Re: [Vo]:E-Cat vs. Water Heater for coffee/tea...
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:02 PM, Daniel Rocha danieldi...@gmail.com wrote: You have to trap most of the steam until all the heat gets transfered. I don't know what that means. And 1% by mass is a very think fog, it won't be dragged out by the flow. It's not given a choice. There is a pump forcing it out.
Re: [Vo]:Okay, suppose there is only 800 W input with no anomalous heat
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:20 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: ** Joshua Cude wrote: You only get a stable water/steam mixture in a closed vessel (a teapot). Why? If it takes say 1 kW to raise the temperature of the flowing water to 100C, and then you supply 1.5 kW (using only and electric heater), then only part of the flowing water will get converted to steam, and you will have to have a mixture of liquid and gas coming out. It is hard to arrange things so it transfers just enough heat to bring the temperature up to boiling, and boils some of the water in the time it takes the water to transit the hot surface. You can get it below that a little, or above it, but manually adjusting the flow rate or input power just right to hit that level is tough. What are you on about. We can calculate the heat needed to bring the water to the boiling point. I was suggesting we exceed it by 50%. There's nothing hard about that, and no computers are needed. It usually ends up at ~95°C, as I said. That's what you see in data from people who run flow calorimetry close to boiling. I was talking about running it above boiling, but way below the level needed to boil it all. Different thing. And it's easy. The power can range within a factor of 7. In this case, anywhere between 600W and about 5 kW. Let's look at the facts here: 1. Rossi did not adjust the flow at all. Krivit would have said if he did. We don't know that, but it's not relevant to this discussion. 2. Rossi did not adjust the input power. Krivit would seen this, too. Again, we don't know that, and again it's not relevant. 3. The video shows some steam coming out of the 3 m hose. 4. Input power was ~800 W. 5. The flow rate was ~7 L/h = ~1.9 g/s OK. So the only way for Rossi to make it produce a little steam and a lot of hot water would be for him to adjust the anomalous heat output. Wrong. As you showed, only 600 W is needed to bring the water to the boiling point.That leaves 200W to produce a little steam and a lot of hot water. It would be a miracle if Rossi has such good control over the anomalous heat that he can push the temperature up to 99°C and have mostly liquid water go through plus a little steam. I don't get your problem. The electrical power raises the water to 100C and produces a little steam on top of it. Simple so far. You can argue that the steam coming out represents more than 200W worth of steam, and therefore that the reactor must have contributed some heat. But there is no fine control needed for this. The more heat it produces, the more steam you would get. Nothing at all magic is needed here. And my guess is that the Ni-H produces a little chemical heat, but the evidence for even that is not convincing. I still think Rossi could easily have adjusted the power (and less likely the flow) without Krivit noticing. I also think his claim of the flow is wrong based on the esowatch evidence. I realize you do not think there is any anomalous heat. You think the electric power input balances the heat output. Then you haven't read my posts. I have frequently allowed the possibility of some heat production in the reactor; a few hundred watts seems to fit some of the data. That is barely possible with this test, assuming you can magically transfer all of the heat to the water without heating the vessel. It's not magic to transfer nearly all the heat to the water. The vessel gets hot sure, but it doesn't radiate much with all that insulation around it. Once it reaches equilibrium temperature, then the input heat goes to the water, or to radiation from the insulation. But in previous tests the input power was lower and the water temperature would only be 60°C so there must have been anomalous heat. Right. I've addressed those too. There are 3 obvious possibilities. The power is higher than claimed, the flow is lower than claimed, or the device produces a little chemical heat. It's really only needed in the EK run, and then only about 300 W. Without tricks, there had to be anomalous heat in previous test runs, as I said. In the EK run, without tricks or mistakes, it seems the reactor would have to produce a few hundred watts, yes. I've said this many times. But a few hundred watts does not convincingly exclude chemical heat. In the Lewan runs, less than 100 W were needed, if any at all. In the January run, I cannot exclude mistakes, because they are too obvious. The claimed flow rate exceeded the pump specs by a factor of 2. (Even Levi made such obvious mistakes in his written report as claiming the temperature was at 100C for 40 minutes, when it was only 18 minutes; it is hard to trust anything from that run.) But if you use the max flow rate of the pump, then no additional power from the reactor is needed to explain the data. And with this run, ~800 W input and 1.9 ml/s flow rate, assuming not one joule of heat radiated from the cell
Re: [Vo]:E-Cat vs. Water Heater for coffee/tea...
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.comwrote: 2011/6/24 Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com: On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.com wrote: I do not know how many times you and abd have been told that the measured boiling point of water is 99,7 °C. Therefore if there is mist mixed into dry steam, it will reduce the steam temperature below 99,7°C. But this is not what is observed, but steam temperatures that are above 100,1 °C. You really should not ignore the last decimal digit in the thermometer readings, because it makes all the difference, It is not the temperature reading that convinces me it is at the boiling point, it is the fact that the temperature is so perfectly flat. This is explained that the heat resistor is below the water level. If you want to go significantly above 102 without increasing pressure, then it is necessary to boil all the water away and start heating steam directly. Well, if you're claiming that all the water is boiled away, then the steam would be heated directly. You would have to supply a very carefully regulated power exactly equal to the power required to vaporize the all the water to satisfy the claim that the steam is dry. Just one per cent more power would cause the steam temperature to rise about 10C. It is not plausible that in all these different runs with different flow rates and different power inputs the ecat always gave just enough power to exactly vaporize all the water, and not a per cent more or less. A far easier explanation for the flat temperature is that there is liquid in the output fluid. if we trust Rossi. If we do not trust, then discussion is meaningless, because E-Cat can be fabricated on all possible levels I suppose trust is not binary. But if we blindly trust him, then there is no need for demos at all. My point is that only a few hundred watts are needed from the ecat to explain even the numbers as given by Rossi.
Re: [Vo]:E-Cat vs. Water Heater for coffee/tea...
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: If you have a high temperature thermometer, please try this at home: Boil some water in a teapot so that steam emerges from the spout. Turn the flame down, so that only a little emerges. Measure the temperature of the steam. You will find it is ~101°C. Turn the flame up as high as it will go. A lot of steam will come out. Measure the temperature again. It will still be 101°C. Of course, because there is liquid water present. You are heating the water, not the steam. You have to pressurize it to make it any higher. When you add more heat, all you do is boil more water. In a pot, yes. The ecat is not a pot. Of course a flow configuration is not quite the same, and there may be a little more opportunity for the vapor to cross the hot surface and heat up before it escapes, but with something the size of the Rossi device, at 1 atm, you would have to make it produce many kilowatts of anomalous heat before you get the steam up to up to 110°C or 120°C. Well, for the flow rates used, you have to produce many kW to vaporize all the water. That's Rossi's claim. But once the water is all vaporized, you only need another watt to raise the temperature of 1 g/s steam flow by 2 C. In the Krivit demo, with about 2 g/s, 10 W more will increase the steam temperature by 10C. Now, it may not be exactly like this, but the additional heat has to get out somehow. If the steam doesn't take it, then the ecat will get hotter, and maybe lose a little more through the insulation. But if the ecat gets hotter, the water boils quicker, and exposes the dry steam to more heating element and allows it to get hotter. It's conservation of energy. If all the water is already in the form of steam, and if you put more power into the ecat, or if it produces more power, then the only way for it to come out is if the steam gets hotter. (I realize I got this wrong before, but not that wrong!) Yes. Completely, unequivocally, blatantly, wrong. You still don't seem to grasp it.
Re: [Vo]:[Video] Andrea Rossi Crunches the Numbers for His Energy Catalyzer (June 14th)
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 4:32 PM, Rich Murray rmfor...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude, Are you conceding that the Rossi device produces some anomalous excess heat -- in a fully reproducible setup, capable of explosions, that would imply important, accessible new physics... I make no definite claims. I am saying that the evidence as presented does not require any nuclear reactions to explain it. I do think it is not implausible that the ecat produces some energy by chemical means. I do not see how that suggests new physics.
Re: [Vo]:Okay, suppose there is only 800 W input with no anomalous heat
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 4:35 PM, Daniel Rocha danieldi...@gmail.com wrote: While I am also a skeptical, even rough approximation gives a huge output gain. Above 100 degrees means gas, A temperature reading within a degree or two of 100C is consistent with a mixture of gas and liquid. and pumping a mixture would require either another pump, by means of ventilation. Why? The pump is capable of pushing through pure liquid. It should have no trouble with a mixture of gas and liquid. Ventilation is noisy and would require a large opening. Why? Pure steam would require more ventilation than a mixture of steam and water. The volume is 1700 times higher. It would be louder and hotter. Even 1% of liquid is a thick fog, which is not the case, This depends on droplet size etc. There are papers on 2-phase flow that measure the size of the droplets; they're larger than in a fog. The actual results are all more consistent with at least 2500KW than less than 1000W. OK. We clearly disagree about this. That little puff of steam looks like a few hundred watts to me. I don't think we can resolve this by typing. In any case, it's not a quantitative measure. Using the quantitative measures (temperature and flow rate), only 600 W is needed. The rest is hand-waving arguments about steam dryness. Rossi could easily prove it's dry by heating it to 120C (by reducing the flow rate), or by measuring the flow rate of the steam. Wonder why he doesn't do it. It is much easier to suppose that Rossi is just draining energy from somewhere else. I think that's harder, actually.
Re: [Vo]:Okay, suppose there is only 800 W input with no anomalous heat
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 4:49 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: ** Joshua Cude wrote: There is no chance any of the water would vaporize with only ~800 W input. You would not any steam at all. Even with this high input power, any steam at all is proof there is anomalous heat. What are you talking about. You just did the calculation yourself showing that it takes only 3/4 of that (600W) to bring the water to the boiling point. If you are putting 800W into the cell, and the only way you are taking it out is with water, some of the water would vaporize. Nope. When you put 800 W into something like this, a large fraction of it radiates from the cell into the surroundings. The cell is insulated. The recovery rate for the water flowing through will be maybe 50% to 75%. In other words, only 400 to 600 W reaches the water. I don't believe it. Then the insulation would be radiating 200W to 400W. Not plausible. But go ahead. Try to make it plausible. Estimate the area and the temperature necessary for this. And if you're claiming 50 - 75 % for any power, then at 5 kW, about 2.5 kW would have to radiate from the insulation. Are you claiming that? Rossi is claiming these things produce multi-kW, but only a few hundred watts are enough to explain all the quoted data. You have it backwards. Rossi is assuming the steam is dry, which it almost certainly is. Based on that assumption he estimates that it produces multiple kilowatts. He does not start off with that assumption and then work backwards. *You* are doing that! You assume there must be only 800 W so there has to be some way to explain these temperatures and the appearance of the steam, and there must be hot water coming through. No, I'm looking at the output, at the temperature curves and concluding that dry steam is laughably implausible, and therefore I do not accept the claim of multi-kW output. Rossi has spent a lot of time with teapot-shaped flow calorimeters, where the steam exit is placed well above the hot surface. That ensures dry steam, as long as you keep the flow rate reasonable. No. It doesn't. Whatever the fluid is, and regardless of the shape, it's gonna flow through. It does it as a liquid, and it does it as a steam-liquid mixture. There's a pump forcing it through. You're saying even those few hundred watts prove a nuclear effect, and maybe if they ran it long enough there would be something, if all the numbers were really nailed down with credible observers. But if it's really nuclear, why is this experiment, just like all CF experiments, in this pergatory, where it's even possible to quibble day after day? Why is there never enough power to make it obvious, and better, to power itself? There is enough power to make it obvious! Even several of the CF advocates here are skeptical, so it is clearly not obvious. There will be self-powered ones with electric power generation within a year or so. And will that be used to power the CF car you predicted would be built before the year 2000?
Re: [Vo]:E-Cat vs. Water Heater for coffee/tea...
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.comwrote: 2011/6/25 Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com: On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: If you have a high temperature thermometer, please try this at home: Boil some water in a teapot so that steam emerges from the spout. Turn the flame down, so that only a little emerges. Measure the temperature of the steam. You will find it is ~101°C. Turn the flame up as high as it will go. A lot of steam will come out. Measure the temperature again. It will still be 101°C. Of course, because there is liquid water present. You are heating the water, not the steam. That is good insight, because E-Cat heats water in liquid phase. Heating element is completely submerged into water. Input water flow is adjusted for exactly on that reason, so that E-Cat's heating element is always completely submerged. I.E. input flow is adjusted so that it matches evaporation rate. First of all, the flow rate is not adjusted in any of the demos after the experiment is started. The only thing that is necessary to account for a flat temperature is, as you say, that the flow rate is high enough so that the entire heating element remains wet. To believe that all the water is converted to dry steam at the bp, would require (1) that Rossi knew beforehand the exact flow-rate to balance the power, and (2) that the power remain stable to a per cent or so. Neither are believable. Rossi's admitted in the secret run, where there was no water/steam regulation that the output power fluctuated significantly. Secondly, why would he want to do this? Allowing the steam to go above the bp would give him the evidence he needs to shut the likes of me up. I've often thought a better way to do this experiment would be to adjust the flow rate (reduce it) until the temperature of the steam begins to climb to 110C or 120C. Then you could be sure the steam is dry, the calculation he likes to stumble over would have some validity. Therefore E-Cat is exactly the same thing as a kettle where there is a hose plugged into nozzle and input water flow is adjusted so that there is always water present in liquid form. Well, that would explain the temperature regulation, but it's not exactly the same, because there is no pump pushing whatever is in the ecat, vaporized or not, out. In the case of the teapot, the exiting steam leaves as it is produced, and so it would be forgiving of fluctuations in the power or input flow rate. That is, the output mass flow rate does not have to match the input flow rate. But the ecat is not open like that. The output mass flow rate must match the input. So, even if the flow rate matched the output of dry steam, a very small decrease in the flow rate or a very small increase in the power would show up as a substantial increase in the steam temperature. The ecat is not a tea pot. Get used to it. This why E-Cat has a tall chimney, to prevent overflow of water and boiling away all the water coolant. The water or steam is pushed out no matter what. It's a closed system. There is no concept of overflowing. My theory of the chimney is it provides a place for the liquid water to become aerosolized by the turbulence of the little steam that is produced, so that what comes out looks like steam. If there is no water in liquid form around heating element, E-Cat melts down. Or the steam gets hotter. Or both. But the steam would get hotter. P.S. It is surprising that you and abd have written hundreds of very long messages although misunderstanding is on such a basic level that people do not know how tea pot is functioning! We unfortunately do not have the benefit of being trained by members of the tea party.
Re: [Vo]:Okay, suppose there is only 800 W input with no anomalous heat
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.comwrote: YOW -- WHAT YOU JUST SAID On 11-06-24 04:20 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: So the only way for Rossi to make it produce a little steam and a lot of hot water would be for him to adjust the anomalous heat output. It would be a miracle if Rossi has such good control over the anomalous heat that he can push the temperature up to 99°C and have mostly liquid water go through plus a little steam. If he can do that, he has truly mastered cold fusion! Jed, man, think about that -- don't just jerk your knee at me in an automatic defense of Rossi, really think about it. Rossi has a factor of SEVEN in output level in the range he has to hit in order to produce SOME steam and SOME hot water, and you have just said it would be hard for him to control the anomalous heat well enough to do that. But Rossi's claiming to have produced exactly enough heat to EXACTLY vaporize all the input water, and NOT HEAT THE STEAM beyond boiling -- that target is orders of magnitude smaller than the target he'd need to hit to produce some steam and some hot water! If he overshoots his dry steam power level by even a little, the steam temperature will go up by a lot; the specific heat of steam is very small compared to the heat of vaporization of water. But the temperature never rises more than about a degree over boiling! Jed, the point you just made is the point that's been bugging me all along -- it would take a miracle of fine control to generate EXACTLY enough anomalous heat to EXACTLY vaporize all the input water, without superheating the steam, and without leaving wet steam or having the device spit water! There's no evidence of that degree of control, no evidence of a feedback loop which could be providing it, no reason except wishful thinking to believe such control exists ... so the conclusion is that he's actually got the power level set somewhere within the factor of 7 window, and he's producing very wet steam or a mix of steam and liquid water; he does *NOT* have it right on the edge, producing dry steam just over the boiling point. It's absurd to think he could exercise the level of precise control needed to produce exactly dry steam. (And that about uses up my Friday night send-some-useless-email time...) Thanks. You put it better than I did.
Re: [Vo]:Barron's (April 27, 2013) investigates Li-battery fires
Tunneling is not applied when an unexpected phenomenon occurs. Tunneling is a phenomenon completely described within quantum mechanics. The word is a metaphor because it represents a particle's ability to penetrate a narrow potential energy barrier higher than its own kinetic energy, but the phenomenon is perfectly well described by quantum mechanical theory developed nearly a century ago, and taught at the undergraduate physics level. The experimental rates match the expected rates to ridiculous accuracy. The only conflict is with classical mechanics. But tunneling is not superimposed on classical theory so classical theory can be retained. Quantum mechanics is a self-consistent theory, and tunneling is an intrinsic part of it. Perhaps it's no wonder that someone with such a misguided understanding of elementary physics is also a true believer in cold fusion. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: Perhaps, Joe, I should be more exact. We are not discussing motion of electrons through a material. The concept of tunneling might be useful to describe this behavior. We were discussing nuclear reactions. Tunneling is applied when a reaction that should not be possible based on a theory is found to actually occur at an unexpected rate. This conflict with theory is then explained by the ability of the process to avoid the expected barrier and pass under it, so to speak. This allows the original theory to be retained even though behavior is not properly described. Instead, a whole new theory is superimposed on the original flawed description. I prefer to change the original concept to avoid the need to create a new concept. In fact, the existence of LENR shows that the original concept is incomplete. Invoking tunneling simply hides the problem. Ed Storms On May 3, 2013, at 9:44 AM, Joseph S. Barrera III wrote: On 5/3/2013 8:31 AM, Edmund Storms wrote: Eric, tunneling in my mind is not real. It is a conceptual ploy to fix a flawed understanding of how a process actually works. Consequently, I do not use this concept. Tunneling is very real. Semiconductor manufacturers have to worry about tunneling already. It's a massive problem for them as they continue to shrink feature size, as the electrons simply tunnel through the gate when they shouldn't, and below a certain size the transistor is always on. - Joe
[Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
The recent editorial in Infinite Energy by Hagelstein represents the incoherent ramblings of a bitter man who is beginning to realize he has wasted 25 years of his career, but is deathly afraid to admit it. He spends a lot of time talking about consensus and experiment and evidence and theory and destroyed careers and suppression but scarcely raises the issue of the *quality* of the evidence. That's cold fusion's problem: the quality of the evidence is abysmal -- not better than the evidence for bigfoot, alien visits, dowsing, homeopathy and a dozen other pathological sciences. And an extraordinary claim *does* require excellent evidence. By not facing this issue, and simply ploughing ahead as if the evidence is as good as the Wright brothers' Paris flight in 1908, he loses the confidence of all but true believers that he is being completely honest and forthright. *1. On consensus* Hagelstein starts out with the science-by-consensus straw man, suggesting that consensus was used in connection with the question of the existence of an excess heat effect in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment. Please! No one with any familiarity with the history of science thinks consensus defines truth (which I think is what he's suggesting scientists believe). If it did, the ptolemaic solar system would still be taught in school, and time would still be absolute. Individual qualified scientists sufficiently motivated to inspect the evidence make judgements based on that evidence, and, since the modern physics revolution, avoid absolute certainty, their judgements representing varying degrees of certainty. Of course, consensus judgements do form, and are considered by those unqualified or unmotivated to examine the evidence to get some idea of the validity of a phenomenon or theory. While consensus does not define truth, a consensus of experts is the most likely approximation to the truth. And the stronger the consensus, the more confidence it warrants. Sometimes the consensus can be very strong, as in the current consensus that the solar system is Copernican. I have not made the astronomical measurements to prove that it is, although my observations are certainly consistent with it, but my confidence in the description comes from the unanimous consensus among those who have made or analyzed the necessary measurements. Likewise, confidence in the shape of the earth is essentially absolute, and serious humans dismiss members of the flat-earth society as deluded, or more likely dishonest. So, when it comes to allocating funding, hiring or promoting, or awarding prizes or honors, there's really no option but to consult experts in the respective field -- essentially to rely on the consensus. It's the worst system except for all the others. Hagelstein claims that cold fusion is an example of the Semmelweis reflex, in which an idea is rejected because it falls outside the existing consensus. That reflex is named after the rejection of Semmelweis's (correct) hand-washing theory in 1847, which Hagelstein cites. Then he goes on to mock a scientific system in which ideas outside the consensus are rejected and the people who propose them are ostracized in a ridiculous parody that bears no resemblance at all to the actual practice of science. It's the usual way true believers rationalize the rejection of their favorite fringe science. But it's truly surprising to see that Hagelstein has no more awareness of the reality of science than the many cold fusion groupies who populate the internet forums. Of course there is a certain inertia in science, and that is probably not a bad thing, even if it sometimes has negative consequences, but there's so much wrong about the way the phenomenon is applied here: i) Hagelstein fails to mention that in 1989 the announcement of PF was greeted with widespread enthusiasm and optimism both inside and outside the scientific mainstream; that Pons got a standing ovation from thousands of scientists at an ACS meeting; that scientists all over the world ran to their labs to try to reproduce the effect to get in on the new and fantastic revolution; that eventual uber-skeptic Douglas Morrison was breathlessly optimistic writing: I feel this subject will become so important to society […] the present big power companies will be running down their oil and coal power stations while they are building deuterium separation plants… and so on. In fact, people took great pleasure in the idea that a couple of chemists could so revolutionize science. Semmelweis received no such reaction. Cold fusion was an example of the anti-semmelweis reflex, where people delight in bucking the system. It wasn't until people started doing experiments and examining the evidence of others that skepticism began to dominate. ii) In spite of inertia in science, the most revolutionary ideas in physics were accepted immediately. Einstein's photons and Bohr's discrete atomic levels and deBroglie's particle waves were all embraced,
Re: [Vo]:Barron's (April 27, 2013) investigates Li-battery fires
Yes, tunneling is described using quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, it is applied because the concept of a barrier energy does not work. No, that's wrong. The concept of barrier energy certainly does work. And again, tunneling is not applied, it is a phenomenon predicted and observed. Set up an energy barrier, send a wave-function toward it, and use the standard procedure to calculate the probability of penetration. Works perfect. A mathematical model was required to account for the rate of a reaction being greater than the barrier energy based on QM would allow. No. That's wrong. Tunneling comes out of QM formalism. It was not added in. In the case of CF, the rate is much greater than expected based on the barrier energy obtained from hot fusion studies. Hot fusion shmot fusion. The claimed rate is much greater than QM predicts. The same QM theory that works in exquisite detail at low and high energy. I'm proposing that this tunneling concept simply does not apply to CF. You're proposing that QM -- as she is spoke -- does not apply. You're not using the concept of tunneling correctly. The CF reaction is not the result of tunneling through the expected barrier. The concept has no meaning when applied to this process. Obviously, the concept has some value when applied elsewhere, although I suspect it is more of a church than an explanation. Assuming you mean crutch, that's where you're so misguided. It's not a crutch. It's part of the theory. It comes directly out of Schrodinger's or Heisenberg's QM as first applied to describe the energy levels in hydrogen. Nothing was added to describe tunneling. Yes, I'm a believer in CF because I value what I can see more than I value what you and other people claim must be true based on what you call elementary physics. No one disagrees that experiment rules. The disagreement is on the credibility of the experiments. The slow but sure decrease in the size of the claims as the experiments improve, as detailed in your own papers, is symptomatic of pathological science. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: It would help if you even tried to understand what other people say rather than using insults. Yes, tunneling is described using quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, it is applied because the concept of a barrier energy does not work. A mathematical model was required to account for the rate of a reaction being greater than the barrier energy based on QM would allow. Yes, QM was used and it can be very accurate when applied to certain systems. In the case of CF, the rate is much greater than expected based on the barrier energy obtained from hot fusion studies. I'm proposing that this tunneling concept simply does not apply to CF. The CF reaction is not the result of tunneling through the expected barrier. The concept has no meaning when applied to this process. Obviously, the concept has some value when applied elsewhere, although I suspect it is more of a church than an explanation. But then, I do not expect you to agree because you value conventional thinking. The CF phenomenon demonstrates that conventional thinking is not always correct. Yes, I'm a believer in CF because I value what I can see more than I value what you and other people claim must be true based on what you call elementary physics. Obvious, some part of your belief is wrong. I'm trying to find out which part. What are you trying to do? Ed Storms On May 3, 2013, at 2:25 PM, Joshua Cude wrote: Tunneling is not applied when an unexpected phenomenon occurs. Tunneling is a phenomenon completely described within quantum mechanics. The word is a metaphor because it represents a particle's ability to penetrate a narrow potential energy barrier higher than its own kinetic energy, but the phenomenon is perfectly well described by quantum mechanical theory developed nearly a century ago, and taught at the undergraduate physics level. The experimental rates match the expected rates to ridiculous accuracy. The only conflict is with classical mechanics. But tunneling is not superimposed on classical theory so classical theory can be retained. Quantum mechanics is a self-consistent theory, and tunneling is an intrinsic part of it. Perhaps it's no wonder that someone with such a misguided understanding of elementary physics is also a true believer in cold fusion. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: Perhaps, Joe, I should be more exact. We are not discussing motion of electrons through a material. The concept of tunneling might be useful to describe this behavior. We were discussing nuclear reactions. Tunneling is applied when a reaction that should not be possible based on a theory is found to actually occur at an unexpected rate. This conflict with theory is then explained by the ability of the process to avoid the expected barrier and pass under
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On May 3, 2013, at 2:52 PM, Joshua Cude wrote: The recent editorial in Infinite Energy by Hagelstein represents the incoherent ramblings of a bitter man who is beginning to realize he has wasted 25 years of his career, but is deathly afraid to admit it. He spends a lot of time talking about consensus and experiment and evidence and theory and destroyed careers and suppression but scarcely raises the issue of the *quality* of the evidence. That's cold fusion's problem: the quality of the evidence is abysmal -- not better than the evidence for bigfoot, alien visits, dowsing, homeopathy and a dozen other pathological sciences. And an extraordinary claim *does* require excellent evidence. By not facing this issue, and simply ploughing ahead as if the evidence is as good as the Wright brothers' Paris flight in 1908, he loses the confidence of all but true believers that he is being completely honest and forthright. *1. On consensus* Hagelstein starts out with the science-by-consensus straw man, suggesting that consensus was used in connection with the question of the existence of an excess heat effect in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment. Please! No one with any familiarity with the history of science thinks consensus defines truth (which I think is what he's suggesting scientists believe). If it did, the ptolemaic solar system would still be taught in school, and time would still be absolute. Individual qualified scientists sufficiently motivated to inspect the evidence make judgements based on that evidence, and, since the modern physics revolution, avoid absolute certainty, their judgements representing varying degrees of certainty. Of course, consensus judgements do form, and are considered by those unqualified or unmotivated to examine the evidence to get some idea of the validity of a phenomenon or theory. While consensus does not define truth, a consensus of experts is the most likely approximation to the truth. And the stronger the consensus, the more confidence it warrants. Sometimes the consensus can be very strong, as in the current consensus that the solar system is Copernican. I have not made the astronomical measurements to prove that it is, although my observations are certainly consistent with it, but my confidence in the description comes from the unanimous consensus among those who have made or analyzed the necessary measurements. Likewise, confidence in the shape of the earth is essentially absolute, and serious humans dismiss members of the flat-earth society as deluded, or more likely dishonest. So, when it comes to allocating funding, hiring or promoting, or awarding prizes or honors, there's really no option but to consult experts in the respective field -- essentially to rely on the consensus. It's the worst system except for all the others. Hagelstein claims that cold fusion is an example of the Semmelweis reflex, in which an idea is rejected because it falls outside the existing consensus. That reflex is named after the rejection of Semmelweis's (correct) hand-washing theory in 1847, which Hagelstein cites. Then he goes on to mock a scientific system in which ideas outside the consensus are rejected and the people who propose them are ostracized in a ridiculous parody that bears no resemblance at all to the actual practice of science. It's the usual way true believers rationalize the rejection of their favorite fringe science. But it's truly surprising to see that Hagelstein has no more awareness of the reality of science than the many cold fusion groupies who populate the internet forums. Of course there is a certain inertia in science, and that is probably not a bad thing, even if it sometimes has negative consequences, but there's so much wrong about the way the phenomenon is applied here: i) Hagelstein fails to mention that in 1989 the announcement of PF was greeted with widespread enthusiasm and optimism both inside and outside the scientific mainstream; that Pons got a standing ovation from thousands of scientists at an ACS meeting; that scientists all over the world ran to their labs to try to reproduce the effect to get in on the new and fantastic revolution; that eventual uber-skeptic Douglas Morrison was breathlessly optimistic writing: I feel this subject will become so important to society […] the present big power companies will be running down their oil and coal power stations while they are building deuterium separation plants… and so on. In fact, people took great pleasure in the idea that a couple of chemists could so revolutionize science. Semmelweis received no such reaction. Cold fusion was an example of the anti-semmelweis reflex, where people delight in bucking the system. It wasn't until people started doing experiments and examining the evidence of others that skepticism began to dominate. ii) In spite of inertia in science, the most revolutionary ideas in physics were accepted immediately
Re: [Vo]:Barron's (April 27, 2013) investigates Li-battery fires
I don't know where you get the idea that cold fusion skeptics are skeptical of all discoveries. The 2011 Nobel prize winners postulated the very new dark energy, and they signed their emails Pons and Fleischmann because they were initially uncertain of their results. We didn't want dark energy to be the next cold fusion, they said. CF skeptics, and yet Nobel prize winning scientists. As for changing alpha decay with 10^18W/cm^2 lasers, I suppose it's a start. They get a factor of 2, which is not that far from the 20 or 30 orders of magnitude needed in cold fusion. You are aware, I assume, that it's quite easy to induce fusion on the bench top with a small dc power supply to accelerate deuterons into palladium hydride. It's making an energy profit that's the problem. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: Nanoplasmonics is a new science that is only a decade old. Almost every day now, this science produces another unbelievable breakthrough. A few days ago, I read an article that showed how light can reach a infinite speed when refracted by a custom build optical material. Invisibility shields are being fabricated using this new science. The skeptics of LENR need to be careful in their negative opinions in the age of new wonders. A.V. Simakin is the first experimenter to couple Nanoplasmonics with LENR. This is the demonstration of LENR you are after. Accelerated alpha-decay of 232U isotope achieved by exposure of its aqueous solution with gold nanoparticles to laser radiation A.V. Simakin, G.A. Shafeev http://www.google.com/url?sa=trct=jq=esrc=sfrm=1source=webcd=4cad=rjaved=0CEMQFjADurl=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1112.6276ei=25F9UdCiLqjC4AP3pYHIBQusg=AFQjCNFB59F1wkDv-NzeYg5TpnyZV1kpKQsig2=pB3pVPZuQrv_xT8EcvrwWA This is a good example of the modification of tunneling through nano-engineering. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 5:07 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, tunneling is described using quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, it is applied because the concept of a barrier energy does not work. No, that's wrong. The concept of barrier energy certainly does work. And again, tunneling is not applied, it is a phenomenon predicted and observed. Set up an energy barrier, send a wave-function toward it, and use the standard procedure to calculate the probability of penetration. Works perfect. A mathematical model was required to account for the rate of a reaction being greater than the barrier energy based on QM would allow. No. That's wrong. Tunneling comes out of QM formalism. It was not added in. In the case of CF, the rate is much greater than expected based on the barrier energy obtained from hot fusion studies. Hot fusion shmot fusion. The claimed rate is much greater than QM predicts. The same QM theory that works in exquisite detail at low and high energy. I'm proposing that this tunneling concept simply does not apply to CF. You're proposing that QM -- as she is spoke -- does not apply. You're not using the concept of tunneling correctly. The CF reaction is not the result of tunneling through the expected barrier. The concept has no meaning when applied to this process. Obviously, the concept has some value when applied elsewhere, although I suspect it is more of a church than an explanation. Assuming you mean crutch, that's where you're so misguided. It's not a crutch. It's part of the theory. It comes directly out of Schrodinger's or Heisenberg's QM as first applied to describe the energy levels in hydrogen. Nothing was added to describe tunneling. Yes, I'm a believer in CF because I value what I can see more than I value what you and other people claim must be true based on what you call elementary physics. No one disagrees that experiment rules. The disagreement is on the credibility of the experiments. The slow but sure decrease in the size of the claims as the experiments improve, as detailed in your own papers, is symptomatic of pathological science. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: It would help if you even tried to understand what other people say rather than using insults. Yes, tunneling is described using quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, it is applied because the concept of a barrier energy does not work. A mathematical model was required to account for the rate of a reaction being greater than the barrier energy based on QM would allow. Yes, QM was used and it can be very accurate when applied to certain systems. In the case of CF, the rate is much greater than expected based on the barrier energy obtained from hot fusion studies. I'm proposing that this tunneling concept simply does not apply to CF. The CF reaction is not the result of tunneling through the expected barrier. The concept has no meaning when applied to this process. Obviously, the concept has some value when applied elsewhere
Re: [Vo]:Barron's (April 27, 2013) investigates Li-battery fires
Mea culpa. The activity of the bulk sample decreases by a factor of two as a result of exposure, but the deduced half-life, taking account of the laser duration and volume is pretty dramatic all right. But none of this is contrary to ordinary QM, and plausible mechanisms are proposed. Like I said, there are easy ways to induce fusion in metal hydrides. From dc electric fields demonstrated by Cockcroft and Walton in the 30s, to muon-catalyzed fusion in the 50s, to pyroelectric fusion in the 00s. The problem is making a profit. Still, an interesting paper all right. But it ain't LENR of the PF variety. Citing effects that are not inconsistent with theory does not make effects that are inconsistent with theory any more plausible. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude said: As for changing alpha decay with 10^18W/cm^2 lasers, I suppose it's a start. They get a factor of 2, which is not that far from the 20 or 30 orders of magnitude needed in cold fusion. Axil says: How many orders of magnitude is implied by a alpha half-life reduction from 69 years to 5 microseconds? Or did you look at the experiment? On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: I don't know where you get the idea that cold fusion skeptics are skeptical of all discoveries. The 2011 Nobel prize winners postulated the very new dark energy, and they signed their emails Pons and Fleischmann because they were initially uncertain of their results. We didn't want dark energy to be the next cold fusion, they said. CF skeptics, and yet Nobel prize winning scientists. As for changing alpha decay with 10^18W/cm^2 lasers, I suppose it's a start. They get a factor of 2, which is not that far from the 20 or 30 orders of magnitude needed in cold fusion. You are aware, I assume, that it's quite easy to induce fusion on the bench top with a small dc power supply to accelerate deuterons into palladium hydride. It's making an energy profit that's the problem. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: Nanoplasmonics is a new science that is only a decade old. Almost every day now, this science produces another unbelievable breakthrough. A few days ago, I read an article that showed how light can reach a infinite speed when refracted by a custom build optical material. Invisibility shields are being fabricated using this new science. The skeptics of LENR need to be careful in their negative opinions in the age of new wonders. A.V. Simakin is the first experimenter to couple Nanoplasmonics with LENR. This is the demonstration of LENR you are after. Accelerated alpha-decay of 232U isotope achieved by exposure of its aqueous solution with gold nanoparticles to laser radiation A.V. Simakin, G.A. Shafeev http://www.google.com/url?sa=trct=jq=esrc=sfrm=1source=webcd=4cad=rjaved=0CEMQFjADurl=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1112.6276ei=25F9UdCiLqjC4AP3pYHIBQusg=AFQjCNFB59F1wkDv-NzeYg5TpnyZV1kpKQsig2=pB3pVPZuQrv_xT8EcvrwWA This is a good example of the modification of tunneling through nano-engineering. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 5:07 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: Yes, tunneling is described using quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, it is applied because the concept of a barrier energy does not work. No, that's wrong. The concept of barrier energy certainly does work. And again, tunneling is not applied, it is a phenomenon predicted and observed. Set up an energy barrier, send a wave-function toward it, and use the standard procedure to calculate the probability of penetration. Works perfect. A mathematical model was required to account for the rate of a reaction being greater than the barrier energy based on QM would allow. No. That's wrong. Tunneling comes out of QM formalism. It was not added in. In the case of CF, the rate is much greater than expected based on the barrier energy obtained from hot fusion studies. Hot fusion shmot fusion. The claimed rate is much greater than QM predicts. The same QM theory that works in exquisite detail at low and high energy. I'm proposing that this tunneling concept simply does not apply to CF. You're proposing that QM -- as she is spoke -- does not apply. You're not using the concept of tunneling correctly. The CF reaction is not the result of tunneling through the expected barrier. The concept has no meaning when applied to this process. Obviously, the concept has some value when applied elsewhere, although I suspect it is more of a church than an explanation. Assuming you mean crutch, that's where you're so misguided. It's not a crutch. It's part of the theory. It comes directly out of Schrodinger's or Heisenberg's QM as first applied to describe the energy levels in hydrogen. Nothing was added to describe tunneling. Yes, I'm a believer in CF because I value what I can see more than I value what you
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 7:59 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude wrote: That's cold fusion's problem: the quality of the evidence is abysmal -- not better than the evidence for bigfoot, alien visits, dowsing, homeopathy. . . Incorrect. The quality of evidence is excellent. Poor choice of words on my part. Of course I know that skeptics and believers disagree about the quality of the evidence, so using that statement as a premise is as pointless as Hagelstein using Cold fusion is real. as a premise. What I should have said is that the quality of the evidence is perceived as abysmal in the mainstream. That's all that was necessary for the point I was making. Namely, that if Hagelstein does not confront, or at least acknowledge that perception, he loses the confidence of all but the true believers. Anyway, if you think the evidence is excellent, why did you write: Why haven’t researchers learned to make the results stand out? After twelve years of painstaking replication attempts, most experiments produce a fraction of a watt of heat, when they work at all. Such low heat is difficult to measure. It leaves room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real. That was in 2001, but your favorite high-quality paper (referred to below) was 7 years before that. See: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionb.pdf This example illustrates the problem. First, it is 19 years old. That you invariably fall back to this paper when quality is challenged shows the lack of progress. The paper identified 3 criteria to achieve high reproducibility, but a few years later the Toyota IMRA lab in Japan reported negative results in 27 of 27 electrolysis cells. Evidently, they could not satisfy McKubre's criteria. That's not surprising since in 1998, McKubre himself questioned the quality of that 1994 paper when he wrote: With hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat production was premature…. He was only getting excess heat from 20% of his cells. And in 2008, McKubre wrote: … we do not yet have quantitative reproducibility in any case of which I am aware., and in essentially every instance, written instructions alone have been insufficient to allow us to reproduce the experiments of others. To most scientists, this means there is no reproducibility in the field. And that represents low quality evidence. Second, the paper is an excellent example showing how improved experimental techniques reduce the alleged effect. The year before PF had claimed 160 W output with 40 W input. That paper was challenged for its poor calorimetry. With McKubre's much improved calorimetry, the claimed output was about 10.5 W with 10 W input (give or take). That suggests that PF's claim could have all been artifact. And the half watt or so that he observed is in the range of artifacts in calorimetry experiments. As you have said, calorimetric errors and artifacts are more common that researchers realize. And then 4 years later, with a presumably improved experiment, McKubre gets about the same power level, but in a smaller fraction of the cells. And that seems to be the end of his efforts at improving the experiments, or attempting to scale them up to make the results stand out. Since then, he has become a kind of validator for hire, working with Dardik or Brillouin, or defending Rossi, and even lending his credibility to the Papp engine. Third, (as Jay2013 (who has done LENR experiments) has emphasized, along with much other criticism at wavewatching.net/fringe/lenr-call-for-the-best-papers/#comments see 7:18 pm) the heat monotonically and suspiciously tracks the input current, which is not what one would expect from a nuclear reaction, but what one would expect from an artifact. In particular, the heat drops off much more quickly when the current is stopped than could be explained by diffusion of the deuterium. Especially considering the many claims of heat lasting for days after the current is stopped. (Jay also wrote: If I read this paper in 1994 I might be thinking “OK, you have my attention. Why don’t you see if you can trace some of the parametric dependencies for the effect, improve your cathode to get higher signal, show me more complete data with more statistics and hopefully return in a couple of years with some more ironclad results?” Sadly, it’s now nearly twenty years later and while McKubre did come up with a few additional parametric dependencies in later papers, I don’t recall if he was ever able to improve much on the signal. I couldn't have said it better.) Fourth, this paper was available to the 2004 DOE panel, which in fact noted many deficiencies in the techniques, methods, and interpretation of the data presented, and were not convinced by the evidence that nuclear reactions were occurring. Sixth, the very journal that published that paper (and many other cold fusion papers in the early days) stopped publishing cold fusion
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 10:24 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: Not totally wrong, just wrongly interpreted. Then you should help the laymen and failed scientists here interpret the misinterpreted evidentiary record -- specifically, you should focus your energy on specific details of specific experiments. Keeping your argument at such a general level will only impress those already committed to the idea that cold fusion is nonsense. Thank you for your kind advice. But, for better or worse, I mainly respond to arguments I see posted. So, the response to Hagelstein was general, because his arguments were general. And it wasn't so much an argument against cold fusion as an argument in defense of science. He, like so many cold fusion advocates, argued that science suppresses new knowledge, when of course, science is where new knowledge comes from. His arguments simply don't reflect reality, and my main goal was to argue that point. As for the line you quoted above, that was in response to Storms stating my general position. I simply corrected it. It's not possible in every paragraph to identify every flaw in cold fusion. Don't be silly. The field is already dead. No one cares anymore. The credit of which you speak has already been handed out to Koonin and Lewis and Huizenga and others. However the final story plays out, I suspect these guys will be seen as having been overzealous in their attempts to enforce their view and as a result having lacked sufficient objectivity to make the claims they were making. What makes you think that? They are certainly not seen as overzealous now, except by true believers. If it plays out in such a way that there are no true believers left, there is no reason to think *anyone* will regard them as having been overzealous. It's caught my interest. Other people become experts at video games; I've gotten similarly addicted to cold fusion debunking. If you're going to debunk, you should hone your skill and zoom in on specific details. I recommend reading some of David Kidwell's papers. He does a great service to us true believers by suffering our incompetence and speaking on our level rather than tossing about vague generalities. Again, thank you. But, as you may or may not know, these are not the first posts I have made on the subject. I have engaged in highly specific discussions about a great many aspects of cold fusion, both here and in ecatnews (now wavewatching.net/fringe) writing as popeye, and elsewhere. But I'm not entirely sure that specific criticism is always more effective. Many true believers simply don't read detailed arguments. After all, if you look at a site like e-catworld, it is evident that most of them become believers because of who else believes. And the favorite argument in favor is the many peer-reviewed papers and the many scientists that claim excess heat. A very simple counter to that is that nearly all of the papers are from the 90s, and that in the last decade there are only a few (less than 5) papers in mainstream refereed journals claiming excess heat, and they only claim about a watt or so of excess power. That basically there has been no progress in 24 years. In any case, I did not re-appear here for detailed cold fusion discussions, because it's very clear in the mandate that this is a believer site, and that's fine. I escaped the mass banning a year ago, because I was on self-imposed abstinence for exactly that reason. I re-appeared here now (briefly) because I thought the response to Hagelstein was more about science than cold fusion. Since it had been so highly praised, I thought a contrary view expressed here was worthwhile, and did not violate the believer mandate, because I think a true believer does not have to subscribe to a conspiracy theory. The trigger though was Storms' post about tunneling. I thought that should be corrected, and so while here, I put up the Hagelstein response. Of course, I can't resist direct responses, so I have sunk into a little cold fusion banter with Rothwell. Nothing new though. We've covered the identical ground several times already.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 8:54 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Someone wrote: Don't be silly. The field is already dead. No one cares anymore. The credit of which you speak has already been handed out to Koonin and Lewis and Huizenga and others. Lewis' experiment was positive. He showed that cold fusion probably does exist. This was some of the best early proof. It is ironic that any skeptic still points to this.I expect that skeptics who point to this have never read the paper, because it is quite clear from the paper that this is evidence in favor of cold fusion. The need to continually pick over negative claims from 1989 like this one and the alleged falsifications of the MIT work, reveals the complete vacuum in field -- that, as I said, there is simply no quality evidence for cold fusion since then. Wegener's theory did not prevail because advocates went back to the early skeptical papers and found flaws in them. It prevailed because better evidence made his conclusions inescapable, and that made the old skeptical arguments irrelevant, apart from possible historical interest. The best way to prove Lewis's interpretation was wrong is to point to better evidence that makes cold fusion inescapable. As for the paper, Lewis himself read it, and he was a skeptic, and he disagreed with your interpretation. As did the editors at Nature. I'm inclined to hold his judgement in higher regard than that of a computer programmer, or his true believer advisors. The only reason he did not see it is because he did not want to see it. That's complete nonsense. If cold fusion were real, he would have been on the cusp of a major scientific revolution. It's a dream of any scientist to have their names attached to revolutions of that sort. Everyone knows that that is the quickest route to honor, fame, glory, and funding. The only plausible influence of cognitive bias works the other way. The reason for your positive interpretation is because you and your cohorts really really want cold fusion to be real, and you don't have the experience to keep your desires in check. It's interesting that you often argue that the lack of progress is because the experiment is so difficult and so expensive, and yet here is an experiment done rather quickly on what I guess was without an assigned budget, and yet you call it some of the best early proof. Not such a difficult experiment after all.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: First of all, you and many other people made such a fuss about CF being impossible, that the money required to advance understanding was denied. Poppycock. The argument was that CF was highly unlikely, but in spite of that, much of the scientific world suspended disbelief to give the two distinguished scientists the benefit of the doubt. Pons was cheered by thousands, and scientists all over the world went to their labs to try to reproduce. Even Morrison, who eventually became the most vocal skeptic wrote shortly after the announcement: … I feel this subject will become so important to society that we must consider the broader implications as well as the scientific ones […] the present big power companies will be running down their oil and coal power stations while they are building deuterium separation plants and new power plants based on cold fusion.…. Optimism ruled until the weakness of the evidence became apparent. And even after skepticism took over, money was allocated. Utah gave PF 5 million for their cold fusion center. Then they went to France with 10 times that from Toyota. You've estimated 500M has been spent. Considering PF spent less than 100k to make the discovery, 5000 times that should be more than enough to prove it to the world. And yet, the evidence is no better now than it was in 1989. OK, we all know that some money was provided. This amount did achieve an increased level of understanding, which you now deny exists, but it was not enough. This increased level of understanding was summarized perfectly by Hagelstein when he said: aside from the existence of an excess heat effect, there is very little that our community agrees on. And if 10 times more had been spent on cold fusion, and the same marginal results existed, if from more labs, you would still say it was not enough. Perpetual motion people could say that there has not been enough funding to prove it works. Every fringe science can make the same argument. Then you use this failure to make progress as evidence that the effect is not real. Surely you see the problem with this kind of circular argument. No. I really don't. Scientists look at evidence, including all the evidence that suggests cold fusion should not work, and make judgements. And those judgements include estimates on the scale of the experiment, and what would be required to establish proof-of-principle. The consensus judgement is that there is nothing to it, and that if there were, the amount of effort already spent on it would have almost certainly been much more than enough to establish proof. Your claim that it hasn't been proven because of insufficient funds simply has no end, and it applies indiscriminantly to any fringe science and therefore has no persuasive value. You say that everyone in conventional science does not believe the effect is real. This statement is not accurate. Actually, most scientists have no knowledge about what has been discovered. Therefore, their opinion is based on ignorance. When I tell people what has been discovered, they are amazed and become very interested. Then you should have no trouble securing all the funding you need. But just above, you said funding was denied because people believed CF was impossible. So which is it? The truth is that when arms-length experts are enlisted to examine the best evidence, as in the 2004 DOE panel, or for any other grant proposals, or for submissions to prominent journals, they usually come up negative. If it weren't true that mainstream science rejects cold fusion, advocates would not spend so much time complaining that it ignores, suppresses, rejects, doesn't fund, doesn't publish, doesn't patent, doesn't replicate, doesn't test anything related to cold fusion. Most working physicists were around in 1989, and they learned enough about cold fusion and its claims to know that if it were real, it would not be so resistant to protracted experiment. That if it were real -- that if metal hydrides represented an accessible energy density a million times higher than dynamite in a table top experiment at ordinary conditions -- it would be easy to design an experiment to prove it unequivocally. It would not be necessary to read dozens of papers to believe it. It would be like the Wright brothers' 1908 flight in Paris, or high Tc superconductivity in 1986. The series of ICCF conferences, the latest being at the Univ. of Missouri, you must conclude were organized by fools and people outside of conventional science. You and a few other people have created a myth. I can understand why people trying to get support for their work on hot fusion would want CF to die Really? I can't. Unless they were quite certain there was nothing to it. They can be forgiven for objecting to their research being shut down for a pipe dream that will come to nothing. But if they thought the field had
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude wrote: Poor choice of words on my part. Of course I know that skeptics and believers disagree about the quality of the evidence . . . This is not a matter of opinion. The quality of evidence is measured objectively, based on repeatability and the signal to noise ratio. Anyone looking at the data from McKubre, Kunimatsu or Fleischmann can see it is excellent. To the extent that people disagree, it really is a matter of judgement. The 2004 DOE panel looked at the best evidence advocates had to offer, and they did not find it excellent, so your statement is manifestly false. In fact they found it sufficiently poor that they recommended against allocating funds for the field. That would be unconscionable if they though the research had any merit. First, it is 19 years old. No, it was written in 2007. Evidently you are looking at the wrong paper. Evidently. The paper you listed is a retrospective in a conference proceedings, and the most recent refereed journal paper cited is from 1990. He doesn't even cite his own 1994 paper; has he lost confidence in the results? This makes the absence of progress even more obvious. There is nothing he chose to cite that was sufficiently credible to get published in a refereed journal in 23 years. What's more, he stops short of a definite conclusion that the effect is nuclear, and he admits the evidence is sufficiently weak to allow doubts in the broader community. I fall back on McKubre's earlier paper because it is one of the best peer-reviewed ones that I have permission to upload to LENR-CANR.org. Your usual excuse. Maybe you're not familiar with the concept of *journals*. The idea is, that publishing in a journal provides wide access to the material. That's the point of it. This may come as a surprise, but there are libraries other than the ones at Los Alamos and Georgia Tech. So, it's not necessary to actually provide the paper. Just the reference. However, there is no statute of limitation on scientific facts. Experiments done in 1650 or 1800 remain as true today as when they were done. Right, but if they didn't convince in 1650, and there is no progress since, they won't convince in 2013. Surely the cold fusion world was not satisfied with McKubre's 1994 results. And yet, no one can do better. The year before PF had claimed 160 W output with 40 W input. That paper was challenged for its poor calorimetry. With McKubre's much improved calorimetry, the claimed output was about 10.5 W with 10 W input (give or take). That suggests that PF's claim could have all been artifact. No, it indicates that you have to heat up a cathode to produce a strong reaction. McKubre's calorimeter prevents you from doing this, Surely one can do good calorimetry with high temperatures. But McKubre has not succeeded in scaling his results up at all. It remains true that better quality results correspond to lower claims. And no one has published anything close to the PF 1993 results. That is why Mizuno's 100 g cathode produced ~100 W of heat after death for several days, whereas the record for a cathode weighing a few grams was ~20 W of heat after death for a day. Presumably that's the anecdotal story of water disappearing at night, that was never reproduced by him or anyone, and never published in a refereed journal. And the half watt or so that he observed is in the range of artifacts in calorimetry experiments. No, with McKubre's instrument it is a couple of orders of magnitude above the range of any artifact, as you see in the calibrations. Again, facts are facts, and waving your hands does not make them go away. And yet in 2001, you said: Why haven’t researchers learned to make the results stand out? After twelve years of painstaking replication attempts, most experiments produce a fraction of a watt of heat, when they work at all. Such low heat is difficult to measure. It leaves room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real.? You said it was difficult to measure and left room for honest skepticism. The essential problem though is the failure to improve on the experiment. The energy density is a million times higher than chemical, and yet it's always so close to the input. Like you said, it depends on temperature, the particular rods, the surface etc. And yet, he can't improve it. That screams pathological science.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: The second was that they seemed to have undue confidence in their knowledge, leaving them vulnerable to overlooking evidence and explaining it away. That's always a danger, but funding agencies and journal editors and hiring committees still refer to experts like this who have undue confidence rather than to members of the public like you for advice. I wonder why that is. As a member of the general public coming upon cold fusion recently, this impression on my part might be an outlier, or it might be representative over the long run. I suspect it will turn out to be representative. You really didn't answer the question of why you think this. You explained your own path to enlightenment, but you said that regardless of how it shakes out, skeptics will be seen as over-zealous. I still say that if it shakes out in such a way that believers drift away, the type that follow your path will be few and far between. The general view in science now is *not* that the skeptics were overzealous, but rather that the believers were (are) pathological. If believers disappear, that view will only be strengthened. But I'm not entirely sure that specific criticism is always more effective. Many true believers simply don't read detailed arguments. After all, if you look at a site like e-catworld, it is evident that most of them become believers because of who else believes. Who is your audience? Who are you hoping to convince? It really is not that premeditated. It's a recreation, after all. And like I said, I mostly respond to arguments I see. So my audience is the same as the audience to the post I am responding to. If the post I disagree with makes general arguments, then my rebuttals will be general too. If it is specific, and I have specific objections, then my post will be specific too. Anyway, I'm motivated by what interests me, and I have to say that arguing about arguing is not my idea of recreation. But if you're going to disabuse those who are left to be disabused, you have no choice but to engage specific details. I don't follow. Those who are left are as likely to be swayed by general arguments one way or the other as anyone else. But like I said, my MO, whether you think it most effective or not, is to express disagreement with stuff I see posted on-line. And I assure you, I will not lose sleep if I fail to convert anyone or to keep anyone from falling victim to their wishful thinking. It is clear that you're willing to do this -- you just posted a very nice post addressing points in Jed's reply and raising a number of juicy details. Like I said, it's not my first time. This is the kind of post that will help to advance the conversation. Name calling (true believer, incoherent ramblings of a bitter man, etc.) will only alienate those who are not already firmly committed to some position, undermining rather than supporting your intentions. I don't agree. Those whose opinions of natural phenomena are influenced by their emotional reaction to spirited argument, will not be influenced by logic anyway. And I did find Hagelstein's essay to be incoherent, and him to be bitter. So, it's just honest to state my position up front, and then support it. A little color in the conversation helps keep it less boring, and while it may not be appropriate in formal literature, I find it quite suitable in on-line exchanges. In any case, I did not re-appear here for detailed cold fusion discussions, because it's very clear in the mandate that this is a believer site, and that's fine. I escaped the mass banning a year ago, because I was on self-imposed abstinence for exactly that reason. I think there is plenty of room for died-in-the-wool skeptics here. But it's not your forum, is it? The charter makes it quite clear that skeptics are not welcome, and the banning a year ago put the exclamation mark on that. If I might offer some suggestions, based on observations of previous bannings: Since I'm not intending to stay, no thanks. - Be respectful. You may not agree with people, and you may not even respect their intelligence or their intellectual integrity, but avoid name calling and condescension. See above. But I see you are suggesting I do as you say, and not as you do, because your post fairly drips with condescension. - Don't be annoying by endlessly repeating yourself. Impossible not to be annoying to true believers. They are naturally annoyed at skepticism. As for repeating myself, well that's really a function of what I respond to. If arguments for cold fusion get endlessly repeated, the rebuttals naturally get repeated too. But only the rebuttals get complained about.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Ah yes. That one slipped my mind. The recombination hypothesis. That is even more pathetic and preposterous than Morrison. It's one thing to say that you don't agree with any of the published challenges to cold fusion. We already know that, or you wouldn't be a true believer. Likewise, skeptics are not convinced by the cold fusion publications, and yet the most common argument to justify its legitimacy is the number of publications. But what you said is that skeptics have not published their objections, when clearly they have. In both the cases in question (and there are others), there was spirited controversy in the literature, and neither side conceded. But in both cases, history has vindicated the skeptics. Because there has not been another refereed paper with excess heat anywhere close to the claims of PF, and there has not been another refereed paper claiming quantitative heat/helium correlation a la Miles. This is why I stopped paying attention to people such as Jones and Cude 15 years ago, and why Cude is on my auto-delete list. Evidently that auto-delete is working about as well as cold fusion...
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: He said nothing that skeptics did not say in 1990. Please. My main argument is the complete absence of progress in 24 years. No one argued that in 1990. I refer to your 2001 opinion that the results fail to stand out, and to the opinion of the 2004 DOE panel. That McKubre's claim of high reproducibility was premature. That in 2008 he admits the absence of quantitative and inter-lab reproducibility. That the size of the claimed effect has gotten smaller (and the number of publications dramatically smaller), which is consistent with pathological science. Everything they said then and that Cude repeats now was promptly disproved by experts back then. The best rebuttal would be better evidence, which never comes. In the last decade, only a few refereed publications claim excess heat, and only in the range of one watt. And nearly all the excitement in the field is about experiments with completely unreliable calorimetry, many of of them reported by companies looking for investment, headed by people with no experience in science like Rossi, Godes, Dardik, Mills. Cold fusion represents an energy density a million times higher than dynamite from a table-top experiment. If it were real, it would not resist protracted experiment for a quarter century. It would be easy to prove unequivocally. It would not need to be defended by the likes of you, or Krivit, or Lomax, or Carat, or Tyler, or Alain, or any of the other groupies who have no background in science. My sense is that Taubes is sincere. He says this stuff because he is a scientific illiterate. This from the guy who spent weeks two years ago arguing that steam cannot be heated above 100C at atmospheric pressure.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
are still toiling to reduce the limit of error on measurements of Einstein's time dilation, and improve the value of the gravitation constant, and so on. The results used by Storms were all available to the 2004 DOE panel, and they were left unconvinced that nuclear reactions were taking place. Lomax claims they didn't understand the evidence, but if the leading cold fusion experts could not explain the results to an expert panel with written and oral arguments, then that demonstrates the weakness of the evidence or the incompetence of the researchers. Lomax thinks they needed a college dropout to help with the argument. I remain skeptical. Regardless of the reasons, it is clear that the results have so far failed to impress the scientific community, and it is clear that far better results could be achievable, if the effect were real. So, why are so few pursuing correlation experiments? It seems likely that cold fusion scientists are not pursuing it (or not admitting it) because they're afraid that more careful results will be negative, and they would rather remain ignorant than to have to admit they wasted 2 decades of their life chasing wild geese. So, an objective look at the heat/helium results does not provide convincing evidence for cold fusion. And given the extraordinary nature of the claimed phenomenon, that means it is almost certainly not happening. On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 7:22 PM, Rich Murray rmfor...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude, Seems you might end up being the last person standing... May ask you to offer a few decisive critiques to refute Lomax's claim, much repeated for a year or longer, that heat and helium are correlated in standard cold fusion experiments, some years ago -- for instance, have there been any attempts since then that fail to show this correlation? Maybe you and Lomax have already long reached an impasse, talking right past each other? What would have to happen for you to be curious enough to join Lomax in proposing new tests for this correlation? within the fellowship of service, Rich Murray On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: Consequently, I for one will not continue the discussion. Me neither! I promise to shut up. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
LENR+ is so 2011. I think the future is in LENR++ or maybe objective LENR. Nickel and light water are certainly easier to obtain than Pd and heavy water, but you still have to mine nickel, and refine it. LENR++ uses ordinary soil and tap water. Just mix the dirt with water 2:1 by mass in an empty tin (I find Libby's bean cans work best, especially if you eat them beforehand), add a secret catalyst, which I can't disclose, turn it upside down, and hit it with a hammer, and it begins to glow red hot. Pictures at 11. As for the WL theory, I think Larsen is running a scam. It's too preposterous to imagine that anyone educated could take it seriously. He tricks his intended audience (with dense and colorful slides) by cleverly getting rid of the Coulomb barrier, and somehow they are not in the least bothered by the fact that the energy barrier to making neutrons is 10 times higher. Thieberger calls it going from the frying pan to the fire: http://www.scribd.com/doc/83026935/Cold-Fusion-and-LENR. As he says, the theory is totally beyond any reasonable credibility. There are many implausible parts to the theory, including the ad hoc additions to explain the absence of neutrons or gamma rays. Here's a recent paper showing why the electron capture has negligible probability: Tennfors, Eur. Phys. J. Plus 128 (2013) But the most blatant problem is not an intrinsic part of the theory, but it illustrates that they are either completely clueless (not true of Widom), or they are trying to pull a fast one. It also shows that the referee for their paper was sleeping. As part of the chain of reactions, they propose 4He + n - 5He. 4He is a highly stable (doubly magic) entity, and therefore adding a neutron actually produces a decrease in average binding energy per nucleon, and is therefore *endothermic*, requiring something close to an MeV to proceed. WL insist the neutrons are cold, so where does the energy come from? Simple kinematics show that the alpha would have to have energy 9 times the Q-value (no more and no less) to conserve both momentum and energy with only one product. Not only would 9 MeV alphas be trivial to detect (from other reactions they would produce, if not directly), but the probability of producing them with the exact energy would be vanishingly small. And while WL do spin a great yarn trying to justify the heavy electrons needed to make protons, they don't even try to explain where the energy for this reaction comes from. And yet somehow Larsen has kept his company alive with an angel investor for 6 years. There really is a sucker born every minute. And they seem to be concentrated in the cold fusion business. Rossi, for his part, has yet to provide evidence of anything nuclear, let alone commercial. Anyway, I though his first delivery was back in 2011. On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 10:03 PM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude I wonder if you have been keeping up with the new thinking in LENR. Specifically, I would like your opinion of the new theories posed by NASA and Widom-Larsen centered on the polariton. These theories are more applicable to the Ni/H reactor (LENR+) rather than the older LENR theories witch are still the mainstream on this site. I believe that LENR is essentially useless. Your opinion on the Rossi and DGT reactors would be interesting. Frankly because LENR is useless and uninteresting, your abuse of LENR is tedious regardless if LENR is real or not. LENR+ is a completely new principle which is coming to perfection in the short term with the first delivery of a Rossi reactor this last week and the upcoming demo of the DGT reactor at the NI conference in August. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: The recent editorial in Infinite Energy by Hagelstein represents the incoherent ramblings of a bitter man who is beginning to realize he has wasted 25 years of his career, but is deathly afraid to admit it. He spends a lot of time talking about consensus and experiment and evidence and theory and destroyed careers and suppression but scarcely raises the issue of the *quality* of the evidence. That's cold fusion's problem: the quality of the evidence is abysmal -- not better than the evidence for bigfoot, alien visits, dowsing, homeopathy and a dozen other pathological sciences. And an extraordinary claim *does* require excellent evidence. By not facing this issue, and simply ploughing ahead as if the evidence is as good as the Wright brothers' Paris flight in 1908, he loses the confidence of all but true believers that he is being completely honest and forthright. *1. On consensus* Hagelstein starts out with the science-by-consensus straw man, suggesting that consensus was used in connection with the question of the existence of an excess heat effect in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment. Please! No one with any familiarity with the history of science thinks consensus defines truth
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 10:21 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: First of all, all data requires interpretation. Of course, but review papers generally report interpretations of the authors, rather than perform primary interpretation, especially on data communicated privately, at which point it ceases to be a review. Your review is highly selective, and therefore, depends on your judgement, rather than on the strength of the original evidence as reported, and hopefully screened by reviewers. Either a knowledgeable scientists does this and explains the reasons behind the interpretations, as I did in the quoted paper, or you do the job and distort what has been observed to fit your conclusions. I think you're guilty of distorting the results to fit your conclusions, and that was what I argued, by showing that many of the papers you cited as support, did not in fact support your case. I was only pointing out why your interpretation and the reasons are not persuasive to me. I submit the evidence is too weak to draw conclusions, and that leads back to the default position. Claims like cold fusion require robust evidence, and the evidence cited there is anything but. Unless you show what is wrong, your comment is just your opinion, I did show some things that were wrong, but it's not necessary to identify errors to maintain skepticism. All that's needed is plausible alternative explanations, since the explanation involving nuclear reactions is so extremely implausible. As for taking Rossi seriously, I do not. I have explained what I accept and what I do not, and why. I take him no more seriously than I take you. Whatever you want to call it, one of your early analyses of an ecat demo posted here, concluded Significant excess power is being made regardless of how dry the steam may be, and None of the plausible assumptions are consistent with the claim for excess energy being wrong. Most of the technical analyses of the Rossi demos agree that those conclusions are nonsense, and from my point of view show you to be gullible and extremely susceptible to wishful thinking. I'm not interested in reviving that debate, but my rebuttal to your analysis is in the archives. Rossi has not been proved fraudulent, or even mistaken, but it should be eminently clear that he has so far failed to prove excess heat from nuclear reactions. Which says it all. There are of course still many people who continue to believe in Rossi, and for whom my distrust of your judgement based on this would not be shared. But to my mind, anyone who still thinks Rossi has something is a lost cause. Again, you distort the data to fit your attitude. Miles published two sets of results. You quote only the first and least accurate. The results were confirmed by Bush and later by McKubre. But you cite both sets of results to support your argument, and Miles continued to cite the earlier results long after the later results were published, because they show a much better positive correlation, over a much wider range. If they are used as evidence, they're fair game for criticism. Moreover, while the paragraph you referenced refers to the earlier results, the next paragraph refers to Jones' critique which is about all their results collectively. In any case, the later results with the metal flasks do not show the range of values observed with the earlier results and they are not positively correlated (except for the binary correlation). The average excess power is only 60 mW, and the average helium level is only 2.8 ppb above background (of 5.1 ppb), 3 orders of magnitude below atmospheric levels. (By the way, in his 2003 heat-He review, Miles only reports 7 credible results, and the average is 25% lower than what you claim.) Both the heat and helium levels in that experiment are near the detection limits, and miraculously, measurements near the detection limit give something close to the expected ratio of heat to helium. So, a little confirmation bias is all that's needed. As I said, the results (all of them) were the subject of considerable controversy in the literature, so it is clear that better results are needed. Even without the controversy, in a field where excess power levels in the range of watts or tens of watts (and higher) have been claimed, it doesn't make sense that the only peer-reviewed heat-helium ratios come from experiments with 60 mW of excess power, and ppb levels of helium. One becomes suspicious that maybe the results with higher excess powers don't fit the expectations, and are ignored. Miles himself admitted the weakness in 1996, when he said The production of helium-4 in these experiments is a very difficult concept to prove since there is always the possibility of atmospheric helium contamination. More studies reporting helium-4 production will likely be required before our helium results become convincing to most scientists. You mention confirmations by Bush and
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 10:21 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: Nevertheless, when many people report seeing the same behavior, the reality of this behavior grows. You take the approach that none of the claimed behavior has been observed, consisting instead of bad interpretation of random events, unrecognized error, and wishful thinking. This opinion is applied to all the trained scientists who have been well accepted when they did studies in other subjects. This argument is a favorite among believers, and has been addressed many times in these discussions. Here are 4 parts of a 5 part response I wrote for another forum: *1) Pathological Science* The phenomenon of many scientists subject to bad interpretations of random events, unrecognized errors, and wishful thinking is sufficiently common that it has been given a name: pathological science. It happened to a lesser extent with N-rays and polywater, and to a greater extent (though perhaps at a lesser level) in homeopathy and perpetual motion machines. It isn't as if 100 scientists (or however many) were chosen at random to do cold fusion experiments and they all claimed positive results. The people claiming positive results are the remainder after considerable filtration. In fact in the 2 cases when panels of experts were enlisted to examine the evidence, their judgements were that cold fusion had not been proven. After PF, cold fusion experiments were done all over the world -- by probably tens of thousands of scientists. A few of the negative results were famously presented, but most researchers simply went back to their previous interests when their experiments showed nothing, and after they had examined the positive claims in more detail, and satisfied themselves that evidence for cold fusion was absent. But calorimetry experiments are famously prone to artifact, and so it's not unlikely that a few might have stumbled on the same systematic errors or artifacts that others were fooled by. Most of the errors were probably discovered and corrected, and *then* the researchers went back to their previous interests. But in a few of the cases where anomalous heat was indicated, the experimenters (in most cases, people with little or no training in nuclear physics) might have fallen prey to cognitive bias and confirmation bias, and once they were hooked on believing the effect was real, could not let it go. This was greatly facilitated by the potential fame and glory that unequivocal evidence for cold fusion would undoubtedly bring. So, they haven't given up, and every so often, they stumble across another artifact, which is suggestive, but never unequivocal, and they play it up for all it's worth, while ignoring all the failures in between. And so it will appear as if the evidence is building. But the absence of one solid result that can be reproduced quantitatively by other labs (even if only sometimes) after so many years and so many attempts suggests weaker evidence of a real effect to skeptics. *2) Diminishing returns* It is a characteristic of artifacts and pathological science that the observed effect becomes less prominent over time as the experiment improves. And it is characteristic of real effects that they become more prominent over time, whether the theory is understood or not. That's certainly true of things like high temperature superconductivity, or (to go back a century or more) discrete atomic spectra, the photoelectric effect, and Compton scattering. But in the case of cold fusion, the claimed energy is, if anything, decreasing over time. In the 90s there were several claims of excess power in the range of tens, hundreds, and even thousands of watts, and several claims of heat after death (infinite COP). But since 2000, most claims have been in the range of a watt or less, particularly in refereed literature. Even within a group, the claims seem to drop off. Dardik claimed 20W in 2004, but has not been able to match that since. The exceptions to 1 W claim limit tend to use spot temperature calorimetry, and are usually accompanied by investment opportunities from people who have a background in fraud, but not in physics. *3) Bigfoot photographs, or many bad results do not a good result make* Like positive cold fusion claims, there are thousands of photographs that are claimed to be of Bigfoot or other monsters, and hundreds of thousands of claimed alien sitings. Admittedly, they are not often published in scientific journals, but I think the phenomenon is the same; the difference is that cold fusion is more obscure or sophisticated and therefore not as easy to dismiss by scientists -- except in the major nuclear physics journals, which do not publish cold fusion results. The idea that many marginal results is somehow stronger evidence than a few marginal results is typical of pathological science, and is expressed frequently by advocates like Rothwell or Krivit. It just doesn't seem likely to
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude is reminiscent of the old geezers who righteously proclaimed from their wheelchairs that man would never fly, set in their sclerotic attitudes pressed into their brains through years behind the reins of their horse drawn wagons. You should keep an open mind to the possibility that cold fusion is not the Wright brothers' airplane. Maybe it's Blondlott’s N-rays. It’s Fedyakin’s polywater. It’s the alchemists’ gold from lead. It’s Lorentz’s ether. It’s Le Verrier’s planet vulcan. It’s Popoff’s faith healing. It’s L Ron Hubbard’s Xenu. It’s Uri Geller’s bent spoon. It’s Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. It's Agricola's dowsing. It's Hahnemann's homeopathy. It’s Wakefield’s autism from vaccines… Remember Asimov's comment: to be a persecuted genius, it is not enough to be persecuted. And by the way, it was not only geezers who were skeptical of aviation. Wilbur Wright said in 1901, If man ever flies, it will not be within our lifetime, not within a thousand years. Meanwhile, Langley, a pioneer of aviation, started investigating aerodynamics as his second career. He was near 70 (and a strong advocate) when the Wrights first flew.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: Regardless of what is suggested as evidence, you will find a way to reject it. This is often stated, but of course it's nonsense. Who could reject a phenomenon that replaces fossil fuels? That powers a car without refueling? Energy densities in the range of GJ/g are not some subtle thing. And when they are claimed to be accessible from a small-scale experiment at ordinary conditions, the evidence should be unequivocal. But in fact, the evidence has not improved from the early 90s, and the requirement for good evidence has not changed. As Rothwell has said: It is utterly impossible to fake palpable heat I do not think any scientist will dispute this. ...An object that remains palpably warmer than the surroundings is as convincing as anything can be.. A very clearly isolated device that produces more heat than ten or a hundred times its weight in gasoline would not be disputed as a new source of energy. And some claims of heat-after-death or gas-loading should be able to provide such a demonstration. But those claims are evidently not robust enough, or they would have plopped such a thing in front of the 2004 DOE panel (or as many as necessary to get at least one working one), and got all the finding they could use. While such an isolated system would surely be sufficient evidence, it would not be necessary. It's easy to imagine reproducible (even statistically) experiments that require external input that would be convincing, but when the quality of these experiments simply doesn't improve in 2 decades, when there is no quantitative, inter-lab reproducibility, then pathological science fits the evidence far better. The goal after any new phenomenon is discovered is to keep looking until it is understood. Cude would stop that process. The view of some skeptics, based on the weak and stagnant evidence, is that a new phenomenon was not discovered. That eventually it is more reasonable to accept that bigfoot probably doesn't exist, than to keep trying to get one clear picture of it. Others disagree, and they are free to keep hunting.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Randy wuller rwul...@freeark.com wrote: ** What he can't explain is why anyone would run around the internet trying to stop people from investigating a phenomenon. I think cold fusion is a pipe dream, and I like people to agree with me. You can't seriously be unaware that all manner of trivial subjects are argued with equal or greater passion on the internet. The simple truth is that good argument can be invigorating. It makes no sense and is probably a symptom of the very negative period (I would describe it as the age of pessimism) we find ourselves living through. Other than in the field of cold fusion, progress in science has continues apace. Shechtman (who should be sensitive to inertia in science because his discovery of quasicrystals was ridiculed by Pauling) identified 3 surprising discoveries on the structure of matter in the 80s: quasi-crystals, fullerenes, and high temperature superconductivity. Conspicuously absent: cold fusion, which would be the most surprising of all. When the pendulum shifts pendulums swing, they don't shift and we enter an optimistic age, everything will seem possible and as such being for something will be much more productive (it always is) than being against something. Everything? It will be much more productive to be for perpetual motion research? You will find a lot less Cude's running around, thank goodness. I don't know. Skepticism of cold fusion seems to pretty common among the very best physicists. What has a cold fusion true believer done for the world lately? Personally, while he is obviously bright, Cude's position is just about the dumbest fool thing I have ever read. But shared by a lot of smart people like Gell-Mann. In answer to your question, of course we should investigate a phenomenon of the significance of Cold Fusion even if the chance of it being real is miniscule. Our main difference is in the magnitude assigned to miniscule. I also think it is absurd to believe we have an adequate understanding of physics today to rule it out. There is a reason lawyers are not consulted about the adequacy of current physics understanding.
Re: [tt] [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: This is often stated, but of course it's nonsense. Who could reject a phenomenon that replaces fossil fuels? That powers a car without refueling? This is precisely my problem with claimed evidence for CF/LENR. Read history and you will see that many vitally important discoveries were rejected, sometimes for decades. None like cold fusion though, unless you go back to Semmelwis, and even that was different. I'm not aware of a small-scale phenomenon like cold fusion, in the last century, in which the basic concept was rejected by the mainstream for decades, that was later vindicated. Many important reforms were delayed, such as the use of seat belts in cars. Projects such as the Transcontinental Railroad could not get funding. History is full of disastrous mistakes and bad judgement, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I see you've abandoned the transistor and light bulb as analogies, because they work against you. But sure, seat belts and Pearl Harbor. That's the same thing. If it's a giant effect, how come it's so conveniently elusive? It is not elusive. As McKubre says, it is neither small nor fleeting. It is hard to reproduce, but once an expert succeeds and the effect turns on, in many cases there is no doubt it is real. But you wrote: Why haven’t researchers learned to make the results stand out? After twelve years of painstaking replication attempts, most experiments produce a fraction of a watt of heat, when they work at all. Such low heat is difficult to measure. It leaves room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real. Sounds elusive to me. And even if there are some who have no doubt it is real, when they try to convince referees for granting agencies or prominent journals, they largely fail. So there is doubt that it is real. And it is elusive. Storms called it his reluctant mistress. MIles wrote in 1996: To our knowledge, no laboratory can provide detailed experimental instructions to another laboratory and guarantee the reproduction of the excess heat effect. McKubre said the same thing in 2008. An article in NewScientist in 2003 quotes a cold fusion researcher who finally threw in the towel: “For close to two years, we tried to create one definitive experiment that produced a result in one lab that you could reproduce in another,” Saalfeld says. “We never could. What China Lake did, NRL couldn't reproduce. What NRL did, San Diego couldn't reproduce. We took very great care to do everything right. We tried and tried, but it never worked.” It was not sloppy. The calorimetry was confirmed by many other researchers. It was shown to be remarkably accurate and precise. It has been replicated by ~200 major labs, as shown in Storms' book. First, the book shows no such thing. The table of excess heat experiments has close to 200 entries, but most of the authors or groups representing major labs appear multiple times, probably an average of 3 or so, meaning there are maybe 65 labs represented. (Interestingly, about a third of those groups are not represented after about 1995, suggesting maybe they lost confidence in their results, or they don't think cold fusion is an important topic. Whether it's 200 or 65 is a quibble perhaps, and your point that there are many stands, but this sort of dishonesty is much too typical of your arguments. Second, the excess heat claims say nothing about whether or not the early FP paper was sloppy or not. In fact, none of the results line up quantitatively, so very little can be said about the quality of the measurements based on the number of claims alone. Third, PF made a pretty basic blunder about the neutron emission, considering they were making a claim about nuclear reactions. That can only be called sloppy, if it was not deliberate deception. I disagree. Reproducibility is much better than it was. The control parameters for Pd-D are well understood. What do you base this on? In 1994 McKubre claimed nearly 100% reproducibility, then in 1998 he said he spoke too soon, and reported only 20%. Storms also claimed high reproducibility in 1996, but in 2010 laments These extraordinary and difficult to create conditions partially explain the frequent failure to replicate when using the electrolytic method. Around 2004 Dardik was claiming 70% reproducibility, but Duncan, who has moved the operation to Missouri, said last year the reproducibility was 20%. Hubler in a 2007 review claimd 1/3 of the experiments worked. The recent claims from NRL reported in Korea, and which you have touted, have a reproducibility of 5%. Nothing I've seen gives any indication of improving reproducibility.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 12:36 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Cude wrote: You should keep an open mind to the possibility that cold fusion is not the Wright brothers' airplane. Maybe it's Blondlott’s N-rays. It’s Fedyakin’s polywater. These things were never replicated. Only one lab briefly claimed to replicate polywater, and it soon retracted. According to Ackermann in 2006, 450 papers were published on polywater in 12 years, with more than 250 over 2 years. And i the very best journals. You're saying they're all from one group, or none of them are claimed replications? What would sustain the field? But of course, they're not from one group, and they are claimed replications. Here's 5 papers from the Garfield library (with excerpts from the abstracts) from different groups in the best journals, all claiming replication: 1. Page Tf; Jakobsen Rj; Lippincott Er,; Polywater . Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrum; Science 167(1970)51 Abstract: In the presence of water, the resonance of the strongly hydrogen-bonded protons characteristic of polywater appears at 5 ppm lower applied magnetic field than water. Polywater made by a new method confirms the IR spectrum reported originally. 2. Petsko Ga; Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectrum Of Polywater, Science 167(1970)171 Abstract: With the aid of a time-average computer, the proton magnetic resonance spectrum of anomalous water (polywater) is obtained. The spectrum consists of a single broad resonance shifted approximately 300 Hz down-field from the resonance of ordinary water. From the text: Samples of polywater, prepared in the manner described by Lippincott (2) in capillaries of … 3. Castelli.Ga Ra; Grabar Dg; Hession J; Burkhard H; Polywater . Methods For Identifying Polywater Columns And Evidence For Ordered Growth; Science 167(1970)865 Abstract: The refractive indices of polywater columns in glass capillaries have been rapidly and accurately measured with an interference microscope. Polywater has been detected by this method in both quartz and Vycor glass capillaries... 4. Middlehu. J Mv; Fisher Lr; A New Polywater; Nature 227(1970)57 Abstract: We have made a form of polywater (which we shall call fluorite polywater) with an infrared spectrum similar to that observed by Lippincott et al. [4] but with the frequencies of the peaks somewhat displaced… 5. Brummer Sb; Entine G; Bradspie.Ji G; Lingerta.H G; Leung C; High-Yield Method For Preparation Of Anomalous Water; Journal Of Physical Chemistry 75(1971)2976 Abstract: An experimental method for the preparation of anomalous water and its in volatile residue polywater in large glass tubes is described. […] In contrast to previously reported results, *every tube*, up to the largest explored (23-mm id), *successfully produces material* [emphasis in original]. The material thus prepared has an IR spectrum similar to that reported of polywater … Summary and Conclusions: The present data indicate that the erratic nature of the polywater phenomenon may be overcome by use of large flamed and sealed glass tubes… There are many more, but that should be enough to make the point. Many different groups in dozens of papers reported not only the preparation of polywater, but measurement of its properties, variations in the material, and in the methods of preparation. And look at the journals they published in: Science and Nature and JPC, but also Phys Rev and JACS and so on -- journals cold fusion can only dream about appearing in. So not only were a lot of people claiming a bogus phenomenon, but it was considered respectable among a large fraction of mainstream science. And still it was wrong. It wasn't that the specific measurements were wrong, but the controls on impurities were not as good as they thought, and the interpretations of the effects were wrong. Cold fusion has been observed at 20 to 100 W with no input power, albeit on rare occasions. It's claims like this that cause observers to distrust the advocates. One watt with no input would be trivial to prove, provided it lasted long enough, and was not a part of too large an apparatus. But to claim 100W, and not be able to convince the world? Outrageous. And then with claims like that, why would the community get so excited about 100 mW *with* input at MIT? And by the way, it was not only geezers who were skeptical of aviation. Wilbur Wright said in 1901, If man ever flies, it will not be within our lifetime, not within a thousand years. Meanwhile, Langley, a pioneer of aviation, started investigating aerodynamics as his second career. He was near 70 (and a strong advocate) when the Wrights first flew. Wilbur said that while returning home discouraging flight tests at Kitty Hawk. At that time the Wrights were already far ahead of all of their rivals, including Langley. Langley was not a supporter of the Wrights when they first flew. You missed the point. Langley was not a skeptic of
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 12:20 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: ***Hagelstein wrote this editorial shortly after having his latest LENR experiment run for several MONTHS in his lab. How has the size of the claimed effect gotten smaller, and how is that consistent with pathological science? PF claimed about 10 W in 1989, and in 1993 they claimed 140W excess (with 40 W input), and they published in refereed journals. Hagelstein is claiming an unverified 100 mW, and they have not published the results. 100 mW is 1400 times smaller than 140 W. Hagelstein's experiment is shown to students at his course. He said visitors were welcome, but when someone visited and reported back in some forum, all he got to see was a closed tupperware box with wires coming out connected to stuff. Not really a convincing demo. Why doesn't he use the heat to do something really unequivocal, like heating a large volume of water. And if his COP is really 14, why can't he get more nanors, boil water, generate electricity and run the experiment on its own power. Why does a new source of energy still need energy input from the mains?
Re: [tt] [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: The reaction cannot be scaled up safely because it is not well understood yet and it cannot be controlled, as Ed says. Rationalization. Everyone wants to see a bigger effect, whether it takes more material or not. It's not that hard to make it safe, and the scaling can be gradual. Instead, as the experiments improve, and the artifacts get smaller, believers find they have to use less material so the artifacts will represent higher *relative* power. It's not convincing anyone.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: I would estimate the chance of making a mistake that leads to positive result to be 1 in 4. You can use whatever estimate suits your fancy afterwards. That means 3 in 4 are genuine, mistake-free positive results, right? So let's be even more generous to the argument and make it 1 in 3. So if 3 independent labs generate positive results due to mistakes, it's 1 in 3^3 or 1 in 27 chance of happening. In my book, if there was a 1 in 10 chance of a professional scientist generating such errors, he should be fired; but that's just me. Since there have been more than 14,700 replications (see below), the chance of measuring errors or noise causing false positives in replication would be 1/3 ^ 14700, which is ~10^-5000 Wow. I had no idea. Now, why didn't they just do this bit of math for the DOE panel instead of trying to convince them with boring old scientific evidence. You can't dispute 10^-5000, so they would have all been convinced cold fusion is real, instead of 17 of 18 saying the evidence was not conclusive. And then all the funding they wanted would have been theirs. Have you contacted the DOE? But statistical analysis depends on the assumptions. Mine would go like this: There is an appreciable chance that calorimetric artifacts or errors would appear in cold fusion experiments. Rothwell writes: calorimetric errors and artifacts are more common than researchers realize. In some of those cases, the scientists would be convinced that apparent excess heat must be nuclear. For those scientists, if they keep at it long enough, the chance that they would see more artifacts or commit more errors supporting their ideas approaches 100%, influenced by wishful thinking and the huge benefit to man and themselves that successful results promise. So, then any number of successful claims are possible limited only by the time and energy true believers are prepared to invest, and the amount of funding they can find to support them. Storms wrote: ...many of us were lured into believing that the Pons-Fleischmann effect would solve the world's energy problems and make us all rich. Cold fusion is not the first phenomenon where this apparently unlikely situation of mass delusion has occurred.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: Of course, that is why science demands replication. No two scientists will likely make the same mistake. I submit all the scientists claiming dowsing, homeopathy, magnet motors, are making the same mistakes. For a century, all the scientists were certain electromagnetic evidence indicated the existence of an ether. As a result, the behavior, if repeated many times, becomes real. So, we can engineer nature, just by making mistakes? That threshold has been passed by cold fusion. That's your view, but believers have not been able to get the rest of the world to accept it. Now the challenge is to do studies that show why and how it works. Unfortunately, this takes money - money that the likes of Cude prevent from being applied. If a definition of crime against humanity is needed, this behavior would qualify. Good thing true believers don't make the laws. If cold fusion funding can be affected by mere argument in obscure internet forums, then the evidence is just too feeble. And for an extraordinary claim, feeble evidence that stays feeble, suggests it's almost certainly false.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: In Storms' book I think there are 180 positive excess heat studies. Each one typically reflects several excess heat events. A few were based on dozens of events. Fleischmann and Pons had the best success rate, running 64 cells at a time several times. Every one of them worked. Until they didn't. PF also published the highest claims, but their biggest published claims came early on. They claimed 140 W in 1993, just about when the Toyota lab opened and they were given tens of millions in funding. They never did that well again; in fact they hardly published anything after that. And in 1998 Pons went into hiding. Never, in the history of science and technology, has an effect been widely replicated which turned out to be a mistake. Never in the history of physics has so little progress been made on so simple an experiment after so much effort. I'd be interested in an example of a phenomenon from a bench top experiment, in which the experimenter controls the parameters, rejected for decades by mainstream journals and scientists as artifacts and pseudoscience, that turned out to be right. The closest I've seen is Semmelweis from 150 years ago, and to a lesser extent, ohm's law, around the same period. Cold fusion is a theory to explain erratic calorimetry results. There are many example of theories used to explain results that turned out to be wrong. The ether is one example, and it was believed for a century. But of course I shouldn't need to tell CF advocates that scientific ideas held by many scientists can be wrong. That's the bread and butter of their defense of the field. In fact, there are many examples of phenomena widely claimed to have been replicated, for much longer than CF, which are nevertheless rejected by mainstream science. Things like perpetual motion, UFO sightings, any of a wide range of paranormal phenomena, many alternative medical treatments, and so on. Most of these will probably never be proven wrong to the satisfaction of their adherents, but that doesn't make them right. Some arguments for homeopathy, sound eerily similar to CF arguments. Check out this one from the guardian.co.uk (July 2010) By the end of 2009, 142 randomised control trials (the gold standard in medical research) comparing homeopathy with placebo or conventional treatment had been published in peer-reviewed journals – 74 were able to draw firm conclusions: 63 were positive for homeopathy and 11 were negative. Five major systematic reviews have also been carried out to analyse the balance of evidence from RCTs of homeopathy – four were positive (Kleijnen et al; Linde et al; Linde et al; Cucherat et al) and one was negative (Shang et al). This is for medicine diluted so that on average less than one molecule of the starting material is present per dose. And while you incorrectly deny the claimed replications of polywater, it is quite similar.There were 450 peer-reviewed publications on polywater. Most of those professional scientists turned out to be wrong. There were 200 on N-rays; also all wrong. Cold fusion has more, but polywater had more than N-rays, and if you can get 450 papers on a bogus phenomenon, twice as many is not a big stretch, especially for a phenomenon with so much greater implication, and if an unequivocal debunking doesn't come along.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Null results in some fields far exceed positive results. Beaudette pointed to the early experiments cloning mammals. He said it took about 1000 attempts for one success. I have pointed to the number of collisions required to detect a few examples of the top quark. I believe the tests ran for about a year and there were billions of collisions per second. That is a very small success ratio but no one claims the top quark does not exist for that reason. Reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean you get the same result every time. That's theoretically impossible in quantum mechanics. Reproducibility means that if you do the same experiment, the results will be the same on a statistical basis. For example in Rutherford's famous experiment, not every alpha was reflected back from the gold foil. But anyone could do the experiment as prescribed, and after enough time, would get the same *distribution* of scattering angles. Examples of (early) transistors or cloning are often cited as experiments that only have a statistical reproducibility. But cold fusion does not even have this. If the transistor or cloning recipes are followed, the success rates are the same within experimental error. But with cold fusion, they aren't in the same ballpark. If you made a transistor that worked, anyone could make it work, but if you get a LENR cathode that works, it only works in one lab, with one experimenter. Of course, even statistical reproducibility is not needed if a single observation is sufficiently indisputable, like the Wrights' flight in 1908, or the explosion of a fission bomb, or even levitation of a superconductor. As long as the effect is reliable enough so that it can be widely demonstrated, or so that anyone can follow a prescription and with suitable patience see the effect. But cold fusion has neither a reliable indisputable demonstration (at any statistical level), nor a more subtle, but statistically reproducible effect. And if it were real, there *should* be indisputable demonstrations. Energy density of GJ/g should be as obvious as a light bulb turning on.There are apocryphal stories of heat after death and things melting, but they can't be taken on tour to convince the world, no matter how many cells you use. Otherwise, the DOE panel would have been presented with a suitable demonstration. And there is no inter-lab reproducibility of any kind. That's why in 2008, McKubre wrote: … we do not yet have quantitative reproducibility in any case of which I am aware., and in essentially every instance, written instructions alone have been insufficient to allow us to reproduce the experiments of others. Miles has said the same thing. To most scientists, this means there is no reproducibility in the field. In 1994, McKubre claimed to have all the criteria to get a positive result every time the criteria were met, but a few years later the Toyota IMRA lab in Japan reported negative results in 27 of 27 electrolysis cells. Evidently, they could not follow McKubre's recipe. That's not surprising since in 1998, McKubre wrote: With hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat production was premature… , given that only 20% of his cells worked. That's consistent with this quotation of an executive director at the Office of Naval Research, who had funded experiments by Miles and others (from a NewScientist article in 2003): For close to two years, we tried to create one definitive experiment that produced a result in one lab that you could reproduce in another,” Saalfeld says. “We never could. What China Lake did, NRL couldn't reproduce. What NRL did, San Diego couldn't reproduce. We took very great care to do everything right. We tried and tried, but it never worked. Lately, you've touted a 2012 conference report from NRL, as irrefutable, but it claims the energy of a drop of gasoline, and admits a dismal 5% reproducibility. Only in cold fusion are steadily worsening (unrefereed) results cited as the latest irrefutable evidence. The reality is that there is not a single experiment in the field that a qualified scientist can perform with expected results (other than null results), even on a statistical basis. There is not a single nuclear reaction that people in the field can agree is occurring. There is not a single credible example where the energy from cold fusion can power the experiment itself, let alone the world. It is ironic that some people in high-energy physics have demanded a higher success rate from cold fusion, and they have condemned it because they claim it is based on statistical proof of existence. That is not the case. Their own research is often based on statistics. Their research is always based on statistics. There is no received wisdom about what level of reproducibility makes a phenomenon credible. Scientists use experience and their wit and make
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I regard tritium as proof that a nuclear reaction occurred. It is as convincing as excess heat far beyond the limits of chemistry. It is easy for experts to confirm that tritium is real. This is another type of evidence that people such as Cude never address. How would you know if you don't read what I write. Tritium is detected at levels far below what is necessary to explain the claims of excess heat, and the levels vary by about 10 orders of magnitude. Its observation would of course have important scientific implications anyway, and since tritium and cold fusion are both nuclear, there might be some connection, so you would expect people to investigate it. Since it avoids the vagaries of and careful control and calibration necessary for calorimetry, and since tritium can be detected at reaction rates orders of magnitude below those necessary to produce measurable heat, the experiments should be vastly easier and more definitive. And one might expect that to be the main direction of research until at least the tritium question is understood. What factors affect it? How does it scale with the mass, shape, loading, and topology of the Pd, or with the electrolysis or gas-loading conditions, and so on. But in fact, as with heat (or neutrons), the situation is no clearer now than it was 20 years ago. There were a lot of searches for tritium in the early days, when people thought there might be conventional fusion reactions, and many people claimed to observe it. Interestingly, some of the highest levels were observed at BARC within weeks of the 1989 press conference, in spite of the now frequent argument about how difficult the experiment is, and how long it takes to get the appropriate loading etc. But as it became clear that the tritium could not account for the heat, and as the experiments became more careful, the tritium levels mostly decreased, just like pathological science everywhere. And some early claimants, like Will, got out of the field. In 1998 McKubre wrote: we may nevertheless state with some confidence that tritium is not a routinely produced product of the electrochemical loading of deuterium into palladium. He was, interestingly, involved with the Clarke indirect observation of tritium in Arata electrodes, where the tritium is determined by measurement of 3He using mass spectrometry, removing the great advantage of the simplicity of measuring the radioactivity. In the last decade, there has been very little activity on the tritium front, which again, fits pathological science, and puts those early results -- some already under suspicion -- in serious doubt. To my mind, if they can't resolve the tritium question in some kind of definitive and quantitative way, there is no hope for heat.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: ***As I stated, Hagelstein's experiment was over 6 MONTHS. Rossi claims he ran an industrial hot water heater for 2 YEARS. The time factor is the one which has grown. Unpublished and unverified claims that mean nothing. Maybe you're not familiar with the claims from the 90s. Check Roulette et al (from the PF Toyota lab fame) or Piantelli for claims of tens or even a hundred watts for months at a time. Piantelli's were even published; Roulette's weren't. Hagelstein's claims are chickenfeed in comparison. I can see why researchers would want to scale down the reaction when they study it, so they can come to an understanding of it. It's much easier to understand when the effect stands out more, not less.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 8:30 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: Wow. I had no idea. Now, why didn't they just do this bit of math for the DOE panel instead of trying to convince them with boring old scientific evidence. ***AFAIK, it was published after the (incredibly biased) DOE Panel. Either that, or they knew, as any intelligent person would, that no one not already a true believer, would take such an analysis seriously. Anyway, it's published now. Why not send it on to the DOE? And it's true, the DOE is biased. They know that cold fusion, if it were real, would benefit the US government and her people strategically, economically, and environmentally, and so they are inclined to accept weaker evidence than they ordinarily would.
Re: [Vo]:Ages of optimism and pessimism
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Yes. I have long felt that we are living in an age of pessimism. Also, people have the notion that we are living through rapid technological progress, but I disagree. Progress was much faster from 1890 to 1950. I don't think that can be justified with objective metrics. There is no doubt that the fundamentals of physics changed much faster during that period, but revolutions like relativity and quantum mechanics can't be expected to come every century, and they are a function of history (earlier progress), and not optimism or pessimism. Understanding biology has made far more progress in the last half century, than the previous, with the introduction of genomics and proteomics and the sequencing of the genomes of many organisms. And as for technical change, communications and computation have developed far faster in the last 50 years. We went from primitive rockets to walking on the moon in a decade. (Not very useful, but progress nonetheless) Moore's law started in the 50s or 60s, and has continued unabated since, without a hiccup in the last 20 years of cold fusion stasis.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: As I recall, somewhere in his book, Polywater Felix Franks said that in the end only one other lab claimed to replicate. Some others claimed preliminary results that seemed interesting but they never claimed a positive replication. I cited 5 papers in Science, Nature, and JPC, all from different groups, and I excerpted the parts where they make explicit claims to have produced polywater. Whatever you recall is wrong. Here they are again 1. Page Tf; Jakobsen Rj; Lippincott Er,; Polywater . Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrum; Science 167(1970)51 Abstract: In the presence of water, the resonance of the strongly hydrogen-bonded protons characteristic of polywater appears at 5 ppm lower applied magnetic field than water. Polywater made by a new method confirms the IR spectrum reported originally. 2. Petsko Ga; Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectrum Of Polywater, Science 167(1970)171 Abstract: With the aid of a time-average computer, the proton magnetic resonance spectrum of anomalous water (polywater) is obtained. The spectrum consists of a single broad resonance shifted approximately 300 Hz down-field from the resonance of ordinary water. From the text: Samples of polywater, prepared in the manner described by Lippincott (2) in capillaries of … 3. Castelli.Ga Ra; Grabar Dg; Hession J; Burkhard H; Polywater . Methods For Identifying Polywater Columns And Evidence For Ordered Growth; Science 167(1970)865 Abstract: The refractive indices of polywater columns in glass capillaries have been rapidly and accurately measured with an interference microscope. Polywater has been detected by this method in both quartz and Vycor glass capillaries... 4. Middlehu. J Mv; Fisher Lr; A New Polywater; Nature 227(1970)57 Abstract: We have made a form of polywater (which we shall call fluorite polywater) with an infrared spectrum similar to that observed by Lippincott et al. [4] but with the frequencies of the peaks somewhat displaced… 5. Brummer Sb; Entine G; Bradspie.Ji G; Lingerta.H G; Leung C; High-Yield Method For Preparation Of Anomalous Water; Journal Of Physical Chemistry 75(1971)2976 Abstract: An experimental method for the preparation of anomalous water and its in volatile residue polywater in large glass tubes is described. […] In contrast to previously reported results, *every tube*, up to the largest explored (23-mm id), *successfully produces material* [emphasis in original]. The material thus prepared has an IR spectrum similar to that reported of polywater … Summary and Conclusions: The present data indicate that the erratic nature of the polywater phenomenon may be overcome by use of large flamed and sealed glass tubes… There are many more, but that should be enough to make the point. Many different groups in dozens of papers reported not only the preparation of polywater, but measurement of its properties, variations in the material, and in the methods of preparation.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: As a practical matter the experimental method works. There is no possibility that every single researcher has made a mistake in every single high signal-to-noise ratio result. That would not happen in the life of the universe. As I've often said, if that could happen we would still be living in caves. Technology would not exist, never mind science. You're just repeating yourself, so I will too. Cold fusion is a theory to explain erratic calorimetry results. There are many example of theories used to explain results that turned out to be wrong. The ether is one example, and it was believed for a century. But of course I shouldn't need to tell CF advocates that scientific ideas held by many scientists can be wrong. That's the bread and butter of their defense of the field. In fact, there are many examples of phenomena widely claimed to have been replicated, for much longer than CF, which are nevertheless rejected by mainstream science. Things like perpetual motion, UFO sightings, any of a wide range of paranormal phenomena, many alternative medical treatments, and so on. Most of these will probably never be proven wrong to the satisfaction of their adherents, but that doesn't make them right. Some arguments for homeopathy, sound eerily similar to CF arguments. Check out this one from the guardian.co.uk (July 2010) By the end of 2009, 142 randomised control trials (the gold standard in medical research) comparing homeopathy with placebo or conventional treatment had been published in peer-reviewed journals – 74 were able to draw firm conclusions: 63 were positive for homeopathy and 11 were negative. Five major systematic reviews have also been carried out to analyse the balance of evidence from RCTs of homeopathy – four were positive (Kleijnen et al; Linde et al; Linde et al; Cucherat et al) and one was negative (Shang et al). This is for medicine diluted so that on average less than one molecule of the starting material is present per dose. And while you incorrectly deny the claimed replications of polywater, it is quite similar.There were 450 peer-reviewed publications on polywater. Most of those professional scientists turned out to be wrong. There were 200 on N-rays; also all wrong. Cold fusion has more, but polywater had more than N-rays, and if you can get 450 papers on a bogus phenomenon, twice as many is not a big stretch, especially for a phenomenon with so much greater implication, and if an unequivocal debunking doesn't come along.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 2:12 PM, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: Kevin, You just drove a stake through the heart of one of the silliest arguments on record. ** ** “Tritium is detected at levels below what is necessary to explain excess heat” ** ** Who cares? TRITIUM IS DETECTED ! Get it? This essentially proves the LENR phenomenon is real. ** ** I missed the obligatory tritium is claimed to be detected, and no even if it's detected, there could be contamination, accidental or deliberate. If this is such indisputable proof, why is it that intelligent people don't buy it? Do they hate the thought of clean and abundant energy? We know that's not the case from the events of 1989.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: You're just repeating yourself, so I will too. Cold fusion is a theory to explain erratic calorimetry results. The results are not erratic. As shown by McKubre they are clearly governed by control parameters such as loading and current density. McKubre himself said there is no quantitative reproducibility. That means the results are erratic. If they weren't, and they were real, there'd be a Nobel prize. When the necessary conditions are met the effect ALWAYS occurs. Granted, it is difficult to meet them. Four years after McKubre said he had all the parameters defined, he said he spoke to soon: With hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat production was premature…. He only got 20% reproducibility, and with piddling power levels. That's erratic.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: I cited 5 papers in Science, Nature, and JPC, all from different groups, and I excerpted the parts where they make explicit claims to have produced polywater. Whatever you recall is wrong. Yes, there were reports of replications, according to Franks. Finally, an admission, They were retracted in the end. Well, yes, in the case of polywater (and N-rays), it was debunked to everyone's satisfaction. That is much more difficult in some fields like homeopathy and cold fusion that involve health or calorimetry (and world saving potential). It hasn't happened yet in cold fusion, and it may never happen. It doesn't change the fact that until that debunking there were hundreds of papers published on polywater, that were wrong. It happens. It took a decade for polywater, it's been 2 for cold fusion and a century for homeopathy and perpetual motion machines. Polywater was not real before its debunking, and so the absence of debunking does not make cold fusion real. You need positive credible evidence to convince people that cold fusion is real. And there isn't any. No one has retracted cold fusion claims. More to the point, no one has found any errors in any major cold fusion claim, whereas after 2 years they found the artifacts that caused the Polywater effect. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 2:27 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: When the necessary conditions are met the effect ALWAYS occurs. Granted, it is difficult to meet them. Four years after McKubre said he had all the parameters defined, he said he spoke to soon: With hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat production was premature…. He only got 20% reproducibility, and with piddling power levels. That's erratic. That is incorrect. I was referring to his 1998 EPRI paper, 4 years after he said he had the parameters figured out. He admits the presumption of repeatable excess heat was premature, and he saysheat producing phenomena were obtained in only about 1/5 of the cells, and with less power than expected. That makes the effect erratic was the point.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: The results are not erratic. Storms called cold fusion his reluctant mistress, and in an interview with ruby carat (I think) he says the effect depends on mother natures mood (I'm paraphrasing). Sounds erratic to me.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: If Polywater is an example of pathological science, then how many of those peer reviewed papers were published AFTER the main realization that chemicals in the cleaning process had affected the glassware used in the experiments? I doubt it's going to be more than a dozen. 20 years after that episode in science, no one was investigating Polywater. If there were a contingent still researching Polywater, then yes, that WOULD be a good example of pathological science. You're right. Polywater is different from cold fusion in that it was debunked to everyone's satisfaction. That may or may not happen in cold fusion, but it hasn't happened yet. Not all field are the same, but they can still be similar. For a decade, people chased polywater in vain. So far it's been 2 decades for cold fusion. It's been a century for homeopathy and perpetual motion and dowsing If cold fusion is ever debunked to everyone's satisfaction, or when the principals disappear by attrition, research in cold fusion will stop too. Going by peer-reviewed literature, it's almost stopped now. What's left now are only the mentally feeble and the scammers. But there is no such contingent. You try the same argumentation approach towards cold fusion papers. LENR is different because there are still anomalous results being found 20 years after the scientific establishment threw it under the bus, because there is no definitive study that proves it to be an artifact. And if it IS an artifact, it will likely be a chemical way to produce energy, so in itself it will still be something worth following. Then you write this: So bad that none of the CF claims survive peer review in main-stream *nuclear* physics journals — the most relevant field. (If a single result had any credibility, you couldn’t keep it out of Phys Rev or PRL or Science or Nature.) ***And for my own little corner of LENR, I know what you write is utterly untrue. I made money by betting that Yoshiaki Arata's results would get replicated in a peer reviewed journal, and one of those journals was Physics Letters A. http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg37542.html
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Plate tectonics were accepted when the evidence became overwhelming, particularly the fossil and seismologic evidence. Yes, it took a a long time, because geology yields its secrets greedily, but it had nothing to do with attrition. On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: A good example of the validity of Planck's observation to fit reality is to look at how plate tectonics were initially rejected, then embraced a generation later. On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.comwrote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck Max Planck: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. The irony is that not only is this not true, and that cold fusion is seeing it work the other way, but Planck himself is a counter-example. Some pathological beliefs, like N-rays and the planet vulcan, only really disappeared when the believers died. In cold fusion, the strongest and most active proponents are still the ones that were there from the beginning (There are some exceptions like Duncan and Zawodny). Cold fusion is likely to continue to fade away by attrition, although it clearly has a surprising staying power. Planck was slow to accept the idea of photons, but he did not have to die to increase their acceptance: about 10 years after Einstein introduced them, Planck came around. And of course, all the architects of modern physics, including Planck, were alive and well before they could conceive of relative time or discrete energy. So, the statement really doesn't fit reality, and I suspect he said it in jest.
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: National Instruments is a multibillion dollar corporation that does not need to stick its neck out for “bigfoot stories”. They recently concluded that with so much evidence of anomalous heat generation... *http://www.22passi.it/downloads/eu_brussels_june_20_2012_concezzi.pdf*http://www.22passi.it/downloads/eu_brussels_june_20_2012_concezzi.pdf Conclusion • There is an unknown physical event and there is a need of better measurements and control tools. NI is playing a role in accelerating innovation and discovery. You don't trust all the academic physicists who are skeptical of cold fusion because you suspect them of -- what? -- greed, self-interest. I don't see how, but I don't get how you don't think that maybe corporate greed might have something to do with a billion dollar corporation making such a perfectly meaningless statement, other than that it might sell more instruments. And by the way, NI has donated equipment for bigfoot studies (link via J Milstone): http://www.oregonbigfoot.com/blog/bigfoot/nvcode-part-eight-infrasound/
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 3:01 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: Of course it is erratic. The only question is: Is it erratic because of random error or because the required conditions are not created every time. We now know that certain critical conditions are required, which are not created except by guided luck. So what? This problem is typical of all new discoveries before they are mastered. *All* new discoveries? It was not the case for fission reactors, the photoelectric effect, blackbody radiation, atomic spectroscopy, Rutherford scattering, electron diffraction, superconductivity, and so on. Low probability of success is characteristic of some developments like cloning or transistors, but in the latter case, a working transistor could be shown to work by anyone. And within a few years of the first demonstration of amplification, transistors were used in commercial products. If there were a working hunk of Pd that you could send to anyone, that would be another story, but as admitted by McKubre and demonstrated most recently by the MFMP, interlab reproducibility is still a bitch.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: If this is such indisputable proof, why is it that intelligent people don't buy it? Do they hate the thought of clean and abundant energy? We know that's not the case from the events of 1989. ***because intelligent people don't like having their careers dragged through the mud. Doesn't answer the question. It just establishes the failure of the evidence. The reason for the derision is because intelligent people don't buy your indisputable proof. If intelligent people bought it, the skeptics would be the ones whose careers would be dragged through the mud.
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 9:44 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: You need positive credible evidence to convince people that cold fusion is real. And there isn't any. It's a little painful to watch this thread, Joshua. This may come as a surprise, but I'm not trying to make it painless for true believers. Also, no one's holding a gun to your head. Here you assert that positive, credible evidence has not been provided, after people have provided positive, credible evidence The statement about positive credible evidence is a summary, not an argument. I've written a lot of words to support that summary. Mainstream does not believe the evidence for cold fusion. Therefore, it is not credible. It's really an observation, but like I said, it's not meant to stand on its own as a compelling reason to reject it. The evidence for cold fusion is a dog's breakfast of inconsistent claims of excess heat and various products of nuclear reaction. After 24 years, there is still not an experiment that anyone skilled in the art can do, and get quantitatively predictable positive results, whether it's excess heat, tritium, or helium (or an unequivocally positive result). That's why the number of refereed positive claims has dwindled to one or two papers a year, and why the claims become ever more lame. Many of the papers in the last decade are about the SPAWAR's CR-39 results, which have been challenged, and which SPAWAR itself has shut down.The few claims of excess power are in the range of a watt or so, when PF claimed 10 W in 198, and 140 in 1993. All the internet excitement results from larger but unpublished claims, and from people looking for investment, and using methods of calorimetry shown to be fallible more than a decade ago. It's not pretty. -- not all of it, but some, it seems to me; sufficient evidence, at any rate, to build a prima facie case that we should all go do some more reading. I've done a lot of reading, and like most people who are not emotionally invested in cold fusion's success, I have become more skeptical as a result. Later on will then no doubt go on to assert once more that positive, credible evidence has not been provided. If you mean as a result of more reading, then yes. Because I'm pretty familiar with the body of evidence. But if later on some better evidence, as described several times, came along, I'd be thrilled to change my mind. I believe the chance of that happening is vanishingly small.
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Alain Sepeda alain.sep...@gmail.com wrote: any real-life scientist claiming that you can work on cold fusion without ruining your career is... LYING. That's a reflection of what mainstream science thinks of cold fusion. It doesn't answer the question of why, if the proof is so obvious, mainstream science holds that view, including when they are enlisted to study the best evidence. A graduate student in science would probably ruin their career by studying astrology or creationism too. It says something about the fields.
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 5:45 PM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: Plate tectonics were accepted when the evidence became overwhelming, particularly the fossil and seismologic evidence. Yes, it took a a long time, because geology yields its secrets greedily, but it had nothing to do with attrition. The same is true for cold fusion. All except for the part about it being accepted; oh and about the overwhelming evidence; oh and the part about the scale of the experiment making progress necessarily slow. Otherwise, same thing.
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 4:54 PM, Alain Sepeda alain.sep...@gmail.com wrote: plate tectonics evidence where overwhelming much before they were accepted. there was explanation for the moving mechanisme decades before. Maybe much before they were universally accepted. Support grew with the evidence, as might be expected. Cold fusion has stagnated at essential rejection for 24 years.
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 4:30 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: In Storms' book I think there are 180 positive excess heat studies. Each one typically reflects several excess heat events. A few were based on dozens of events. Fleischmann and Pons had the best success rate, running 64 cells at a time several times. Every one of them worked. On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: Until they didn't. ***Then you acknowledge those 64 cells did work. Pursuing this finding is not pathological science. You like semantic games I see. Sure they worked, where by work I mean they appeared to give off excess heat, to a careless researcher.
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: Going by peer-reviewed literature, it's almost stopped now. ***I see you're changing your stance. Earlier you said it had stopped. Always be careful of context, semantics, and qualifiers. In the context of giving credit for debunking, I said the field was already dead, and the credit had been given. So, yes, in the perception of the mainstream, the field is dead. But, going by the peer-reviewed literature, there is manifestly still some activity, but it has almost stopped. Happy? What's left now are only the mentally feeble and the scammers. ***Dr. Arrata is a mental giant compared to you. At least I know how to spell his name. He has considerable stature, yes. I don't know how much of that is justified, but it is certainly not due to his work in cold fusion. Anyway, compared the Gell-Mann, Weinberg, Glashow, Lederman, Hawking, Seaborg, he doesn't stack up so well.
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 4:19 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: I'm glad to hear that NI donated a PCMCIA card. Did they go out on a limb and say (as with Cold Fusion) There is an unknown physical event? Nope. It's self evident that there are images of an unknown physical entity. I trust physicists who are skeptical. I don't trust physicists who are pathologically skeptical, … where the difference depends on whether they agree with your preferred truth or not. who refuse to look at the data in the same way that Galileo's detractors refused to look through the telescope. Skeptics have looked at the evidence in 2 formal DOE panels, and every time they're asked to review papers or grant proposals. We know they'd love for it to be true from the events of 1989, and if it were, it would provide an opportunity for fame and glory, and it is the business of scientists to be aware of credible work in their field of interest. You do know that Galileo's detractors were religious, not scientific, and that the modern physics revolution was embraced as quickly as it could be developed. You don't seem to be very familiar with the body of evidence from the 90s. You just want cold fusion to be true, and you see some scientists saying it is. I think that's pretty characteristic of many of the unwashed groupies. Like the LENRproof web site that contains no proof at all. Instead it argues: look at all the people who think it's true, so it must be, and isn't that swell. And yes, I do think it's because of their greed, self-interest, hubris and various other things. Which remains implausible to me because cold fusion is in virtually everyone's interest, and because of the explosion of interest and activity in 1989. Greed ought to work the other way, as is evident from Storms' statement: …many of us were lured into believing that the Pons-Fleischmann effect would solve the world's energy problems and make us all rich.
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On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 10:57 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: You're right. Polywater is different from cold fusion in that it was debunked to everyone's satisfaction. That may or may not happen in cold fusion, but it hasn't happened yet. ***Then by your own reasoning, LENR is not pathological science. Again with the semantics. I don't really care what word you use. To me, both polywater and cold fusion are almost certainly bogus phenomena, they followed similar publication trajectories (if on somewhat different time scales), made essentially no progress after the alleged discovery, and kept a following long after the mainstream had largely dismissed them. They're not identical. Cold fusion got far more attention and love at the start, but polywater got more legitimacy for a longer period (with publications in Science and Nature etc). Since the polywater debunking has been mostly accepted, it can be used as an example of how a large number of legitimate scientists can all make similar blunders, or interpret erratic data in a similarly bogus way. It makes the bogosity of cold fusion much more plausible. In my vocabulary, both are examples of pathological science. Your mileage may vary. (By the way, if you look at another thread here, you'll see that even polywater has not been completely dismissed by everyone. It's the nature of pathological science…)
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On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 9:06 AM, Alain Sepeda alain.sep...@gmail.com wrote: just delusioned and selectively blind like what roland benabou describe I think groupthink is a much better explanation for belief in cold fusion than it is for skepticism. Mainstream science is an extremely diverse and diffuse entity that actually encourages and rewards innovation and novelty and disruptive ideas supported by good evidence. But the True Believers in cold fusion are fairly tightly knit group that discourages dissent, and embraces cold fusion's many inconsistencies. It's the reason so many cold fusion advocates (though not all) accepted such an obviously unlikely claim as Rossi's with almost no scrutiny, and from someone with a history of fraud, but none in physics.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Cude not only fails to see this pattern, he mixes up two numbers: The claim that high loading is correlated to claims of excess heat was made early on, but that bit of alleged intelligence has done nothing to help with the reproducibility or to scale the effect up. In fact, both Storms and McKubre emphasized the importance of loading, but reported only about a watt of power and around 10% excess heat, far below what PF had published earlier. Anyway, it is far more plausible that artifacts are correlated to loading (or to the procedure required to achieve the loading) than that nuclear effects are correlated to loading. Especially when you consider that high loading near the surface will occur well before bulk loading is achieved, and the current wisdom has it that it's a surface phenomenon. And especially since, as Storms points out, in gas loading such high loadings are not necessary. You say (elsewhere) it's impossible that loading can be correlated to artifacts, but when nuclear physicists say it's impossible to induce nuclear reactions in Pd with electrolysis, you say they are being closed-minded, and there may be some exotic reaction no one has thought of. Well, I say you are being closed minded by excluding artifacts, since there may be an exotic artifact no one has thought of. The reality is that the effect doesn't stand out (as you put it), it doesn't scale, and quality reports are becoming scarcer. That fits an exotic artifact better than an exotic nuclear reaction, of which no one can dream up a plausible example, and not for the lack of trying.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 9:47 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: The role of correlation and real-world control factors is often overlooked, even by supporters. This is critically important. Cold fusion heat with the Pd-D system is correlated with several control factors, including: * Heat appears with D but not H. * Heat only appears with high loading. In the first place, as Storms points out, neither of those are true. Even in electrolysis, there are claims of heat with H as well, and again as Storms says, probably the main reason the claims are scarcer is because far less effort has been put toward it, mainly because PF thought it was DD fusion. High loading correlation seems to be necessary in electrolysis but not in gas loading, and at the subatomic level it's hard to see why that should make a difference. Here is the critical thing about these control parameters: they cannot affect temperature measurements. They cannot cause an artifact that looks like excess heat. When nuclear physicists say nuclear reactions in that context can't produce measurable heat, they are called closed-minded. Has it occurred to you that you are being closed minded by excluding artifacts that might correlate with loading, or with the procedures required to produce the loading. I'm not saying I can identify a plausible artifact, but then you can't identify a plausible nuclear reaction that fits the observations either. And between them, nuclear reactions are far less likely, in the view of people who actually have experience with nuclear reactions. (Alain: You should use an English spell check program. I depend on one!) A logic and coherence checker would help too.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: Cude: I missed the obligatory tritium is claimed to be detected, and no even if it's detected, there could be contamination, accidental or deliberate. That is an absurd cop-out. There are dozens of papers by four top PhDs at the top tritium facility in the World, LANL. Yet Cude wants to suggest that the hundreds of experiments at LANL where tritium is detected are all nothing but measure error - and furthermore that the management of the facility was deceived and continued to fund the researchers for many years. Dozens? Really? Storms lists tritium papers in table 6 in chapter 4 of his book. I count 8 papers from LANL, including two from Storms and Talcott. Rothwell has a few more, which Storms presumably skipped because of difficulty accessing them (e.g. Solid State Fusion Update, Los Alamos), or because they are only presentations (not papers) (e.g. NSF workshop). That's still pretty impressive, until you look a little closer. Most of the papers are conference proceedings, or highly obscure journals that don't even rate a calculation of the impact factor (e.g. Trans Fusion Tech, Infinite Energy). That doesn't exactly scream credibility for what would be a revolutionary result. Secondly, the same authors (Claytor, Menlove et al) also claimed to measure neutrons at levels similar to the SE Jones claims, and those claims were later explicitly retracted. So, working at LANL does not make you infallible. Thirdly, the most prominent of the authors' (Menlove) latest co-authorship appears to be 1991, so he appears to have lost confidence, or why abandon such a ground-breaking experiment. Fourthly, the levels really are very low. It's true that tritium can be detected at reaction rates orders of magnitude below those necessary to produce measurable heat, and surprise, surprise, that's where they are detected. The levels are mostly at a fraction of a nCi with one in the range of a nCi (far lower by the way than the BARC claims in 1989), with sensitivity (they claim) of 0.1 nCi. Higher yes, but why always so close. And they spend a lot of time explaining why the detected ionizing material is tritium rather than an artifact of the instrument or some other isotope. That kind of kills the point of looking for tritium, which was supposed to be at unequivocal levels. But just like heat and neutrons and helium, it too appears at levels that are not far from the noise. Finally, the latest paper from LANL on tritium seems to be 1998, even though they certainly hadn't answered any interesting questions about it, like what reaction produces it. I don't think it's clear how much support they got from management, but the stopping of the experiments without resolving anything, or even getting a decent publication out of it, suggests that either the experimenters themselves lost confidence, or LANL killed it. And isn't one of the usual arguments of mainstream suppression that LANL *didn't* support Storms' research? You can't have it both ways. You can't say: LANL supports LENR research so it must be real, and LANL doesn't support LENR research so they must be corrupt. Unless you are in possession of received truth and so you must fit all observations to fit that truth. If this is such indisputable proof, why is it that intelligent people don't buy it? Do they hate the thought of clean and abundant energy? We know that's not the case from the events of 1989. Once again you're trying to conflate tritium with heat. Good grief. It's the advocates that conflate tritium and heat. No one here would care a whit about tritium for scientific interest. The reason it's brought up is to make the excess heat claims more plausible. You yourself say the results crush skepticism about LENR, so that you can carry on believing excess heat is possible too. Did you read what I wrote? I delineated the two carefully, and explained why tritium would still be important to investigate. Here it is again: Its observation would of course have important scientific implications anyway, and since tritium and cold fusion are both nuclear, there might be some connection, so you would expect people to investigate it. Since it avoids the vagaries of and careful control and calibration necessary for calorimetry, and since tritium can be detected at reaction rates orders of magnitude below those necessary to produce measurable heat, the experiments should be vastly easier and more definitive. And one might expect that to be the main direction of research until at least the tritium question is understood. What factors affect it? How does it scale with the mass, shape, loading, and topology of the Pd, or with the electrolysis or gas-loading conditions, and so on. There's no conflation there. The idea is that if there is a connection (and you agree there is because you classify both as LENR), then it makes sense nail down
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Cude wrote: After 24 years, there is still not an experiment that anyone skilled in the art can do, and get quantitatively predictable positive results, whether it's excess heat, tritium, or helium (or an unequivocally positive result).” Yes, there is. It was published in 1996. See: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEhowtoprodu.pdf It's not a description of an experiment, it doesn't predict a quantitative result, and it gives no indication the likelihood of success. In 1989, PF said if you do electrolysis of Pd in heavy water, and you have enough patience, you'll see excess heat. The Storms paper is a kind of collection of observations from many experiments, and he's a little more specific than PF, but basically he still says if you follow these instructions, some of which may not be essential, and there may be other factors, and you have enough patience (which he says explicitly), you'll see excess heat. That's no more of a quantitatively predictable result than PF offered. And of course, with the benefit of this paper, the quality of the results did not improve. Storms never claimed the kind of power PF claimed for example. (And he also recommends flawless crack-free palladium in that paper, whereas now the business is believed to happen in the cracks and flaws.) That's why, *after* this paper, you wrote After twelve years of painstaking replication attempts, most experiments produce a fraction of a watt of heat, when they work at all. Such low heat is difficult to measure. It leaves room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real. It's why an executive director at the Office of Naval Research, who had funded experiments by Miles and others said (from a NewScientist article in 2003): For close to two years, we tried to create one definitive experiment that produced a result in one lab that you could reproduce in another,” Saalfeld says. “We never could. What China Lake did, NRL couldn't reproduce. What NRL did, San Diego couldn't reproduce. We took very great care to do everything right. We tried and tried, but it never worked. It's why McKubre said in 2008 that there is no quantitive reproducibility nor inter-lab reproducibility. Even if the effect is small, if it is quantitatively reproducible, then it's possible to use systematic experiments to scale it up like Curie did, or Lavoisier did, and then it becomes credible. But again, a single really prominent effect (especially from an isolated device) would suffice if it were reliable enough so that it can be widely demonstrated, or so that anyone can follow a prescription and with suitable enough devices see the it in a reasonable amount of time. But cold fusion has neither a reliable indisputable demonstration (at any statistical level), nor a more subtle, but statistically reproducible effect that can be carefully studied, and so credibility eludes the field. See also: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CravensDtheenablin.pdf This is a statistical analysis of all the experiments up to 2007. That's the opposite of what I was asking for; namely a single experiment that produces an expected result. I have respect for statistics, but this is nonsense. I'm sure Cravens and Letts could do a Bayesian study of bigfoot sightings and come up with a vanishingly small probability that it's not real, and it would be taken about as seriously. Probably someone's done it. Statistics have an important place, but I think this is sort of thing Rutherford was talking about when he said: if your experiment needs statistics, you should have done a better experiment.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 3:09 PM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 5:45 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 4:54 PM, Alain Sepeda alain.sep...@gmail.comwrote: plate tectonics evidence where overwhelming much before they were accepted. there was explanation for the moving mechanisme decades before. Maybe much before they were universally accepted. Support grew with the evidence, as might be expected. Cold fusion has stagnated at essential rejection for 24 years. Obviously the controversy isn't over. I meant it is comparable to the time when plate tectonics was considered fringe science. It took about 45 years from the time continental drift was first proposed in 1912 to its acceptance. However, the concept is really much older and was first proposed in 1596. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drift According to Wikipedia it seems the concept of continental drift wasn't firmly rejected until the mid 19 th century due to certain findings and the influence of James Dana, a prominent geologist of the time. It's not at all comparable because of the very different scales of the phenomena. Cold fusion is a table-top experiment, in which the experimenter is control of all the parameters, and the conditions (pressure, temperature, etc) are easily accessible. Fields like geology, paleontology, and cosmology, yield evidence on a much slower time scale. The big bang theory and black holes and neutron stars were also accepted rather slowly. But it's difficult to come up with a phenomenon on the scale of cold fusion that was rejected for decades and was later vindicated. There is, as described in Hagelstein's essay, Semmelweis, and to a lesser degree there is Ohm, but both of those go back 150 years, when progress was slower, and scientific thought was different. In any case, I'd be interested in a more recent example. People have cited the laser, and quasicrystals, but those were never dismissed to the same degree, and vindication came in a very short time. Van Neumann was skeptical of the laser, but he was persuaded over a beer with paper and pencil. Those large scale theories (big bang etc) represent ordinary competition of ideas, which are resolved as the evidence improves, or a new theory is introduced that accommodates all the evidence. One of the supporters of continental drift also proposed a theory that the earth is expanding. In this, he was wrong, and the mainstream thought was right. So what do these things tell us? That mainstream thought can be wrong. Of course, we know that from the Ptolemaic solar system, and absolute time, and continuous energy, and Lamarckism etc. But surely it doesn't say that mainstream thought *must* be wrong whenever a new idea is introduced, because that rapidly leads to a catch-22. So, can we predict whether mainstream thought is right based on previous phenomena? Well, scientists should obviously make their judgements based on the evidence. As for observers trying to decide what to bet on, the consensus of experts is surely the most likely approximation to the truth. What else is there? The consensus of plumbers? The consensus of your friends? The consensus of true believers of the fringe view? Your own preference? Should we accept creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, telekinesis? Wegener's theory is different from cold fusion in another way. In the case of Wegener's theory, the objections were based largely on gut instincts that forces to move the continents could not exist. There was no scientific evidence for this line of thought, and as you point out, it was kind of recent -- continental drift of some form had been considered much earlier. But with cold fusion, the alleged phenomenon is contrary to copious experimental results that are highly consistent with a robust description of subatomic interactions. Consider this analogy as a kind of reductio ad absurdum: Mainstream thought currently has it that the solar system is Copernican, with evidence so strong as to be as close to truth as one can imagine. If someone came along now and proposed that Ptolemy was right after all, he would be dismissed unless he produced evidence at least as strong as the evidence we have for the Copernican system. It wouldn't matter that the mainstream has been wrong before; no one would believe that they're wrong now. Just as no one takes the flat-earth society seriously just because their view is now opposite to the mainstream. Now, I'm not saying that nuclear physicists are as certain that cold fusion can't happen as astronomers are that the solar system is Copernican, but they are much more certain than most casual observers understand, and their certainty is justified by much more hard evidence than the rejection of Wegener was. And cold fusion will not be taken seriously until the evidence for it is at least as robust as the evidence that suggests it won't happen
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:36 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: Doesn't answer the question. ***Of course it does. The question was why don't intelligent people believe cold fusion. If the mainstream believed it, then believers would not suffer derision. It just establishes the failure of the evidence. ***No, it establishes the real reason why intelligent people don't get involved in Cold Fusion. The reason for the derision ***Sneering is against the rules here. As important as this forum is, it does not have jurisdiction over mainstream science, which is where the derision I was talking about allegedly takes place. is because intelligent people don't buy your indisputable proof. ***Nope. It's because you're a skeptopath. Others just like to pile on and when we scratch the surface, we find they're utterly uninformed about the evidence. If the evidence were indisputable, the ones who do get informed on DOE panels or journal reviews would be convinced (they're anonymous), and then the masses would take note, become convinced, and it would be 1989 all over. If intelligent people bought it, the skeptics would be the ones whose careers would be dragged through the mud. ***You proceed from an odd form of idealism. Scientists are human. Nothing ideal about it. People that are skeptical of relativity would have no career in physics. People skeptical of evolution would have no career in biology. People skeptical of the mood landing would have no career with NASA.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:35 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: interlab reproducibility is still a bitch. ***True enough, but that doesn't make it a pathological science. It makes it a difficult one. Something is not made pathological. Poor interlab reproducibility is characteristic of pathological science.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:42 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: That's a reflection of what mainstream science thinks of cold fusion. It doesn't answer the question of why, if the proof is so obvious, ***Interesting little conditional you've inserted here. The proof is not obvious but the evidence is. With so much evidence, with 14000 replications, the evidence is compelling. This is far from a pathological science. There are a lot of claimed examples of excess heat. They are not replications, because many of the experiments are different, and the levels of claimed heat are all over the map. The question stands. If the evidence is so compelling, why don't intelligent people accept it? A graduate student in science would probably ruin their career by studying astrology or creationism too. It says something about the fields. ***If a grad student in physics were to study astrology, it's obvious they've stepped out of their core competence. But if they want to study Condensed Matter Nuclear Science and LENR, they're within their core competence. It says nothing particularly relevant about the field of astrology. Your ridiculous analogy says something about human nature. Is said science, not physics. A psychology student could propose to study astrology. And a biology student could propose to study intelligent design.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 4:05 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:40 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: Mainstream does not believe the evidence for cold fusion. Therefore, it is not credible. ***What a ridiculous line of reasoning. It's what the words mean. Credible means believable. If something is not believed, then it is not credible. It can be credible to some and not others, but in the main, it is not credible.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: So, Pons Fleischmann were careless researchers, eh? Yes, sadly. Then how is it that their findings have been replicated 14,700 times? They weren't How did they become 2 of the most preeminent electrochemists of their day before they took on this anomaly? Pons wan't, but Fleischmann was. Smart people can be careless, especially when they are also clueless about nuclear physics, and the potential prize is huge.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: At least I know how to spell his name. ***Gee, that's about as semantically irrelevant as an argument can get. Lighten up. It was a gentle poke, since you were chiding me on not being as great as Arata. He has considerable stature, yes. I don't know how much of that is justified, but it is certainly not due to his work in cold fusion. ***It was due to his work in Nuclear Physics. Are those others representative of cold fusion debunkers?How many debunkers have won their nation's highest honor due to work in Nuke Physics? All the skeptics I listed won the *world's* highest honor for their work in subatomic physics. How many have buildings named after them? Fortunately that's not a criterion, or Donald Trump would be dictating scientific phenomena.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:53 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: It's self evident that there are images of an unknown physical entity. ***Wow, you put more credence into bigfoot than cold fusion. Who can deny that some of those photos are not explained? Therefore they are images of an unknown physical entity. It's also self-evident that there are unknown aspects to cold fusion experiments. It's a meaningless statement. But come to it, there probably is more likelihood of a large monster somewhere than there is for cold fusion. But I'm not familiar with the literature. You? Note that National Instruments DID NOT go out on a limb to say what you just did over bigfoot, Like I said. They didn't have to. It's self-evident.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 4:20 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:57 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: Again with the semantics. I don't really care what word you use. To me, both polywater and cold fusion are almost certainly bogus phenomena, ... In my vocabulary ... ***Now that your position has been obliterated, you're moving onto Humpty Dumpty definitions. Yet another way we can all see you're full of shit. Sue me. I'm an anti-semantic. I'm not saying cold fusion is bad because it's pathological. I call it pathological because it's bad. Labels provide a shorthand, and allow more economic comparisons to previous episodes. I subscribe to a descriptive grammar, and pathological science has acquired a pretty recognized meaning. It is science of things that are not so, and its main characteristics are the lack of progress and the diminishing publication rate. It is usually contrary to well-established experimental evidence, and it helps if its reality would be a revolutionary advance, raining glory upon its discoverers. Cold fusion fits.
[Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial 2
Walker wrote: Yes, definitely -- conflation is a critical mistake, but it is most likely to occur when it is convenient for one's position. Throw perpetual motion machines, homeopathy, polywater and cold fusion all into the same category. It does not matter that there appear to be basic differences that make the comparison strained, at best. There are differences of course. Identical analogies serve no purpose. I assume we all agree that homeopathy and polywater and perpetual motion are bogus. And so when someone makes an argument that applies equally to all of them, then the comparison shows why it is not persuasive to someone who also thinks cold fusion is bogus. That's the purpose of analogies. If you want to convince skeptics that cold fusion is real, arguments that apply to perpetual motion won't work.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial 2
Rothwell wrote: Cude and others conflate many different assertions and issues. They stir everything into one pot. You have to learn to compartmentalize with cold fusion, or with any new phenomenon or poorly understood subject. That's nonsense. It's the believers who are forever using tritium and neutrons at ridiculously low levels to prove PF were right. The skeptics are skeptical of both, but are fully aware that even if low level neutrons a la SE Jones were valid, it wouldn't prove PF right. That's why Jones got into nature and PF didn't. Turned out, Jones retracted, until he made claims again. But they're marginal too. In this case, the tritium findings by Storms and soon after at TAMU and NCFI proved beyond doubt that cold fusion is a real, nuclear phenomenon. After they published that 1990 it was case closed. Every scientist on earth should have believed it. Unfortunately computer programmers don't get to tell every scientist on earth how to make scientific judgements. Morrison followed the field in detail until 2001, and he had the background and experience to make credible judgements and he was skeptical. So did Huizenga. And I'd put more credence in the Gell-Manns who considerd it briefly than the Rothwells or Storms who devoted their lives to it, but can't tell a likely charlatan (Rossi) from a scientist or inventor. And if the tritium was so conclusive, why were the results so variable, and given the variability, why has tritium research stopped before anyone settled anything about it? That's not the behavior of scientists. It's the behavior of pathological scientists. The excess heat results proved that it is not a chemical effect, in the normal sense. Perhaps it is a Mills effect. Again, there is so much evidence for this, at such high s/n ratios, it is irrefutable. The helium results support the hypothesis that this is some sort of deuterium fusion, at least with Pd-D. There is no doubt about the helium, but no one has searched for helium or deuterium from Ni-H cells. All the other claims are fuzzy, in my opinion. There is not as much evidence for them. All the results are fuzzy, and the levels are determined by the quality of the experiment. Heat levels comparable to inputs, or chemical background, or typical artifacts. Helium levels comparable to atmospheric background. Neutrons and tritium, for which instruments are far more sensitive, appear at guess what, far lower levels. The point is, DO NOT CONFUSE THESE QUESTIONS. Do not conflate them! Gee. Someone learned a new word, and is gonna get all the mileage he can from it.
[Vo]:Re: [Vo]:‘Pathological Science’ is not Scientific Misconduct (nor is it pathological)
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 8:47 AM, Chris Zell chrisz...@wetmtv.com wrote: ** Given that the topic is phrases that should be abandoned, can we do away with extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence ? That phrase (or some form of it) is usually attributed to Truzzi, but the sentiment, is simple common sense, and has been part of scientific thought for centuries. Laplace said The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness. And Hume said: A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence. So I think your desire to believe cold fusion without good evidence is not going to outweigh the history of the statement. Extraordinary simply means based on the established scientific generalizations already accumulated and verified. In other words, the evidence for an extraordinary claim should be as strong as the evidence that makes it extraordinary. The evidence for cold fusion should be as strong and robust as the evidence over the past 60 years that suggests it should not happen.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: The question stands. If the evidence is so compelling, why don't intelligent people accept it? Why are some intelligent people racist? Has to do with self-interest, I think. But it is in nearly everyone's self-interest for cold fuison to be real. And in any case, my question was really why don't *all* intelligent people accept it.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
or rather, why do nearly all intelligent people reject it. On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 11:44 AM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.comwrote: The question stands. If the evidence is so compelling, why don't intelligent people accept it? Why are some intelligent people racist? Has to do with self-interest, I think. But it is in nearly everyone's self-interest for cold fuison to be real. And in any case, my question was really why don't *all* intelligent people accept it.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Chris Zell chrisz...@wetmtv.com wrote: ** ** I believe that this lack of civility and fair play makes the 'extraordinary evidence' concept into nonsense. Civility has nothing to do with it. When evidence competes, the strongest evidence is taken more seriously. Keep in mind that the above *doesn't even begin to account for the distortion caused by entrenched moneyed interests. *Dr. Greer (of recent UFO exposure notoriety) referred to them as Petro-Fascists - which nicely sums them up. Anyone care to explain how an entire war costing hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives took place when it was entirely triggered by fraud? And hardly anyone seems to care? Not sure of your point. Academic scientists wouldn't give a hoot about Petro-fascists if an opportunity to win glory, honor and funding presented itself, as we saw in 1989. And the US government stands to benefit strategically against the petro-enemies if cold fusion were real. Fission and hot fusion were originally thought to be the final answer to our energy woes in the 50s and later, and the US pumped billions into both. Although it didn't work out the way everyone hoped, the incident shows that energy revolutions are not suppressed for petro interests or anyone else's. Any exception to generalizations - might always be inferior as to weightor strange, given lack of funding, Nonsense. High Tc superconductivity was instantly accepted. Quasi-crystals were ridiculed for a while but in a few years, they were embraced. Scientific inertia is no match for good evidence. If cold fusion were real, $500 M would be enough to produce similarly unequivocal evidence. A completely isolated device that can do some real work, or heat a large container of water, to prove its energy density is 10 or 100 times its weight in gasoline, would have the world beating a path to cold fusion's door …. again. attention or the outright prejudice that many encounter - in this circumstance of bias. The reality of cold fusion is in the interest of all but a very few researchers, so any bias in this area is more plausibly in its favor, as is obvious from 1989. The extraordinary goalposts might always be a distant illusion, especially if the desired effect is subtle or difficult to enlarge. This is true. If the evidence does not improve, it will come no closer to convincing the skeptics. Whatever his flaws ( and they are many) Rossi displays wisdom by attempting an end run around the biased. Godspeed to him in that. I don't know if Rossi will be able to maintain what is almost certainly a charade as long as Mills has (20 years) or if he will collapse as Steorn essentially has, but if it's the latter, he will have exposed many cold fusion believers like Storms, McKubre, and of course Rothwell, (but not all) as gullible fools. That will not help their cause.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:05 PM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: When blood transfusions were first tried (in 17th century?) some were a success and some ended in deaths and nobody knew why. It wasn't explained until the discovery of blood typing in the early 20th century. Until then blood transfusions were prohibited, for good ethical reasons. I don't see that as an example of the mainstream rejecting an idea that was eventually vindicated. They rejected indiscriminate transfusions for good reasons. Indiscriminate transfusions are still rejected. Why must a community comprised of intelligent people demonise certain research interests? What you see as demonizing is just the natural consequence of scientists making judgements and expressing their views on it. When these are favorable, scientists are venerated. It's not wrong to express your opinion.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:27 PM, Chris Zell chrisz...@wetmtv.com wrote: ** [medical anecdotes] If you're on of those who rejects evidence-based medicine in favor of anecdotal tales of cures from a vague sense of unease, then it's no surprise you are sucked in to the cold fusion vortex.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: However, if a minority of the intelligentsia judge the evidence is compelling it does not give the majority the right to portray the minority as stupid or delusional or as practicing pathological science. The right to express opinions is already present, as long as slander is not involved. That doesn't mean it's polite or good behavior, but usually these characterizations are implicit. And it really is appropriate for scientists to express their opinion that a certain pursuit is highly unlikely to be productive, and likely sustained by wishful thinking, just as it is to recommend other pursuits as inspired and viable.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: History is full of large groups of intelligent people who made ignorant errors leading to disasters. Especially military history. Examples include: Yet you insist it's impossible for a group of cold fusion researchers to make collective ignorant errors.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: The answer is that people often make drastic mistakes. Even intelligent people do. Even cold fusion researchers do. It was not obvious because these people were blinded by emotion. So are the people opposed to cold fusion, such as Robert Park and Cude. Facts, logic, analysis, common sense, education, the lessons of experience . . . all are sacrificed when emotions and the primate instinct for power politics take over the mind. The only plausible influence of emotion in the cold fusion controversy is the one that was on display in 1989 when people stood and cheered Pons, and thousands ran to their labs to try to be among the first to be associated with the revolution, and get their names up in lights. People really wanted cold fusion to be true. It was in their interest, and it was especially in the government's strategic and economic interest, so this claim that people are emotionally resistant to cold fusion is nonsense. Storms wrote: many of us were lured into believing that the Pons-Fleischmann effect would solve the world's energy problems and make us all rich. That's where the emotional pressure is. This is what history teaches us. Learn from it, or you too will make dreadful mistakes, as George Santayana said. History teaches that whacky ideas and fringe science are sometimes just wacky ideas and fringe science. There are degrees of certainty. We're all certain the earth orbits the sun and a rock falls to the ground, and proposals to the contrary would be dismissed with the certainty they deserve, regardless of how mistaken the Japanese were. The view that cold fusion isn't happening is not that certain, but I don't think the great unwashed, and some of the washed have any appreciation of how remote the possibility is. Almost like a rock being repelled by the earth. You've been singing the same tune for 2 decades. I predict you'll be singing it for another two.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I would like to explore this dreadful history a little more, because I know a lot about it. Certainly not because it has any relevance. What you're saying is that two countries are at war, one claims they will crush the other, and the other doesn't believe it, and therefore cold fusion is real. But for me, I'd associate the US with cold fusion skeptics, and Japan with the true believers. (In truth, I don't think the episode is in the least instructive to this debate.) Anyway, what about when Napolean said he would crush the 7th coalition at Waterloo? The coalition didn't just accept that and roll over either, and they of course were Napolean's waterloo. Or how about Sonny Liston, the heavy favorite in 1964 against Clay (Ali)? He said on the eve of the fight: Cassius, you're my million dollar baby, so please don't let anything happen to you before tomorrow night. Ali didn't back down though, and the rest is history. Of course Ali was far more vocal in his predictions, but in war and fights, both sides usually expect to win, or there wouldn't be wars. Cude and others have often said: If there was any chance cold fusion is real, of course smart people would support it. Everyone wants to see zero-cost energy. Then they say, since smart people do not support this research, that proves there is nothing to it, and no chance it will result in new technology. Obviously, no one could say that many smart people rejecting something proves it's wrong. What it proves is that the evidence for it is not conclusive or unequivocal, which is what true believers claim. Scientists make their judgements based on the evidence, and the vast majority judge the evidence to be weak, and given the overwhelmingly strong evidence against it, they remain skeptical. It's true that most scientists have not kept up with the details of cold fusion research, or even of its broad strokes, but in 1989, nearly every scientist on the planet looked pretty closely at cold fusion, and concluded it was almost certainly bogus. Since then, the evidence has not gotten any better, and so there is no reason to revisit that consensus. What most scientists (at least nuclear physicists) learned when they considered the possibility, was that if the claims of cold fusion advocates had merit, unequivocal evidence would almost certainly be rather easy to produce. And once produced would be submitted to and accepted by a prominent journal like Science or Nature. That hasn't happened. Also, a panel of experts enlisted by the DOE met in 2004 and examined the best of the evidence up to that time, and 17 of 18 said that evidence for LENR was not conclusive. And if do sample the informed opinion, by looking at the results of peer-review in prominent journals or by granting agencies (like the DOE panel), or by the fact that the APS recently rejected the publication of the ICCF conference, then you find that the consensus remains strong that cold fusion is almost certainly bogus. The difference between 1989 and now is that then we had two believable (even distinguished) guys who seemed to have stumbled on (or intuited their way to) a revolutionary claim that would be hard to get wrong. Now, we've got much more distinguished people who claimed negative results, who have looked carefully at the positive results and found they don't stand up, and most importantly, we've got dozens or even hundreds of people who have spent a long time looking for results, and the evidence still doesn't stand up. And experiments are not better (or at least the results are not better), and the theories are no more plausible, except to True Believers. Every new claim that is no better than the previous claims makes it look more pathological, not less. Moreover, there's no one left working in the field with the distinction of Fleischmann; all that's left is a bunch of mostly senior, run-of-the-mill scientists. So what happened in 1989 fits the pattern for some physics discoveries, and that's why people took notice. What's happened since fits the pattern for pathological science, and that's why it's now being ignored. Cude, Frank Close, the editors at Scientific American and others are not worried that they might be holding back a valuable technology. [...] You wrote a lot of words to say simply that skeptics consider the possibility of cold fusion being real exceedingly remote. The additional verbiage replaced by an ellipsis (as well as the entire Japanese story) was intended to put this attitude in a bad light, but then you say: They are as certain it is wrong as I am certain that creationism is wrong. completely deflating your argument. Because none of it was specific to cold fusion, but to the general idea of being too confident that something is wrong. And here you are, certain that something is wrong. The truth is that there *are* varying degrees of certainty about
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial 2
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Cude wrote: That's nonsense. It's the believers who are forever using tritium and neutrons at ridiculously low levels to prove PF were right. [...] No one says that tritium proves that PF's claims of excess heat is correct. Tritium cannot prove that calorimety works. That's absurd. It does prove there is a nuclear effect, which is indirect supporting evidence for heat beyond the limits of chemistry. That's not the same as proof. I'll rephrase without weakening the point: It's the believers who are forever using tritium and neutrons at ridiculously low levels to give PF more credibility. Still conflating the two. Also the tritium is not at ridiculously low levels. You misunderstood the context. The claims are at ridiculously low levels compared to what would be needed to explain the claimed heat. Capiche? It is at very high levels, easily measured, typically 10 to 50 times background, sometimes millions of times background. Storms writes (in the book): Tritium production is also too small and too infrequent to provide much information about the major processes. If the evidence for tritium were unequivocal, people would not abandon the experiments, and the explanation of their production would become clearer, and experts would be convinced by them. But in fact, as with heat (or neutrons), the situation is no clearer now than it was 20 years ago. There were a lot of searches for tritium in the early days, when people thought there might be conventional fusion reactions, and many people claimed to observe it. Some of the highest levels were observed at BARC within weeks of the 1989 press conference, when people thought ordinary fusion might be taking place, but as it became clear that the tritium could not account for the heat, and as the experiments became more careful, the tritium levels mostly decreased, just like pathological science everywhere. And some early claimants, like Will, got out of the field. In 1998 McKubre wrote: we may nevertheless state with some confidence that tritium is not a routinely produced product of the electrochemical loading of deuterium into palladium. In the last decade, there has been very little activity on the tritium front, which again, fits pathological science, and puts those early results -- some already under suspicion -- in serious doubt. To my mind, if they can't resolve the tritium question in some kind of definitive and quantitative way, there is no hope for heat. Isn't it interesting that neutrons can be detected at reaction rates a million times lower than tritium, and that's exactly where they're detected. You can predict the levels of nuclear products because they are correlated to the detection capability more closely than anything else. Easily measured, high sigma levels of tritium are not low because they are lower than an irrelevant inapplicable theory predicts. They would only be low if they are hard to measure. We all get that low is a relative term, but in the context of my sentence, it meant low compared to levels required to explain the heat.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
OK. My apologies. Like I said before, I came to post a review of Hagelstein's editorial, which, although negative, I did not think violated rule 2. And then, of course, I can't resist replying to direct responses to stuff I write, and it spiraled outta control. I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. Otherwise, adios. It's been a slice. On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 5:25 PM, William Beaty bi...@eskimo.com wrote: Please immediately move all debunking to VortexB-L. Vortex' Rule 2 is intended to prevent debunking-based postings here. Also please read: On Wed, 8 May 2013, Edmund Storms wrote: What is the usefulness of all this discussion. Cude will not accept the most obvious and well supported arguments and he will not accept what I just said here. Yes, such discussions usually prove pointless. A simple problem with a simple solution: DEBUNKING IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN ON VORTEX-L. If you see some, it's probably coming from someone who didn't read the forum rules: http://amasci.com/weird/wvort.**html#ruleshttp://amasci.com/weird/wvort.html#rules It's not just about no sneering. Skeptics are not welcome here. Vortex-L exists to provide a Believer forum which stays far away from the message traffic and time wasted in discussions with staunch non- Believers. There's plenty of other groups for such topics if you want to indulge (including vortexB-L.) And, if rule #2 isn't clear enough, well, here's the expanded version: http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.**htmlhttp://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Note well: I started this group as an openminded quiet harbor for interested parties to discuss the Griggs Rotor away from the believer-skeptic uproar on sci.physics.fusion. It quickly mutated into a believers forum for discussion of cold fusion and other anomalous physics. I created Rule #2 to prevent this list from becoming another battleground like the sci.physics.fusion newsgroup. Be warned: IF YOU SELF-IDENTIFY AS NON-WOO, THEN YOU COULD BE REMOVED FROM THE FORUM AT ANY TIME. PS Hey, part of that old article in THE SKEPTIC is now on google books... Skepticism and Credulity, Finding balance between Type-I and -II errors http://goo.gl/jU5Zf Another one: BERKUN, Why smart people defend bad ideas http://scottberkun.com/essays/**40-why-smart-people-defend-**bad-ideas/http://scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-bad-ideas/ (( ( ( ( ((O)) ) ) ) ))) William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb amasci comhttp://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:00 PM, William Beaty bi...@eskimo.com wrote: On Sat, 11 May 2013, Joshua Cude wrote: I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. [...] I push the crackpot-friendly aspect as a long-time experiment in Provisional Acceptance of crazy hypotheses. Currently in science, at least where weird topics are concerned, we instead operate with a philosophy of Provisional Disbelief, where we allow the evidence convince us to change our minds. But that's not the case for cold fusion, where provisional acceptance was the order of the day in 1989. Where Pons got a standing ovation, and scientists everywhere went to their labs to get in on the revolution. Where even eventual uberskeptic Douglas Morrison wrote: … I feel this subject will become so important to society that we must consider the broader implications as well as the scientific ones […] the present big power companies will be running down their oil and coal power stations while they are building deuterium separation plants and new power plants based on cold fusion.…. That's called provisional acceptance. It didn't stand up though. (I know I said I'd slink away, but many of the responses here are about argument style and so on, so I think it's legitimate to reply to some of them. I still plan debunking replies to some of Rothwell's longer posts, but I'll put them elsewhere.)
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I would not call Cude articulate. How could you. You said yourself, you don't read what I write. It would be presumptuous to give an opinion about something you haven't read. As McKubre often says, I could do a better job as a cold fusion skeptic than any of the skeptics. It's a pity he (or you) can't do a better job as a cold fusion advocate. Because the mainstream does not believe cold fusion is real. So the skeptics are doing a pretty good job. If McKubre (or you) can do a better job as skeptics, then that just means the mainstream would be even more convinced. I'm not sure how this helps your case. I know of actual weaknesses in the experiments, whereas Cude makes up stuff, reiterates assertions that was proved wrong in 1990, and refuses to address substantive technical issues such as McKubre's Fig. 1. I've not made anything up, anything I've reiterated has not been proved wrong to anyone's satisfaction except a small band of true believers, and I addressed the loading correlation twice, but how would you know, since you don't actually read what I write. I do not think Cude is a credit to the hardcore skeptics. But then, I do not know anyone else who is. This is like expecting someone to be a credible spokesperson for the Flat Earth Society. You've got this backward. The flat earth society rejects the mainstream view, just like cold fusion true believers.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 9:45 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you write about it? Which would be in violation of Rule 2, as well. Not at all. You can see many harsh critiques of cold fusion theory and experiments here in recent weeks, such as the debates between Beene and Storms. Not the same thing at all. Catholics argue about doctrine, but not about the existence of God. I don't particularly object to a the idea of a believer site, but Leitl is right here, that points of view critical of the reality of LENR are not welcome here (independent of the rules).
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote:
Vorl Bek vorl@antichef.com wrote:
From reading the exchanges here and on other forums, I have the
impression (my 'verdict') that the evidence for lenr is
either:
anecdotal ('all the water boiled out of the bucket!';'there
was a terrific explosion!' - that sort of report), but that the
events can not be repeated;
As McKubre shows, the events have been repeated. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionb.pdf
It shows that many groups claim excess heat, but he admits in the paper
that the experiments are not reproducible, in that some teams see nothing,
different results are seen in different labs, and inconsistent results are
seen in the same lab with similar samples.
They cannot be scaled up safely because they cannot be controlled.
Implausible excuse. There are ways to protect yourself against hundreds of
times more power or energy than observed in the biggest claims in cold
fusion. The plausible reason they don't scale up, is because when they do,
the effect doesn't get bigger.
in fact, according to Cude, claims have been scaled down over
the years.
That is correct. The cathodes are much smaller, for various reasons. The
ratio of heat to the mass of the cathode is much higher, however.
The main reason is because it gives confirmation bias a much better chance
when small errors can represent large *relative* effects.
Despite the cries here that nobody (I assume that means taxpayers)
will give money to allow lenr enthusiasts . . .
We are hoping that funding will be made available to professional
scientists, not enthusiasts. We would like to see a situation in which a
professional scientist with tenure can apply for a grant and not have
authorities call him up and threaten to shut down his lab or deport him.
Has this happened to Duncan, Hagelstein, Kim, Dash…? Because, if not, then
we have such a situation.
In other words, we favor traditional academic freedom, and the freedom to
do research the other scientists and the public thinks has no merit.
This freedom exists, but if the other scientists you're talking about
includes nearly all other scientists, it would be an insane system that
provides public funding for something that has no merit by nearly unanimous
opinion. There is competition for funding after all, and merit is the main
criterion.
to do the job they could
do if they had more money, I find it hard to believe that if there
was anything to the lenr effect, that some way of exploiting it
would not have been found since PF in 1989.
Why do you find it hard to believe this is difficult? Many other subject
are difficult, after all.
Because it's a small-scale experiment and the claim is a dramatically large
energy density. That's the claim to fame, after all.
Billions have been spent on plasma fusion with not significant progress
towards commercialization.
But the proof-of-principle was established at the beginning. And this is a
difficult, large-scale experiment -- its difficulty and scale being
precisely the reason cold fusion is so attractive, if only it worked.
There has not been much progress in HTSC which was discovered at about the
same time as cold fusion, even though HTSC got a lot more funding.
From the claim to acceptance of proof-of-principle required a tiny fraction
of what has been spent on cold fusion, which still does not have acceptance
of proof-of-principle.
In fact, the Japanese gave PF a lab and x million dollars and a
couple of years to repeat their original supposed lenr effect, and
they could not do it.
That is incorrect. The achieved high reproducibility, routinely triggering
boil offs in 64 cells at at time. The work culminated with cells that ran
for weeks at boiling temperature, at 40 to 100 W. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RouletteTresultsofi.pdf
Nothing like routinely triggering boil-offs in 64 cells is reported in
that paper. That paper reports excess heat in 2 or 3 cells out of 7, and
it's a sloppily prepared conference proceeding with sentences that aren't
finished, missing section headings, errors in the correlation between
figures and the experiment number in the table, sketchy and incomplete
information, absence of raw data in favor of processed excess power and so
on.
It's a pathetic example of a scientific report, and it is the *only* thing
that came out of the tens of millions spent by Toyota. It's no wonder
Fleischmann's name is not on it; he was probably ashamed.
There's a reason people put more weight on refereed papers. It saves
duplication of effort in trying to penetrate poorly presented results. In
any case, Pons knew the importance of refereed publication, and so failure
to achieve that is significant.
The paper promises more papers on more careful experiments (taking account
of recombination and so on), but nothing more was ever published, even
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: The existing level of good research almost certainly proves than nuclear reactions can occur at low temperature. No. That's manifestly wrong. If it almost certainly proves it, then experts who examine it would say that. But 17 of 18 of the DOE panel said the evidence was *not* conclusive, and the mainstream continues to disbelieve it. Therefore it is *not* proven. To be in denial of that evidence by skeptics is no more than intellectual dishonesty. No. You're the one who's dishonest. By saying it's proven, when it's not. Proof by assertion is not proof at all. Look at Blacklight Power after running through maybe $80 million. Are they close to market? They're not even close to proving they have an effect. BTW the need for enriched isotopes explains why many visitors - notably Krivit, were not shown a working device. No one was shown a working device, where by working I mean a device that proved nuclear reactions were producing heat. The Rossi reactor may sometimes work with the natural ratio of nickel-62, which is under 4% - but it is hit-or-miss. No. It's a miss or miss more. The need for isotopic enrichment explains many things in the Rossi saga. No it doesn't. It's just a wild ass speculation to rationalize his failures.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: I wrote an entire book in order to place the evidence in one place and to show how it relates to the claims. In 2007. The world's view was not changed by it, and it's obvious why. The evidence as reported in your book makes cold fusion less plausible. If you do not know enough science to read and understand this collection, than you have to accept somebody's word about what it says. You are then in the position of believing either Cude or me or Jed, based on which of us sounds more plausible. He is in the position, as are funding agencies, of accepting the judgement of the vast majority of experts (like the DOE panel and most Nobel laureates who have weighed in) or a small ragtag band of true believers. Cude will win that argument because he says what you already believe and he says it very well. I think the point is that this would not be possible if there were credible evidence for cold fusion. No amount of polemic can make high Tc superconductivity look bogus, for example. Cude will simply say the work describes error and I will say it does not. How will you judge which of us to believe? It's not that the errors are necessarily obvious, especially from written reports, and can be exposed one at a time. It's that if the claims were true, the demonstrations would get better, as they invariably do with real phenomena. But instead they get worse, and less frequent, as is typical of pathological science. Some claims that Rothwell likes to repeat are so outrageously high (100 W with no input), that unequivocal demonstrations like the Wrights' flight should be easy to do, and yet when 60 minutes did a piece on cold fusion, they had nothing to show other than Duncan doing a calculation in a notebook. So how to judge which to believe? Look at what's come since. Does it make sense that in a decade or two since whatever evidence you talk about, there is so little (if any) progress? Until you can buy a CF device from Wall Mart, I suspect you will not know what to believe. That's the problem. Is there a single phenomenon that was not believed until a commercial product was released? This is just the silliest argument among many very silly arguments from the true believers.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: I think it is rude for him not to address substantive points raised by others, such as McKubre Fig. 1. I did. Twice. I know it's easier for you to ignore what I write, and then attribute made-up arguments to me you think you can address, but if you're looking for an example of rudeness, that's it. Also, for example, he asked a legitimate question: In any case, my question was really why don't *all* intelligent people accept it. I made a serious effort to answer that question with an important example from history, of intelligent people who rejected what should have an irrefutable fact: that the U.S. would win an all-out war. Come on. You were just showing off. If you read the rest of my post, you'd realize I was making the point that war-time bravado and sociological decisions made in the heat of war are not the same as dispassionate decisions made by scientists over a period of many years. That you dig up that sort of example shows that there aren't any in the science arena.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: I think many people have expressed highly skeptical view of BLP, Rossi and others here. I think most of this skepticism is justified! And yet you have said: Rossi has given out *far* more proof than any previous cold fusion researcher. […] That test is irrefutable by first principles. If skepticism of Rossi is justified, then according to your statement, skepticism of the whole field is justified.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: Their method is assertion rather than trying to advance mutual understanding of the basic facts to be understood: there are no convincing experiments, there is zero credible evidence, every experimental result lies beneath the threshold of detection, and, by implication, there are no cold fusion researchers who can carry out a credible experiment. Here there has been little to no attempt to understand the history or the details of actual experiments. It's all over-broad generalization. You do seem to like arguing about arguing. But if you read the arguments, they do go beyond the simple assertion that the experiments are all wrong. I really think rehashing the details of all the experiments over 20 years would be a pointless exercise that would serve no purpose. This has been done -- with DOE panels and reviews of grants and journals etc -- and most scientists don't buy it. For casual observers, which I think includes most of the participants, it is possible to get a sense of the credibility of the evidence by making some general observations. So, for example, when Jones Benes argued that the tritium evidence was the bee's knees, he made no argument about specific results, but rather, based the argument on LANL's reputation. My reply was not mere assertion but a 5 point argument that dismantled his claim, and used LANL's reputation against cold fusion. In brief, it was that (1) the papers were all conference proceedings, (2) the same authors retracted neutron results, (3) Menlove jumped ship, (4) at the end the claimed levels were low, mostly near background, and (5) LANL abandoned the experiment in 1998 without a single respectable publication, and not a hint of the work on their web site. Similar arguments can be made about the tritium results in general. In particular, why is no one doing them anymore, considering nothing interesting about them has been settled.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 2:30 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: To be concrete, I think the issue is primarily one about attention to detail and to questions of burden of evidence. It's fine to be skeptical of the tritium evidence, for example. But if one is going to argue against it, one is going to have a lot of work to do. One will have to show how each tritium result in each experiment was wrong or questionable, in specific detail; i.e., the burden of evidence (on this list, at any rate) will be on the person arguing against tritium having been found in some LENR experiments. Again, I think that's nonsense. It's not possible to find errors in experiments, just by reading reports, especially when they are incomplete conference proceedings, as is the case for most of the tritium results. It would be a lot of guessing and would not advance the discussion. But the absence of glaring errors does not make a claim credible. What's needed is credible replications and some kind of visible progress. In the case of the tritium results, they vary by *ten* orders of magnitude, and no two labs get the same results or even consistent results themselves. I already argued why the LANL results are not persuasive. Likewise, BARC claimed high tritium results within weeks of the 1989 press conference using Pd-D, and then 2 years later they were claiming levels 5 orders of magnitude lower using H-Ni. What happened to Pd? Then you have Bockris's results were also very high, but were challenged as fraudulent. He was cleared in a hearing, but there was a *hearing*, rather than having the question settled in the lab. Can you imagine if someone had accused Mueller and Bednorz of fraud when they claimed high temperature superconductivity? They would have simply invited the accuser, or adjudicator, or his charge, to the lab, and they would have said, OK, Yup, it works. Or they could have called up *anyone* else in the field on the planet, and they could have said: Yup, it works, they're OK. Tritium results are supposed to be so obvious, but they had to have a hearing to determine if someone contaminated the experiment. You also have McKubre in 1988 confidently stating that tritium is not observed in electrolysis experiments. As with heat (or neutrons), the situation is no clearer with tritium now than it was 20 years ago. The levels have largely decreased over time, and in the last decade, there has been very little activity on the tritium front, which again, fits pathological science, and puts those early results -- some already under suspicion -- in serious doubt. To my mind, if they can't resolve the tritium question in some kind of definitive and quantitative way, there is no hope for heat. It's simply that one can't get away with a facile statement to the effect that there is no reliable evidence that the tritium findings are not contamination, etc. and expect it to advance anyone's understanding. It's just a dogmatic assertion, since there are specific reasons to think it's wrong. See above. That's not what I've done. I've said that if there were reliable evidence, the tritium saga would have played out differently, and not just slowly disappeared from the scene.
