Mark Gibbs <mgi...@gibbs.com> wrote: I've been following the endless arguments about how the tests could have > been rigged and it seems like every theory has been repeated over and over > again . . . >
I have not gone through the arguments but as far as I can tell, only two have been proposed: 1. The so-called "cheese" idea. As I have pointed out, they would discover this when they go to measure voltage. 2. Shanahan's theory that IR cameras do not work, even when you confirm them with thermocouples. The other objections I have noted were not objections at all. They were meaningless. For example, Mary Yugo said that one of the tests was invalid because the reactor was already running when the researchers arrived. So what? That cannot affect the result. Think about the Pu-238 reactor on the Curiosity mars explorer. It was hot from the moment the isotope was separated. The half life is 88 year so it will be palpably hot for hundreds of years, and measurably hot for thousands of years. You cannot turn off this nuclear reaction. But that does not prevent you from measuring the power of the reactor. You start at time X and go to time Y. The fact that the reactor was running before X and continued to run after Y has no impact on your measurement. If anything, this bolsters the evidence that the reactor is not a battery and it has no stored chemical fuel. Another meaningless objection is to the use of 3-phase electricity. It is not harder to measure, and the 2 extra wires are not a "rat's nest." A third example would be Milstone's demand that we separately measure the heat from electricity and the anomalous reaction. That is physically impossible. Heat all flows together throughout a reactor. As I tried to explain to him, the only way you can separate two heat sources is when you can measure exactly how big one of them is. Fortunately, in this case, we can. There are several experiments such as Arata's where heat comes from multiple sources including chemical reactions and cold fusion. There is no way to separate them, except by guesswork. That is a serious deficiency. There are also strange, unfounded notions, such as Mary Yugo's assertion that the temperature at the core of the reactor should be 2 times or 6 times higher than the heater envelope because the core produces 2 to 6 times the heat of the electric heater. It doesn't work that way. The vessels are made of metal which conducts heat easily, so the heat quickly flows from one to the other. Anyway the temperature does not start at zero so you would not see "6 times higher" numbers. If you had two reactors side by side, insulated from one another, all else being equal the difference between ambient and the reactor core temperature would be proportional to the difference in power . . . but that is a whole different situation. There were a whole bunch of factually correct "objections" that are not problems at all but rather advantages that should bolster confidence. Levi et al. deliberately underestimated, going to conservative extremes. Several skeptics pointed these underestimations if they were problems, and as if Levi did not notice them. For example, they said the surface area of the reactor was underestimated because it was treated as a flat plain rather than a cylinder. Yes, we know. The authors pointed this out. No, this does not affect the conclusion. There were a few backward assertions. That is, statements that are factually 180 degrees wrong, such as Mary Yugo's complaint that this method is excessively "complicated." On the contrary it is the simplest method known to science, with the fewest instruments and only one physical principle, the Stefan-Boltzmann law. Other methods are more accurate or precise, but this is the simplest. Also the most reliable once you do some reality checks and calibrations. Then there is the unclassifiable weirdness such as Shanahan's demand that they publish all of the thermocouple data. The authors said the thermocouple tracked the IR camera the whole time, staying just about 2 deg C above it, for an obvious and mundane reason. Okay, so if you want to see that data set, go to Plot 1, "Emitted thermal power vs time." Print that out, and draw another line smack on top of the first line. You would not see the 2 deg C difference on this scale. Shanahan refuses to believe the authors because they did not print a graph with two lines right on top of one another. That's hilarious, but it isn't science. but no one who claims it's a fraud seems to be willing to admit they just > don't know even though they have no actual evidence of fraud and can't > prove anything. > The evidence for fraud they point to is in Rossi's personality and behavior. That cannot be subject to an investigation or to a rigorous analysis by us, because we are not police officers. For Mary Yugo that boils down to the statement "I don't trust Rossi." I, Jed, don't trust him either in many ways, but I do trust IR cameras and wattmeters, and I am sure that Rossi cannot affect them, so he is irrelevant. As I said, he might as well be on Mars for all the influence he can exert on the instruments. Years ago when wattmeters had discrete components a person might have secretly opened one and changed the performance to produce fake results. Nowadays they have integrated circuits. You can't affect the performance any more than you can with a calculator or a cell phone. All you can do is wreck it. > I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of the criticisms and the > arguments for and against as a sort of FAQ to add to the test results. > I think it is up to the skeptics to compile such a list. - Jed
