Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 11:42 AM, James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: I've seen it claimed by a rather emotionally committed skeptic -- with some background in conducting CF runs with calorimetry -- that an adequate 19th century technology water-bath style calorimetry of the E-Cat HT would cost a couple hundred bucks maybe Obviously if this is true then the $20,000 budget for the E-Cat HT test available to Levi et al (2013) would have been more than adequate. Clearly, if this estimate is accurate then it is easy to understand why a skeptic might get emotionally committed to discounting the report: I didn't see the claim, but I suspect some hyperbole was involved. But I would be skeptical of a $20,000 budget when a technology of this value was being validated, and you can buy tube furnaces off the shelf with water cooling in the range of 10k. Then the only thing that might be necessary for good calorimetry might be additional insulation.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 12:38 PM, James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: OK, I'll ask the question a different way: Is there any explanation offered, even if only in an interview, by the researchers as to why they did not use normal calorimetry? In the December run, the experiment was already running, so there was clearly no opportunity. They did not change very much for the March run, so the most likely explanation is that the option was not available, since it would clearly involve some modification to the ecat, but this is obviously speculation.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 1:00 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: They used perfectly normal calorimetry. Normal to me means common. But I have not seen calorimetry performed with IR thermometry. Do you have some references for where it has been used? There is not the slightest chance output is any less than 3 times input. The thing about that method is that it's indirect, and there is no natural way to integrate the output energy. That gives opportunities for deception. If you actually heat a large volume of water, the heat had to come from somewhere, so that's more unequivocal. And if that's done with a clearly isolated device, the evidence would be much stronger. Then, if you take it public, with unrestricted scrutiny, you've got a revolution. I do not think it would be good idea to put reactor in an enclosure where you cannot keep an eye on it. The previous one melted, so I think they should leave it in the open air. That's ridiculous. You keep an eye on it with thermocouples. And if you have a cooling system, you have far more opportunity to do something about it if it gets too hot. If they were to build something like an enclosure with flowing water tubes around the outside, the skeptics would find a hundred reasons to doubt those results. They would say that Rossi hid something in the box, or the flow rate is not correct, or the thermocouples are placed incorrectly, or this, or that, or an onion. Not if the water were collected to integrate the heat. And insulation is not heavy, so exceeding the entire device's weight in chemical fuel should be easy. But yes, open public scrutiny, or accessibility to the device by *any* qualified scientist would be necessary to allay all suspicions. It does not take much to set off the skeptics. Cude sees one extra wire with three-phase electricity and he calls that a rat's nest of wires. One wire! You're mixing objections up. The rat's nest of wires is possible with single-phase too. The reality is that it is a rat's nest from the pictures. The 3-phase involves more complicated measurement, and additional wiring. I don't know if there was a neutral or ground from the mains, but if there were, then it's more than one wire, and 3 times the measurements, and also more processing -- and for no advantage. No doubt he would call a flow calorimeter a rat's nest of cooling water pipes and way too many thermocouples. If you circulate the water from a 1000L tank, you wouldn't need anything more than a mercury thermometer to verify the heat produced. Thermocouples could be used to regulate things, but it would not affect the actual amount of heat needed to heat a volume of water. If you think that the ecat has a practical future, then surely an unequivocal demonstration should be possible.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 1:01 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Dennis, I don't think it would be quite so easy for Rossi to perform the experiment that you propose. It's amazing the excuses true believers contrive to explain why inferior experiments were used. If the thing is to be useful, it should at least be able to heat water. The recent tests were conducted in the open air and the thermal resistance that the ECAT works into has a very strong influence upon its operational parameters. But the thermal resistance is completely out of the experimenters control, and is affected by people walking by. Some kind of water cooling could be designed to remove heat at exactly the same rate, and would be easily controllable. How is that not preferable? If Rossi were to place his device into a tank of water much more heat would be conducted away from the core. That depends on how it is coupled to the water. But it doesn't need to placed into a tank. You can just circulate cooling water through conduits inside an enclosure. These things are already available off the shelf, and for much higher temperatures. This loss of internal temperature likely would prevent the positive feedback from operating properly. I suspect that he went to a lot of trouble adjusting the parameters so that the experiment would be successful in the open air instead of the typical connection methods planned. But why? It has practically no use in that configuration. To exploit it, especially to make electricity, requires some kind of heat exchange, usually with a fluid. Many skeptics insist upon a simple experiment where the ECAT is naked and is easy to observe as protection against scams. He has made a great deal of effort to accommodate their wishes and they are still not satisfied. Do you honestly think that Cude and the others would not come up with some other excuses to claim that the test was not accurate if set up as you suggest? I am convinced that there is no possible way to convince them that his device is real. If you think skeptics can't be convinced, how do you think it can ever be made practical? A system that heats a volume of water would be pretty convincing. That would leave only the input side to worry about. A generator with finite fuel would be good, as long as open scrutiny were permitted, but using controlled cooling should make it possible to self-sustain, and then no input at all would be necessary. Heating enough water in a neutral location without any input and with open scrutiny would convince anyone. But this system is so far from adequate from a skeptical view, that it's a joke. The input is unnecessarily complex and measurements are inadequate, the output is indirectly measured, the blank run uses a different power regimen, the system should self-sustain, but doesn't, the reactor temperature (central cylinder) is not monitored, and above all, it's behind closed doors in Rossi's facilities supervised by hand-picked academics, most of which have been avowed supporters from the beginning. A month before this report, I indicated what I thought would be significant, and what wouldn't. None of the criteria I suggested were needed were met in this test. And it fits the description of a test I specifically said would fall short. It's in the first verbose post I wrote on the subject here. So, this does not represent a change of criteria. On the other hand, true believers were hoping for an independent test with a dozen researchers from 4 universities published under peer review. But they seem to have lowered their standards and are perfectly happy with this farce.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 1:20 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: The ECAT will need adjustment depending upon the environment into which it operates. This is what should be expected. Exactly, and controlled cooling provides a way to adjust it. Sitting in the open air does not.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 1:29 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I have significant experience with flow calorimeters. I would say: 1. It would end up costing much more than a few hundred dollars. True. But not more than 10k for an off-the-shelf unit. That sounds like a bargain for what Rossi's doing. 2. It would take weeks of testing and futzing around to make it work. 3. It would clog up and it would leak. They always do. I would hate to work with something like this running constantly for months! Not if it's off-the-shelf. It would be designed to work for months,and would certainly be adequate for days, which is what these experiments were run for. 4. The skeptics would find a hundred reasons to doubt it, as they did with Rossi's other flow calorimeters (some of which I will grant were not good). Well, if he produced steam, then yes. Otherwise, a repeat of Levi's experiment was repeatedly requested, but never done. How hard would it be to measure the temperature in the water flow, and if you circulate water from a large tank, even better. You say skeptics can't be pleased, but the experiments specified for the steam cat were simply never done, so how can you know. And now he's abandoned that configuration and is doing something totally different, with its own problems. No test can answer all questions or lay to rest all doubts. Of course it can. At least any doubts about the existence of a new source of energy. An isolated thing that heats a lot of water would do it, under suitable scrutiny..
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Mark Gibbs mgi...@gibbs.com wrote: Even though I'm still wearing my skeptic's hat (that's the one with the propeller on top) isn't the argument about the need for calorimetry made irrelevant the amount of energy observed to have been generated? In other words, even with more precise measurements the exact energy output couldn't have been something more than an order of magnitude lower which would still validate the claim of significant over unity energy output. It's not an order of magnitude, it's a factor of 3. That's the power gain. You can get an order of magnitude in claimed energy density with only a 10% gain in power if you wait long enough. So, the claimed energy density is kind of arbitrary, and relies on the credibility of the power measurement. Still, a factor of 3 is a lot, and if the measurements can be trusted, it's difficult to make an error that large. But it's an indirect method, and if there's suspicion of tampering or deception, it's better to use direct methods. Heating an actual volume of water, or even a flow of water, is harder to fake, as long as you avoid phase changes, and put the thermocouple probes in the water.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 2:05 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Extraordinary claims call for the most ordinary proof you can come up with. That's true for true believers. For everyone else the usual saying represents common sense, and the opinion of great thinkers from Pascal through Sagan. I see no reason to consider your view above theirs
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 3:09 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I still think that a standalone unplugged demo is the best approach - not high wattage and fancy instruments and lots of wires and computer programs. That would be nice, but evidently that would probably cause the reactor to melt, or explode, so it is not an option. That's the excuse anyway, but it makes no sense. If controlled cooling were used to regulate the temperature, I see no reason that the necessary temperature could not be maintained without it running away. And in the 2012 reports, Rossi, or Penon claim more than 100 hours of self-sustained running. And if it ever proves to have practical value, it will have to be possible to make it self-sustain, since it will have to be able to make more electrical power than it consumes, or more heat than you can make with the fuel that produced the electricity to begin with.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Flow calorimetry has much to be said for it but it is more complicated and less believable than this. A lot more can go wrong with it, and usually does go wrong with it for the first several weeks. It is both more believable, which is why it is actually used for calorimetry, while ir thermometry is not (normally), and has the important advantage that you can control and tailor the cooling.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I have thought about that. During the initial warm up phase you would get an interesting result. After that, when it reaches a steady state, you would maintain the entire body of water at a certain temperature for weeks. The body (the bath and its container) would be losing heat into the surroundings. It amounts to more or less the same thing they are doing now, with a bigger body and more thermal mass, plus evaporation and other complicated stuff. I do not see an advantage. Heat loss is of course an obvious problem in heating a large tank of water. But if it were simply ignored, and the tank still heated up, it would strengthen the claim of excess heat, not weaken it. Moreover, a blank run could be used to verify the effect of the ecat. A modern hot tub at 37C loses about 100W to 200W in ambient temperature, if covered. That would increase as the temperature went up, but presumably losses could be significantly reduced with a better cover, and possibly more insulation. But with an ecat producing 1.5 kW like the December run, it should be possible to demonstrate excess heat pretty clearly. It does not avoid the steam question! On the contrary, with a body water you are right back to that problem, with evaporation. With a covered tank below the boiling point, evaporation can be ignored. The present method is the simplest. Using a body of hot water heated to terminal temperature would be more complicated. But far more direct and unequivocal. It has a visual way of integrating the heat that spot temperature measurement does not.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 3:50 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: It will take more than just a generator and an extension cord to close the loop. Some form of energy storage will be required to do the job. To close the loop with electricity, probably yes. But if you used controlled cooling, you could allow the ecat to rise to the temperature at which it self-sustains, and prevent runaway with the cooling. That would be the obvious way to do it.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 4:03 PM, DJ Cravens djcrav...@hotmail.com wrote: They only need to make their sponsors happy not Crude. I hope the best for them. Hey, if you're referring to me, I'm with you all the way on the self-sustaining water-tank heating demo. So the insult is particularly hurtful.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I do not understand what you have in mind here. Nature allows us to do some things and not others. We have to work with what nature allows, not what we would wish for in an ideal universe.[...] Obviously with more engineering RD a self-sustaining Rossi reactor could be made. How is that so obvious, after your song and dance about what nature allows. I think it's obvious now, that if it is triggered by heat, and it makes heat, it's a matter of controlling how much heat dissipates to make it self-sustaining. And he's claimed 100 hours of self-sustaining already. That's enough for a whiz-bang demo. It would not prove anything the present test does not prove. Mary Yugo would insist it is fake. Robert Park would ignore it. Why bother? Just use a different watt meter next time and all remaining questions vanish as surely as they would with a self-sustaining reactor. Well, that's not consistent with your previous statements about the need for an isolated self-sustaining device that remains palpably hotter than ambient as a demo that could not be refuted. I think that's right, but it just never appears, even though cold fusion is supposed to have an energy density a million times that of dynamite.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 4:18 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: The best proof is one that has the least possibility of error. Or the least possibility of error that favors the ecat, or the least possibility of tampering. An isolated ecat eliminates input tampering. A heated tank of water eliminates output tampering. Heating an isolated tank of water of sufficient volume to sufficient temperature with an isolated device is pretty much iron-clad, as long as the isolation can be transparently verified. Every complication that is added to the setup results in many more issues to question by the skeptics. Not true if the complications allows disconnection from the mains, or allows manifest integration of the heat. The technique used by the testers of the ECAT is good enough for any reasonable scientist to accept Only if you define reasonable as true believer. You fail to realize that there is no way what so ever to meet their requirements since they do not believe LENR is possible. An isolated device heating an isolated tank of water in an isolated location would meet all the skeptics' requirements. Anyway, as I said, you can't possibly think it will ever be practical, if you think skeptics cannot be convinced. They have failed to prove their position entirely, Also the believers have failed to prove theirs...
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Mark Gibbs mgi...@gibbs.com wrote: Indeed, making steam and using it to, say, drive a car across Italy without stopping would be pretty damn convincing. Nice to see you can envision a demo that would convince skeptics. Unfortunately the actual demos don't ever get better. They never approach this sort of level. There is always talk of self-sustaining, but it is never reached, in a public demo.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 4:37 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: There was a time when this field desperately needed a standalone self powered reactor to prove the reaction is real. That is because absolute power was low, ranging from 5 to 100 W. However, now that Rossi has developed high-powered reactors ranging from 500 to . . . 1 MW (I guess?) the need for standalone reactors is reduced. Nonsense, the absence is all the more suspicious. With a thermal-to-thermal COP of 2 or more, it should be a piece of cake to make it self-sustaining. That he hasn't most likely means the claims are bogus. The only way these results could be wrong would be if Rossi has somehow found a way to fool a watt meter. If he is capable of doing that he is also capable of making something that looks like a self-sustaining demonstration but is not. Disagree. The latter is not in the same league.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Terry Blanton hohlr...@gmail.com wrote: Dr. Richard L. Garwin is alive and well and will likely live to have his tea. If you believe Rothwell and Roberson, skeptics will never have to concede, because no application of cold fusion is obvious enough to make them believe it. Therefore, there will be no crow, or tea, on the menu. Of course the premise is nonsense. But the last sentence is still almost certainly true.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: If the device cannot self-power, it is still valuable with a lower COP, the proverbial hot water or space heater - A COP of 3 is not useful if the electricity was made with fossil fuels at an efficiency of 1/3. That's a wash.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 7:25 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: If it is real it is the most important advance in technology since the discovery of fire. If the scientific community is convinced it is real, every industrial corporation and university will be hard at work on this. ~$100 million per day will devoted to it. Huh. That's what the skeptics say. I thought true believers thought that it was being suppressed because the mainstream hates cldan and abundant energy and challenges to the status quo. I'll hang on to that quote the next time conspiracy theories rear their ugly head.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 8:36 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: WHY are you so certain that wattmeters do not work?!? You know that's not the objection. There is no chance Rossi can fool one, and if the people doing the test have any doubt about that, they can bring a portable generator. Would that they had. To put it another way, if you do not trust the wattmeter, why would you trust the IR camera or thermocouple? If Rossi can fool a wattmeter he can fool any instrument. What would he fool with an isolated device? And he couldn't fool a mercury thermometer to measure the temperature of a tank of water, if it was brought by a skeptic to a neutral location.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 8:43 PM, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.comwrote: Portable generator is also fine and even better, because it leaves very little room for tricks and doubt. But after 10 or so demonstrations we have had only one portable generator and that also was brought by Rossi. And it had the same output as the claimed ecat.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Nothing in the recent test was brought by Rossi. This test was a hands-off black box test, exactly what the skeptics have been demanding. It seems you will not take yes for an answer. So much nonsense. The test was running when they arrived in December, and the instruments were the same in March. In fact the ir camera, and the power meter were the same as used in the various experiments reported in 2012. Rossi's fingerprints are on every aspect of this test.
Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe...
On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 9:29 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.com wrote: Leading scam hypothesis does assume that Giuseppe Levi is a scammer and he is as bad as Rossi. And he brought most of the instruments. I see. And these other co-authors are so stupid they do not even notice the equipment is not working? Probably. Essen was stupid enough to think a humidity probe could determine steam quality, or that visual inspection of steam was enough. Even though they calibrated the wattmeter with a resistor? Even though they stepped a blank cell through a calibration? Different power regimen. Doesn't count. So you are saying Levi wants to destroy his own reputation for no reason, for no possible benefit. There may be benefit, and he has retained plausible deniability, so the risk is small. Because there is not slightest chance he or Rossi will get away with this. Sooner or later someone will bring an instrument that reveals the scam. Much later is possible though. BLP has gone for 20 years+ with many claims and no product and no revealing of a scam. Also, how did Rossi and Levi manage to make modern integrated circuit instruments work wrong? Watch these videos if you didn't like the cheese video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD7DzTIFJdU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KMLmpC7-Ls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1eMryiU1ro They're not about faking power, but show some amazing electronics fakes.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:55 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Why not give a direct answer to a direct question. Do you agree that the COP is greater than 1? Yes or no? Read the reply again, with particular attention to the first word. I would have thought that elaboration was a good way to advance the discussion, but apparently you prefer a kind of cross-examination to a discussion. I don't claim to be certain of anything, but I am highly skeptical of a COP 1, though there might be some amount of chemical heat produced in that cylinder. -Original Message- From: Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com To: vortex-l vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Fri, May 31, 2013 2:23 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:44 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.comwrote: Josh, your entire theory will be shot if you acknowledge that the COP is greater than 1. Are you now ready to accept this condition? No. The only thing you seem to be able to do is miss the point. The claimed COP is 3. That means that even if the claim is right, it's far from ready for industrialization, given that electricity is produced with 1/3 efficiency. So, as I said, I hardly think he's looking at the final version of the power supply when the ecat is still completely inadequate. And so this excuse for using 3-phase is as much nonsense as all the other excuses with sub-gauss and sub mK magnetic field and temperature oscillations.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:59 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: No reason for any of your issues is given except that there is no reason that you are aware of to do what makes sense to most other engineers and scientists on the list. 3-phase is not needed. He ran higher power steam cats without it, and none of the excuses given make sense. And are there scientists other than Storms, on the list? The actual reason for the Dec run is most likely a holdover from the 2012 hot cat experiments, in which inputs up to 5 kW were used, and an ordinary line would not have been enough. But for the March run, they introduced a new power supply, and planned from the outset to run low power, so single phase would have worked, but maybe made deception more difficult. We do not have an problem with any of the design issues that Rossi has chosen. Three phase power is common in applications. Not applications with less than 1 kW resistive loads. Good true RMS power meters are used for the input power measurement. They are good for ordinary applications, but not when there is suspicion of tampering.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:09 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: I admit that I do not believe that the magnetic field is important in this case. I am very pleased to see that some progress is being made. It is not too close to zero with this particular geometry Well, the particular geometry is not completely obvious, but if they are helical coils, then yes, it would be close to zero in the vicinity of the reactor. and if you recall the tops and bottoms of the resistor coil are very close to the core tube. Close, but off axis, and so while the field would be stronger, it would still be very weak. Anyway, if it were magnetic field, a very strong non-uniformity would be observed, with much more heat near the ends, but wasn't in the Dec or March runs. You need to admit an error when you make it if you intend to appear knowledgeable and not full of it. I did not make an error, and true believers will always think honest skeptics like me are full of it. I accept that.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:17 PM, MarkI-ZeroPoint zeropo...@charter.netwrote: If you genuinely want an explanation of how the eCAT is positive feedback, which Dave is trying to do, backed up by his model, then it requires following a line of reasoning. Wrong discussion. The question of COP 1 here arose in the context of industrialization, not in the explanation for controlling positive feedback. Dave is NOT asking you for an acceptance that Rossi’s device does have COP1; he is only asking that we temporarily accept that condition, and follow the reasoning from there. That's exactly what I did in the other context. I said, *even if* the COP were 3, it wouldn't be enough for industrialization. And then 2 people pounced on me, suggesting I was admitting that the COP was 3. Why are you afraid to do that? I'm not. That's exactly what I am doing. In the feedback system, I argue that if the COP were 3 (or especially 6), then removing the external heat would not quench it. And if it were 3 or 6, it would be easy to make it self-sustain by controlling the heat loss with insulation and regulated cooling.
Re: [Vo]:Defkalion
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 9:50 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: The effects of heat and the use of heat to control chemical and nuclear reactions is well established. Perhaps, but elsewhere I asked for an example where the addition of heat is used to control a positive thermal feedback system, especially one in which the external heat is several times *below* the heat produced by said reaction, and none were offered. Do you have an example?
Re: [Vo]:Defkalion
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 10:35 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Applying more heat to make it stop is not what he does. He ceases to apply the excess drive heat to make it stop. This is 180 degrees different. The extra drive power to the resistors is added to the internal power during the time the device is heating up and hence gaining temperature. When that source is quickly removed, the positive feedback direction becomes reversed and the device begins to cool. Except there are many reports in which the power is said to be stable, and the measured temperature is stable.
Re: [Vo]:Defkalion
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 10:44 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: The group at moletrap has a hobby of trying to debunk anything that they do not understand. You should have realized by now that these clowns can not admit when they are shown in error to keep up appearances of understanding these systems. They know when they are found wrong, but fail to state it publicly. This would be funny if it were not tragic for these groups to be possibly delaying the introduction of life giving discoveries such as LENR. One day they will be shown completely wrong and will crawl under a rock to avoid blame. I doubt that will happen. So far, they are batting 1000, while Sterling Allan is batting zero.
Re: [Vo]:Defkalion
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 11:07 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Cude and the others of this group can not accept that LENR is anything except for a scam. Not true in my case. I think most of LENR research is not a scam; it is probably just pathological science. But I don't even rule it out completely. I just find the evidence far too weak to be convincing, and in the absence of good evidence, based on very strong evidence that it should not occur, I remain highly skeptical, as I am of perpetual motion and dowsing and telepathy and so on. This position explains why they 'know' that there must be some form of trick being propagated by Rossi. Again, that doesn't apply to me. I think cold fusion is extremely unlikely not only because it is contrary to expectations, but because if Rossi's claims were valid, unequivocal proof would be very easy to stage. So, I consider alternative explanations, including possible deception, far more likely.
Re: [Vo]: Interesting Information Contained in Output Temperature Curve Shape
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 12:57 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: There is a wealth of information contained within the shape of the output temperature curve associated with operation of the ECAT. That's total speculative and nonsensical over-interpretation. It's based in the first place on the assumption that the power is constant during the on phase and zero in the off phase, but if that's what it is, why would Rossi have forbidden measurement of the actual wave to the ecat during the live run? He permitted measuring the power to the ecat during the blank run. Then they say it's the same, except for the turning off, but don't allow measurement. Again, why? He's told us what it is, but it can't be measured. The most obvious explanation is that he's concealing additional power input during the off cycle. The exact shape of the power cycle is completely unknown. If the particular details of the power input are proprietary, and it's not measured, you can't conclude anything from the output waveform, beyond that it has the same periodicity as the input power fluctuation. The on portion may not be flat, and the off may not be zero or flat. Otherwise, there would be no reason to disallow their measurement. Even if your assumptions of the input were correct, your interpretation of the inflection point is far too vague and unspecific to mean anything to me. Your spice model may give you all the results you want, but your descriptions of what's happening are far from clear.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:11 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: No problem, I will meet you here in a couple of years and we can compare notes. Good, but I was hoping you'd be able to tell us now if you might get a little skeptical if the hot cat has a similar fate that the steam cat has seen in the last 2 years. If it has come to nothing in that time, will you be so confident? I assure you that I can speak to any of the objections that you have provided they are not totally out of reality. That's your argument? You assure me that you have one? Mostly you ignore my objections and speak to someone else's and repeat your own unsupported claims. Lets start with one of your choice regarding the many heat generation issues. How about how a small amount of heat can control a much larger amount? Are you interesting in an explanation or do you want to keep stating things that can be shown wrong? You haven't shown anything to be wrong. And if you have an explanation for controlling positive thermal feedback with heat, why don't you just give it already, instead of repeatedly saying you will give it. Or, how about my favorite recent issue about how DC flowing due to rectification in the load Someone else's argument. Address my points when you respond to my posts, or it's very inefficient.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:13 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: I am attempting to keep you form getting banned since I want to use you to clear up a number of issues. It is hoped that you will go back to the other skeptics and then set them straight. Garbage. You don't need anyone else to present an argument. Just post your best. You're free to go over to other forums and direct them to your words of wisdom.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:25 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Maybe we are making headway in this discussion. Can I assume that you are now saying that the hot cat can actually produce heat by some unknown process? So far it is not clear that you accept this premise. For heaven's sake. You piddle along asking stupid questions to avoid actually addressing my objections. Let me spell this out for you. I am skeptical of the ecat, partly because *if* it worked as he claims with a thermal-to-thermal COP of 3 or 6, (1) it would be easy to make it self-sustain (possibly with thermostatically controlled cooling), and yet he doesn't, and (2) it would be difficult to control with the addition of heat. What I said was that it is possible to conceive of a situation in which one could control positive thermal feedback with adding heat, particularly if the external heat were concentrated and at a higher temperature -- think flames to sustain charcoal briquets when they are being lit. But the hot cat uses external heat that is more diffuse and at a lower temperature than the heat from the reaction, so it is very difficult to imagine -- think controlling glowing embers with a space heater held nearby. And even if it were possible, it's the last way any sane person would do it. If the thing produces heat, and there's a danger of runaway, the obvious way to control it is with thermostatically controlled cooling. The claim that he needs heat to control it is such an obvious excuse to allow him to add heat, I'm amazed true believers buy into it. So, no, I think it highly unlikely that the hot cat is actually producing heat by an unknown process. But that's totally irrelevant to the question of whether it's plausible to use heat to control it *if it were producing heat*. Do you understand the concept of a hypothetical? Then, are you agreeing that DC current flowing in the primary due to rectification … I didn't follow the dc discussion you're talking about, and I don't follow what you're saying about it here. But that's not the point. I don't believe we could enumerate every possible way to trick those meters, even if we had a decent report about how things were connected and where the measurements were made, which we don't. But the way to exclude tricks is to take the control of the experiment away from the suspected deceiver. Give open access to the hot cat under whatever necessary supervision. This test was the furthest thing from that, and it used unnecessarily complex input, a severely inadequate device to measure the input if there was suspicion of deception, and an indirect way to measure the heat output, when much more direct and visual methods are available. I have not personally been following the energy density so I must leave that discussion to those with more knowledge. No one really knows exactly how LENR works including me so that is unfair to ask of me. And you don't see a double standard here? You said that anyone unqualified to describe how a deception might work is not allowed to speculate that deception might be occurring based on sadly inadequate measurements and scrutiny, And yet you say you are not qualified to explain how such a high power density is possible without melting the nickel, or how nuclear reactions can happen in the first place, and yet that doesn't stop you from speculating -- nay practically guaranteeing -- that they are happening. You know, there would be a very easy way to at least show that the heat is coming from the central cylinder (if it were), just by putting a thermocouple on it and outside the resistor radius. But of course, they didn't do that either, did they?
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 8:08 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Josh, once you understand how the ECAT uses heat for control you will realize that the heat can not be applied continuously. Well, you're gonna have to explain it if you expect me to understand it. And then you're gonna have to explain how the December hot cat used continuously applied heat, and worked for over 100 hours. And how the steam cats were all at constant temperature. And how some of the steam cats allegedly self-sustained for 4 hours, or the hotcat self-sustained for more than 100 hours back in August or July 2012. Or you're gonna have to suspect Rossi was less than honest in some of those demos, and that would make him suspicious in this one. Please take time to study what I have been and am currently writing so that you will not keep making this statement when it is not accurate. I haven't been able to read everything. Did I miss where you explained something? Because all I've seen is a few vague and unjustified paragraphs that in themselves explain squat. Remember, continuous heat input to the ECAT results in thermal run away. Except when it doesn't, I guess, as in the examples listed above.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 8:57 AM, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: ** Yes it was a poor analogy, but so what? Cude’s analysis is wrong no matter how much he obfuscates and by jumping on a poor analogy – he does not gain credibility. ** Which analogy is that? I was suggesting there was no analogy in which heat is used to control a positive thermal feedback. Yes - the ICE is not a good analogy to ECat but in contrast ICF is an adequate metaphor – which is why he avoids ICF of course. In ICF, the goal is to reach a situation where each pellet self-sustains -- i.e. ignites. That is expected when the heat produced by fusion that stays within a pellet is equal to the heat added to initiate fusion. That point has been reached in the ecat, but it has not been reached in ICF, so my objection does not apply there. Subcritical fission is also a good metaphor No, it's not, because in that case, they don't control large heat with smaller heat. They control fission reactions with neutrons. The neutrons produced by the reactions themselves are necessarily fewer, or of a less favorable energy than the external neutrons. So, there is no neutron profit, and therefore it is subcritical. But there could be an energy profit, although it's not clear it will be realized in practice. The ECat can indeed be self-sustaining in single or in multiple units, according to the inventor. Right, and the repeated claims without demonstration makes it suspicious. The electrical input provides *control* and prevents runaway by permitting a lower mass of active material. Well, that's his excuse, but my objection stands. If 360 W from outside the reactor is enough to initiate the reaction, it seems implausible that 1.6 kW produced inside the reactor would not sustain it. Rossi uses electricity to make heat as part of ongoing phase-change cycling process [wild speculation deleted] The temperature was stable in the Dec hot cat. Apparently phase-change cycling is too difficult a topic for Cude to understand. True. Your explanations sound like word salad to me. Now, some of Hawking's words read like that to me too. So you may be another Hawking. But in any case, I don't benefit from it. You're out of my league.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 12:27 AM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:58 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: But I think you misunderstood. I was not referring to new science theories there. I was saying that it's common sense that if Rossi's claims were being accepted by the majority, there would be huge excitement. Not necessarily. Sometimes people act in accordance with the rule Once bitten, twice shy. But I'm referring to the time where they have overcome shyness on the second round; that is, where the claims are accepted by the majority. Once that happens there will be huge excitement. So I am arguing precisely that they have *not* accepted it, probably because they are twice shy. Others were arguing I could not know that it was not widely accepted. I still think it's common sense.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 3:51 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: No, you don't. Plenty of ICEs (outboards, motorcycles) run without batteries. Car engines would run without batteries too, unless they use some kind of electronic fault detection that shuts it down without a battery. But the spark doesn't need a battery. And even with a battery, it's still self-sustaining. It's not a valid point. It's a simple point -- some engines (many engines; most engines?) require a secondary source of power to control the cycle. No, any ICE can run without a battery (except for artificial fault detection), and a battery is not a secondary source of power. The battery holds the same amount of energy when you shut the engine down as it did when you started it. So, even if you want to think of the battery helping to control something, all the energy in the battery, beyond a short time after it's installed or recharged after you left the lights on, is put there from the engine. The engine supplies the power that controls it. That's self-sustaining buy any definition. Anyway, if it serves some purpose for you, that's fine, but I was asking if there was a system that uses an *external* *heat* source to control a source of heat. That's not it. If an ecat were to use a battery which was charged by the ecat, that would be self-sustaining too.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 1:39 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 3:54 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: But the ecat just uses electricity to make heat. So if the ecat already makes heat, it should self-sustain on that. Like combustion. I passed over this point too quickly. One question is why in Rossi's device the heat generated by the reaction would not be sufficient to sustain the reaction, as in combustion, without some kind of external drive. This does seem like an odd requirement. Giving Rossi the benefit of the doubt, the fact that an external stimulus is required in the form of resistance heating (also heat, as has been pointed out), this seems to indicate that one of two phenomena, or both, would need to be occurring: - The general area of the reaction is somewhat localized, and the normal thermal gradient that would lead heat to dissipate from that location must be countered from outside of it by the resistance heaters, so that sufficient heat is retained in that area. Right. External heat would affect the temperature gradient. But remember it took only a fraction of the external 360 W to cause the reaction power to initiate and increase to 1.6 kW, so it seems implausible that the 1.6 kW would not be enough to sustain it. - The reaction depends upon a flux of heat, and not simply elevated an temperature on its own. Heat is random motion, so it's hard to see how at the site of the potential reaction the direction of the flux would make a difference, and rate of the flux would be far higher at 1.6 kW than at 360 W.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: There is a third possibility as well. The reaction is localized, and it depends upon an elevated temperature to kick off. But the local region is destroyed by the reaction, so you have apply heat once more to initiate the reaction in other parts of the charge. But again 1.6 kW from within can do this more efficiently than 360 W from outside.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 3:22 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Eric, The resistive heating requirement is to be able to reverse the temperature excursion at the proper time by removing the extra input. Constant heat input will result in the destruction of the device when useful output power is generated. Except when it doesn't like in the December hot cat, and all the steam cats.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 4:10 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Eric, Model 1 appears to be more in line with what I suspect is happening except for the explanation of the lack of external heat for control issue. You need to consider that the peak heat power being generated inside the core is only about 2 times greater than the resistor heating required to control it at the turn around point. Rossi has stated this on several occasions and it matches my model. But it's not consistent with the December hot cat, in which case the overall COP was 6, and as I've argued, less than half of the input power will reach the core, the rest directly heating the outer ceramic. So, in that case, you probably have at least a peak power in the core at least 10 times larger that the external heat that is controlling it. When such a large percentage of the net power at that node is taken away abruptly, a turn around in temperature direction occurs. This is a complicated positive feedback system where a large fraction of the internally generated heat is being absorbed by the thermal mass of the device. Enough external heat is removed to force the core to be starved. That reverses the temperature path. Once reversed, the positive feedback works in a manner that accelerates the falling core temperature toward room. Could you provide the temperature dependence of the reaction rate and the heat loss that would produce such an effect. And also explain how the December hot cat was stable with constant input power. If you are very good, or lucky, you can reverse the core at just below an optimum point which will allow the temperature to languish there for an extended time before it begins it rapid decent. This is how you achieve a high value of COP. The core has a lot of time during which it puts out large values of heat energy before requiring a refresh drive pulse. The drive remains off for a longer time while the high temperature lingers. Does this help to explain the operation according to my model? Not to me. It's all just hand-waving. Could you quantify things a little? And explain why constant power was used in December.
Re: [Vo]: DC Meter Cheat Spice Model to be Replicated
On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 9:21 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: I have requested that Cude or any others interested in finding the truth construct a similar model and prove me wrong. I never made any claims about dc rectification. I said that the experimental design leaves opportunities for deception, one example of which is the cheese video. There are surely others that talented electrical engineers could design that would fool that cabal of trusting dupes, and would be impossible to deduce from a poorly written account of the experiment. I think it's a mug's game because it assumes that every possible method of deception can be excluded. There are obviously ways to reduce the possibilities of deception, but the best way is to have people *not* selected by Rossi arrange all the input power and its monitoring, make it as simple as possible (2 lines) and preferably from a finite source (generator), and use a method that visually integrates the heat, like heating a volume of water. It's just such nonsense to imagine that Rossi has a technology that will replace fossil fuels, and he can't arrange an unequivocal demonstration. This [cooperative analysis of a particular deception scheme] is the way science should be conducted and I hope that it represents the future of cooperation between all parties concerned. If you think *science* is about second guessing someone's demo, and trying to sleuth whether or not he cheated, then you have no clue. Science at its best is about disclosing discoveries so others can test them. Even if Rossi needs to keep his sauce secret, the need to guess and speculate about what's going on, and to make models to determine something that *someone already knows* is not science. It's idiocy. And yes, I freely participate in this idiocy, but at least I don't call it science.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:36 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: This is a good start Josh. I think I can explain that to you since you seem to be a pretty sharp guy. Thank you Mr Roberson for that kind compliment. Unfortunately it also takes an explanation that is realistic and a sharp guy to explain it. And you seem to be a guy who thinks he's a lot sharper than he is. I wish you'd look at my much simpler intuitive argument, and tell me what's wrong with it. For example, if 360 W from the outside can trigger the reaction, why would 1.6 kW from the inside not sustain it? I get that the basic claim is that the reaction power alone is not enough to maintain the reaction, so it decays toward zero, but the sum of the external and reaction powers is enough to make it grow, even to a temperature at which runaway occurs. But the problem is that it seems unlikely that a plausible temperature dependence of the reaction rate and of heat loss would produce that situation, given the constraints represented by the claimed observations. In particular, the much higher output power compared to the input power. While they claim a COP of 3 or 6 for the device, that would correspond to a much higher COP for the fuel itself, because much less than half of the input heat would reach the fuel. As I see it, you only need to postulate how the reaction rate depends on temperature, and how the heat loss depends on temperature to determine what will happen to the system. For a given input power and temperature, you can then calculate the net power (total power produced by the external plus reaction minus the heat loss). If that's positive, it will get hotter, if negative it will cool down. When it encounters a change in sign it will stabilize, A sign change (or zero net power) occurs when the heat loss is equal to external power plus the reaction power, much like the sun is stable with it's heat loss balancing its reaction rate. If the net power is positive, and it grows with temperature, then you get a runaway condition. In my brief tests I only used simple functions (of the temperature for the reaction rate, and of the temperature difference from ambient for the heat loss), and if the system is designed to be stable at 2 kW output for 360 W input, as in the December run, the removal of the input always left a system stable at a somewhat lower temperature. The reason is that the reaction rate has to grow quickly at the beginning to keep the total input power ahead of the heat loss so it is always positive until it reaches the 2 kW level in the December test. In my calculations, if it grows fast enough to ensure that it reaches 2 kW, where the sign changes by design, then removal of the external drive doesn't quench it. This is true even assuming all 360 W reach the fuel. Realistically, far less than half would, especially at the higher temperatures, and this makes removal of the external even less significant. Now, it is surely possible to contrive a reaction rate dependence and a heat loss dependence to make it quench without the external heat, but it's far from obvious that it would be realistic, and that one could engineer the necessary dependence, particularly in so many and varied configurations. So, that's why I asked what your proposed functional dependences are that would give the observed behavior. How does the reaction rate depend on temperature, and how does the heat loss depend on temperature? And are they realistic dependences? But the real question, which is what raised the issue to begin with, is *why bother* trying to engineer these dependences. You and Storms admit that Rossi has difficult engineering challenges to make such a system stable with a high COP. Why would he make it so difficult for himself? No sane person would do it this way. If the reaction rate depends on temperature, and there is danger of runaway, then the obvious way to control it is with thermostatically controlled cooling. And then you could easily make it self-sustaining, by adjusting the cooling to give any temperature necessary. Instead he adds heat with the pretense of controlling the heat, because of course, that may be all the heat he's actually got. It's like so many cold fusion claims. It's not that there is an obvious alternative explanation for the apparent excess heat. It's that there are far more direct, straightforward, transparent, and well-established ways to demonstrate it that are not used. It seems like the claims only occur when the experiment is unnecessarily indirect and complex. So, I think it's a waste of time analyzing results like this. Do the experiment with an isolated finite power source, with flow calorimetry that integrates heat in a visual way, and do it under public scrutiny without restrictions on observers, and then the world will change. As Aesop's fable The leap at Rhodes finshes: No need of witnesses. Suppose this city is Rhodes. Now show us how far you can jump. The
Re: [Vo]:Ekstrom critique of Levi et al.
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:47 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: So, do you need help with that spice model? You're just repeating your arguments and ignoring the responses I've already given to them. Obviously I have no proof. How could I? True believers insist on an explanation of how deception might explain the alleged observations, but do not hold themselves to the same standard to give an explanation for how nuclear reactions could be initiated in those circumstances, or how they could produce that much heat without radiation, or how NiH could produce 100 times the power density of nuclear fuel without melting, regardless of what produces the energy. That doesn't stop you from believing it happens though. There's various ways to create illusions, and I don't necessarily know how it might have been done. But I know there was a rat's nest of wires, and an unnecessarily complex method of supplying power, and that deception on Rossi's part is far more likely than cold fusion. Most people looking at the cheese power video could not prove there was a trick from the video alone, and especially not from a paper written to describe the experiment, by people who actually believed in cheese power. But that doesn't mean they would not be nearly certain there is one. And it would be easy for anyone with elementary knowledge of electricity to set up an experiment to demonstrate cheese-power unequivocally, if it were real. Likewise, the same could be done for the ecat. But when they use 3-phase, when single would do, when the wiring is in place ahead of time, when close associates choose the instruments which are completely inadequate, when the blank run uses different conditions, when the input timing is determined from a video tape, when the COP just happens to equal the reciprocal of the duty cycle, when the power supply box is off-limits, and the power measurements are restricted, and when the claim is as unlikely as cheese-power, it is ok to be suspicious. The remainder of your discussion is nothing more than using words to avoid the issue. They are a direct response to your arguments or requests. But you have no counter to them, so you just repeat what you said before. You wrote a large number of unsubstantiated and untrue statements which I want to take apart one by one. Yea, sure. But you don't respond to any of them. Instead you just stomp your feet and repeat yourself. As long as you ignore my responses, I'll keep repeating them. You have a double standard. Answer for that.
Re: [Vo]:Ekstrom critique of Levi et al.
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: The tactic of the obstructionist is to avoid dealing with the case The avoidance here is from the true believers who insist that any alternative explanation must described in detail, whereas they refuse to explain the thermodynamics of a power density 100 times that of uranium in a fission reactor without melting, or how nuclear reactions can produce that much heat and no radiation, etc.
Re: [Vo]:Ekstrom critique of Levi et al.
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 11:35 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: It is apparent that Mr. Cude does not have a valid case and is not willing to discuss the issues. I've written a lot of words, so obviously I'm willing to discuss. I'm kind of outnumbered here, so it's not possible to respond to everything promptly. I'm sorry if you felt neglected in the last round, but Rothwell spewed forth so much nonsense, that was nevertheless more comprehensible than your non-explanation explanations (which are really just assertions), that it took higher priority. As for the weekend, well, I do unfortunately have a life. I insisted to others who are part of it that there were more people than usual wrong on the internet, and it was really important that I straighten them out, but it was my anniversary, and my wife was having none of it. But on our little weekend, I asked everyone who would listen if they thought adding heat was a logical way to regulate positive thermal feedback, and everyone from the concierge to the waiter to the lifeguard at the pool said that while it might be possible in some contrived situation, it's the stupidest thing they ever heard of. Of course, I had to explain that it was like using an electric space heater to regulate the output of a fireplace. Only the cab driver hesitated, and said he'd get back to me after he checked with his dispatcher -- I'm still waiting. We can show that every one of his positions is nothing more than speculation with absolutely no substantiation. With only a paper to go on describing an experiment that we cannot test, that's true of every position, and in particular the position that it involves cold fusion. There are alternative explanations, and to the smart people, cold fusion is the least likely. You have made no argument to change that view. He refuses to acknowledge errors I've acknowledged several errors that true believers have made. that he continues to present as fact when he knows that they have no basis. I have presented as fact only things that are facts. Like the fact that they said they used 3-phase power. The idea that the purpose of the 3-phase is to obfuscate and make deception easier is, I have admitted, speculation, just as is the idea that there's any cold fusion going on. He fails to understand how heat can be used to control the ECAT even though I have attempted to explain it to him on numerous occasions. No. You really haven't. You have only said that you could explain it. I have asked for your proposed temperature dependence of the reaction rate and heat loss, and you haven't supplied it. He fails to understand how the DC component … I have made no specific argument about dc. You are arguing with someone else. I have said that the meter they use is inadequate because it has a limited frequency range, and clampons measure only net ac current. Therefore power at a frequency outside the range of the meter would not be detected, or concealed conductors could produce zero net current through a clampon, while nevertheless delivering power to the load, as in cheese power. I'm no EE, but if you want to exclude tricks, you should measure the input in detail. There is no indication the connections were removed and checked carefully, or of any use of a scope. That makes it suspicious. One method of deception has been identified. I hardly think it's the only one, given the confusing wiring, and the even more confusing description of the wiring and the measurements. We can't even agree on where the measurements were made in some instances. I didn't follow the dc discussion you're talking about, and I don't follow what you're saying about it. But one thing that I've not seen excluded (in addition to the cheese power) is that the 3 power lines are all floating on a dc level because of tampering with the line itself. The clampons would not detect that, and neither would the interline voltage measurements, which is all that is reported. But if there's a neutral line in to the box, power can be generated from the dc component above that indicated by the meter. Hartman says he considered a dc bias of all the input lines, but that it would require a return line, and he looked for one from the ecat. If that's what Essen was referring to as excluding dc, then I'm not buying it. Because there was no measurement of the voltage or current on the lines to the ecat during the live run in March, so that says nothing. The voltage measurement was on the input, and there is no mention that a neutral line was not available there. So that's 2 scenarios I've proposed, and you have yet to propose a single scenario for how nuclear reactions could be initiated in those circumstances, or how they could produce that much heat without radiation, or how NiH could produce 100 times the power density of nuclear fuel without melting, regardless of what produces the energy. That doesn't stop you from believing it happens though. So,
Re: [Vo]:Ekstrom critique of Levi et al.
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 11:53 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 4:29 AM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.comwrote: Put yourself in the shoes of those 7 scientists who have placed their reputations on the line. I don't think it's a big risk. They can plausibly claim ignorance. In fact their ignorance is the most plausible explanation. ***No, the most plausible explanation in the light of 14,700 replications of the P-F Anomalous Heat Effect is that the effect is real and Rossi has found a way to generate it more reliably. We had this conversation about those replications, and you believe that every single one of them was an error, which has been shown to be more than 4500 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE demonstrably incorrect and impossible. No, you don't know your mathematics, because that's like saying that the chance of rolling 10 sixes out of 60 dice is (1/6)^10. It's nonsense.
Re: [Vo]:Adding Energy to get Energy
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: Anyway the Farnsworth Fusor is a fusion reactor that many high school level students have built, including Conrad. It involves adding electrical energy in order to achieve LENR reactions. Sound familiar, Joshua? You missed the point. I have no problem adding energy to get energy. The problem I have is when you get back several times more heat than you used to start it, it should be easy to keep it going on its own. It's like combustion. In the Fusor, they haven't done this, plus what they put in is not heat, but real electrical energy to accelerate ions. They don't get that back, so self-sustaining is harder. It's more like trying to close the loop in electrolysis experiments, where you need electricity, but you produce heat. That takes a bigger COP. The mainstream wants to call it hot fusion but it is not. The gainful reactions are fusion but technically not hot or cold, and yes they are definitely low energy - warm not hot. Well, you can play with labels hot and cold, but this is ordinary fusion in the sense that the Coulomb barrier is overcome (or tunneled through) by kinetic energy, the branching ratios are perfectly standard, and everything is completely consistent with scientific generalizations (theory) already accumulated and verified. The published threshold level for D+D fusion is variously listed at around 1.4 MeV up to 2.2 MeV Where are those published? Because from what I've seen (see Bussard's google talk for example, or just wikipedia) the cross-section for D-D fusion peaks around 50 keV, and is still appreciable below 10 keV. The article on fusors says a minimum of about 4 keV is needed to get useful rates. The sun's interior is 15 billion kelvins, corresponding to about 1.3 keV. That makes for a slow fusion rate, and keeps the sun burning. and yet the Fusor average plasma energy level is lessthan 1 eV But in the fusor, it's not the plasma temperature that gives the ions the energy to fuse. The ions are accelerated into the plasma with a few keV energy. In the fusor, the ions are accelerated to several keV by the electrodes, so heating as such is not necessary (as long as the ions fuse before losing their energy by any process). -- Wiki so it truly is LENR on the input side. No, it truly is not. You don't have a clue.
Re: [Vo]:Adding Energy to get Energy
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: We are taking about two different phenomenon of nature. Trying to use the same concepts and words to describe both results in confusion. Those of us who have studied cold fusion for the last 23 years have a definition of CF that is not up for discussion. Please try to understand what I'm telling you. Cold fusion and hot fusion require different conditions to cause their initiation, they have different nuclear products, and they result at different rates. These are facts and not a matter of arbitrary definition. Cold fusion requires only a few eV for it to be initiated. In contrast, many keV are required to cause hot fusion at the same rate. Cold fusion produces helium while hot fusion produces fragments of helium. What do you mean fragments? Isotopes? The nuclei? Hot fusion produces isotopes of helium, including 4He very occasionally from DD fusion, but commonly from DT fusion, among other products. Cold fusion requires a solid while hot fusion occurs in plasma. Hot fusion also occurs in a solid in neutron sources where they accelerate hydrogen isotopes into palladium deuteride in commercial neutron sources.
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: Watch the cheese video. The ends of the wires that the magician wants you to measure are already exposed. Clever, huh. Too clever by half. This would not begin to fool any scientist, electrician or EE on God's Green Earth. There has not been an electrician since Edison who would not check all the wires, and who might fall for this. You miss the point as usual, which was that no wires need to be stripped to measure voltage. As for no engineers being fooled by the video, that's because the alternative to a trick is cheese power. Almost no one would be fooled by it for that reason. The immediate assumption is a trick and so the immediate reaction is to look for it. Plus Tinsel deliberately left a couple of clues in the video. That's not the case for the ecat. But what if he found some true believers in cheese power, or instead of cheese, he used a little box that was maybe a little radioactive, and he called it a cold fusion electrical generator. Then he could have used the same laissez faire Swedish team and Levi. And say he skillfully built up expectations in a very elaborate way over a period of time, and was a little more careful in the deception, and maybe used a more complicated input with 3-phase power, and restricted the measurements and inspection to protect his secret sauce. I'm confident that team could have been easily fooled. And then, instead of nice video with a couple of tells, he gets the true believer team to write up their account of the device. Now, if the Swedes were fooled, people who have access only to the written account cannot determine what the trick is, and so you and the rest of the cold fusion believers would insist that unless we can prove what the trick was, it has to be real cold fusion. You are just guessing about the measurements they must have made to exclude things. But those things are not in the paper, and to hear their interviews, it sounds like they were mostly napping. No, they measured the voltage at the connection points on the 830, or some other previously prepared monitoring points. Quoting from the report: As in the previous test, the LCD display of the electrical power meter (PCE-830) was continually filmed by a video camera. The clamp ammeters were connected upstream from the control box to ensure the trustworthiness of the measurements performed, and to produce a nonfalsifiable document (the video recording) of the measurements themselves. As noted, they made a video showing every minute of both tests. Rossi could not have touched the equipment or the instruments. What the hell does that prove? The argument is that Rossi set it up beforehand. In the first case, that's obvious. Any measurements they made could easily have been on points provided by Rossi when the experiment was set up, or on the PCE830, which clearly is not designed to detect deception; it's a but like Essen using a relative humidity probe to measure steam quality. You're not suggesting they would strip the wires while the experiment was in progress are you? So that monitoring video is meaningless. This is proof that the people doing the tests are not naive idiots who trust Rossi, and that they took reasonable precautions against obvious tricks such as hidden wires. It is the furthest thing from proof of anything. It in no way excludes the likely possibility that Rossi set up both experiments, leaving only safe points to monitor the input during the run. (Is that video publicly available, by the way? I haven't seen it.) Additional messages from the authors confirm that they looked for things like a DC component in the electricity and they checked the equipment stand to sure it was not charged with electricity. Essen said they excluded it, but he didn't say how. If we're just going to accept what they say without scrutiny, then why bother reading the paper at all? Just accept their conclusions and rejoice. Except that Essen said of the steam tests that the steam was dry based on a visual inspection, and then based on a measurement with a relative humidity probe. So, I'm not prepared to accept his claim at face value. And even if his measurements do exclude dc in the exposed conductors, I'm not prepared to accept that a concealed conductor was not there. There's various ways to create illusions, and I don't necessarily know how it might have been done. But I know there was a rat's nest of wires, and an unnecessarily complex method of supplying power, and they used a completely inadequate measuring device, so that deception on Rossi's part is far more likely than the sort of power density they claim without melting, let alone a nuclear reaction. There is not the slightest chance Rossi could have done anything so easy to discover as the hidden wire under the insulation trick. You should keep an open mind. That kind
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 4:44 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Mark Gibbs mgi...@gibbs.com wrote: Ah, so it's OK to argue that Cude is, in effect, hand-waving away Ohm's law and that's indefensible because that law is accepted but it's not OK to argue that Carat's dismissal of conventional physics as being wrong about LENR is also hand waving? Yes, this is okay. We are talking about two fundamentally different things: actions taken by engineers and laws of nature. Right, but as long as the actions are not freely testable by others, the possibility that they have been fooled or are incompetent is a valid alternative explanation for the claims. People believed N-rays and polywater based on mistakes too, but in those cases the claims could be tested, and were shown to be the result of confirmation bias (or deception) or experimental error. If the ecat were accessible to anyone, deception could be ruled out. Let's go over this carefully, because this is an important distinction, and Cude has often repeated this mistake. First of all, Carat is not dismissing laws of nature. She is only saying that cold fusion cannot be explained by theory, but a theory is not required to explain an anomaly before you accept that it is true. Right. And an understanding of a trick is not required before you accept that it is a trick. Cude claims there may be a method by which an engineer can cause a reactor to consume 900 W yet the instruments only show 300 W. This is demonstrably true. There are many ways. You can cause a reactor to consume 900W yet the instruments show nothing, as seen in the cheese video. Of course, showing zero would be too suspicious, because then people would question the presence of the instruments, so they show a fraction. However, he says he cannot specify what that method is. Therefore, his assertion cannot be tested or falsified, so it is not scientific. The entire experiment can't be tested, making it unscientific, as I've argued from the start. But if the instrument were made generally available for testing, deception could be quickly falsified, if it's not used. If we could buy them at home depot, and heat our homes with them, that would falsify deception. (And I'm not saying commercial products are needed for credibility -- only that it proves that deception *is* falsifiable.) Anything that an engineer can do is known to science, by definition. Any magician's illusion is known to science. That doesn't mean a scientist will understand the illusion just from observation. And it doesn't mean he is forced to believe in magic, if he can't duplicate the illusion with a spice model. And this written report is a far inferior window on the claims than direct observation, when it comes to detecting deception. McKubre does not have to supply a theory before his claim is fully accepted. No one disagrees with this. The disagreement is that you have to supply an explanation for alternative explanations before you can accept their possibility. What McKubre needs is robust evidence, which doesn't exist. The alternative explanation of artifacts and errors fits the erratic and unreproducible observations far better, even if they can't be identified in detail. However long it takes, science is never allowed to dismiss the anomaly. What science is allowed to accept is not dictated by you. Anyway, science fully accepts anomalies that have good evidence to support them. It always has. It rejects claimed anomalies for which the evidence is weak or absent. It largely rejects claims of homeopathy, dowsing, perpetual motion, and cold fusion. Conversely, the only way to prove that McKubre, Fleischmann and the others are wrong would be to show an error in the laws of thermodynamics. Nonsense. The only way to prove them right is with consistent evidence, which after 24 years is still absent. It is NEVER okay to say: An engineer (Rossi) is doing something to make a fake test I do not understand and cannot describe, but I am sure he is doing it. This is empty speculation. It cannot be tested or falsified so it is not scientific. If the claim cannot be freely tested, it is not only ok to be suspicious of deception, but outrageously gullible not to be. This is especially the case if the claimant stands to benefit financially from the confidence in his claims, and even moreso if he has a controversial past involving deceptions related to energy. Any act that a person can do to make a fake test must be described by the textbooks and by SPICE. If it is not in the textbooks, that makes it a genuine anomaly. In other words, if Rossi has discovered a way to make a power meter report 900 W as 300 W, but SPICE cannot simulate that method, that makes it an important new discovery that the instrument makers and EEs must investigate. Your kind of thinking is the reason there are so many frauds in the world.
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: Mark, you quoted Siegel as saying that CF violated physics because it did not act like hot fusion. Carat simply pointed out that CF was not like hot fusion and this comparison was not valid. She simply made a statement of belief, not a proof. Siegel also made a statement of belief, not a proof or fact. They are hardly equivalent. Carat's statement is that of a true believer with no knowledge, background, or experience. That sort of thing can be said (and is) about any pseudoscientific claim. Perpetual motion is not like ordinary motion. Homeopathy is not like ordinary water chemistry. Psychic energy is not like ordinary energy. It is meaningless. Of course, anomalous results sometimes defy current understanding. That's how science progresses. But evidence for such results has to be as strong as the evidence that suggests they are impossible. Anti-gravity violates current theories, and a magician who releases a ball that files up will not convince anyone that he has a genuine new anomaly, any more than the various claims of pseudoscientists with lame or absent evidence. But careful experiments, widely performed, that show consistent anti-gravity effects would be immediately accepted, just as HTSC was. Siegel's statement simply says that copious, highly robust, and consistent evidence suggest cold fusion won't work. That's not hand-waving at all. It's based on more than half a century of solid evidence. Evidence for cold fusion needs to be as strong to be accepted, and so far, it is pitifully weak.
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 3:12 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: The Elforsk web page announcement is better than a signed statement, in my opinion. So was EPRI's statement. A conclusion issued by an organization carries more weight than statement signed by one EE. Along the same lines, when the CEO of National Instruments gave a 20 minute video recorded presentation about cold fusion in front of thousands of employees, that was a bigger commitment and more convincing that brief statement from a corporate executive that yes, we have consulted with Rossi and others. Anyone who still claims the NI has no interest in cold fusion is nuts. Nothing against Elforsk or NI, but is there a recent example of a revolution in science that was adopted first by instrument makers and energy companies. And interest from NI is not surprising; it's a potential market. Also, no EE here or anywhere else has presented a serious description of how this might be fraud. And no physicist here or anywhere else has presented a serious description of how this might be a nuclear reaction. But that doesn't stop you from believing it is. Diagrams showing hidden wires and claims that you can add a circuit to an electronic device that magically makes 900 W of electricity look like 300 W are not serious. The simple fact is that the measurements made and reported are woefully inadequate to exclude deception. Cude has waved his hands and said there might be a method of deception that he has not thought of yet. As I have often pointed out, such assertions cannot be tested or falsified. Of course they can be falsified. (Popper would turn over in his grave if he heard you.) Many better methods have been described to exclude fraud. If you cut the wires to the ecat and it kept producing heat, that would falsify it. If you used a finite source of energy instead of an infinite one, it would be falsified. Have skeptics wire the ecat and put a scope right on the ecat connections, or at least the power to the box. Use the output to generate electricity and close the loop and then run the ecat far from any power lines -- falsified. Replace fossil fuels with ecats, and it's falsified So it's falsifiable. If it weren't falsifiable, it could never become practical. Now, in experiments behind closed doors, revealed only written reports, you could neither prove it's faked nor that it's real. Either way would require trust, and while important in science, no theory can depend on it. So the ordinary way to falsify a deception theory, is the way theories are tested all the time. Make ecats generally available to *any* qualified scientists for testing. Just the ecat, and the box if Rossi insists. And send along a thug to prevent tampering. Then let the scientists do all the wiring independently and the testing completely independently. If CERN, MIT, LANL and SRI all come back with the same results consistent with Rossi's claims, deception is as falsified as any theory could be. Of course Rossi won't ever let that happen, but that doesn't change the fact that it's falsifiable. Now, tell us how the theory that it's a nuclear reaction is falsifiable. Because if it's not, then it's not science. There might be an error in Ohm's law we have not yet discovered, but until you specify what that error actually is, you have no basis for arguing that law may be wrong. Right, but you see the difference. There is no secret involved, and no artificial constraints. Anyone on the planet can test Ohm's law, and the results are reproducible. If Ohm's law only worked on one material for which only one person had the recipe, and he restricted access to testing it, suspicion would be justified. Except there's not a lot of money in it.
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 4:44 PM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: LENR complies with all know physical laws. The problem is that few scientists have a background in this new branch of science. You don't know what you're talking about. LENR is contrary to predictions based on a century of copious, reproducible experimental results which fit a highly consistent and robust picture. That doesn't mean it's wrong, as history shows; it means the evidence for it must be as consistent and robust as the evidence that predicts it's wrong before it will be taken seriously. At present, there is no consistent evidence for it at all.
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 5:03 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Let me quote the specific text from Cude that I discussed: You're just repeating your arguments and ignoring the responses I've already given to them. Obviously I have no proof. How could I? True believers insist on an explanation of how deception might explain the alleged observations, but do not hold themselves to the same standard to give an explanation for how nuclear reactions could be initiated in those circumstances, or how they could produce that much heat without radiation, or how NiH could produce 100 times the power density of nuclear fuel without melting, regardless of what produces the energy. That doesn't stop you from believing it happens though. Let's go over this one more time: True believers insist on an explanation of how deception might explain the alleged observations . . . Yes, because any method of deception MUST fit in with textbook physics Sure, but that doesn't mean observers MUST know what it is. This is impossible where all the skeptical observers have is a written account of the observations. You're asking skeptics like me to model the deception, when if you followed the other threads, the paper is so bad, we can't agree on where measurements were made, and some people can't figure out that 3-phase was used. It's nonsense to talk about ordinary scientific scrutiny when that paper is all we have. Make the ecat available, and then it'll be possible to exclude tricks. There is no way in the current situation. If you cannot simulate it, it is not deception. It is a genuine inexplicable anomaly. So, if a scientist can't explain or simulate how a magician does his tricks in a restricted and contrived context, they are genuinely magic? That's utter nonsense. Especially if the scientist is only given a written account of what the magician did. I don't know how you can write such crap. Unless genuine inexplicable anomaly includes the possibility of deception, in which case, I agree. Also, you have to define this method in a way that can be falsified, Deception can be easily falsified if access to the device is given. An isolated ecat not connected to the mains falsifies the claim that the power is coming deceptively from the mains, e.g. And you can't falsify the claim that it's cold fusion without access to the experiment either. . . . .but do not hold themselves to the same standard to give an explanation for how nuclear reactions could be initiated in those circumstances, or how they could produce that much heat without radiation . . . YES, again, because these are genuine anomalies. Only if you are sure there is no deception. Which in this case requires extreme naiveté. That has been proved by replicated, high-sigma experiments. Even if true -- and the mainstream disagrees -- it doesn't mean Rossi's experiment is valid. It's a separate claim. The true belief by many in cold fusion provides fertile soil for scams. You do not need to show *WHY* there is heat without radiation, you only have to show *THAT* there is 10,000 times more heat than any chemical reaction can produce, no chemical changes, and commensurate helium. Right. And you don't need to show how deception is executed, you only have to know the possibility is not excluded, as you yourself have admitted. It's a matter of judgement which possibility is more plausible. To most intelligent people, the possibility of deception in a case like this -- being utterly common -- is far greater than the possibility of a scientific revolution -- being rare indeed. Cude has made a huge mistake here. He does not understand the scientific method. You don't have the first clue about the scientific method. You're a computer guy, who spent the last 24 years immersed in pseudoscience, and you've dropped some of your fortune trying to prove it's right. You're desperate for vindication. But it's not coming, and you're frustrated. It's funny how the most vocal advocates for cold fusion shouting that skeptics are not scientific mostly have no scientific background. You and Lomax and Krivit (though not on Rossi), Carat, Wuller, Tyler, and all the engineers on this site. If there were anything to cold fusion, it really wouldn't need a bunch of untrained idiots to promote it. All the scientific progress in the last 24 years has been made by people who think cold fusion is nonsense. And cold fusion advocates have been spinning their wheels. I think the method used by the ones making progress is a better method, no matter what you call it.
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 6:50 PM, John Berry berry.joh...@gmail.com wrote: There is one very very simple truth. Many will never believe right up until a technology is widely available. If so, I think it will be a first. I am not aware of a phenomenon that was widely rejected by the mainstream until a successful technology became widely available. And energy densities a million times that of dynamite is not a subtle thing. It should be as demonstrable as the Wright's 1908 flight, which converted all serious skeptics long before commercial flight. No demonstration could convince them, maybe not even if they ran it themselves. Utter nonsense. A completely isolated device that generates heat orders of magnitude beyond its weight in gasoline would convince anyone. But an experiment behind closed doors, reported by hand-picked observers, with dodgy methods, and directed by someone with a controversial past, will not do it. There are plenty of anomalies that were accepted instantly because the evidence was strong. Your statement has no justification in history. Hence we can compare this with other beliefs such as shape shifting reptilian royals/politicians, Scientology, and religion etc. I agree completely. Cold fusion is just like those beliefs, which also have widely claimed but erratic evidence to support them. And skeptics are no more open to being wrong than the most fundamentalist true believer of anything else is. Skeptics would change their minds in a heart beat with good evidence, just as they did in 1908. But there is nothing that will convince true believers in cold fusion that they are wrong.
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 7:34 PM, Ruby r...@hush.com wrote: How did quantum mechanics come about? Experimental phenomenon occurred in blackbody radiation that could not be explained by the conventional physical theories of the day. Right, but all the anomalies that led to QM were robust, reproducible, and widely (even universally) accepted. Anyone could measure the blackbody spectrum and confirm the UV catastrophe. That's not the case with cold fusion. And the development of QM theories to explain the anomalies were accepted as fast as they could be developed, because they fit the evidence, and made successful predictions. The whole amazing development of a completely new and non-intuitive physical theory took about as long as people have been spinning their wheels in cold fusion (with the benefit of a century of progress). And in cold fusion it's still 1989. There really is no resemblance to cold fusion. Also, the early planetary model of an atom with a central nucleus and an orbiting electron did not fit the conventional theories of the day. The conventional theory of the day said that as the electron moved, it would lose energy, Just to get it right, the theory said that an accelerating electron loses energy, not just a moving one. (circular motion involves acceleration) That is what is being said here about cold fusion/LENR/LANR/quantum fusion/anomalous heat and transmutations. Current nuclear theory does not explain ALL the many effects that are seen in this science. The problem is the evidence for many claimed effects is too weak to be accepted. The absence of a theory wouldn't matter if the evidence were robust as is clear from your example of QM and countless others. But when the evidence is erratic, *and* other evidence suggest the likelihood is vanishingly small, then it's likely not real. It's likely pathological, which is why it just limps along for decades with nothing to show for it. Please don't give up Mark. Your voice is needed. This is the problem with naive cold fusion advocacy. They seem to think it's an issue like abortion or capital punishment that is settled by lobbying. But what it needs is better evidence, not better argument. All the gullible journalists in the world won't change the situation, but a single reproducible and accessible experiment could. I doubt there will ever be one.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 9:01 PM, Alan Fletcher a...@well.com wrote: Levi didn't provide pictures of the resistors, but it's reasonable to assume that they had the same structure as showed by Penon. http://coldfusionnow.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/105322688-Penon4-1.pdf The resistors are laid inside a cog-like pattern of troughs in the outer layer of a ceramic pipe (ie a cylinder with a cylindrical hole). This pattern is what shows as bands in the overheated November eCat (positive or negative, depending on your bias). The resister wire itself is clearly straight (not helical) strung down one trough (left to right), across to the next trough and back again in the opposite direction. The magnetic field is a red herring, but I'm not sure that's right. They talk about coils in the paper, and if you zoom in on the picture, you can see what appears to be a helical coil between those insulating supports.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 12:36 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: He said you need a battery for an internal combustion engine, and so that means it's not self-sustaining. That was what I responded to. My point was a valid one. It's that for a regular ICE you need a secondary source of power to drive the spark plugs No, you don't. Plenty of ICEs (outboards, motorcycles) run without batteries. Car engines would run without batteries too, unless they use some kind of electronic fault detection that shuts it down without a battery. But the spark doesn't need a battery. And even with a battery, it's still self-sustaining. It's not a valid point.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 7:31 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: the analogy only goes so far, in that it is harder in Rossi's case to recapture the heat and channel it back into the secondary source. But the ecat just uses electricity to make heat. So if the ecat already makes heat, it should self-sustain on that. Like combustion. An ICE is self-sustaining. The ecat needs external power. They're different. Your example is wrong, no matter how much you wriggle.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 2:52 PM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: I'm not talking about initiating. I'm talking about sustaining. I have no problem using electricity to initiate the ecat. But if it's a source of energy, it should behave like one and be able to at least power itself. A match is needed to ignite a firecracker, but once ignited, the explosion sustains itself. A match is needed to start a campfire, but not to sustain it. In addition to the wood fuel, oxygen must be supplied. A battery is used to start a car engine, but not to sustain it. In addition to the gasoline fuel, oxygen must be supplied. If the ecat must be self-sustaining to be considered a credible source of power, then a campfire or a car engine should not be accepted as credible sources of power because they don't make their own oxygen. I would consider the firewood + oxygen or the car engine + oxygen as the devices that are self-sustaining. One can certainly enclose oxygen with an engine or with chemical fuel to make a self-contained thing that self-sustains, if you have trouble with the abstract notion of a device that includes gases present in the atmosphere as part of its definition. Oxygen is not an energy source, so it does not represent energy input. Including the ac mains as part of the ecat is different though because that is an energy source by itself, and the goal of the ecat is to replace the power source that provides the mains.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: A match is needed to ignite a firecracker, but once ignited, the explosion sustains itself. A match is needed to start a campfire, but not to sustain it. Cold fusion is not fire. It does not work the same way. Well, no. Nuclear reactions are different. I was just disputing the idea that the concept of keeping cold fusion going with external heat is a simple extrapolation from other sources of heat that require external heat to keep them going. It's not. Evidently, Rossi's reactor requires external stimulation to keep the reaction under control. Not evidently. Allegedly. That's what he claims to give an excuse for attaching a source of power. But the problem is, if it's heat, how does it know that it's external? Heat just produces a temperature in the fuel. If the heat from the fuel can maintain that temperature, how can adding heat stabilize it? As I said, this is conceivable if the external heat is more concentrated (at a higher temperature), but in the hot cat, it must be more diffuse, and at a lower temperature. That's how it works. You cannot dictate to Mother Nature how things must work. If you unplug a Rossi cell and try to make it self-sustain without input, it will melt. But just turning off the input power stops the reaction? How can it do both?
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:23 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: There seems to be a serious hangup over why a heat generating device needs some form of heating input to sustain itself. The skeptics can not seem to get their arms around this issue so I will make another short attempt to explain why this is important. To achieve a high value of COP the ECAT operates within a region that is unstable. This translates into a situation where the device if given the chance will attempt to increase its internal energy until it melts or ceases to operate due to other damage. Control of the device is obtained by adding external heat via the power resistors allowing the core to heat up toward a critical point of no return. Just prior to that critical temperature the extra heating is rapidly halted. The effect of this heating collapse is to force the device core heating to change direction and begin cooling off. I do get the basic idea. The problem is I don't see how to make it work in the latest experiments. The switching would have to be on a pretty slow time scale, because of thermal mass. It would take on the order of minutes for an appreciable change in the internal temperature to result from shutting down the resistors, as is consistent with the rather slow change in temperature in the March experiment. But in the December experiment, there is no switching on this time scale. The power is measured on the lines to the ecat, and they claim the power is constant as recorded by the PCE830 on a 1 second time scale. Also they say that the power output is almost constant on the same time scale. So, I fail to see how that kind of a scheme could work there. The input in that experiment is 360 W applied to the resistors, and that is allegedly enough to trigger the reaction. The total output power is about 2 kW, so that would be 1.6 kW generated by the reactor *inside* the cylinder. If 360 W from outside is enough to trigger the reaction, how can 1.6 kW not be enough to keep it going? I picture someone holding a butane lighter to glowing coals, and expecting them to extinguish when he takes the lighter away. Now, you might discount the December run, but then you'd impugn Levi's integrity, and since he was clearly in charge in March, that makes the whole thing kind of dodgy. But even in the March run, things don't add up. They claim it takes about 800 W to the reactor from the resistors to trigger the reaction. From the geometry, only a fraction of that power will actually be absorbed by the reactor itself. (The rest will be absorbed by the ceramic and the end caps.) The average output from the reactor is also about 800 W, but this is generated inside the reactor, so again, it makes no sense that the reaction would extinguish when you turn the external power off. Furthermore, in all cases, it seems implausible that the output would be that stable without any feedback from the reactor output. Even if the sort of control you talk about were possible, it would require the exact duty cycle to keep the temperature from drifting up or down. And even if Rossi found the right duty cycle, it seems unlikely it would stay the same for 4 days at those temperatures. People are always excusing the absence of progress by suggesting the reaction is so hard to control, but from both these experiments, it appears to be rock stable. That would be the case if the heating were all resistive. The behavior looks nothing like you would expect a new reaction sensitive to temperature would look. Positive feedback can work in either direction; that is, the temperature can be either increasing or decreasing and the trick is to make it go in the desired direction. Are you saying positive can be negative. What's the trick to making it decrease when 1/5 the power makes it increase? The closer to the critical point that Rossi is able to switch directions, the longer the temperature waveform will linger near that point before heading downward. This is a delicate balance and most likely the reason Rossi has such a difficult fight on his hands to keep control. High COP, such as 6, is about all that can be safely maintained. Sorry, but it sounds like nonsensical speculation to me. The explanation above is based upon a spice model that I have developed and run many times. To model the behavior, you need to propose a reaction rate (power out from the reactor) as a function of temperature, and the temperature dependence of the reactor on the power produced by the reactor and the external input. What functional dependence do you use for these? I can't think of any that would work. Again, if 360 W from the outside gets it going, why can't 1.6 kW on the inside keep it going? In the old ecats, with a resistor inside the reactor, one could possibly conceive of a method if the resistor produced higher temperature concentrated a single point, and the reaction were diffuse throughout the
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: If we are going to do analogies, a more useful one would be to compare the Rossi reactor to an internal combustion engine ICE. With an ICE you have to apply the spark periodically to small portions of the fuel to trigger the reaction. Right, but the spark is produced from power generated by the engine itself. It's entirely self-sustaining. Cude is demanding we find a way to ignite the entire tank of fuel with the spark plug once, and then have the car run normally after that. This does not work. The car goes up in flames, similar to the way Rossi's reactor melts. What a terrible analogy. The ecat is not an engine, and I'm not proposing any such thing. I just don't believe that if the reaction producing 1.6 kW thermal is stabilized by an external input of 360 W thermal. I don't see why turning the external off would quench the signal as Dave claims, or why it would melt the ecat as you claim.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:36 PM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: As dave explains it makes sense if the energy input provides cooling power. Exactly. The whole thing is nuts. If it really needed to be regulated, it would make sense to regulate with temperature controlled cooling.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:48 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: I agree Dave, I have been providing this explanation for several years without any effect. I'm glad you are adding your voice. The critical point at which the temperature must be reduced depends on the degree of thermal contact between the source of energy (the Ni powder) and the sink (The outside world). The better the thermal contact between these two, the higher the stable temperature and the greater the COP. Rossi has not achieved a COP even close to what is possible. You sound like you're just making shit up. It's wild speculation based on nothing whatsoever.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:52 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Josh, what is common sense now becomes ancient history when the newest theories come out. Yes, I know that happens sometimes. And sometimes things that are common sense remain common sense. But I think you misunderstood. I was not referring to new science theories there. I was saying that it's common sense that if Rossi's claims were being accepted by the majority, there would be huge excitement. How do you think men learned to fly heavier than air crafts when it was common sense that this was not possible. Like I said, you're arguing a different point, but what the hell. It wasn't common sense that flight was impossible. Everyone saw birds fly, and gliders were already common. And while there were some famous skeptics, and there was some erroneous skepticism of the Wrights specifically, most scientists regarded powered flight as inevitable. That's why the subject was treated seriously by all the major journals, including Science and Nature before the Wright's flight. That's a matter of record. There are better examples to support your argument, but I don't know of a case where a small scale phenomenon like cold fusion was rejected so categorically for a quarter century that was later vindicated. I'm aware of a couple that come close, but they occurred about 150 years ago. You need to realize that all knowledge does not reside within your understanding. I do realize that. But I wonder if you realize that you are not in possession of received wisdom. All of us should be open to learning new concepts and it is about time for you to give LENR a fair chance. It is about time for you to give the bogosity of LENR a fair chance. All your thinking starts from the assumption that it's real. You'll never make progress that way.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Bill Beaty has an excellent quote on this subject, here: http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. Even if that were true, and I don't believe it, I hope you're not arguing that on that basis, any fact that is damned must be true, or any invention considered impossible is possible, or that any claimed discovery that causes nervous shock must be real, or that every innovation denounced as fraud is true as the driven snow. Because that would be silly.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 4:47 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: If someone is looking for an analogy they could look at the behavior of a power transistor mounted on a heat sink. For this exercise assume that the collector is directly connected to a power source. Apply enough base drive to obtain a relatively large collector current. Really not the same. The base signal controls the collector signal, it does not control the production of the energy. So I don't see how it informs the problem at all.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 9:29 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: . But my sense tells me that a significant number of scientists are starting to take genuine interest and that they will stay tuned for further details. Read the cold fusion forums for the last 24 years. This has always been someone's sense. And there are occasional blips like the one Rossi caused 2 years ago, which he revived now. But let's look at your sense in a year. My prediction, cold fusion will be at the same place, but you'll have the same sense based on some new claims that are all the rage then.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 9:45 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, and only in a diesel engine do you not need a battery to keep spark plugs going. Demanding a self-sustaining device is like demanding a diesel engine. ICEs were first developed in the 1860s, and the diesel engine was invented in 1893, several decades later. I don't think that necessarily implies a similar period of development at this time, since we know so much about heat engines. But I think the only reasonable assumption is that it would be nontrivial for Rossi get his device to be self-sustaining. Seriously? Do you really not know how an internal combustion engine works? Have you not used a lawn mower, or a kick-start motorcycle or a pull-start outboard motor. Remember the cranks on model Ts? The engine produces the electricity for the spark, and to charge the battery. Even if the battery were involved in producing the spark (and in some engines it is partially used), the engine charges the battery, so the whole thing is still self-sustaining. I have no problem using a battery (or any number of them) to power the ecat. And if the ecat can charge the battery, I'll happily call it self-sustaining. Man, this place is crawling with ignoramuses.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 10:54 PM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: I think this is more about who is the gatekeeper to the ideology and business of science rather than any exercise in ethics. The gatekeeper class resents this clique of stiff necked maverick scientists who have the temerity to violate the status quo and defies the picking order in their profession. Nah. That's just a true believer fantasy necessary to rationalize the nearly unanimous rejection of something they really really want to be true. Cold fusion was introduced by two very conventional members of the mainstream, and it was rejected anyway.
Re: [Vo]:Comment by Anderson at Forbes
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 8:34 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: I’m a Professor Ameritus in Electrical Engineering ... Everything I read in the 29 page report, and following challenges as answered by the authors, seems extremely convincing. All objections, typically suggesting fraud, are not to me at all convincing. Tomorrow will tell! Is it unfair to be suspicious if he can't spell his own title?
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 2:33 PM, Alan Fletcher a...@well.com wrote: OK -- in fig 6 (Dec) they show a blue-and-yellow CONTROL box and three triacs. They don't have a picture for March, so we don't know if it includes the functionality of the blue-and-yellow box or just replaces the triac. The control box is inside the boundary of Rossi's black box, so it's irrelevant. They replaced the input box, so your claim that it was too much trouble to replace the input box is nonsense.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: My guess is that he is designing for industrial applications. It's not gonna be useful for industrial purposes with a COP of 3; remember the electricity was made with an efficiency of 1/3. It's gonna have to be self-sustaining. I hardly think he's looking at the final version of the power supply when the ecat is still completely inadequate. You're grasping.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:39 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: There are advantages to using a three phase power input that have been pointed out. For this application, the disadvantages are greater. Measurements of 3 phase systems are done every day so this is not important. Of course they are. But everyday measurements do not need to consider the possibility of deliberate deception. 3-phase is more complicated and involves more wires. Increased complexity is a magician's friend. It is so utterly unnecessary, and it has such clear benefits for deception. Like forcing the use of a particular line, and increased opportunity for hidden wires or power, and increased opportunity for more power if you want to make something glow red. If Cude can show a real test that proves 3 phase measurements are not accurate, then someone will listen. I see it differently. True believers insist on an explanation of how deception might explain the alleged observations, but do not hold themselves to the same standard to give an explanation for how NiH could produce 100 times the power density of nuclear fission fuel without melting, let alone explain what kind of a reaction would produce the alleged heat. It doesn't matter if you don't understand the trick in the cheese power video. You are pretty sure it's a trick because the alternative is too implausible. Likewise, some deception is far more likely and plausible in Rossi's ecat than the alternative explanation just based on thermodynamics, and far more so if you consider the nuclear physics.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 7:32 PM, Berke Durak berke.du...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: I don't buy it. The reactor is a sealed faraday cage, so it's not going to care about ripple or dc vs ac. It's just a thermal interface. The reactor might require or might be incompatible with low-frequency AC magnetic fields, which can go through 3 mm of steel, especially AISI 310 steel which has very low magnetic permeability. (Faraday cages bounce off electromagnetic signals (balanced E + B) but not necessarily penetrating magnetic signals.) Good grief. The resistors are coils, presumably helical solenoids with the axis parallel to the reactor cylinder. The magnetic field is near zero outside a solenoid, except at the ends. Not the best way to get magnetic fields in. Moreover, the Ni is above the Curie point at those temperatures, and so is not ferro-magnetic. But it's a real reach anyway to think you could even measure magnetic fields, let alone induce nuclear reactions with them. And some say the skeptics are grasping. In addition we are told the instantaneous power was about 930 W. If unfiltered, full-wave rectified AC was used then in 10 ms, that 930 W will supply or fail to supply about 10 J. As this is metal here and not water the thermal masses are pretty low: for the steel casing which has a thermal mass of about .15 J/K this would mean a change of 1.5 degree, 100 times per second. With a diffusivity of .36 m2/s this 100 Hz thermal signal would certainly reach the core. What? No! What are you smoking? Do you notice how tungsten light bulbs glow for a fraction of a second after you turn them off? That's thermal mass. Photographers measure the flicker of tungsten lights, and it's less than 10%. Now, the visible light output is far from linear, with a threshold at near full power, so that means there's probably even less variation in the thermal output over the cycle. And that's a tiny filament. For the heating resistors, it would be even less. And now imagine if the heating resistor varies its thermal output by a per cent or less, and if only a fraction of the heat from the resistor reaches the SS cylinder, which has a mass of 1.5 kg (probably a thousand times that of a tungsten filament, and 4 times the heat capacity). There is no way any temperature ripple would be observed in the steel, let alone reach the core. You need to go back to that heat equation. But in any case, in the dummy run, they measured the power to the ecat so that suggests it's an ordinary ac signal. Anyway, a box powered by ordinary mains can produce any signal shape they want. They wouldn't go to 3-phase just to skimp on diodes and capacitors. The 3-phase looks more like obfuscation to me. Again, if they need to have precise PWM without a large 100 Hz ripple, they will have to produce high-power DC, and they will want it to be reliable. It's not just a matter of skimping on capacitors. They measured the power to the ecat on the lines going in to the ecat using clamp on meters in the December run, and in the dummy run in March. So it's ac at the line frequency; the meter has a narrow frequency range. And in March it's single phase ac. There's no reason they need high power dc. As a side node, the use of tri-phase power seems to indicates that this is the real deal. Why would indeed Rossi bother with that if he didn't have a true need to industrialize his product? So, in the end you admit that it's not needed for this purpose, and that it's a bother. Why bother? I explained that. It forces the use of a specific mains line that will not be used for anything else. It increases the complexity, which gives much opportunity for deception. And it makes much higher power available, in case he wants to make it glow.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:32 AM, MarkI-ZeroPoint zeropo...@charter.netwrote: Josh: ** ** Eric’s comment about not needing a battery to keep spark plugs going was referring to a DIESEL engine, and diesels don’t have spark plugs. He said you need a battery for an internal combustion engine, and so that means it's not self-sustaining. That was what I responded to.
Re: [Vo]:some more information about the december 2012 Ecat test
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 6:01 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I do not understand what you are saying here. Are you saying that Rossi was present? Or that that he interfered with the experiment? I do not think that Levi or his co-authors has said that Rossi was absent. Only that he played no role in the testing, and he did not touch the equipment. This is about the December test, where, according to the paper, the ecat was running when the test began. That means Rossi or his delegate must have started it up, and that he not only interfered, but essentially defined everything about the test. And they did not change the testing appreciably for the March test.
Re: [Vo]:Ekstrom critique of Levi et al.
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:35 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: I thought that the DC issue was put to rest. Only according to the credulous true believers. Essen said they excluded it, but he didn't say how. If we're just going to accept what they say without scrutiny, then why bother reading the paper at all? Just accept their conclusions and rejoice. Except that Essen said of the steam tests that the steam was dry based on a visual inspection, and then based on a measurement with a relative humidity probe. So, I'm not prepared to accept his claim at face value. And even if his measurements do exclude dc in the exposed conductors, I'm not prepared to accept that a concealed conductor was not there. There's various ways to create illusions, and I don't necessarily know how it might have been done. But I know there was a rat's nest of wires, and an unnecessarily complex method of supplying power, and that deception on Rossi's part is far more likely than the sort of power density they claim without melting, let alone a nuclear reaction. It can be easily shown that there is not amount of diode trickery which can be put into the control box that will confuse the primary power measurement. I don't agree. Just because you or I can't think of diode trickery doesn't mean it's not possible. You or I can't think of any nuclear reactions to explain the results either, but that doesn't seem to convince you that it's not possible. You should keep an open mind to possibilities you have not thought of. DC input has been eliminated so that is not an issue due to direct observation by one or more of the test personnel. Except we don't know the observation, so it's not convincing. There is noting left to clarify as far as the input is concerned. Manipulation of the mains line is a far smaller perturbation than used in many similar scale scams. Concealed conductors can make the current look like it's zero, or could carry dc or high frequency power. And you also agree that duty cycle operation is obvious by output waveform picture review. No. I disagreed with that at least 3 times. Maybe you missed them. I don't see your problem here. Yes, the modulation of the temperature is consistent with the modulation of the input, but it says nothing about the actual power level in the alleged off part of the cycle. The claim is that the ecat is sustained in the off-cycle, so the decay curve is consistent with the total power *not* going to zero. All the skeptics are claiming is that you'd get the same thing if the input drops to the same level as the level the ecat is claimed to be producing by itself during the off cycle. And that could be done using the cheese power method with a voltage divider or a variac or something. I'm not saying that's how it was done. I'm saying that the unnecessarily indirect output measurement, the unnecessarily complex input supply and the inadequate input measurement, and the blank that was run under different conditions, makes the entire operation suspicious and leaves possibilities for deception. I just don't believe someone who actually had an energy source with MJ+/g, that could produce hundreds of watts at a COP of 3, would demonstrate in this way. It could be made so much better. And so I remain skeptical. When nothing comes of this in a year, will you be a little more skeptical? The viewed duty cycle matches that stated within the report. Anyone that suggests a cheese power type scam is not looking at the evidence. It matches the frequency. Anyone who suggests the evidence proves it goes to zero in the off-cycle does not understand the evidence. Cheese power is far more likely than nickel powder with a power density 100 times that of uranium in a fission reactor, let alone than the possibility of nuclear reactions in that context. Any RF power input would cause serious disruption of the test reading with any change of position of the probes. If that is not seen, the scope would have detected it. Essen said they did not use a scope, and I'm not convinced it would affect meters that have a limited response in the 60 Hz range. It is time for the skeptics to leave this poor horse alone. Many people suspected James Ernst Worrell Keely of fraud and deception, but no one knew exactly how he did it, and his supporters dismissed the skeptics. After his death, a most elaborate and complex series of hidden devices were found below the floors and behind walls and so on. There are many more recent examples as well such as Madison Priest and Stoern and Papp and so on. This sort of thing is utterly common, but the claimed scientific revolution is rare indeed. And all of this is independent of how much you want it to be true.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:40 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Of course it is not the exact same. Positive heat feedback is what we are mainly interested in. You know that, so why bring up the obvious differences? Because it's not positive heat feedback.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:37 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: It is great to see that we are in such close agreement. Let's handle the issues related to positive feedback as I requested and you will improve your understanding. I thought you were keeping an open mind, not a patronizing one that is certain it is in possession of received wisdom. By the way, a long time ago you promised I'd see the truth about the validity of the old steam cats real soon now. How is it that they never got validated and now are abandoned? If 2 more years pass, and this hot cat configuration is abandoned, what will you say then. I'll be here to check up.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:41 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Josh, please refrain from insults. Please refrain from telling me what to refrain from.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:32 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: With that in mind, please submit for discussion your main reason for discounting my explanation so that it can be properly addressed and everyone who is following this concept can draw their own conclusions. It is my sincere wish that you will eventually understand the process and help to clarify it to other skeptics. In other words, you got nothin'. I made my case. Feel free to explain whatever part of it you disagree with. And if you have a chance, can you specify the functional dependence of reaction rate on temperature, and temperature on total power produced that would give the observed behavior and still quench when the external power is shut off (as you say), or melt down (as Jed says).
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
Storms, please read the exchange. I was saying the transistor was not a good analagy because it's not positive thermal feedback. The claim that cold fusion is positive thermal feedback, is the basis of my argument that it should easily self-sustain if there were a COP of 3. On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: Cude, please admit to the obvious. The LENR effect has positive feedback. Increased temperature causes increased power generation. This is an established fact. Of course, if as you believe, CF is not real, than this statement is irrelevant to you and any discussion is a waste of time. Ed Storms On May 31, 2013, at 11:39 AM, Joshua Cude wrote: On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:40 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.comwrote: Of course it is not the exact same. Positive heat feedback is what we are mainly interested in. You know that, so why bring up the obvious differences? Because it's not positive heat feedback.
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Even the people here such as Cude cannot come up with anything. They are scraping the bottom of the barrel when they say that three-phase electricity is difficult to measure or there might be a hidden wire under the insulation, forgetting that the researchers have to strip off the insulation to measure voltage. No one knew how Keely did his tricks either, until he died and they ripped up his workshop. And I'm not convinced those guys stripped any wires. It's far from clear it wasn't Rossi or his delegate who didn't do all the setup. He certainly did it in the December run. And to hear Essen, the Swedes were pretty much hands off. All Hartman did was look around and take pictures. Cude came dangerously close to admitting the COP might be over 1. You just miss the point. I was disputing the idea that it was ready for commercialization even if the claim were true, and so the idea that his power supply is for industrial purposes is nonsense.
Re: [Vo]:Ekstrom critique of Levi et al.
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 4:29 AM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: Put yourself in the shoes of those 7 scientists who have placed their reputations on the line. I don't think it's a big risk. They can plausibly claim ignorance. In fact their ignorance is the most plausible explanation.
Re: [Vo]:Ekstrom critique of Levi et al.
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 6:58 AM, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.comwrote: What is the best thing about this new demonstration that it excludes definitely steam based tricks from the possible repertoire. So from the beginning it was all about the feeding extra input power via hidden wires. Therefore most of the skeptics were just wrong, because they criticized Rossi's demos on a base of steam quality. Why should Rossi be restricted to one kind of deception? Change-up is the best way to avoid detection. Those steam cons had higher COP and higher power than this latest demo, and the steam was almost certainly very very wet. And note the input was simpler in those experiments. And it would have been trivially easy to eliminate the steam issue, by -- you know -- not making steam, like Levi did in the 18 your test. Ever wonder why that wasn't done under scrutiny?
Re: [Vo]:Ekstrom critique of Levi et al.
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:59 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Bring on your proof that what I have pointed out is not true. Take a few moments to show how DC flowing into the control box due to its internal rectification changes the power delivered to it. You're just repeating your arguments and ignoring the responses I've already given to them. Obviously I have no proof. How could I? True believers insist on an explanation of how deception might explain the alleged observations, but do not hold themselves to the same standard to give an explanation for how nuclear reactions could be initiated in those circumstances, or how they could produce that much heat without radiation, or how NiH could produce 100 times the power density of nuclear fuel without melting, regardless of what produces the energy. That doesn't stop you from believing it happens though. There's various ways to create illusions, and I don't necessarily know how it might have been done. But I know there was a rat's nest of wires, and an unnecessarily complex method of supplying power, and that deception on Rossi's part is far more likely than cold fusion. Most people looking at the cheese power video could not prove there was a trick from the video alone, and especially not from a paper written to describe the experiment, by people who actually believed in cheese power. But that doesn't mean they would not be nearly certain there is one. And it would be easy for anyone with elementary knowledge of electricity to set up an experiment to demonstrate cheese-power unequivocally, if it were real. Likewise, the same could be done for the ecat. But when they use 3-phase, when single would do, when the wiring is in place ahead of time, when close associates choose the instruments which are completely inadequate, when the blank run uses different conditions, when the input timing is determined from a video tape, when the COP just happens to equal the reciprocal of the duty cycle, when the power supply box is off-limits, and the power measurements are restricted, and when the claim is as unlikely as cheese-power, it is ok to be suspicious. You will fail miserably I assure you! You love to make unsupported statements and then fail to do any of the simple tests required to clear up your misunderstanding. I have waited a long time for you or Andrew or Duncan to make that spice model that will demonstrate that what I say is accurate. I will be happy to help you set up a model that will take perhaps 15 minutes of your time to run. If you do not know how to makes such a model then you should remove yourself from this discussion since that would demonstrate a lack of understanding of basic EE knowledge. Dave -Original Message- From: Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com To: vortex-l vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Fri, May 31, 2013 4:19 am Subject: Re: [Vo]:Ekstrom critique of Levi et al. On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:35 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.comwrote: I thought that the DC issue was put to rest. Only according to the credulous true believers. Essen said they excluded it, but he didn't say how. If we're just going to accept what they say without scrutiny, then why bother reading the paper at all? Just accept their conclusions and rejoice. Except that Essen said of the steam tests that the steam was dry based on a visual inspection, and then based on a measurement with a relative humidity probe. So, I'm not prepared to accept his claim at face value. And even if his measurements do exclude dc in the exposed conductors, I'm not prepared to accept that a concealed conductor was not there. There's various ways to create illusions, and I don't necessarily know how it might have been done. But I know there was a rat's nest of wires, and an unnecessarily complex method of supplying power, and that deception on Rossi's part is far more likely than the sort of power density they claim without melting, let alone a nuclear reaction. It can be easily shown that there is not amount of diode trickery which can be put into the control box that will confuse the primary power measurement. I don't agree. Just because you or I can't think of diode trickery doesn't mean it's not possible. You or I can't think of any nuclear reactions to explain the results either, but that doesn't seem to convince you that it's not possible. You should keep an open mind to possibilities you have not thought of. DC input has been eliminated so that is not an issue due to direct observation by one or more of the test personnel. Except we don't know the observation, so it's not convincing. There is noting left to clarify as far as the input is concerned. Manipulation of the mains line is a far smaller perturbation than used in many similar scale scams. Concealed conductors can make the current look like it's zero, or could carry dc or high frequency power. And you
Re: [Vo]:On deception
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:05 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: And I'm not convinced those guys stripped any wires. How does one measure voltage without stripping wires? Watch the cheese video. The ends of the wires that the magician wants you to measure are already exposed. Clever, huh. It's far from clear it wasn't Rossi or his delegate who didn't do all the setup. Okay, so you are saying they attached the voltage probe to the bare wire without looking at the wire. With their eyes closed, perhaps? No, they measured the voltage at the connection points on the 830, or some other previously prepared monitoring points.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 5:52 AM, Berke Durak berke.du...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 3:32 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: Good grief. The resistors are coils, presumably helical solenoids with the axis parallel to the reactor cylinder. The magnetic field is near zero outside a solenoid, except at the ends. The magnetic field outside a solenoid is smaller than inside but not zero. Which is why I said *near* zero. It's orders of magnitude smaller. The flux lines have to be closed, and thus there is flux outside, and there is no meaningful lower limit for macroscopic magnetic fields. Obviously, but all the lines close over huge space compared to the confined space inside the solenoid (at the ends). Surely you're not arguing that fields weaker than that of the earth's are going to have an influence here. And the large thermal mass of the whole isn't in the path from the resistor coils to the perimeter of the cylinder where the reactions might be taking place. The thermal mass of the resistors themselves will largely smooth out the power variation, so your claim of 10 J variation on a 10 ms time scale is nonsense. And only a fraction of that reaches the cylinder. And they claim the reaction is in the Ni-H. You can claim it's going on in mustache if you want, but it has no bearing on reality. In any case, sufficiently precise instrumentation will allow the slow and stable 100 Hz signal to be picked up anywhere. You have a lot of faith in precise instrumentation, or you have not done a simple order of magnitude estimate. You can get some idea of the rate of temperature change by looking at the temperature on the outside when the power is cycled in the March run. Now the outside has more thermal mass than the cylinder, but it will also absorb more of the heat from the resistors because of geometry and because it's at a lower temperature, so within an order of magnitude, it's probably a wash. According to the temperature plots in the paper, when the resistors do turn off completely, the temperature of the outside drops by about 25K in 4 minutes. That means that for a complete turn off the temperature in the cylinder might change by 25/(60*4*100) = 1 mK in 10 ms. That's for a complete turn-off. But we know from considerations of visual ripple in tungsten bulbs, that the power will decrease by maybe 1% during a 100 Hz cycle because of the resistor's thermal mass. So, now we're down to .01 mK variation. Please let me know of a device that will detect that on a 500K background. Nuclei are capable of reacting to low-frequency, low-intensity magnetic fields as shown in nuclear magnetic resonance. NMR is done *inside* the solenoid (usually superconducting) with fields in the range of teslas. And while nuclei react to the fields, it is a strictly electromagnetic and not nuclear reaction, in the sense that nuclear forces are not involved. The question is again the same. We don't know the sensitivity of the LENR to low-frequency thermal signals, so this might be irrelevant or this might be part of the secret. But in any case, if Rossi needs a specific waveform, and by waveform I'm talking at the sub-second timescale, then it makes perfect sense from an electrical engineering point of view to first obtain a clean DC source and then use that to generate whatever waveform is needed. And obtaining clean, high-powered DC with a thermally robust circuit is much easier from three-phased power than single-phased power. And this is only one valid reason for using triphase. You mean speculative reason. But how does that fit with the fact that the steam ecats used single phase, and they used in some cases more than 1kW input, and claimed in some cases, 10 times higher output power than this last run, with a COP of more than 10. And how does it fit with Rossi's claim that he can run the ecats using gas to provide the external power? And how does that fit with the claims of 4 hours of self-sustained operation without any magic waveform, or in this case 4 minutes? I don't think anyone seriously believes he needed, or even benefitted by the use of 3-phase power as a legitimate power source for a legitimate ecat. By far the most plausible reason is to make it easier to pull a fast one. I'm sure it's not essential for all possible trickery, and if he ever switches back to single-phase, he may have something else up his sleeve, as he did with the steam in the previous incarnation. Change is as good as proof to true believers it seems. It seems that in your mind anything Rossi does can be construed as being part of a trick or ploy. They measured the power to the ecat on the lines going in to the ecat using clamp on meters in the December run, and in the dummy run in March. So it's ac at the line frequency; the meter has a narrow frequency range. That's not clear to me from the report. Here is what it says
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:44 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Josh, your entire theory will be shot if you acknowledge that the COP is greater than 1. Are you now ready to accept this condition? No. The only thing you seem to be able to do is miss the point. The claimed COP is 3. That means that even if the claim is right, it's far from ready for industrialization, given that electricity is produced with 1/3 efficiency. So, as I said, I hardly think he's looking at the final version of the power supply when the ecat is still completely inadequate. And so this excuse for using 3-phase is as much nonsense as all the other excuses with sub-gauss and sub mK magnetic field and temperature oscillations.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:48 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Every one of the points you make are pure speculation. There is absolutely no evidence that Rossi is using 3 phase power to conduct any scam. Right but all the excuses for why he might need them are pure speculation, and far far less plausible, given that the steam cats ran on single phase with higher power in and out, that Rossi claims gas heating works, and the claims that is can self-sustain. How do you expect for anyone to believe your side of the discussion if there is never any proof of any one of your points? Because the alternative explanations, for which proof is also lacking, are ridiculous.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:52 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: I suggest that you study the magnetic fields associated with solenoids Josh. Obviously you must not realize that they have an external field much like a bar magnet. This is simple for you to study and realize your mistake. OK. I studied it. Didn't find a mistake though. The field of a long solenoid is near zero between the poles and outside. Or as wikipedia puts it, the field outside must go to zero as the solenoid gets longer. Yea, there's some leakage between the turms (although that drops off very fast too), but for 33 cm solenoids with a diameter of probably less than a cm, it'll be orders of magnitude below the field at the poles, which is already pretty weak. And I said near zero. It's why you can walk around near a 12 Tesla ICR magnet and not get your keys pulled outta your pocket. This is supremely silly though. Does anyone really believe that magnetic fields at this level have something to do with he alleged reaction? Even if you accept it, that configuration would be the last way one would exploit it. Fraud from a guy with a history of fraud is far more plausible.
Re: [Vo]:new hypothesis to confute regarding input energy in Ecat test
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:59 AM, John Berry berry.joh...@gmail.com wrote: If he does not know such a simple thing, I think he can be safely ignored No one's holding a gun to your head.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:11 PM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: Lets start with one of your choice regarding the many heat generation issues. How about how a small amount of heat can control a much larger amount? I agree this is possible under certain circumstances. But I don't see it in the hot cat. I made the case for why I think it wouldn't work. What part of that case do you disagree with? Or, how about my favorite recent issue about how DC I made no specific claims about dc. I simply said there's enough complexity on the input for one to be suspicious that a deception could work, The cheese video is an example. I'd much rather you explain how a power density 100 times that of uranium in a fission reactor works without melting the nickel, and how a nuclear reaction is triggered by heat, and how nuclear reactions can produce that much heat but no radiation. I know it involves secrets, but them secrets are the basis of tricks too.
Re: [Vo]:Ethics of the E-Cat investigation put into question
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 3:38 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: The monitoring of the input was comically inadequate, if there is any possibility of deception, the blank run used a different power regimen, the claims of power density 100 times that of nuclear fuel without cooling and without melting are totally implausible, the lack of calorimetry is completely inexplicable. I don't see how you come to that conclusion. I get the impression the input monitoring was actually pretty good, and that there have been some crossed signals with different authors of the report as to what measurements were actually carried out. This situation in itself is comical. The paper should report the relevant measurements and checks that were needed. The fact that they are coming back after the fact with various and contradictory and incomplete claims shows that it's a farce. I don't see how measurements with a PCE830 can be considered pretty good, when there are obvious and easy ways to get power past it. Once that is acknowledged, the question is whether he's simply being squirmy, or whether he's doing something more. I rather like the fact that people here generally proceed on an assumption of innocence until such an assumption becomes untenable. For many of us, that point was passed a long time ago, particularly because he chooses equivocal methods, when it would be easy to make an unequivocal demonstration. Such a thing could have been done in a trivially easy way with the original ecat. Just the fact that he's abandoned that before it was proven, and moved to an entirely new equivocal demonstration makes the assumption untenable The fact that the alternative is almost as unlikely as cheese power, makes it's untenableness virtually certain.
