Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote: Imagining that testing an experimental device with unknown operating > characteristics can be handled with a boiler form is what's preposterous. >
The operating characteristics are not unknown. They are readily apparent. Anyone can the thing produces heat at a stable rate. Levi et al. can see that is what it is doing, so they know they can summarize the entire run with one temperature difference, except for the heat excursion. We can ignore that and still get a reasonable approximation of performance. Anyway that would only add to the total energy. If this machine behaved like one of Mizuno's glow discharge reactors, with power fluctuating from zero to high values from second to second, then one observed number would be meaningless. You would have to have the computer find an average value for excess power. The fact that the eCat heat is stable can be established with perfect confidence by watching the instruments. The temperatures do not fluctuate much. The flow rate is stable. Input power is stable. That's proof that the reaction is stable, and proof that you need only one set of numbers to summarize the results. The reason it is stable is a mystery, but it is irrelevant. For that matter the cause of the heat is a mystery, also irrelevant. Calorimetry treats all sources of heat as a black box. It makes no difference at all whether the heat is from electricity, a chemical reaction, a nuclear reaction, or something unknown to science. There is no way you can distinguish between these sources of heat, except by measuring net energy over time. > Yes, if all the procedures for taking the measurements have been designed > by experts, and if fraud is not suspected, sure, it could be done. > These are experts, and there is no chance of fraud. Levi or any experienced person would spot any method of fraud in a few seconds, as quickly as he would spot a gross experimental error. The two are exactly the same: there is no method of fraud that is not also a potential experimental error. The only difference is intent. People committing fraud intend to set up the experiment in a way that produces a misleading result. People making errors do the same thing by accident. Any experimentalist has spent decades looking for mistakes and will find deliberate fraud as easily as he finds mistakes. There is no subtle or hidden method of committing fraud such such as simple system. Alan Fletcher went to a lot of trouble listing many plausible methods of committing fraud. Probably he listed nearly all plausible methods, and several implausible ones. There was not one method on his list that I would not have spotted instantly if I had an opportunity to poke around inside the eCat. Levi did have that opportunity and I am sure he is better at experiments than I am. In the test that Krivit observed, in the segment shown on the video, fraud is possible. It would be simple to commit fraud in what what shown in the video. You could use a hidden battery or wire. Krivit did not use his own instruments to confirm the readings, and he did not poke around inside the eCat. Perhaps Krivit poked around earlier, but it was not shown in the video. When I asked Rossi if I would be allowed to poke around, he said no. I would never attend a test with that restriction for the obvious reason that you cannot rule out fraud unless you are allowed to pick the thing up, weight it, look for wires, look inside it, estimate the size of the enclosed cell, and so on. Levi did all of that. - Jed
