At 03:54 AM 5/29/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 9:35 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Cude>> You find it so hard to believe that a few hundred cold fusion
researchers can all be wrong, but if cold fusion is real, then far
far more researchers would have to be wrong.
Lomax> This is the core of Cude's religious position: he believes
that researchers have demonstrated that cold fusion is not real.
It's a fantasy.
Taking a little break from your actual research, I see.
Your premise is wrong. You set up this straw man because you think
you can knock it down. Basically everything that follows is
therefore irrelevant (and more than a little boring), but what would
be the fun in ignoring it?
Cude is heavy on claims and light on evidence.
The core of my position has been stated many times. It's that cold
fusion researchers have failed to demonstrate that cold fusion is real.
Lost performative: "demonstrating to *whom*"? It's rather obviously
true, properly framed, but for the same reason, it's banal and boring.
Cold fusion researchers have not demonstrated to the satisfaction of
an imaginary, non-existent person called "Joshua Cude," that "cold
fusion" is "real," whatever that means.
It's really banal because cold fusion researchers have not "failed"
to do this, they haven't even attempted to do it.
The evidence is simply lacking.
"The evidence" must mean "the evidence that would convince Joshua
Cude." Because there are enormous piles of evidence, all of which
means nothing without analysis, and analysis that begins with false
assumptions is almost guaranteed to produce false conclusions. As
soon as the analyst begins to approach a conclusion that contradicts
the assumptions, the analyst will assume analytical error and back up
and not go any further down that road. It's how humans think.
Since the effect is contrary to what we understand about natural
science, without evidence for an effect, I remain skeptical. In
this point of view, I am in good company.
What is "the effect"? Lack of precision allows Cude to write tomes of
"criticism" that has no foundation in fact. As to "good company,"
Cude is relying on the past, on an imagined agreement with certain
past analysis. Let's concede this immediately: there are many
knowledgeable scientists who remain skeptical. In fact there are many
cold fusion researchers who remain skeptical. But skeptical about
what? By losing precision, Cude can claim all the great scientists
are on his side.
There is this teeny little problem, but I'm sure he can find a way to
dismiss it. The Nobel laurates who took the evidence seriously, and
who didn't dismiss it out-of-hand as "impossible." It was only a
narrow student understanding of quantum mechanics and how it can be
applied that led some to think that the experimental results reported
by so many were "impossible."
And that's what we are dealing with, here, experimental results. Not
theories. "Cold fusion" is, technically, a theory. What theory? The
terms must be defined. "Cold fusion" was a term applied by media,
mostly, but which also became popular, to refer to whatever is behind
the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect, or FPHE. The very first question,
scientifically, is not whether or not the FPHE is real or not,
because scientific protocols assume that reported data is real. Is
there an FPHE?
*Of course there is.* The issue is what causes it.
When P&F claimed they had evidence in 1989, the world leapt at the
potential; journalists and scientists alike, all over the world,
paid attention, and many got involved in experiments. When two
scientists with respectable reputations claimed evidence for
something revolutionary, no one wanted to be left behind. The world
was giddy with excitement and anticipation.
Which was, of course, radically premature. However, it was also a
simple human response. Pons and Fleischmann made mistakes, more than
one. But they also discovered an effect. It turned out to be much
more difficult to replicate than first impressions. That would be a
core mistake, but I can easily forgive them for making it, I don't
think they anticipated what would ensue.
But then, in the next weeks, months, and years, nothing came of the
great excitement.
And this is where Cude begins to lie, and I use the term "lie"
advisedly. If he stuck to "months," he'd be right, more or less.
However, the 1989 ERAB report was partly based on negative results
from Miles, at China Lake Naval Laboratory, who had been attempting
replication and who had found no excess heat. Before the panel issued
its report, Miles started to get results. He phoned the ERAB panel.
They did not return his phone call. Miles, of course, went on to
discover and demonstrate, conclusively, that the reaction was
producing helium, that the FPHE is correlated with helium production.
Wanting only replication of that result, this was conclusive
evidence, of a classical kind, for fusion. Over the years, hundreds
of research groups also found the FPHE. And, yes, some failed, and,
I'm sure, some continue to fail. We don't hear about those continued
failures, for the most part, but I'm confident they exist, they
merely became much more uncommon for two reasons: skeptics don't look
for them, and those who trust the prior work talk to each other and
find out how to produce the effect.
This is crucial: nobody has produced the effect, more than
transiently and without rigor, and then shown prosaic cause. Nobody
has produced the effect without helium being generated (obviously,
the researchers must be looking for helium, this is not going to be
found accidentally, because the amount of helium produced to account
for the heat is very, very small; and most researchers, ongoing,
don't want to waste time and money looking for what they already
know, from other work, will be there.)
Many excellent scientists did experiments and concluded P&F were
incompetent or deluded or both; that there was nothing there.
Many sociologists of science have written about what happened. Cude
is describing it accurately here, except that "excellent" is not what
they say. If A, an expert in a field, does an experiment using
methods with which he is intimately familiar, and then B, an
"excellent scientist" but not familiar with that specific field, and
does not see the same results, is B justified in concluding that A is
"incompetent or deluded or both."?
Hardly. Rather, a truly "excellent scientist," who will, through his
own excellence, understand his own limitations, will keep studying
and working. Miles was an electrochemist, and this work was difficult
for *him*. Further, with the approaches used in those early days,
setting up the effect often took months. The time spent by the famous
early negative replicators was completely inadequate.
The incident is famous among sociologists for the breakdown of
scientific protocols and courtesy. We just looked at how this
happened with N-rays; the difference is that Wood happened to be,
probably, "right." His methods were not scientific, in fact, and the
rejection of N-rays did not follow scientific protocols, much more
work would have been necessary.
In the case of cold fusion, this is what would have been necessary:
*reproducing* the FPHE, then showing the prosaic cause. I have seen
one paper where something like that was attempted, a paper looking at
the early Focardi Ni-H work, that purports to have shown the reported
heat, then shows, at least to the researcher's satisfaction, a
prosaic cause for this. Something like this also happened with Lewis
at Cal Tech, they used cells substantially larger than P-F cells
(they were working in a rush and based on very incomplete
information), and, when they failed to stir the cell, and with the
thermocouple placements and deficient methods they were using, they
saw what looked like excess heat. Stirring the cell caused the effect
to disappear.
It's claimed that F&P "were incompetent or deluded." Fine. Reproduce
the incompetence, the experimental "errors* that make the effect
appear. What is really being claimed by Cude is that hundreds of
researchers are "incompetent or deluded." Because of the numbers
involved, for his claim to make any sense at all, he must categorize
researchers into "excellent" -- those who get negative results -- and
"incompetent or deluded" -- *by definition* those who get positive results.
The way around this impasse would be obvious: study and reproduce the
"incompetent" techniques, then show, by controlled experiment, the
prosaic cause (or causes, there could be more than one). Take
McKubre's work, for example.
The claim has been made by some that McKubre was not, in his work,
accurately measuring the input power. This is a critical factor in
the kind of work that McKubre has been reporting. In one recent
discussion, a skeptic claimed that bubble noise created a high
frequency component in the input power, which was then missed by the
calculation method used by McKubre. This was actually interesting, in
theory, even though it would predict results that contradicted other
aspects of the reports.
Fine: do the experiments, fully capturing the input power data
(voltage and current at high acquisition rate). Continue this until
the FPHE is seen, analyzing the data in McKubre's fashion. Then
re-analyze using the more sophisticated and complete input power
data. Does the effect disappear?
It turned out, when I asked the researchers, that more sophisticated
analysis had been done, but it was boring, and simply had not been
reported in the literature. The simplified assumptions that McKubre
followed were quite adequate to measure input power, under real
experimental conditions, and, besides, *there were controls* of more
than one kind that demonstrated that mismeasurement of input power
would have been very unlikely to be the cause of the effect.
Electrochemists work with the problems all the time, and they knew
that the technique was sound. State of the art, stuff that isn't
necesarily mentioned in research reports, which are generally written
for *peers* who also know this stuff.
CF was a bust.
Politically, for a time, yes. And this means *nothing* about the
"reality* of it. It's about politics, pure and simple. N-rays were
not real because Wood did his private experiment, that most people
believed only on his own say-so, and cold fusion was not unreal
because some people couldn't demonstrate the evidence. These outcomes
were political in nature, not scientific.
It didn't help that P&F were caught in a really obvious error with
respect to the associated radiation.
Of course. That was a political effect. They had no experience with
radiation measurements, no understanding of the possible artifacts.
In fact, what they discovered becomes much more clear when we know
that there is almost no radiation. The error was "really obvious" to
nuclear physicists, with experience with this, and really obvious to
armchair analysts with 20-20 hindsight like Cude, but obvoiusly not
to them, they didn't know what to look for. Did they consult with
anyone who might have given them a correction? I don't know. But this
is a detail. It has no bearing -- at all -- on the FPHE, only on how
it might be interpreted, and, since we now have the results from many
investigations, we can say that the primary reaction involved in the
FPHE does not produce any detected radiation, that radiation, if
there is any, is at levels not far from cosmic ray background. It is
really almost irrelevant in trying to understand possible mechanism,
and any usable cold fusion theory must explain this lack of radiation.
Obviously, for example, if, say, we propose that there is some kind
of electron catalysis that bypasses the coulomb barrier, obviously
under rare conditions, to produce d-d fusion, we run straight into a
problem: simple catalysis with muons produces the same branching and
thus the same radiation as hot fusion. Given the product of helium,
there is a severe problem: how is momentum conserved? In the
classical branch to helium, momentum is conserved by the emission of
a gamma ray at high energy, balancing the momentum of the generated
helium. There were efforts to explain this by a kind of Mossbauer
effect, but this would be a Mossbauer effect at levels far higher
than ever before observed, there are some severe difficulties. Much
more likely is a much simpler conclusion: the reaction is not simple,
Coulomb-barrier-bypassed-but-otherwise-normal d-d fusion. Storms
points out some possibilities. But this is theory. If "cold fusion"
is the cause of the FPHE, then the reality of "cold fusion" rests
only on the reality of the FPHE.
And, by all routine and normal standards, the FPHE is real. Suppose
the FPHE were a medicinal effect. Suppose that "heat" is "remission"
from some major disease, like cancer. The claims of Cude et al boil
down to a claim that it is a placebo effect, the product of wishful
thinking and/or reporting bias. Fine. Here is why it is not: there
are dose-response effects that unmistakeably show that this is not
merely experimenter bias.
There might be some "artifact," sure, but it is an unidentified one,
and "unidentified artifact" could be used to dismiss *any*
experimental data. Rather, we look for evidence, usually statistical,
that allows us to rule out, for practical purposes, this possibility.
Miles' helium was measured by an independent laboratory that was
blind to the measured heat. He apparently measured heat and helium
for an entire series of cells, not just of "successful" cells.
Further, in other work, we know that heat results depend on
1. Palladium batch. Some batches of palladium rod show the effect far
more reliably than others.
2. Current density, i.e., current per unit area of the cathode. Since
current density is correlated with input power, some systematic power
measurement error could explain this, but controls have ruled that out.
3. H/D ratio above 1% clearly poisons the effect, that's a
dose-response effect for sure. ("The effect" here is the FPHE, which
involves, by definition, palladium deuteride. Confusing about
everything and everyone, there may be more than one possible LENR,
and inadquate research has been done on this.)
Now, I've heard your response to that. Those who failed to reproduce
all did something wrong. The conditions weren't right. The D-Pd
ratio was too low. The surface wasn't treated right. They actually
did see heat, they were just too stupid to realize it. They were
afraid their paradigm would collapse. And on and on.
How about they did not use the same allegedly defective technique?
This is really very simple. It was possible to think, in 1989 and
possibly into 1990, that the FPHE had not been verified. As others
figured out how to do it and actually did it, that became a
completely untenable position. The early rush to replicate was a
mistake, if, from it, people were going to rapidly conclude "error."
An example of how Cude analyzes everything from the point of view of
his conclusions: he presents contrary arguments as straw man
arguments. "They were just too stupid to realize it." That's a
comment that reflects the politics, not the science. How about this:
Cal Tech and MIT were looking for a large effect, and, as well, for
accessory evidence like neutron radiation and helium and tritium. Any
heat they found was much lower than expected, if Pons and Fleischmann
were correct *and if they set up the same conditions.* Setting up
"the same conditions" -- they had no reason to anticipate this --
turns out to be really, really difficult. Miles, an electrochemist,
initially failed. Pons and Fleischmann themselves, when they ran out
of their original palladium and purchased a new batch, could not
reproduce their own work.
Rather, a scientific approach looks at *all the experimental
evidence* and seeks a harmonizing conclusion, that predicts or
validates all of it. In this, we find, fraud and utter incompetence
are not commonly necessary. Rather, all that is needed to place the
Cal Tech and MIT work into the overall picture are some simple
things, and all this has been published.
1. Cal Tech and MIT did not attain deuterium loading higher than 70%,
almost certainly. At least we can say that they did not determine the
loading ratio, and cold fusion researchers learned that this was a
critical variable. This, by the way, dumps the "batch" issue. A good
batch of palladium is *defined* as one which can reach 90% loading or
more, which is where the FPHE effect starts to become significant.
2. So, from later work, Cal Tech and MIT would be predicted to show
little or no heat, and, then, from what is known about the other
results, no radiation -- since they produced no nuclear reaction or
only a very little -- and no helium.
3. What Cude wants is a theoretical framework that discards a large
body of evidence as "error" without actually demonstrating the error,
but merely hypothesizing it. That is, a *theory* is being used to
discredit *experimental evidence.*
And this is where we understand that science, for Cude, has become a
religion, with dogma. It was well-understood, and known to the 1989
ERAB panel, the Nobel laurate who was co-chair, made certain this was
in the report, that proving cold fusion impossible was ...
impossible. Quite simply, there is no "established theory" that could
prove that an "unknown nuclear reaction" was impossible. As often
stated, the principle is obviously false, people state that fusion
cannot take place at these low temperatures. Okay, muon-catalyzed
fusion takes place close to absolute zero. "Oh, that's an exception."
If it's impossible, folks, no exceptions. What "unknown nuclear
reaction" might mean is some other form of catalysis. How could we
say that there is no other form?
We can't, unless we have complete and comprehensive knowledge of all
phenomena, and we are far from that. And, folks, that's what I
learned from Feynman, and he's happy, I'm sure, that we are waking up
to this, he struggled with the Cargo Cult approach to science all his
life. Hint: Cargo Cult science is not about observation of
experiments, forming hypotheses, making predictions from them, and
then revising the hypotheses if the results don't confirm the hypotheses.
There was a conjecture, routinely accepted, that nuclear behavior in
solids would not deviate significantly from reality. Fleischmann has
written about what they were looking for. Contrary to the confident
claims of pseudoskeptics, that they were deluded by a desperate
desire for "free energy," they were trying to confirm the conjecture,
by seeing if they could see some difference between prediction and
reality. I've seen this dismissed as revisionist, that Fleischmann is
just rationalizing his past. However, that's a clear demonstration of
how story has taken over, instead of understanding of what happened.
In ordinary communication, when someone says "I was looking for X,"
we just accept it. The man has no reason to lie, he gains nothing.
And, if it's true, he was doing basic science, filling in a lacuna,
something commonly assumed but that had never been adequately tested.
He says that they expected to fail. And the rest is history, the damn
thing melted down, they "looked like a cat that had eaten a mouse,"
an observer of the wreckage later reported (Beaudette).
Of course they were excited! Wouldn't you be?
Then began many years of hard -- and expensive -- work. They were not
ready to announce, that's clear from the history. What does that tell
you about them? About the work, it tells us that they had great
difficulty getting this effect to show up reliably. They didn't have
a simple "kit" that would reliably show heat. Later, others developed
such things, apparently, but, always, so far, with the FPHE,
"reliability" remains statistical, not individual. Cells, with some
approaches, now "reliably" show *some heat,* but the amounts vary greatly.
When we give someone a medicine for cancer, results vary greatly.
Does this mean that the effect is not real?
Physicists, as "hard scientists," are utterly unfamiliar with this.
Plasma physicists work with effects that are precisely predictable,
to many decimal places of accuracy. But "cold fusion" isn't like
that, precisely because *it is not understood*. We can say, with very
high confidence now, that deuterium is being converted into helium,
regardless of mechanism. ("We" only includes those who objectively
and neutrally review *all* the evidence, it does not include
religious fanatics who sort evidence first into "excellent" and
"deluded," based on apparent conclusions, and then who, based only on
"excellent" evidence, conclude "nothing has been shown."
It is now up to the physicists to determine the mechanism. If they
want to waste their time trying to impeach the evidence for such
fusion, that would be fine, but it's not where the gold is. A Nobel
Prize to the physicists who really do figure this out. And, if they,
instead, elucidate and demonstrate the "artifacts" behind the FPHE,
probably no Nobel, but, at least, they'll have done some good science!
And that research would be published.
Cude's political speculations and diatribes would not make peer
review at any mainstream peer-reviewed journal. Quite simply, they
are not "science."
Well maybe so. But given the failures, the CF cabal would have to
come up with something better to get taken seriously again.
If I'm a part of that "cabal," WE DON'T CARE. The work is being taken
seriously, and funding has, from what I hear, substantially
increased. Seriously enough? Given the potential, no, but that's a
political problem, and there are people working on it. The work is
being published in mainstream journals, about two papers per month.
The decline in publication, which certainly took place, reached a
nadir around 2004 or 2005, with only about a paper every two months.
Positive report on cold fusion is appearing from mainstream news
organizations and from U.S. government agencies.
I know that there is interest from the consultants who make
recommendations to major corporations and politicians, because I got
a call from one, they are very interested in cold fusion and in
Rossi, of course. It's obvious to me that there was a turn, sometime
around 2004. The presenters to the 2004 U.S. DoE review were not
politically sophisticated, they were scientists, and they expected,
more or less, to be treated as scientists, and for those who read the
review report to read beyond the conservative language used. Instead,
it's obvious from the final report, many of the reviewers clearly did
not understand the evidence presented, they got it flat-out wrong in
their reports, and there were blatant errors in the final review
summary. These aren't just differences of opinion, I mean real,
verifiable, clear errors as to what was being reported.
Yet that review showed a drastic difference from 1989, when the panel
was almost unanimous with a very negative conclusion, only modified
and mollified by the intervention of a Nobel laureate. Cold fusion
was clearly treated as emerging science, still controversial, but
*unanimously* considered as being worth of modest funding under
existing programs. That did not happen, not yet. As with 1989, the
DoE did not follow their own panel's recommendations. We can wonder
why. My guess is: people like Cude. He's right. He's not alone. There
is more than one blind idiot in the world, who prefers to stick with
his firm beliefs than consider alternatives. Lots more than one.
After all, new discoveries in science typically auger in progress
at breakneck speed. That's the best time for a new field. Lots of
low-hanging fruit to pick.
Yup. If that fruit isn't nipped in the bud, as it was.
Instead, CF people kept doing the same experiment with the same
results over and over.
This is actually completely false. The problem is the opposite, they
did *not* do the same experiment over and over.
Electrolysis experiments with input power, chemical reactions,
differential equations, and finally after much data reduction, a
claim of excess heat. Nothing obvious, and it never got more
obvious. In fact as the experiments improved, the effect got
smaller. (And as they got worse (as with Rossi) the effect got bigger.)
This is pure claim, contrary to the evidence. Where is the
peer-reviewed review of the field that shows this oft-claimed
disappearance of results with increased precision? And notice an
assumption here. We don't know the story with Rossi, because Rossi
hasn't been scientifically confirmed -- or rejected. What Cude is
assuming is simple: if there is a bigger effect, there must be "worse
experiments." He is, very obviously, reasoning from conclusions. Bad
Idea. But it's quite what Cude and those like him do.
Some people did try variations on the experiment, using gas loading,
glow discharge, sonic, superwave, and so on, but in every case the
results were and are unconvincing.
Again, "to whom"? Superwave results are convincing, to neutral,
skeptical observers, like Duncan. They've been published under peer
review, they meet ordinary scientific standards. What they show is
heat, not "nuclear reaction," but *theory* might tell us that the
source must be nuclear. Cude is demonstrating a common characteristic
of pseudoskeptics, a lack of curiosity that is diagnostic of
"religiosity." *What is the cause of this anomaly?*
Real scientists would want to know, and they would not be content
with armchair critique, they would *investigate*. That really can't
be done, much, with Rossi right now, though there are some people
trying. It's been said to be like the "secret" of the atomic bomb.
Once it was known to be possible, it wasn't really a secret any more,
it could be possible for someone to independently find it. If Rossi
turns out to be fake -- and Rossi, not all the results, could not be
mere error -- then work may shift back to the Pd-D system, right now
many of the serious researchers, it seems, are working on Ni-H. Which
is not the FPHE, it was not considered established with anything like
the confidence about PdD.
As Rothwell complained, they never stand out. There is always some
form of input (or at least it is not obviously excluded), and the
heat is demonstrated with calorimetry, which is known for being
prone to artifact.
Calorimetry is a known and established technology, routinely used.
*All human observation" is prone ot artifact. Given that the reported
heat is way above known calorimetry error, *there is an anomaly,*
something unexplained.
The finding of correlation between excess heat and helium almost
certainly rules out artifact in either, that's the power of
correlation. Cude simply dismisses this. Peer-reviewers accept it.
Cude is now in the "fringe," though he still has plenty of people who
will pat him on the back and encourage him. If he tells them who he is.
Cude has no reputation to defend, he has no future to protect. He's
attacking people who are public, who use their real identities, and
who publish under them, whose careers and enduring reputations are at
stake. Cude is a coward, a troll.
I think mainstream science's attitude toward the field has become
like it is to other fringe areas that never seem to get anywhere.
Dying fringes don't show a quadrupling of publication rate. Rather,
they may occasionally get something through. Cude, I believe, is a
"general debunker," he doesn't just do this with cold fusion. He is a
classic pseudoskeptic, that is, a skeptic who fails to be skeptical
about his own ideas. A real skeptic in even, does not firmly hold to
his own speculations and theories and attachments, even though he may
use them as operating hypotheses, he never forgets that they are
hypotheses, open to correction and modification from contrary evidence.
There are intepretations that explain *all* the evidence reported
under peer review in mainstream publications (in the sense that none
of it contradicts them, including all the "negative" reports.) Cude
simply rejects those, in favor of a view that only explains a
minority of the publications, based on a theory that he believes in,
an impossibility theory.
This has gone beyond merely being obvious to a few, it's breaking out all over.
Instead of pulling their hair out trying to figure out where other
people have gone wrong from their poorly documented, unrefereed
accounts, they are waiting for evidence that stands out.
Heat/helium. I made that point to Storms, that this was a
reproducible experiment, that had been done by many research groups,
and that there was *no* contrary evidence. So he wrote a paper on it,
and submitted it to a journal. They asked him to, instead, write a
review of the entire field. Storms (2010) was a solicited review from
a major, highly reputable, mainstream journal, published by the
second-largest scientific publisher in the world. Krivit's articles
in the Encyclopedia of Electrochemical Power Sources were solicited,
I believe, by Elsevier, the largest such publisher in the world. The
largest scientific society in the world, the American Chemical
Society, published the LENR Sourcebook series, starting in 2008,
cooperating with Oxford University Press.
In real *scientific* circles, where "peer review" is important, cold
fusion apparently won this battle about five or so years ago. In
fringe science, negative publication does decrease and stop, but only
because positive publication also stops. Given two dozen papers a
year that seem to *assume* the reality of some LENR effect, given
that these are not just, as claimed, minor journals of no importance
(and I'm not at all including conference papers or the Journal of
Condensed Matter Nuclear Science), where is the critique from outside
the field. All the critique I've seen has been from within the field,
for example, Kowalski criticizing SPAWAR charged-particle reports.
Kowalski is a skeptic, but he also seems to assume that something
real is taking place. That is, he's a real skeptic, not a pseudo-skeptic.
The claim is a factor of a million more energy density than
chemical. How can that be so hard to make obvious. Why can't they
make an isolated device that remains indefinitely warmer than its
surroundings? Why can't they make an isolated device that makes a
cup of tea? That's what's needed.
Just remember muon-catalyzed fusion. It's real, that's not disputed.
It can't do the things demanded. This objection is not about science,
it's about using practical consequences to dismiss and maintain
theoretical obstinacy. The PFHE is fragile, that's obvious. "Fragile"
isn't at all the same as unreal, if it can be shown through
controlled experiment to exist. It can, indeed, be "hard" to turn a
discovered effect into practical application.
My sense of Rossi is that the "isolated device" that will brew tea is
quite possible with his approach, but that it would be unstable and
dangerous, and, further, he doesn't appear to give a fig about what
people like Cude care. He doesn't need them, why should he? He will
do what he promised, or he will fail to do what he promised. It's
pretty simple, really.
There is only one practical reason to make a isolated device as Cude
demands, to make a more convincing demonstration that has fewer fraud
possibilities. Scientifically, this is not necessary at all, it would
be a political device, and it would be expensive. That is, to run the
control electronics, Rossi would have to generate electricity. That's
very inefficient and it would vastly complicate the device. He also
would need a method of control that does not depend on generating
control heat. We don't know if that's possible, he may. But it's a
hell of a lot more complicated. His device would become much larger,
I'd predict. And it might not work, and here is why:
Suppose that the effect is, to some degree, chaotic. That is, for
difficult-to-control reasons, the operating conditions shift. Say, at
450 degrees, the reaction runs quite well. For a while, and suppose
that we have this thing set up so that it runs at 450, supplying its
own heat to maintain that. Surely, if this thing is working, it can
generate that heat. But what if the operating point shifts? What if
it increases a bit? What if a ten degree shift is enough to lower the
heat production lower than that necessary to maintain 450 degrees?
Even without that, output heat would decline, until it starts to
collapse. What Rossi apparently does is to introduce heat that is
adequate to maintain the reaction chamber, relatively small, at 450
degrees, or whatever the optimal point is. He then prevents the
reaction from running away by cooling, and the heat that leaves
through the cooling method is the "heat product."
There is a reason to use steam for cooling, because steam will be
generated, under E-Cat conditions, at a constant temperature. Rossi
can then depend on the heat transfer coefficient of the hotter
reactor chamber to a constant coolant temperature, and simply needs
to maintain the reactor chamber at a desired temperature with his
heater controls. It is certainly possible to measure input power, and
it's done all the time, with wattmeters. If, long term, output power
(considered as the heat transferred to heating water or creating
steam) is much greater than input power, this can be a successful
commercial device, and, yes, tea can be brewed with it. That is,
water can be boiled for less input power than would be needed to boil
the water directly.
None of this means that Rossi is for real. It merely means that there
are quite plausible explanations for the secrecy and for the lack of
"convincing demonstrations," as defined by Cude. It means that Rossi,
like the real world, is not arranging itself for the convenience of
Cude (or for me, for that matter). Given the level of examination of
this work, even as limited by the secrecy, I personally find the
"fraud" hypothesis untenable, but Cude is completely free to believe
in fraud if he wants to. It's a matter of religion, and, on this, I'm
an agnostic. I don't know, I cannot completely rule out fraud, I can
merely conclude that, in my opinion, it's unlikely. Nor can I claim
conclusive evidence that Rossi is real, i.e., that there is true and
significant anomalous heat here.
As to the theories behind Rossi, they are even less convincing than
the theories advanced to explain cold fusion. None are satisfactory,
and that's what the experts who have actually examined the E-Cat, and
who have discussed this with Rossi, are saying.
Pseudoskeptics are utterly convinced that their beliefs are real, it
is only the beliefs of others that are fair game. Real skeptics must
live with uncertainty, ignorance, a recognition that we don't
understand everything, and apparently never will. We take baby steps,
from time to time.
It's a bit like Uri Geller claiming he can bend spoons with his
mind, as long as he provides the spoons and can control the
conditions under which he demonstrates it. I can't explain how he
does it, no matter how long I think about it, and tear my hear out.
Sure. Now, can others reproduce that? And then show, by convincing
evidence, how it is done? It's very tricky with "psychic phenomena."
I.e., that a particular "psychic" demonstration can be imitated with
fraud or tricks does not prove that the demonstration was fraud, it
merely shows what we should already know, quite well, that fraud --
and error -- are possible. Given a very surprising result, bending
spoons, apparently by concentrating on them or something like that,
then the existence of a reasonable prosaic explanation, a trick, that
would produce what independent observers see, is enough to raise
sufficient doubt that most of us will just drop the "telekinesis"
explanation, given Geller's persona.
However, caution: Wood did not demonstrate that N-rays were produced
by observer bias, not in a scientific way. We don't actually know,
for sure, what he did, nobody observed him! Most people simply
believed him, instead of believing the others who had observed
N-rays, instead of believing the photographs, etc. With all this,
theories were set up as alternate explanations, i.e., the photographs
were the product of a subtle observer bias having to do with exposure
times. But the actual experimental work, documented and reported as
research results, was never done.
As it happened with N-rays (very likely), Wood was right as to
conclusion. But he didn't prove that, the "proof," such as it was,
was in the lack of confirmation by others, once the hypothesis of
observer bias was realized. It would be interesting to see historical
accounts, including any publications, of what happened then. How hard
did the supporters of N-rays try to test the Wood hypothesis? It
would, apparently, not have been difficult. And that's why I conclude
that N-rays were, in fact, what Wood thought they were. Even though
Wood didn't actually show that, himself.
But with cold fusion, the situation is very, very different. The same
widespread rejection took place, and, as with N-rays, there was
persistent research for a time. However, the persistent research,
first of all, confirmed the effect, and that's conclusive. There is
an FPHE, get over it. That means that there is unexplained heat, not
explained by known chemistry and not explained by measurement error.
At least not yet! (If so, where is the publication, the peer-reviewed
report, subject to the ordinary protocols of science?)
And there is helium being produced, above background, not explainable
by leakage, correlated with that heat consistently with the value for
deuterium fusion (and there are few, if any, other possible fuel/ash
combinations consistent with the experimental results, and that
ratio, 23.8 MeV, doesn't depend on mechanism at all.)
And, although it makes me a little curious, I'm not all that
interested in understanding how he does it. I'm satisfied that it's
a trick, an artifact, because if he could really bend metal with his
mind, a far more direct demonstration could be done. Strip him down,
to underwear, shackle his hands and feet, and bring in a metal bar
he has never seen before and hold it a foot in front of his mind,
and ask him to bend it.
It bores me, too. But where is the replication? By the way, I think
Geller has been replicated, in the sense that others have been able
to reproduce bent spoons, but, to my knowledge, these have been
magicians. Since the Geller=Magician theory is so plausible, it's
enough for me. But can mind move matter? Of course it can! The
question is how and through what?
Same with CF. The experiments always have to have a certain context.
No. That's simply an assertion. The experiment: reproduce the FPHE,
using whatever state of the art is known to do that. Measure helium.
Compare the heat and the helium. Does it correlate? While a single
experiment is of interest, what is truly interesting would be a
series of them, all identical.
This one has been reproduced by more than twelve research groups
around the world. The "negative replications" did this, except that
they didn't see the heat. Nevertheless their results form a part of
the overall body, if they looked for helium. They amplify and confirm
that if, there is not heat, there is no helium.
Dardik required Duncan to come to Israel to see the experiment.
What Cude has missed, to be charitable, is that Dardik's work was
confirmed independently in the United States, and in Italy, and we
know that the CBS producers visited the McKubre replication, which
was, apparently, one of those relatively rare exact replications, and
with a substantial series of cells. There is a display of the McKubre
data acquisition system that was shown on the CBS special that
featured Duncan and Energetics Technologies.
Basically, Cude is arranging facts or beliefs to create an
impression. It's religious apologetics.
Rossi invites only select people to his laboratory, with protocol
under his control. They need input for safety they say, and the
evidence for GJ/g heat comes in the form of instrument readings. It
is purely a mug's game trying to understand and analyze these
contrived experiments.
To a degree, I agree. So? That's about Rossi, not about an entire
field with many hundreds of researchers around the world. Rossi isn't
science, not yet, we cannot base any science on Rossi, it's
speculation, and that Cude confidently uses this as he does merely
displays his personal certainties, his religion.
If D-Pd or H-Ni generates GJ/g of heat, then take some D-Pd or H-Ni
and put it in an isolated beaker and watch it boil.
That's totally silly. PdD only generates excess heat, it's known and
demonstrated conclusively, at greater than 90% loading, which loading
evaporates if you stop the pressurization through electrolysis. That
evaporation cools, by the way, and only if the deuterium released
promptly burns would it release heat (which would be the heat stored
up through the electrolytic generation of deuterium). No, we know
that Pd-D, sitting by itself, removed from one of these cells, does
get hot, so "boil" is a red herring. That requires a *lot of heat.*
It doesn't get to boiling temperature. Some of that heat may be from
oxidation, there is the famous cigarette lighter effect. That,
however, doesn't explain heat in the underwater environment of heavy
water electrolyte, and this is a whole complex issue, the last
peer-reviewed criticism to be published, negative about cold fusion,
was just such a critique, claiming, based on discussions I've had
with the author, that there is, indeed, an anomaly, but it's
chemical, and represents unexpected oxidation. Fine. He's never done
any experimental work, nor has anyone else shown that his theory
explains the FPHE results, and the theory is contradicted by lots of
evidence. He has been trying to get more work published, and he can't
seem to make it though peer review, anywhere.
Nor can Cude, or anyone else thinking like him. That is what's telling.
If an electrode is producing heat after death, isolate the electrode
and prove it. If Arata's deuterated Pd generates heat for days
without power, then remove it from his device (under pressure) and prove it.
This is crazy. The "device" is just a small chamber containing PdD
(more accurately, an alloy). It does generate heat, and that's been
confirmed, and there is no power input. The problem is more complex
than Cude would have it, indeed. I don't consider the Arata work
conclusive, by any means. Now, Arata has supposedly measured helium.
Supposedly Arata stops his experiments at 3000 hours and then
analyzes the contents for helium. I have not seen any results, and I
don't know that the others who have replicated Arata have published
any helium results. I do know that researchers have been working on
this, but not publishing, and I suspect that what's behind that is
what is behind Rossi's not publishing for years.
This is hot stuff, potentially extremely valuable, and why give away
the information that you have personally gained at high cost? Because
of people like Cude, because of what remains, still, probably a
majority assumption among "scientists in general," nobody would
believe you anyway!
Thus pseudoskepticism, that attacks anyone who comes up with
unexpected results in a protected field, really damages the progress
of science. Pseudoskepticism did not encourage the hard work that
would have been necessary to actually disprove that the FPHE was
artifact. It caused the graduate students who would otherwise have
done this kind of work -- there is no glory in it, comparatively,
only scientific value -- to run away from a "pariah field." Instead
of part of the field being commercial (= secret, mostly) and part
being public (academic, university), only a small fraction of those
who might have continued work did so, as to what was being published,
and they frequently did not share full information.
SPAWAR knew about the neutron production some years before they
announced it, and, as a result, the Galileo project, an effort by
multiple volunteers, pursued the less-interesting results. Military
secret. Then the military finally realized that the levels were so
low that this had no security implications, and the "gold cathode"
approach was published.
Pseudoskepticism is one of the worst enemies of science around. It
pretends to scientific knowledge, mistaking theory for real
knowledge. There is a kind of knowledge, the knowledge of theories
and what they predict, but the only grounded knowledge is careful
observation and report. Rejecting reports merely because they
contradict theory is the end of scientific progress.
That there are practical considerations that mean we don't accept and
spend precious time on every report is something quite different.
Cude is wasting his time, in fact, attempting to debunk and show that
something is bogus, and his motive is pretty transparent. Unless I'm
wrong -- very wrong -- and he's being paid. Now, *there* is a
conspiracy theory. I find ordinary stubborn denial to be adequate,
combined with a certain personality type.
