At 03:15 PM 7/19/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
The 120 kW excursion makes the 18-hr test less credible to me. It means that during that excursion the delta T between the ecat walls and the water would have to increase by an order of magnitude. If ordinary operation is at 300C or 400C, this would cause the metal to melt.
Yeah, my thinking is along these lines also. This tends to indicate that there is some unidentified artifact operating. It does call into question the more moderate results. For example, suppose there was some problem with the temperature sensor placement, suppose it is somehow picking up increased heat....
It could be any of millions of things. Those of us working with cold fusion really have to be aware, there are millions of ways to get it wrong. That works in the other direction, by the way.
That we can show reasons to be skeptical doesn't prove that there wasn't any excess heat. To do that would require work that hasn't taken place, that Rossi has not allowed. Jed Rothwell has pointed this out, and so have many others.
Joshua, you are quite right to remain skeptical on Rossi's "demonstrations." I think you've erred with respect to other things in this field, but we can look at that later. I am not the authority on Truth, and anyone who thinks they are is probably in deep doo-doo, intellectually.
Looking at the Rossi demonstrations, I'm inclined to think that there is *some level* of excess heat here. But, then again, I do accept other LENR excess heat findings, lots of them. I can easily understand why someone who thinks those other findings as "not conclusive" would find Rossi even less conclusive. For starters, no independent verification, basic criterion.
And we'll just have to wait for that, unless, say, Brian Ahern hits gold. There are people digging, one of them may strike the mother lode. I love the people who look, instead of just sitting and pontificating. If nothing else, they give us far more interesting stuff to pontificate about!
In fact, though, these people are responsible for most breakthroughs in science. Behind them are phalanxes of people who do more boring work, replicating and measuring and nailing things down....
