At 07:17 PM 7/20/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 6:07 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<<mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com>a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
The demand for self-powered operation is a classic pseudo-skeptical
excuse, that's not necessary for an independent test, where input
power can be nailed down accurately, and simply complicates the device.
A skeptic doesn't need excuses.
They have the Magic Right-as-Rain Protective Shield?
Actually I didn't say anything about skeptics, the comment was about
pseudo-skeptics.
This business about complications is an excuse for delivering on
something even Rothwell calls trivial (in the case of the ecat). How
can infinite gain not be worth the complication?
Rothwell was wrong, eh? Rothwell was saying that with respect to a
claim of 6:1 power or more. And it was still wrong. Arranging for
generation of power from the kind of heat that the E-Cat was
producing would be complicated. It would require a radically different design.
The problem with the E-Cat demos was not that they were not
self-powered. Imagine a self-powered demo that did what the E-Cats
did, exactly. Supposedly too much power, eh? But wait, how much power
did they generate? If it was a seventh as much, perhaps that was
stored energy by some scheme.
(Suppose that this thing cheaply generates substantial extra power,
but less than is necessary for self-powered operation. As an "energy
amplifier," that could reduce energy costs substantially, it could
still be a practical product. Of course, much more than that is being claimed.)
It would only have an advantage over a heat pump to the extent that
the capital cost might be lower. If it delivers more energy than a
heat pump, self-powered operation should be in reach, at least in principle.
Sure. And it sure might be. Whether self-powered is "in reach" or
not, "reaching" it would be an additional development step, one
providing no particular advantage at the early demonstration stages.
Anyone actually working with these 'cats could tell if they are
generating power, and how much, using standard techniques. The
problem is that those techniques weren't used, and when people like
Rothwell offered to do it at their own expense, that was declined.
The Pons-Fleischmann effect was -- and is -- relatively fragile and
unreliable, but it's not down in the noise, there is plenty of
experimental evidence that there is substantial heat being generated,
but it's difficult to scale it up. The approach, loading the
palladium with deuterium generated by electrolysis, wasted a lot of
energy, and when excess energy was found, in the most reliable
approaches, it was down around 5% of input energy. That's still ten
times noise, and control experiments showed that the calorimetry was
accurate, etc. Other evidence has shown that the effect is, indeed, fusion.
Essentially, that an effect is real doesn't mean that a practical
application is ready or even close, it can take many, many years to
find techniques to make such applications possible, if ever. Nobody
claims that muon-catalyzed fusion isn't real because there is
apparently no possibility of practically using it.
Yes, a self-powered application would *probably* be more impressive.
But that's all. In no way is it a requirement. You know, I have a gas
furnace that heats water to make steam to heat my apartment. It is
not "self-powered." It requires not only gas supply, but also
electricity, to operate. So?
All this speculation is an attempt to jump the gun, to try to figure
out of Rossi's results are plausible.
Or to be the first to Pin The Tail On The Donkey.
Hmmph! No appreciation around here.
