FP's experiments discussion

Shane wrote:

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OK, I think I see where you are confused. My fault. I said you guys "killed" CF, when I should have said you critically maimed it. Put it in the trauma center, where it was on life support for 20 years until recently when it started showing some signs of recovery. It isn't "alive and well" as you say...yet, but getting there.

Still not making sense. If it was on life support with ten times the current activity, how can the current activity show it's thriving.

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Got to give it some credit for coming back after what you guys did to it.

Didn't you read my masterpiece posts? It's what the field (or nature) did to itself. Bad science gets a reputation for bad science. Simple cure: good science. Problem is good science doesn't give positive results.

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The thing just won't die no matter how hard you try.

No, it's the other way. The field won't earn legitimacy, no matter how hard its advocates try.

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I suspect soon the amount of LENR related research activity will rapidly grow until it surpasses the level it did when it was almost killed. I'm sure you will be counting the number of publications, and inform us when it exceeds it's current level by 10x's? "

It needs 100x to reach the level of 1990, and 1000x to reach that of other legitimate fields, and at least 10,000 times for a field with the importance of this one. I wouldn't hold my breath.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

Instead "best evidence" papers come from 10, 20 or more years ago.

IF that were true, and it may well be..... we would have to look at the level of funding then v. now. And this should be obvious, I would think.

Another difficulty with such an evaluation is who is judging the quality and significance. That may only become clear when the dust has cleared. If and when reproducibility becomes routine and theor(ies) mature.

Otherwise your comments are appreciated.

oystla wrote:

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And this is how "Scientific" the "Replicators" where in 1989, that decided the fate of cold fusion during the 40 days after the anouncement:

"One published photograph of the Utah cell showed Pons's hand, and that gave us the scale," he said. Dr. Lewis said his group had also used the photograph showing Dr. Pons's hand as a measure of the cell's size. "

Really Scientific, right? The hand that sealed the fate of Cold Fusion. Shame on CALTECH and MIT.

So, what, the size of the cell is critical? Is that claimed somewhere? I'm pretty sure there are positive claims of cold fusion over the years using bigger cells and smaller cells.

And if the failure of others to confirm P&F's claims is because they could not get access to critical details, then there is no one to blame for the failure, and the subsequent stigma, but P&F themselves.

But of course, it wasn't just the failure of others to replicate. It was the weakness of the evidence from P&F themselves that led to the sea-change. The initial enthusiasm for cold fusion was based on trust because most people did not think scientists of the calibre of P&F could get fusion or heat measurement wrong. When their seriously flawed paper finally reached the public, their credibility was shot, and trust was not enough.

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When Fleischmann later explained to the dear physisists that the Cell that Pons held in his hand, was just a glas Jar that showed the principles but had nothing to do with the actual cell or its size, it was too Late. The damage where done And CF was dead and buried by CALTECH and MIT.

Ah, yes, it's so clear when you put it like that. A couple of papers by some relatively junior professors at caltech is the reason no one has been able to make progress in the field. It's the magic of those papers that prevented P&F from doing good experiments in a posh lab in France with generous funding from Toyota, and caused a falling out between them, kept them from publishing results from the French lab, and eventually led to Toyota shutting the lab down without any tangible results. It was those papers in 1989 that have reached forward in time to prevent the more than a dozen LENR companies formed to be unable over 3 decades to bring out a single product. Those papers are why Piantelli and Takahashi and Arata and Storms and McKubre and a dozen other scientists have not been able to generate solid proof, forcing amateurs to try to come to their rescue in the form of the MFMP. Those papers are the reason no theorist has been able to come up with a plausible mechanism for the claimed phenomenon. All it takes to suppress a field the entire world went absolutely nuts for is two papers. Now it makes sense.

We should really encourage Koonin and Lewis to present a couple of papers on the impossibility nuclear weapons, and in a flash all nuclear armaments would be rendered harmless.

Longview wrote:

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Thomas Clarke wrote:

IF that were true, and it may well be..... we would have to look at the level of funding then v. now. And this should be obvious, I would think.

The total level has certainly dropped, but it's the per-lab funding that's relevant. And they only need to meet some threshold required to replicate the early results to be able to make progress or at least not regress. The advantage of research now is that it has the benefit of the earlier work.

The sort of funding that SKINR has received, or Rossi or BLP or Brillouin should be enough to build on what has been done in the past, but so far it's not happening, or at least it hasn't been shown to the public that it's happening.

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Another difficulty with such an evaluation is who is judging the quality and significance. That may only become clear when the dust has cleared. If and when reproducibility becomes routine and theor(ies) mature.

Well, anyone is free to do the judging, but I think the comment that best evidence is from the 90s stems from the fact that cold fusion advocates frequently fall back to citing those old results when they defend the field. So, in many cases, it is the judgement of advocates that the old results are the best.

Quote from joshua cude

but it's the per-lab funding that's relevant.

I don't understand that position. Clarify, please.

Joshua wrote:
"So, what, the size of the cell is critical? "

And again Joshua proves no knowledge of the early history of Cold Fusion. Joshua does not know that the main criticism of F&P where related to cell size.

Yes, the cell size where critical in the 40 day tests by the deciding institutes.

".....Dr. Lewis said. By failing to install a stirring device in the test cell, temperature differences in the cell led to false estimates of its overall heat, he said. "

This Faulty critisism based upon a wrongly Sized cell, where one of the main critisism by the Scientific community, and which resulted in :

"Top physicists directed angry attacks at Dr. Pons and Dr. Fleischmann, calling them incompetent, reciting sarcastic verses about their claims....."

And the real truth is that The Fleischmann invented a cell that did not require stirring, but the institutes never retracted their Faulty critisism.

And this where their attitude from day 0:
".....from the outset they [physisists] have expressed profound skepticism of claims by Dr. Fleischmann and Dr. Pons..."

Joshua writes: " And if the failure of others to confirm P&F's claims is because they could not get access to critical details, then there is no one to blame for the failure, and the subsequent stigma, but P&F themselves."

Yet again Joshua proves no knowledge of cold fusion history.

The whole point og this tragedy was that the american physisists had no patience to wait for the F&P paper later to be published. Fleischmann asked them to wait, but they would not listen.

The physisists rushed to their laboratories after the press conference and concluded 40 days (and nights!) later:
"Dr. Steven E. Koonin of Caltech called the Utah report a result of "the incompetence and delusion of Pons and Fleischmann." The audience of scientists sat in stunned silence for a mement before bursting into applause."

Joshua writes: "It was the weakness of the evidence from P&F themselves that led to the sea-change." And "When their seriously flawed paper finally reached the public, their credibility was shot, and trust was not enough."

Yet again Joshua proves no knowledge of cold fusion history.

Fleischmann and Pons published several papers. Only a handful papers where published critisising F&P, all of which F&P answered and proved wrong. The critics never replied. So F&P got the last Word, at least wrt published science papers.

Joshua writes :"It was those papers in 1989 that have reached forward in time ..."

Wrong again, F&P published several CF papers i the years between 1989 and 1994.

I Wonder what motovation that drives Joshua to use so much of his time and energy on this field of "pathological science" and make so many false claims and falsify history the way he does.

Quote from AlainCo

Today, as it is the core of Groupthink principle, some people refuse to admit they simply screw up and keep a cult on old obsolete data done by incompetent team who were not honest enough to admit it.

The door swings both ways.

Quote from Alain

To compare Higgs boson with LENR evidences, this slides by Olafsson&Holmlid is clear

Clear, and 100% wrong. I got to that slide on theoir presentation before you posted it but did not think it worth highlighting. Since you have done this I will say why.

All evidence has statistics, and known errors, and unknown errors.

The LHC data is (must be) statistical. The observations are PDFs of given fragment types and these get more accurate as you collect more data. So the sigma here is precise and structural - it comes from the experiment.

In addition to this statistical issue - those bumps are maybe just a fluke, but the chances of that are precisely known, there are the possible errors:
The bump could be an artifact, via some mechanism known or unknown.

LHC Higgs chasers have strong evidence this is no artifact. They had two independent experiments measuring Higgs energy via different decay channels. Each could, in principle, prove Higgs and show its energy. Because the equipment. people, decay modes measured are all different these are truly independent. The two teams had an agreement NOT to talk to each other or exchange information about what energy they saw the bump (this was put into place before the experiment started) so they were not influenced by each other.

The fact that the two bumps (from different teams) have the same energy is therefore strong evidence against artifact. Stronger even than the existence of two teams - which because they are independent is equivalent to a replication.

Finally this result is predicted from theory - so the standard of evidence needed to believe it is relatively low.

Now let's go to the He/energy evidence. As has been noted here before this has a strong known error mechanism: gas seepage from high external lab He concentration. This mechanism will generate He proportional to experiment time. Since excess heat is also proportional to experiment time you would expect correlation.

Why is this not all over the shop? Because the data was cherry-picked. Specifically:
Runs with low He were not counted.
Equipment He >> expected amount over a number of rums were noted as "leakage" and discarded, with the apparatus reworked before new runs.

We are left with runs in the middle, which will naturally be distributed normal.

Now, this is not even an unknown error (which we have no protection against in this case) it is a known mechanism for obtaining the given graph from experiments where He comes from external leakage. There are other possible known error mechanisms so I'm not saying this is the end of the story - but it is enough to discredit the results.

What does Holmlid mean by 40 sigma? He is noting that the He amount produced, governed by individual He emission statistics would have some small error due to statistical mechanics being only an approximation.

That is absurd. It assumes the only variability on the observed ratio is due to statistical mechanics. That would be like saying that a pressure measurement was always 40 sigma because the inherent randomness from stat mechs is very low.

I'm unhappy that a scientist who has done real work in the past should be presenting such an obviously dishonest argument.

WOW,

Thomas Clarke is calling Professor Olafsson and Holmlid "dishonest".

Strong word.

and BTW Thomas present some weak, unclear, unfounded, unproven, strange arguments that we need not spend time on.

Quote from oystla

WOW,

Thomas Clarke is calling Professor Olafsson and Holmlid "dishonest".

Strong word.

and BTW Thomas present some weak, unclear, unfounded, unproven, strange arguments that we need not spend time on.

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No. I'm saying that one specific slide from those guys contains an obviously dishonest argument. And justifying that. There is no generalisation, nor ad hom.

Compare that with your criticism of me here which is general and has no justification. Also, although you don't like my one specific point you don't say what in it is wrong.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

No. I'm saying that one specific slide from those guys contains an obviously dishonest argument. And justifying that. There is no generalisation, nor ad hom.

Compare that with your criticism of me here which is general and has no justification. Also, although you don't like my one specific point you don't say what in it is wrong.

Did You also find a slide You liked? Was there something new/important in Holmlid's presentation?

Professional critics always sheds light on the up's & downs.

Up to now You must be called the master of the downs! Try to improve!

Quote from Wyttenbach

Did You also find a slide You liked? Was there something new/important in Holmlid's presentation?Professional critics always sheds light on the up's & downs.Up to now You must be called the master of the downs! Try to improve!

Ok, so how about obeying your own stricture?

I do a decent job of trying to understand an important (because highlighted by Alain) side. You ignore the effort, and criticise me for not looking at all the other slides trying to find one I could be positive about. Why not look for the positives in my posts?

If you treat these slides as something more than an exercise in PR it takes time to work out what each one really means. Alain's slide struck me because of the 40sigma headline which seemed weird. (and was, indeed, weird).

In the LENR field in particular there is so much material that has no merit, but occupies the attention of readers, that pointing out what is distracting is surely a public good - at least if you feel that studying the field is worthwhile.

I would welcome even one detailed positive critique here of any specific LENR arguments - not posting other people's arguments, but making sense of what is posted. Go for it!

If Alain posts any other key slides from Holmlid I'll comment on those too.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

Now let's go to the He/energy evidence. As has been noted here before this has a strong known error mechanism: gas seepage from high external lab He concentration. This mechanism will generate He proportional to experiment time. Since excess heat is also proportional to experiment time you would expect correlation.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

I do a decent job of trying to understand an important (because highlighted by Alain) side. You ignore the effort, and criticise me for not looking at all the other slides trying to find one I could be positive about. Why not look for the positives in my posts?

If I read the slides right, then the experiments are performed (contained) in a vacuum Tube under a Ag atmosphere. Could You enlight us how You think that during an experiment He can be accumulated inside the vacuum tube?

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If I read the slides right, then the experiments are performed (contained) in a vacuum Tube under a Ag atmosphere. Could You enlight us how You think that during an experiment He can be accumulated inside the vacuum tube?

These slides refer to "storms helium bump" - which I think means Storms 2010.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEstatusofcoa.pdf

This is a review of many groups who have measured He in electrolysis experiments that claim excess heat under different conditions, mostly with lab air outside the cell. Storms notes an He/heat ratio that is about 60% of that expected from some of this data. The difference can be explained by He stored in the electrode.

But, more simply, these results can be explained as an artifact due to variable leak rates and experiments with high leak rates being stopped and leaks mended. Obviously in this context a "leak" can and will be defined as anything whether the He/heat ratio is higher than that expected.

The argument that the He could not be from atmosphere because in a few cases it is higher than atmospheric falls down because of lack of accurate He measurement close to the equipment in both space and time. In labs He concentration is often much higher than that in the atmosphere generally and obviously can be variable both spatially and temporally.

The issue about Argon is that in (non-lab) atmosphere you'd expect Ar concentration 2000X He. Therefore if the measured gas has lower Ar than He it can be seen as a sign that leakage is low.

Unfortunately this fails because leakage will transmit He much more than Ar (He is a smaller and lighter atom) and as above the actual He atmospheric level near the experiment can be very much larger than in the atmosphere generally.

Now, all these issues can be controlled by more careful experiments and measurements. But in the experiments with positive results this was not done, so there is a perfectly good mundane explanation for these apparent killer results. There have been other experiments in which no He was found.

LENR supporters allow any number of negative experiments on the grounds that LENR is not understood and does not always happen. In this situation a clear correlation between he and excess heat at the correct level would be important evidence. Unfortunately the correct level is low for the few experiments that have positive results - which coincidentally have very low excess powers. For the experiments claiming much higher excess powers where the buildup would therefore be easier to measure without artifacts we do not currently have any positive results. Coincidence?

There may well be some experiments done under an Ar atmosphere externally - if you highlight these we will look at the specific results from them and see what they indicate. But the data referenced by Storms mostly suffers from the gas leak issue as above.

There is a general point here. LENR researchers obey the Wyttenbach "look at everything till you find a positive" stricture.

Therefore they give powerpoint presentations highlighting the positives. Unfortunately in science all the complex details matter and when you look closely at a positive (say the Lugano test, as anyone knowing me well would predict I would say) you can find that in fact it is not what the headline would indicate. These He measurements are at very low levels and therefore artifacts need to be carefully considered on an individual basis. Looking at a whole set of experiments and trying to get more accuracy out of the combined results only works if those results are not cherry picked. As I've noted they must be - equipment can leak and no-one is going to present results that come from leaks.

Further (and more damning) you get an incredibly good correlation for one tube between excess heat and He concentration if you do a set of experiments of different lengths at the same excess power. Some of this data is generated like that as multiple measurements from a single run. That correlation is expected if leakage is the reason for the He buildup.

Details matter. Most people don't care, or rely on authorities like Storms to analyse these details. Unfortunately in the LENR field all of the authorities are necessarily biassed - they stay in the field because they are convinced LENR is real and that means given results that could be LENR, or could have a mundane explanation, they will reckon LENR the most likely cause. Let is suppose 1000 qualified scientists look at LENR, nearly all find the evidence unconvincing and will not work in the field. The very few who do are selected.

Of course, were the experiments good enough they would present evidence that would convince people outside the LENR field. That is what Abd hopes will happen with a new He experiment. As above, getting bomb-proof evidence should not be too difficult if the claims of excess heat are correct and also the D+D fusion mechanism is correct. Two big ifs.

For now, without better experiments, this "best evidence of LENR" looks very feeble. That is a judgement, of course. But summarising the evidence as is done on this Powerpoint slide without noting that there are mundane explanations for the data is misleading.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

There is a general point here. LENR researchers obey the Wyttenbach "look at everything till you find a positive" stricture.

I'm 'very critical' with my judgment about LENR experiments, remember my comments about Lugano.
On the other side You seem to have a LENR perception problem. Even if some COP are lower than one (1) LENR may happen, but such experiments will have no commercial impact besides, that also such experiments will change the theory of Physics and ← . Under this respect even Lugano confirmed LENR (if we assume that nobody faked the surface MS output).
The Holmlid study is also paper-published behind a paywall. May be its worth to discuss the paper. A slide show is always commercial & the words are missing. May be He means measured Alpha, which would make the story water proof.
The question about the Holmlid presentation is not if 'Helium' is measured correctly. The main contribution is the MeV spectrum which contains some signals one has to explain. Producing a MeV spectra with mJ Laser Pulses sound interesting. Even more because its also possible to tune it by means of puls- frequency and puls-energy.
Some ten years ago this would have been a 'high energy physics' publication...

The complete absence of progress in cold fusion is once again emphasized by the citations of arguments in defense of P&F's early work. If the field (and the arguments) had any merit, those arguments would *not* represent the last word in the literature; advocates would be citing recent *results* that put an unequivocal end to the dispute. Unfortunately, there aren't any.

If this sort of thing helps you guys sleep at night, then more power to you. But I fail to see how you think it's going to be persuasive to skeptics who can *see* that nothing has come of it.

I suspect that 30 years from now, when the world still thinks cold fusion is bogus, there will be a counter-part to alainco (maybe his descendant) rehashing the minutiae of the (then) 60 year old experiments and insisting their defenders got the last word, and citing Beaudette's book that they think proves cold fusion is real, even though the field does not represent a single meaningful or reproducible scientific or practical advance. By then, even graphic artists might have given up, so the task of finally, once and for all, proving cold fusion to the world might fall to junior high students, who might form the Stanley Pons Memorial Project.

--

I mentioned the events of 1989 to show that the overwhelming inclination of mainstream science was to accept the phenomenon of cold fusion, and to show that suggestions about an intrinsic bias against it are nonsense. The account in Storms book of 2007 leaves no doubt that scientists around the world were enthusiastic and excited to get involved in the new field. And the gushing first reaction from Douglas Morrison shows that even eventual and adamant skeptics were at first excited to accept the claims.

oystla cited the applause Koonin got when he finished his talk accusing P&F of incompetence. But talks always get applause, and in comparison to the 7000 scientists that gave Pons a standing ovation a few weeks earlier, this was pretty tame, and represented appreciation for a detailed and logical examination of a revolutionary claim.

And I brought up the criticisms of P&F to explain why the sentiment changed in a matter of weeks. It doesn't matter if a few advocates think that the criticisms were all suitably answered, and that P&F held sway. What matters is that in the judgement of most scientists who paid attention, P&F were exposed as incompetent and probably delusional.

The initial enthusiastic response from the world in 1989 was obviously contingent upon the reliability of the two scientists making the claims, which was thought to be high. Certainly, no one thought scientists of that calibre could get claims of nuclear fusion or measurements of heat wrong, especially when such an important revolutionary claim depended on them.

But then, when it was discovered that the work was without question sloppy, and the report was rushed, and some public claims had been clearly exaggerated, confidence in P&F evaporated, and the sentiment changed. Any 8 page paper that requires two pages of errata is sloppy, particularly when a critical spectrum is completely revised. And then the interpretation of the spectrum was found to be wrong, their rationalization for the work was determined to be completely invalid (the proximity of deuterium nuclei to one another in fully loaded Pd is *less* than in a deuterium molecule), and the best that can be said of the calorimetry is that it was not compelling, and did not support the public claims made in the press conference.

Again, you can argue that the criticisms were answered and that on your score-card, P&F won the debate, or got the last word, but the reality is that the evidence was *not* compelling, and the judgement reached about P&F's incompetence has been vindicated over the years.

Their results did not convince the reviewers for Science or Nature, which had been holding a place for their paper, but rejected it because it did not meet ordinary standards of scientific rigor.

The results did not convince the ERAB panel that studied the field for 6 months, and which represented interests that could only benefit from cold fusion in many ways.

The results did not convince the patent office, which eventually (1998) rejected the application submitted in 1990.

The results did not even convince the organization that gave them a posh lab in France and generous support for their research. In 1998, Toyota shut them down without them having produced any tangible results.

It's even questionable that P&F could convince each other as time went on, given that they stopped speaking to each other some time during the 90s, and then Pons abandoned the field.

Then in 2004, the DOE enlisted another panel to examine the best evidence up to then, and reached the same conclusion the first one had reached in 1989. And since then, reports of new experiments claiming excess heat (particularly from electrolysis with Pd-D) in the refereed literature have all but vanished.

Finally, it seems even cold fusion advocates agree that the results have not been good enough to convince the world, which is the reason the MFMP has formed, in order to generate the evidence they agree P&F did not.

Next to all that, a book rehashing old arguments, published by an electrical engineer with a bachelor's degree, the title of which reveals him as a member of the believer cult, is pretty irrelevant. Whether or not one is a believer, to suggest that cold fusion prevailed, when the publication rate marches inexorably toward oblivion, is clearly delusional.