Wow. This is really something. If their results can be duplicated, it’s a game changer.
Pons and Fleischmann should go down in history, and probably will.
They’re the opposite of Michelson and Morley. M&M set out to prove something big, and when they didn’t... opened the door to something even bigger. AFAIK, no one laughed at them when they announced that they could not find evidence of the “luminiferous aether.”
P&F set out to prove something big and did so. Because of university politics surrounding them, they were driven off the stage by catcalls and thrown tomatoes.
I think P&F be remembered in much the same way as Davisson and Germer, who demonstrated the existence of electron spin - a purely quantum effect - using macroscopic apparatus. By showing that quantum mechanics governed the behavior of particles with mass just as it does photons, they played a huge role in defeating the last of the quantum skeptics (what today we would call “quantum deniers” LOL).
It will fall to others to do the same for P&F, but if these results hold up, it will be done for P&F. Only a matter of time.
When will MIT - the center of gravity of the anti-LENR backlash back in 1989 - start asking for federal money to do LENR research? That’ll be when the dam bursts.
Toyota - IIRC - took P&F under their wing after the 1989 uproar subsided. They’re not stupid, obviously.
Not needed. The Toyota work "is" the needed replication of the Mitsubishi work. More confirmations would be "nice" but this is the essential validation of the earlier work.
And you are remembering correctly that Toyota did set up P & F in a laboratory in France with good equipment and funding. Unfortunately, that was done at the behest of the chairman of Toyota, and when he died, support from Toyota waned. But P&F did, at that laboratory and time period, replicate and extend their earlier work from Utah. Not much was published involving the mechanisms (Toyota and the trade secret meme), but they DID publish proof that their original calorimetry and excess heat measurements from Utah were correct.