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I have always considered P&F to have been shafted by their university deans and such. The news conference that was foisted upon them was clearly premature. If the usual review process had been allowed to take place, the experiments would have been re-worked by P&F.

Instead of ridicule and banishment, P&F would have been hailed as great discoverers. The whole field of “cold fusion” and variants would have avoided two decades of suffering, and instead have attracted a generation of scientists, much as the discovery of high temperature superconductivity inspired many departments in great universities. This still has not occurred for this field.

Sad - mishandling probably set back research in this area by over 30 years.

I see it differently. Chemists making a claim of something as unlikely as cold, low-energy fusion is bound to raise a great deal of skepticism. If physicists had made that claim, I would have been skeptical; from chemists it was highly improbable.

Needless to say, I am very skeptical of the E-cat scam.

I have always considered P&F to have been shafted by their university deans and such. The news conference that was foisted upon them was clearly premature. If the usual review process had been allowed to take place, the experiments would have been re-worked by P&F. Instead of ridicule and banishment, P&F would have been hailed as great discoverers. The whole field of “cold fusion” and variants would have avoided two decades of suffering, and instead have attracted a generation of scientists, much as the discovery of high temperature superconductivity inspired many departments in great universities. This still has not occurred for this field. Sad - mishandling probably set back research in this area by over 30 years.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but P&F traveled all over presenting their findings at universities. I'm employed at a major university and attended their lecture way back when. Yes, there were skeptical questions being asked, but they were given the time to present and answer questions like any other scientists. Not only was there no ridicule of any kind, but many chemists here carried out attempts to reproduce, and probably better attempts than P&F, and the fact that nothing recognizable could be found, is what has driven the simple lack of interest from chemists. Certainly no widely respected physicist would take any interest in it. If you can't recruit interest in a new energy source for over 20 years, there's a very good reason.

Instead of ridicule and banishment, P&F would have been hailed as great discoverers.

P&F were given a considerable amount of money and resources by a wealthy member of the Toyota family for a number of years in the 1990's. They still turned out to be failures.