At 04:51 PM 8/24/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I do not like to be argumentative. Perhaps I misunderstand Abd's argument here. But it seems to me he repeatedly claimed that in order to measure a mysterious source of heat from an unknown phonomenon, you must have detailed, time-sequenced data. It is not enough to have one number. Even if the people watching the meters or screen display can see that the temperature is stable, it is not enough to say "5°C for 18 hours." You have to have data points from 1080 minutes all showing more or less the same temperature.
Weird. What I've said is that more data is better than less.
Lomax claims that a single number would suffice for a well-established phenomenon, such as the heat measured from a combustion furnace.
Semantic error: suffice for what? To test an operating furnace, that uses well-known design, that is tested by a protocol known to detect nearly all possible problems? Or to test a device which is new, which has unknown internal structure and operating methods, and which defies conventional wisdom?
A single measure can be of interest, but rarely would it be conclusive.
But it cannot be relied upon for something no one has ever seen before, such as a sample of radium in 1898 or a cold fusion reactor today. If Madam Curie had reported only that the "sample remains warm" that should have been rejected. She would have to say "it remains 1.3°C warmer than ambient in a well-insulated box, and here are 1000 data points to prove it." One data point, or the temperature measured once a day for a week would not prove the point.
Curie's discovery might have had another possible cause that could cause some "warmth," for sure.
I don't get this. As I said, perhaps I misunderstand.
Yes, you do.
But I think that if the method is well established, and the data is manifestly 1 or 2 dimensional, it makes no sense to say it must be presented in more detail because the phenomenon being measured cannot be explained.
A "well-established method" is designed to measure something that is "well-known." There are ways to treat the Rossi reactor as a black box, and measuring the heat from a black box is reasonably well understood. But methods that one would use for this were not used.
Rather, as an example, temperature was measured inside the boundaries of what we'd call the "black box."
The instruments prove that radium and the Rossi reactor produce stable, unvarying heat. That much we know.
No, we don't know that at all. Jed, sometimes I can't figure out where you get this nonsense. We sort-of-know that the temperature in the reactor chimney is sort-of-constant, once the thing reaches operating condition. We do not know, at all, that the heat is "stable, unvarying." Indeed, we have some (inconclusive) evidence that it is not. It's practically a consensus now, haven't you noticed? The E-Cat/test design heat output could vary wildly and yet the chimney temperature would remain stable, over a very wide range of heat generation values. All that would vary is the steam quality.
(Here, "steam quality" refers to the ratio of vapor to total water in the effluent, whether the "water" is as dispersed droplets or more amalgamated liquid.)
The basic point here is that we have been given only a narrow window into the operation of the E-Cat.
Even if we no earthly idea what causes the heat, we can still measure it, quantify it, and characterize it as stable.
We could. Jed, isn't this obvious? If you want to characterize something as "stable," don't you need more than one measurement? Even if it is not specifically reported, a statement that the temperature of something remained within the range of X to Y is really based on many measurements, and given the ubiquity of cheap logging devices, we are quite accustomed to seeing, in papers, graphs of temperature. Effectively continuous measurement.
Rossi's possible manipulation of the input power points out something: what if the temperature were being logged during the changes he may have made? Was there an anomalous change in temperature corresponding to the times when the output became noisier?
What was the input power? Again, this could have been continuously logged. It wasn't.
Or in the case of the Mizuno glow discharge effect, we can sure that it is extremely unstable.
[...]
In short, you can measure the effect of a phenomenon even if you have no idea what causes it.
Of course you can. However, if the phenomenon is not well-established, i.e,. not observed with massive redundancy already, we don't necessarily know what to measure in order to understand it. You are perfectly aware that Rossi chose to use a method of measuring heat that was utterly inconclusive. Assumptions were made about steam that just weren't true, for example, that a slightly elevated temperature meant necessarily that the steam was dry. That would be adequate only if the pressure were also measured. If the pressure is unknown, the boiling point is unknown. However, from the apparently, at least temporary, temperature stability, we may assume that the steam is at the boiling point for the internal pressure, which may then be calculated.
But if it's at the boiling point, we have no measure of steam quality at all. It's "saturated steam," which can be anywhere between 0%+ to 100%- quality.
All this means is that the Rossi demonstrations were not conclusive, far from it. So ... why, Jed, are you standing on your head to defend the indefensible? If you "know" that the Rossi reactor is "real," i.e., that it generates *substantially* what is being claimed, you must know this from private information and private inference, and you certainly are not going to convince us based on that. "private" information can be spectacularly in error.
(Even public information can, but public information, at least, can be subject to wide analysis that can expose unexpected issues and possibilities.)
