There have been a few responses over at Forbes. I have a feeling these people are reaching the end of the road in some sense. They are scraping the bottom of the barrel. They now make assertions directly contradicted by the paper. Three examples:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - Kirk Shanahan published a long response claiming that the IR camera may not have worked. I hope I am not simplifying his reason, which is that the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth-power law makes the numbers increase quickly. That's a valid point. Also he said: "We know the surface temp is inhomogeneous, so more than one spot needs to be checked." He did not realize that the IR camera does read the entire surface, and it does show inhomogeneities. That's the whole point of it. Shanahan mistakenly thought they used the thermocouple on only one spot with "a non-loaded Ecat." He confused test #2 and test #3. Here is part of my response: You wrote: “Actually, they checked the temp of one spot on a non-loaded Ecat.” They checked it with the thermocouple continuously, for the entire run. You are confusing the second and third runs. The paper says: “A K-type thermocouple heat probe was placed under one of the dots, to monitor temperature trends in a fixed point. The same probe had also been used with the E-Cat HT2 to double check the IR camera readings during the cooling phase.” The temperature did not vary much from one spot to the next. The differences is about 5 deg C. It makes no sense for you to assert that the IR camera happened to measure the temperature correctly in the spot measured with the thermocouple, but it got all of the other temperatures wrong. It would take a huge difference to erase the excess heat. There is no way a steel surface could have gigantic temperature differences in any case. Steel conducts heat too well for that. The lower temperatures are far from the heat source, as shown in the profile. . . . - - - - - - - - - - - - - Yugo wrote: "This entire adventure is very bizarre. There was no need to go to a far more complicated and difficult to measure “new” and “hot” ecat unless the whole idea was to confuse the experimenters and to hide deliberate errors in the measurement. . . ." MY RESPONSE: There is nothing complicated or difficult about this measurement. This technique is used millions of times around the world in industrial applications. The instruments are industry standard, off-the-shelf, and intended for this purpose. There is not the slightest chance Stefan-Boltzmann’s law is wrong or this technique does not work. . . . - - - - - - - - - - - - - And, finally John Milstone: jedrothwell said: “Others claim that there are extra hidden wires under the insulation and no one checked for that, which is preposterous.” So, after claiming that they did check for hidden conductors in the wire, you now admit that it is just your assumption that they checked for it. . . . RESPONSE: No, as Ian Walker already pointed out to you, it says in the Appendix they checked for it. Also they told me they did. Figure 1 shows a direct connection to each of the 3 wires (for voltage) in addition to the clamp on ammeters. It is not possible they stripped the wires for voltage measurement and somehow failed to notice there were two conductors. In any case, the two conductors would short out. The paper says: “Figure 1 shows the wiring diagram of the PCE-830. All cables were checked before measurements began. The ground cable, the presence of which was necessary for safety reasons, was disconnected. The container holding the electronic control circuitry was lying on a wooden plank and was lifted off the surface it was resting on, and checked on all sides to make sure that there were no other connections. . . ." - Jed
