Fair enough. I think that is rather damning.
It would seem they should be able to recreate their initial reaction. Still, it does seem that this is so against the stream, that it could be as elusive as it has been.
If this never pans out, they will be seen as the guys who cried wolf and never produced the goods. And ultimately, that may be appropriate.
If something they noticed does pan out, they still deserve some credit for pointing folks in the right direction.
I realize this is heresy thought with regard to long standing beliefs in this field.
"It would seem they should be able to recreate their initial reaction. Still, it does seem that this is so against the stream, that it could be as elusive as it has been."
It sounds so, until you realize that the Moonfake is simply doing his usual propaganda pitch of taking a PART of the truth but not telling the whole story. P & F "did" recreate their initial reaction and bettered its reproducibility and output.....BUT.....because they were being funded by Toyota, were not allowed to publish the full details of the steps to get the reaction to go. They "did" report in detail on the results as regards calorimetry and the OUTPUT of their reactors, but not the recipe for how to generate the necessary nuclear-active state in palladium.
Where the Toyoda effort fell through was in moving from the lab to engineering. Neither Pons nor Fleischmann had enough engineering skills to accomplish that, and, as I recall, the Toyota heir who had been driving the effort died around that time.
"If this never pans out, they will be seen as the guys who cried wolf and never produced the goods. And ultimately, that may be appropriate. If something they noticed does pan out, they still deserve some credit for pointing folks in the right direction."
Not to worry. I'm sure Pons will be very polite when he finally receives his Nobel.