Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:04 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: At 04:31 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: You are arguing with a straw man, Joshua. You're call yourself a straw man? It's obvious that many scientists do not accept cold fusion. So people write to explain it. That's somehow unusual or suspicious? No. It's usual and expected. You said they weren't, though; that CF had passed that stage. I was just trying to demonstrate that it hadn't. And now you agree. The reviews do not outnumber the primary research publications. If we look at recent publications, they are anomalously high, that's true, but the reviews are covering a vast body of literature, not just peer-reviewed work, they cover, as well, conference papers. I don't have a count for the primary papers, but mainstream peer-reviewed publication for the period of the 19 reviews is about 50 papers, using the Britz database. I counted 23 last time I looked a few months back. So yea, reviews don't outnumber them, but 5 were negative and 9 theoretical. That leaves 9 papers with new positive experimental data, less than half the number of reviews. (I excluded hydrino papers, and the Sourcebook papers, since the Sourcebook is not a legitimately peer-reviewed journal. Maybe that's the difference.) But even 19 reviews and 50 papers signals a dying field. 1/3 is plenty for correlation studies. You, and others like you, have invented an non-existent standard that scientific research should meet. If there is a drug that will cure a disease one-third of the time, there will be great excitement! You are now stating the low end of reproduction (without specific reference) and neglecting the high end. I don't have much data on the Energetics Techologies primary work, but it was replicated by McKubre and ENEA, reported in the American Chemical Society Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, 2008. Even within the Energetics work, reproducibility is abysmal. The summary of their results from 2008 I think claims 80%, but when you look at the results, no two experiments give the same answer. Only in CF is an experiment considered reproducible when it gives the same sign of a result. 23 cells were run and reported by McKubre. Excess power as a percentage of input power was given. They only gave specific excess power results if they reacjed 5% of input power, though their calorimetry has, I think, substantially better resolution than that. Of the 23 cells, 14 showed excess power at or above 5%. Two were at 5%, two were above 100% (200% and 300%), and the rest were intermediate. That's what I'm talkin about. I look at Table 1 in this paper and wish that it had simply presented the actual results, instead of filtering it and summarizing part. I'd want, for every cell, the actual measured or estimated excess energy. The chart presents excess power, but filters out *most* data below 5% of input power (presumably steady state input power at the times of the appearance of excess power). Filtering out the low end disallows understanding how the phenomenon operates under marginal conditions. Preaching to the choir. Indeed, your whole thesis here has been that there is a solid scientific consensus, in place for twenty years, that cold fusion is bogus. Now comes a review that clearly backs off from that, as to some substantial fraction of experts, and you manage to reframe it as all more of the same since 1989. Actually, it's how the summary of the review itself framed it. And do you realize that Pons and Fleischmann, per Fleischmann's account published something like 2003, was expecting to find nothing? Do you know what he was researching? Hint: it wasn't a technique for generating energy. He was doing pure science, attempting to falisfy a theory that he thought was correct, but that he also thought was incomplete. Indeed, it was necessarily incomplete, because it was an approximation. I'm not sure how that bears on any of this, but that's not what he said to Macneil Lehrer in 1989: It is this enormous compression of the species in the lattice [which he earlier said was 10^27 atmospheres] which made us think that it might be feasible to create conditions for fusion in such a simple reactor. I would assume that you'd have solid theoretical grounds for that assumption, some theory that is well-established, with excellent predictive power, that would be overturned if the experimental results are valid. Okay, what is that theory? How does it predict the results of cold fusion experiments. Please be specific! That seems backward to me. I'm not interested in developing a theory for why something doesn't work. If the results collectively showed evidence of something new going on, then it would be worth trying to understand them, but in my judgement, they don't. The fact remains, progress, experimental or theoretical, has been completely consistent with pathological
RE: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 01:30 AM 2/24/2011, you wrote: Not being able to concede a point is a clear sign of someone with an ulterior motive, or a pathological skeptic who simply can't accept things which challenge their understanding of things. Not surprising... He reminds me of some of the worst editors on Wikipedia! Yeah, one in particular who happens to be named Joshua. However, the style, the tone and emphasis was different, so I think it's unlikely. Or the Joshua I know has matured some. None of these skeptics can manage to get up a published review? Is Shanahan with his Letter responding to Krivit and Marwan in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring the best they can manage?
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
It seems like the field needs a new improved experiment showing helium/heat. Joshua, can you specify some parameters that would convince you? Sent from my iPhone.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 02:05 AM 2/24/2011, Rich Murray wrote: Abd, Thanks for your generous, civil response to Terry's idiot -- uh, naturally, it increases my confidence in you when you show up as the only one to fully understand and support my simple The Emperor has no clothes... critique about the error by SPAWAR of thinking an external high voltage DC field would be felt within a conducting electrolyte. To be fair to SPAWAR, they thought they saw a difference, and, after all, experiment trumps theory. But this particular theory is a whole lot more established than some vague concept that LENR is impossible. SPAWAR abandoned that line of inquiry, it seems. In the Galileoo protocol, they originally suggested using a magnetic field. A magnetic field might actually do something, it could influence conductive crystal growth at the surface of the cathode, perhaps. It turned out, though, that Pem said she'd been making assumptions, confusing what they'd found with nickel cathodes. It is always possible to get mildly significant results from chance. Given the chaotic nature of CF phenomena, it's a particular hazard. It would be nice if at some point, someone from SPAWAR would acknowledge the problem. The problem, in fact, should have been acknowledged in the very first paper, that an effect from an external electric field would be very contrary to expectation, but they treated it otherwise, as I recall. The publication also somewhat impeaches the reviewers, who should have questioned this, big time. Hindsight is wonderful, isn't it? People make mistakes, everyone makes mistakes. We have peculiar blind spots, sometimes. Your double sandwitch of active layers, only fitted together at the very start of exposure, is a really elegant way to reduce background clutter -- a third layer perpendicular to the sandwitch to catch glazing impacts is another very elegant feature -- can you set up a web cam to share online real time and continuously record what you see during runs with a microscope, while setting an audio alarm to go off when a flash occurs? Well, theoretically, the microscope is a USB device. I can take videos with it, but I think I have to download them, I don't think it will do live video, this one. I have another one that will. However, I don't think I'll go for live, at this point, too much complication on the connection end. And, I expect, it would be pretty boring. Again, setting up analysis for a flash would be work that I'm not up to. The microscope was not designed for this, and it has automatic level control. I really don't know what I'll see. I'm just going to look! Because of the thickness of the cell wall, I can't use the microscope at maximum magnification, i.e., I'll be using the 10x lens, which gives me 100x. It's a 1200 x 1600 pixel CCD; I'm not sure how I'll set it up. (I made a custom stage, so that the cell is held upright, while the microscope is laying on its side. Acrylic is great stuff, I've found.) Joshua Cude may be a scout, an agent provacateur who is testing the CF network to find its most competent members. Maybe. He has a coolness that is remarkable. I made a few mistakes, and he pinned them immediately. That's rare. More commonly with a pseudoskeptic, they are so certain you are wrong that they don't pay attention to the arguments at all, so mistakes pass unnoticed. Indeed, I was writing off the top of my head, for most of it, and some of what I wrote, that he caught, I'd written many times! By the way, I still have not confirmed that what he wrote was correct, and it might not have been. (I'm talking about the process for the 2004 DoE review.) But he was very definite and clear, and a quick check did not confirm what I had written ..., so ..., my interest is truth and clarity, not winning or trying to prove that I never make mistakes. I make mistakes. Let's get that one out of the way immediately! I'll eventually find a deeper source, or personal testimony from those involved. I haven't asked yet. The key that something was really off was, though, that he'd make sweeping statements that were clearly false, such as no peer-reviewed confirmation of heat/helium after Miles in 1993. I cited the counter-examples. If those had been errors, I'd think he'd have pinned those, too. Perhaps what I thought was peer-reviewed wasn't. (One can't always tell by the journal, and I didn't check the actual articles.) And he put great emphasis on this alleged absence, when, in fact, as to science, peer-reviewed papers provide additional confidence, that's true, but a reviewer writing a review of the field does his or her own screening of sources, and may use even private communications, whatever, and, then, if there is something off about the choice of sources, those who review the review would consider that! Testimony is testimony. In any case, Cude did not respond to that, but simply continued to make the original assertion. That
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: The key that something was really off was, though, that he'd make sweeping statements that were clearly false, such as no peer-reviewed confirmation of heat/helium after Miles in 1993. I cited the counter-examples. If those had been errors, I'd think he'd have pinned those, too. Perhaps what I thought was peer-reviewed wasn't. [...] In any case, Cude did not respond to that, but simply continued to make the original assertion. I did respond. Twice now. I concede the 1994 references, but that doesn't change the point. The only other refereed papers were from Arata, which I think showed helium but not quantitative correlation, and in any case did not represent enough of a confirmation for Storms to use their data in his calculation of energy per atom. All the rest of your references were conference proceedings or the Sourcebook, which is clearly not a peer-reviewed journal. So if I have to modify my statement, it would be that since 1994, no peer-reviewed confirmation has been regarded by Storms as quantitatively meaningful. Hardly weakened, I would say.
RE: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
Charles wrote: Isn't it more likely that the skeptics simply think the field is a joke, rather than that they're intimidated by the weight of the positive evidence? Yes, given the ridicule that CF has received over the years, that is certainly a good possibility... We're very complex beings and how we respond or interpret things is a function of what has happened in our lives... Especially the childhood years. So there are multiple possible explanations, and which ones are dominant in any one person is a function of their life's experiences... But for some, which is what prompted my comment, theory seems to have replaced religious belief, and that makes for someone who can be hit square between the eyes with facts that demolish their point, but which seem to have no impact at all on them... It's as if they didn't even hear what you said. The years have taught me that when you're debating with someone, in a rational way, and they begin to respond as described above, it's time to just walk away... Just agree to disagree. -Mark -Original Message- From: Charles Hope [mailto:lookslikeiwasri...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 8:56 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Cc: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude? Isn't it more likely that the skeptics simply think the field is a joke, rather than that they're intimidated by the weight of the positive evidence? Sent from my iPhone. On Feb 24, 2011, at 10:52, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 01:30 AM 2/24/2011, you wrote: Not being able to concede a point is a clear sign of someone with an ulterior motive, or a pathological skeptic who simply can't accept things which challenge their understanding of things. Not surprising... He reminds me of some of the worst editors on Wikipedia! Yeah, one in particular who happens to be named Joshua. However, the style, the tone and emphasis was different, so I think it's unlikely. Or the Joshua I know has matured some. None of these skeptics can manage to get up a published review? Is Shanahan with his Letter responding to Krivit and Marwan in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring the best they can manage?
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
I just had to chime in here, after reading this entire thread. I am amazed at how many of you have been so patient. Then again, I had a few cough that were that patient with me when I first paid attention to weird science too. My experience with septicism goes back a few years. I am not positive, but seem to remember that one of my favourite quotes originated from Chris Tinsley; or at least he used it several times. Forget pearls, pigs just look puzzled. Never attempt to teach a pig to sing. You will only frustrate yourself, and annoy the pig. This is not analogous to any particular person, merely a stepping back to look at what is really going on. If the assumptions made by any one person are not divulged - i.e., their background, interests in the field, experience, etc. - then you can rest assured there is a reason. They might, perhaps, be recognised. That would never do! Debbie On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Terry Blanton hohlr...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: I'm no longer writing for you, Cude. Ignore my posts if you like. Let us know if you have something substantive to say, beyond repeating your canned bluster. May whatever Deity is yours bless you Abd. I am amazed at your patience and perseverance. I recognized JC's P-S style from Bill Murray's illegal crossposts and chose to not engage JC. Oh, Rich, not Bill. Never argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience. T
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 11:44 AM 2/24/2011, Charles Hope wrote: It seems like the field needs a new improved experiment showing helium/heat. Joshua, can you specify some parameters that would convince you? I'm not sure that the field needs this, not as a priority. Improved heat/helium would make a nice grad student project, my opinion. The kind of thing that Cude thinks people would lap up: improving accuracy.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 11:56 AM 2/24/2011, Charles Hope wrote: Isn't it more likely that the skeptics simply think the field is a joke, rather than that they're intimidated by the weight of the positive evidence? I don't think anyone is intimidated by the weight of the evidence. Most skeptics simply don't know, that's all. And if they are already convinced that CF was a Huge Mistake, they are not motivated to find out. They will need, to change, either some commercial product, or massive shift in the literature. I don't know which will come first. There is a shift in the literature, but there is still a large, shall we say, blackout zone.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 04:22 PM 2/22/2011, Charles HOPE wrote: On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: [...] I'm designing and constructing a single, very specific experiment, that anyone could replicate with about $100 and a power supply. But this work is not designed to prove cold fusion. All it will do, if the replication succeeds, is show a few neutrons per hour. (The design is, I hope, insensitive to normal charged particle radiation, and will effectively exclude background.) Will that $100 include neutron detection? Yes. It will include a stack of LR-115 SSNTD material. Cheapest way I know to detect neutrons! The material is 100 microns of polyester with 6 microns of red cellulose nitrate. Like CR-39, though with somewhat different characteristics, cellulose nitrate is disrupted, weakened by charged particle radiation. The stack will have at least two layers of this film, if it's just two, two pieces will be front-to-front, making a sandwich: Polyester, CN, CN, Polyester. The stack is held to the outside of the acrylic experimental cell with two acrylic rods in opposite corners along one side, the two pieces are effectively pin-registered, and then are held down against the cell by another piece of acrylic pushed over the same pins. LR-115 is sold for neutron detection, through knock-on protons, which probably account for the bulk of the back side tracks seen by SPAWAR. Like CR-39, it is developed by etching with sodium hydroxide. It does not require as high an etching temperature, nor as long an etch time. The thin detector layer seems to give quite crisp track images; many or most tracks are etched entirely through the red layer, so they stand out, unlike the situation with CR-39. Generally, charged particle radiation, unless it's high energy, would not make it through the acrylic cell wall (1/16), nor through the polyester layers. The plan is to assemble the detector stack when setting up the cell, before that, the pieces of film are kept separately. So background radiation from cosmic rays, radon, etc., in storage, will only produce a single track, nothing matching on the other film. What I will be looking for is coincident tracks, that cross from one detector layer to the next. These would not be background, generally, only actual immediate background during the experiment would cross. In addition, I may be able to obtain vector and energy information. If I'm lucky, I might see some triple tracks. This is dry configuration, the cathode will be held against the inside of the cell wall, instead of being held against the CR-39 as in the Galileo protocol. At this point, since I have not run this experiment, I'm not selling kits, but all the materials are available, including LR-115 by the sheet. A 9x12 cm sheet is $27.90, plus shipping, probably about $5 for priority mail to anywhere in the U.S. I also have food grade NaOH, which seems good enough http://lomaxdesign.com/coldfusion/
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: To summarize Cude's position: He does not believe in the scientific method, replication, high signal to noise ratios, peer review, calorimetry or the laws of thermodynamics. To be exact, he believe that whatever pops into his own mind, or what he says I believe, automatically overrules all of the above and the other 400 years of academic science. Most of those things are tools, and I believe in them like I believe in hammers. But no matter how much you believe in hammers, it doesn't mean you can build a house. Outside the field of cold fusion, scientific progress has continued apace, indicating the scientists are using the tools of science effectively. And in the judgement of most of these scientists, with these tools at their disposal, the likelihood of anything interesting going on in cold fusion experiments is very remote. Inside the field of cold fusion, progress has been stalled for a long time. Someone at the India meeting wrote somewhere (maybe on NET), that the meeting was pretty uninteresting, and that the field is moribund. So, it would seem the scientists doing work on cold fusion don't know how to swing a hammer.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
This becomes an examination of the tendentious pseudo-skepticism of Joshua Cude, who, I have concluded, is so careless with the evidence he presents, distorting it in his summarization of it, enough that I consider it the equivalent of lying. People lie. It is sometimes necessary to point it out. The benefit/cost ratio of this discussion has been declining, but some issues of interest have still come up this time. Mostly this becomes a rehashing, though, of standard skeptical arguments, repeated over and over with no attempt to find areas of agreement. Arguments shown to be contrary to fact are repeated later, without any sign that the counter-arguments have even been read. Bald assertions that are demonstrably false by the presentation of simple counterexamples, are again repeated. Etc. I consider Joshua Cude thoroughly discredited, not to be trusted. At 11:32 PM 2/22/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: Cold fusion would revolutionize the field of fusion if it were valid. Physics journals would fight to publish the results, if they felt they were credible. It is a physics field, whether you ... like it or not, I presume. The methods are those of electrochemistry or materials science, not those of nuclear physics. There isn't any radiation produced -- to speak of. Sure, there is some nuclear process going on, but Joshua here is expressing ownership of reality by a particular discipline. That's offensive. Chemists have the right to say this is not the chemistry we know, just as much as the physicists have the right to say this is not the physics we know. What's offensive is when one says, this is not what we know and therefore you are wrong. I'm saying that the chemists found something that they, experts in chemistry, say is not chemistry. If it's not nuclear physics, fine. What is it? Uninterested? That's your privilege. Are you a nuclear physicist, Joshua? Cold fusion is either (Joshua's position) pure chemistry or it is cross-disciplinary (my position; the methods of chemistry with a result indicating something involving nuclear physics). So if Joshua is right, then his position that physics journals should be covering it is contradictory. If it's chemistry, it belongs in chemistry journals, or in multdisciplinary journals if there are possibly cross-disciplinary issues. There is a law called Moulton's Law: when a bureaucracy makes a mistake, it is impossible to fix. If cold fusion were to turn out to be real, it would of course be huge, and very embarrassing to all the skeptics. They would not take the chance unless they believed sincerely, and with high degree of certainty, that it is bogus, Moulton's law or not. CBS spoke with Richard Garwin, who said that they say there is no doubt, but I doubt, so there is doubt, or something like that. I don't doubt that Garwin doubts, but what they say is that there is no reasonable doubt. Is Garwin's doubt reasonable? To determine that, we'd need to look at a lot of details. What is the basis for his doubt? Just general lack of understanding? That can be reasonable, sometimes. But it also is not evidence of any kind, other than very personal evidence, which can vary greatly from person to person. Is the problem that Garwin accepts a different body of evidence than the ones who conclude that CF is real? If so, what evidence is accepted, in common, and what is rejected, and why, specifically, is this or that piece of evidence rejected, if it is. And what is the basis for rejection? What can happen, and which commonly happens, with entrenched conflict like this, is that the evidence is rejected because it tends to lead to a conclusion that the one rejecting does not like. That's very common in debate. Evidence is attacked because of conclusions that it could imply. But science looks for maximum harmonization. We might know the truth about cold fusion when we have an explanatory theory, or set of theories, that harmonizes all the evidence, and when those theories have been tested through confirmed predictions. What I'm claiming is that we already have this, in part. This theory does not explain everything. But it does explain a great deal, and is not inconsistent with *any* experimental data. But this, Joshua continues to reject, and bases his rejection of experimental evidence on his *belief* that cold fusion, if real, would have resulted in the creation of a particular kind of device that meets his personal criterion, his own particular cup of tea. This is an individual claiming authority over science. It does not work like that. This is what is really happening: the two largest scientific publishers in the world, Springer-Verlag and Elsevier, are now publishing substantial material on cold fusion. Big deal. Publishers get paid to publish. It is the editorial boards of journals that must answer to content. Elsevier publishes on the paranormal, homeopathy, and astrology too.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 01:03 AM 2/23/2011, Rich Murray wrote: Neither Joshua nor I are implacable doctrinaire skeptics. Again, I am very impressed by the clarity and scope of Joshua Cude's assessments. Now, it is clear that he has been monitoring cold fusion adequately for many years. You are not a doctrinaire skeptic. You may have some screws loose, but so do many of us. :-) He is such a skeptic. Yes. He knows *some* of the evidence well. His knowledge, though, is that of one who has made a diligent search for anything he can present to create a particular impression. Your position is different. Cold fusion has always been a moribund field, as I observed carefully from 1997 to about 2003 -- the image that comes to my mind now is that of a random scatter of bird seed under the feeder, becoming a variety of seedlings that never thrive, mature, or leave new generations. In that period, cold fusion publication declined to a nadir in about 20004-2005. It has since roughly quadrupled. There are many problems with the state of the research, problems with how research is published and presented, but much of this is related, as Bart Simon studies in Undead Science, to the effects of the marginalization of the field in 1989-1990. I like Jed, and I like Abd. Joshua's replies to their arguments are convincing. Their debate deserves thoughtful and repeated study -- perhaps a classic clarifying contribution in the process of cold fusion work since 1989. Rich, Joshua's arguments are honed and refined to be convincing to someone who is not intimately familiar with the evidence. If you like, I'd suggest we go over some particular details, I trust that you would give it your best shot at understanding. I also know, however, that you invested a lot of time in studying this from a skeptical point of view, and it's difficult to set that aside and give it a fresh look. You've noticed some things. For example, that the CF work of the SPAWAR group, allegedly showing some kind of morphological changes and enhancement of results by a supposedly strong electric field, allegedly created by placing plates on either side of the cell, is highly unlikely, because, as you pointed out, the field will mostly be found across the acrylic cell walls, and the field in the conductive electrolyte must necessarily be very low, because of very low current. I find the silence of the SPAWAR group on this puzzling, myself. CF results are commonly chaotic, to really understand the effect of some change, one must see it across many experiments, not just a few, but performing these experiments takes a great deal of time. So people publish what looks like interesting work, even if, in fact, what has been found is of little statistical significance. Often the data we would need to really judge significance is missing. As an example, consider the ET SuperWave replication work done by McKubre and ENEA, and published in the 2008 ACS Sourcebook. I think you may not have that source, but don't worry, what I'm going to say about it is pretty simple. McKubre shows a series of 23 cells in his table of result, and it looks like this may be all the cells he ran. Good. That gives us a clue as to relative success of the approach. However, even with McKubre, he hasn't filled out the chart with his actual experimental data, he only gives actual results for those cells with 5% or more maximum excess power as a percentage of input power. Then he gives total excess energy only for those 14 cells. In presenting the relatively dead cells and their estimated loading, he's done more than many CF researchers do. But in not giving us the calculated excess energy, maximum excess power in mW, and the actual calculated maximum excess power for the low-performing cells (He only states 5% for some, or, no explanation, gives 1%, 3% and 4% for three, I cannot look at his data and perform good correlation on it, it's a deficient correlation that I could do. As to the ENEA results, the paper only gives summarized results of six successful ENEA replication attempts, three of which are discussed in detail. There is no statement of how many cells were unsuccessful. Two cells showed over 100% excess power, one 100%. (I find it hard to believe that the calculated results landed precisely on multiples of 100%. The data has been rounded. Why?) One cell is reported as 7000%, the largest excess power observed at ENEA. (Notice that excess power is a very different result from excess energy, which is integrated power. Lots of CF papers don't really make the distinction crystal clear. Both results can be very significant, each in their own way.) Given that the paper is exploring the application of the SuperWave technique, presumably to report on the very interesting question of whether or not SuperWave improves results, making them stronger or more reliable, the deficiency it reporting on the ENEA results, in particular, stands
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
If a device can produce 10 kernels of wheat from one kernel, you only need one kernel to feed the world. Once it gets going, there is no input required. Sure. Let's look at the analogy. You can produce 10 kernels of wheat from one kernel. Easy. Plant it. Does that mean that the world is fed because you have one kernel? Well, yes. Or at least all the wheat in the world comes from kernels produced in previous harvests. There is no external input of wheat kernels. When the energy from cold fusion can be sowed to produce more energy, eliminating the need for external input of energy, then you will have something. (And just to forestall a likely objection: Yes, growing wheat takes external energy, just like producing energy from CF takes external hydrogen and Pd. So don't mix up the analogy. Wheat production does not require external input of wheat. When unambiguous energy production by CF should does not require external input of energy, the question of artifacts is mute.) Cude holds a series of contradictory assumptions that he asserts, one at a time, or a few at a time. It's polemic, debate tactics. Each meme is designed to discredit cold fusion. Because that's his goal, he doesn't care if his ideas are self-contradictory, he's just looking for one more reader to be hooked, to swallow his bait, to walk away with, Yeah, how come they couldn't reproduce that experiment? You know, if you spent less time trying to analyze my motives, and describe my style, and call me names, and stuck to the topic, your posts would be 1/3 as long, and much more compelling reading. In prior correspondence, Cude asserted this claim that confirmation of Miles was not published under peer review. I cited a series of the confirming papers published under peer review in mainstream journals. He simply ignored that and, above, repeats the assertion. Give me time. I'll get to it. I do have other responsibilities, alas. But briefly, those were mostly conf proceedings, and the Arata publications identified helium but did not (so far as I know -- some are Japanese) give correlations. In any case, Storms ignores Arata's results in his calculation of correlation, so that's not a ringing endorsement. The experiments Storms uses for his calculations after Miles were all conf proceedings, and even then, the last one was from 2000 -- 11 years ago. So you've got Miles results from 1994, severely criticized in the literature by Jones in 1995, and after that nothing but conference proceedings. In a 20-year old field with hundreds of experts working. The variation of the results is huge considering the accuracy with which you claim heat and helium can be measured, but in 11 years no one bothers working on it. Pathetic, really.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
- Original Message From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Wed, February 23, 2011 12:16:39 PM Subject: Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude? At this point, since I have not run this experiment, I'm not selling kits, but all the materials are available, including LR-115 by the sheet. A 9x12 cm sheet is $27.90, plus shipping, probably about $5 for priority mail to anywhere in the U.S. I also have food grade NaOH, which seems good enough http://lomaxdesign.com/coldfusion/ Well done...but your local nuclear regulatory agency might shutdown your business until the kit is thorougly screened for all manner of emissions. Or have you already got that covered? Anyway I would buy one of the kits and try to show it to some nuclear scientists. I live in a town where the main employer is a government funded nuclear research lab, CRL (Chalk River Research Laboratory) whose principle missions include the production of medical isotopes and technical support for the CANDU reactor. Both operations are run by the crown corporation AECL (atomic energy of canada ltd.) Currently the future of AECL and CRL is up in the air. The government wants to break up AECL by selling off the CANDU reactor and operations. It will maintain ownership of CRL while but want it to be run by the private sector. Harry
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 05:25 PM 2/23/2011, Harry Veeder wrote: Well done...but your local nuclear regulatory agency might shutdown your business until the kit is thorougly screened for all manner of emissions. Or have you already got that covered? Well, you should understand the expected neutron level. From my understanding, the level is about ten times cosmic ray neutron background, but the emitter is very small and background refers to the SSNTD that is very close to the cathode. The level at human distances away would be well below background. And neutron background is very low, there is much more dangerous radon floating around as well. I'll be lucky if I get a neutron per hour leaving tracks. But the experiment runs for about three weeks Anyway I would buy one of the kits and try to show it to some nuclear scientists. I live in a town where the main employer is a government funded nuclear research lab, CRL (Chalk River Research Laboratory) whose principle missions include the production of medical isotopes and technical support for the CANDU reactor. Both operations are run by the crown corporation AECL (atomic energy of canada ltd.) Currently the future of AECL and CRL is up in the air. The government wants to break up AECL by selling off the CANDU reactor and operations. It will maintain ownership of CRL while but want it to be run by the private sector. Harry I'll announce the kits when they are available. Making replication easy was the idea! You can do a lot more with these kits than the simple experiment. As I've mentioned, I'll be watching the cathode with a microscope. What will I see when I watch in the dark? I'll have a piezoelectric detector on the deuterium cell and a control hydrogen cell ($70?), listening. What will I hear, or more to the point, see with a high-bandwidth oscilloscope? Will I see any sign of excess heat? I'm not doing careful calorimetry, but hey, why not at least observe cell temperature and ambient? I'm doing what's cheap and easy to do. Later, with a cell like this, drop a little beryllium chloride into the electolyte and See What Happens. Anything? This is what I call fun. Thinking about it is fun. Doing it is work, to get there, but is, overall, I believe, even more fun. And then I get to write about it -- whatever happens! That's fun, too And it might do some good. I'm also going to try something that I haven't mentioned, since it only costs me a buck. I will place, below the cathode SSNTD, another SSNTD, oriented edge-on to the cathode. I want to see if I can capture the full length of some tracks I intend to, first, expose some LR-115 edge-on to my Am-241 source. There is lots of High School Science possibility here
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 04:48 PM 2/23/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: If a device can produce 10 kernels of wheat from one kernel, you only need one kernel to feed the world. Once it gets going, there is no input required. Sure. Let's look at the analogy. You can produce 10 kernels of wheat from one kernel. Easy. Plant it. Does that mean that the world is fed because you have one kernel? Well, yes. Or at least all the wheat in the world comes from kernels produced in previous harvests. There is no external input of wheat kernels. When the energy from cold fusion can be sowed to produce more energy, eliminating the need for external input of energy, then you will have something. Sure. And when we can produce all the wheat we need without any seed input, we'd really have something with that, as well. Cude holds a series of contradictory assumptions that he asserts, one at a time, or a few at a time. It's polemic, debate tactics. Each meme is designed to discredit cold fusion. Because that's his goal, he doesn't care if his ideas are self-contradictory, he's just looking for one more reader to be hooked, to swallow his bait, to walk away with, Yeah, how come they couldn't reproduce that experiment? You know, if you spent less time trying to analyze my motives, and describe my style, and call me names, and stuck to the topic, your posts would be 1/3 as long, and much more compelling reading. I'm no longer writing for you, Cude. Ignore my posts if you like. Let us know if you have something substantive to say, beyond repeating your canned bluster.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
By the way, my responses to Cude will be drastically shortened, I suspect. If Cude raises some issue that anyone think is crying out for an answer, second the motion, so to speak. Ask for response.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: I'm no longer writing for you, Cude. Ignore my posts if you like. Let us know if you have something substantive to say, beyond repeating your canned bluster. May whatever Deity is yours bless you Abd. I am amazed at your patience and perseverance. I recognized JC's P-S style from Bill Murray's illegal crossposts and chose to not engage JC. Oh, Rich, not Bill. Never argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience. T
RE: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
Abd: You've been most patient, and Jed too, in trying to bring JC up to speed on the facts, don't waste your time... Of course, one could predict how he was going to respond, with the following statement: You know, if you spent less time trying to analyze my motives, and describe my style, and call me names, and stuck to the topic, your posts would be 1/3 as long, and much more compelling reading. It's completely obvious to anyone who takes the time to read this thread that you and Jed have been most patient, and it was only your most recent posting or two that delved in his motives. Up to that time, you both genuinely tried to update him on the state of the field, but as you so aptly stated, JC doesn't even acknowledge those instances where you or Jed present him with facts which refute his hand-waving and sweeping generalizations... He doesn't even have the decency to acknowledge when you make a valid point -- that one thing is essential to gaining any credibility and respect from the Vort collective. Not being able to concede a point is a clear sign of someone with an ulterior motive, or a pathological skeptic who simply can't accept things which challenge their understanding of things. Not surprising... He reminds me of some of the worst editors on Wikipedia! -Mark -Original Message- From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 3:19 PM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com; vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude? By the way, my responses to Cude will be drastically shortened, I suspect. If Cude raises some issue that anyone think is crying out for an answer, second the motion, so to speak. Ask for response.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
Abd, Thanks for your generous, civil response to Terry's idiot -- uh, naturally, it increases my confidence in you when you show up as the only one to fully understand and support my simple The Emperor has no clothes... critique about the error by SPAWAR of thinking an external high voltage DC field would be felt within a conducting electrolyte. Your double sandwitch of active layers, only fitted together at the very start of exposure, is a really elegant way to reduce background clutter -- a third layer perpendicular to the sandwitch to catch glazing impacts is another very elegant feature -- can you set up a web cam to share online real time and continuously record what you see during runs with a microscope, while setting an audio alarm to go off when a flash occurs? Joshua Cude may be a scout, an agent provacateur who is testing the CF network to find its most competent members. I will join the CF network at Wikiversity -- maybe I can start groups to work with the toxicity of aspartame (methanol, formaldehyde, formic acid), and on the subtle details in the deepest Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Originality is the spirited spice of dreams. I haven't kept on cross-posting, as Vortex-L has become my active venue for CF. Gratefully, Rich On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Terry Blanton hohlr...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: I'm no longer writing for you, Cude. Ignore my posts if you like. Let us know if you have something substantive to say, beyond repeating your canned bluster. May whatever Deity is yours bless you Abd. I am amazed at your patience and perseverance. I recognized JC's P-S style from Bill Murray's illegal crossposts and chose to not engage JC. Oh, Rich, not Bill. Never argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience. T
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 10:34 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: At 03:01 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: By whom? Maybe you're new to the field. Well, not exactly. It was a joke. Promises have been made by Pons Fleischmann first in 1989 (just watch their interviews on youtube, where they claim it is the ideal energy source: clean and unlimited and simple) and then by just about every cold fusion advocate since, including McKubre on 60 minutes promising cars that don't need refueling, Rothwell's entire book of promises, and promises from shady characters like Dardik and Rossi. There are endless promises every time the topic arises. Pons and Fleischmann made no such promise. They noted the potential, *if* this could be developed. First of all, has promise normally has a built in hypothetical. The child showed remarkable promise in the recital. That's the way the promise of CF has been voiced. It's what I meant. Secondly, from an interview in 1989: Macneil / Lehrer: This is being hailed as the ideal energy source. Is that the case? Fleischmann: Yes. There would be many advantages in using it as an energy source. Because, as was referred to in the run-in to this program, the reaction would be clean, ... the fuel supply would be plentiful, and it could ... be carried out in a very simple manner. That's an expression of promise for the field of cold fusion. Fleischmann wrote that it would take a Manhattan-scale project. This is not an easy problem. Unlike the original Manahattan project, there is no explanatory theory, making engineering extremely difficult. And that has nothing to do with the science. It certainly has nothing to do with whether or not there is measurable excess heat, since we can measure heat in milliwatts and the experiments often generate heat in the 5 or 10 watt range, sometimes much more. Sometimes the heat generated is well in excess of all energy put in to electrolyse the deuterium. In gas-loading experiments, there is no input energy, beyond the natural heat of formation of palladium deuteride. I.e., we definitely get excess heat, over input energy, with gas-loading, but this is still small, overall, and it's difficult to scale. This is where a lot of current work has gone. The difficulty in scaling robs those experiments of credibility. The gas loading experiments have to detect nuclear heat above considerable chemical heat, and the results are far from convincing. If a trace amount of Pd produces a watt or so of power, why would 10 or 100 times as much not produce 10 or 100 times the power? Why does it only work when the measurements are dubious. And why can't Arata pressurize a small cell with his magic powder, isolate it from all external connections, and demonstrate that the thing gives off heat indefinitely? Quite simply, that an effect is commercializable -- or not -- could affect decisions about research funding, for sure, but it has nothing to do with whether it is real or not. Agree? Disagree. If an effect is not real, it is not commercializable. If it is real, it may be. If nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments are producing measurable heat, it would be daft to think that it is not commercializable. Cold fusion is a natural phenomenon, it promises nothing unless a way can be found to make it happen reliably and with sufficient return on energy input to cover losses. Well, yes, but there are many claims of reliability (100%) with huge returns (10, 20, even hundreds), but still no delivery on the promise. There is a single, easily-describable, repeatable experiment. It has nothing to do with huge returns, which are, themselves, anomalous, i.e., generally not repeatable. It is pure science, i.e., it establishes that there is an effect, excess heat correlated with helium. You do, I hope, understand that correlation can establish this kind of thing even if the effect itself is quite unreliable. Right? Muon-catalyzed fusion, when discovered, was first thought to be a possible energy source. That remains as a possibility, but, the problem was, nobody knows how to make muons and keep them active long enough to recover the energy cost. Muon-catalyzed fusion was discovered by the associated radiation (neutrons). Cold fusion was claimed on the basis of excess energy. That's a big difference. If you start with excess energy, then there's no need to find a way to get excess energy. No, muon-catalyzed fusion was predicted first, before it was confirmed. Yes, it was then confirmed through neutrons, I understand. Cold fusion was not predicted and was not claimed on the basis of energy alone. That's a myth of the history. What was actually claimed was an unknown nuclear reaction. Yes, unknown nuclear reaction was claimed on the basis of the energy *density.* You're not contradicting me. Muon-catalyzed fusion started (experimentally) with neutrons, cold fusion started
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 10:34 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: Excess heat is an experimental result. Excess heat is an interpretation of experimental results. If it is the result of an artifact, it should be possible to identify the artifact. Maybe, but it takes time and effort. Time and effort that skeptics are not inclined to commit because they do not find the results compelling enough. If the result is not an artifact, the thinking goes, a better experiment should be possible. This is the point, Joshua: There are hundreds of researchers who have reported significant anomalous heat from palladium deuteride. The large number is actually disturbing. So many experiments, and they never get better. They can't come up with one that captures the attention of mainstream. They can't make an isolated device that generates heat. In fact, consistent with other pathological science, the size of the effect (with the exception of the dubious Rossi device) has become smaller over the years. Science doesn't work that way. Pathological science does. It's like hundreds of thousands of alien and ufo sightings, but none quite good enough to be convincing. The better the photography, the less convincing the image. My question to you is, it seems that you believe there is no excess heat. From what does this belief stem? You haven't been listening. From the absence of any progress. From the inability to generate heat indefinitely from and isolated device. Most likely, if you are reasonable, you think that there is something that appears to be excess heat, fooling the researchers. But, something is not a scientific explanation. If there is something fooling this many researchers, it should be possible to figure out what it is. Lots of people have tried, you know. However, did they try hard enough? Most people gave up trying a long time ago. Most no longer care what the something is or what the many things are. They are satisfied that if there is excess heat, someone will find a way to demonstrate it conclusively, with an isolated device that generates heat indefinitely. Cold fusion is often classed with N-rays and polywater, but in each of those examples, the artifact was rather quickly found, once there were enough people looking and running controlled experiments. Actually an artifact was not found for N-rays. Wood failed to reproduce the results, and debunked them by sabotaging Blondlot's experiment, effectively forcing a blinded experiment, and proving cognitive bias. In spite of the debunking, Blondlot continued to be convinced of N-rays for another 20 years. In any case, there are also examples of marginal disciplines that will likely never be accepted by science, and never be disproven to the satisfaction of its adherents. Homeopathy and perpetual motion are two examples. Not all fields are the same. When scientists do not believe an effect is present, they have no motivation to waste their time trying to find other people's mistakes. At least in the case of N-rays, the time required was minimal. Wood complained he had wasted a whole morning on the experiment, before he was enlisted to go to France for his famous sabotage. You can't do CF in a morning, and sabotage is not as simple in CF. A credible double-blind test in CF would be telling, but it would require the cooperation of believers and skeptics, something not likely to happen. Was the artifact ever identified with cold fusion, Joshua? You seem to believe that there must be one. But what does the preponderance of the evidence show at this time? How would you judge? Like N-rays, it may just be cognitive bias. The preponderance of evidence, the absence of progress, the diminishing size of the effect, suggest the absence of excess heat. And how can you explain the helium correlation, that magically happens to appear at the right value for fusion? (Huizenga was amazed that it was within an order of magnitude of that value, Miles' helium measurements were relatively crude compared to what was done later.) I don't believe there is excess heat, and I don't believe there is a correlation with helium. Miles measurements were relatively crude, but judging by peer-review, they were the best so far. The only more recent peer-reviewed results admit helium is not definitive. And those who found it at least somewhat compelling, not a single one was compelled enough to recommend special funding for the field. That would be criminal if they thought there was even a slight chance of solving the world's energy problems. So there is no way you can say the evidence is overwhelming, based on the DOE panel. No. See, this is a conclusion from your opinion about practical application. My own opinion is that the field is not ready for a massive special program. The problem is that we don't know what's happening! We could easily throw endless amounts of money at this, and end up with
RE: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
From: Joshua Cude From Lomax: This is the point, Joshua: There are hundreds of researchers who have reported significant anomalous heat from palladium deuteride. The large number is actually disturbing. So many experiments, and they never get better. They can't come up with one that captures the attention of mainstream. They can't make an isolated device that generates heat. In fact, consistent with other pathological science, the size of the effect (with the exception of the dubious Rossi device) has become smaller over the years. Science doesn't work that way. Pathological science does. I've read enuf... Now, I know why I have not wanted to dwell too much on this particular thread. Life's too short. I try to dispense what limited resources I have left in my life wisely. Mr. Lomax: There's an old saying. I'm sure you've heard of it. Do not cast pearls before swine. Mr. Cude: Relying on subjective circular reasoning to validate your POV is no way to go through life, win friends and influence people. But by all means, continue to hug your cactus. My two cents. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On 02/21/2011 03:01 PM, Joshua Cude wrote: Promises have been made by Pons Fleischmann first in 1989 (just watch their interviews on youtube, where they claim it is the ideal energy source: clean and unlimited and simple) and then by just about every cold fusion advocate since, including McKubre on 60 minutes promising cars that don't need refueling, Rothwell's entire book of promises, and promises from shady characters like Dardik and Rossi. There are endless promises every time the topic arises. [...] Cold fusion [...] has not delivered. That's true in a field I've spent some time working in, too. People promise all sorts of things, and then the things show up years late, or more often never show up as promised, at all. In fact, I've made promises which later turned out to be impossible to deliver on, weren't even possible in theory, as we figured out much later. So, I guess the stuff I work with is all bunk, all just phony-baloney, it's lies and coverups, it can't be real, because we don't succeed in delivering on our promises. It's really too bad, if the sort of stuff I worked on were real, it would make a big difference to the world. But we miss on our promises, so it's all hokum; that's totally conclusive, air-tight reasoning, Joshua sure hit the nail on the head there. Too bad. I'm a programmer, by the way.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 9:18 AM, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.comwrote: On 02/21/2011 03:01 PM, Joshua Cude wrote: Promises have been made by Pons Fleischmann first in 1989 (just watch their interviews on youtube, where they claim it is the ideal energy source: clean and unlimited and simple) and then by just about every cold fusion advocate since, including McKubre on 60 minutes promising cars that don't need refueling, Rothwell's entire book of promises, and promises from shady characters like Dardik and Rossi. There are endless promises every time the topic arises. [...] Cold fusion [...] has not delivered. So, I guess the stuff I work with is all bunk, all just phony-baloney, it's lies and coverups, it can't be real, because we don't succeed in delivering on our promises. It's really too bad, if the sort of stuff I worked on were real, it would make a big difference to the world. But we miss on our promises, so it's all hokum; that's totally conclusive, air-tight reasoning, Joshua sure hit the nail on the head there. It's hard to comment without specifics. But I also gave an example of a technology that has not delivered on its promises (high temp superconductivity), which is nevertheless a legitimate phenomenon. But it is able to demonstrate proof-of-principle on a small scale. In the case of cold fusion, it's not the failure to replace fossil fuels after 20 years that's the problem. It's that in spite of grandiose promises, even proof-of-priciple has eluded the field. Yes, advocates will say it has been proven beyond a doubt, but the fact is that it has not been proven to the DOE or to mainstream science. They can't even make an isolated device that generates unambiguous heat in obvious excess of its own weight in rocket fuel. That, I submit, is a very small barrier to legitimacy. If the world accepted proof-of-principle, it would forgive failure to deliver on the big stuff for a very long time. Look at hot fusion for proof of that.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 03:31 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: I've seen what they write. Practically every review is preoccupied with defending the reality of the field. I know you've read Storms' abstract to his latest review, because you are acknowledged in the paper. It's 2010, and most of it reiterates the reality of the evidence for the effect. That's desperately trying to prove it's real. Try to find another 22-year old field that adopts that sort of defensive tone in the abstract. Thanks, Joshua. I'm seeing better critique here than I've seen from any ordinary pseudoskeptic. First of all, reviews cover a field. If they cover a field, and if the reviewer concludes that the field is investigating a real phenomenon, the review is going to be proccupied with defending the reality of the field. Further, people who believe that a field is bogus are going to read any review that accepts it as real as preoccupied with defending. Storms' 2010 Review, however, is concerned with presenting the overall status of the field. That's what he does. The abstract is a sober presentation of the state of research. No review of cold fusion could present it as being uncontroversial, because, obviously, there is still some controversy among people. Storms focus in that paper, though, is in presenting the breadth of the evidence. He puts a lot of attention into the heat/helium evidence. Any review of an effect that is not trivial to observe will reiterate the evidence for the effect. You state this as reiterating the reality. You are writing polemic, you know that, right? You are *advocating* a position. I'm asking you why. Storms and 18 other reviews have been published in mainstream journals. I didn't decide that these were mainstream, Britz, a skeptic, did. You've missed something huge. Cold fusion is now routinely accepted as a reality by the peer reviewers at mainstream publications, and it is the purely skeptical view that is being rejected. On which planet? Cold fusion papers appear in a tiny subset of the peer-reviewed literature, mostly second-rate, non-physics journals. They do not appear in APS journals, and certainly not in the prestigious journals like Phys Rev, PRL, Science or Nature, where discoveries of this magnitude would automatically appear if they were accepted as a reality Any field is going to publish in journals that consider work in the field relevant to their readership. Second-rate journals are not interested in trashing their own reputation by publishing fringe nonsense. Presumably you know the history behind the effective blackout in certain journals. However, Naturwissenschaften is not a second-rate, non-physics journal. It's Springer-Verlags flagship multdisciplinary journal. Cold fusion is not a physics field, it's more chemistry, but is cross-disciplinary. This is not the place to go into the shameful history of what became the automatic, non-reviewed rejection of cold fusion research papers in certain journals. It's a well-known scientific scandal, covered in sociological sources. There is a law called Moulton's Law: when a bureaucracy makes a mistake, it is impossible to fix. That's because bureaucracies defend what decisions they made in the past, and I've seen this operate even when the decision is utterly preposterous. Editors reject a paper becauseof A and B. When it's pointed out that A and B are errors, they then reject it because of C and D. And, besides, our readers aren't interested in this nonsense. This is what is really happening: the two largest scientific publishers in the world, Springer-Verlag and Elsevier, are now publishing substantial material on cold fusion. The largest scientific society in the world is now regularly hosting seminars on cold fusion, and publishing, with Oxford University Press, the Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook. The prestigious journals you mention are *holdouts.* The discovery is old news, and current work is not designed to prove that cold fusion is real. Hagelstein's review, also published in Naturwissenschaften last year, covers a detail, setting an upper limit on routine charged particle emission from the reaction (which is of high interest for theoretical work, it kills a whole pile of theories). The work that was recommended by both DoE reviews, but which the DoE never funded, is being done, slowly. And it's being published, because the blackout journals can't control the world. But some people, living in their own peculiar dream, think those journals are the world. Especially U.S. physicists. Cold fusion is just a small field, though there is potential for something big. It's not nuclear physics, in how the research is done. It's chemistry and materials science. It has implications for physics only in a certain detail: it is a demonstration of how the approximations of two-body quantum mechanics break down in condensed matter, which really should have been no
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 02:51 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: Yes, I am aware that I do not belong here. I joined because my critique of Levi's interpretation in the Yahoo group was cross-posted here, and was being (ineptly) challenged. I felt I had a good reason to come and defend it. I have joined only conservations relevant to the Rossi device, although inevitably, they tend to stray to the field in general. I will stay to defend things I've written, but will look for an opportunity to bow out. The upshot of this is that, as far as I'm concerned, Joshua is welcome here if he stays within sober consideration of the issues and doesn't use participation here as an excuse to ridicule people holding views he considers fringe. He's made some very cogent commentary, but he may also have strayed over the edge, I'm not judging that. He may also, if he wishes, invite my participation in the Yahoo group, of which I'm unaware. I specifically invite him to help develop educational materials on cold fusion on Wikiversity. It's important that skeptical points of view be represented there, and especially the evidence favoring skeptical positions be covered. http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cold_fusion I make mistakes. Someone who disagrees with me is more likely to find them, as Joshua may already have done.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
To summarize Cude's position: He does not believe in the scientific method, replication, high signal to noise ratios, peer review, calorimetry or the laws of thermodynamics. To be exact, he believe that whatever pops into his own mind, or what he says I believe, automatically overrules all of the above and the other 400 years of academic science. He does believe in ESP. He thinks that people operating mass spectrometers in blind tests can magically know whether heat was produced in a given experiment. They are biased by this magically-acquired knowledge. You would think that people with such awesome mental powers would also be imbued with a modicum of objectivity and self-knowledge too, but maybe not. I don't know enough about ESP to judge. Very interesting! But not science, as I said. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 04:31 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: If you examine what's being published, you don't find an attempt to prove it's real, not lately, anyway. You find, in primary research, reports of phenomena that imply reality, discussion of possible explanations that assume CF is possible, etc. In secondary reviews, and there have been nineteen published since 2005, you find acceptance of the phenomenon as a reality. The 19 reviews outnumber the primary research, an indication of a moribund field. The reviews do read like they're trying to convince, and not like the field is already accepted. What's important about the reviwers is their acceptance by peer reviewers. Many of the reviewers themselves are trying to convince, that's true. You are arguing with a straw man, Joshua. It's obvious that many scientists do not accept cold fusion. So people write to explain it. That's somehow unusual or suspicious? The reviews do not outnumber the primary research publications. If we look at recent publications, they are anomalously high, that's true, but the reviews are covering a vast body of literature, not just peer-reviewed work, they cover, as well, conference papers. I don't have a count for the primary papers, but mainstream peer-reviewed publication for the period of the 19 reviews is about 50 papers, using the Britz database. The latest is Storms (2010) published in Naturwissenschaften, Status of cld fusion (2010). That review now represents what mainstream reviewers will accept. It represents what reviewers at Naturwissenschaften will accept ... in a review. The dearth of primary research in peer-reviewed journals, and the fact that Storms references, especially later ones, are mostly to conference proceesings, represents how little mainstream reviewers accept. So you can present a negative side. Science moves on, Joshua, and we are seeing what science does when a political faction in the scientific community manages to bypass the scientific process and sits on research. It starts to leak out. There were many negative replications published. Later work shows that those replication attemps could be expected to fail to find anything, because they did not, in fact, replicate, they did not reach the apparently necessary 90% loading. At that time, 70% was considered to be about the maximum attainable. To go above that took special techniques that the replicators did not know and understand. Well, good. But this loading requirement has been known since the very early 90s, and still, in reviews as late as 2007, reproducibility of 1/3 is reported. And still they can't make enough power to power itself. 1/3 is plenty for correlation studies. You, and others like you, have invented an non-existent standard that scientific research should meet. If there is a drug that will cure a disease one-third of the time, there will be great excitement! You are now stating the low end of reproduction (without specific reference) and neglecting the high end. I don't have much data on the Energetics Techologies primary work, but it was replicated by McKubre and ENEA, reported in the American Chemical Society Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, 2008. 23 cells were run and reported by McKubre. Excess power as a percentage of input power was given. They only gave specific excess power results if they reacjed 5% of input power, though their calorimetry has, I think, substantially better resolution than that. Of the 23 cells, 14 showed excess power at or above 5%. Two were at 5%, two were above 100% (200% and 300%), and the rest were intermediate. Only six cells were reported from ENEA, in a common but frustrating practice of only reporting successful cells. We do not understand the success of a technique unless we understand *how often* it's successful. One of those cells, it's claimed, showed 7000% of input power. I can look at reports like this and find many deficiencies in what is reported, as I've hinted above with ENEA. This is very complex work, and I understand that the relatively brief publications in work like the Sourcebook must be abridged. But the lack of detail leaves me unable to assess the statistical significance of the ENEA results. They ran hydrogen controls (how many? several What's wrong with stating numbers?) I look at Table 1 in this paper and wish that it had simply presented the actual results, instead of filtering it and summarizing part. I'd want, for every cell, the actual measured or estimated excess energy. The chart presents excess power, but filters out *most* data below 5% of input power (presumably steady state input power at the times of the appearance of excess power). Filtering out the low end disallows understanding how the phenomenon operates under marginal conditions. In some work, helium is
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: The massive rejection of cold fusion, which extended to rejection of a graduate student thesis solely because it involved cold fusion research, and once the news of that got around, cut off the normal supply of labor for replication work. Nobody gets a Nobel Prize for boring replication, running the same experiment that others have run, over and over, and nobody gets rich from it. As I investigated cold fusion, I saw this, and I'm working, myself, subject to my own rather severe limitations, to fix this, I'm designing and constructing a single, very specific experiment, that anyone could replicate with about $100 and a power supply. But this work is not designed to prove cold fusion. All it will do, if the replication succeeds, is show a few neutrons per hour. (The design is, I hope, insensitive to normal charged particle radiation, and will effectively exclude background.) Will that $100 include neutron detection? -- Never did I see a second sun Never did my skin touch a land of glass Never did my rifle point but true But in a land empty of enemies Waiting for the tick-tick-tick of the want A uranium angel Crying “behold,” This land that knew fire is yours Taken from Corruption To begin anew
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 05:46 AM 2/22/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 10:34 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: Excess heat is an experimental result. Excess heat is an interpretation of experimental results. Sure. So are all experimental results that aren't just dumps of raw data. If it is the result of an artifact, it should be possible to identify the artifact. Maybe, but it takes time and effort. Time and effort that skeptics are not inclined to commit because they do not find the results compelling enough. Great. But skeptics will devote great time and effort to ridiculing others who do spend time actually performing those experiments, trying to ensure that work is not published, that journals which publish the work are attacked, attempts being made to get editors fired, getting a patent examiner fired because he organized an alternative energy conference, and filling the internet with obviously bogus theories that radically contradict experimental evidence, all the while claiming that it's the others who are guilty of Bad Science. Don't find results compelling, fine! Then ignore them! If the result is not an artifact, the thinking goes, a better experiment should be possible. It is always possible to design a better experiment. Joshua, look at P13/P14 from McKubre's work. The chart shown on p. 2 of the Hagelstein review paper is from that. Notice on the abscissa of that chart the scale in hours. And then realize how much time it takes to run work like that. And then sit back and suggest better experiments to the people who are actually running them. McKubre was not working for you, he was working for the Electric Power Research Institute, and he did his job. Convincing you was not part of his job. It still is not part of his job. This is the point, Joshua: There are hundreds of researchers who have reported significant anomalous heat from palladium deuteride. The large number is actually disturbing. Right. CF researchers can't win. If there are just a few experiments, they are cherry-picked and just a handful of fanatics. If there are hundreds, well, obviously this is poor work. So many experiments, and they never get better. They can't come up with one that captures the attention of mainstream. Perhaps there is no mainstream with a brain. People are people, they mostly act like ... people. Once they have made up their mind about something, they tend to not look back. That's the norm, Joshua. And scientists are ... people. Only a few are willing to set aside their prior work and look anew. You have not disclosed anything about yourself. What's your history with this topic? They can't make an isolated device that generates heat. In fact, consistent with other pathological science, the size of the effect (with the exception of the dubious Rossi device) has become smaller over the years. Science doesn't work that way. Pathological science does. This is simply not true, again. It's a common claim. This is the way this works: 1. A characteristic of pathological science is that as measurement accuracy is increased, results become less significant. 2. Cold fusion is pathological science. 3. It has happened that some cold fusion results disappeared when errors were fixed and measurement accuracy was fixed. 4. Therefore the size of the effect has become smaller over the years. The effect I'm nost concerned about is heat/helium. That's been measured over the years. The first results gave only a power of ten for helium, the measurements were crude and difficult, because of the presence of confounding D2, which has almost the same mass as He-4. Those results gave helium within an order of magnitude of the value expected for deuterium fusion as the source of excess heat. This work has been repeated with increased accuracy. The result is that the experimental value got closer to the 23.8 MeV figure expected for deuterium fusion. There is no contrary experimental evidence. Notice that this result does not depend on reliability of the excess heat effect. It only requires that helium be measured in the same experiments as excess energy. Notice, excess energy, i.e., integrated excess power. It's like hundreds of thousands of alien and ufo sightings, but none quite good enough to be convincing. The better the photography, the less convincing the image. Great. However, what I've seen is the opposite. The better the experimental techniques, the clearer the image. Deuterium fusion is what I see in this camera. My question to you is, it seems that you believe there is no excess heat. From what does this belief stem? You haven't been listening. From the absence of any progress. From the inability to generate heat indefinitely from and isolated device. But that's not relevant. Muon-catalyzed fusion is accepted as real without any progress at all, along the lines you
RE: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 08:54 AM 2/22/2011, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote: From: Joshua Cude From Lomax: This is the point, Joshua: There are hundreds of researchers who have reported significant anomalous heat from palladium deuteride. The large number is actually disturbing. So many experiments, and they never get better. They can't come up with one that captures the attention of mainstream. They can't make an isolated device that generates heat. In fact, consistent with other pathological science, the size of the effect (with the exception of the dubious Rossi device) has become smaller over the years. Science doesn't work that way. Pathological science does. I've read enuf... yeah, I agree. Confident assertion of what is blatantly false. And more, I went into it in detail, unfortunately. Now, I know why I have not wanted to dwell too much on this particular thread. Life's too short. I try to dispense what limited resources I have left in my life wisely. Aw, you are entirely too sensible. Mr. Lomax: There's an old saying. I'm sure you've heard of it. Do not cast pearls before swine. Yeah, I know the saying. I don't agree with thinking of people, from shallow evidence, as swine. I prefer to first hear some snorts, see some wallowing in the mud, maybe some very strange lipstick, you know, pig stuff. Besides, I think pigs are cool. I just don't lay pearls before them. They don't know what to do with them. But others do, sometimes. Nevertheless, I wasted far too much time on this today and yesterday. I was wrong. I saw sufficient cogent argument there that I thought we'd caught that rare bird in CF discussions, a genuine skeptic. Not one-o-them pseudos. Mr. Cude: Relying on subjective circular reasoning to validate your POV is no way to go through life, win friends and influence people. But by all means, continue to hug your cactus. My two cents. Mr Cude will doubtless continue to believe that his arguments are cogent and that anyone rejecting it is simply too attached to recognize True Brilliance, simple Sober Prudence, Common Sense, and Stable and Proper Belief in Established Scientific Consensus. Which means, of course, What I Believe. My remaining puzzle is Who is This Guy? I know a Joshua, real name, who might write like him. Style seemed a little different, but these kids, grad students, generally, do grow up and mature. Maybe. The line of argument was generally different, so I'm not placing bets on that ID. Joshua Cude's main argument is new, in fact, I've never heard the skeptical position stated quite like that. There is often a tinge of it, some use of the lack of the Killer Obvious Unquestionable Demo, for under $99.50, with Idiot-Proof Instructions, postpaid, as if it were a scientific proof of some kind, but never so explicitly -- since is it so obviously flawed. I have a sense of serious familiarity with CF history, combined with some very strange lacunae, which might simply represent trolling. I.e., he's stating stuff he knows to be false, or certainly very shaky, just to get a reaction. Maybe he's just a very fast study, and has done a Whole Lot of Reading this last month. Which would kinda contradict his stated position: this is totally bogus, not worth the time of day. Some mysteries may never be solved. If he had his way, cold fusion would be one of those. He does not want it solved, he's really uninterested in what the Great Artifact might be, because he wants what will make it moot so that he doesn't have to think, weigh, investigate, consider contradictory evidence, seek the harmonizing reality under it all. You know, real science, that does this with the entire lab notebook.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 10:18 AM 2/22/2011, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: On 02/21/2011 03:01 PM, Joshua Cude wrote: Promises have been made by Pons Fleischmann first in 1989 (just watch their interviews on youtube, where they claim it is the ideal energy source: clean and unlimited and simple) and then by just about every cold fusion advocate since, including McKubre on 60 minutes promising cars that don't need refueling, Rothwell's entire book of promises, and promises from shady characters like Dardik and Rossi. There are endless promises every time the topic arises. [...] Cold fusion [...] has not delivered. That's true in a field I've spent some time working in, too. People promise all sorts of things, and then the things show up years late, or more often never show up as promised, at all. In fact, I've made promises which later turned out to be impossible to deliver on, weren't even possible in theory, as we figured out much later. So, I guess the stuff I work with is all bunk, all just phony-baloney, it's lies and coverups, it can't be real, because we don't succeed in delivering on our promises. It's really too bad, if the sort of stuff I worked on were real, it would make a big difference to the world. But we miss on our promises, so it's all hokum; that's totally conclusive, air-tight reasoning, Joshua sure hit the nail on the head there. Too bad. I'm a programmer, by the way. Well, that explains it. Programs don't exist, the relationship between input and output is random, and attempts to show correlation have completely failed. If information technology were real, it would be reliable, and we would always get the same output. People are fools to believe that a hunk of sand could handle information and make decisions based on it, it's a fantasy, a product of wishful thinking, fed by 1960s science fiction. When I was young, people were still sensible enough to know that this would be impossible, but the aggressive sales forces of Intel and Fairchild and so forth overcame our common sense, and now we spend huge amounts of time and money on complete fantasy, such as these conversations, which clearly do not exist.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: Any review of an effect that is not trivial to observe will reiterate the evidence for the effect. I checked the abstract for a review of high temp superconductivity (which incidentally has 100,000 publications in the last 20 years), and it mentions progress in developing applications and theories, it does not say supporting evidence has accumulated, or evidence supports the claims... However, Naturwissenschaften is not a second-rate, non-physics journal. It's Springer-Verlags flagship multdisciplinary journal. Impact factor is 2.something, and it certainly is non-physics. At least, I couldn't find any physics luminaries who have published there in the last 30 or 40 years. (It was different in the 20s and 30s.) It's not an insignificant journal, it's just that publishing there is not an indication of general acceptance, but rather an indication that the paper couldn't get published in a more appropriate journal. And considering the importance of a real cold fusion effect, that means it's being largely dismissed by the mainstream. Cold fusion is not a physics field, it's more chemistry, but is cross-disciplinary. Cold fusion would revolutionize the field of fusion if it were valid. Physics journals would fight to publish the results, if they felt they were credible. It is a physics field, whether you There is a law called Moulton's Law: when a bureaucracy makes a mistake, it is impossible to fix. If cold fusion were to turn out to be real, it would of course be huge, and very embarrassing to all the skeptics. They would not take the chance unless they believed sincerely, and with high degree of certainty, that it is bogus, Moulton's law or not. This is what is really happening: the two largest scientific publishers in the world, Springer-Verlag and Elsevier, are now publishing substantial material on cold fusion. Big deal. Publishers get paid to publish. It is the editorial boards of journals that must answer to content. Elsevier publishes on the paranormal, homeopathy, and astrology too. Cold fusion is just a small field, though there is potential for something big. It's not nuclear physics, in how the research is done. It's chemistry and materials science. It has implications for physics only in a certain detail: it is a demonstration of how the approximations of two-body quantum mechanics break down in condensed matter, which really should have been no surprise, I learned from Feynman, personally, that we didn't know how to do the math in those complex environments. We have severe difficulty with anything other than the simplest three-body problems. That sounds like a pretty big detail in *physics*. But quantum mechanics is used to analyze condensed matter with more than 3 bodies. The 3-body problem in nuclear physics is more difficult, but nuclear forces are short-range; it's pretty implausible that the hugely spaced lattice has much effect on nuclear forces. But, whatever, it is definitely physics. However, the ash was found and confirmed, and the neat thing about this is that it finesses the debate over excess heat. Not sufficiently convincingly to the DOE panel, or to the physics community in general. And lots of cold fusion evidence is like that. It's a wall of fact, difficult to penetrate and understand. And yet heat is dead simple to penetrate and understand. That's my problem. The massive rejection of cold fusion, which extended to rejection of a graduate student thesis solely because it involved cold fusion research, Well, a usual criterion for a PhD is that it contributes to scientific knowledge, and is publishable. I don't know if was published or not, but one can argue that the entire field has not contributed to scientific knowledge. Nobody gets a Nobel Prize for boring replication, running the same experiment that others have run, over and over, and nobody gets rich from it. But many new avenues begin with replication. And scientists know that. That's why so many physicists from the modern physics revolution became famous. They accepted new results eagerly, replicated and extended. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit. If CF were real, the same would be true. However, as I'm sure you know, a number of Nobel Prize-winning physicists did not think it was impossible, and tried to develop theories of how it might work. One tried to develop theories, but Schwinger was in his twilight years by then, and not many physicists took him seriously. One is a number I guess. Josephson has expressed support for cold fusion, and for the paranormal. Hmmm. Who else? And if we're going to decide the matter by lining up the opinions of prestigious scientists, there are a lot more on the skeptical side. My favorite theory is Takahashi's Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate theory, but it's obviously incomplete and probably is only a clue to the
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
Neither Joshua nor I are implacable doctrinaire skeptics. Again, I am very impressed by the clarity and scope of Joshua Cude's assessments. Now, it is clear that he has been monitoring cold fusion adequately for many years. Cold fusion has always been a moribund field, as I observed carefully from 1997 to about 2003 -- the image that comes to my mind now is that of a random scatter of bird seed under the feeder, becoming a variety of seedlings that never thrive, mature, or leave new generations. I like Jed, and I like Abd. Joshua's replies to their arguments are convincing. Their debate deserves thoughtful and repeated study -- perhaps a classic clarifying contribution in the process of cold fusion work since 1989. Jed has rendered careful, responsible service for years by archiving full papers on all aspects of the explorations, along with some good critical work, for instance, on the Arata reports. Abd is devoting much time and effort to enable anyone to prove neutron emissions with a small, low-cost deuterium-palladium electrolysis cell. I suggest he supply a weekly post on his progress, sharing all data immediately real-time, including full high-resolution views of both sides of the sensitive plastic. Why not share duplicates of his first cell with other researchers -- Ludwik Kowalski, Scott Little, Pam Boss? Could more such scientists form a common public website for this single device? During a long meditation today, I wondered about the floor under Rossi's demo -- is there a space under it that could allow wires or thin metal tapes to carry 15 KW electric power from public electric power on a different meter than that for the building, with provision for delivery of the power up the table legs to the device -- that would be about $1.50 per hour -- the justification for this suggestion is that all ideas have to be aired in trying to assess this perplexing drama -- well, if it turns out to be a hoax, Rossi can make a bundle selling the movie rights -- but I would prefer him to be revealed as totally right on, so I can be a wrong off floating brown shiny object... Rich
[Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
Subject was Re: [Vo]:Revised version Celani reports on gamma emission from Rossi device At 04:12 AM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: Not true. I have described what it would take to convince me (and so has Jed Rothwell), and if cold fusion could deliver a tiny fraction of what has been promised for 22 years, my criteria would be easily met. This discussion has been about the Rossi work, which is based on a secret process, and which is inadequately confirmed, there has merely been a somewhat convincing demonstration that *something* is going on in that thing. This is nothing like the accumulated evidence for cold fusion, based on open and documented and reproducible experimental techniques, widely confirmed. I'm not interested in Rossi's work for the moment. Obviously, if *Rossi's promises* are fulfilled, all bets are off. Rossi, by the way, is also working on unknown nuclear reaction, he'd merely be succeeding, if he does, in demonstrating a far more vigorous reaction than any prior reports. So I'm going to ask, as to cold fusion in general, what has been promised and what do promises have to do with science? And... convinced of what?
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: Subject was Re: [Vo]:Revised version Celani reports on gamma emission from Rossi device At 04:12 AM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: Not true. I have described what it would take to convince me (and so has Jed Rothwell), and if cold fusion could deliver a tiny fraction of what has been promised for 22 years, my criteria would be easily met. This discussion has been about the Rossi work, which is based on a secret process, and which is inadequately confirmed, there has merely been a somewhat convincing demonstration that *something* is going on in that thing. This is nothing like the accumulated evidence for cold fusion, based on open and documented and reproducible experimental techniques, widely confirmed. I'm not interested in Rossi's work for the moment. Obviously, if *Rossi's promises* are fulfilled, all bets are off. Rossi, by the way, is also working on unknown nuclear reaction, he'd merely be succeeding, if he does, in demonstrating a far more vigorous reaction than any prior reports. So I'm going to ask, as to cold fusion in general, what has been promised and what do promises have to do with science? A new energy source has been promised. And... convinced of what? Convinced that nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments have produced measurable heat.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: This discussion has been about the Rossi work, which is based on a secret process, and which is inadequately confirmed . . . I think the confirmation is better than most claims, simply because the power is so high, and the input to output ratio is so good. It was a rather sloppy demonstration. You might say that the NRL tests with Pd powder are the extreme opposite. They are as careful and exacting as any test can be, and they have been repeated automatically hundreds of times. Yet, because they produce only ~100 J per run, I find them less convincing than the Rossi demo. . . . there has merely been a somewhat convincing demonstration that *something* is going on in that thing. That is what Levi reportedly said recently, in conversation with another researcher. Something worth further investigation is how I think he put it. I am not arguing with that Cude should accept the Rossi demo completely. I have some doubts about it myself. Any claim of this nature calls for more tests, especially independent tests. However, I do think that questioning the flow rate is ridiculous. I think these demands about the pump and reservoir are mere excuses to evade the issue. If there is a problem, it isn't in the flow rate. You have to look elsewhere. Cude has added that he is not convinced that nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments have produced measurable heat. From my point of view that puts him in the category of creationists who are not convinced of the evidence that the world is more than 6,000 years old, or that people did not ride on dinosaurs. The evidence for cold fusion heat far beyond the limits of chemistry overwhelming. If you do not believe it, you are not a scientist. Period. The evidence for tritium and commensurate helium is not quite as overwhelming but I have never seen any rational reason to doubt it. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Cude to provide one. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 10:33 AM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: So I'm going to ask, as to cold fusion in general, what has been promised and what do promises have to do with science? A new energy source has been promised. By whom? And, I'll ask again, What to promises [and speculations] have to do with science? Cold fusion is a natural phenomenon, it promises nothing unless a way can be found to make it happen reliably and with sufficient return on energy input to cover losses. Muon-catalyzed fusion, when discovered, was first thought to be a possible energy source. That remains as a possibility, but, the problem was, nobody knows how to make muons and keep them active long enough to recover the energy cost. And... convinced of what? Convinced that nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments have produced measurable heat. Thanks. Now, may I assume that you are not ignorant of the literature? There are two questions here: the first is measurable heat. We have a huge number of experiments, some being repeated series of identical experiments, showing measurable heat. To be clear, this means, for most experiments, heat that is not expected from known prosaic processes, also called anomalous heat. Anomalous heat is heat of unknown origin, by definition. Is there such heat? The second part of the question concerns the origin of the heat, whether the origin is nuclear or not. May we agree that anomalous heat, by itself, does not prove nuclear. But if we cannot agree that there is anomalous heat, surely we will be unable to agree on nuclear. That's why the 2004 U.S. DoE review panel, 18 experts, was evenly divided on the question of excess heat, half the reviewers thinking that the evidence for it was conclusive, but only one-third considered the evidence for nuclear origin to be convincing or somewhat convincing. Right? So, first question, is there anomalous heat? Given that there are massive reports of it, widely published, from hundreds of research groups, 153 reports in mainstream journals as of 2009, there is only one sane way for you to deny it, as least as far as I can imagine. That would be to claim that you know the origin of this heat, or at least that someone does. Otherwise it's still an anomaly. Right? (The 2004 DoE panel, half, thought the evidence for anomalous heat to be conclusive. If we imagine that the other half thought it was bogus, we end up with a paradox or conundrum. It's unlikely. In fact, the other half, probably, was mostly and merely not convinced, which can be a lack of conviction from pure caution, some need to see more evidence, and for only for a few on the panel would there be a belief that the evidence was totally spurious. One reviewer seems to have thought that fraud was involved, as I recall, or certainly Bad Science. But this has become an isolated, fringe position. Sometimes, as well, people argue and apply logic from conclusions. I.e., if they believe that LENR is impossible, they then discount the evidence for LENR, more than they would if they were not attached to a conclusion. Human beings. Don't leave home without being one. This is backwards. There may be anomalous heat that is not of nuclear origin.)
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
In any case, a test as today's unofficial Bologna test (18 hours 15 KW) will not convince him. Possibly the water was not heated- it was actually cooled. See my posting Peter On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 5:52 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: This discussion has been about the Rossi work, which is based on a secret process, and which is inadequately confirmed . . . I think the confirmation is better than most claims, simply because the power is so high, and the input to output ratio is so good. It was a rather sloppy demonstration. You might say that the NRL tests with Pd powder are the extreme opposite. They are as careful and exacting as any test can be, and they have been repeated automatically hundreds of times. Yet, because they produce only ~100 J per run, I find them less convincing than the Rossi demo. . . . there has merely been a somewhat convincing demonstration that *something* is going on in that thing. That is what Levi reportedly said recently, in conversation with another researcher. Something worth further investigation is how I think he put it. I am not arguing with that Cude should accept the Rossi demo completely. I have some doubts about it myself. Any claim of this nature calls for more tests, especially independent tests. However, I do think that questioning the flow rate is ridiculous. I think these demands about the pump and reservoir are mere excuses to evade the issue. If there is a problem, it isn't in the flow rate. You have to look elsewhere. Cude has added that he is not convinced that nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments have produced measurable heat. From my point of view that puts him in the category of creationists who are not convinced of the evidence that the world is more than 6,000 years old, or that people did not ride on dinosaurs. The evidence for cold fusion heat far beyond the limits of chemistry overwhelming. If you do not believe it, you are not a scientist. Period. The evidence for tritium and commensurate helium is not quite as overwhelming but I have never seen any rational reason to doubt it. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Cude to provide one. - Jed -- Dr. Peter Gluck Cluj, Romania http://egooutpeters.blogspot.com
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 9:52 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Cude has added that he is not convinced that nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments have produced measurable heat. From my point of view that puts him in the category of creationists who are not convinced of the evidence that the world is more than 6,000 years old, or that people did not ride on dinosaurs. Points of view clearly differ. From my point of view, being convinced by flaky evidence like Rossi's puts you in the category of creationists, who believe in a young earth because of scripture. And I think the similarity favors my point of view. In both cold fusion and creationism, you have a small group of fringe scientists who adopt an idea in which they have important self-interest, and try desperately to prove its reality. And in both cases the idea is completely contrary to the virtually unanimous opinion of mainstream science. And in both cases, you have the fringe group claiming a conspiracy against it by the mainstream. The evidence for cold fusion heat far beyond the limits of chemistry overwhelming. If you do not believe it, you are not a scientist. Period. So, we have someone who is not a scientist, who doesn't know that the temperature of steam can exceed 100C at atmospheric pressure, saying that vast majority of people who do science are not scientists. But let's look at scientific progress in the last 22 years. In the field of cold fusion: score zero. In fields outside cold fusion: too much to list of course, but perhaps the sequencing of the human genome by what you call non-scientists tops the list. The evidence for tritium and commensurate helium is not quite as overwhelming but I have never seen any rational reason to doubt it. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Cude to provide one. For me, the absence of a reason to doubt, is not a reason to believe. And I am not holding my breath waiting for a rational reason to believe the claims.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On 02/21/2011 12:39 PM, Peter Gluck wrote: In any case, a test as today's unofficial Bologna test (18 hours 15 KW) Any documentation, or reports by witnesses? Any clear measurements which give substance to the 15 kW number? Did anybody write it up? I'm not sure what an official test would be, really. The issue isn't whether it's official, it's whether it's convincing. For the record, the last experiment I saw from Ed Storms which I saw mentioned on this list, which involved, IIRC, radiation detection during gas-phase loading of palladium, was *extremely* convincing, IMO. It is Rossi, and Rossi's work, and Rossi's claims, and the demonstration at UoB in December with what I would call really poor documentation of measurements and results, which I find unconvincing. I wish to heaven someone of Ed's caliber had been conducting the test of Rossi's reactor. (But then, to be blunt, the result might have been negative in that case, and we wouldn't be wasting our time arguing about it.)
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Feb 21, 2011, at 8:47 AM, Joshua Cude wrote: So, we have someone who is not a scientist, who doesn't know that the temperature of steam can exceed 100C at atmospheric pressure, saying that vast majority of people who do science are not scientists. But let's look at scientific progress in the last 22 years. In the field of cold fusion: score zero. You are making the logical error of generalizing from the specific. You clearly have not read the literature or followed the field very long. I suggest you start with: http://www.lenr-canr.org/ Just because one demo is flawed and there are no CF water heaters for sale at Sears does not mean there has been no scientific progress in the field. For me, the absence of a reason to doubt, is not a reason to believe. And I am not holding my breath waiting for a rational reason to believe the claims. Your faith is irrelevant to the purpose, and as voiced above actually contrary to the stated purpose, of this list. While rational and quantitative discussion of a specific demo is relevant, generalizing this to dismissal of the entire field is pathological skepticism. This list was formed to get away from the interminable, meaningless and unproductive debate between pathological skeptics and true believers. See the vortex-l rules: http://amasci.com/weird/wvort.html especially Rule 2, and http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html http://amasci.com/pathskep.html Quoting Bill Beaty: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Vortex-L is for those who see great value in removing their usual mental filters by provisionally accepting the validity of impossible phenomena in order to test them. This excellent quote found by Gene Mallove clearly states the problem, and reveals the need for true believers in a science community otherwise ruled by conservative scoffers: It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them. - Arthur C. Clarke, 1963 So, on Vortex-L we intentionally suspend the disbelieving attitude of those who believe in the stereotypical scientific method. While this does leave us open to the great personal embarrassment of falling for hoaxes and delusional thinking, we tolerate this problem in our quest to consider ideas and phenomena which would otherwise be rejected out of hand without a fair hearing. There are diamonds in the filth, and we see that we cannot hunt for diamonds without getting dirty. Note that skepticism of the openminded sort is perfectly acceptable on Vortex-L. The ban here is aimed at scoffing and hostile disbelief, and at the sort of Skeptic who angrily disbelieves all that is not solidly proved true, while carefully rejecting all new data and observations which conflict with widely accepted theory. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Here specifically is rule 2: 2. NO SNEERING. Ridicule, derision, scoffing, and ad-hominem is banned. Pathological Skepticism is banned (see the link.) The tone here should be one of legitimate disagreement and respectful debate. Vortex-L is a big nasty nest of 'true believers' (hopefully having some tendency to avoid self-deception,) and skeptics may as well leave in disgust. But if your mind is open and you wish to test crazy claims rather than ridiculing them or explaining them away, hop on board! and the link regarding pathological skepticism, once again, is: http://amasci.com/pathskep.html Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On 02/21/2011 01:28 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: On 02/21/2011 12:39 PM, Peter Gluck wrote: In any case, a test as today's unofficial Bologna test (18 hours 15 KW) Any documentation, or reports by witnesses? Any clear measurements which give substance to the 15 kW number? Did anybody write it up? Sorry, I saw your original post on the demo today, with the note No details given... only after I sent that. I don't know about Joshua, but a report of an experiment with no details given sure doesn't convince *me*, but maybe that makes me a pathological skeptic, too, eh? I seriously doubted ol' Stiffler's results, and I'm dead cert that the Steorn gadget is a scam, so maybe I'm just an incurable skeptic, eh? When someone with a dubious background and no relevant formal training reports a potentially highly profitable breakthrough in physics, I want to see clear documentation of experiments by trained scientists with good reputations before I'm going to do more than yawn and write it off as another PPM that just happens not to be physically totally impossible. So far that hasn't been forthcoming from Bologna: The documentation of the results has been too sloppy and incomplete to conclude very much or to rule out cheating by Rossi, IMO, and the behavior of the experimenter has been too bizarre to take him seriously. As my ol' Grandad might have said, if BS were music, Rossi'd be a brass band. I'm not sure what an official test would be, really. The issue isn't whether it's official, it's whether it's convincing. For the record, the last experiment I saw from Ed Storms which I saw mentioned on this list, which involved, IIRC, radiation detection during gas-phase loading of palladium, was *extremely* convincing, IMO. It is Rossi, and Rossi's work, and Rossi's claims, and the demonstration at UoB in December with what I would call really poor documentation of measurements and results, which I find unconvincing. I wish to heaven someone of Ed's caliber had been conducting the test of Rossi's reactor. (But then, to be blunt, the result might have been negative in that case, and we wouldn't be wasting our time arguing about it.)
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On 02/21/2011 01:33 PM, Horace Heffner wrote: On Feb 21, 2011, at 8:47 AM, Joshua Cude wrote: [a bunch of sneering jeers directed at Jed] Here specifically is rule 2: 2. NO SNEERING. Ridicule, derision, scoffing, and ad-hominem is banned. Pathological Skepticism is banned (see the link.) The tone here should be one of legitimate disagreement and respectful debate. If I have been guilty of sneering during this debate, point it out, I'll apologize sincerely, and I'll stop doing it. I think I've avoided that sin (at least in this discussion) but if not, I'm very sorry. Joshua, on the other hand, is almost asking to be banned with his attacks on Jed, and his ludicrous dismissal of an entire field about which he apparently knows little.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 10:52 AM 2/21/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: This discussion has been about the Rossi work, which is based on a secret process, and which is inadequately confirmed . . . I think the confirmation is better than most claims, simply because the power is so high, and the input to output ratio is so good. It was a rather sloppy demonstration. You might say that the NRL tests with Pd powder are the extreme opposite. They are as careful and exacting as any test can be, and they have been repeated automatically hundreds of times. Yet, because they produce only ~100 J per run, I find them less convincing than the Rossi demo. Jed, a single demo has so many possibilities for problems that, quite simply, it can't be considered conclusive. For the science, an experiment repeated hundreds of times is more convincing, even if the results are not so dramatic. However, the NRL report is just one report! They might be seeing the result of some systematic error. Rossi might be a skillful fraud or be resulting from unexpected phenomenon. (I agree, unlikely. But Rossi is not a clear confirmation of any prior work, since we don't know what's inside. Obviously, Rossi is interesting. Were I a venture capitalist with lots-o-money, I'd be looking at Rossi, through he doesn't seem to be interested -- in which case I'd mostly disregard it. I *might* deprecate other investments pending knowing more about Rossi, which is how Rossi could be damaging the field of cold fusion, effectively inhibiting research into other approaches. I dislike the secrecy, for sure. It's Rossi's right to be secret. It's partly a consequence of the horrible situation with patents. That either is causing Rossi to be secretive, or is providing him with cover, a plausible reason for secrecy. Either way, harm. . . . there has merely been a somewhat convincing demonstration that *something* is going on in that thing. That is what Levi reportedly said recently, in conversation with another researcher. Something worth further investigation is how I think he put it. Of course. But we have been given nothing to investigate further! I am not arguing with that Cude should accept the Rossi demo completely. I have some doubts about it myself. Any claim of this nature calls for more tests, especially independent tests. However, I do think that questioning the flow rate is ridiculous. I think these demands about the pump and reservoir are mere excuses to evade the issue. If there is a problem, it isn't in the flow rate. You have to look elsewhere. I've discussed Rossi with pseudoskeptics, a little. They certainly aren't convinced! Nor would I expect them to be. It's a huge red herring. Pseudoskeptics dismiss Rossi for the same reason that they dismiss cold fusion: because it seems impossible. We know that this logic is seriously flawed. Cold fusion, per se, is not impossible, which is why there were Nobel prize-winners working on theory! It's merely unexpected. So pseudoskeptics will confidently predict that Rossi is bogus. It's just what can be expected from them. I do not predict, confidently, that Rossi is bogus, because I see no theoretical impossibility. There might be some reaction that does what he's claiming. It's not impossible, on the face. Unlikely. Sure. But so seemed a lot of things until our understanding expanded. Because we know, as students of cold fusion, that what seems impossible might not actually be impossible, we are vulnerable to all kinds of claims that seem to contradict accepted wisdom. That's the cost of being open-minded. We still choose where we put our energy and our attention, and I'm not pouring my attention into Rossi, because I'm interested in the science, and Rossi contributes almost nothing to the science but some speculative, contingent possibility. Cude has added that he is not convinced that nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments have produced measurable heat. From my point of view that puts him in the category of creationists who are not convinced of the evidence that the world is more than 6,000 years old, or that people did not ride on dinosaurs. The evidence for cold fusion heat far beyond the limits of chemistry overwhelming. If you do not believe it, you are not a scientist. Period. I've seen no claim from Cude that he's a scientist. Nor do I know the nature of his rejection of excess heat results. There are reasons for most people, including most scientists, to be skeptical, and it doesn't mean that he's like a creationist. It could simply mean that he's unfamiliar with the evidence, and he's framed it within a general mind-set that was effectively created by the particle physicists in 1989-1990, that had nothing to do with real science and normal scientific protocols. He's bought the propaganda, which is very understandable. It was designed, like most
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 12:47 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 9:52 AM, Jed Rothwell mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.comjedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Cude has added that he is not convinced that nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments have produced measurable heat. From my point of view that puts him in the category of creationists who are not convinced of the evidence that the world is more than 6,000 years old, or that people did not ride on dinosaurs. Points of view clearly differ. From my point of view, being convinced by flaky evidence like Rossi's puts you in the category of creationists, who believe in a young earth because of scripture. And I think the similarity favors my point of view. Joshua, don't be distracted. You are now entering You territory, the exchange of accusations. You don't understand Jed's position on Rossi, he's not convinced. He's aware of the problems and has documented them. He's examined some of them and has rejected some alternative explanations. From what I've seen, there are only two likely explanations of the Rossi demo: he's got a genuine nuclear reaction going, or he's got a sophisticated fraud going. And, frankly, I can't tell the difference. Can you? How? In both cold fusion and creationism, you have a small group of fringe scientists who adopt an idea in which they have important self-interest, and try desperately to prove its reality. That's a political description, polemic. Every researcher has self-interest in their field of research. Desperately doesn't describe the mental state of cold fusion researchers today. They aren't trying to prove that it's real. That happened years ago. You may not agree, but I'm telling you how they think. Do you know how they think? How? Have you talked with them? You've missed something huge. Cold fusion is now routinely accepted as a reality by the peer reviewers at mainstream publications, and it is the purely skeptical view that is being rejected. There may be a small group of scientists -- you put scientists in quotes as if they are not scientists, though these are scientists by every definition of the word, including general recognition (Setting aside a few relative amateurs) -- but the real issue is the collection of peer reviewers at mainstream publications. We could toss in the 18 experts of the 2004 U.S. DoE panel, though that was a review far shallower than the normal peer-review process at a mainstream publication. Those experts *unanimously* favored further research and publication, which is entirely contradictory to your confident assertion that it is only fringe 'scientists' who are desperately tryingto prove it's real. If you examine what's being published, you don't find an attempt to prove it's real, not lately, anyway. You find, in primary research, reports of phenomena that imply reality, discussion of possible explanations that assume CF is possible, etc. In secondary reviews, and there have been nineteen published since 2005, you find acceptance of the phenomenon as a reality. The latest is Storms (2010) published in Naturwissenschaften, Status of cld fusion (2010). That review now represents what mainstream reviewers will accept. The review does not contradict former reviews of the field, rather it confirms and extends them. I.e., say, in the early 1990s, there was a review that concluded that neutron radiation was far, far below that expected from d-d fusion, setting an upper limit. Storms confirms that neutron radiation is almost entirely absent. There were many negative replications published. Later work shows that those replication attemps could be expected to fail to find anything, because they did not, in fact, replicate, they did not reach the apparently necessary 90% loading. At that time, 70% was considered to be about the maximum attainable. To go above that took special techniques that the replicators did not know and understand. And so on. We understand science by understanding the entire body of publication, and attempting to harmonize it. Later reviews, published in the normal cautious manner, are expected to extend the conclusions of earlier reviews. And that's what has happened. And in both cases the idea is completely contrary to the virtually unanimous opinion of mainstream science. And in both cases, you have the fringe group claiming a conspiracy against it by the mainstream. That's irrelevant, were it true. The real situation now is that the *skeptics* are claiming a conspiracy. Have you talked to Shanahan? As to the virtually unanimous opinion of mainstream science, what do you mean by this? Ask a random scientist, call him up at work, about cold fusion and what is his opinion? Does it matter what his field is? If you want to know the opinion of mainstream science, there are generally, two ways. You can look at the results of a review panel, or you can look at what is being published in the way of
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
Rich Murray wrote: Since 1989... No replication... By independent groups... By associated groups... By the same group, on the scale of days, weeks, years... By the same group with a single device, on the scale of days, weeks, years... That's ridiculous. The bulk Pd-D experiment has been widely replicated by many different groups, both independently and with materials passed from one lab to the next. It was done hundreds of times in a row at TAMU and later Toyota. The NRL distributed PdB alloys, and the ENEA passed out their thin cathodes, made by Violante et al. Both were confirmed by many labs. Tritium was reported by over 100 labs, according to Bockris. (I do not have a tally.) The Energetics Technology technique has also been independently replicated. Arata's experiments with the DS-cathode and later with Pd-Zr powder have been independently replicated, but not as much as bulk Pd. Ni-H experiments have been sporadically reported. Some people such as Srinivasan made a great effort to replicate but they failed. At ICCF-16, McKubre characterized the evidence for Pd-D as compelling and the evidence for Ni-H as strong. I agree with that. I give Rossi a great deal more credence than I would otherwise because there is previous strong evidence for Ni-H cold fusion. We can't ignore that. He is not making an unprecedented claim out of the blue. People here say he should be replicated before we can believe him. Maybe, but after all, he himself is replicating others, especially Focardi. The two of them are close friends, by the way, and Focardi respects Rossi. If we are going to take into account human factors and personality factors, we should bear that in mind. Rossi does act like a flake at times, but he has won the respect of many good people. A lot of groups in Italy take him very seriously. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Feb 21, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Rich Murray wrote: Rich, a floating shiny brown anomaly in the punch bowl Agreement at last! 8^) Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Feb 21, 2011, at 9:47 AM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: On 02/21/2011 01:33 PM, Horace Heffner wrote: On Feb 21, 2011, at 8:47 AM, Joshua Cude wrote: [a bunch of sneering jeers directed at Jed] Here specifically is rule 2: 2. NO SNEERING. Ridicule, derision, scoffing, and ad-hominem is banned. Pathological Skepticism is banned (see the link.) The tone here should be one of legitimate disagreement and respectful debate. If I have been guilty of sneering during this debate, point it out, I'll apologize sincerely, and I'll stop doing it. I think I've avoided that sin (at least in this discussion) but if not, I'm very sorry. Your points have all been very logical and focused in my opinion. The demo was obviously highly flawed and it even appears its main purpose may have been to secure funding. No doubt there is a cloud over the whole affair, and it is an embarrassment to the CF field in general, whether Rossi is on to something or not. I do think we have probably beat this horse to death and then some though, but that is a matter of personal taste. I think it is just a matter of waiting to get the truth. Not that easy for investors though. I guess there is not much else to talk about for the moment. It would be nice to hear more about ICCF. Joshua, on the other hand, is almost asking to be banned with his attacks on Jed, and his ludicrous dismissal of an entire field about which he apparently knows little. Yes, and unfortunately via posts which are limited in contributory ideas, meaningful quantitative contributions, or supporting references which might provide some redeeming value. Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 12:33 PM, Horace Heffner hheff...@mtaonline.netwrote: On Feb 21, 2011, at 8:47 AM, Joshua Cude wrote: Your faith is irrelevant to the purpose, and as voiced above actually contrary to the stated purpose, of this list. Yes, I am aware that I do not belong here. I joined because my critique of Levi's interpretation in the Yahoo group was cross-posted here, and was being (ineptly) challenged. I felt I had a good reason to come and defend it. I have joined only conservations relevant to the Rossi device, although inevitably, they tend to stray to the field in general. I will stay to defend things I've written, but will look for an opportunity to bow out.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: At 10:33 AM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto: a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: So I'm going to ask, as to cold fusion in general, what has been promised and what do promises have to do with science? A new energy source has been promised. By whom? Maybe you're new to the field. Promises have been made by Pons Fleischmann first in 1989 (just watch their interviews on youtube, where they claim it is the ideal energy source: clean and unlimited and simple) and then by just about every cold fusion advocate since, including McKubre on 60 minutes promising cars that don't need refueling, Rothwell's entire book of promises, and promises from shady characters like Dardik and Rossi. There are endless promises every time the topic arises. And, I'll ask again, What to promises [and speculations] have to do with science? I'm not sure what you're getting at. Many scientific breakthroughs and inventions are associated with the promise of benefits to mankind. Insulin promised to save the lives of diabetics, and delivered; high temp superconductors promised cheaper magnets, but have not delivered (yet). Cold fusion promised abundant, clean energy, and has not delivered. Cold fusion is a natural phenomenon, it promises nothing unless a way can be found to make it happen reliably and with sufficient return on energy input to cover losses. Well, yes, but there are many claims of reliability (100%) with huge returns (10, 20, even hundreds), but still no delivery on the promise. Muon-catalyzed fusion, when discovered, was first thought to be a possible energy source. That remains as a possibility, but, the problem was, nobody knows how to make muons and keep them active long enough to recover the energy cost. Muon-catalyzed fusion was discovered by the associated radiation (neutrons). Cold fusion was claimed on the basis of excess energy. That's a big difference. If you start with excess energy, then there's no need to find a way to get excess energy. And... convinced of what? Convinced that nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments have produced measurable heat. Thanks. Now, may I assume that you are not ignorant of the literature? There are two questions here: the first is measurable heat. Actually, I could have made that more restrictive. I am not convinced that cold fusion experiments have produced excess heat, where by excess heat, I mean heat not associated with electrical or chemical inputs; so that no indication of a potential power source is demonstrated. We have a huge number of experiments, some being repeated series of identical experiments, showing measurable heat. To be clear, this means, for most experiments, heat that is not expected from known prosaic processes, also called anomalous heat. Anomalous heat is heat of unknown origin, by definition. Is there such heat? I don't believe there is. Obviously, the temperature readings are not completely understood by the experimenters, so there is something unknown, but evidence for excess heat is not compelling. The second part of the question concerns the origin of the heat, whether the origin is nuclear or not. May we agree that anomalous heat, by itself, does not prove nuclear. Well if excess means not chemical, and not electrical, there are not very many other options available; it's not likely to be gravitational. But if we cannot agree that there is anomalous heat, surely we will be unable to agree on nuclear. Right. That's why the 2004 U.S. DoE review panel, 18 experts, was evenly divided on the question of excess heat, half the reviewers thinking that the evidence for it was conclusive, but only one-third considered the evidence for nuclear origin to be convincing or somewhat convincing. [The] reviewers were split approximately split approximately evenly between 1) evidence for excess power is compelling, to 2) there is no convincing evidence... Compelling is not conclusive, and if you read the individual reports, that sentence from the summary is favorable to cold fusion. By my reading, only 6 or 7 of the reviewers really take excess heat at all seriously, and only one finds it conclusive. But whatever, at least half found the evidence lacking. And those who found it at least somewhat compelling, not a single one was compelled enough to recommend special funding for the field. That would be criminal if they thought there was even a slight chance of solving the world's energy problems. So there is no way you can say the evidence is overwhelming, based on the DOE panel. Right? So, first question, is there anomalous heat? Given that there are massive reports of it, widely published, from hundreds of research groups, 153 reports in mainstream journals as of 2009, there is only one sane way for you to
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: But Rossi is not a clear confirmation of any prior work, since we don't know what's inside. Sure he is. This is a confirmation of Piantelli and Focardi, and Mills for that matter. We know approximately what is inside: finely divided Ni and two other elements in trace amounts. Several reliable sources have confirmed that. I dislike the secrecy, for sure. It's Rossi's right to be secret. He has no choice. He would lose everything if he revealed the recipe now. He would lose years of effort and the opportunity to make billions of dollars. No one can blame him for being secret, although I do blame him for writing bad patents. Anyway, I hope Levi, Daniele Passerini and the others who witnessed the 18-hour test will give us more details. It says they will. Google translate: About what they are not branched [?] official report, which will instead be provided on the experiments that will soon be initiated in accordance with the Department of Physics. That will give us more to work with. It certainly eliminates any chance of stored chemical energy. I think the 30-minute run was beyond any real-world chemical explanation, but it was perhaps on the edge of some extreme techniques with rocket fuel. 18 hours completely closes that question, and several others. Here is a mistake in the Google translation, which I discovered looking at the original Italian. It converted Delta T into TD. The correct sentence should be: This was a test without steam (with the Delta-T deliberately well below those achieved last January 14). That's what Celani was looking for. That's good. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: At 12:47 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 9:52 AM, Jed Rothwell mailto: jedrothw...@gmail.comjedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Cude has added that he is not convinced that nuclear reactions in cold fusion experiments have produced measurable heat. From my point of view that puts him in the category of creationists who are not convinced of the evidence that the world is more than 6,000 years old, or that people did not ride on dinosaurs. Points of view clearly differ. From my point of view, being convinced by flaky evidence like Rossi's puts you in the category of creationists, who believe in a young earth because of scripture. And I think the similarity favors my point of view. Joshua, don't be distracted. You are now entering You territory, the exchange of accusations. You don't understand Jed's position on Rossi, he's not convinced. He's aware of the problems and has documented them. He's examined some of them and has rejected some alternative explanations. From what I've seen, there are only two likely explanations of the Rossi demo: he's got a genuine nuclear reaction going, or he's got a sophisticated fraud going. And, frankly, I can't tell the difference. Can you? How? In both cold fusion and creationism, you have a small group of fringe scientists who adopt an idea in which they have important self-interest, and try desperately to prove its reality. That's a political description, polemic. Every researcher has self-interest in their field of research. Desperately doesn't describe the mental state of cold fusion researchers today. They aren't trying to prove that it's real. That happened years ago. You may not agree, but I'm telling you how they think. Do you know how they think? How? Have you talked with them? I've seen what they write. Practically every review is preoccupied with defending the reality of the field. I know you've read Storms' abstract to his latest review, because you are acknowledged in the paper. It's 2010, and most of it reiterates the reality of the evidence for the effect. That's desperately trying to prove it's real. Try to find another 22-year old field that adopts that sort of defensive tone in the abstract. You've missed something huge. Cold fusion is now routinely accepted as a reality by the peer reviewers at mainstream publications, and it is the purely skeptical view that is being rejected. On which planet? Cold fusion papers appear in a tiny subset of the peer-reviewed literature, mostly second-rate, non-physics journals. They do not appear in APS journals, and certainly not in the prestigious journals like Phys Rev, PRL, Science or Nature, where discoveries of this magnitude would automatically appear if they were accepted as a reality We could toss in the 18 experts of the 2004 U.S. DoE panel, though that was a review far shallower than the normal peer-review process at a mainstream publication. You have no idea what you're talking about. 18 reviewers met for a day; CF advocates gave live presentations, 9 reviewers had the literature for a month; Each of them wrote reviews longer than most reviews of published papers. It was a review, by any measure, at least 10 times deeper than the normal peer-review process at a mainstream publication. Those experts *unanimously* favored further research and publication, which is entirely contradictory to your confident assertion that it is only fringe 'scientists' who are desperately tryingto prove it's real. No, they did not. They rejected, unanimously, special funding for the program. That would be ridiculous if any of them held out hope for a real effect. The statement you refer to: The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV. appears first to be a sop to the presenters egos, after the devastatingly critical review, but also a simple restatement of the mandate of funding agencies. They are not recommending more research, only that well-designed proposals deserve to be considered.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 03:28 PM 2/21/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: But Rossi is not a clear confirmation of any prior work, since we don't know what's inside. Sure he is. This is a confirmation of Piantelli and Focardi, and Mills for that matter. We know approximately what is inside: finely divided Ni and two other elements in trace amounts. Several reliable sources have confirmed that. Okay, to Jed, and perhaps to others, this is confirmation of prior work. But because it's secret protocol it's weak in that respect. I agree that the existence of (possibly) similar prior work is supportive, and is reason to be less likely to dismiss Rossi out-of-hand. I dislike the secrecy, for sure. It's Rossi's right to be secret. He has no choice. He would lose everything if he revealed the recipe now. He would lose years of effort and the opportunity to make billions of dollars. No one can blame him for being secret, although I do blame him for writing bad patents. Jed, you have pointed out that he may be shooting himself in the foot with his secrecy. It's just not true that if he disclosed everything he'd lose everything. It depends on how he discloses and to whom. His strategy might be reasonable. But a consequence of that strategy is that I'm not going to believe that Rossi is a demonstration of cold fusion. I'm not going to claim that it's fraud, on the other hand. I'm going to claim that *I don't know* and that I think I don't have enough information to decide. On the one hand, there are all the obvious reasons to be skeptical. On the other hand, there is what Jed has pointed out. Which is why I am *not* going to get into an extended argument over Rossi. Anyway, I hope Levi, Daniele Passerini and the others who witnessed the 18-hour test will give us more details. It says they will. Google translate: About what they are not branched [?] official report, which will instead be provided on the experiments that will soon be initiated in accordance with the Department of Physics. That will give us more to work with. It certainly eliminates any chance of stored chemical energy. I think the 30-minute run was beyond any real-world chemical explanation, but it was perhaps on the edge of some extreme techniques with rocket fuel. 18 hours completely closes that question, and several others. Again, depending on so many details about which we know nothing, so far, and may not ever know. I've argued that making a huge fuss over Rossi simply discredits the field, and I've hoped that reputable cold fusion scientists would be very, very cautious about Rossi, as most seem to be. Some of the damage will be done anyway. People are already using Rossi as an example of overblown, inflated claims. That could backfire, for them, but, then, if Rossi doesn't show up with his 1 MW reactor, we end up looking very foolish. And there are millions of reasons why some project like that could fail, *even if Rossi's demonstration was real*. Those who are using Rossi as an example of obvious bogosity don't care about future reputation, they will simply shrug it off and say, Okay, I was wrong, surely you can understand how shady this operation looked? And they'd be right! It looks shady! If someone trusts Rossi, thinks that his work is solid, great. Perhaps they should send him a check. If Rossi is right, he'll become fabulously wealthy, and might remember this with kindness. I just don't want to see cold fusion standing up with Rossi, in the firing line, depending on whether or not Rossi is real and useful. If Rossi produces and starts selling 1 MW reactors, and they work, I'll be happy for the world. And for him. If I wanted to place a bet, though, it would be on Rossi disappearing when the 1 MW reactor doesn't appear. Which may or may not mean that he was right. The world is complicated, and I don't pretend to have a comprehensive understanding of it. I'm not sure that anyone does. Just because you are paranoid does not mean that they are not out to get you. In Rossi's shoes, I'd be very worried, and I'd want to be connected to and working with as many people as possible. I'd want to make sure that my secret is not closely-held, that if something happened to me, it would come out. In many places, so that it could not be suppressed. I do *not* believe in a conspiracy to suppress cold fusion. I'm just talking about prudence, with something that the U.S. military has noted could be vastly destabilizing, economically. There are people who don't like destabilizing. Some of these people may have no scruples, and they have a lot of money and power, which they, big surprise, might seek to protect. I place high odds on disappearance because two different scenarios support it: Rossi is real and is disappeared, and Rossi is a fraud and disappears. As to the other major possibility, Rossi is real and we have a 1 MW reactor this year, well, I like that one, but not
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 01:41 PM 2/21/2011, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: I don't know about Joshua, but a report of an experiment with no details given sure doesn't convince *me*, but maybe that makes me a pathological skeptic, too, eh? Of course not. That was hyperbole on Jed's part. He might be right, if Joshua is very knowledgeable. He's, so far, parroting some pieces of the pseudoskeptical line, but that's understandable. After all, the pseudoskeptics dominated coverage in media for twenty years. However, this is what I find fascinating. If you just read mainstream peer-reviewed journals, you don't find this imbalance. You can find, in peripheral journals, tertiary references to cold fusion as being an example of pathological science, but these are not reports by experts in the relevant fields, they are people studying other things who use the example as if it were an established thing. But the thing is *not* established by what's in peer-reviewed mainstream journals. Quite the opposite. There is an *impression* that the rejection was established. That may have largely been created by the 1989 U.S. DoE review, which was highly negative in reality (much more negative than the report they issued implied, as to the strong majority position). That review took place only a few months after the announcement, before the positive replications started to come in! It was highly imbalanced, representing what seems to me like a somewhat reasonable skeptical position *at the time.* And then it was treated as if the conclusions were written in stone. And when it says that the experiment could not be reproduced -- which was true for a few months! -- that has been quoted over and over, long after it became preposterous.
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: If you examine what's being published, you don't find an attempt to prove it's real, not lately, anyway. You find, in primary research, reports of phenomena that imply reality, discussion of possible explanations that assume CF is possible, etc. In secondary reviews, and there have been nineteen published since 2005, you find acceptance of the phenomenon as a reality. The 19 reviews outnumber the primary research, an indication of a moribund field. The reviews do read like they're trying to convince, and not like the field is already accepted. The latest is Storms (2010) published in Naturwissenschaften, Status of cld fusion (2010). That review now represents what mainstream reviewers will accept. It represents what reviewers at Naturwissenschaften will accept ... in a review. The dearth of primary research in peer-reviewed journals, and the fact that Storms references, especially later ones, are mostly to conference proceesings, represents how little mainstream reviewers accept. There were many negative replications published. Later work shows that those replication attemps could be expected to fail to find anything, because they did not, in fact, replicate, they did not reach the apparently necessary 90% loading. At that time, 70% was considered to be about the maximum attainable. To go above that took special techniques that the replicators did not know and understand. Well, good. But this loading requirement has been known since the very early 90s, and still, in reviews as late as 2007, reproducibility of 1/3 is reported. And still they can't make enough power to power itself. If you want to know the opinion of mainstream science, there are generally, two ways. You can look at the results of a review panel, or you can look at what is being published in the way of secondary sources under peer review or under independent academic supervision. The 2004 DoE panel results completely contradict the impression you are giving, here, Joshua. Are you aware of that? If you want to know the truth, read the whole damn review, not just cherry-picked excerpts quoted from it by people who have an axe to grind! Read it, come back, and tell us. OK. I've read them. They are more critical than I expected. Only one of the reviewers (maybe a token believer, for all I know), found the evidence for nuclear reactions conclusive. Several, as we've discussed, found the excess heat results compelling, but most were pretty ambivalent about it. None found them sufficiently compelling to recommend special funding. The report criticized poor technique, poor documentation, poor identification of goals, poor calorimetry, poor experimental techniques. They concluded it is all more of the same since 1989. No progress to speak of. Not a ringing endorsement. Rothwell writes polemic. I would not claim that you are not a scientist because you don't believe anything. However, if you have become familiar with the evidence, which, to assume good faith, I'll assume you are not, and you cling to a *belief* that cold fusion is impossible and that therefore the levels of heat reported are impossible, I'd say -- then and only then -- that, within this field and this issue, you are not functioning as a scientist, you are functioning as a believer. I don't believe it's impossible, just highly unlikely. And none of the evidence I've seen is in the least persuasive. To repeat, after 22 years, if it were real, they could do better. But let's look at scientific progress in the last 22 years. In the field of cold fusion: score zero. In fields outside cold fusion: too much to list of course, but perhaps the sequencing of the human genome by what you call non-scientists tops the list. Eh? Cold fusion is probably the most difficult theoretical question to have been presented to physicists in the 20th century. Obviously. How do you come up with a theory for something that doesn't work. Nothing is more difficult than impossible. The fact remains, progress, experimental or theoretical, has been completely consistent with pathological science. None to speak of. Here is why fusion: in some experiments, helium has been collected and measured. Notice, one can run a series of identical cells, and only in some cells is excess heat seen. Miles, who was an original negative replicator covered in the 1989 DoE report, began to see results. In his ultimate series as reported by Storms (2007 and 2010), he found heat in 21 out of 33 cells. In 12 cells, he found no excess heat. Helium samples were measured by an independent lab that did not know which samples were from which cells, they did not know if the samples had shown excess heat or not. Of the 12 cells that showed no excess heat, no helium beyond measurement background was found. (This is far below atmospheric ambient, by the way). Of the 21 cells showing
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: Given that the experiments are working close to detection limits for helium, a little cognitive bias could explain the correlation. 1. They were not close to the detection limit. 2. As Abd noted, they were blind tests. So it would not be cognitive bias, it would be ESP. The rest of these criticisms were made back in 1989. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now. You know nothing about this research. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
On 02/21/2011 03:28 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: This was a test without steam (with the Delta-T deliberately well below those achieved last January 14). That's what Celani was looking for. That's good. Good? That's *great*! Is there a paper on it, either present or forthcoming, I hope, I hope? The presence of steam, and the absence of clear documentation of the dryness test which was actually done, along with the invisibility of the end of the hose during the bulk of the run, totally muddies the water. Flow calorimetry with water as the effluent (and, yes, with the brand and model of the pump given, to avoid squabbles over whether the guys in Italy know how to use a graduated cylinder and stopwatch) would bring the results pretty much within range of the term rock solid. (Only Mitch Swartz, with his widdershins-vortex anomaly or whatever it is he thinks invalidates all flow calorimetry, would object, I think.)
Re: [Vo]:What will convince Joshua Cude?
At 03:01 PM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 10:33 AM 2/21/2011, Joshua Cude wrote: On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: So I'm going to ask, as to cold fusion in general, what has been promised and what do promises have to do with science? A new energy source has been promised. By whom? Maybe you're new to the field. Well, not exactly. In 1989, I bought $10,000 worth of palladium, as a palladium account at Credit Suisse. That was a low-risk way to make a modest investment, in case this thing turned out to be real. Palladium is a precious metal, this was not a high-risk investment. If I'd been a little faster, I'd have made a little money, maybe 10% or 20% As it is, I broke even. The price went up and then went down. I concluded, with everyone else, that it had been a bust. And there the matter stood until the beginning of 2009, when I had independent reason to investigate. I bought all the books, including the ones by skeptics like Taubes and Huizenta, Close and Park, etc. Compared to your average bear, no, not new to the field. By now, intimately familiar with it. I was credited in the 2010 review by Ed Storms in Naturwissenschaften. Have you read that? Promises have been made by Pons Fleischmann first in 1989 (just watch their interviews on youtube, where they claim it is the ideal energy source: clean and unlimited and simple) and then by just about every cold fusion advocate since, including McKubre on 60 minutes promising cars that don't need refueling, Rothwell's entire book of promises, and promises from shady characters like Dardik and Rossi. There are endless promises every time the topic arises. Pons and Fleischmann made no such promise. They noted the potential, *if* this could be developed. Fleischmann wrote that it would take a Manhattan-scale project. This is not an easy problem. Unlike the original Manahattan project, there is no explanatory theory, making engineering extremely difficult. And that has nothing to do with the science. It certainly has nothing to do with whether or not there is measurable excess heat, since we can measure heat in milliwatts and the experiments often generate heat in the 5 or 10 watt range, sometimes much more. Sometimes the heat generated is well in excess of all energy put in to electrolyse the deuterium. In gas-loading experiments, there is no input energy, beyond the natural heat of formation of palladium deuteride. I.e., we definitely get excess heat, over input energy, with gas-loading, but this is still small, overall, and it's difficult to scale. This is where a lot of current work has gone. And, I'll ask again, What to promises [and speculations] have to do with science? I'm not sure what you're getting at. Many scientific breakthroughs and inventions are associated with the promise of benefits to mankind. Insulin promised to save the lives of diabetics, and delivered; high temp superconductors promised cheaper magnets, but have not delivered (yet). Cold fusion promised abundant, clean energy, and has not delivered. Sure. But, again, that has nothing to do with the science. Phenomena have been discovered and accepted, sometimes, for a century before appplications became possible. Quite simply, that an effect is commercializable -- or not -- could affect decisions about research funding, for sure, but it has nothing to do with whether it is real or not. Agree? Cold fusion is a natural phenomenon, it promises nothing unless a way can be found to make it happen reliably and with sufficient return on energy input to cover losses. Well, yes, but there are many claims of reliability (100%) with huge returns (10, 20, even hundreds), but still no delivery on the promise. There is a single, easily-describable, repeatable experiment. It has nothing to do with huge returns, which are, themselves, anomalous, i.e., generally not repeatable. It is pure science, i.e., it establishes that there is an effect, excess heat correlated with helium. You do, I hope, understand that correlation can establish this kind of thing even if the effect itself is quite unreliable. Right? Muon-catalyzed fusion, when discovered, was first thought to be a possible energy source. That remains as a possibility, but, the problem was, nobody knows how to make muons and keep them active long enough to recover the energy cost. Muon-catalyzed fusion was discovered by the associated radiation (neutrons). Cold fusion was claimed on the basis of excess energy. That's a big difference. If you start with excess energy, then there's no need to find a way to get excess energy. No, muon-catalyzed fusion was predicted first, before it was confirmed. Yes, it was then confirmed through neutrons, I understand. Cold
