BTW, please excuse if my comments (appended below) duplicated
others. I haven't had the time to read the huge volume of stuff on
the list of late.
However, the volume of junk on the list is symptomatic of the problem
the list was formed to avoid - the interminable and unproductive
arguments between true believers and pathological skeptics. The list
was formed to move forward, to explore, not stagnate in a quagmire of
negativity. Sooner or later this kind of baloney should be relegated
to vortex-b, where there is no useful archive to clutter up. Sooner
or later I hope the conversation and all the participants move toward
improving the field instead of arguing about it.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
On Feb 26, 2011, at 4:21 PM, Horace Heffner wrote:
On Feb 26, 2011, at 2:10 PM, Joshua Cude wrote:
On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 7:53 PM, William Beaty <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
,in the data by orders of magnitude (10^10 if I remember), from
the fact that the highest values came from BARC within weeks of
the press conference (for what is supposed to be a very difficult
experiment), that they have gotten smaller over the years, and
don't come close to accounting for the measured heat, it is
reasonable to conclude that they do not provide enough evidence to
suggest nuclear reactions at room temperature in benchtop
experiments create measurable heat.
One brief question to clarify a small confusion.
I noticed that in the last week or so you've mentioned that values
have "gotten smaller over the years." Perhaps I'm missing
something. Do you see this decrease as evidence of problems? Why
keep pointing it out? ( Or did I miss an earlier explanation? )
It is characteristic of artifacts that as experiments improve,
they get smaller. On the other hand, real effects -- desirable
effects -- almost invariably become more pronounced as more people
work on them, and the experiments get better. This is true even if
the theory is not understood, just from systematic, or even non-
systematic, search of parameter space. Better conditions and
recipes are found, reported, repeated, and extended. It's the way
science works. Especially science that can be performed on a
benchtop. A good example is high temp superconductivity, where
higher critical temperature and critical current densities seem to
be reported every year (although many claims do not bear up under
scrutiny), in the absence of a widely accepted theory. (The
relatively slow progress in plasma fusion is not difficult to
understand when you realize that experimental iterations are
measured in decades, considering progress should be expected to be
exponential in the number of iterations.)
The above does not characterize the field of LENR. The experiments
are not typically replicated. There is no funding for that.
Also, scientists typically have little interest in repeating their
own work, in which they have faith, especially when they are old,
retired, and trying to accomplish something meaningful.
Consider the high quality experiments done by Claytor et al., at LANL.
[snip]
Investment in pure science in this field, at least in some areas,
is highly justified. The last DOE report essentially backs this
up, though little funding has been forthcoming. Clearly, if
practical progress is made, nothing else could be nearly as
important to economic development or defense. It is insane to
ignore this field.
