The Pomp factor in Cold Fusion - a reply to the open letter by Patrik Wiksten

I have been honored with an open letter by Patrik Wiksten titled “The Pomp factor in Cold Fusion, an open letter to Stephan Pomp” on lenr-forum.com. Of course this well formulated letter deserves an answer so I’ll give it a try. 

The fact that Wiksten has dedicated his reflections about the question of the E-Cat and the continued testing to me probably means that I have touched on a sensitive issue for cold fusion [1] and the understanding of how science progresses in my recent blog-post “The Cat is dead” [2].

Let me start with stating that I think I have an obligation to take part in the E-Cat discussion. I am employed by Uppsala University – and thereby in a sense by the Swedish tax-payers – as professor in applied nuclear physics and as such I teach nuclear physics on various levels. In addition, I also give lectures on the topic of “Science and Pseudoscience” in schools, to students, and on the PhD student level. 

Given the additional fact that the E-Cat-story, since it began to come to public attention in January 2011, involves people from Uppsala University, it is clear that it would be wrong for me not to honor a university teacher’s duty within the so-called 3^rd task. This 3^rd task means that I should not only teach and do research within the walls of the university, but also actively spread scientific knowledge to society. The latter very much includes to take part in discussions about science and scientific reasoning in general and to defend science.   

All this does, of course, not mean that I am failure free [3]. Far from that! And I think that I am very much aware of this quite normal human trait [4]. Actually, the ability to be self-critical and discard ones opinion/belief/previously acquired knowledge when confronted with new evidence is, arguably, at the very heart of what it means to be a scientist. This is a very hard thing to do and it is all too human to defend ones position despite facing contradictory facts.   

Now, how does our work as experimental nuclear physicists look like? When experiments are designed and run, data are analyzed and interpreted, many mistakes are made. This comes almost as a necessity. What we scientists do is supposed to be difficult since we try to extend the realm of knowledge and find out things that no one has reported before. Hopefully though, my colleagues and I manage to get rid of these mistakes by the time we publish the results. We look over and over what we have done, discuss if we think everything was done correctly, whether there might be any mistakes left, and whether there might be alternative explanations for our findings than the ones we propose. What we finally publish represents as complete information as possible for anyone to redo the experiment and/or at least check our analysis routines and judge if the presented conclusions can be drawn from the experimental findings.

A lot of the analysis work is devoted to this tedious and sometimes annoying thing called uncertainty estimation or error analysis. All to allow to challenge the reported results and possibly falsify them.

Because this is what we scientist generally strive for: to either improve older results or falsify them, providing new input as a challenge for theoretical physicists to explain our experimental findings. How boring it would be to just replicate what is already known and has already been done! I mean: where would the fun in science be if we could not challenge the results of the previous generations? Progress is made by identifying mistakes.

Now, Patrik, the mistake you seem to make is to believe that everything that challenges our current knowledge is correct just because it goes beyond “the current paradigm”. Well, we certainly wish for new knowledge but we have to test claims against the facts and things we know. There is a fitting saying: “You have to be open but not so open that your brain falls out!”

It seems obvious to me that the mistake of Levi et al. and, likely, of many people working on “LENR” is the confirmation and publication bias; when some measurement seems to confirm your believe (“excess heat”) it is assumed to be true and factual, and it gets published (or, rather, spread as news on the internet).

When, on the other hand, an experiment fails to produce the result one is looking for (i.e., everything looks as if it fits the current “paradigm”), nothing is published and one looks for a mistake in the setup.

You see the problem, Patrik? An observed excess heat (within LENR research) is an extraordinary claim and one should put in a lot of effort to check and double-check if everything was done correctly, can be reproduced, etc. In the E-Cat case, e.g., one seems, among other things, to have forgotten to check some cabling …

So what is the point of this long post? It simply is that what Levi et al. do is not well-performed research. One can even ask if it is justified to label these reports as “research” (see especially the Appendix, p. 11ff, here).

In addition, the findings reported by Levi et al. - surprisingly and most embarrassingly supported by Elforsk - do not call for an extension of nuclear physics. They outright contradict what we have learned the past 100+ years; no radioactive products, no radiation in the process, yet complete conversion of all nickel isotopes into just one (Ni-62 content being raised from 3.6% to about 99%). This cannot (!) be explained by some new reaction alone if you not also claim that previous fundamental knowledge is plain wrong!

So maybe I am just being lazy but I prefer to use Occam's razor and assume that someone has played a simple trick and switched the samples (already before or after the test). And while E-Cat-fans try to figure out how to reproduce the results without using Joe Labero I grab a beer, try to explain in blog posts how real science works, or just watch a good movie.

Cheers!

Footnotes:
[1] That is if you claim (and some do) that E-Cat = LENR. If that is true (not impossible) than I am afraid to say that LENR is a dead Cat.

[2] See also the follow-up “Mr. Rossi, I admire you”

[3] At least according to my wife and kids. But, of course, they might be wrong :-)
[4] My presentations about “Science and pseudoscience” contain quite a bit of material on this issue and psychological aspects on why we sometimes believe strange things.