In Spain we have also the case:

www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/Ciencia/china/duplicada/Galicia/elpep

or

www.faz.net/artikel/C31373/plagiatoren-in-spanien-war-die-guttenberg-a

Great conversation, but I think we need a clearer definition of 'fraud.' Mendel and Newton 'fudged' or 'tweaked' their experiments or data to make them 'fit.' But we now might say that they were right. So is tweaking fraud? That seems to be something of a different scale than say Sir Cyril Burt's faking of his twin IQ studies.

You are right that it is necessary to distinguish the concepts fraud, mistake, plagiarism, intellectual theft, ...But for me it was assumed that the fraud was easily understood. Please could you this distinguish all these concepts or give more examples which have been happening in the history? Thank you in advance

Daniel B : uses Cold Fusion as an example of scientific fraud, but just

because no other institution could duplicate the results of

Fleischmann and Pons, does not make it a fraud.

You need to become more informed about these Low Energy Nuclear

Reactions ( LENR ) by reading articles in the Magazine:

INFINITE ENERGY. There have been a small group of dedicated

individuals continuing to do experiments with some limited success

in combining two elements in glass tubes with applied arcs, and

the result is a third element.

INFINITE ENERGY magazine is available thru BARNES AND NOBLE

Book Sellers in the US, but I do not know how or where it is available

outside the US.

In addition, just because you can make small quantities of a third

element in a test tube, does not make it a commercially viable

thing to do. Now if you could apply focused Solar Energy on two

or more inexpensive elements, with the result being a rare

element that is humanly desirable for something like the mico-

electronics industry, then it would be a useful thing to do.

The problem is that whatever you " make " needs to be less

expensive than the mining, milling, processing and shipping costs

combined, and what you begin with also needs to be relatively

inexpensive.

It is now possible to " make " Gold, but to make Gold, you need

to start with Platinum which is more expensive than Gold, so

why would you want to do it, if you lose lots of money in the process.

Dear Michael,

Do you think that there are nuclear reactions at room temperature? Please, could you tell me a serious publication of that?

Which raises the question on how to distinguish between frauds who know that they are deceiving others and fringe scientists who really believe their - er - theories. Can one be a fraud when one's deluded?

Dear Joachim,

I am quite agree with you, but perhaps we are wrong. In any case this could be a wonderful opportunity to defend those differences that they claim to understand. I think that it is important to write about these things for avoiding to promote people who doesn't deserves it and to value others who works strongly for obtaining interesting results.

The Chart of The Nuclides indicates over 3500 nuclear reactions

that are, if I am not mistaken all fission reactions where changes

occur that fission heavier element down the chart toward

simpler and more stable elements. Some half lives are extremely short,

and some take billions of years.

The Magazine : INFINITE ENERGY discusses low energy nuclear reactions

that involve fusion, and others that involve fission.

For example it is now possible to create Gold from Platinum, but why would you

want to as Platinum is more valuable than Gold. Just because something

is now marginally possible in a fancy T shaped glass tube in the

presence of a carbon arc, does not make it an economically

intelligent thing to do.

If nothing else, INFINITE ENERGY magazine is an interesting read.

The question for me is we can have a cold nuclear reaction or not. It was claimed that it was possible to reach a nuclear fusion at room temperature and ( I am not at expert in nuclear physics) this is impossible for my humble point of view. Obviously this would be the solution a the problem of energy that our society has and if you claim it without clear results it means that you are doing a scientific fraud because it seems that there is the intention to deceive.

I do not know whether the report of cold fusion could be identified as fraud or not. To my understanding it could be a chance mistake of perception who happened to observe some thing unusual which they believed to be cold fusion. I agree that they should have been very careful in making such a conclusion which was even by common sense unacceptable. However, this report makes some people to doubt even possible experimental observation of cryogenic emission of electrons. I tried to explain this observation in a recent paper entitled, 'Unravelling the origin of cryogenic emission of electrons -a challenging unsolved problem of condensed matter physics' available on research gate. I would be happy if some body can tell me where exactly my perception goes wrong. Else, do some of you believe that the observation of cryogenic emission of electrons is a phenomenon which can be placed on the level of cold fusion. I would be looking for your comments.

In development of science people can make mistakes, a word like fraud can be attached if people do not take note of the reminders of they being wrong.

Scientific community has lately been very concerned about plagiarism and intellectual theft. However, I wonder if there is any mechanism to deal with a situation which is faced by many scientists around the world. Although it is a well accepted fact that several researches, which were not published in spite of their accuracy because the referees in their mind set believed them to be wrong, were later found to be true and revolutionary. A classic example is the observation of oscillatory chemical reaction for which Belousov (who first observed it) was humiliated and insulted for reporting it in a conference. However, later when other scientists confirmed the observation, Belousov was awarded with highest National honour, but after his death. One would agree that even to day many scientists are facing serious problems to get their similar researches published and to have due recognition for their hard work. Their researches are not getting published just because the publication gives them some recognition and this has a contradiction with the professional interests of referees and referees have the final word for editors. In the process, people who are working hard to reveal the truth of nature are being humiliated and insulted, while the scientists who have been working on conventional ideas and conventional approaches are enjoying their works in spite of the fact that their efforts are inconclusive or wrong. Interestingly, this is going on since in the contemporary world of science where other scientists have no time to see if wrong practices are going on in other fields. Is it not a fraud ? If it is what should be done to stop it ? Shouldn't all concerned come forward to help the development of science in the right direction and raise voice to stop such practices ? I think every field of science should have a society with a sole objective to listen appeals against such practices and to bring justice to the efforts of all who are victims of such a situation. In my humble opinion no Belousev should leave this world waiting for deserving recognition for his scientific work. SO, ARE WE READY TO WORK IN THIS DIRECTION ?

Dear Jain,

I agree with you that there are the two extremes: people who makes tricks or traps for obtaining their promotion or others which didn´t get their promotion or recognition due to their hard work or talent. This is quite injust and over all when we live in one world where the communication is so easy.

So if you want, I think that we could open a window for discussing here about these problems. For example why not to send here the comments of referees that clearly are wrong or papers which are a copy of one idea that we have send to publish to a review.

Obviously this needs to have brave people but with enough knowledge on the subject. I haven´t had time to read your paper but at a first look it is interesting although out of my actual knowledge.

Hello Daniel,

Thanks for your concern. In my opinion, this is not a question of one person or other who has been victim of a fraternity of scientists (referees and editors) who dominates the field by their belief in a particular set of premises and approach to get the theory they have been trying to build. The question concern many who are really victim of similar fraternities in different branches of physics and possibly in other subjects. While I certainly look for an academic help of physics community to establish the truth of nature in relation the low temperature behaviour of many body systems like liquid Helium-4 and liquid Helium-3, I feel that the physics community should have an international society dedicated to help in all such cases and publish a journal which not only publishes the papers with referee's comment and clarification of author(s) and if necessary invite opinion of other scientists after the publication.

In any case, for immediate reasons, I welcome your idea of opening a window to discuss on what has been the outcome of sustained efforts of last 75 years where superfluidity of He-II has been presumed to be a consequence of p=0 condensate and what is the potential of the new theory that I developed by using new approach based on first quantisation. While the former efforts have been reviewed elegantly in a recent review article published in Sept 2013, my theory of He-II is now published in Amer. J Conden Matter Physics 2, 32-52(2012)).

Dear Jain,

Nowadays we have a powerful tool for sending quasi-instantaneous information to everybody of one community intelligent, as the scientific is presumably.

Unfortunatelly when you read papers, even within the most prestigous reviews, you find mistakes or misinterpretations difficult to believe. On the other hand, you know that a great percentage of recent discovers have had troubles for publishing. One paradigmatic example was the integer quantum Hall effect, but there are others very important too. Therefore I think that it would be very interesting to hava a place where, freely and in an open form, we could say many of these things which only belong to the hide side of our personal contacts. I believe that this could be a good oportunity to clean internationaly home.

I think that this kind of information is very worthy to tell it in the scientific community, no just for fun of knowing better our component of human behaviour but for trying to repair abuses which clearly might be done with certain idea or result.

I am very skeptic of commitees or other kind kind of tribunals for deciding what is right or wrong in science. Fortunataly we have the reproducible experiment at difference of other human activities, which is out of our subjective thoughts, but in between there is all a procedure which could give a one the things who belongs to the other.

The important for me is to have knowledge of the different situations which could be dead in a worthy person or humble laboratory.

Well then, exactly what should do be done to curb this situation where referees do not allow a research to share publication space precisely because the success of the research in question has a conflict of interest with them. They are not ready to even discuss the merit and demerits of the research. I hope every physicist would agree that this practice is against the basic principle of:

(i) research which aims at concluding the truth of nature,

(ii) of teaching which aims at conveying the correct understanding of the subject,

(iii) scientific behaviour which aims al letting different scientific account of a phenomenon reach the larger community of science as early as possible because no body knows it could be useful for human welfare, faster development of the subject and related technology, etc. etc.

In summary there are many ways in which hurdles created by referees are against the social and scientific world. I do not know if it could be a bigger ..... than reporting an observation like COLD FUSSION. Perhaps it is.

Millikan's Oil Drop Experiment was the Biggest Scientific Fraud in 20th Century.

Dear Pradosh,

Thank you very much for the answer, but could you explain it a little bit deeper?

Dear Pradosh,

Let me to try to explain something about the "fraud" that you have mentioned: Millikan's measurement of the electric charge of the electron. This is a quite simple experiment that most of the laboratories of the faculties of physics have nowadays for undergraduated students.

The idea is simple: charged drops are left to fall in between to charged plates and in such form that the electric and gravitational forces are balanced. At a certain moment the electric field is off and then the Stokes law of motion is applied when is folling under the gravitation law.

The fantastic thing is that during the Nobel lecture talk, Millikan gave a value of 1.5924(17)×10−19 C (the two digest beween parenthesis includes the error), while the value accepted at present is 1.602176565(35)×10−19 C. And this error is more than five times the standard error that Millikan was using in his measurements, in spite of being less than the one percent of difference with the present one. This is the kind of fraud that I do not consider as such, because at those times it was even discussed if the electrons had a discrete electric charge.

The criticism to this experiment was done by people of R.Feynman based in the wrong value of the air viscosity used or by the historian G. Horton due to the selection made with the chosen drops. In any case for me the experiment is simple, nice and the accuracy actually fantastic.

Daniel:

The normal statistical mechanics for the expected rate of hydrogen-hydrogen interactions at RTP aren't valid in the presence of a palladium electrode.

Palladium is a “freak” metal with some very odd properties, and the spacing of its atoms gives it a freakish affinity for hydrogen and deuterium. At “room temperature and pressure”, I think a litre of palladium is supposed to suck up around 900 litres (!!!) of hydrogen, so immediately, your RTP hydrogen experiment is now actually running with a hydrogen density that's around a thousand times greater than RTP.

And then it gets even worse. The deuterium dissolved inside the palladium isn't unordered, it's arranged within crystalline regions as a sort of artificial “pseudo-metallic” arrangement that mirrors the surrounding palladium crystal structure, except that deuterium is free to move through the surrounding metal, but only in given directions and along given paths. It's pretty much a recipe for creating closely-aligned deuterium-deuterium collisions, with the palladium matrix providing containment and inertial confinement.

Then you have the grain structure of the palladium to take into account – the monocrystalline regions will have two-dimensional boundaries that further concentrate the deuterium into sheets, and also into one-dimensional columns where three microcrystals meet, and pointlike regions where four microcrystals meet.

If the rate of fusion is a function of the statistical likelihood of getting near-perfect headon collisions, then a palladium matrix would seem to send the likelihood of these collisions through the roof without our having to invent any new physics, simply because of the microstructure. Unfortunately we don't yet know enough about how hydrogen moves through palladium and what the dependencies might be on the palladium's physical microstructure to be able to calculate an actual reaction rate. So it's not just that we're lacking a computer model that lets us assign numbers to the claimed P&F effect, we're also lacking an adequate computer model for any sort of hydrogen or deuterium fusion statistics within palladium, period. We know that the reaction rate would be expected to be significantly higher than normal, but we don't know how to put a figure on “significantly”.

Also, since it's quite possible that any significant numbers of collisions might be mostly happening within in the dense “hydrogen rivers” flowing along the network of crystal boundaries running through the palladium, it's quite possible that an effect might be strong in one piece of palladium and weak in another, depending on the microstructure, the fault characteristics, the way that he palladium has been treated, whether or not anyone's previously dropped it on a hard surface, whether it was cast or machined, and so on.

There's just too many variables – it's quite conceivable that one group might find a significant effect and another might not, and I quite understand why groups chose to give up when they couldn't replicate the effect.

But to “cry fraud” when the effect isn't replicated in chunks of palladium is probably to fail to appreciate the complexity of the situation. When the P&F controversy broke, I saw loads of nuclear physics guys standing up and publicly “crying fraud” based on their certainty that that there was no possible way to get accelerated nuclear reactions from a beaker and a metal electrode – they tended to see the suggestion as professionally insulting - but when I asked a few of those guys how much they knew about palladium, not one of the guys I asked had heard of palladium's crazy hydrogen affinity, because they were physicists, not chemists.

Emil Rupp was one of the world's most successful experimenters in the field of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s … until people realised that the reason why he kept being able to come up with results before anyone else was that he was doing a lot of pre-research to work out how an experiment should play out, and writing it up and publishing, but eliminating the "redundant" middle stage of actually carrying out the experiments. :)

Physicists don't tend to talk about Rupp, because it's almost an article of faith that no respectable physicist would ever fake data, and Rupp's the nightmare counterexample. He was to 1920s/30s experimental physics what Bernie Madoff was to Wall Street finance.

Dear Eric,

Thank you very much for your comments but I am still without understanding the cold fusion. You only speak about possibilities of being produced a chemical reaction in presence of palladium, why? How is possible to joint the hydrogen nucleus for making a nuclear reaction and to produce helium?

Please, is anyone able to justify the cold fusion just speaking about palladium or other chemical compound? Do you know a reliable publication about it?

Apparently, the cold fusion is again being talked. See the following links.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cold-fusion-is-hot-again/

https://mospace.library.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/36786

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/PT.4.2409

Hi Daniel!

The difficulty with the question of palladium-induced hydrogen fusion is that it doesn't really fit into any single existing discipline. It combines elements of chemistry, mettallurgy and nuclear physics with nanostructure physics, quantum mechanics and nonlinear statistics, and then on top of that, the hydrogen flowing through the solid palladium structures has properties that arguably don't fit any of the existing defined states of matter - the hydrogen "flows" like a liquid, but its ordered and constrained to moving in directions dictated by the palladium crystal structure and the flaws and channels running through the palladium. So you have maybe some BEC and/or superfluid-type properties, too.

Nominal temperature isn't an obstacle, because fusion only requires a pair of nucleii to have an adequate collisional energy, and that can happen statistically even when the average background temperature is fairly mild.

For examples of this, you can look up the "sonoluminescence" effect, which is supposed to create momentary pockets of high-energy steam that burn tiny pits into big brass ship propellers, even though the average temperate of the seawater is a bit chilly. Or you can check out the "freak wave" effect that's blamed for sinking large ships at sea, even when the average wave height is quite moderate. Temperature will tell you something about the typical interactions in a medium, but what we're interested in here is the atypical ones. So room temperature fusion isn't impossible, it's just normally so statistically unlikely that any lone reactions that do happen can normally be ignored as statistically-insignificant flukes.

For hot fusion, we normally get around this problem with brute force - we use higher densities and pressures to boost the rate of collisions in the hope that if enough neutrons hit each other randomly enough times, a few of them will stick.

However, the other approach is to eliminate some of the randomness - if you take a snooker table the size of a football field and throw balls around at random, then the odds of two balls hitting each other are low, and the odds of them also making a perfect colinear strike are even less. However, if you constrain the degrees of freedom for the balls' vectors and positions, by laying a set of plastic gutter pipes across the field, so the balls can only roll along the drainpipe channels, then not only will the balls be continually hitting each other, they'll be making near-perfect strikes nearly 100% of the time.

The existence of ordered channels also suggests the possibility of force-channelling - if the hydrogen permeating the palladium is a heavily-constrained fluid, then if you apply a mild static or vibrational force to the palladium, you could be squeezing hydrogen along internal channels into "dead ends" and creating "hotspots" where you have anomalously high collision energies.

If you think about how we use particle accelerators as atom smashers, we're making use of four properties - we physically constrain the location of the particles, we physically constrain their freedom of movement to only coincide with the allowed locations, we increase the density where possible, and we increase the energy.

The palladium matrix would seem to provide the first three out of those four key features, and force-channelling may provide the fourth.

Having said all this, I do accept that _even_if_ the P-S effect is real, that it might be too difficult to reproduce consistently - and giving up when you can't reproduce the effect may be an honorable and pragmatic thing to do.

More optimistically, if the effect if real, we may rediscover it five to eight years from now thanks to research into hydrogen-affinity in bucky-ball-related structures. We have researchers trying to create ordered nanoscale carbon structures that suck up hydrogen and arrange it into free-flowing high-density planar and linear structures. If these guys find an anomalous effect similar to what P&F found, then it'll be in the context of known and reproducable microstructures, and the effect should be easier to reproduce and study.

However, if this happens, the effect is liable to be discovered by the nanotech material research guys rather than the nuclear fusion guys, and we can again expect the fusion guys to get upset about it.

Dear Eric,

Thank you very much for your long and interesting answer, but for me there are still the same difficulties for understanding the cold fusion:

1- The nucleous of deuterium are charged positively and energy need to avoid the Coulomb repulsion is very high and I cannot understand how the palladium can avoid it.

2- If the nuclear reaction was made then the neutrons or He-4 needed to appear and I don't understand how these kind of experiments do not detect all these reaction products.

3- The scientific interest and over all the economical one are so big that I don´t understand how this procedure was not used after 15 years its discovery.

4- My strong word of fraud was devoted to the form that the results were presented and no to be wrong or fail in the predictions. Read the original papers of the effect:

a- Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons. 1989. Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium. Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 261:301-308.

b- Jones, S.E., E.P. Palmer, J.B. Czirr, D.L. Decker, G.L. Jensen, J.M. Thorne, S.F. Taylor, and J. Rafelski. 1989. Observation of cold nuclear fusion in condensed matter. Nature 388:737-740.

Dear Yatendra,

Thank you for your information. It is obviously an interesting issue because we have problems with energy, but it seems to be very difficult to understand from a basic nuclear physics and less if you think in the form that it was presented. In all that I know, it was presented against the minima scientific criteria and trying to hide the details of the results avoiding the peer review with enough time for understanding the phenomenon.

But, frankly, there are many things interesting with this subject which are not well solved yet.

Dear Yatendra,

Thank you for your information. It is obviously an interesting issue because we have problems with energy, but it seems to be very difficult to understand from a basic nuclear physics and less if you think in the form that it was presented. In all that I know, it was presented against the minima scientific criteria and trying to hide the details of the results avoiding the peer review with enough time for understanding the phenomenon.

But, frankly, there are many things interesting with this subject which are not well solved yet.

I have changed also the question trying to introduce more nuances following your suggestions

Yes, we have reasons to doubt the observation of cold fusion, in the frame work of our present understanding of nuclear physics and nuclear reactions. However, are we sure that our present understanding of nuclear physics is perfectly correct ? Our understanding is unequivocally accurate ? Perhaps even the nuclear physicists would say NOT. The reason can be seen in one single observation. Ever since the inception of fields and field theory in late 1920s, field theory has been applied not only to the so called particle physics, models of universe, etc., but also to the well perceived many body systems such as Atomic nucleus of many nucleons, liquid helium-4, helium-3 and conduction electrons in electrical conductors. And the result is that even after nearly 85 years of persistent efforts, neither of these system has a microscopic theory that explains the experimental properties. We don't have a theory of superfluidity of liquid helium-4, or helium-3 or superconductivity. As far as the physics nucleons in atomic nucleus is concerned, we have 4-5 models to understand different properties. Superfluidity of helium-4 has nearly no theory in spite of thousands of papers published in different journals. BCS theory which was considered to have final word on superconductivity failed to explain high T superconductivity and many aspects of recent experiments (coexistence of ferroelectricity and superconductivity, etc) on metallic superconductors. The observation of cryogenic emission from metals has posed serious difficulty to the accuracy of theories of electron fluid at low T. However, since the field of field theories has emerged as an industry of producing thousands and thousands of papers every year and has emerged as big source employment for thousands of physicists and computer experts it is difficult to question the validity of this approach in spite of the facts there are well documented proof that field theories can not provide clear, complete, and experimentally consistent account of the low temperature or low energy behaviour of different many body systems (including atomic nucleus) in spite of mathematical accuracy of these formulations; pl note that here I am not talking their accuracy in terms of the laws of physics which these theories violate. But how to make thousands of people understand this fact. There is a big question of conflict of interest.

Dear Daniel ,

Millikan had manipulated the data to support his theoretical presuppositions. The following references provide interesting historical accounts.

1.Fanklin, Allan D.,1981, Millikan's Published and Unpublished Data on Oil Drops , Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences vol.11,p.185-201.

2.Holton , G.,1978 , Subelectrons , Presuppositions and the Millikan-Ehrenhaft Dispute , ibid , vol.9,p.161-224.

3.Broad , William , 1982 , Betrayers of the Truth :Fall and Deceit in the Hall of Science , Simon Schuster , New York.

'It may be overly critical to label Millikan's action fraudulous , it is perhaps more accurate to say that Millikan was a skilled self deceiver' - Marc Rothenberg (Smithsonian Institute ) in The Nobel Prize Winners Physics , Vol I , Standard Books , p. 280-281.

Dear Yatendra,

I am quite agree with you in many of the criticisms respect to the well established channels of thinking in science (sometimes could be even mafia). This is obviously a problem for the innovation because a new idea needs much more efforts for being published when it is out of the fashion topics or methods. What is very difficult to say , at least for me, is what is the actual value of most of the publications. It is absolutely impossible to follow the literature whithout making a choice of authors and subjects are you going to read. This is very dangerous because in between there are many interesting ideas and what is more important, the referees perhaps are not able to recognize them because it is much more difficult to understand something completely new than other beatiful publications on the things that you are waiting for.

In any case, independently of all these things, the cold fusion is a difficult problem no for the nuclear physics theory or for other stablished knowledges. For me the problem is that a so brilliant idea is waiting for a convincing explenation. For instance one very simple: if you have two charged deuterium nucleus you know by the simple Coulomb law that the energy necessary for putting them together is very huge. How could you explain this by a simple statistics behaviour? What is the role of the palladium?

Dear Pradosh,

I know something about that but what is unbelievable is that with a so simple experiment he could find a very close value to the actual of the electric charge of the electron, which at those times even most of the people were doubting about its existence. Do you know anything more about this problem? Do you think that he was choosing the data (true in my opinion) or that he was introducing new numbers by hand?

Dear Prof Daniel,

I certainly do not have any idea about the state of the hydrogen absorbed in Pd. However, two things might be working in the process if the phenomenon is really taking place. 1. The state of hydrogen might be playing a kind of catalytic role and/or 2. it is related to some kind of resonance which makes energy flow in a single channel which promotes the said reaction. I remember about twenty years back many scientists were working on surface enhanced Raman scattering from molecules absorbed on metallic surfaces. This implies that metals (possibly because large number of free electrical charges) enhance the scattering of photons corresponding to a particular mode of motion of molecule. This indicates that the state of hydrogen/ deuterium in Pd metal in presence of free electrons of Pd may have unique role to play. However, this is all a vague idea that I could think of. The reality may not even be close to this.

Daniel , In fact the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment is the only known (to me) experiment which won the Nobel Prize in Physics. 'Ehrenhaft's repetition of Millikan's experiment showed scattered data. Prevailing Theory suppored Millikan's work .... Millikan however had lied. Not all the data from the 60 day period were included in his published paper. Reexamination of his notebooks reveals that he had published only of the experimental results , choosing only those observations which confirmed his position. Data not in agreement were rejected with such explanations as 'very low , something wrong'.........His autobiograohy (1950) is filled omissions , revisions of historical events and errors. Perhaps his flaw was the inability to admit to a scientific mistake' - Marc Rothenberg.

Nevertheless, an important question is whether his results are reproducible or not. I mean if we perform the experiment to-day on an identical set up or even on a set up with better precision, and get the results what he reported, I feel we can not say it a fraud.

Dear Yatendra,

The two points that you speak are electronic processes and therefore with small energies if I have understood you properly. It might be involved only some electronvolts in changing this electronic structure, meanwhile in nuclear reactions it is necessary much more energy for hopping the Coulomb repulsion barrier of the electric proton charges. From where is obtained such energy due to palladium properties? Ok, may be we don't understand some details or this people don't want to tell it, but in such a case, do you think that nobody in the world could find a solution to so interesting issue? Frankly I do not believe it.

Dear Pradosh,

What is unbelievable is that he could find a so good numerical value for the electric charge of the electron at those times.

Dear Daniel,

Firstly, I accept that my suggestions are simply a possible guess, secondly, a better guess could be possible only if the state of hydrogen/deuterium in Pd was correctly understood (which we don't). I mentioned about resonance because this phenomenon is capable of channelling energy available in the entire system into to a single process. In principle, you are right that some body in the world could find a solution to this interesting issue. However, my experience tells, no body has time to work on the problems other than what he is doing. People in the field of many body physics have very strong belief because the initial work was done by several great physicists, in whom they have blind faith. No new point can be accepted.

Dear Yatendra,

I am quite agree with you and I am absolutely ignorant about the possibilities between deuterium and palladium, but I know from a basic physics which is very surprise as I have been trying to explain previously in my answers.

On the other hand, if I make a so important discovery, I would patent it and to explain it to the scientific community as soon as possible for solving one of the most important problems of the mankind: energy. This tell me that something as a fraud is there, but I would like very much to be wrong and to hear people who is still nowadays making congresses on this issue.

Apparently, a theory based weak nuclear interactions explains the phenomenon which is now known "low energy nuclear reactions" (LENR) not cold fusion.

The Widom-Larsen Ultra-Low-Momentum Neutron Catalyzed Theory of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml

Dear Yatendra,

Thank you, I have learnt something about what the Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LERNs) means by involving surface high energy electrons (plamons polaritons quasiparticles). This is a very different theory than the cold fusion becausi it doesn't needs to overcome the Coulomb barrier that worried me. Nice, an electronic collective effect is involved for giving the necessary energy and nucleus's deuterium are assumed out of the Born-Oppenheimer fixed energy.

This theory turns out to be quite appealling but I do not know how it is followed by experiments. In any case I am not an expert in this issue and only can grasp basic physics involved.

A subscription to INFINITE ENERGY Magazine would make you more versed in

what is the current research in Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.

I buy it occasionally at BARNES AND NOBLE Book sellers along with

several other science magazines.

Some of the Experiments from Quantum Rabbit are interesting, and the

math equations are advanced, and I do not even pretend to understand

them, but still read the articles.

NOW LENR is also known as ECAT (Energy catalyzer ) and apparently, there are ECAT power plant available in the market; no idea about the reliability of this news.

However, there are some interesting links:

http://hydrofusion.com > ECAT Technology

http://hydrofusion.com/news/wanted-pilot-customer-for-ecat-1-mw-plant

http://hydrofusion.com/ecat-products/ecat-1-mw-plant

http://hydrofusion.com/ecat-products/ecat-1-mw-plant

Dear Michael,

Thank you for the advice of your magazine, but I suppose that the LENR is explained in many places more. I have just seen a full and interesting information after following the links of prof.Yatendra about the issue.

Dear Yatendra,

Thank you but those links seem to be only a commercial seller, but what I don't know is how it works. But in any case you have changed my vision of this subject and I am going to get more information about it.

May be this link could be useful to every body

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEastudentsg.pdf

It records some 338 references related to the topic of LENR or CANR

and most recent papers are available at

http://lenr-canr.org/index/DownloadOnly/DownloadOnly.php

Dear Yatendra,

Thank you for the information, over all the link with the papers is very interesting and I shall wait to have time to read some of them.

Part of the problem is that there's not always a clear way to distinguish between legitimate data selection for quality control ("this experimental run was clearly faulty, let's discard it and try again"), and illegitimate data selection ("We can't get the experiment to work, let's keep running it until we get an answer that the journal will like").

And then there's scope for recalibration and compensation between runs ("Oh, this figure's way too low, we obviously need to readjust and try again"), and statistical analysis ("Okay, the figures are off, to the tolerances must be worse than we thought, let's factor that in and redo the calculations with that in mind").

I think that some people would be horrified if they realised some of the things that experimenters are allowed (or expected!) to do.

Dear Eric,

Do you think that there is a big proportion of experimental papers that they are with bad data?. Which could be a kind of intuition as Millikan probabily has made as Pradosh has denounced . Obviously if the data are chosen for being more interesting but they are true, that is legitime and even clever, what is no-legitime is if the experiment is wrong and they choice they fit the data knowing the result or even waiting a result which could be believed. That is my humble opinion.

I recommend you to go to the following link for seeing that we still have problems of frauds and we needed to have an international office or something as prof.Yatendras has suggested sometime ago

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.list/tagNo/2642/tags/scientific-fraud/

Is this the 10 top scientific frauds in 2013?:

1. One of our favorite stories this year was about a 15-year-old retraction by David Vaux, of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. Vaux, who has fought the good fight for scientific integrity many times, had a heck of a time publishing a rebuttal to a flawed piece of research in Nature. So he decided to retract his own essay about that study.

2. Another retraction story took a page out of a spy novel: Investigators looking into research by a star researcher were forced to install hidden cameras that revealed he was tampering with the evidence. He has now retracted three papers from the literature.

3.Graduate students take note: Faking data in your dissertation can still get you a PhD, as long as the thesis remains “scientifically valid.” That would seem to be the take-home message of the tale of Nitin Aggarwal, whom the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found guilty of misconduct. The case has led to one retraction so far.

4.Speaking of ORI investigations, we recommend reading about the case of Michael W. Miller, who faked data on his federal grant applications and had several papers retracted in 2012. This year, however, Miller bounced back, landing a job as, you guessed it, a consultant for grant applications! (He lost that gig after we called his employers to ask if they knew about his past.)

5.For sheer controversy value, one of the biggest retractions of 2013 has to be that of a 2012 paper on genetically modified maize and rats by Gilles Séralini and colleagues. In the retraction—which Séralini strongly opposed—the editor of Food and Chemical Toxicology didn’t cite any of the usual reasons for retraction, such as fraud or gross error, instead basically saying that the paper shouldn’t have passed peer review to begin with.

6.The flip side of author objections might be, “What does it take to get your own paper retracted?” That question occurred to anyone who had followed the story of Robert Trivers, who finally succeeded in having a 2005 Nature paper he’d co-authored—and soon doubted—retracted in November.

7.We have to hand it this year to scientists who’ve done the right thing, which in our case means retracting papers even if it comes at great professional cost. Biologists Pamela Ronald and Daniel St. Johnston, who voluntarily retracted papers from Science and Nature, respectively, are on that list. And scientists reward that kind of behavior too, it appears.

8.In January, we wrote about a successful effort by “Clare Francis,” the pseudonymous scourge of journals worldwide, to force a retraction of a 2006 paper in the Journal of Cell Biology—providing proof positive of our contention that anonymous whistleblowers deserve a fair hearing by editors. Love him or hate him—and yes, Clare is a “he”— Francis is right more often than a broken clock, to mangle a favorite phrase of Ivan’s father.

9.We have several candidates in a category we call “Plagiarism Euphemism of the Year.” There’s “unattributed overlap,” “a significant originality issue,” and an “approach.” Why, we wonder, do journals have such a hard time naming It That Cannot Be Named?

10.For some comic . . . well, not quite relief, given the subject, but the retraction of “Penile Strangulation by Metallic Rings” deserves a mention.

Only history will show how some contemporary scientists have deliberately obliterated over a thousand years of history in order to appropriate the material that they claimed to be theirs.

Does it make sense that prior to the enlightenment (1650 AD) and all the way back to Aristotle (533BC) nothing really happened?

@Mohamed. History could be very far for a person who has lost its intellectual property or what is worse that could lost to publish a good result or to have a recognition. It would be a great injustice to prevent a person to see his/her ideas made reality or would be worse, to see other be owner of them.

@Subhrajyoti. You have said very strong things, could you prove them? Physics is not a science of opinions or subjective definitions, fortunately every result must be found in the laboratory or it has to be measured. The transformation of mass in energy is everyday used in the central nuclear for obtaining electricity and also the general relativity was also measured quite well in many experiments: precession of Mercury, deflection of light by the Sun or the redshift under the gravitation field. Notice that modern astrophysics or fundamental particle physics have the theory of relativity as background everyday.

Ever since scientists started framing laws of nature or formulating models of natural phenomena on the basis of experimental observations, even the basic theory of nature such as classical mechanics has been modified in view of newer experimental observations and we accepted wave mechanics as a more appropriate alternative of classical mechanics. In what follows, only experimental observations lay the foundation of an acceptable theory of nature and no body knows if newer experimental observations again guide us to modify our present theoretical foundation of nature. Although, at this point of time there is no indication for a change in wave mechanics, however, we see an interesting scenario where innumerable number of quantum theories have been published to explain a single experimentally observed phenomenon without concluding a viable model implying that either all the N theories are wrong or at least N-1 are wrong and only 1 is correct. Can be say that there is a fraud ?

Dear Yatendra,

Physical theories always contain the last ones explaining what is the new approach. General Relativity contains Newton's Gravitation or Maxwell's Electrodynamics contains the previous ones and Quantum Electrodynamics all of them. There are no possibility to have N-1 wrong theories because all of them must explain physical facts which is not so easy to do.

Dear Subhrajyoti,

Let me try to answer you step by step.

1. If the transformation of mass into energy is done so frequently, why there still exists a huge energy crisis?

Being true equations is not equivalent to obtain it frequently or in an easy form. It is concentrated in nucleus which is not inmediate to go within them and nuclear reactions well controlled are necessary. On the other hand not all these nuclear problems are solved, but this is independent of the certainty of the equations mentioned by you.

2. Why researchers are thinking of alternate energies?

We haven't solved the nuclear controlled reactions, mainly with fusion. Notice that the these reactions need very high temperatures and also they emit new high energy particles which are dangerous.

3.

Respect to the questions of relativity:

3. 1. If I have understood you well, in this question you speak about General Relativity experiments that I have mentioned and in this theory it is not to have an inerticial system. What transforms one inertial to a non inertial is exactly the gravitation interaction through the equivalence principle.

3. 2. Please, could you explain the Michelson-Morley experiment in so many different forms? I would be very grateful to see it. Thank you in advance!

3.4. The superstition is out of the scientific theories and usualy in religious concepts or ignorance, not in science which always can be discussed as we are now doing.

My favorite is not a huge one, but a very informative one. It involves French and English scientists, and the topic was penetrating radiation. I think the time period was just prior to WWI. The French claimed to have discovered a penetrating form of radiation emanating from objects subject to strain. They named these "n-rays". E.g., a cane, bent somewhat was reported to emit radiation which was not visible, which penetrated dry cardboard but not wet cardboard, etc. Detection could be accomplished photographically. Experiments were done in a darkened room. The english group tried to repeat the experiment, but could observe no such radiation. Finally an English scientist was invited to visit the French lab. Under cover of the darkness he inserted "absorbers" (e.g., wet cardboard) in front of the detector, and the French demonstrator continued to observe the n-rays. This settled the question in the minds of most of the scientific community. There were no such rays.

Dear Roy,

Thank you very much for this interesting contribution. By the way the person who was to discuss the critical experiment was an american physicist ,Robert W. Wood and no an english one, although it was a clear reply to the english x-ray discovery.

For me,the most important conclusion is that the publication of almost 300 papers on the subject and claiming to see experimental results shows that the criteria of publication can be subjective and injust with the serious people or other circunstances which would be very interesting to study. For more information see:

http://skepdic.com/blondlot.htlm

Randi at Caltech: A report from the Paranormal Trenches, Skeptic vol.1, nº 1, p-22-31, Springer.

The biggest scientific fraud in my memory is the one that has now become known as 'the Schön scandal':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

As for the "cold fusion" that Fleischmann and Pons claimed, to the people in the know it was almost immediately evident that there was something fundamentally wrong with what was purported to be the relevant experimental data -- if my memory is not failing, some aspects of the neutron data were inexplicable at first sight (suspicions intensified after the addition of the name of a junior scientist to the list of authors in the revised version of the original manuscript -- that is the name of the person to be later scapegoated for all the irregularities in the "experimental" data). This was not the case with the fraudulent works by Jan Hendrik Schön; it took some time before people began to realize that they had been taken for a ride (although even in this case it proved that had the editors of journals taken the concerns of the referees of the relevant papers seriously, the wrongdoings had come to light much earlier than they did in practice).

Dear Benham,

Thank you, Es ist nicht schön!

It is not beatiful in opposite direction at what his name says. My best congratulations to Germany and the people who has discovered and acted on recovering of the truth.

The biggest fraud is to evaluate the research by the impat factor number of the journal where it is published.

Dear Kazaros,

I suppose that the impact factor of the review is only one of the parameters, but you are right that any parameter that you choose might be questionable: the number of publications, the area of knowledge, the number of cites, etc... Please, could you tell us in what form you could solve this problem?

Dear Daniel,

It is not a problem which can be solved once and forever. For example, what probably was good for Spain in 1985 is harmful nowadays. The second point is that the problem is complex and it cannot have a linear solution for all areas of science. I can give some ideas which can work for so called basic sciences.

What I can suggest probably will work for mathematics, theoretical physics, etc.

In these areas I guess governmental grants should be given up to some age, say 45 or 50 and individually, not to groups. At the same time I will suggest to pick as members of review committees only scientists who are over 50. The government can establish prizes for best 10-20 works in distinct areas in order not to discriminate elder researchers. In this case can be used also social networks.

The main idea should be to give chances to young capable individuals to dedicate themselves to research and not to humiliate more or less established researchers with senseless merits.

Dear Kazaros,

Thank you very much for your answer but I think that we are going to need a long time to refine it, at least my understanding of it. Let me to put some of them:

1. I do not understand how you are worry with the age of the researcher. It would be very injust to leave out of the possibility to get a project a person by its age, mainly if you consider that it has going to be paid for making such activity.

2. The first thing to take into account, from my humble point of view, should be the quality of his/her scientific results. The problem is to get an universal criteria for measuring such quality and this is related with your first contribution about the factor impact of the reviews.

3. In one paper must be distinguished the number of authors, the originality of the research, its scientific impact and to distinguish clearly what is the contribution of each other. For example I know papers in physical review made with more than 200 authors. Who is going to say what is the scientific contribution of one of them?

4. 4. I fully agree with your comment: "The government can establish prizes for best 10-20 works in distinct areas in order not to discriminate elder researchers. In this case can be used also social networks".

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for your questions. Let me clarify what I think about your doubts, point by point.

1. I would like to remind that my suggestions were for basic sciences. To do research in these areas one doesn't need to be in a project. I have forgotten to add that for elder researchers can be established grants by which they can get sabbatical leave for doing research. This will have also positive impact for creating temporary positions for younger doctors.

2. I guess it is impossible to get a universal objective criterion for measuring the quality of scientific research. That’s why the players should be separated from the arbiters. The unique way which I see is to do it considering the age. I hope that you will agree with me that the system of financing research by projects is vicious. For example in mathematics I cannot imagine that one can assure that after two or three years he will prove a concrete serious result. It is possible if you are going to do variations on a theme.

3. Your third point is also very interesting. Can you imagine the following situation in the production area? Suppose that some production costs x units. But if z companies have participated in the production that each of those companies is paid x units. You will say that it is absurd but this is what happens with scientific production. This situation favors to appearing of groups who artificially add names of each other to their papers and thus get huge advantage with respect to those who are not so “smart” to follow the same way or don’t want to do that. This is extremely negative for the beginners because who don’t participate in such games can be simply pushed out from the system.

Dear Kazaros,

Let me to go directly to your questions without being losing time in other alternative possibilities.

1. I do not understand why do you divide young from older researchers and less where do you put the limits. This would be a very high non trivial problem to solve. From my point everybody could be necessary, even for discussing, although the tasks not were for developing a given project. By the way, perhaps we have a misunderstood with this word: a project do not need only being with financial support, it can be also just as a planning of working with a certain number of targets to get. Perhaps research in mathematics is different and I am speaking only from the common sense and my personal experience.

2. This is a very important problem that you touch and you come back to the age as fundamental factor of the solution. I frankly think that this is not the solution. In fact what would be important is to separate the scientific carrier from the personal circumstances as could be the age. If we speak about Spain, it is quite amazing that believing to a great community as it is Europe we follow justifying our research with local competitors. But you can understand it if you see our presidents without speaking languages at all.

3. Your example is perfect for this point and I fully agree. It cannot be the same value if there are 200 authors and 100 of research centers than one. And speaking in economical terms: it doesn't cost the same one kind of research than other, then it would be very important to say if the results are also comparables. Again it is necessary to distinguish clearly the importance of the research and what is the role of everybody there.

Sorry, I was reading again the text and I have found a mistake in point 2, where it is written believing to a great community, it must be belonging to a great community.

Dear Daniel,

It is a real pleasure to discuss with you. Let me explain my “obsession” with the ages of researchers.

1. a) I believe that the younger researchers should have possibility to find their place in the system and it should not depend on the sympathies or antipathies of powerful guys.

b) If a person has not find his place in the system before 45 or 50 then the probability that he would do it afterwards is equal to zero.

c) While it looks reasonable to help beginners to get some stability, I believe that more or less established investigators should get gratification only for the work that they have performed. Thus there will be no need to have huge bureaucracy related with funding the projects.

2. I don’t see any solution to the problem related with universal objective criterion for measuring the quality of scientific research. Personally this problem doesn’t bother me. The problem will disappear by itself if the number of pseudo researchers will be less visible.

Dear Kazaros,

You have started your contribution saying that the biggest fraud was the factor impact of the reviews and also its importance in the criteria of selecting people of being able to be professionals of the research. I agree with you partially and the problem is that we agree also in the difficulty of finding a solution of the selection problems related with the research. Again let me try to answer you and at the same time try to give my positive contribution to this issue.

1.a) It seems that the mathematicians are obsessed with the age. Their equivalent to the Nobel Prize is Fields Medal which cannot be done to any person older than 40. Frankly I cannot understand it and perhaps you have accepted these kind of arguments as a culture of your research.

b) Your sentence: "it should not depend on the sympathies or antipathies of powerful guys" can be solved easily with general and public criteria. On the other hand, being younger do not mean to be more objective at all, even it could be worse. Usually younger people are more radicals in their opinions and obviously they have more interests involved in the decissions because their professional carrier is not finished yet. With only logic, elder people could be more independent than young people, although they are nedeed for changing steady states of influence given by history: but the important is to put the good proportion of both, no too much youngs and the same for qualified elders (no powerful elders which have had many administration jobs in the past).

c) In any case, the idea is to avoid that the age could be an important factor in trying to take a good decission for requesting good curricula for the jobs.

d) I have been involved in many tribunals and comissions, my procedure was always the same. Put my criteria before open the curricula and try to see how to give a numerical value that could justify in front of the person who is going to be out. The fundamental idea is how important was the amount of contribution given to the knowledge, what are the skills developed in a certain time, how he/she defends his/her results and what is his/her vision of the future. It is very difficult to be objective, if not impossible, but then it is necessary to compare with their competitors.

2) Your sentence: "The problem will disappear by itself if the number of pseudo researchers will be less visible" is quite reasonable, but I think that the solution is easy identifying them with names and convincing people that they earn a fraudulent salary ( usually is much higher than the one of younger people) which could invested much more efficiently. But we are in legal society which needs to be proven.

Say if there are fraudulent people you are not going to solve the problem introducing younger people which is trying to get the same situation in the future. The problem is to have irresponsable people which can happen in any profession and independently of their age, from my humble point of view.

Dear Daniel,

I guess we have more common points than you think. We agree that the current system for funding science is far from being satisfactory and that it should be changed. My suggestions were for basic sciences. The main point in my suggestion is that the scientists should get gratification for their work and not for projects as it is done nowadays. The unique exception should be done for young scientists, which is also natural. It doesn’t mean that younger researchers are more capable or honorable.

Dear Kazaros,

I think that the use of "fake" co-authors on papers seems to be fairly widespread, and probably counts as "fraudulent" when people are being named even when they obviously don't meet the publishing journals' criteria for being counted as a co-author.

People use false co-authors to "game the system" and get better rankings and ratings on the citation indexes. If I have five friends doing similar research at approximately the same level (perhaps we were all in the same university course), then if we each write one paper a year, then we all have quite low rankings, and our papers might be treated dismissively by journals because single-author papers are looked down on.

However if we all list each other as co-authors, then suddenly we've each supposedly produced six papers during that year, and each of us appears to be part of a thriving research group. If two of our papers get cited in other research, then instead of two of us receiving one citation each and the other four receiving nothing, all six of us get /two/ citations each. That means that even the least successful members of the group (producing zero-citation papers) get higher citation rankings than what the most successful members would have gotten if we hadn't agreed to include each other on our author lists.

In some areas, fictitious co-authorship seems to be so widespread that it's practically a social norm. Co-authorships get traded, and senior staff at some research institutions may demand co-authorship status on papers published by people further down the chain as a benefit of rank. One Russian department head was supposed to have co-authored over three hundred papers in one year!

Dear Eric,

Thank you. It will be interesting to know who and why "invented" the current system of science funding.

Dear Kazaros,

I am sure that we are in agreement in most of the criticisms. We know the problem but what is difficult is to find a the solution.

One positive step is denounce it as we are doing here, but obviously is very far of a solution and even if we were able to establish a partial differential equation to define it, we had infinte solutions that we needed to select using convenient boundary and initial conditions.

Dear Eric,

The point of the publications that you touch is clearly fraudulent and everybody looks to other side. The question is that you can be with wonderful publications and with a great number without making anything on them. That is one of the points that, Kazaros and me, were discussing and you clearly points out. Thank you. I think that it could be very useful for the system to discuss all these issues because they are at the end the ones which are going to allow to survive or not as a professional of the research.

Perhaps pertinent observation, at this interesting state of the discussion, could be to ask how many new ideas in Physics are per number of papers. Or what are the real discoveries and what is its price, because another fraud is to have people publishing always the same idea even if it is proven its usefulness or interest.

I know that the "interest" is a very difficult concept and quite subjective too, but the real interest is not in h index or other factors which measures many parameters outside of an individual author.

I think that one of more worthy challenges could be to consider the people, even at the end they are wrong, but who can present interesting ideas or solutions risking their scientific reputation or wasting a lot of time within a hard work which likely nobody is going to recognize. What do you think about?

Dear Prof Baldomir,

This refers to my post about 12 days back and your response posted about 11 days back. I am sorry that I was away for some time for my personal reasons. In my post I did not mean N theories of nature at large but N theories of a single phenomenon, say for example theories of superconductivity. Ever since the discovery of High T superconductivity, a large number of quantum theories of the phenomenon have been published but none of these theories explain widely different aspects of all superconductors or a single superconductor or a class of superconductors. Naturally, none of these theories stands as the viable theory of the phenomenon. The most disturbing aspect of these theories is that people are publishing related papers without noting the well founded fact that theories based of single particle basis with plane wave representation of conduction electrons violate the physical realities of the states of these electrons for which they can never provide complete, clear and experimentally consistent microscopic account of the phenomenon. Even the widely celebrated BCS theory suffers from this fact and it is for this reason it does not explain all experimental observations on even metallic superconductors. Since people working on these theories are totally ignoring the said violation when they write their papers, it is clear that they are not interested to bring the truth behind the origin of superconductivity, in stead they are trying to protect their academic interests. We note that the cold fusion met serious criticism because nuclear theories failed to accept the possibility and the observation is considered to be a fraud, I wonder why shouldn't we have the same scale that publication of theories of superconductivity by using single particle basis is also a kind of fraud particularly when it is well evident that such theories violate the physical realities of the states of conduction electrons at low temperatures.

Here is a link of the paper which clearly proves the fundamental error every paper on superconductivity is committing.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/110441679/Intrinsic-Problems-Superfluid-Theories

In fact this also applies to the theories of superfluidity of liquid Helium-4 and BEC in trapped dilute bose gases.

Dear Yatendra,

Thank you very much for your interesting answer and let me answer you in separate points for more clarity:

1. Even if the N theories are for the same phenomenon, I think that they need to have the previous ones as special cases. The reason is that all physical theory is maintained by experimental facts that need to be explained again by the new theory. I do not know any physical theory than didn't do it. That is the main difference with Mathematics which has independent theories as functors, transfinite numbers, etc which are going to stay without any possible criticism.

2. I am not speciallist in superfluidity or superconductivity, but my general knowledge tells me what is the degree of difficulty behind these phenomena. Therefore, please, do not understand this as a criticism but as a question of a layman in the subject: why do you choose only two particles in equation 2?. In superconductivity this is justified because it is a form to transform fermion-boson and to keep them in the same energy state. But if you have bosons, I do not understand why you need to take just two particles.

3. In usual ( or metallic) superconductivity there are two forms to understand its phenomenology: Ginzburg-Landau and BCS. Both are equivalent as theories but the form to explain the things is absolutely different. Perhaps it is necesary to have a third point of view, but what is necessary is that the new theory has to contain these ones besides some new experimental facts. I am understand that this field of knowledge needs many criticisms as yours because it has a so huge amount of information which is going to be difficult to distinguish what is important or not. This is at least my external perception when go to conferences related with the subject.

Dear Prof Baldomir,

Thanks for your points. I understand that a new theory of superconductivity/ superfluidity has to contain theories that have succeeded in accounting for one or many aspects superconductors or superfluids.

I too understand that BCS and Ginzburg-Landau theories are two different theories (while the former is microscopic theory, the latter is phenomenological theory) which have been used to understand superconductivity and related aspects and a more general theory has to contain these theories. However, you would agree that a microscopic theory is the one which helps in testifying whether our most fundamental theory, -the wave mechanics, has the desired potential to account for the observation of superconductivity and related aspects and I have no doubt that BCS theory has achieved this goal to larger extent but only partially. At this point I would like to invite your kind attention to this fact that BCS theory does not explain all aspects of even metallic superconductors indicating that we need to have a more general theory of superconductivity of even metallic superconductors and this can not be done by ignoring the criticism of its foundations/ assumptions, and mathematical formulations which point out their inherent errors or by not allowing any such work to share space in published literature. The criticism can be set aside only coming forward to discuss and analyse with open mind to accept whatever is acceptable and reject whatever is erroneous. This helps every body in the field to proceed forward in the right direction and to discover the real origin of superconductivity and similar phenomena.

In what follows, there are many experimental observations (for example co-existence of superconductivity and ferroelectricity*, observation of cryo-emission of electrons**, etc.) which clearly prove that BCS theory is only partially correct and my link given in my earlier post that you have read reveals its reasons.

(*) http://www.scribd.com/doc/146390067 ;

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236869920_Questioned_BCS-I

(**) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259821166

I hope you would agree that ignoring all such studies is against the scientific spirit of research.

I will address your point about superfluidity in my next post.

Article Questioned_BCS-I

Article Unravelling the origin of cryogenic emission of electrons - ...

Dear Prof. Baldomir

Why did I choose two particles in formulating my theory of superfluidity of a system of interacting bosons (SIB, -such as liquid Helium-4 and trapped dilute bose gases)

[ http://article.sapub.org/pdf/10.5923.j.ajcmp.20120202.02.pdf ] or

[ http://www.scribd.com/doc/110404594/Theory-Superfluidity-Helium-4 ] and related papers ?

The reasons are very simple and can be understood even by layman to the subject.

1. The very fact that all atoms found in nature interact primarily through a two body central force demands that we need at least two particles to build our theory of a SIB to fully understand its possible quantum states at low temperatures (LTs) at which two body interactions dominate their states because their kinetic energy assumes least possible value which, at T = 0, equals zero point energy retained by each particle. Naturally, I find no reason that we can correctly describe the many body states of a SIB in terms of a single free particle state. This is corroborated by the fact that conventional theories formulated by using single free particle states described by plane waves have not succeeded to fully explain the LT behaviour (including superfluidity and related aspects) of a SIB even after sustained efforts of about 75 years.

Single particle consideration is valid for gases; it is approximately valid to understand certain aspects of liquids but does not remain valid to understand crystallization or properties of crystals at all. It may be noted that superfluid state of a SIB is the state where two body zero-point repulsion does not allow it to become solid and zero-point repulsion too is a two body force. Hence it is wrong to presume that the many body states of a SIB can be understood in terms of a single free particle state simply because unlimited bosons can occupy a single quantum state; in fact a SIB (particularly at LTs) has no quantum state which can be identified as a state of a single free particle and be described by a plane wave.

2. Another simple reason lies with the wave nature of particles which too dominates the behaviour of a SIB when average de Broglie wave length (λ$_T$) of particles tend to become larger than the inter-particle distance (d). Even conventional theories recognise this fact but do not use this aspect to recognise the fact that quantum states of the system can not be understood in terms of single free particle states. It is a well understood fact that in the event of λ$_T$ > d, two neighbouring particles have to have their wave super-position arising as a most fundamental consequence of their wave nature. It is bound to happen. We have no choice to ignore this physical reality and its consequences. In what follows we have to construct states of wave superposition of two particles to incorporate it in our mathematical formulation to correctly understand the quantum states of many boson system. Once we do so we find that the superposition forces two particles to assume a pair state and as a result of this each particle in the super-position loses its identity as a separate single free particle; in stead each particle in this state can be identified as a part or a representative of the pair. The accuracy of this point lies with the fact the my theory based on this reality explain each and every aspect of liquid helium-4 and BEC state of trapped dilute boson gases. On the other hand conventional formulations have not succeeded in establishing even the nature of condensate in the superfluid state of a SIB.

However, in spite of the above mentioned simple reasons for which single free particle picture does not remain valid for a SIB at LTs, I would welcome if possible errors of these points are openly discussed and analyzed with open mind rather than ignoring the physical reality behind these points. I hope you would agree that the act of ignoring my works concluding these realities is against the spirit of scientific development.

Dear Yatendra,

Sorry for the delay in answering you but it was reading your recommended papers that I have found very interesting and I repeat you that I am an layman of this issue.

Dear Yatendra,

Let me to advance something of a layman in bosonization interactions. For me the interaction between atoms is two due to the hopping electrons creating bonding and antibonding states which translates in chemical bonding. I think that you speak of a very different bonding and I am trying to understand it when I have time to go to such interesting issue.

Dear Yatendra,

I have been reading your last paper trying to understand it and I can follow what are the targets but there are many points difficult to follow for a layman as me. In any case my sincere congratulations for so hard work done for you as unique author and having the extra value of the originality.

Let me to put some basic questions due to my ignorance:

1- You assume two potentials VR (repulsion) and VA (attraction) for the atoms, what is its physical origin?

2- You introduce the temperature T as a thermodynamical variable, but I suppose that at microscopic level the phonons are needed to justify its absortion or emition by the atoms and perhaps even it would be necessary to distinguish between transversal (low velocity) and longitudinal (high velocity). Are not these particles the source of the thermodynamic behaviour of these condensed phases?

3- You work with states of the atoms that you never introduce the spins, which are the responsable of having fermionic or bosonic statistics. Why is it possible to distinguish symmetry or antisymetry without them under their exchange?

Thank you and congratulations again.

Dear Prof Baldomir,

It appears that you have read my paper on first quantization theory of superconductivity. Your appreciation is greatly inspiring and encouraging. Thanks a lot.

Let me now help in understanding the answer to your important questions.

1. There are well established reasons that hard core finite size repulsion has its extended range to λ/2 (with λ being the de Broglie wave length) when λ/2 > σ (where σ is the hard core diameter of the particle). This can be easily understood in terms of one the basic principles of wave mechanics. Accordingly, a particle in wave mechanics manifests itself as a wave packet of size λ/2. In what follows when λ/2 increases beyond σ with fall in particle energy, its hard core repulsion $f_o$ range gets extended to λ/2 and the particle exerts a repulsive force on the neighbouring particles and pushes them out of its λ/2 range. This is the origin of the zero-point repulsion $f_o$. One can understand this as a consequence of the hard core repulsion (the repulsive part of the real interaction) of range σ clubbed with wave packet manifestation of a quantum particle. When this force tries to strain the lattice, it is natural that the lattice opposes it by a force (say $f_a$) as its natural reaction. This reaction obviously originates from the interaction responsible to bind lattice constituents. In the event of equilibrium between $f_o$ and $f_a$ the lattice has net strain in its structure and a net fall in energy of electrons in their ground state which represents their collective additional binding with lattice that we identify as an energy gap.

2. This binding obviously depends on temperature (T). You are right that phonons would obviously have their role in exchanging energy between strained lattice and electrons and you may find that I do conclude so in my paper. It is very well stated in my paper that electrons in superconducting state have (q,-q) bound electron pairs; however, I find that the basic reason for it lies with operation of zero-point force which comes into existence when electrons at low T occupy their ground state.

3. My paper does consider the Pauli exclusion. However, as it concludes that basic cause of bound pair formation of electrons lies with $f_o$ and $f_a$ where spins have no impact. Spin states and their representative wave function can be added to conclude whether fermions will have anti-parallel states or parallel spin state. In the former case spatial wave function is expected to be symmetric for their exchange, while in the latter case it would be anti-symmetric.

Finally, let me submit for every concerned physicist that like many of us, I might have some errors (conceptual or mathematical) but no referee so far indicated. My papers met negative recommendation not on the basis of physics based argument but for unclear and confusing statements. I am ready to discuss each and every statement of my paper for its accuracy and clarity, if any physicist comes forward to discuss with open mind. My paper does not use any new concept at all.

Once again let me express my sincere thanks for your appreciation of my efforts.

Dear Yatendra,

Thank you for your answers and I understand that it is very difficult to explain my questions in so small space. Let me to concentrate in each question in other form for trying to do things easier and , on the other hand, I do not understand how editors allow to referee a paper without given serious reasons (by the way I have also suffered them); at least I always try to do it. It is the minimum respect to a person who has been working seriously and believes to have an interesting result.

1. I understand a little bit more but not clearly; sorry. I suppose that the increase of the de Broglie wave length is due to decrease the velocity of the particles, what you call p=0. I can follow that the velocity at crititical temperatures below 2.4K as it could be for He4 this sounds reasonable and it is in agreement with the condition that the chemical potential should also be negative. Say it seems that a collective overlap of material wave functions works. If you associate an interaction ( which is not very clear to me to me, but which could be just by quantum interference for the atraction due and the repulsion due to have lattice opposition to change the volume: how is measured). But notice that the origin is this, then these forces are practically the same for every kind of boson: is this true? The reason is that wave length only depends of the velocity reduction (assuming that the mass is kept constant).

Please, forget the title of prof. which is just an accident in my life for earning a little bit more money for my family. Unfortunatelly this title doesn't avoids my huge ignorance in subjects as this.

2. You are right that you promise to introduce phonons in another paper, but it seems necessary to take them into account instead of mentioning the lattice so generally. If I have understood you properly this is going to be repulsive force on the particles and it had to be proven. It seems that the quantum overlap of the bosons must be compensated by the annihilation of phonons and I think that this can get only with optical phonons if their mass changes. This is not simple to justify but it is physically possible because you are suffering a change of phase.

Perhaps I am wrong and I have made too much assumptions.

3. Thank you, this point is clear. But I think that you can consider the overlap of the wave functions perfectly using the exclusion principle of Pauli because if you have bosons therefore you have singlet states of the spins which allows to have the other three quantum numbers equal. Thus you can get an increase of the overlap of the wave funcitions or what is the same, in your model, you increase the attraction interaction among the boson particles.

Everything is ok in this point and I think that it would be only strenghten your arguments.

Dear Daniel,

To understand how zero-point repulsion comes into picture can be understood by following a simple process through which a high energy electron (say β - particle of sub Ǻ λ) entering liquid helium-4 creates a spherical cavity of size (say D) about 38 Ǻ by pushing about 1000 He-atoms out of the cavity when its zero-point force $f_o = h^2/4mD^3$ becomes equal to a force $f_a$ arising due to He-He attraction. Further increase in D stops at the equality of $f_o$ and $f_a$.

In what follows high energy electron keeps losing its kinetic energy by its collision with He-atom till its velocity becomes small enough that corresponding λ/2 becomes equal to d (distance He-He atoms). Assuming that d represents the size of free space available for the electron, the condition λ/2 = d represents that the electron has reached its ground state as a particle trapped in a spherical cavity of size d. However, this electron at this point has enough energy that its zero-point pressure is not balanced with hydrostatic pressure around the electron. Consequently, electron loses its energy by pushing the surrounding He-atoms away from its position and creates a spherical cavity of size 38 Ǻ when $f_o$ equals $f_a$ which is represented by forces of surface tension on the inner surface of spherical cavity + hydrostatic pressure + external pressure on the liquid He.

As such the existence of an electron in an electron bubble renders experimental evidence for: (i) the fact that a quantum particle manifests itself as a wave packet of size λ/2, (ii) the action of its zero-point force $f_o$ to dislocate the neighbouring particles against a force $f_a$ which tries to restore their positions, and (iii) the dislocation stops only when $f_o$ and $f_a$ reach a state of equilibrium.

It is natural that in the state of equilibrium some dislocation will obviously arise. However, the zero-point force of electron in metals is opposed by very strong inter-atomic attraction in the lattice due to which atoms are not displaced or dislocated by significant distance but certainly renders non-zero strain in the lattice. It is this strain that I talk about in the lattice in superconducting state of a superconductor. Number of experimental observations clearly corroborate the increase in the distance between atom-atom positions in superfluid states of Helium-4 and Helium-3 and lattice strain in superconductors.

I will address your remaining points in my next posts.

In the interest of concluding correct understanding for the origin of superfluidity and superconductivity, I sincerely invite all interested physicists to come forward to participate in this discussion.

Dear Daniel

You are right that increase in λ arises due to fall in velocity.

However, every particle (like atoms/ molecules or electron, etc) always occupy certain space exclusively because at short distances they encounter strongly repulsive hard core potential. In an environment where they remain free and do not form structures like solids or poly-atomic molecules, each particle occupies a volume of size λ/2 when this size becomes larger than hard core size σ. With fall in T, λ/2 increases as a result of which exclusive volume occupied by each particle increases. At certain T = T_c (say), when λ/2 becomes equal to d (inter-particle distance), each particle finds it self trapped in a cavity of size d with lowest possible energy = h^2/8md^2. With fall in T below T_c, each particle tends to lose its energy further by increasing λ/2 for which it ties to increase the size of cavity by pushing its neighbours away from its location. Since this happens to each particle in the system, the net volume of of the system is expected to increase with decrease in T below T_c. In what follows a system like liquid He-4 or liquid He-3 is expected to exhibit volume expansion with decrease in T below T_c. This prediction of my theories and analysis is experimentally found with liquids He-4 and He-3.

In what follows from the existence of an electron bubble that I talked about in the previous post gives a clear picture of how $f_o$ comes into operation. Assume that a particle in a cavity has h^/8md^2 energy as its ground state energy or zero-point energy. A simple derivative of this energy with respect to d, indicates that particle in the cavity exerts a force f_o = h^2/4md^3 which tries to increase the size of the cavity. If cavity size is decided by weak inter-particle binding forces such as those existing in liquids He-4 or He-4, f_o exerted by trapped electron is seen to create a cavity of size ~38 Ǻ, while the same electron in a metal where positions of ions are fixed by strong forces does not create a cavity of size larger than the inter-ionic distance. All these facts reveal the origin of f_o and its consequences.

Interestingly, every physicist argues that liquid He-4 and He-3 do not become solid due to zero-point force but does not see its role in the superfluid behaviour of these liquids. This evident from the fact that no conventional theory explains the observation of negative volume expansion of He-4 liquid at T around 2.17 K and of He-3 around 0.6 K. Interestingly there are many such experimental observations that are not explained by conventional theories of interacting bosons/fermions.

Dear Yatendra,

Thank you very much for your interesting answers. Although I am sure that there are more specialist in these fields that can interact with you much better, I will continue with my basic understanding because it seems that nobody want to enter.

1-You have explained in a very clear form how the atraction and repulsion forces work and bubble of 38 Ǻ is created in an stable form, but now I do not see where the bosonic state is and how it is necessary into this equilibrium.

Dear Yatendra,

You finish your last post saying that:

"This evident from the fact that no conventional theory explains the observation of negative volume expansion of He-4 liquid at T around 2.17 K and of He-3 around 0.6 K. Interestingly there are many such experimental observations that are not explained by conventional theories of interacting bosons/fermions."

which is very strong and I cannot understand that if there are experiments on this negative volume at this critical temperature of 2.17 K that conventional theories didn't explain, why you do not contact experimentalists and you make a cooperative work. This could be very interesting and it is my suggestion: contact experimental people and try to collaborate with them for solving real problems with the help of your model.

A comparative study of my theory with conventional theories of liquid helium-4 type systems of interacting bosons is given at the following link. Here I clearly list all important properties of liquid Helium-4 and similar systems not explained by conventional theories.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260166256

The basic difference lies with the fact that my theory concludes that the ground state of a system of interacting bosons is a state where all atoms have identically equal non-zero zero-point energy h^2/8md^2 and this state can be identified as the pair state of q = q_o = \pi/d (with relative pair momentum k = 2q) and CM momentum K =0. The Bose Einstein condensation occurs as a part or representative of a pair of particles with q= q_o and K=0. Evidently, particles have BEC in a single energy state of momentum p=\hbar q_o and K=0 and it is this state which has minimum possible energy as explained in

http://article.sapub.org/pdf/10.5923.j.ijtmp.20120205.02.pdf

my paper published in Internl J. Theor and Math Phys. 2(5), 101-107 (2012).

This explains how bosonic nature enters.

Article A comparative study of conventional and non-conventional mic...

Dear Daniel

Thanks for your suggestion to contact experimentalists. To this effect I really wonder what makes them to simply say that they are not theoretician. Perhaps, the situation arises for the following reasons:

(i) Every body is busy with their current research projects, progress of the research of their graduate students, and related academic interests.

(ii) My work has conflict of interests with those who have been working on single particle plane wave representation with a presumption that p=0 condensate (macroscopic occupation of atoms in a single particle state of momentum p=0) as the origin of superfluidity .

(iv) Any physicist who does not work in the field but wishes to know the true reason of superfluidity of Helium-4 (He-II), is possibly guided by his feeling of skepticism because I am still struggling to establish my work in spite of its accuracy and experimental consistency, while conventional theories have been developed by very prominent physicists and advances in the field are also being made by widely respected physicists in the field. In this context it may be noted that Landau also questioned the belief of conventional theorists that superfluidity of He-II has its origin with p=0 condensate. He gave several reasons but majority of people ignored his objections and continued their search of the existence of p=0 condensate theoretically and experimentally but without any convincing results.

Some time in 1974 Kleban also questioned the existence of p=0 condensate but his well sounded conclusion too was was ignored.

My comparative study (see the following link) gives several experimental results which are not explained by conventional theory, while my theory provides simple and clear account.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260166256

In such a situation I can only mention that at this point of time I am struggling to establish my work because it represents a minority conclusion. However, the nature is not guided by the beliefs of minority/ majority. It is guided by its laws and I have clearly established that conventional many body theories violate these laws and it is my humble belief that sooner or later conventional theorists would recognise this fact and help in developing the many body physics in the right direction.

Article A comparative study of conventional and non-conventional mic...

Dear Yatendra,

I was reading your recommended paper titled:"Laws of Nature Forbid the Existence of p = 0 Condensate in a System of Interacting Bosons" which is very interesting, but I think that I have not understood two things:

1. If you represent a particle by waves (de Broglie waves for instance), the basic quantum mechanics tells you that the fundamental state is with energy and momentum, never zero as it could be in classical mechanics. Say it is impossible to have the p=0 state and I suppose that the people cannot be so ignorant, then they are using other explenation which is out of my knowledge. Isn't?

2. When you put the particles in the fundamental state and you count their different momenta N(N-1) tell us that their kinetic energy increases also as its square, This goes also out of my idea of fundamental state. Where is my misunderstood?

Dear Yatendra,

Perhaps you could look in the literature of the experimentalists and try to find conditions which are wrongly explained. If the theoreticians do not discuss your work and do the fraud of rejecting its publication, the only solution that I see is to convince the experimentalists that they have presented results able to be interpreted better. It is clear that they have not conflict of interest between one theory or other.

Dear Daniel,

I am grateful that you are sparing so much of your valuable time to study my papers and analyse their content so critically.

You have rightly recognised that a quantum particle can not have p=0 and particularly so when it is a part of system confined to finite volume. Even the wave mechanics of a single particle trapped in a box of finite size, as mentioned in almost every graduate text, concludes that the particle has to have a least value of energy h^2/8mL^2 (where L is the size of the box) as zero-point energy or equivalent magnitude of momentum p = h/2L. In fact momentum of the particle is not even a good quantum number. We derive its magnitude from the energy eigen value; momentum in all allowed states loses information about its direction. Hence even mention of momentum as an experimental observable is erroneous. The momentum expectation value

of such a particle in its all quantum states has ZERO value. However, if people talk about momentum distribution of particles in the system confined to finite volume, I have no problem in presuming that they are talking about its magnitude derived from allowed energy eigen values. I too never understood why they are talking about p=0 state and condensation of particles in this state. A p=0 state is not even physically relevant for any experiment performed over a state of their flow (motion).

About your second point : When we try to explain the dynamics of a many body system in terms of pairs of particles, we consider their dynamics in terms their relative motion and centre of mass (CM) motion which are respectively identified as the motions of structureless bodies of mass m/2 and 2m respectively when particles have identical mass. Note that these bodies do not exist in the system and could possibly be identified to represent some kind of quasi-particles.

In using this kind of description, there are two options that we can exercise: (i) make pairs of particles with a rule that no particle is included in any two pairs which means that we have only N/2 pairs, (ii) make pairs of particles with no restriction and in this case each particle in a system of N particles makes N-1 pairs indicating a total of N(N-1)/2 different pairs that we can count. This means N(N-1)/2 relative motions and N(N-1)/2 CM motions. However, pl. remember that these motions do not represent real particles; they are quasi-particles (pl. allow me to use this nomenclature even if it is not exactly valid in terms standard meaning of this word). The real number of particles remains N. In what follows, one can assume that the energy of N particles is distributed among N(N-1)/2 relative motions and the same number of CM motions. The net energy of the system remains proportional to N only. It does not increase in proportion to N^2.

I hope this explains your question. Moreover, this counting I used only in relation to conclude that CM motions which represent nothing but a kind of free particle have to have their momentum K =0, leaving relative motions (where each particle can be seen to have q or -q motion). Since these motions involve inter-particle interactions, they are bound to have non-zero energy or corresponding non-zero momentum q = q_o in the ground state of the system. My theory analyses all these aspects in detail to identify that each particle in the system is a part or representative of a pair and this helps greatly in reducing the mathematical description of the system.

Dear Yatendra,

Everything is understood, except some details as how you can divide a level of energy occuped by several bosons in pairs, when the interaction had to be the same between atoms with also one interaction using special potentials. But in any case, your physical picture has coherence that it needed to be considered seriously by the referees and to ask you, if they want, about more interesting questions that I have done.

I wish you good luck with your research!