HONESTY ON THE INTERNET
By Mitchell Swartz
HONESTY ON THE INTERNET
By Mitchell Swartz
[This article is a response to an email to Dr. Swartz by an interested reader, who we shall call Mr. Murray here, who emailed Dr. Swartz and asked why his "cold fusion" work should prevail, while all others who have tried to succeed in such research had failed! I shall skip several paragraphs of the NEN text for political, legal, and emotional reasons... PB]
Dr. Michael Swartz asked on the Internet: "Would like to know what Mr. Murray's credentials are to handwave dismiss seven independent investigations that passed peer review?
Mr. Murray's response: "I am clearly unqualified in terms of education, employment, and experience." [Give Murray an "A" for honesty.]
Remember when you surf the Internet looking for qualified information that you may be highly disappointed. There are some who, while not qualified to open a laboratory door, are vociferously instructing prestigious scientists how they should be running their experiments. The Internet is highly democratic. Just don't expect to find substantive, accurate information from everyone. The Internet surely makes the peer-reviewed literature look good, even with its enormous faults of over-skepticism for new technology.]
[...skipping several more paragraphs...]
MOST IMPORTANTLY the real issues [in sucessful "Cold Fusion" Research] are the following:
1. If Mr. Murray, or more likely a student or researcher of the field, would like to read further in the literature and apply some numbers, he/she might try issues of greater quantitative significance, such as discussed in M. Swartz, "Relative Impact of Thermal Stratification of the Air Surrounding a Calorimeter," Journal of New Energy, vol 1, no 2, pp 141-143 (1996). For example, the development of hydrogen over the cathode during electrolysis increases the thermal conductivity making the measured excess heat potentially a "lower limit" because the calorimetric thermal leakage increases with the generation of H2 or D2 in the pericathodic volume above the electrode.
2. Mr. Murray might examine the artifacts in the MIT PFC-II data, or the Harwell data, which covered up the confirmation of Fleischmann-Pons cold fusion. These artifacts were carefully examined independently by the US Navy (Dr. Melich), by myself, and others, and have been confirmed subsequently by others.
3. Would also point out that Dr. Melich, Dr. Miles, Dr. Noninski and myself in our SEPARATE studies, devoted weeks and months of time to the analyses [1] involving the errors in the Harwell, MIT PFC-II, and other calorimetric experiments that have been WRONGLY used to claim cold fusion does not exist. Attention is directed to the fact that these times of effort and degree of inspection and the critique wrought appear to have involved orders of magnitude more care (including passage through peer review) than Mr. Murray (or a few of the other arm-chair "critics" of this field) has unfortunately elected to devote to some of his (their) not-fully-baked brick-toss low wattage, and sometimes disinformational, "critiques".
[1] The references are available at the COLD FUSION TIMES web site URL = http://world.std.com/~mica/cft.html
Hope that clarifies at least some of these important matters, and directs those seriously interested where to obtain more information on the scientific and engineering issues.
Dr. Mitchell Swartz (mica@world.std.com)
www.padrak.com/ine/NEN_5_8_4.html
Dec. 10, 1997.