At 05:07 PM 12/29/2012, Mark Gibbs wrote:
On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Jed Rothwell
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Mark Gibbs <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
So, your considered and thoughtful way to address what you see as
someone's misunderstandings and to educate them is to be insulting
and to attack the man while you address the argument?
Look, I am sorry,
No, you're not. You can't get over your emotionality.
... I cannot think of a way to say that politely.
Oh, I'm sure you could if you tried. But you don't want to.
Mark, Jed is Jed. When I first became aware that LENR was a live
field, in early 2009, I had correspondence with Jed and Steve Krivit,
mostly abou the blacklistings of their web sites on Wikpedia. It
became clear immediately that Jed is very firm in his opinions and
very blunt. He has, shall we say, redeeming qualities. He is
*usually*, on fact, right.
He is also heavily involved with Japanese culture, and does a lot of
translation from the Japanese. He *was* trying to be polite, without
surrendering his point. I.e., he is also an American.
If you want to participate here as an ordinary list member, that's
fine. But you are also a journalist, and for a journalist to get
involved in personal debates, when planning to report on the topic,
is unprofessional. That, in fact, is what Steve Krivit did, and, as a
result, many -- and possibly most -- of the scientists in the field
don't trust him and won't talk to him.
What Jed is telling you is partly fact, and partly informed opinion.
If you want to be objective, you will need to sort thorugh it. Jed
knows a great deal about this field. Ed Storms, who has commented
here today, is probably the world's foremost expert on cold fusion. I
suggest consulting them, actively. Both of them are opinionated, but
both are very communicative, they are resources. They won't lie to you.
You cannot demand that an experimentalist propose a theory before
you accept his results. That is not his job. That is not how it is done.
Er, I didn't. I answered Peter's question.
Yes, you did. What you wrote was not wrong, but it pushes certain buttons.
I'm setting all that interchange aside, and responding to the
original issues raised by your comments.
First of all, there is a confirmed "theory of cold fusion." It's not
complete. The *mechanism* is missing. Given how much effort has
already been put into coming up with a mechanism and then attempting
to test it, with little success, I don't expect any theory of
mechanism to be widely accepted soon. This is an enormously difficult
theoretical question. There are tools to use, the tools of quantum
field theory, but the problem is that the environment is extremely
complex and applying the tools of quantum field theory in complex
environments takes mathematics that we don't have.
The prior *expectation* that fusion would not occur in the condensed
matter environment was based on approximating the problem as a
two-body problem. It was thought that would be sufficient, but Pons
and Fleischmann decided to test it. They were *not* seeking a
solution to the energy problem. They were doing basic scientific
research. They *expected* some deviation from the calculations based
in the assumption, but also that they would not be able to measure
it. When their experiment rather dramatically melted down, they then
worked for another five years in secrecy, and were forced to announce
prematurely, by University legal.
By that time they knew that they were seeing nuclear-level heat. They
had scaled *down* for obvious safety reasons, and that is still
advisable for most cold fusion work. Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect
devices, using palladium deuteride, electrochemically loaded, are
famously unreliable, and that cuts both ways.
Something shold be made crystal clear. There is no longer any real
scientific controversy over the reality of the effect. Jed will point
to tons of experiments that showed excess heat, but that's not what
sealed it scientifically. What all those experiments -- there are 153
reports confirming the heat effect in peer-reviewed literature -- did
was to show that *something* highly anomalous was occurring. There
were lots of reasons to doubt that it was nuclear in nature.
However, by 1993, Miles had done the necessary work to determine the
correlation between excess heat and helium. That work has been
confirmed with increasing accuracy. Helium is a nuclear ash. Yes, you
could say it might be leakage, except that idea does not match the
actual experimental results and leakage would occur whether there was
heat or not, *and these experiments look for helium in FP experiments
whether there is heat or not. The non-heat cells become controls. And
when there is no heat, there is no anomalous helium. And, further, as
accuracy improved, the ratio got closer to the figure for deuterium
fusion to helium, 23.8 MeV. The most accurate measurement so far, in
terms of the effort made to capture all the helium (usually about
half of it escapes measurement) came up with about 25 +/- 1.5 MeV.
The theoretical figure for deuterium fusion is 23.8 MeV.
Writing in the second deition of his book, Huizenga, the highly
skeptical co-chair of the 1989 DoE ERAB Panel, mentioned with
amazement the Miles result. He wrote that, if confirmed, it would
solve a major mystery of cold fusion, the ash. Miles has been amply
confirmed. Storms, writing a review under peer review, in
Naturwissenschaften, "Status of cold fusion (2010)" cites twelve
independent studies that come up with adequately similar results.
This is difficult and expensive work. But it's been done. There is no
longer any reason for ordinary workers in the field to measure the
ratio. They *assume it*, and sometimes use helium evolution as a
confirmation that the heat they are seeing is not artifact.
The preponderance of the evidence has become overwhelming, the theory
that the FP Heat Effect is a nuclear reaction is confirmed. It is
almost certainly deuterium being fused to form helium. *How* that
happens is another issue. The practical consequences are another issue.
If we just look at the palladium deuteride FPHE, it is possible that
practical application will never be possible. However, we cannot know
that until and unless we understand the *mechanism*.
Jed Rothwell will argue that it's highly likely we will learn to
control the reaction. I tend to agree. But what I don't know is how
long that would be likely to take. It could be a long time.
On the other hand, as you know, there what amount to rumors -- not
scientifically confirmed -- of nickel hydrogen reactions. What that
reaction might be is highly speculative. Storms thinks the ash is
deuterium. Rossi apparently made noises about copper. But we have
nothing reliable on which to base *any* conclusions about
nickel-hydrogen. The cold fusion community in general thinks that
something *might* be possible with other than nickel and hydrogen.
There are credible reports of biological transmutation, i.e., some
kind of LENR managed by microorganisms. I say "credible," because the
researcher reporting it is knowledgeable and seems to have no motive
other than science. But it's unconfirmed.
When Rossi announced, there was a flurry of speculation from the cold
fusion community. There were opinions that this might be real. I
warned cold fusion researchers from appearing to approve of Rossi's
work, because of the risks. In general, we will give the benefit of
the doubt to scientists, pending confirmation. But Rossi is not a
scientist, and that was apparent from the beginning. He's an
entrepreneur and inventor, and he is highly secretive. We have no
solid data, and, given the magnitude of what he reports, independent
confirmation is necessary, and that's totally missing.
What we dislike, Mark, is for these different areas to be confused.
There are legitimate researchers working with nickel and hydrogen.
Testing of a nickel hydrogen reactor is being set up at SRI
International by Brillouin, so that the calorimetry will be solid and
reliable. Nobody who is established as a scientist is reporting, so
far, independent confirmation of *large* nickel hydrogen results.
But LENR is real, cold fusion is real. It might be only a scientific
curiosity, but it's real, just as muon-catalyzed fusion, likely to
never be of practical import, is real.
If you want to be a contribution to the future of science and of
energy, Mark, satisfy yourself as to the facts here. The evidence for
cold fusion is enormous, the skeptics abandoned the field almost
totally a decade ago, never having done what it takes to establish
the presented experimental evidence as artifact. The original reports
of neutrons were artifact. But the original reports of anomalous heat
were confirmed, and, eventually, the ash was identified.
Conclusively. That's over.
That many people tried, to some degree, to reproduce the experiment
and failed, with a difficult experiment, proves nothing but the
difficulty of replication. What proves the FPHE is not only the many,
many confirmations of the heat, but the correlated helium. That could
not be artifact. One of the projects I intend to work on is to obtain
funding for a more precise measurement of heat/helium. That is, in
fact, precisely the kind of research that both Department of Energy
reviews recommended, but the pseudoskeptics used the reviews as
"proof" that cold fusion was "still dead." Read the 2004 review
carefully. It's replete with blatant errors, but ... the tide had
clearly shift since 1989. The evidence on heat/helium, in it, was
misread, what was a strong correlation in the research was misread so
that it became an anti-correlation. (The reviewer thought that
hydrogen control cells were deuterium cells showing excess heat.)
Even so, half the reviewers thought the evidence for excesss heat was
conclusive -- and some reviewers were clearly not going to consider
cold fusion as a possibility -- and one third thought the evidence
for "nuclear reaction" was "convincing" or "somewhat convincing."
The review paper was written by scientists, not politicians, and they
imagined that the review would be read as science, by scientists.
Reading scientific papers is work. They don't always spell everything
out. Anyone who knows the field who reads the review would have
questions. Were the questions asked? For a matter that could have
enormous long-term effects, was a one day session adequate? I don't
think so. But even with that, the difference between the 2004 and the
1989 reviews is striking. Skeptics point to a phrase in the review
that "conclusions were much the same." That's only because the
"charge" was to determine if a massive federal program should be initiated.
And the answer to that is *still* the same as in 1989. There is, as
yet, no strong evidence that practical application is possible. There
is, however, strong evidence that it *might* be possible. As Jed
notes, cold fusion routinely is more successful at generating excess
power than the massive, and hugely funded hot fusion projects. The
latter have a solid theoretical bases, the reactions are quite well
understood, that's the difference.
So what is needed with cold fusion is basic science, and that takes
money, but not nearly as much money as huge engineering projects
dealing with a monstrous engineering problem, how to harness hot
fusion. Modest funding is what's called for. But the 1989 report
certainly did not show half the reviewers thinking that the anomalous
heat was real!
There are competent theoretical physicists working on the problem of
mechanism. My guess is that this problem is going to take years of
effort by the best minds in physics to solve. Much of the basic data
needed to judge theories has never been collected. Most research was
aimed at trying to find the "reliable experiment" that you seem to
think it necessary. It's not necessary for the science, even though
some kind of reliability is necessary for practical application.
Back to the original question:
And remember, this whole discussion is Peter's fault ... he
originally asked "when will enter LENR such lists as [Greatest
Inventions: 2012 and 1913 Editions]?" My answer was "When there is a
testable theory or a demonstrably practical device."
Again, I wasn't asserting that LENR doesn't exist, I was answering
Peter's question.
There is already a testable theory, that the heat/helium ratio in the
Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect is due to the fusion of deuterium with
helium. It's been tested and confirmed. If it is false, it would be
relatively easy to show that.
It's still, like a lot of science, difficult or expensive. I was told
that if I wanted to see the FPHE, I should be prepared to spend at
least $8,000, and to invest a lot of time to learn the various arts.
Work to confirm -- or falsify -- heat/helium should aim at running
many identical cells, using the state of the art such that many or
most of them show the FPHE. (There are protocols known to do that).
And it should carefully collect and measure all the helium from the
cells. It should be done with attention to every known criticism of
the prior work. We pretty much know what to do, but it hasn't been
done because it's difficult and expensive work, and does not advance
the field as to improving reliability or sustainability.
*That* is the experiment that should have been done *by skeptics*
before 2000. Instead, they sat back and said "impossible, not worth
the effort." Certainly when the 2004 report was issued, skeptics
could have applied for funding, this is a "basic question."
There is adequate evidence already such that researchers in the field
don't need confirmation of heat/helium. They are not going to waste
precious time and expensive procedures to confirm what they already
know, to high certainty. The limited private funding that exists is
not going to do this work.
This is precisely what needs public funding, or commercial interests
who might be interested in major investment might want to fund this
research as part of their due diligence.
Since there is already a testable theory, that's not going to make
cold fusion the Invention of the Year. No matter how well known
theory becomes, that doesn't make lists like that. *Only* practical
applications do.
Mark, you got the reaction you got because you mixed up theory with
the issue. Peter's question had *nothing to do with theory.*
A successful theory of cold fusion will *probably* make engineering
the effects more possible. However, if a stable technique is found,
and well-demonstrated to be stable, it's possible that practical
applications will exist before a solid theory. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
