User talk:Eagle Adler

Welcome to the site! --TheLateGatsby (talk) 18:21, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Also, be sure to "sign" your comments in talk pages with four "~"s or by clicking on the blue pen in the edit box. --TheLateGatsby (talk) 18:22, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Cold fusion
Saw your edits to Fusion woo. You mention cold fusion in your comments on the Talk page (and the article mentions it as well). A confident claim that cold fusion is ready for commercialization would be woo, very likely, and "reactor" is not a term used in legitimate cold fusion experiments, it's confined to certain recent claims for NiH reactions (which may or may not be fusion and which may or many not be real at all, none of this has been confirmed).

But cold fusion itself is amply confirmed, see the most recent comprehensive review of the field in a major multidisciplinary journal, Status of cold fusion (2010) (convenience preprint). Cold fusion is an example where common opinion has not kept up with the scientific journals, that peer-reviewed review is only one of 16 such that I've documented since 2005. The extreme skeptical position disappeared from the journals years ago, and a paper that categorically rejected cold fusion probably could not be approved today.

Note that cold fusion is not understood. From the evidence, deuterium is being fused to helium, without gamma rays (and the claim that fusion reaction must necessarily produce neutrons is bogus, pseudoskeptical woo), but the mechanism (and thus the exact pathway) is unknown. There are, Storms claims, some plausible theories, but all have some defect or other.

But we have RW editors who are quite certain that what I'm telling you is "crank." Because obviously, anyone who "promotes" cold fusion must, ipso facto, be a crank. Like Oxford University Press, and the largest scientific society in the world, the American Chemical Society, which co-published the Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook in 2008 and 2010, I think it was, or Springer-Verlag, the second largest scientific publisher in the world, which publishes Naturwissenschaften, or Elsevier, the largest, which recently published the Encyclopedia of Electrochemical Power Sources, including extensive articles on cold fusion.

None of this matters to the pseudoskeptics on RationalWiki, who are terribly certain of what they believe. --Abd (talk) 21:57, 3 September 2012 (UTC)