Nanomagnetism and LENR

Quote from Thomas Clarke

I make no assumptions about how the +50W excess was measured

Apart from assuming it must have been measured incorrectly somehow...

Quote from Thomas Clarke

This whole setup looks like classic silliness

For sure, I don't think anyone can deny that. But at the same time, the guy who looked at it, is prepared to say it does work. Probably knowing he's going to get some grief from his peers.

To say "the temperature dropped at night" tells me you probably didn't watch that video, as there's a graph that showed what happened. It's just something you came up with to avoid giving a more considered answer. Do you really think a 5C difference could be a mistake? My fingertip says otherwise. And presumably you think no-one would double check that ever-so-slightly unusual result? That's borderline offensive!

I jokingly called you "skeptileptic" the other day, I had just heard it, and I thought the definition was amusing (convulsive skepticsm sorry to anyone who finds that to be in poor taste). Now I'm thinking that maybe, many a true word is said in jest?

Quote from Thomas Clarke

It is sort of embarrassing to have this anecdote classed with LENR experiments, however bad many of those are.

Classic quote. Although perhaps more suited to the Huw Price Reputation Trap thread?

Colwyn,

Re assumptions. If your spouse came to you and said their were three-legged green men from Mars standing on the garden lawn you would probably want a bit more evidence before believing this.

Few people would say that you were "making assumptions maybe it was a joke etc" in this case.

Extraordinary things require better than good evidence. In this case the evidence is not even ordinary - these guys are testing their own stuff, the test method is weird and could go wrong in any number of ways - in short even with perfect honesty any decent experimenter (or sensible person) would view such results with suspicion and need to check.

It is only in magic LENR world that every weird thing that happens has to be proven wrong - other wise it stands as a miracle. If science worked to those standards we would have evidence for fairies, ghosts, UFOs and green three-legged Martians.

Translation: You are all gullible idiots with zero professional knowledge.

@mary. I missed your last post to me about measurement errors, thermodynamics, Newton and Einstein:

I do understand "measurement errors": they are the first step of TC's standard argument. Generally qualitative, rather than quantifiable, but nevermind... Next step is to assume that only he is aware of these mechanisms, and only he can be trusted to avoid them.

In the case of measuring the voltage of a battery, I'd say measurement errors are next to impossible. A child could probably manage. We are basically back to allegations of fraud.

And no need for the lecture on the so-called laws of the thermodynamics. They are as much laws, as Newton's "laws" are... And similarly they are known to break down depending on scale; the smaller the scale, the less suitable model they become.

Thanks Brian.

I suppose anyone might build something of a small attempted model of this apparatus. Hopefully some of the brilliant engineering "replicators" who have focused their energies on the more mundane task of a Parkhomov replication might step up to look at this in various ways. The measurement errors in the presence of electromagnetic interference are a common issue in neuroscience labs for example. Once it was customary to include faraday screening (literal aluminum screen isolation "chamber" to avoid at least much of that which Thomas warns.)

Do you, Brian, happen to know exactly, or approximately what type of ferrite composition is in the "brick"? What is its appearance, approximate density etc. Does the ferrite look like any commercially, or milspec surplus available-- say from microwave and/or high power radar work? Dimensions and weight of the ferrite? Any "branding" evident? Any preferred residual magnetism, or magnetic bias evident with a compass for example? Any anisotropy with respect to resistance or impedance through the bulk? And if so, how might such anisotropies correlate with the winding orientations?

Thanks,
Longview

Brian,

Thank you for the interesting description and video. To me it seems implausible that nanomagnetism, by itself, could be responsible for LENR, as the energy balance does not work out. Nonetheless I think it's great that you've stood by the inexplicable results of your own nickel powder experiments and your testing of the Manelas device despite the lack of an explanation. Here we see empiricism at work. The skeptics on this forum would require that you have gotten a negative result in your testing to be credible. They have put theory before experiment.

The argument that Manelas was bamboozling you requires some substantiation, to say the least.

Did you make some critical mistakes in your testing? That is not something I can be the judge of, but I have some questions, and would be interested in seeing further testing done:

• Does the Manelas device still work? Are you still seeing the odd behavior you saw before?
• Can you boil the device down into an extremely simple thing that reliably shows the effect without any extraneous components?

Perhaps induced beta decay was involved. You mentioned strontium ferrite. 90Sr is a beta emitter. Lots of energy in such reactions, well above chemical. Electrons are emitted at high velocities; if this happens anisotropically, there could be some magnetic effects.

Eric

Quote from Mary Yugo

[quote] there is not enough evidence to tell what they are yet.

There are untold numbers of LENR developers working on systems that will be released to the market before too long and you don't even know who they are or what their scam is. I thinks you should also go dark and flush them out of their holes so you can pounce.

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There are untold numbers of LENR developers working on systems that will be released to the market before too long

How long do we have to wait before you admit you are wrong? I recall similar statements 5, 10 years ago!

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We measured Battery voltage continuously for a week while the power supply developed an excess 30 watts with a 100 watt loss in the system components.

I wonder how this was determined?

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Arthur had the unit running for nearly 2 years when I showed up. I was the first one to make rigorous measurements that seemed to confirm an energy gain. There are many ways to dispute that measurement, but the HOBO thermistor measurements were revolutionary. Four thermistors were mounted around the trunk with one of them mounted on top of the ferrite billet.To our great surprise that thermistor ran 5-7 degrees COLDER than ambient for the entire week.I do not understand any of the thermodynamic mechanisms, but heat must have been flowing in an unaccustomed manner.

So - my explanation for the identical observation would be that EMI (larger near the ferrite) made ac pulses on the thermistor sense amplifier input which were partially rectified due to dynamic non-linearity (slew rate limiting). This is very common, and can lead to systematic errors. EMI can get into earth wires as well as signal ones, creating earth loops, and getting rid of it requires very great care. If you build all active circuits in a shielded box with good enough LF filterss on inputs and care over supply and earth noise you can make electronic circuits bulletproof - but it is easy to miss something. I wonder what was done here?

My own experience, from many years of working with different systems, is that you can do the theory, work out what is supposed to happen - and then be surprised by what does happen. Whenever this happnes I take it as a personal challenge and usually have enough time to understand it. It can require persistence over several days or weeks, because the measurements just seem crazy until you work out the real mechanism - usually something that was dismissed as impossible or negligible in an initial analysis.

That is why I feel that colwyn and some others here are lacking in a necessary humility in the face of the real world.

You can never, in new setups, (or even old setups !) be sure that you don't have some systematic error which will hit you when least expected. Long practice at finding these helps, but mostly because you learn not to make assumptions, as colwyn does, about error being impossible. It is satisfying because when you finally work it out, the same theory (with a few tweaks and second order terms) can exactly explain the apparently impossible data.

Quote

Maybe there is something in LENR, I don't know. But it is not nuclear in nature, I am pretty convinced of that.

The evidence it is not nuclear is indirect - absence of the expected high energy products are transmutation to radioactive nuclei (which would emit high energy products after the experiment). These are problematic for the LENR community - but it has its excuses. WL theory attempts a coherent partial - and not very convincing - excuse.

More however, there is very weak evidence that anything is nuclear.

You don't jump on nuclear reactions just because you have a few anomalies. The "LENR collection"; excess heat, high energy particles, transmutation, exists because LENR experimenters have looked long and hard for these three things as expected consequences of their a priori expected LENR.

Of these three things, only excess heat has any major track record, and that must be weighted by the fact that 50% of all experiments must show an excess, the type of experiments done encourages artifacts, and tighter experiments replicating see much lower excess energy than original claims.

(Deleted comment.)

Message for Brian Ahern,

You said that you have Manelas's equipment in your possession. Does that include the disassembled working model you tested? How can I help you develop a plan to follow through?
What other form would the help you seek take? Can we discuss this via email privately? Perhaps, if you do, the site manager here could arrange an exchange of email addresses .
If it helps, I am a skeptical observer of the LENR world, but feel strongly that enough evidence has surfaced to warrant significant further empirical research, and an effort to develop a
theoretical basis for any anomalous observations.

Brian,

Perhaps you should try to track down one of the other devices mentioned in the article provided by Mary? They were probably wired up in the same way as your device..

It is fun to read about these stories, and it is amazing how rich they are on peculiar details. For instance in the video, there was a measurement curve with dips that were said to correlate with the aurora borealis. Who would have expected that?