At 08:36 PM 8/19/2012, James Bowery wrote:
On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 6:00 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Subject was Re: [Vo]:Some doubts expressed about Celani demonstration
At 10:43 PM 8/17/2012, James Bowery wrote:
Isn't 23 years of torture enough?
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 7:53 PM, Jed Rothwell
<<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]>
wrote:
Several experts in calorimetry expressed doubts about the Celani
demonstration at ICCF17. Mike McKubre in particular feels that it is
impossible to judge whether it really produced heat or not, because
the method is poor. He does not say he is sure there was no heat; he
simply does not know. Others feel that he exaggerates the problem.
But that's not the purpose. Celani is investigating the behavior of
materials, and for his purpose, every experiment is a control, with
respect to variations in material processing. He doesn't need to
scale up, and he doesn't need to know absolute heat production. He
only needs to know *relative* heat production, and for that purpose,
absolute calorimetric error is not so important.
When he's found a reasonable optimization of his processes, *then*,
before he attempts to scale up or to finalize his work, he'd want
absolute accuracy in his calorimetry.
This is incommensurate with McCubre's criticism which is that he
doesn't know if there is heat being produced. If Celani has a bunch
of systems that are more or less "below unity", he's not getting the
information he seeks.
Below unity systems are rare and special. It's unlikely. However,
this misunderstands and assigns inappropriate weight to McKubre's
comment. McKubre is quite conservative, and when he says he doesn't
know something, it doesn't mean that he knows the opposite. It means
that he's not certain about the actual power in Celani's system.
Because negative power is unusual, comparison, for a first
approximation, suffices. I've often seen experimentalists rely upon
rough methods, when they work for them. Absolutely, if we want proof,
we'll want more.
On the other hand, expanding on my terse exasperation:
The calorimetry problem should, for the purposes of cold fusion,
have been solved by now -- not just technically but
economically. There have been enough experiments done that the
instrumentation design should not only be relatively standardized
but inexpensive.
"Should be" apparently has no economic clout. Celani's device, it may
not be realized, will not fit in most standard calorimeters. What I
know from long discussions is that accurate calorimetry is, indeed,
expensive. Miles showed a home-made calorimeter. Perhaps indeed there
"should be" some standard and cheap designs. But what I see most
experimenters rely upon, first-pass, is isoperibilic calorimetry and
other approximate methods. As mentioned, if conditions are kept the
same, it can suffice *for comparisons.*
I am not familiar with Celani's specific methods. I understand that
there can be problems with the kind of calorimetry that many use, informally.
