[Vo]:terrifying online videos
Danyk666 and his microwave oven (Czech language) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_DKblzdbJI Yeesh! Like pouring a bucket of live spiders down your pants. And if you thought THAT was bad... danyk and his unshielded x-ray source http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzMXKxadnVw danyk makes a jacob's ladder http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUJzQ0QPx9g danyk microwaves a cup of water http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DofLTIDszI danyk zaps a CDROM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Re0njZ4mY danyk's flyback transformer stopped working (wait for it) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGV3fGo-_Cc danyk runs a light bulb w/wrong kind of AC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqrstOfUDLA danyk Tesla Coil, carbon track growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AS6ZZnbvpA danyk TC, outbreak of RF-powered glass-meltery http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6cqZ7b4P00 and... danyk will kill you with his coffee\\ mug small shaded-pole motor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HeG_CAOsG0 10 x 50Hz = 15,000RPM (or perhaps 30K) (( ( ( ( ((O)) ) ) ) ))) William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
[Vo]:Just how stupid is Al Gore, anyway?
Examiner.com recently posted an article that obviously is not Al Gore friendly, titled “Just how stupid is Al Gore, anyway?” See: http://www.examiner.com/x-31244-Louisville-Public-Policy-Examiner~y2009m12d3-Just-how-stupid-is-Al-Gore-anyway http://tinyurl.com/yddzj6m What piqued my curiosity was not the author’s AG bashing techniques but two comments he makes allegedly attributed to AG: When enviro-loonies like Algore start talking about windmills, cold fusion, solar and geothermal energy, just ask yourself: “Gee, I wonder why folks aren’t already doing this, if it’s so simple and so obvious.” ...and “There are a number of problems with geothermal energy. First of all, Gore was way off base in his description of the temperature of the Earth’s mantle. You have to drill down almost two miles, before you get enough heat to create steam (100 degrees Celsius).” Regarding the first comment, I was not aware of the presumed implication that “cold fusion” had ever entered AG’s cross hairs. Is this true? Regarding the second comment, what are reliable figures on tapping into geothermal energy on an economical scale? Why I bring it up is that we are now technologically capable of drilling miles deep for oil, including from ocean floors of thousand feet deep, so... I haz to ask myself, just how difficult would it be to tap geothermal energy if a national program was started? Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]:Climate-gate widely compared to cold fusion
At 02:10 PM 12/2/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote: Many mass media articles and blogs have claimed that the climate-gate scandal resembles cold fusion. Unfortunately, all the ones I have checked have the resemblance backwards. They think cold fusion was wrong and never replicated, and that the cold fusion researchers acted badly, rather than opponents. It's a mass-media phenomenon. They write articles, they use what they wrote before, assuming it was true. An error can become embedded so deeply that it's difficult to root out. It will be necessary to patiently point out the problem with the never replicated claim, and it will be necessary to do this over and over and over. It's also important to confront directly the problems on our side. In saying this, I'm not acknowledging the ultimate cogency of criticisms based on those problems, only that the problems do complicate the issue, making it more difficult for the most reasonable of critics to let go. Many articles express anger at academic politics. I find some of this naive. Commentators seem surprised to learn that scientists who disagree with the mainstream are locked out of prestigious journals. I could have told them that anytime in the last 40 years. As I mentioned, I have known this since college, where I worked with people who disagreed with the mainstream, and paid dearly for it. That is why, when Mallove published his book, I was not surprised to learn that cold fusion has been suppressed. Suppression of politically incorrect research and analysis is indeed a phenomenon I've observed. Some kind of decision is made, and it doesn't necessarily involve any conscious conspiracy, that certain lines of research report are dangerous, that people will be misled into making harmful conclusions, and therefore this research should not be published unless truly and unarguably conclusive. And then, because no body of published work can be built up, it becomes possible to dismiss what does manage to make it into print as unconfirmed. It's circular, and it is a generic problem, certainly not confined to cold fusion or global warming. The example I know best was actually and ironically exposed for me by Gary Taubes, with his various articles on dietary fat and low-carbohydrate diet, and most recently by his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. For years, research that could question what became the conventional wisdom in the 1970s, that fat was Bad and that low-fat diets were Good and that low-carb diets were Dangerous and Untested, were suppressed, quite actively, and the reason was that it might lead people to fail to follow healthy diets, instead falling for fad diets, with assumed definitions for both of these. Even though the so-called healthy diets had never been adequately test (way too expensive!) and at least one of the fad diets (Atkins) was actually based on sound science and had been recommended for various purposes, including the treatment of diabetes, for well over a century. The US DIA report refers to CF as disruptive. That is, acceptance of LENR could result in extensive economic disruption, as companies and careers dedicated to hot fusion research could collapse, and new opportunities arise, some of which may be more effectively pursued by other nations. Acceptance of low-carb dieting as a strong general recommendation (possible) would have massive effects on food industry, which is heavily committed to high-carb products, easily manufactured and stored and marketed. That's a parallel. Are those economic considerations behind the general rejection of CF or LC diets? True scientists won't be much swayed by those consideration, but it can affect research grants, pressure on publishers, and careers. It would be naive to think it irrelevant. What I can say is that even though, starting around 2000 or so, research favoring low-carb diets began to make it through peer review and publication, that rationally should have shown them to be at least as effect and at least as safe as standard low-fat recommendations, had practically no effect on the general attitude among nutritionists, who, by this time, had been under thirty years of continual propaganda and teaching supporting low-fat diets. And so I continue to see in mass media, dietary recommendations from experts that completely ignore the newer research, which often would rationally indicate the reverse of what continues to be recommended. But it will shift, eventually. And Why Cold Fusion Prevailed will prove to be a prescient book title. I'd say that anyone who carefully reads the 2004 DoE review and associated documents would see this. By that time, the critics were standing on a floor made of eggshells, ready to collapse. Any expert on that panel who commented with comments obviously based on twenty-year-old opinions without review of the actual evidence before him was clearly biased, impeachable, whose position
RE: [Vo]:terrifying online videos
This is pretty cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi7Srd-LSeE -Mark -Original Message- From: William Beaty [mailto:bi...@eskimo.com] Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 5:14 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: [Vo]:terrifying online videos Danyk666 and his microwave oven (Czech language) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_DKblzdbJI Yeesh! Like pouring a bucket of live spiders down your pants. And if you thought THAT was bad... danyk and his unshielded x-ray source http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzMXKxadnVw danyk makes a jacob's ladder http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUJzQ0QPx9g danyk microwaves a cup of water http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DofLTIDszI danyk zaps a CDROM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Re0njZ4mY danyk's flyback transformer stopped working (wait for it) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGV3fGo-_Cc danyk runs a light bulb w/wrong kind of AC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqrstOfUDLA danyk Tesla Coil, carbon track growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AS6ZZnbvpA danyk TC, outbreak of RF-powered glass-meltery http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6cqZ7b4P00 and... danyk will kill you with his coffee\\ mug small shaded-pole motor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HeG_CAOsG0 10 x 50Hz = 15,000RPM (or perhaps 30K) (( ( ( ( ((O)) ) ) ) ))) William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.709 / Virus Database: 270.14.91/2542 - Release Date: 12/02/09 23:32:00 No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.709 / Virus Database: 270.14.91/2542 - Release Date: 12/02/09 23:32:00
Re: [Vo]:Climate-gate widely compared to cold fusion
At 04:25 PM 12/2/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote: Here is a good example of an article about climate-gate that includes mythology about cold fusion, from some guy named Poe who is allergic to doing his homework: http://westvirginia.watchdog.org/2009/12/02/w-va-scientists-split-on-climategate/http://westvirginia.watchdog.org/2009/12/02/w-va-scientists-split-on-climategate/ I added a comment, which has not yet appeared. I suppose someone reading my comments would be inclined to ignore them or reject them because they are so far from the mainstream version of cold fusion history. In this case, I began the response: The Defense Intelligence Agency, the Italian ENEA (equivalent to the DoE), the Italian Chemical Society, Physical Society, and National Research Council (CNR) have all recently recommended that governments expand their support for cold fusion. . . . I expect the author will think I am crazy, and reject this message, even though he can click through to the ENEA site and confirm what I wrote. The gap between my version and the mass media version is so wide, my version sounds like a fantasy. I sympathize with that. If someone told me the moon landing was faked, I probably would not take it seriously. On the other hand, if they gave me a hyperlink to a document at a NASA website affirming this, I would at least check it out. Keep it up, Jed. And the less polemic you are, the more you simply present a sentence like that first one, the more that *readers* will check it out. If you seem highly attached to some outcome, many, maybe most, won't bother looking at your sources because they can plainly see you are a fanatic. Frustrating, I know. But it's part of the natural filtering mechanism that humans use to efficiently allocate their time. In off-line discussions with skeptical physics professors, and wannabe physicists, I have often suggested they read something rigorous, such as McKubre, M.C.H., et al., Isothermal Flow Calorimetric Investigations of the D/Pd and H/Pd Systems. J. Electroanal. Chem., 1994. 368: p. 55: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf I do not know if they follow through on this, because I never hear back from them. I have no idea what they think. I doubt they are sitting around gobsmacked, the way I would be after reading an official NASA document about the fake moon landing. Patient persistence will pay off, eventually. I recall only one, a Wikipedia skeptic, who wrote back after I pointed him to this paper. He thought he found an error, in a confusing phrase in the paper. It took me a while to untangle it. Even though he admitted this was not an error all, he still says that all cold fusion results are wrong and he urged me to drop the subject and stop wasting my time on it. Conclusion-driven. Common error. Along the same lines, a few journalists have challenged my assertions about the ENEA. I say see for yourself and point them here: http://iccf15.frascati.enea.it/http://iccf15.frascati.enea.it/ I don't recall any that responded. People don't like to have their paradigms challenged. You know who wrote that, right? People should make a distinction between: 1. Debatable issues that depend upon expert judgement, such as calorimetry. 2. Matters of opinion, such as who should win an election. 3. Matters of fact. It is a matter of fact that the ENEA sponsored ICCF-15. You can look it up. It is a binary assertion, either Yes or No, with no ambiguities. Yes, you are correct. We should. Sometimes, though, we assume that a fanatic is presenting warped evidence, cherry-picked. In this article, Poe is quoted as saying that no one replicated. It is a matter of fact that many scientists claim they replicated. That's in category 3. Whether they actually replicated or not is in category 1: it must be debated and settled by expert judgement. (Obviously, I think it has been settled.) Yes. And in a Wikipedia article that was being written according to the Wikipedia guidelines and wikitheory, as written years ago, the distinction would be clearly maintained. It's obvious that the calorimetry question isn't completely settled, simply because there are still many people who think it was settled in the other direction, including scientists who ought to know better. But I don't see, in the recent peer-reviewed literature, any serious questioning of the position that there is excess heat. By a fair understanding, it was really the majority position in 2004, that is, a majority among the knowledgeable, those who actually examined the evidence. What does Britz think, by the way, about excess heat? Has he betrayed his current position? I will grant, it is sometimes hard to know which category an assertion falls into. Not with sufficient care. However, with matters of fact, there still is an issue of how they are presented.
Re: [Vo]:Labinger paper, more detailed commentary.
At 02:45 PM 12/2/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Simon is interested in the process of closure. And what he comes to with Undead Science is that there can be an apparent closure where an apparent scientific consensus arises, but there is life after death, hence, undead science. This is like saying there is no apparent scientific consensus about evolution because the creationists disagree. Jed, I think you have some axe to grind here, because you aren't reading carefully. Your analogy is actually opposite to what I wrote. The parallel with evolution is that an apparent scientific consensus formed that evolution is real. To some extent, work on alternate theories, if they can be justified by that name, continued. So we could call creationism undead science. But the analogy breaks down, because there is very, very little creationist science, it is mostly criticism or polemic about the mainstream theory. Whereas with cold fusion, the zombies are actually walking the streets. Scientists are performing real scientific experiments, doing standard analysis, reporting their work, verifying and validating each other. Supposedly cold fusion was dead, but it wasn't. There *was* an apparent scientific consensus. That isn't to be denied. But was there a *real* scientific consensus. It's obvious that there was not. That would be a consensus rigorously based on scientific principles, and such a consensus would be far more widely accepted. Cold fusion was always a factional dispute, and that one faction had serious political power and the other didn't has no bearing. Had it been a real consensus, it would have continued to spread rather than merely influencing general opinion. Cold fusion researchers would have increasingly abandoned their efforts, not merely because of the obvious difficulties, but because they had become convinced that the effect was an illusion, probably by some conclusive demonstrations that the reported experiments had other explanations than LENR. The argument is valid but a red herring that it's impossible to prove a negative. Rather, we suspect LENR because of certain positive signs. If those signs are shown to have other causes (not merely possible explanations), as happened with N-rays, for example, LENR would not have been disproven, as such, but it would most definitely had the rug pulled out from under it. There would be no reason to believe that it was real. That would take new evidence. In the cold fusion dispute, by late 1990 we had one side is playing by the rules, publishing papers and data, and making a solid case. The other side had run off the rails, abandoned the scientific method, and they were engaged in academic politics or in some cases a weird new form of religion. They have no legitimacy, and no right to be call themselves scientists any more than the flat-earth society or creationists do. The two sides are well represented in the debate between Morrison and Fleischmann: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf Yes. Except I wouldn't put it in quite such stark terms. It's obvious that the quality of Fleischman's reply greatly exceeded the quality of Morrison's critique. In particular, I was struck by Morrison's facile introduction of the palladium cigarette lighter, which released significant energy through, first, relaxation of pressure, the lighter being a rod of palladium pressurized with hydrogen gas, then through ignition of the hydrogen. But there was no pressurization in the experiment being criticized. So no initial temperature rise. And there would be little or no oxygen available to burn the evolved deuterium gas, at the cathode. At the same time, much deuterium gas would be being evolved by electrolysis as the cell approached boil-off. Certainly consideration of recombination is in order. But the cigarette-lighter effect falls into the category of a highly speculative explanation, one which raised far more questions than it answers. It's a bit like Shanahan's calibration constant shift. Sure, a possible source of error. However, large enough to explain the results across a wide range of experiments using different techniques? Critics like Shanahan become sources of persistent invention of critiques. It's just as offensive as naive belief on the other side. Indeed, though, both belief and skepticism are essential to scientific progress. For public policy decisions, though, the search should, at each point, be for the most likely explanation. To determine that, it is not necessary to rule out and disprove completely every possible objection, and, indeed, there is no end to such possibilities, depending on how outrageous we are willing to be in proposing them. Proving LENR is the wrong approach, in fact. Rather, there are these effects, reported by so many researchers. What's the *most likely* explanation for them? Given the body of evidence, the
Re: [Vo]:Just how stupid is Al Gore, anyway?
- Original Message - From: OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson svj.orionwo...@gmail.com To: vortex-l vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 11:07 AM Subject: [Vo]:Just how stupid is Al Gore, anyway? First of all, Gore was way off base in his description of the temperature of the Earth’s mantle. You have to drill down almost two miles, before you get enough heat to create steam (100 degrees Celsius).” snip Regarding the second comment, what are reliable figures on tapping into geothermal energy on an economical scale? Why I bring it up is that we are now technologically capable of drilling miles deep for oil, including from ocean floors of thousand feet deep, so... I haz to ask myself, just how difficult would it be to tap geothermal energy if a national program was started? Geothermal can mean using the constant temperature of the earth a dozen feet down as a heat sink for heat pumps to heat and cool, reducing the electrical demand for both functions. It can also mean locating hot spots where one can drill to a reasonable depth and extract heat for domentic and industrial purposes. One of the oil/energy companies has placed some TV ads citing their efforts in that direction. It does not mean drilling down to the mantle in all cases. What you get is a bunch of localized but nominally continupus sources of energy, along with solar and wind, to satisfy the neergy appetite of the world. Mike Carrell Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks This Email has been scanned for all viruses by Medford Leas I.T. Department.
Re: [Vo]:Climate-gate widely compared to cold fusion
On 12/03/2009 10:53 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: One of the most cogent of criticisms of CF research is probably the claim of publication bias. CF was such an attractive field, in terms of potential significance, that many workers attempted to find something. Much of the work was never published, I'm quite sure. Now, when one looks for a possible effect, one may find it even if the effect does not exist, because of the vagaries and variations that are normal. The higher the publication bias, i.e., the higher the ratio of unpublished to published work, the more likely that apparently strong results will appear even if there is no actual effect. Indeed. In experiments which are subject to statistical analysis, 5% probability of a result occurring by chance is (or used to be) the commonly accepted threshold for saying something was /significant/. But this means that if 20 experiments are done with entirely random results, with the correct conclusion being the null hypothesis, we would expect *one* of them to produce a statistically significant result. And if experiments which fail are not published, the (one) published result will show a 100% success rate, even though the truth of the matter is that there was no effect present. This is a major problem in the social sciences, and in particular it's a problem when you have many input variables and many output variables. The temptation to go fishing by cross correlating everything against everything is always present (and it's even a good place to start if you're really not sure how the system you're studying works at all) but the 1 in 20 rule says that if you do that, you'll inevitably find /something/ which is statistically significant, as long as you have enough inputs and outputs. This is why replication is so important: The system necessarily selects for the experiments which show positive results -- nobody's interested in publishing null results, really, unless it's some kind of spectacular and totally unexpected null, like the MMX. So, replications which are announced in advance, well funded, and which are published regardless of whether they succeed are vital. Absent the pre-announce caveat, of course, you could 40 people try to replicate, just 2 succeed, and the 38 with blank results decide it's not worth publishing -- and now we'll have an initial positive result and two clear replications, even though the correct conclusion would have been the null hypothesis! One entertaining conclusion from this line of reasoning is that if the Universe were infinite, with an infinite number of inhabited planets, then somewhere in the Universe there would certainly be a world on which magic worked -- or, rather, a world on which, every time anyone tried to cast a spell, the result *just* *happened* to come out as intended, purely by chance! Sadly, however, even in an infinite universe, we can also conclude that you could never, ever find such a world, even if you had a way of visiting a new world every few seconds, just by blinking, because the ratio of non-magic worlds to magic worlds would be so totally astronomical. What's more, if you /could/ find a world where magic had always worked (up until the moment you dropped in), we can also say with complete assurance that the magic would *stop* *working* the moment you arrived -- because, of course, every attempt at a spell is an independent event, and even if every spell up to that moment *just* *happened* to succeed, the very next one attempted will still have an extremely low probability of success! So no matter what happened in the past on your current world, the future is, with overwhelming probability, going to be governed by the laws of science, not magic.
Re: [Vo]:terrifying online videos
Thanks, Bill! On 12/03/2009 08:14 AM, William Beaty wrote: Danyk666 and his microwave oven (Czech language) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_DKblzdbJI Yeesh! Like pouring a bucket of live spiders down your pants. Well he SAYS it's at reduced power (in one of the comments). Doesn't say how reduced, but notice that in this one there's no fan on the magnetron, so it's presumably not working very hard. And if you thought THAT was bad... danyk and his unshielded x-ray source http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzMXKxadnVw Holy Flying Mice. I hope Danyk isn't planning on having a lot of kids (or maybe he wears lead shorts when playing with this stuff). danyk makes a jacob's ladder http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUJzQ0QPx9g I had a roommate in college who had a very nice Jacob's ladder which he'd made from an old neon sign transformer. He just took two lengths of very heavy gauge, very stiff bare copper wire, about 2 feet long, and screwed them to the terminals, pointed the ends up, bent them apart in a reasonably neat curve so the closest point was right between the electrodes (where they were maybe an inch or two apart), and voila, plug it in and get a repeating traveling arc running up between the posts. (Of course it's convection of the heated air in the arc which makes it climb.) Sometimes it didn't start right away, but then spitting on it just a little would generally get it going. Never touched either one of the terminals, so I don't know what the effect would have been. I would guess that the secondary floated so it wasn't as dangerous as it looked, but for all I know it could conceivably have had one side grounded internally, which would have made it a rather different story. He used to keep it on a table next to his bed. danyk microwaves a cup of water http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DofLTIDszI danyk zaps a CDROM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Re0njZ4mY Am I wrong, or will the gaps around the CD, when he leans it up against the horn, produce occasional flat beams going off in random directions? Czechoslovakian roulette? What happens if you get a shot straight in the eye? In an old Doc Savage novel, where Doc plays with unshielded microwaves, that meant an instant cataract but I've never known if that's also true in the 'real world'.
Re: [Vo]:Just how stupid is Al Gore, anyway?
In reply to OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson's message of Thu, 3 Dec 2009 10:07:45 -0600: Hi, [snip] Regarding the second comment, what are reliable figures on tapping into geothermal energy on an economical scale? Why I bring it up is that we are now technologically capable of drilling miles deep for oil, including from ocean floors of thousand feet deep, so... I haz to ask myself, just how difficult would it be to tap geothermal energy if a national program was started? [snip] I think the main problem with geothermal is the low thermal conductivity of rocks. That restricts either the power output or the longevity of the well or both. Both reduce the cost effectiveness. In those rare places where neither are a problem geothermal is already used. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/Project.html
[Vo]:What Britz says now
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: What does Britz think, by the way, about excess heat? Has he betrayed his current position? The last I heard from him was when I wrote the Tally of Cold Fusion Papers: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdfhttp://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf He went over the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions, even though I take a poke at him on p. 35. Anyway, I originally wrote that he does not think cold fusion is real. He objected to that. I asked him to clarify his position. His response: Sigh, wrong once more. Britz does not believe that cold fusion does not exist, he is not sure whether it does or not. There is a difference. I understand that you are frustrated that I don't accept the overwhelming evidence, as you see it, but don't categorise me among those who totally deny that may be a new phenomenon. I do believe there may well be. I shoehorned this into the paragraph on p. 33, along with a comment he made in 1998: Based on this sample of 49, I [Jed] would reassign the 1,390 papers as shown in Table 7. Although we differ in our evaluation of some papers, my overall tally of positive/negative/undecided is within 5% of Britz's. The biggest difference between us is in the conclusion we draw from the literature as whole: I am convinced that cold fusion does exist, but Britz does not think it exists. To be precise, he says he is 'not sure whether it [exists] or not' He says he is: '[not] among those who totally deny that may be a new phenomenon. I do believe there may well be.' In the past he said: 'There are enough quality positives for the original FP system (tritium, some XS [excess] heat) to force me to give it a (small) chance.' I sent this paragraph off to him for approval and he said: That's OK as it stands. My guess is that he will not fully agree it is real unless the establishment comes around and places like the APS and the DoE endorse it. I get a sense he is a conformist, or he fears being ridiculed. He used to say he was collecting papers on cold fusion as a mere hobby -- like stamp collecting. He took pains to distance himself from the subject, as if to assure people that he wasn't one of them. In the past I told him that if the results are real they might have important consequences for society, and that a professional scientist or engineer has a social responsibility to investigate and promote important discoveries in his own field. Suppose a civil engineer driving far from home happens to notices that a bridge is in disrepair and may collapse. I say that even though that bridge is not his responsibility, he has a larger professional responsibility to report it to the authorities. Britz did not want to hear that! - Jed
Re: [Vo]:terrifying online videos
The Jacob's ladder is spectacular, of course, and so are Tesla coils in general, but, with reasonable precautions, like don't touch!, are pretty safe. However, an unshielded x-ray with enough output to nicely light up a flourescent screen? For perspective, though, as a kid I looked through a flouroscope at my feet in shoes. They used to have these things in shoe stores. I did survive. I notice something about that video. He's not near it when it's operating, as far as any evidence shows. The object being x-rayed is on a turntable, and the video camera can be sitting there recording it all. He doesn't even need to be in the same room. Pop the breaker from the basement What's really cool about this is that the magnetron is an interesting device that you can get really cheap, or free, from a junk microwave oven. I had a broken smoke detector. Presto! Americium-241 alpha source. A little bit of cheap zinc sulfide spinthariscope screen, and I can see nuclear radiation effects, quite safely. It's claimed in the literature that I could swallow the source and I'd still be safe, it's apparently happened. It's oxidized fully, and it isn't soluble at all. Let's see, should I get a bunch of these sources, reduce them, and collect the Americium? Let me pass on that one! These sources can be shipped through the mail, individually, and you can buy a smoke detector, new, with such a source in it for about $6. So you can easily guess what will be used to calibrate the polycarbonate SSNTDs I'll be fabricating from makrolon sheets. They will almost certainly have significant background from normal storage, I don't yet know how much, I should know in less than a week, I hope. In the end, if this approach doesn't work, I'll break down and use something like Landauer detectors, they are expensive but not out of range. I have a few, courtesy of an anonymous donor, but they are old; I also have new LR-115 detectors which I'll use supplementally. But I won't be able to view the cathode through them, like I can with clear CR-39, at least until the surface gets too damaged. (Yes, for the polycarbonate detectors, I'll be working wet. Too many advantages. If I'm looking for neutrons, and I am, the front surface isn't terribly relevant anyway.)
Re: [Vo]:Labinger paper, more detailed commentary.
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: There *was* an apparent scientific consensus. That isn't to be denied. But was there a *real* scientific consensus. It's obvious that there was not. That would be a consensus rigorously based on scientific principles, and such a consensus would be far more widely accepted. Ah. I see what you mean. Proving LENR is the wrong approach, in fact. Rather, there are these effects, reported by so many researchers. What's the *most likely* explanation for them? Given the body of evidence, the streams of evidence that converge, it's obvious. Yes, that is what Melich and I concluded: We do not assert that cold fusion is unquestionably a nuclear effect and only a nuclear effect. As noted already in this Appendix, we assert that a chemical effect or experimental error is ruled out, and that the heat beyond the limits of chemistry, helium commensurate with a plasma fusion reaction, tritium and heavy metal transmutations all point to an unknown nuclear reaction. In short, the nuclear hypothesis best fits the facts, but until a detailed nuclear theory is worked out and broadly accepted, this will remain only a working hypothesis. It is conceivable that cold fusion is caused by an unknown effect even more powerful than nuclear fusion that triggers some nuclear changes as a side effect of the main reaction, just as fission reactor heat triggers chemical changes as a side effect of fission. . . . Krivit's latest blog entries say he thinks cold fusion is not fusion: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/blog/http://newenergytimes.com/v2/blog/ QUOTE: But 'cold fusion' doesn't look like fusion. It sure looks like fusion to me! Frankly, I do not have the foggiest idea how he reached that conclusion. Plus I do not know any researchers trying to squelch the Windom-Larsen theory, or any theory. They ignore theories they do not believe in. Theories are a dime a dozen in this business. As far as I know none of them makes useful predictions -- or even testable predictions! So they are useless. Heck, they aren't even theories, just speculation. A theory is not viable unless it can be tested and falsified. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Labinger paper, more detailed commentary.
On 12/03/2009 04:57 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: Theories are a dime a dozen in this business. As far as I know none of them makes useful predictions -- or even testable predictions! So they are useless. Heck, they aren't even theories, just speculation. A theory is not viable unless it can be tested and falsified. If I recall correctly, Hagelstein's theory based on phonon coupling to the lattice made testable predictions. However, that was a number of years ago, and since the theory seems to have sunk without a trace, I'd have to guess that it was, indeed, falsified, so to speak.
Re: [Vo]:Labinger paper, more detailed commentary.
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: Theories are a dime a dozen in this business. As far as I know none of them makes useful predictions -- or even testable predictions! . . . If I recall correctly, Hagelstein's theory based on phonon coupling to the lattice made testable predictions. However, that was a number of years ago, and since the theory seems to have sunk without a trace, I'd have to guess that it was, indeed, falsified, so to speak. You are probably right. I spoke rather harshly. To be honest, I can seldom follow lectures about theory long enough to see if they make predictions. However: 1. At conferences I sometimes follow Ed Storms around as he asks the theorists, Okay, so what testable predictions do you make? How can I use this theory to improve my experiments? They seldom give a satisfactory answer. Except in one instance, with Hagelstein's theory about laser stimulation. Hagelstein predicted it would work at specific wavelengths (with 2 lasers) and by gum, it seems to do that. So says Cravens. 2. In theory papers I do not recall seeing a section titled predictions or something like that. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Labinger paper, more detailed commentary.
At 05:42 PM 12/2/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote: I meant to say: Simon is interested in the process of closure. And what he comes to with Undead Science is that there can be an apparent closure where an apparent scientific consensus arises, but there is life after death, hence, undead science. This is like saying there is no apparent scientific CLOSURE about evolution because the creationists STILL disagree. Closure does not mean that a large group of people come down on one side or another. It shouldn't mean that, anyway. Glad you stated that, Jed. Now, the attempt is to deal with sociology as a science, it's not a hard science, at least not yet!, but, still, one can attempt to approach it objectively. What's the proper field of study in sociology: what is, as can be observed, measured, reported, as to the topic (which is society, Jed, not cold fusion), or what should be? Tell me, in the field of condensed matter nuclear science, what would we report, the design of experiments and their results, or what those results should be? In a few cases, sure, a theoretical paper, we'd report something like, According to this analysis, measurement of neutrons at low levels should be possible. But that's theory, not actual experimental report. The closer that Simon is talking about, and where he shares language with other sociologists of science, is indeed about a group of people coming down on one side or another. Closure is a social phenomenon, and is not contingent upon the apparently closed fact. I.e., by the standards of sociology, the cold fusion issue was closed by 1990. Simon is pointing out the contradiction, the existence of non-closure in spite of apparent closure. And, again, this is not dependent upon the fact. All those scientists who continued to work in the field could be wrong, not the mainstream. Unlikely, from the perspective of what we know. But Simon is interested in how they did it. How did they manage to continue in spite of heavy obstacles placed in their way by the general conclusion? By traditional standards, closure happens when a definitive experiment is performed. Whether anyone pays attention to that experiment or not is irrelevant. Absolutely incorrect, Jed. You are again confusing what should be with what is. Closure is a social phenomenon, not a matter of absolute truth. A sociologist can't actually compare a consensus with truth. Nor can a sociologist judge whether or not an experiment is definitive. All that a sociologist can do is to research and report what people think about it, and what they do about it. There really aren't traditional standards for closure, though there are processes which sometimes worked, i.e., the apparent consensus was real and reflected the opinion of the knowledgeable, and presumably including some of those who stuck their feet in their mouths approving of N-rays or polywater. While opinion may bounce for a time when there is a definitive experiment, definitive, sociologically, must mean nothing other than convincing, and the convincing must be the convincing of a defined population. It's about people, and only indirectly about science. There is the scientific method, which you correctly observe was not followed, and there is science as a body of knowledge held and shared by more than isolated individuals. We can call the opinion of an isolated individual science, but you surely know that such opinions aren't very reliable in themselves. Science, in terms of knowledge, more properly refers to shared knowledge, where the foundations of the knowledge are well understood. The edges of science are areas where there is speculative knowledge, partial knowledge, inference, and, yes, opinion. It's possible that everyone agrees on something that is an error. However, it's unlikely that the knowledgeable will so agree, as long as the knowledge is sufficiently comprehensive. And if I find that my own opinion in a field is rejected by everyone but me, I should think long and hard about how solid my knowledge is before I proceed with an assumption that I'm right, and I should be prepared, if I proceed on that assumption, for opposition. But, of course, there never was a real scientific consensus on cold fusion, just the opinion of a politically powerful faction that was able to sway the rest of science, i.e., the community of scientists who *aren't* familiar with the specific field. Once one has sufficient knowledge of the literature, it's trivial to see the errors and false assumptions of the expert critics. They aren't familiar with the actual evidence, but maintain *belief* as not only the evidence but also as to what those convinced that CF is real believe and claim. They are not familiar with the present field, though they may have substantial knowledge of the early history of it. For them, the topic closed, and was no longer worth the effort of consideration. People have to
