Detecting the presence of these transmuted elements should be much easier to replicate than trying to characterize "excess" heat, right? And the next step would be to try and find out what isotope of the transmuted elements was? Anyone know how much deuterium costs?
It depends. The transmuted elements could be viewed as contaminants while it'd be hard to explain away excess heat. There are so many sources of potential contamination. Random heat signatures not so much.
Heat is notoriously difficult to measure accurately, especially when small amounts are being produced or if the experiment runs over a long time.
Heat can also have many sources, some of which aren't expected by even highly experienced experimenters.
For example, hydrogen has spin isomers, and the conversion of orthohydrogen into parahydrogen releases energy.
Metals like palladium can also release surprising amounts of energy due to lattice or adsorption effects.
Graphite absorbs neutrons in reactors and can store sufficient energy in the lattice structure defects that it's a hazard if released too quickly.
Electrical interference can produce currents that are absorbed in the metal. Residual magnetic fields release energy if the metal is demagnetised. Etc...
Meanwhile, measuring the production of new elements is trivial, even in tiny amounts, and cannot possibly occur via only chemical processes. Crystal structure, phase transitions, external fields, etc... have no effect on this measurement. It is a simple, reliable, accurate measurement.
If you see a scientist insisting that you pay attention to the unreliable metric and waves his hands to explain why you should ignore the reliable metric then it's a safe bet that he's either fooling you, or he fooled himself.
The level of evidence required increases with the audacity of the claim. That's because outrageous new physics is almost never the case, for the same reason that miracles or aliens are almost never (or just never) the explanation for something.
"Extraordinary evidence" is usually interpreted, nowadays, as unobtainable evidence, with the effect that any discovery incompatible with current consensus is reflexively discounted.
This is less often harmful in cases where the current consensus is based more on actual evidence than on groupthink and conformity. So, in physics, there is actual evidence for most things observable.
But there are plenty of fields where fashion prevails. Without citing current problem children, geology until quite recently forbade mention of catastrophic events like bolide strikes, and psychology filtered all hypotheses through behaviorism.
It's evidence so incontrovertible and ironcland that the chance it is wrong (or faked) is less than the chance the outrageous claim is true.
This could be close to unobtainable, for sufficiently outrageous claims. The argument I am making goes all the way back to Hume's "Of Miracles".
In the specific case of Cold Fusion and the like, the evidence is further impeached by the lack of progress. What's happening looks just like a pseudoscientific study of nothing that spits out bad results that never goes anywhere.
That presupposes a correct probability, implicitly assuming the consensus model is correct. That begs the question, a fundamental cognitive mistake.
The current consensus model does not deserve any privilege over any other model that also accounts for the same body of evidence. The degree of privilege afforded to it is exactly the inertia that prevents progress.
Science does not need for there to be a consensus model. Nature doesn't have one. Insistance on a single model when more than one meets requirements is purely human pigheadedness, and a primary impediment to progress.
None of this means that low-energy fusion happens, or doesn't. But the vociferous attacks on reports of what looks like it are the absolute antithesis of science. Science says only, "Try it again, more carefully."
The sort of scientific nihilism you are advocating there is obviously unworkable. Decisions have to be made based on SOMETHING. Science encodes the condensed wisdom of experience, so if you say don't use what we know, what process do you propose to use to decide what is worthy of investigation?
Cold Fusion requires not just one "miracle", but a stack of multiple miracles, all in contravention of existing knowledge. It requires that fusion can occur when QM calculations show it can't. It requires that excited nuclei not emit gamma radiation. It requires that energy go not into energetic charged particles (which would produce detectable secondary radiation) but somehow immediately go into the lattice of a solid, spread over large numbers of atoms.
Stack on top of that another coincidence: that despite P&F's initial results being shown to be shit, that somehow there was a pony in there somewhere anyway.
The simplest and cleanest explanation for all this LENR work is that it's nonsense driven by some combination of almost pathologic wishful thinking, incompetence, and even outright fraud.
I don't understand what is supposed to be nihilistic about treating evidence as evidence. If it's fraud, the evidence will say so. If it's nonsense, the evidence will say so. Sometimes the evidence is fine, but is being misinterpreted, and sometimes then indicates something more interesting than had been guessed. Guessing wrong is not fraud. Reporting exactly the results you got is what is supposed to be expected, whatever the results suggest.
It took much longer than it should have to converge on the unit charge, just because everyone after Millikan was afraid to report a result too far from his.
> I don't understand what is supposed to be nihilistic about treating evidence as evidence.
What is nihilistic is your ignoring all the previous evidence, the evidence that, as I told you, gets encoded into known physical laws. That's the problem with radical changes: they require repudiation of all that evidence, in favor of the comparatively razor thin evidence that has caught your fancy.
> No, background radiation makes nuclear radiation a noisy and ambiguous signal.
You make a decent measurement -- my former speciality. That's not waving a Geiger counter surrounded by concrete or granite. (It just wouldn't have been worth the effort at the time of the original cold fusion nonsense.) Sure, about atomic reaction products if you can analyse their appearance as well as neutrons and gamma rays.
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