xedude wrote:
"There's good reason why neither of them still work in their former capacities . . ."
Fleischmann continued in his employment normally until he retired at an advanced age. Pons worked for Toyota for a while at the same job. I do not know where he is now. But I suggest you stop worrying about the personal affairs of these two professors and turn your attention to the scientific literature instead. Their personalities and actions have nothing remotely to do with the subject.
"When the claim was made and other people attempted to repeat their experiment (w/ null results), P&F spit out 'reasons' why only their experiment worked. One of those was that there were some 'details' that P&F hadn't disclosed."
This is incorrect. Again, I suggest you review the actual scientific literature, and also a reliable history of the field, such as Mallove or Beaudette.
"They made the mistake of trying to directly infer neutron production from their gamma spectrum."
Yes, they did. This is the first accurate statement you have made.
"They didn't initially run a control experiment!"
That is incorrect. They performed dozens of control experiments for many years before announcing the results
"As for the other experiments, there is still not something that pops out and says, "hey, here's cold fusion."
Yes, there is: excess heat 4 to 6 orders of magnitude beyond the limits of chemistry, tritium, transmutations and gamma rays.
"Extraordinary claims require extradordinary proof."
No, they do not. They require ordinary proof, with standard off-the-shelf instruments and long accepted techniques. They should be evaluated objectively and fairly, and held to the same standards and rigor we demand for ordinary claims. "Ordinary claims" should not be given a free pass. Many supposedly "ordinary" explanations for cold fusion have been offered that do not begin to meet minimum standards of credibility. See, for example, the critiques written by some of the DoE review panel members, especially #7. In my summary, I pointed out some obvious problems with #7's hypothesis. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm
"For those people who are interested in a nontechnical discussion of the events that kicked off the whole cold fusion debate, there is a pretty good book about the whole P&F fiasco, written by Gary Taubes called 'Bad Science : The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion'."
I disagree. My views about this author are here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusion.pdf
(See pages 4 and 5.)
- Jed