want information from them you must accommodate their demands and customs.

Of course they and I welcome any corrections, editing or peer review, but I will not spend weeks on an article that may be summarily erased without warning.

Perhaps I am asking for assurances that the Misplaced Pages community does not wish to make, or cannot make. In that case, I will drop the subject.

Here is one example of what I think needs to be said. The article now reads:

"Energy source vs power store

While the output power is higher than the input power during the power burst, the power balance over the whole experiment does not show significant imbalances. Since the mechanism under the power burst is not known, one cannot say whether energy is really produced, or simply stored during the early stages of the experiment (loading of deuterium in the Palladium cathode) for later release during the power burst.

A "power store" discovery would yield only a new, and very expensive, kind of storage battery, not a source of abundant cheap fusion power."

I would change that to something along these lines:

Skeptics claim that while the output power is higher . . .

. . .

Cold fusion researchers point out a number of flaws in this argument:

1. There is no significant chemical fuel was present in the solution. The potential chemical energy and chemical storage of cells has been carefully inventoried and it shown to be less than 500 joules, whereas cold fusion cells have produced between 50 and 300 million joules.

2. No chemical process can produce (or store) more than 10 eV per atom of reactant, whereas many cold fusion reactions have produced between 1,000 and 100,000 eV per atom.

3. Many cells have produced significant excess heat after a short incubation period, so if there were energy storage, it would show up quite clearly as an energy deficit (an endothermic reaction). Small endothermic reaction such as the initial formation of palladium deuteride are readily observable with most calorimeters. For example, with some cells, about a week after the experiment begins, 10% to 30% excess heat begins and it continues for about a month continuously. If this were caused by a storage mechanism, there would have to be an energy deficit large enough to capture all of the heat during the one-week start up phase. Roughly 60% of the input energy would have to be absorbed by the palladium, presumably in the formation of an exotic deuteride. As far as anyone knows, this scenario is chemically impossible, and there is absolutely no evidence that such deuterides have been formed, but if they were, the 60% deficit would show as clearly as the 30% positive excess does.

4. Some cold fusion reactions have started up with little or no incubation time, sometimes as short as 20 minutes, and many occur without any significant input energy, especially with gas-loaded, cavitation and ion-beam loading , or with finely divided (powder) metal targets.

. . . and so on.

Please let me know if you would be interested in a contribution of this nature.

Sincerely,

Jed Rothwell

JedRothwell@mindspring.com

Thank you for your comments! I hope that with your help we can improve this article, removing some of its bias (without replacing it by counter-bias, of course) and making it more informative. However, we must work within the limitations of (and take advantage of) the Wiki environment.

"Locking" or protecting a page is really a last-resort, temporary measure, designed to let edit wars cool off rather than to fix a page in a "correct" state (after all, how would new discoveries be merged?). It is generally agreed to be a very destructive act to the Wiki in general (for example, frustrated editors may make inappropriate changes to other pages - in this case, edit wars might spill over to fusion power).

As you say, distinguished scientists are not accustomed to having their work mercilessly edited and modified. However, this is not the correct place to put their original writings anyway. Misplaced Pages's Misplaced Pages:No original research policy explicitly forbids this sort of thing - after all, original research does not belong in an encyclopedia. What I would suggest is that you write up your article, as you suggest; it could be based on the Misplaced Pages text or not, as you prefer, and then post it in some other location. You or others could then edit this article, using (and referring to) yours as an authoritative reference. Of course, this article could be edited again by others, but it's very difficult to make a wild claim stand when it contradicts a concretely-referenced fact.

Alternatively, simply providing concrete references to papers contradicting what's in the article now (here on the Talk page, say) would probably spur users here into amending the article. For example, if you could give specific references for points 1 through 4 above (ideally in the form of web links, even if only to journals accessible only to subscribers, but many of us do have access to university libraries) I for one would be happy to try to merge them into the article.

If you feel that you are making edits well-supported by references, and they are still being ripped out, we have various dispute-resolution mechanisms, the first of which is simply to post here discussing the specific change.

In short, we cannot "lock" your edits in as the Final Word, but if you (or someone, anyway) provide concrete references, they are unlikely to be removed. If you feel a particular edit has introduced bias (or re-introduced), please discuss it here.

I hope we can take advantage of your knowledge, one way or another. This article could certainly stand to be improved! --Andrew 16:45, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Andrew wrote:

As you say, distinguished scientists are not accustomed to having their work mercilessly edited and modified.

Actually, they are accustomed to that. They fight like cats and dogs. Any researcher still working on cold fusion has very thick skin. That is not the problem. What bothers them about this kind of article is:

Accountability; they want to know who wrote this stuff. They do not care whether people have PhDs, but they want your return address.

Rigor. This article makes many statements which are not footnoted and not in evidence (as far as I know).

Accuracy. Many of the statements in this article are contradicted by textbook physics and chemistry. If I were to write something like this and then circulate it for comments, they would tell me: "do your homework! Don't bother me with a half-baked paper!"

"However, this is not the correct place to put their original writings anyway. Misplaced Pages's Misplaced Pages:No original research policy explicitly forbids this sort of thing - after all, original research does not belong in an encyclopedia."

I propose to summarize the present research in layman's terms.

"What I would suggest is that you write up your article, as you suggest; it could be based on the Misplaced Pages text or not, as you prefer, and then post it in some other location."

I have written and ghost-written many papers and posted them at LENR-CANR.org, but most are not for the layman, and they are too long and detailed for an encyclopedia entry.

I could do that. I would be happy to make a few other suggestions.

. . . Okay, I beefed up the previous statements with a few footnotes and some clarifications. It is attached to the end of this thread (or whatever you call these things.) It does not convert well from the Word format, and I have not added the hyperlinks, but you get the picture. This is too long, but I could reduce it to a paragraph or two. doing this for the entire article would take weeks, I think, plus I would have to run it past the researchers for review, and it takes them weeks more to respond.

- Jed

(edit conflict)

I hope we can take advantage of your knowledge, one way or another. This article could certainly stand to be improved! --Andrew 16:45, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Andrew wrote:

As you say, distinguished scientists are not accustomed to having their work mercilessly edited and modified.

Accountability; they want to know who wrote this stuff. They do not care whether people have PhDs, but they want your return address.

Rigor. This article makes many statements which are not footnoted and not in evidence (as far as I know).

I propose to summarize the present research in layman's terms.

"What I would suggest is that you write up your article, as you suggest; it could be based on the Misplaced Pages text or not, as you prefer, and then post it in some other location."

I have written and ghost-written many papers and posted them at LENR-CANR.org, but most are not for the layman, and they are too long and detailed for an encyclopedia entry.

I could do that. I would be happy to make a few other suggestions.

- Jed

(edit conflict)

Firstly Welcome to wikipedia! We always welcome well referenced material but not original research. So provided the facts that you state above have been published in a reputable, peer reviewed, scientific journal than yes please! However you have been misinformed about page locking. We don't lock pages. We never have done, and there are no plans to do so in the immediate future (although long term who knows?)Perhaps you have been confused by page protection. We sometimes protect a page from vandalism or edit warring (where two opposing factions repeatedly edit the article to their preferred point of view instead of trying to come up with a neutral point of view that they may not love but can both live with)but this is only ever a temporary measure - a few days to a couple of weeks at most. We have found that out controversial policy of allowing everyone and anyone to edit, generally produces a better, more neutral, more informative article than anything a panel of experts can produce. If you live with the very real possibility (no probability) that anything you add will be edited to kingdom come, then we welcome you with open arms. If OTOH an open environment where literally anyone can edit is not for you, then we understand. Theresa Knott (ask the rotten) 17:00, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Theresa Knott wrote:

"So provided the facts that you state above have been published in a reputable, peer reviewed, scientific journal than yes please!"

Yes, they are. I was going to mention that the article as written does not meet that standard. Many of the assertions and it are not documented, and some are contradicted by the literature.

Well that's excellent news, because i agree, the article needs improving.

"However you have been misinformed about page locking. We don't lock pages."

D. Brooks and Wired magazine say you do in rare cases. I believe the special nature of cold fusion -- the fact that it is so controversial and there is so much misinformation about it -- make it a good candidate for locking. Perhaps some other method can be devised. You might have two articles about cold fusion, one written by experts which cannot be changed, and the other written by your usual methods.

The "rare cases" are pages like the main page (because if it gets vandalised our visitors may get a very strange impression of[REDACTED] "did you know: that paul is gaaaaaayyyyy!!! Ha I am an uber1337 haxor!" doesn't go down too well. As far as I am aware none of our articles are permanently locked.

"We have found that out controversial policy of allowing everyone and anyone to edit, generally produces a better, more neutral, more informative article than anything a panel of experts can produce."

The article about cold fusion is better than most, but it is highly opinionated from my point of view, and it has many technical errors and facts not in evidence. I think a panel of experts could do a better job, but they will not do it unless you let them work the way they are accustomed to.

I understand where you are comimg from. Many academics do not take to the Misplaced Pages way of editing at all. But some do, and we always want more. But we do not give special treatment to anyone I'm afraid. I'll explain why below.

"If you live with the very real possibility (no probability) that anything you add will be edited to kingdom come, then we welcome you with open arms."

No, I cannot ask the researchers to contribute on that basis, and I myself am not willing to spend a month on that kind of project. If you would like a more technically accurate article on cold fusion you will have to adjust the rules somewhat, and make this section more like a conventional journal or encyclopedia. I do not know how flexible your methods are, and I am certainly not here to tell you how to run this web site. If you are allowed to improvise new rules for a peculiar situation I recommend you do so.

- Jed

No we wont do that, for the following reason. When Jimbo started Misplaced Pages he started another encylopedia at the same time. It was called Nupedia. Nupedia was much more traditional, your article would be reviewed by a panal of experts who would pass it (or fail it) based on thier opinion of it's accuracy tone etc. Nupedia in principle sounded great. But in practise it was a dismal failure. Meanwhile Misplaced Pages has grown from nothing into a pretty darn good encylopedia in the space of 3 years. It's not perfect, many of our aticles need a lot more work to be up to the best possible standard, but we are getting there, and we are better than many other encylopedias already. We are not going to change our working practices that have served us so well so far. Theresa Knott (ask the rotten) 20:39, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Theresa Knott wrote:

"No we wont do that, for the following reason. When Jimbo started Misplaced Pages he started another encylopedia at the same time."

I suggest that the situation with cold fusion calls for a unique approach. Your procedures and rules may work well in most cases, but flexibility is called for in this case. I see no reason why you should dogmatically stick to one and only one approach, without regard to unique circumstances, history, or social factors.

"It's not perfect, many of our articles need a lot more work to be up to the best possible standard, but we are getting there, and we are better than many other encyclopedias already."

Most articles may be good, but this one is not. I agree it is better than other encyclopedias -- I said so in the introduction -- but I have pointed out some major flaws that could be fixed.

I think I have stated my case pretty clearly, so I will not trouble you by reiterating it. If you are not enthusiastic about this idea, I will drop it, and get back to editing this stack of papers from Italy and China that appeared in my in-box the other day.

- Jed

We welcome your participation; if you feel like contributing directly, that would be welcome, but if you'd rather just feed us raw data on the talk page, that's certainly helpful too (well, within reason!). But I'm afraid your idea of moving the page to a more administered version is not going to happen. If you'd like details on how the protection process works, see ] and ]. In spite of having many really contentious articles (Male circumcision is the site of a cur