On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]>wrote:
> >> A skeptic doesn't need excuses. >> > > They have the Magic Right-as-Rain Protective Shield? > Someone who makes a claim and is challenged may need an excuse. The skeptic is not the one making a claim. > > 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. Then it would only be a matter of time. Boiling water without input would be pretty impressive with something the size of the smaller (or larger) ecats. It's certainly a fair fraction of a kW at those flow rates (even the lower ones calculated from the pump frequency). Then you need nothing more than a time piece to convince skeptics that there is a new energy source there. > 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. It's established engineering. Compared to finding a new energy source, it really is a trivial addition, and the advantage is huge, because infinity is so much bigger than any other gain, that demonstrating it is vastly easier and more convincing. > 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. > Most scientists are not convinced by this. > > 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. > Again? CF is claimed based on measuring the very thing that would make it practical: heat. Muon catalyzed fusion is observed based on detection of neutrons, not heat. > > Yes, a self-powered application would *probably* be more impressive. But > that's all. In no way is it a requirement. Definitely more impressive. It may not be a strict requirement, but it seems like such an obvious thing to do, that when you're talking about validating something most people don't accept, failure to do it just seems too suspicious; especially for something people have been plugging unsuccessfully for 22 years. This is all the more true for something like the ecat, where the input is *heat*, and the output is heat. There is no reason, even with a gain of 1.5 that it couldn't be self-sustaining. Rossi's claim of safety is not believable, but even if true, for demonstration purposes, it would not be difficult to provide safe isolation. He says many have exploded, but he's still kicking. 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? A gas furnace does not need electricity. My barbecue does not need electricity. When the world is convinced of CF, a trickle of electricity to control something is OK. The ecat is not using electricity just for peripheral purposes, though. It is using it to provide heat; the very thing they are claiming the ecat produces. That's the problem.
