At 01:07 PM 12/27/2011, Mary Yugo wrote:
On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 7:24 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
<SNIP>It's been called "fusion confusion." Look, Aussie Guy is
anonymous, what he writes is next to meaningless. Don't mix this up
with the huge corpus of work from hundreds of scientists around the world.
Hi Abd,
Thanks for the citations and suggestions. I will look into them in
the future. I am hopeful that the work you describe is valid and
will lead to something useful.
To restate, my interest here is limited. I find it amazing and
amusing that anyone believes Rossi and Defkalion on the strength of
what they have done (and not done) thus far.
I don't believe them. I finally concluded that Occam's Razor was that
Rossi was deliberately deceptive. That is not a proof, and I'm not,
for example, aware of anything illegal from him, specifically.
However, I don't know what representations he has made to others,
involved in binding contracts. Puffery and even straight-out lying
are not necessarily illegal, a lot of people don't understand that.
Fraud is illegal, but there must be someone actually defrauded, not
merely fooled.
So I follow their story, hoping it will get better but finding
out it keeps getting worse.
I've seen no sign of improvement since early this year. It's amazing
how badly these demonstrations could be run. I concluded that Rossi's
goal might very well be to (1) attract attention, while (2) appearing
to be a fraud. As Jed knows, there could be some sane reasons for him
to do that. Or at least not totally insane.
And if Aussie Guy really has cells that run continuously and
indefinitely at a COP of 5x over a 1 Watt input, I'd find that
interesting as well.
It's just a claim, and it might be naive, we know nothing about
Aussie Guy except that he doesn't seem particularly familiar with the
field of LENR.
I sort of doubt that he has such cells and that they will work
the way he hopes. I am also amused by his claim that he is going
to get an E-cat to test. I have no idea why he believes that given
that nobody else in the world has said they have.
We can't tell. He might have a contractual commitment, or he might
merely be making optimistic statements. People do that, you know.
In summary, I am interested in robust, rather large claims to cold
fusion/LENR demonstrations.
Rossi claims that, but that was not, and cannot be considered to be,
the state of the science. There is clear evidence that LENR is
possible, enough that it is quite foolish for it to be unfunded,
particularly given the horrendously poor showing, so far, through hot
fusion approaches. I've opined that it's possible this will never be
commercially practical, but that's why we do pure science. You can't
know till you know!
The position of the particle physicists in 1989-1990 was pretty sad.
It was basically, "This is impossible because we cannot understand
how this could possibly work. Those chemists don't understand nuclear
physics. It must be a mistake."
It's one of the basic bonehead mistakes to make in science, the kind
of thing Feynman warned about. Dismissing experimental evidence on
purely theoretical grounds is generally a Bad Idea.
Here is what I suggest taking home, but if you really want to know
this independently of my suggestion, you'll need to do a *lot* of
reading. Low Energy Nuclear Reactions are possible, and they do
include fusion, i.e., the conversion of deuterium to helium, with the
release of enormous energy *per reaction.* However, we are -- unless
Rossi or other independent approaches pan out -- far from being able
to reliably set up the reaction conditions so that the energy is
robust and predictable, what you want to see.
It took twenty years of development of the state of the art to come
to the point where someone who is willing to put in the time and
money, to learn how to do it, can see the FPHE. Many many early
replication attempts failed, for reasons that are now fairly well
known. What puzzled many was that what seemed to be *the very same
conditions* would sometimes produce the result and sometimes not.
Turns out that what may seem to be "the same" isn't necessarily the
same. I've become fond of the graph published by SRI for P13/14.
Unfortunately, they did not publish what needed to be published, for
what they show is the "chimera of cold fusion," the appearance of a
very clear, unmistakeable heat signal. That graph shows excess heat
from two cells operated in series, same current through each, as a
current excursion in the deuterium cell produces a tracking excess
heat signal, but the same excursion in a hydrogen cell produces only
more noise. The signal is very well elevated above the noise, it's
quite clear. What people don't see is that the same pair of cells was
put through the same protocol three times, and the excess heat signal
only appeared the third time. The first two times, the deuterium cell
behaved like the hydrogen cell.
What was the difference? Researchers generally explain this as a
phenomenon of the conditioning of the material. Only some material,
for starters can even be conditioned, some palladium cannot hold
enough deuterium, it has to do with nanostructure, apparently. Then
as deuterium is loaded and deloaded, as there is cycling of the
deuterium flux through the palladium surface, the material is
altered, it expands, it develops structure.
For a while. Then it stops working again. How do you turn this into
an energy source? Rather obviously, electrolysis isn't the way to do
it, it's very unlikely. Electrolysis just happens to be a handy way
to create extremely dense deuterium, confined by a metal lattice.
Most people do think that gas-loading into designed material, just
right as to cavity size and properties (zeolites are popular), is
more likely to produce results.
Rossi comes from left field. It's relatively easy to come up with
possible mechanisms for deuterium fusion to helium. Proton fusion
involving nickel is far more difficult to understand. (And for the
same reasons that PdD cold fusion isn't simply deuterium fusion,
neither would NiH results be simple hydrogen fusion, which doesn't
work anyway.)
All the rest I've seen so far and all the theory, I'd rather
let other people investigate. I am competent to judge the quality
and reliability of most types of thermal and electrical power
measurements and I have a sensitive nose for sniffing out scam
possibilities. I don't really know the details of nuclear
physics. So, apart from than that which I mentioned, I leave it
to others. As Clint Eastwood's character once said, a person has
to know their limitations.
Yup. You get a Bad Idea from Rossi. Want to see some sane
calorimetry, look at the work of Pons and Fleischmann, or that of
Michael McKubre at SRI, or other competent researchers.
I have never claimed that cold fusion/LENR does not exist or does
not work. All I claim is that I don't know and that some of the
papers that others have suggested have been obscurely written and
that for others, knowledgeable people have raised counter
explanations and objections to the findings. I think that remains
true. In any case, I am not interested in arguing that.
I've never seen a sane "counter explanation and objection" to the
heat/helium correlation. Lots of objections have been made the helium
findings by themselves, though none that really consider the
quantities involved (the levels have often risen well above ambient
helium. Krivit had no clue about this, when he was trying to
criticise Violante, that Violante made no attempt to exclude ambient
helium and was reporting levels *above* ambient, only.)
The purely skeptical position on cold fusion is basically dead, it
can't seem to get published any more, whereas there has been a stream
of reviews in peer-reviewed journals in the last five or six years,
that accept cold fusion as a reality. The strongest review is "Status
of cold fusion (2010)," by Edmund Storms, Naturwissenschaften, October 2010.
I think the current evidence suggests that Rossi and Defkalion
*could* both be lying and scamming (not necessarily that they are)
and I am quite prepared to argue about that as I am sure you know!
I agree with you on Rossi/Defkalion. But Jed has a different
position, apparently based on private knowledge. I cannot rule out
that Rossi has a real approach. I've seen some convinced by
demonstrations that, sanely, were less than convincinng, crucial
possibilities were overlooked. So I know that some experts can be
fooled, so I really can't judge whether Jed has good information or not.
What I'm suggesting to you is that you clearly distinguish between
the science of LENR, and what Rossi has been claiming. Rossi is not a
scientist, and isn't following scientific protocols. He had no
patience for "control experiments." He says "I already know what will
happen if I don't use the catalyst, why should I do that?" He really,
then, quite obviously, doesn't care about accurate measurement of an
effect. He just wants "a lot" of heat.
So what if the steam isn't completely dry? But nobody seemed to
realize that if the "steam" was really carrying a *lot* of water,
which it could, water could be overflowing from his cells (in the
earlier demonstrations), the "excess heat" might be somewhere between
small to nothing.
It isn't science, not yet. It's just news, and often incautiously
reported news. One Rossi claim I'll say was false: Rossi made certain
claims about October, that we'd all know by October, October was
going to silence the skeptics. Didn't happen. The Defkalion delivery
apparently never happened.
Most of us have pointed out that a small but reliable devices could
readily be sold, that megawatt plants simply make it all more complex
and difficult.
Mary, you know this. It makes no sense.
