Bad news for Sonofusion

[wbongianni]

The Taleyarkhan's work has come under fire, and is being investigated for fraud by his own university, Purdue. http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060306/ ... 306-3.html. Questions were raised by coworkers who had negative results, and were suppressed by Russ. Also, a coworker of Seth Putterman, B. Naranjo, uses the published data to fit californium as the source, rather than dd fusion. He claims that his fit is a better match than dd by a factor of 100 million.

Purdue promises a full disclosure of their investigation in the near future.

If true, why does fusion attract such a pletoria of charletans. Or is a matter of self selection. Wayne

[Wilfried Heil]

Article by Brian Naranjo, which seems to identify Cf-252 as the neutron source.

>http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/naranjo_prl_preprint.pdf

So one of these landmark discoveries is cold coffee, and the other one appears to be nothing but hot air - for now.

The reason for such action would be to secure patent rights, in order to claim priority for a solution that someone else might find in the future. There is an editorial in Nature about the (now withdrawn) sonofusion US patent application as well.

[GMacDonald]

Fraud ...way to funny

Now there is a guy with issues : - )

[Carl Willis]

I read the article about this on CNN.

I posted some graphs of Taleyarkhan's data from one of his papers a while back in this same forum. If we accept his data as being honest, the time structure of the neutron response absolutely precludes any interpretation of it being caused by a continuous neutron emitter such as Cf-252. Of course, if the charge is that Taleyarkhan is fabricating data, Naranjo's argument becomes important. Naranjo's pre-print from yesterday is interesting, but remember two things: first, it is a pre-print and has NOT been peer-reviewed. Second, the raw data from Taleyarkhan that Naranjo uses to claim that the proton-recoil pulse height spectrum is not caused by 2.5 MeV neutrons and may instead be consistent with Cf-252, has very large statistical uncertainties. Look at Naranjo's graph, with number of counts on the vertical axis. He's trying to fit curves through a pulse-height spectrum whose bins have only 5-10 counts in them, and in the energy region that is central to his thesis, the tail above about 0.8 MeVee, there are only 2-3 counts above background on average. Unfortunately I don't have online access to the Nuke Inst. and Methods from 1984 where his statistical correlation procedure is presumably discussed in detail, but on first glance, I would say that his letter is not convincing enough for the implications it carries.

It's one thing to question whether a scientist's interpretation of his data is accurate, for example; but it's a much more serious matter when you publicly question whether he's fundamentally honest. The latter is apparently the thrust of Naranjo's analysis, and for that reason I think he needs a stronger case in the data and needs to have this taken through a peer-review process rather than just tossing it up on ArXiv.

I really do hope Taleyarkhan is being honest. I have no idea, but I do think that extraordinary claims (i.e. that he's dishonest) require extraordinarily conclusive evidence, which we don't see yet.


-Carl

[TBenson]

Having been involved in a similar case, my first reaction is that these accusations of fraud are politically motivated. The fusion science world is corrupt beyond belief.

Note that Putterman, who has been accusing Talearken from the beginning, has is OWN fusion gadget which he has been peddling furiously, and for which he is trying to raise $$. It's amazing to me that the press, and the readers, don't realize that this is happening all the time.

Ultimately I suppose Taleyarkhan could be fraudulent or just mistaken, but my first guess is that his results are valid and his detractors are playing a game of "trash the competitor". It stinks and it's bad for science.

[wbongianni]

I think the fusion community has the same problem the human clone community has; money trumps science. Both have the problem that staking out the territory with prior patents is a just too good to pass up. If the technique is eventually made to work, the patent holder stands to make millions, and perhaps, billions.

It was no accident that Fleshman and Pons were more concerned with patent protection, than peer review.

Finally, extraordinary claims require extordinay proof, and sonofusion is an extraordinary claim. Scepticism is no enemy of science. Wayne

[TBenson]

I agree completely. I am very cautioius and skeptical and very aware of the very real risk of charlatans.

However...I do not consider the actions by the detractors, in this case, to be skepticism. They look like highly publicized character assassination. It's another version of "science by press release" except in this case, instead of making claims, they are attacking the claims. And these attacks are highly inflammaory. For example the word "fraud" is utterly destructive to the scientist involved, even if he is eventually cleared, he may never recover his reputation. Just the accusation is incredibly damaging, and I think, absolutely inappropriate.

Every working scientist I think has got to ask him or her self..."how would I like to have my competitors call me a fraud in print?" Keep in mind that this can be done any time, regardless of your guilt or innocence. The press doesn't care about reality. By the time your name is cleared, your reputation is ruined.

How long before people stop taking risks? How long before science grinds to a frickin halt, because everybody is too scared of attacks to announce anything truly novel or new?

I really think we are in a serious crisis in the US in particular. The environment for truly novel science is extremely bad.

In a similar vein, many surgeons are so frightened of the (very real) risk of litigation, that they are simply refusing to perform certain risky procedures. Think about that. Doctors are scared to try to save people's lives in risky situations, because the risk is being thrown back in their faces as "their fault". It's a total perversion of the nature and purpose of medicine.

A similar thing is happening in physics.

I'm not a physicist, just an outside observer, so perhaps I'm off base, but that's the way it seems to me.

[DaveC]

There are many different kinds of "mistakes" in doing experimental work.

A good scientist tries very hard to disprove his work BEFORE publishing.

A careless scientist (oxymoron, maybe??) just publishes results and leaves it to others to find the mistakes or validate it. This is a bad way to do science.

The charlatan or fraud KNOWS what he is doing, well enough to say the right words (mostly) and baffle 'em with obscure psuedo-science phrases like could be, might be , may be and so on. By carefully adding enough legitimate buzz words, the simple will be impressed and the knowledgeable will be confused, and possibly put off.

Since those providing funding are rarely fully knowledgeable with current laboratory practices and problems, this type of reporting is functional to obtain more funding... for a while.

This issue here will sort out as the accusers and defendant trade technical information. If the Talyarkaian folks have something, it will become evident. It the Putterman folks are onto his game, this will also come out.

In neither case will it be settled by outrageous claims of wrongdoing, but the irrefutable experiemental facts.

It is very important to remember that "scientific philosophy" involves beliefs about things and how one believes they work. It was the stuff of all the Middle Ages foolishness. You will also find an interesting biblical reference in the letter to Timothy where this kind of stuff is called ... "the oppositions of science, falsely so-called".

True "science" involves demonstrable, repeatable, laboratory evidence. The hard anvil of facts.

We seem to be getting less and less of the latter, of late.

Dave Cooper

[Richard Hull]

Prof. Dr. O.M. Bockris of Texas A&M and one of his doctoral candidates had this same gun leveled at them. As noted earlier here by others, academic mud-slinging always ends badly for the accused even if vindicated or cleared.

Read the horror story which I have posted before.

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=7001#p48873

[GMacDonald]

WOW …. I thought contracting was a blood sport and academia was where the tired went to rest .
Gentlemen forgive me
….. I stand corrected … ( humble bow )

DG MacDonald