QuoteThis is a strawman. I'm not inclined to address it.
Perhaps then your argument about trust was different from what I suggested. I'm here extending your point (about lack of trust) which I agree with but apply more wholeheartedly than you. Perhaps (3) is a straw man, but not (4).
(4) You are prepared to trust the views of a very few outlying scientists, and/or a number of non-scientists such as Jed who post on the internet, and/or a number of people with a clear financial interest in promoting LENR (Rossi, the otehr LENR companies, etc). this group all have strong motives for being biassed (unconsciously) because they have devoted their lives or finances to this stuff and for it to be nothing would be very upsetting.
(4) is a strawman, too.
I don't know how you could have come away with what was put in (4). Perhaps I said something unclear at some point.
Thomas,
LOLs. See you have thin skin. Surprising as you have no qualms in strongly criticizing LENR researchers of shoddy, incompetent work, yet take such offense when a couple here "mildly" peer review you.
I can see both sides here and it may come as some surprise, but find myself with a tent in each camp. I actually believe that LENR is a very real phenomenon
Welcome to the addiction Randy! That said...if you believe "LENR is a very real phenomenon", well then you don't have: "a tent in each camp".
You are a believer...trust me. 
Thomas tried that approach too from the skep side, and you see what he did?
So skeps are your enemy. Very simple formula. Come on, admit it. No middle ground.
Not that believers want it this way, as they have reached out to the skeps since 1989, as they have here, but the skeps have opted to slap the offered hand away and fight. The literature is filled with such examples.
Eric
I was being cautious with (4). Note the and/or connectives. So technically you are agreeing with me, because you satisfy at least one of these options.
As for Jed and calorimetry. I'd say he has the expertise of a technician. He has no doubt an outstanding knowledge of the literature. He has some practical experience of what works, but not the wisdom that comes from 20 years experience and realising the glitches. He does not have the hard physics and math background that would allow him to work out second order effects ab initio. That is based on his work in labs and his education.
Physics and maths at a uni level are not be alls and end alls. And you can get through university courses without learning much. But they teach rigor and that, combined with curiosity and and interest in the real world, goes a long way. The difference between doing an LS and believing what is written, and doing an LS and really understanding the significance of what is written, is what decent PhD candidates learn. It takes a while, and till you have done it you don't even know there is a difference.
For Jed, I don't see that depth of experience in his CV:
QuoteDisplay MoreBA Cornell U. 1976 in Japanese language and literature
Programmer and technical writer, mainly in transaction processing such as billing systems and systems to monitor telephone PABX equipment.
Librarian at lenr-canr.org, an on-line library of 1,200 full text documents and a bibliography 3,500 items.
Rothwell edited many cold fusion papers, especially for several ICCF conference proceedings. He translated several papers and one book from Japanese into English. He wrote several reviews of the field in Infinite Energy magazine, and co-authored papers with Edmond Storms, Tadahiko Mizuno and Eugene Mallove. He wrote the book "Cold Fusion and the Future" which he translated into Japanese (with some revised content for the Japanese audience).
Rothwell spent a few months doing calorimetry, mainly with Mallove and later with Mizuno.
Nor have I seen the depth of critical analysis I'd expect from (limited) online communication. As always, such judgements of characters on the internet are based on partial information and may be wrong - but certainly no reason to trust his judgement over LENR, where he clearly has a strong bias.
Randy
QuoteMaybe I'm missing something, but I haven't seen to much outright skepticism as to LENR itself...albeit some, but mostly what I've seen is TC saying the scientists need to do a better job to convince him.
If LENR is real then the lack of convincing evidence from those working in the field is a very great shame - and something that could be corrected. I see them again and again abandoning claimed positives without a 100% thorough investigation.
Although I see the theoretical issues (my view there aligns almost precisely with that of Hagelstein) it is actually this lack of follow-through that makes me pessimistic.
There are a decent number of researchers in the field able to do science and who no doubt would like a Nobel prize. They must know that to get this what is needed is bulletproof checked and cross checked anomaly. Yet what they do is a set of different experiments each showing different indicative evidence without following up on the old evidence. If excess heat exists in even 50% of the claims drilling down to get this unambiguously is possible. It is an obvious aim - exactly what MFMP try to do. (Recently MFMP seem to have lost this spark - but I'm sure it is still their aim - just they are weighed down by the fact that initial attempts did not work - and unfortunately distracted by Rossi mania). MFMP are amateurs but there have surely over 25 years been decent scientists with the same intent. Repeated failure tells a story.
I'd love to be proved wrong. But wishy-washy interpretation of marginal evidence as strong is not the way to do it!
QuoteTo that end, if TC is a scientist, then I value his critique of the science and his standards are for him to set, not me.
I'm not a scientist. However I have a scientific education (Maths, Physics) at university level and extensive broad experience of engineering both in industry and research, in which I've applied that maths and physics learnt to practical problems. So think of me as an educated amateur who has been exposed to high standards.
It does not matter if my standards are unreasonably high. They are needed to convince others, and, if LENR exists, are achievable. So why not adopt such an approach? Anything else seems like navel-gazing to me.
Tom,
As for Jed and calorimetry. I'd say he has the expertise of a technician. He has no doubt an outstanding knowledge of the literature. He has some practical experience of what works, but not the wisdom that comes from 20 years experience and realising the glitches. He does not have the hard physics and math background that would allow him to work out second order effects ab initio. That is based on his work in labs and his education.
Jed has 20 years of experience with calorimetry and realizing its glitches. As you suspect, your research has been incomplete. The summary above omits some important details. Jed has also had a direct involvement in assessing various various claims. The details have come out only a little at a time. Enough, however, to get a clear sense that he could more than effectively defend the suitability of using isoperibolic calorimetry against your criticisms in the other thread. My argument does not require that he know a lot about calorimetry in any absolute sense; only that he know more than you, which I believe he does. Only a basic exposure to a field is required to get a sense of whether someone is speaking from a position of knowledge or not. It is actually pretty easy to do, and lawyers do it for a living, and the best ones are quite good at it.
I do not suggest that you or anyone take Jed's word concerning LENR in general. My point, as I have mentioned previously, pertained to calorimetry. I mention it once more.
Calorimetry is not something that requires a PhD or a rigorous grounding in mathematics to understand or do properly. It is something that HVAC technicians can do very well. It consists primarily of a set of relatively simple techniques for measuring the amount of energy that goes into a system and the amount that goes out, across the boundary that defines the system. The calorimetry needed to effectively investigate cold fusion has been around since the 19th century (possibly even the 18th century) and requires little math. The calorimetry that has actually been used to study cold fusion is some of the most advanced in the world and has gone well beyond what has been needed to show an effect on many occasions, such that we can have confidence that there is a genuine anomaly, one that cannot be explained by normal experimental error.
I would trust a skilled HVAC technician, using tried and true HVAC techniques, to get a good first-order read on the energy balance of a system. From my experience over the last five years observing the behavior of physicists, my expectation is that they would be cavalier, and I assuredly would not trust them to get it right. That they would not get it right makes sense in retrospect, since they do not generally carry out or think about calorimetry. That those who have shown interest in disproving LENR have often been cavalier is unfortunate, for had they not their observations might have been more on target and possibly been helpful.
If LENR is real then the lack of convincing evidence from those working in the field is a very great shame - and something that could be corrected. I see them again and again abandoning claimed positives without a 100% thorough investigation.
I've pointed you to some research that has been carefully carried out, and whose error, if any, can only be systematic error of some kind. The researchers have pursued it over a period of years, have been thorough and have refined their method in response to criticism. The signal is still strong, and they have not abandoned their claims. Perhaps you do not like it. I suggest you take any criticisms you have to the authors, who will be able to acknowledge any genuine problems you identify and clarify any misconceptions you may have.
Eric
QuoteCalorimetry is not something that requires a PhD or a rigorous grounding in mathematics to understand or do properly. It is something that HVAC technicians can do very well. It is consists primarily of a set of relatively simple techniques for measuring the amount of energy that goes into a system and the amount that goes out, across the boundary that defines the system. The calorimetry needed to effectively investigate cold fusion has been around since the 19th century (possibly even the 18th century) and requires little math. and has gone well beyond what has been needed to show an effect on many occasions, such that we can have confidence that there is a genuine anomaly, one that cannot be explained by normal experimental error.I would trust a skilled HVAC technician, using tried and true HVAC techniques, to get a good first-order read on the energy balance of a system. From my experience over the last five years observing the behavior of physicists, my expectation is that they would be cavalier, and I assuredly would not trust them to get it right. That they would not get it right makes sense in retrospect, since they do not generally carry out or think about calorimetry. That those who have shown interest in disproving LENR have often been cavalier is unfortunate, for had they not their observations might have been more on target and possibly been helpful.
Calorimetry is, in vanilla form, exactly as you say. What makes it tricky is understanding when the (normal) assumptions might fail, and why.
Providing you use it normally, this is not an issue because most closed systems behave well (how can they not) and some forms of calorimetry (e.g. mass flow) are bulletproof when done with good equipment.
Here are just a few examples of how calorimetry can do wrong - typical of LENR positives:
(1) (Low grade) isoperibolic of wire in glass bulb neglecting the fact that thermal resistance of wire depends on the pressure and constitution of vapour, and the surface emissivity of the wire, which can change.
(2) flow calorimetry using the rated output power of the pump for power added rather than its electrical input power (the correct value to use will depend on how much of the pump electrical dissipation is conduced to the flowing water, and how much lost).
(3) flow calorimetry of open electrolytic cells in which recombination within the cell is necessarily uncontrolled.
Here, for example, is a decent "calorimetry 101" for LENR calorimetry in particular, written by storms. It is not very difficult:
http://pages.csam.montclair.ed…ki/cf/155calorimetry.html
My point about this is that the (real) problems above, and others, are not necessarily anticipated by such a review written with hindsight by somone who has looked at many LENR calorimetry experiments [in Storms' account (3) is dealt with - not surprisingly given the long history - (1) and (2) are not.
For another example here is an extended discussion of isoperibolic calorimetry from Fleischmann:http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmantheinstrum.pdf
No discussion of surface emissivity variation due to surface change, or other effects which become significant at 300C and are not a problem at 100C.
Your skilled technician, going on past experience, and maybe also reading Fleischmann, Storms, would fail
What you need, to be safe, is a very critical frame of mind, and checking and rechecking all assumpotions from first principle.
MFMP do a lot of cross-checking (they are sort of forced to, anyway, because if they get complacent people from the web will ask the relevant questions). Most LENR researchers do not, which means that unexpected experiment-specific errors can be expected. I'd trust amateurs (MFMP) with an open mind, built-in crowd critique of methodology and interpretation, and the flexibility to cross-check and go on investigating over skilled technicians any day. Having said that, MFMP will take a lot longer to generate decent results.
Where I agree with you is:
QuoteThe calorimetry that has actually been used to study cold fusion is some of the most advanced in the world
Which means that it is likely to bring up new and unexpected error modes. And:
QuoteFrom my experience over the last five years observing the behavior of physicists, my expectation is that they would be cavalier, and I assuredly would not trust them to get it right. That they would not get it right makes sense in retrospect, since they do not generally carry out or think about calorimetry. That those who have shown interest in disproving LENR have often been cavalier is unfortunate, for had they not their observations might have been more on target and possibly been helpful
Which explains why so many LENR papers show apparent positive results.
And this is where we disagree:
Quoteone that cannot be explained by normal experimental error
None of these anomalous error mechanisms are "normal experimental error". They are abnormal and unexpected experimental error which only becomes normal in hindsight, when fully understood and investigated. The fact that LENR experiments tend to be conducted at high temperatures with highly reactive gasses makes abnormal errors more likely, as does the natural selection for "highest results" which will equally select for "highest abnormal errors", as does the lack of of proper checking from researchers.
The fact that rather obvious new errors are still being made and discovered shows that such things happen. How can you be confident that the apparent good positives are simply more of the same without some extra checking of the sort I have suggested (looking to see a sequence of experiments each tightening instrumentation and controls from the previous and examining the same result from the same system)?
The hypthesis to be supported is extraordinary, so it needs much more than "well there might be problems but we do not know what they are". it requires: "We have investigated every conceivable issue that anyone has suggested, and cross checked as far as is posisble, and the result remains rigorous and anomalous".
QuoteI've pointed you to some research that has been carefully carried out, and whose error, if any, can only be systematic error of some kind. The researchers have pursued it over a period of years, have been thorough and have refined their method in response to criticism. The signal is still strong, and they have not abandoned their claims. Perhaps you do not like it. I suggest you take any criticisms you have to the authors, who will be able to acknowledge any genuine problems you identify and clarify any misconceptions you may have.
Eric, you will forgive me, but everyone here has done that with sundry papers. However I'm happy to take your sequence of results posted here, and will work through them over the next week of so. If they relate to CR-39 integrative measurements of low-level ionising radiation I'm not sure how even best case you could come to that conclusion, but we will see.
By "normal experimental error" I had in mind normal statistical error, i.e., threshold results. I did not say this very clearly. The only explanation for many of the calorimetric results can be systematic error. Implicitly you agree with me on this point in your discussion above.
Eric, you will forgive me, but everyone here has done that with sundry papers.
There is a lot to read, and I don't ask that you carefully read through that particular selection of papers. I only ask that if you decide not to in this and other cases, you avoid generalizations involving the quality of LENR research over time. Such generalizations require great care, will be quite measured and can only be made by carefully reading of a lot of papers.
Another paper about the same story: https://www.academia.edu/18051…efereed_LENR_Publications
The problem with Jed Rothwell is that he, like many believers, accepts and believes claims without adequate evidence if they pertain to success in LENR, especially at high power. He was quite sure that some of his unnamed friends had conducted adequate tests of Defkalion and had obtained positive results. Even after Rossi categorically refused to allow Rothwell and a team he was assembling to test the original ecat, Rothwell still thinks Rossi has something. He admits Rossi is an obvious liar and exaggerator yet he STILL believes in the basic claim to tabletop high power LENR from Rossi.
@Thomas
The basic calculations for measuring input power and enthalpy for the original steam-temperature output ecats are simple and involve only arithmetic and linear equations. The current contortions necessitated by the so-called hot cats are completely unneeded to prove the principle. But Rothwell is easily able to work through the math for the earlier case. Anybody with a high school education should be able to. The problems were detecting sleight of hand with the input power and using a calibration to verify the measurement of the output power. Somehow Kullander, Essen, Levi, the Swedish professors, and of course Mats Lewan, ALL missed BOTH of those flagrant issues along with Rothwell, and in the process all were bamboozled by Rossi and still are. The hot cat is the wrong experiment. People who think otherwise are simply falling for Rossi's continuing shifting demos and obfuscation goals.
In my contacts with Rothwell in 2011 by email, I found him both educated enough and persistent enough to get at the truth. But he was much too credulous and when his efforts to have Rossi submit to proper measurements failed because Rossi refused, he made excuses for Rossi and has been doing it since. Amazing how gullibility and wishful thinking override rational thinking in some people including several who write here.
Brillouin is now the great hope of wishful thinkers, for example Carl Page. But I strongly suspect that Godes is much like Rossi and McKubre is completely gullible, and the eventual results will be the same.
For some reason, I thought there were a number of researchers that were in fact getting high COP and high repeatability. I would only include AR if he had vetted company, otherwise he's too much of an outlier, IMHO.
It can be very confusing for someone just coming into this discussion to sort out fact from people's opinions. There are many claims of high COP, and some claims of repeatability. Whether such claims are true or not is something for specialists to weigh in on. I suggest the book "Excess Heat," by Charles Beaudette, for a good overview of much of the history of LENR research. Ed Storms's book "The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction" provides a more recent take on the same subject.
Andrea Rossi is a completely separate matter. His claims are to be firewalled off from those of LENR researchers, who are not associated with him. That is not to say that he's wrong. Simply that he's not part of the scientific effort looking at LENR. He is an independent engineer and, surely, a businessman.
People here have their opinions, but often they are not careful. You must take everything you read here with a huge grain of salt.
Thomas, Wrt your statements;
"That is a precise analogy for LENR. Scientists accept the evidence - for example anomalous heat from open cell calorimetry that goes away for closed cells."
Goes away? F&P used (early on at least) open cells. Mckubre at SRI replicated experiments using closed cells, and confirmed the F&P results. They also identifed the requirement for high D/Pd loading.
"What will help is taking individual items of evidence and looking honestly to see what they prove."
Yes of course, but you also need a level of Scientific understanding to be able to "honestly" interpret the results.
Like using CR39, which have been used since late 70's by mainstream science, and when used in LENR research it is suddenly no longer trustable? - but can be "affected by anything" as you once said.
Or understanding the fundamentals of calorimetry, which we seemed not to agree upon. I trust the formulas: If you know the data and parameters of the external border of a "black box" you don't need to worry what happens inside the box to calculate the heat flow. Really not!
"It is easy for me to say the results are unsafe, because of possible errors which I can list."
And as I have noted earlier The problems with your list of possible errors are:
- they are just not possible and/ or
- they would If true have no Significant impact on result and/or
- they have no relevance to the experiment in question and / or
- indicates a misunderstanding of what the experiment are doing and /or
Etc.
Time for a part of a story from Dr. Francesco Scaramuzzi, an Italian mathematician and physicist, that was involved in Cold Fusion research at ENEA since the start in 1989
".....A well known physicist was asked what he thought of CF. His answer was that it was not good science, because of the lack of reproducible experiments. I wrote to him, presenting the following arguments:
a) I agree that reproducibility is a "must" in experimental research;
b) however, a new field, at its beginning, is often characterized by lack of reproducibility, and it is the task of the scientists operating in that field to understand what is going on, in order to pursue reproducibility;
c) this has been done in the case of CF, making meaningful, even though slow, progress (I sent him a paper of mine2 in which I had discussed this problem).
My letter did not produce any effect, in the sense that he did not change his mind, and went on demanding reproducibility, as if it were an intrinsic characteristics of research and not something that has to be pursued.
In order to clarify the issue, let me try to propose a few statements about reproducibility. First, what does it mean? Consider a simple desk-top experiment. When you perform it, you choose your sample, you work out a procedure (a protocol), and you get your results. It is reproducible if you obtain the same results with the same kind of sample and the same protocol every time you perform your experiment. A further stage of reproducibility consists in describing your experiment in a scientific publication, with the consequence that any other scientist who performs the same experiment, on the basis of that paper, obtains the same results. Now imagine that you perform your experiment, take note as accurately as you can of its parameters (sample and protocol) and when you repeat it you do not get the same results: the experiment is not reproducible! There are two possible explanations: either the first experiment was wrong, or you did not have the same kind of sample, or follow the same protocol. If, by examining your first experiment, you reach the conclusion that the measurement itself was correct and reliable, you have to accept the second explanation. At this point you start a further stage of your research: you try to understand which features were hidden in the choice of the sample and in the protocol, that could have influenced your results without your being aware, and thus you begin what may be a difficult march towards reproducibility. It is not correct to state, as many have done for CF, that non-reproducibility necessarily means a wrong experiment.
An episode that I will now describe will help to illustrate my previous statements: it occurred in 1992 to the ENEA Group of Frascati, which I was leading. We had been working on CF experiments based on gas loading of deuterium in titanium, looking for neutrons and tritium, and eventually we had reached the conclusion that we should move to a different type of experiment: the measurement of excess heat in palladium charged with deuterium in an electrolytic cell with heavy water (substantially the Fleischmann-Pons experiment). In order to build the cathodes, we took the only palladium sheet that was at hand in the laboratory, constructed the electrolytic cell and put it in an accurate calorimeter, and performed the experiment: the first three runs, with three different cathodes taken from the same sheet, and with the same protocol, gave very clear evidence of excess heat production: a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the experimental errors.3 At this point, we had used all the palladium existing in the laboratory, and thus we ordered more of it from the same firm that had provided the previous sample, asking for the same commercial characteristics. When the new palladium arrived, we started another series of experiments, none of which gave any sign of excess heat production. So, there we were: we had no doubt about the correctness of the first measurements, but it had been sufficient to change the sample of palladium for the excess heat to disappear, even though, from a commercial point of view, it was the same kind of palladium. This was the beginning of the project that brought the Group to results quite close to total reproducibility in 1996. I will come back to this subject later.
...."
from: http://www.enea.it/en/publicat…pdf/Cold_Fusion_Italy.pdf
