Lugano performance recalculated - the baseline for replications

Do you have a properly written report of any of the experiments (say one of the "killer result" ones)?

Of course I'd agree that this is a better bet than Rossi - but then that bar is so low it means nothing.

It is little things, like not knowing what was the background level of counts, and no having a control (which would greatly reduce the possibility of some other effect triggering the counter) that just can't be estimated from raw results.

I agree the results are impressive, and were there proper evidence for them I would be all over it. One reason for not putting much store in patent descriptions is there is, as well as lack of detail, too much conflict of interest.

For the particle count results (not understanding much, and not having a clear writeup) I'd suggest the following. (Probably completely wrong). Evidence of extraordinary high fusion counts comes from:
(1) particle count
(2) ion energy

I suggest that the high particle counts might be direct capture of protons and/or ionised He. These would be low energy, true, but the ion energy measurement is obscure to me, and I notice the phrase "maximum ion energy" which could apply to a very small subset of the ions from background etc - you'd expect some fusion with this setup. I'm unwilling to look at this patent description in great detail because I know most of my questions will not be answered and it is quite a lot of work to deal with the ones that can be answered, from such a limited write up as here.

If you reckon these people are sane, you could look at whether what is happening is consistent with the apparent claims. Fusion is the holy grail and an unconventional fusion approach with clear evidence would attract massive funding from industry. For some money, or a place in an existing lab, all you need is an interesting unusual claim and one person convinced (no SME) with patents like this as evidence. It is not evidence, of course, but it works as remarkably good PR.

For significant development and >1e7 dollars you normally need better evidence, e.g. a write-up of the evidence that could be properly checked by an SME under NDA. This would not necessarily be public. But the significant development money would be obvious. Unfortunately this is not a great tell, we all know very large amounts of money spent by industry on completely hare-brained projects, and no-one aware of this at the time because the whole is wrapped in secrecy.

Tom

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In chemistry, which is thankfully still alive, there is the common wisdom that the majority by far of the disclosures of new chemistry and new chemical technology are first seen in patents. Further, that much technology never appears in journals. The rule is that you cannot do a thorough literature search without extensive patent searching as well. I see no reason to doubt that, and have some considerable experience confirming it personally. In the days when one could easily browse Chemical Abstracts at your nearby University library it was quite clear, even though the Abstracts reviewed only a subset of the extant new patent literature.

For phenomena which break accepted physics by a large amount unfortunately patents are a bad indicator - such ideas seem to attract lone inventors who have crackpot ideas but can be remotely convincing, and the hit rate (fraction of such that are actually some new effect) is currently zero - to my knowledge.

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Let us add this to the situation the Lipinskis find themselves in: big physics, that is big name laboratories and big name "investigators" have a set of likely unwritten rules. One of the rules is that anything new suggested by someone from outside the "club" is surely "rubbish" (using your unfortunate term for something the Lipinskis call "MEE" theory, that is a "grand" theory that is quite unproven and perhaps improbable and/or unprovable, and with which you, along with me, disagree).

You might pursue an unusual line of investigation based on either theory or experiment. If on theory - you need to evaluate the theory. For example, no-one would spend even $1 based on one of Axil's word salads, yet those could, in some sociological sense, be described as unconventional theories.

In this case it is pretty clear there is a totally unsupported and erroneous theory making a specific prediction (the 233eV resonance) and experimental evidence to support this. In that case you investigate because of the experimental evidence - resonances are interesting - and further results can inform a better theory. My reading of this however is that the later results do not support this 233ev resonance and therefore the theory (only initially supported by this claim of resonance) has no backing. Rubbish is shorthand, and not polite, but quicker than "hypothesis with no experimental evidence and internal theoretical inconsistensies".

For non-physicists it can seem that theories are rejected or not based on sociological phenomena. In reality the "hard" aspects of physics - none harder than nuclear - work well because the underlying phenomena are determined by powerful and simple rules many of which we know. Coherence with the massive amount of existing theory and experiment then becomes an important and valid criterion.

I don't see any "club" preventing funding for weird approaches. NASA funds LENR based just on Bushnell's personal opinions. Much LENR research is sponsored by eccentric donors liking the idea. In general scientists look for novelty and any unusual theory with merit gets jumped on. 99% of these jumped on theories turn out to be completely wrong.

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We really don't know how difficult it may have been to get their material published. Were you on any editorial board or review committee that may have judged some of their work? I know I was not. I do not think it is fair to pre-judge their efforts simply because of the circumstances beyond their control which may have forced them toward the patent route to disclosure-- a route that is not that unusual when dealing with genuine innovation by small entities. The quality of their disclosure speaks robustly to the fact that patent disclosures can be effective ways to transmit technological progress--- the most important function of patents from the outset.

If they had what they claim you might expect (depending) no public disclosure but write-ups under NDA to get funding. You would not rule out patents. Were it not real, you would expect what there is, patents.

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I should add, there is no indication that the Lipinskis are suffering for lack of funding (they sold cc:mail to Lotus in the 90s, seem to be moving upscale in addresses with each move, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and now Silicon Valley). In addition to their office in Palo Alto and there laboratory nearby, they seem not to be inviting outside investment. I am sure that in due time someone will take that interest.

in such a case there is no way, given secrecy, to be sure. If they are self-funding then it means nothing, if they have obtained a lot of money from elsewhere it makes things a bit more interesting. My problem is that the claims are so extraordinary, if hitting Li with protons delivered such results for real others would have seen it. If you argue there are very specific conditions needed to get these results then the problem is that in conditions of secrecy and no write-up those "very specific conditions" could be either erroneous experiments are some new extraordinary effect. Experience tells us that the first is very highly more likely than the second.

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2. If this works, it is really simple to prove = either there is excess heat or not. Simple measurements will tell this.

If that were true generally there would not be 30 years of LENR experiments with no clear results.

Specifically I agree with you that claims of sustained COP > 2 with 100s of Watts in should be easy and clear to prove. That has not stopped a number of claims - including the one I comment on - that are provably unfounded. Simple can be got wrong by scientists who are working outside their own area - even more so for amateurs. (Look to Jiang's results for another obviously unfounded claim).

More seriously, I think you are in principle wrong on the "no" side. There have been any number of experiments showing no excess heat, and that will not settle the interest here. Since LENR is by definition not well defined, and (again by definition) the precise conditions to obtain it are not understood, all you need is one positive claim that is believed and all replications that fail will be seen as varying in some necessary condition. Also I note many commenters here who see a COP of 1.1 as indicative evidence. What a waste of time and energy!

The correct conclusion from what you say is that in six months, with no replicable clear result, the whole "hot-cat replication" meme would be written off as a null result. I'm wondering whether that will happen.

We can agree about the importance of hard work in this whole process.

Specifically, those doing experiments and making public claims of results can make their work more useful to others by cross-checking assumptions and doing the additional work that only they can do to make results clearer.

To take two topical examples:

In the Lugano case - the researchers could have cross-checked temperature.

In Jiang's case, he could have cross-checked how well the thermocouples were working and which was actually "broken".

Such care would reduce the amount of "noise" in reported results and make it easier (if less exciting) to see what was going on.

MFMP, to be fair, do this quite well.

Quote from AlainCo

Can you explain the resulst without a conspiracy theory ?
at least Thomas propose scientific explanations, possible or not, but scientific.

The alternative explanation requires only that Rossi substitutes fuel and/or ash. there is no reason to suppose the one member of the experimental team would be aware of this - there are many ways it could have been achieved.

I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories - but it is remarkable what one person with people around not predisposed to question can do.

The one thing we do know is that people around Rossi disposed to question (e.g. Krivit) get called snakes and asked to leave.

Quote from Longview

Hubert Lipinski is a Ph.D. physicist. The patent application is well written.

How can you critique it without reading beyond the headers and the abstract?

How do you know an SME has not reviewed it under an NDA? The chances are good that this has happened more than once over the 7 years or so of record.

As I understood my first read through over a month back, the particles measured by the hardened ORTEC (PIN) detector must first pass through an aluminized mylar sheet of substantial thickness, I would say the reading cannot be simply stray protons or stray helium nuclei. Surely the nuclei have to have substantial (MeV ?) energies to register in that setup. For negative controls you at least have numerous experiments where the conditions are clearly and consistently failing to give substantial readings. If you are talking of the detectors there were definite calibration standards used, and those are dated and kept secured between uses. But all that is material to be examined by experts, to be sure.

I wish you had not presented your argument Ad Ignorantiam above and your argument Ad Populum elsewhere (where the populace is physicists and moneyed interests).

That scientists cannot read something that other scientists have failed to read. Is this again evidence against big science, that somehow it is fatally flawed? And what does it say of "big physics", which is after all largely supported by public funding of one sort or another?

I know I am going to read the whole patent application again. I suspect I'll feel better after that.....

Longview

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I think you are not understanding my argument. I'm not saying I can show the experiments described in the patent application wrong. I'm saying there is not nearly enough information for their evidence to be string. [and, also, that I'm no expert in the relevant fields and so it would take me a long time to critique them, even given extra information]

You argue that these experiments may have been critiqued under NDA and the evidence may be very strong that there is something extraordinary here. That is possible. But, given that it is extraordinary, it is not very likely.

Compared with Rossi we do not have copious negative evidence - so this is a much better bet. But nor do we have strong positive evidence. To make something so extraordinary the preferred hypothesis you need extraordinarily strong positive evidence.

As for big physics etc. If there were decent experimental results written in a way that could be evaluated by physicists (obviously with more details than this patent application) that showed extraordinary new results they would jump on it - some would replicate - etc. Look at the CF first 6 months.

That has not happened. Maybe Lipinski etc have indeed something extraordinary but are keeping it quiet for commercial reasons. Or, maybe they have some results that seem interesting but don't quite add up when examined more closely. I'm not saying the patent app is bogus, just that they misinterpret something. Both those things are possible, but one of them requires some extraordinary new physics.

It is proper to rate the extraordinary less likely than the ordinary. it does happen, but only once in a blue moon, whereas between blue moons there are an awful lot of false alarms. In this case the lack of publication and critique means a false alarm could remain in the minds of Lipinski et al for a long time. If you thought you had evidence of something extraordinary you would not easily give up on it (somone said above that even with only the hope of something extraordinary, and no evidence, they would not give up on it).

Thus far the Lipinskis don't tick many positive boxes, but equally they don't (from what I know, which is little) tick many negative boxes. In that state of little knowledge it may be that you reckon the chances that they have what they claim are higher than I do.

Tom

Quote from Pathoskeptic

Theory is necessary for understanding what is happening. I can see you do not understand this simple fact about science.

What a waste of time.

More positively:

Good grasp of theory is necessary to understand what experimental results mean, and (when there are errors) catch them. You can see in part the believer mentality comes from accepting experimental results uncritically because of not having the theoretical tools to work out what they mean and whether this makes sense.

theory is also necessary in a different way. You can't knock down standard theories without an alternate hypothesis to put in their place. In that case your hypothesis is scutinised,as a new potential theory, for consistency and for making predictions that are experimentally validated.

Much of the LENR argumnet here is negative. "Here is an experiment with an anomaly which i don't understand => LENR".

Now, experiments with real anomalies indeed represent something that motivates new hypotheses, challenges existing theory. But it is not good when you don't have a predictive hypothesis to put in place of existing theories. If all your LENR hypothesis predicts is that sometimes (but not usually) experiments will show excess heat it is not a real theory, and certainly can'r be preferred over some mundane explanation for occasional excess heat like a combination of error and fraud.

Kim, for example, develops a BEC model of L:ENR, and initially he predicted that LENR results of excess heat would happen more readily at lower temperatures. that prediction failed, and he has now changed his ideas to match observation. that is not a good sign. Loose theories can always be over-fitted to evidence. Different evidence, just change some feature of the not understood theory. The theory starts to have traction when it makes definite predictions for new results which are later found correct. Kim's theory was, initially, such a definite predictor. Unfortunately the prediction was not validated.

So, if you think LENR (as possible new physics) is about experiment and no theory you are going to get things very wrong. There are some experimental results so striking they support new theories anyway if validated. LENR unfortunately has a collection of non-striking results at the moment.

Were Rossi's claims to be founded they would be very clear striking results. Unfortunately when independently tested they vanish. (The isotopic evidence - striking - was not independent).