On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com>wrote:
Cude>> ... as long as Rossi uses his own designates to report measurements, he will not be taken seriously. As soon as it would be visual and obvious so anyone can see it, he would be rich and famous. Lomax> Cude has repeated this meme, it should be answered. Rossi did not pick the Swedish scientists who observed, Mats Lewan did. Maybe, but Rossi OK'd them. > And he seems to have accepted any reputable physicist willing to look at the work. So far, that would be 3. His public demo was invitation only. He has never made a public invitation to anyone who wants to make direct measurements on the experiment. The kind that would be required to verify his claims. Because reported measurements to date (except maybe the secret ones) do not verify his claims. > Given their reputations, if Rossi were inclined to reject anyone who would not be gullible, he'd not have allowed them to observe. In order to maintain the fraud hypothesis here, I'd have to assume that Rossi paid off Lewan and the other Swedes. No. He talked to them. He read their interviews, and what they wrote. He probably got the sense that they were prepared to believe that the output flow of mist and steam was pure vapour. He might have gotten a gentleman's agreement that they would accept the experimental setup as it was, and simply read the meters. When I asked Lewan in the comments on his blog why he hadn't made more penetrating investigations, this was his response: "The reason for the set-up is of course partly limited by *what Rossi lets us prepare,* but it's also of practical reasons: I don't have the E-cat in my own laboratory and have no possibility to prepare a thorough set-up of my own wish. Furthermore there's a good reason not to change an existing set-up as this probably creates new situations that have to be dealt with in follow up tests. I actually only planned one test but postponed my return to Sweden to make a second as I had some things I wanted to check better, as the steam flow. If I had changed the set-up I probably would have had to do three or four tests to be satisfied (and to satisfy all readers...). *Try to imagine coming to a lab which is not yours*, only having a couple of hours to check a thing that most people don't believe in…" Rossi is no doubt good at manipulating and reading people, and knowing who will be bold enough to insist on this measurement or that change. Those Swedes all seem pretty mild-mannered. Also note that an early plan to allow the Swedes to test the device in their own labs was scrapped until further notice. > As to visual and obvious, no, it would not be "as soon as." There is a mechanism of fame, and it takes time, sometimes. Media ignorance of the Rossi story is puzzling, but this happens. Consider the Wright brothers. Consider Pons & Fleischman. It was overnight. The Wright Brothers were very secretive, avoiding the press and others, limiting the photographs, until they had an offer on the table. But after the first *obvious* public demonstrations in 1908, "the Wright brothers catapulted to world fame overnight". The demonstration did not rely on experts' testimonies, or invitee's accounts. Anyone who wanted could witness it with their own eyes. If Rossi wants to be secretive, that's fine. But if he makes an obvious public demonstration where there is no input energy, and no doubt about energy densities higher than chemical, I expect overnight fame. Just like the Wright brothers. > There isn't any doubt that this is highly newsworthy at this time, You mean you have no doubt. Obviously, if there were *no* doubt, it would in the news. It's not as if the major media don't have access to the internet. > it's either the energy development of the century, or the most brazen fraud to hit with respect to energy production. This will be noticed by history regardless, this is not one of a long line of similar frauds. I don't see it that way at all. It's either true or false, yes. But there are many ways it can be false, and I wouldn't even rule out self-deception on Rossi's part. Why or how it's false doesn't matter. Without evidence, we have no reason to believe it's true. But if it is fraud, I don't see it as particularly different from previous frauds, particularly Mills (which might also be self-deception). > Cude comments, generally, as if LENR itself is not believable. Yet, I noticed this from Wikipedia yesterday: > Norman D. Cook (Oxford University, England), "Computing Nuclear Properties in the fcc Model.", Computers in Physics, Mar/Apr 1989, pages 73-77. […] on theoretical grounds alone, it would be quite premature to dismiss cold fusion as theoretically unlikely." > In 2010, Cook revised his previous work on nuclear models: > How about a recent textbook, Models of the Atomic Nucleus, by Norman D. Cook, Springer, 2010 (Second edition), which has a newly added chapter on LENR? […] glib dismissal of cold fusion as "junk science" in 1989 has been shown to be truly "junk evaluation." > Springer published the first edition of the book in 2006, and Cook doesn't seem to have written anything on cold fusion until 2008, so he is not some long-term "advocate." So, you find one more scientist who is sympathetic to CF, and that is supposed to change the fact that the vast majority, especially physicists, continue to dismiss CF as theoretically unlikely, and experimentally unproven. Cook is impressively prolific and interdisciplinary, but as far as I can tell, he's a psychologist (according to American Scientist), in the department of informatics at the University of Kansai in Japan. At the time of the Computers in Physics article, he was a member of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford. Can you name a university that uses his book as a text book? And if I understand your reference, he did make sympathetic comments about CF in 1989. > Cude represents a grad student level understanding of physics, a grad student who has diligently studied to master a field, which means stuffing his head with what's been known and theorized, and being able to regurgitate it in a way to bring approval from experts in the current state of his field. Actually, that's an undergraduate level. Graduate students are required to bring new knowledge to the world. After all, a few Nobel prizes have been awarded for graduate work, including those awarded to Mossbauer, Josephson, and de Broglie. And my attitude toward CF is shared by the likes of Gell-Mann, Glashow, Weinberg, and so on. The Nobel committee clearly feels their level of understanding is solid. > He doesn't yet understand that science advances through recognizing what is not known, not through believing what is assumed to be known. Actually, it advances through both. Well, not believing, but making hypotheses based on what is assumed to be known. > We provisionally accept what is known, without belief, Scientists do, yes. But this does not describe most of the CF advocates, who most certainly accept what they think is known with fervent belief. > because we need to have something to stand on, or we could not make progress. Quite. > Obviously, science has come up with tremendous accomplishments in extending theory to the point where it can make frequently very accurate predictions, but the prediction of "fusion below detectable levels in the solid state" was a prediction that had never been confirmed, and could never be. Some things can be confirmed. But the absence of detection in a vague context can't be, because there are an infinite number of conditions in the solid state. The prediction was based on a theory consistent with such a wide range of experiments, and not contradicted by any, that physicists made it with uncommon confidence. Even so, when P&F made their announcement, I doubt there was a physicist on the planet that didn't second guess the theory. But when the experiments didn't hold up, their confidence was restored. > and, as Cook wrote in 1989, there were "enough unsolved problems" that such a prediction must be considered a hypothesis, a guess, based on approximations, not a basis, at all, for rejecting experimental evidence. Well, it was much more than a guess, but like I said, they did second guess it for a while. They did not reject experimental evidence because of the theory. They went to the lab and did experiments, and they took a closer look at the experiments reported. And then they rejected cold fusion with increased confidence. It's all about the evidence. P&F evidence turned out to be flaky, and every CF experiment since has turned out to give flaky results. None of them are convincing. And the attitude, I suspect, of physicists is that if cold fusion is happening, this would not be the state of affairs. It would be easy to detect. A factor of a million is a lot. > The excess heat reported by Pons and Fleischmann was a reproducible experiment. No. It was not reproducible. And it was not convincing. > It was a difficult one, No. It was an easy one. Just not reproducible. Irreproducibility makes an experiment look hard. But electrolysis is easy. Calorimetry is easy. What was hard about it? > However, I know of no example of a researcher who persisted, despite initial replication failure, who ultimately failed to find the effect. Most who failed gave up quite quickly. Researchers who initially failed and gave up, did so not only because they failed, but because they also took another look at the apparent successes, and concluded the evidence was absent. Those who kept going, obviously believed in the claims, and that kind of belief leads to cognitive bias, and eventually, as calorimetry goes, it pays off. So it's a bit of a tautology. The problem is that those who ultimately claimed to find the effect were unable to convince those who failed to give it another go. The effect was so marginal, so iffy, so controversial, that most scientists didn't buy it. Those who failed had already shown that they have a sufficiently open mind to give CF a hearing after P&F, but nothing after them was convincing enough. Once bitten, twice shy I suppose. Still, scientists are loath to be left behind in a revolution, so if they thought there was a small chance that CF was real, they would be all over it, just like they were in 1989. But I suspect 22 years without progress makes most of them even more certain it is bogus. > The chimera walked through the lab, and was photographed. The same camera at other times showed no chimera. Many people photographed their labs, having set out the same bait, they thought, and saw no chimera, which proves? Others saw it. A chimera, or the loch ness monster? There are similarities. The problem is the pictures, when they get them, are never clear. A fuzzy head there maybe, and that looks like a tail. Occasionally a better picture comes along, and it turns out to be a stuffed animal. There are enough photographers in CF that even if they all sucked at taking pictures, some pictures would be clear. But there are no clear pictures. > Let's go over the chimera traits, as it appears in electrochemical PdD experiments. >1. Appears correlated with current density. Except in heat after death, which happens sometimes, but not always. > 2. Appears under disequilibrium, probably due to deuterium flow. What does that mean? > 3. Leaves behind helium in proportion to its total presence. Not convincingly. > 4. Leaves about half of the helium behind, trapped in the lattice, near the surface. The rest mostly escapes in the effluent gases. ditto. > 5. Disappears rapidly with hydrogen impurity in the heavy water. (The figure I have in mind is that 1% is enough to poison the effect.) And yet hydrogen works just fine with Ni. > 6. Appearance and disappearance depends upon incompletely understood characteristics of an experiment, such as the history of the cathode. Huh? > 7. Appearance is reported to produce unexpected minor products or secondary effects, such as transmutations other than to helium, radioautographs on X-ray film. So, we are expected to believe there is not one but several reactions that are contrary to known theory and that no one can pin down. > 8. No theory of chimera appearance has been found to be accurately predictive. One might think that with a list of necessary characteristics, someone could set up a convincing demonstration, but as Rothwell and Mallove used to lament, there isn't one. Anyway, that list kind of illustrates the flaky nature of the experiment. There are so many "appears" and "probably"s, and "about"s, and "mostly"s and "depends on incompletely understood characteristics of an experiment"s, and "unexpected"s and unpredictables. > The pseudoskeptical position is that a new, previously unknown species is impossible. The pseudoskeptics, unlike real skeptics, are content to simply believe this, based on a trust or attachment to the alleged thoroughness of prior exploration, and they find no need to establish, by experiment, the true cause of the effects. It's lack of evidence that makes most people skeptical. There are enough examples of pathological science, where the fervent desire for something to be true skews the results, that they are waiting for better evidence of an effect to give it a second chance. > Real skeptics would, with phenomena like this, keep an open mind, as Cook did in 1989. As did most physicists in 1989. Like I said, most second-guessed the theory for a while. But the evidence didn't stand up. > It appears that Cook, like many others, eventually came to be convinced that there is something real happening here. > He's notable as a theoretical physicist who knew the inadequacies of theory, back in 1989, Is he a notable as a theoretical physicist? He's been in psychology and informatics departments. American Scientist lists him as a psychologist. He publishes mostly on psychology topics like the brain and perception etc. According to the Web of Science database, his physics papers are hardly cited at all, several with zero citations, and the most cited paper with 11. He's certainly conversant in nuclear physics, and has written a book on it, but I don't see evidence that he would be regarded as a notable theoretical physicist by anyone. It's sort of beside the point anyway. CF has its MIT theoretical physicist, and several other somewhat notables. One more doesn't change the picture significantly. The fact that you have to beat the bushes like that to turn up a positive comment on CF is kind of the exception that proves the rule. > and he's confirmed what I was taught by Feynman in about 1963. The predictions of quantum mechanics were inadequate to make precise predictions of the behavior of bulk matter, the math is too difficult. That's silly. Quantum mechanics is used to make many accurate predictions about the behaviour of bulk matter. Solid state physics makes heavy use of quantum mechanics. In any case, nuclear reactions involve extremely short range forces, so the many body problems of electromagnetic forces in bulk matter don't apply. > Besides cold fusion, one of the experimental clues that these assumptions could be off was Takahashi's early work with the bombardment of PdD with accelerated deuterons. He reported evidence of triple deuteron fusion at levels that were 10^26 higher than the normal prediction, based on simple probabilities and the plasma assumptions. In 1999. He was looking for evidence to confirm his idea of 3-body deuteron fusion, so confirmation bias seems likely. Any other groups observed similar results? Anyway, a decade later, there doesn't seem to be much to show for it. And the reactions were detected by the energetic particles, which aren't supposed to happen in CF. > Something in the solid state shifts things, sometimes. That led him to look for possibly multibody effects in cold fusion, hence his later theories. I think this is the wrong way round. He refers to his ideas of multibody reactions, first published in 1989, in the experimental work of 1999.
