Are We at or Near the Tipping Point?

1st Official Post

    I'm curious what the LENR and LENR-watching community thinks about the recent signalling by leading members of the A-list in various fields openly coming out and making statements (signalling) favorable to LENR?


    I'm referring to recent articles by or quoting Huw Price, Carl Page, venture capital investors, and Bill Gates as examples within a larger theme package.


    I am NOT referring to publicity stunting by interested parties.


    Is this the signal to the wider audience that we're passing the tipping point? Not necessarily that breakthroughs are occurring, but that the water isn't toxic anymore and in fact, it's OK to put your toe in.


    I'm an MBA, not a physicist or engineer, and have some opinions based on that perspective, but would like to hear what others in this space feel about the uptick in authority chatter.

    Hi all


    As I pointed out on many occasions, actions speak louder than words. It is the strategic positioning of large amounts of money that indicates where people think things really are.
    Q) Where are big oil on owning oil fields?
    A) They sold up the vast majority of their oil fields starting in 2011 and are leasing oil field production at the market rate. You move from owning an asset to leasing it when you know it will take a hit.
    Q) Where are the major investment banks on the value of oil, short or long?
    A) They are massively short and have been since about 2013 see the commitment of traders report. And visit Sifferkol.
    Q) Where are the major old money trusts on owning Fossil Fuels?
    A) They sold up and got out.
    Q) Are the Nuclear power industry investing or demanding government subsidies?
    A) The latest nuclear power plant planned to be built, in the UK, the original group, first said they wanted it all subsidised, that they were not willing to invest, then they pulled out, a Chinese consortium, with less experience and less knowledge, took over and demanded money up front and even bigger subsidies.
    Siemens, world leaders in the Nuclear power industry and providers of most power plant parts, Pulled out of the nuclear market back in 2011 and even sold up their nuclear parts industry, which would be profitable for as long as there is nuclear power, with very little risk, it was essentially a cash cow.
    Q) Are those who created and were the biggest players in green energy still invested in it?
    A) No. Siemens World leaders in wind and solar power until 2011, sold up their $33 Billion green industry, including a massive plan to carpet the Sahara with solar to power Europe.
    Q) Is America using up its strategic reserve of oil?
    A) Yes. That is what Fracking and Oil Sands are.
    Q) Are the prices of Commodities on an upward trend?
    A) Commodity stock prices are tanking. LENR enabled industry will allow the production costs of commodities to drop precipitously, holding a larger stock than what you need of a commodity when the price is about to drop is very foolish.
    Q) Is Saudi Arabia preparing for market decline.
    A) Saudi Arabia has changed strategy to one of High Market Share (HMS), as are several other low cost oil producers. You Change to an HMS strategy when the price of product that was formerly of increasing value is due to drop and move to declining value. If you are a low cost producer you quit being the high priced deli and become Walmart or Tesco, still making the same profits but by killing off your competitors you grab their market share. Saudi Arabia has to do this as quickly as possible to kill off as many competitors as possible and to be an early adopter of LENR to prevent others taking back market share in a post LENR age.
    Q) Are all the major car production companies ready to shift to electric cars?
    A) Yes. Done.
    Q) Are major shipping lines changing the size of their engine rooms?
    A) Yes. The latest designs show a marked reduction in engine room size and they are preparing to turn former engine room space into further container space. Hey ho engines are always getting smaller :)


    Kind Regards walker

    Quote

    while the skeptics think it will finally put an end to LENR, once and for all.


    The skeptical view is that LENR, as a scientific hypothesis, was always unlikely and has become more so with every year in which there is no hard evidence.


    On the other hand I don't see any skeptics predicting that the interest in LENR, with its twin refrains of persecution by the scientific establishment and promise of a free energy future will decrease. It has now got to the stage where what influences people's perception from year to year is things like Rossi getting funding.


    Says it all, and if anything would "finish it" then no LENR advocate would now be supporting Rossi. As you can see that is not the case.

    Walker:


    Do you seriously think any of these factors relate to decision-makers thinking LENR is likely to emerge as a disruptive technology? 99% of decision-makers have never heard of LENR!


    On the other hand the fact of climate change and fossil fuel reduction means all decision-makers look to a log-term future without fossil fuels. Renewables have been vastly successful over a sustained period and will continue to be so. Nuclear has a public acceptability problem but is being strongly promoted as the best base load power source by everyone who can, including the UK.

    Quote

    Is this the signal to the wider audience that we're passing the tipping point? Not necessarily that breakthroughs are occurring, but that the water isn't toxic anymore and in fact, it's OK to put your toe in.


    I'm not sure the water ever was toxic. As far as way out ideas go, they are picked up and run in the popular specialist press in terms of what is currectly trendy.


    [lexicon]IH[/lexicon] + Woodford giving money to Rossi is enough to make LENR trendy, with many non-scientists like Huy Price who are inclined to distrust scientific judgments and on the basis of this have a "LENR could be real" view.


    Of course, if LENR were real, then we would get these "better calorimetry papers showing real evidence". If your judgement goes that way look out for those papers - but remember you will need to delve deeply into them to see what are the artifacts, or else just not know whether the eye-catching headlines mean anything.


    What can a non-technical person do to form an opinion? You could, logically, look at the "best bet" experiments from groups a year or two ago. If these are real, they will undoubtedly replicate with better instrumentation - the killer papers will come out next time round. If the next paper round is on a different system, with less good calorimetry, claiming different headlines - then you have positive evidence the first "best bet" did not pan out.


    Don't think noise that industrial interest, with no proof of concept, means anything. There are enough people in industry who distrust science and will find the same evidence as Huy Price quotes enough for a high stakes bet. VCs expect only 10% of bets to pan out, so you don't need a high confidence. Large companies can afford to put small amounts of money into something with such high rewards if it does pan out, and the judgement of whether it will likely do this comes from science - many decision-makers will not look at this and suffer confirmation bias.


    I'd expect that this Rossi-induced phenomena will run for another year or two.

    Yes, the tipping point is just around the corner. It will happen this year for sure. Like is was supposed to happen last year, and a year before that, and a year before that...


    Bollocks.

    Walker, I have seen you saying this elsewhere:
    "A) Siemens World leaders in wind and solar power until 2011, sold up their $33 Billion green industry, including a massive plan to carpet the Sahara with solar to power Europe."


    It is true that Siemens sold out their CSP operations but by no means their wind turbine engagement, see e. g.
    http://www.siemens.com/press/p…offshore-wind-power-e.pdf
    "In offshore wind power alone, Siemens has an order backlog of more than 1,100
    wind turbines with a total capacity of more than 4,500 MW."


    In fact, dropping their nuclear activities Siemens explicitly said that doing so they would instead concentrate on renewable energy systems. Siemens's withdrawal from the Desertec Industrial Initiative had mainly political causes and they were not alone, so did 16 other members of DII, leaving just three. Thinking that LENR would have anything whatsoever to do with this is just silly, please forgive me.


    I think poor Bill would be turning in his grave. What is simple about a conspiracy theory in which the world's decision-makers all know LENR is real but somehow manage to hide this fact from public discussion?


    Whereas my explanation requires no complex hypothesis at all - the things you note come directly from known non-LENR factors.


    Let me give you a word: apohenia


    Here is a typical claim from Rossi. His E-Cat megawatt plant is "mostly in SSM" (self sustaining mode) which is idiot-speak for no external power. If that were true, Rossi could get support money without limit. Of course, he'd have to prove it. He never has since 2007! which is one of the reasons most scientists who look at claims of high power LENR think of them as bullschitt. And micro or milliwatt level LENR isn't going to alter oil (or any other) markets. Not any more than Farnsworth's fuzer or muon-catalyzed fusion -- those are real and work fine. But even if it's valid, which is far from certain, LENR would still be at that level.

    Quote from Randy Russell

    Is this the signal to the wider audience that we're passing the tipping point? Not necessarily that breakthroughs are occurring, but that the water isn't toxic anymore and in fact, it's OK to put your toe in.


    Let's assume for the sake of argument that LENR is real (as I believe it to be, contrary to the skeptics here). Right now, with the high-profile people you mention giving small signals that they're following developments and think they're promising, we might be at a minor inflection point of sorts, but not one that that will explode into the news any time soon. Just my impression. I say this because I've been following LENR for about 4-5 years now, and every once in awhile something interesting has come up, but we haven't seen a sea change in public awareness yet.


    The waters are definitely still toxic. An associate professor at a university like Berkeley would have to keep things on the down-low with any experiments he or she might be carrying out and be pretty darn sure the results are replicable before seeking publication; that is to say, he'd need to have a killer story before going to press. Otherwise if the results turn out to be hard to reproduce he will draw upon himself the suspicion of his peers that he is susceptible to belief in things like n-rays, polywater and homeopathy, which skeptics have spent great energy in associating with LENR. One must ignore that academic science is a deeply human endeavor to argue that such intangibles don't matter. It would be much less risky for the career of the curious associate professor simply to watch from the sidelines, perhaps hoping that the skeptics have been too cavalier.

    Mr Russel:


    When discussing "tipping point" I assume you are asking If the Scientific environment will open up and more openly start discussing LENR.


    Contrary to what some believe, the Scientific community, and especially the physics community put cold fusion research in the same category as UFO belief after the Baltimore meeting in may 1989. And of course no physisist that have any career ambitions would ever show interest in UFO's and do research in UFO observations.


    Even the BARC Institute in India stopped their cold fusion research in 1994 because of what they stated was "global Peer pressure".
    Ref. http://www.business-standard.c…india-115053000437_1.html


    So are we at a Scientific "tipping point"?


    In my opinion no, far from it.


    Physics will allways ask for theory first, then repeatabil experiements that confirms theory. Something that don't conform to theory can't be, since all physists knows theory rules over nature, not the other way around (haha).


    Commercial products seems much closer to reality, than any change of Scientific opinions. Therefore The majority of the physics community will not change their view before real LENR based reactors have been implemented by Industry as commercialized products and proven to work...


    If that means E-cats or Brilliouin reactors or NANOR devices only time will tell.

    Quote

    Physics will allways ask for theory first, then repeatabil experiements that confirms theory. Something that don't conform to theory can't be, since all physists knows theory rules over nature, not the other way around (haha).


    Oystla - such statements are dangerous - you know very well I can prove you wrong.


    (1) HTSC - definite experimental evidence, enthusiastically embraced by scientists, although there was at the time no theory for how it could exist. Discovered 1986, Nobel Prize 1987.


    (2) Dark energy. From observation, unexpected, generally agreed, still no theory


    Do I need more?


    Cold Fusion/LENR is not accepected generally because:


    (1) the evidence is so weak
    (2) people have been collecting evidence for 25 years - if it were true you'd expect stronger evidence by now
    (3) when you look at the (weak) evidence it is incoherent. Returning to the same experiment with better instrumentation does not, as would be expected, lead to definite results.

    Quote

    The waters are definitely still toxic. An associate professor at a university like Berkeley would have to keep things on the down-low with any experiments he or she might be carrying out and be pretty darn sure the results are replicable before seeking publication; that is to say, he'd need to have a killer story before going to press. Otherwise if the results turn out to be hard to reproduce he will draw upon himself the suspicion of his peers that he is susceptible to belief in things like n-rays, polywater and homeopathy, which skeptics have spent great energy in associating with LENR. One must ignore that academic science is a deeply human endeavor to argue that such intangibles don't matter. It would be much less risky for the career of the curious associate professor simply to watch from the sidelines, perhaps hoping that the skeptics have been too cavalier.


    I agree it is quite easy for a sociologist to argue this. I don't agree it is necessarily true, I could argue the opposite and give specific evidence:
    (1) Science rewards novelty (publication guidelines)
    (2) Science rewards unexpected novelty enormously (e.g. Nobel for HTSC)
    (3) science and the real world would reward unexpected practically useful novelty even more.


    My point however is that it is not a sociological question - it is a scientific question that can (and must) be judged on the scientific evidence.



    BTW - here is how I would publish LENR work:
    (1) not use the word LENR
    (2) find an experiment which gave clear anomalous results
    (3) write it up very carefully, noting the anomaly, without LENR speculation
    (4) send in for publication in the appropriate Journal (not nuclear anything)
    (5) note and destroy (by doing better experiments on exactly the same effect, under the same conditions) any alternative explanations put forward by reviewers or others.
    (6) Followup papers would confirm the anomaly.


    After the anomaly was clearly accepted, and clearly not easily explainable by mundane explanations - which would have been suggested and ruled out - then would be the time to advance something weird like LENR without high energy products.


    Steps 1-6 have never been followed, not,I think, because LENR researchers are idiots, but because they have not been able to gather the necessary evidence.

    This is definitely an interesting field and there seems to be just enough evidence on either side of the topic to keep it in play. I guess that is almost a given, since anything of certainty would've put this part of discussion to bed by now.


    As for being at a tipping point, I'm inclined to intellectually admit that while I'd like it to be, it most likely isn't. As for the signalling from the A-listers, I guess it's just that they have stronger radar and brighter blips, that others are happy to report seeing. Nobody big is betting the house.


    I definitely think something is about to shake out, and for the better on the energy front for many of the reasons that Walker outlines wrt to the massive outflows from the sector. My gut tells me that. Macroeconomics tells me that. Neither tell me why. However, I also doubt LENR is a big a reason for this for the equally valid reasons TC makes. Correlation is not causation. There are a lot of reasons deep pockets want out of oil for the long play; the short play is usually geopolitical, like poking Putin in the eye.


    So, if the money is flowing out, where is it going? Notice that other than small, interesting, $2 bets, the big money isn't flowing into LENR...yet. If it were, the correlation argument would get better legs. The VC's to me aren't that predictive since they'd probably want to have money on ANY horse that has a shot in this big a space. There are boring equations for this and their MBA's and analysts have done them and figured out the ante. The interesting part is they didn't recommend avoidance. It still just looks like buying insurance if it takes off. That's what VC firms do.


    Interestingly, there are a number of boutique energy companies doing direct-to-market commercialization labwork, but not many multinationals, except wrt to how it would affect their products, planning, and market mix. To me, the reason you don't see the big corporations researching this directly is that even if the recipe gets worked out, LENR's future, while transformational, looks like a giant generator, heater, or small engine market, with a few profitable islands in the [lexicon]industrial heat[/lexicon] and power space, and maybe prime mover powerplants. The rest of what would be a huge market would almost instantly be flooded with an insane number of entrants.


    Putting the early, non-industrial scale LENR market into a Porter's five forces model to me doesn't look like one with high profitability guarantees until the economies of scale shake out and you wind up with a handful of ultra competitive, high volume, low margin manufacturers and some higher profit, but much smaller scale boutique outfits in the niches of disinterest to the bigs. The barriers to entry would be too low for that not to happen. I can't see any inputs other than some well guarded IP that could be sewn up that would allow integration up or down. Competition would be global and ruthless.


    Apparently, the money's in the licensing for the Brilliouns and other players, and probably what Rossi actually dreams about. This would be especially true if one of them could perfect a claim to 'the' critical path. Two things seem to me to work against this: Early methods to do anything useful are almost universally out-engineered by subsequent iterations when smart people get to look inside the box; and, secondly, if LENR works on the individual scale, you will have virtually no way to enforce your patent unless you can flood the market with low cost options making it not worthwhile to the bootleggers.


    It's clear the voltage has been turned down on the electric fence, but probably not off and efforts to cross it are being led by the brave, perhaps the foolish, and those with a lot of insulation. But I guess the tipping point, if it comes, is still a ways off.


    It seems be a lot easier to see who loses money if this works than who will wind up with the heavy purse.


    Thanks to everyone for the thought provoking responses to my first post and Happy New Year!


    So, we wait...some more.

    • Official Post
    Quote from Mats002

    Thomas, you are obviously a genius, sitting high above established professors with a long history. As only one example you are superior of this guy: http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/366leonid.html


    Can I kiss your feets please? :crazy:




    Matts,


    I saw this DR. Kowalski make a post on EGOOUT yesterday. First I'd heard of him and got to wondering who he was. A quick search on LENR-CANR shows he has been involved in CF/LENR almost from the beginning. Has done the research, and became somewhat the historian as he chronicles the inside story for the ICCFs over the years. I found this one pretty comprehensive and most interesting:


    http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KowalskiLcoldfusion.pdf


    Describes correlation between excess heat and the "nuclear signature". Problems with replications (Letts I believe) after switching Pd batches (same as FPs). Fluent in Russian, and sheds light on their significant (Russian science) -in particular Alexander Karabut, contribution to LENR. Something I didn't know too...those Russian scientists whom pursued LENR were as maligned and tormented by their "mainstream scientists" as those in the west have. Had their very own Parks after them. Called it "voodoo science". LOLs.


    Sheds a little more light on the first US government panel of scientists convened, named ERAB (Energy Research Advisory Board), and headed by John Huizenga, in 1989. Also talks about a common theme (rejection of research) all too prevalent since 1989.


    Good read if anyone has the time. And to Dr. Kowalski...thank you for your many contributions!

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