FP's experiments discussion

    Quote from RobertBryant

    Could you provide your statistical analysis of the PdD2 CF results from1989- 2014, that justify this rather general statement THH?


    Robert: I think you are making assumptions here. My general statement does not refer to any specific results, so could not be justified by reference to them.


    However, your comment here provokes another general statement.


    A statistical analysis of a set of results using differing methodologies, equipment, etc would not serve to determine whether a claimed effect was sporadic, because it might be perfectly replicable but only appear under particular (known) conditions.


    To bring this to LENR specifics, Abd said a while ago that there was money for some guys to redo Pd/D2 work looking for correlation between excess heat and He. That set of experiments is to the point of your question, because if some controllable and replicable effect can be identified they could use it reliably in their experiments.


    Quite apart from the correlation, their work would serve as an additional check on whether or not some replicable Pd/D effect exists, and analysis of their results would help determine the degree of replicability.


    We are still not out of the woods on that, because as Shanahan has argued there could easily be a replicable effect based on some unexpected (by F&P. Jed, and those in the CF field) mechanism for ATER or another experimental lacuna that would in some experiments create apparent XSH anomalies that are in fact experimental anomalies.


    The merit of new experimental work is that any such possibility, since it has been suggested, can relatively easily be checked and prevented in the new experiments. That would require them to read Shanahan's published work and explicitly guard against that possibility using better experimental design, rather than arguing on theoretical grounds that it could not happen as others have done. I'd expect that, from any competent group replicating the work, because Shanahan's CCS can be detected or evaded quite easily once you admit it as a possibility.


    I have not heard the results of these experiments, but perhaps they now exist?


    THH

    Quote from RobertBryant

    THH which documents are badly documented ?


    The F&P paper very badly documents the experimental results that it discusses.


    And your quote:


    "Personally I find it somewhat cult-like that the flakiest part of a very badly documented experiment ."


    is misleading in that it leaves out the thing that I find cult-like, replacing that by a full stop! Having a very badly documented experiment has nothing to do with cults, and what you have quoted is clearly missing the second part of the sentence.


    I'm summarising here a point I made and various people including I think at the time McKubre agreed with that the F&P paper cited here as strong evidence (from simplicity to complications back to ....) is in fact very poorly documented if viewed as an authoritative account of important experimental results showing an anomaly not accepted to date by the scientific community. Rather, that paper is a discussion of calorimetry illustrated by offhand reference to a whole set of experiments, with a few poorly documented specific results, and a lot of generalisation. There is nothing wrong with that approach in a summary paper, nor in a paper whose intent is to discuss calorimetry. The problem is if its content is taken as a report of definitive experimental results, as many have done.

    Quote from Alan Smith

    Don't worry Robert, THH has produced a poorly documented response which you need not take as proof of anything.


    Alan, please read my replies above, then, while of course as a fellow Brit I find your dryer than Martian surface humour entertaining, it might mislead some here, please be specific and explicit yourself.

    Robert: I was referring to Alan and not you as a Brit.


    Re cults: I have not claimed the existence of cults related to LENR, rather stated that some behaviour is cult-like and should be avoided. I don't see this is a war, or a negotiation, merely me and you saying what we can to further understanding of these matters.


    I have viewed Rossi followers as in some ways a cult, but then I don't see that has any relationship to LENR.


    Cults, of course, (and ECW shares some elements with this) have a strong tribal element where those with different views are scorned and free discussion is prohibited.


    Will I promise not to mention cults here? No. And I cannot see why you should object to that. Were I calling some group of people a cult, who were not that, you could call me out. You may wish to do that in the case of Rossi followers. Where I point to cult-like behaviour, as on ECW, again you can disagree with me. You see I've given my reasons which do hold for ECW.


    I also think that any group of people interacting socially with strongly-held views different from the majority has the potential to be cult-like (that is a general comment) and therefore when I find myself within such a group, even virtually, I take special care to avoid this.


    This site is admirably uncult-like in its moderation. Thanks to Alan and many others. Which is why I don't expect this post to be moderated.


    :)

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    I mean difficult to produce and therefore difficult to detect

    That makes no sense. There is no connection between the difficulty of producing an effect and the difficulty of detecting it.


    To take an extreme example, it is very difficult to produce a nuclear explosion but extremely easy to detect it. If you see the size of the bomb and size of the explosion, and you measure gamma rays and other effects, you can be absolutely certain it is a nuclear explosion. If you see the size of a cold fusion cell and you measure 100,000 more energy coming out of it than a similar-sized chemical reactor, plus tritium and helium, you can be absolutely certain it is a nuclear effect.


    It is difficult to clone a sheep, but especially with Dolly it was obvious she was the clone of her mother. You could tell by looking at her coat, and you could be more certain by examining her DNA.


    It is extremely difficult to sent a robot explorer to Mars but when the photos come back there is no question the robot is on Mars.


    It is difficult to program a computer to beat the world's top experts in games such as chess, go or Jeopardy, but once you do it, there is no question the computer has won.


    I could give hundreds more examples.


    Perhaps you mean it is "difficult to detect" because you have to wait and do the experiment over and over before you get a chance to detect the effect. That is incorrect. If you have the money, the expertise and the equipment you can set up an array of experiments. One or more is bound to work every time you do a run. Bockris used to run a 10 x 10 array. He got 20 or 30 to work every time. Fleischmann and Pons did arrays of 16 and they always got positive results, although not always 16 out of 16.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    The F&P paper very badly documents the experimental results that it discusses.

    Not in my opinion, or Fleischmann's, McKubre's or in the opinion of any expert in calorimetry I have heard from. You think so, but you also refuse to address any of the proof that Fleischmann, I and others pointed out, such as the fact that only the cathode is boiling. And the fact that there is not enough input power to boil the water, and energy balance is zero in the the control runs. Since you evade any discussion of these issues, I assume you have no answers, and you are tacitly admitting Fleischmann is right.


    You claim there are problems, but you have never listed a single one, in this experiment, or any other major experiment. You are only pretending to be skeptical. A real skeptic would have some basis for doubt. You have nothing.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    While I agree that a replicable controllable effect could easily be detected, once you have an effect that cannot be controlled, that can switch off at any time for reasons not understood, you then cannot easily distinguish sporadic effect from sporadic experimental error.

    This is nonsense. All cold fusion experiments have controls, such as Pt-H. They can always be turned off, although it sometimes takes a few days with highly loaded bulk Pd. It is like turning off a large pile of burning coal. You have to wait for the fuel to escape from the metal. No one has identified any plausible experimental error in the best experiments. You haven't even tried, as I noted above. You claim there are invisible, undetected errors. That is not falsifiable, and it applies equally well to every experiment in history.

    Quote from kirkshanahan

    We know what was claimed to be. [What temperature]

    Not claimed. Shown. The pen recorder trace was in the book, and I uploaded a copy here. The thermocouple that produced it was working before the experiment, during and after it, and it still works today. You saw the pen recorder trace, but you refuse to believe it. You selectively ignore any data that does not agree with your crackpot theories, and then you tell the audience here that a pen-recorder graph is a "claim." No, it is a direct instrument reading.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    We are still not out of the woods on that, because as Shanahan has argued there could easily be a replicable effect based on some unexpected (by F&P. Jed, and those in the CF field) mechanism for ATER or another experimental lacuna that would in some experiments create apparent XSH anomalies that are in fact experimental anomalies.

    Shanahan's claims were shown to incorrect by experts. See:


    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MarwanJanewlookat.pdf


    Just because someone, somewhere makes a claim, that does not mean it is a valid claim. You might as well say relativity might be wrong because hundreds of wannabe physicists on the internet claim they can disprove it. (Einstein has long been the target of crackpots.) Shahanan is trying to show the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, that calorimetry does not work, and that he is better at calorimetry than Bob Duncan and dozens of other world class experts who have done cold fusion experiments. The data does not show what he claims. Control experiments do not show what he claims. Why do you believe him?

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Shanahan's claims were shown to incorrect by experts. See:


    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MarwanJanewlookat.pdf


    Just because someone, somewhere makes a claim, that does not mean it is a valid claim. You might as well say relativity might be wrong because hundreds of wannabe physicists on the internet claim they can disprove it. (Einstein has long been the target of crackpots.) Shahanan is trying to show the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, that calorimetry does not work, and that he is better at calorimetry than Bob Duncan and dozens of other world class experts who have done cold fusion experiments. The data does not show what he claims. Control experiments do not show what he claims. Why do you believe him?


    Jed: just to answer this (and the other one about controls).


    I don't "believe" Shanahan. In fact I don't think Shanahan believes Shanahan in the way you mean.


    But equaly, when you say "Shahanan is trying to show the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, that calorimetry does not work, and that he is better at calorimetry than Bob Duncan and dozens of other world class experts who have done cold fusion experiments" I don't think you have a good argument.


    The nub of CCS/ATER is that some difficult to reproduce active environment on electrodes in certain Pd/D experiments induces ATER - normally considered impossible. That hypothesis is similar in nature, but less radical than, the LENR hypothesis to exaplin the same thing.


    Then, he notes that some type of CF cell would have a calibration constant shift due to changing in-cell temperature gradients from ATER.


    Obviously, controls do not help this, because they will not show ATER and therefore the corresponding shift.


    I agree, there are calorimetric experiments that can quite easily be shown not susceptible to this, but many of the experiments cited by you (including F&P) do not show this.


    You don't need CCS/ATER to see that LENR "controls" are not necessarily controls. D vs H (and Pt vs Pd) make major physical changes that can affect system operation.


    The reaction of CF researchers in your Marwan reference above is basically to deny this can ever happen on theoretical (or other) grounds. That is similar to main-stream scientists denying LENR can ever happen on theoretical (or other) grounds and just as dangerous.


    Your comparators do not hold. For example, relativity was denied for many years before a vast amount of reproducible evidence existed in its favour. More importantly, relativity made precise unexpected predictions which were (long after the prediction) experimentally validated. LENR theory has no such predictions yet. If there were a consistent LENR theory that made precise unexpected and measurable predictions, even if it were a long shot, it would get investigated.


    In fact the various modified GR theories are all contenders. But they need to make distinct predictions, and those need to be shown correct. Last I heard the most interesting such contender was looking like its predictions were not being found. But it is early days.

    Quote from oystla

    Your fatal flaw in your analysis is that you think you see water levels, when you actually can't on these old degraded video tapes.


    And you have been tricked by light and shadows, as we clearly see in below pictures, where you think it's water level in your horizontal red line, but it is a shadow that has been there all the time from behind as seen in the other picture which is completely water filled tubes and still you see the same shadow where I placed an arrow..


    The second picture (the one with the red F) comes from the jpeg posted with the comment "Videos reveal the real behavior during boil-off of Cell 1" (1). It's a small portion of the entire jpeg showing only two images of Cell 1. On the right of these 2 images, there is a series of 6 images that shows how the level of the liquid level decreases before and during the final boil-off phase indicated by F&P as the period during which half of the initial water content would have been vaporized. So, shadows and reflections in the videos have nothing to do with the evident progressive lowering of the liquid level within the cells.


    Regarding the quality of the video, as already said (2), the longest was given to Rothwell in a digitized form by Fleischmann, when he was still at IMRA, ie before 1996. Its quality is more than enough to see what happened during the 1992 experiment, provided there is readiness in seeing it.


    (1) FP's experiments discussion

    (2) FP's experiments discussion

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    But equaly, when you say "Shahanan is trying to show the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, that calorimetry does not work, and that he is better at calorimetry than Bob Duncan and dozens of other world class experts who have done cold fusion experiments" I don't think you have a good argument.

    It isn't my argument. See Marwan et al. They are experts and so is Duncan, and so was Fleischmann. Every one of these people who has bothered to look at Shanahan's paper say it is wrong, mainly for the reasons listed in Marwan. (For other reasons as well.) If you disagree, I suggest you write a detailed review of Marwan. Explain, for example, why it is that Shanahan's effect never happens with the control runs such as Pt-H. How can the choice of metals and the type of water cause the Shanahan effect to turn on or off?


    Quote from THHuxleynew

    The nub of CCS/ATER is that some difficult to reproduce active environment on electrodes in certain Pd/D experiments induces ATER - normally considered impossible.

    No, the nub of it is that source of the heat moves and that affects the calorimetry, but only when you use Pd and D2O, never with other materials. That's impossible. Also, you are mistaken. Cold fusion is not difficult to reproduce. If you are an expert and you do 100 experiments at a time, you are bound to see it. Saying it is "difficult" is like saying it is difficult to clone animals because you have to do 1000 samples at a time (or in series).


    You have not addressed why is that kind of "difficulty" is an issue in the first place. It makes no scientific sense. Do you say that robot explorers on are Mars may not exist because they are difficult and time consuming to fabricate, launch and land?


    Quote from THHuxleynew

    I agree, there are calorimetric experiments that can quite easily be shown not susceptible to this, but many of the experiments cited by you (including F&P) do not show this.

    You are wrong about that. Obviously you are wrong, because you have not given us a single reason to doubt Fleischmann's work, and you have not addressed any of the reasons Fleischmann and I listed, such as the fact that control experiments show an energy balance of zero. If you have a reason -- any reason! -- I am sure you would have listed it by now. You did once claim that there might be entrained, unboiled water, but that is wrong for a number of reasons that Fleischmann listed. Perhaps you still say that, but repeating a mistake does not make it correct.


    You keep saying this or that experiment is wrong, but you give no reasons. Waving your hands and saying there may be an error somewhere that someone someday may find is not science. A negative view has to be supported with as much rigor as a positive view. You are claiming that calorimetric techniques that have been used for centuries and constants such as the heat of vaporization of water are wrong, retorts do not work, and inventorying the salt left in the test tube does not prove the water was vaporized. These are radical assertions. You have to justify them.

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