Why was the one-year test performed?

Quote from Jack Cole

IH Fanboy wrote:

This has been explained over and over, but we still see these questions that show no awareness, from people it was specifically explained to. "Explanations" are not fact, but neither is the implied story here, that IH must have completely believed in Rossi, and must have paid no attention to the abundant skeptical comment by 2012, and therefore ...

The conclusion given depends on the point of view of the author. If the author is a general LENR pathoskeptic, it is proof that IH was really stupid, deluded by an obvious con. If the author is a believer in Rossi, it is proof that they are now just being greedy, trying to avoid paying $89 million while still keeping and secretly using the IP to compete with Rossi.

However, Jack and researchers in the LENR field had, as a background, knowledge that some sort of NiH effect was not impossible. So they did not have that background of total prejudice. However, it became obvious, by the end of 2011 or so, that Rossi was not a scientist, was not careful, and somehow managed to create a long series of demonstrations that were possibly flawed in this way or that, and it became obvious that he was avoiding the testing of his devices by actual experts. Instead, he pulled in scientists who were naive, with credentials that could make it look like they would do a good job finding any problems. However, indications are that whenever someone actually challenged what Rossi was doing, the test was over, and Rossi never returned.

Before the lawsuit, most LENR reseachers had become highly skeptical. Some still thought the Rossi Effect was real, even if Rossi was obviously eccentric and erratic. Then came the lawsuit. Now, I'm seeing almost no support from any LENR researchers, except for Peter Gluck, who has not been active in research for a very long time. Peter Gluck's relationship with the rest of the field has become shaky. It's a bit like Steve Krivit only in a different direction.

So, by 2012, the situation was more or less a stalemate. Rossi's announcement had come to dominate public attention. Researchers set up their own programs, some of them, to confirm NiH results. There is some evidence for NiH reactions, SRI has seen them in the exploding wire experiments, apparently.

There is Piantelli, of course. But none of this work has been adequately confirmed.

It looks to me like IH decided to break the logjam, to give Rossi the benefit of the doubt, tolerating his eccentricity, to the extent of $11.5 million. That required agreeing to some crazy conditions. I think they saw sufficient leeway in the Agreement to sign it. And we will see whether or not they were correct on that.

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It wasn't so plain to me then either then. Why would it be? There were several apparently positive test results (as far I can tell are all shown to have major problems).

Right. It took time to find that, though, and many of the tests did not become definitive "no heat," but rather became inconclusive. There were also the arguments that depend on Rossi being sane. "A fraud would not act like this," is still being repeated. It's a seriously flawed argument. But in 2012, it might have carried some weight.

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Indeed, Parkhomov's apparent success was galvanizing to myself and others to perform a lot of experiments. Then over the course of 2015, the negative replications came one after another.

Like Parkhomov. Parkhomov did attempt a control, but his experiments were so wildly variable that the control experiment failed even more quickly than the regular experiments. The data was, then, very shaky. And he never nailed his protocol down. He kept changing it, so that data from one experiment was not commensurable with the others. Total mess. In other words, Parkhomov was not replicating himself. And I looked at his input power/temperature curves and they did not show a sign of XP. It was all in the evaporative calorimetry, and would appear about the time the water started boiling, and as the water boiled more vigorously, XP increases. As did, I'm sure, water splashing out of his pot with an irregularly-shaped boiler inside, might as well have been designed to bump water out.

Preliminary results from Parkhomov were exciting (I was very excited until I studied the data!). For public science, great! But the problem with public science can be that people get very excited about something that to a seasoned researcher would be a hint to do much more careful work. Not to announce definitive results!

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In the later part of 2015, it occurred to me that Rossi has made sure that all of his tests shared a single flaw: no proper calibration was ever performed.

That was obvious before 2015. In 2011 Rossi was asked the obvious question, about control experiments, i.e., no fuel (as the simplest control, there are better ones, but at least it's a place to start). He said something like "I don't need to do control experiments because I already know what will happen. Nothing!"

Of course a control experiment will not generate "nothing." It will demonstrate system behavior without the fuel, such as how the device will look to an IR camera, for example. Lugano, they *almost* did a control! What stopped them? They gave a reason that must have come from Rossi, but they reported it as if it were their own idea. The heating element will burn out if we run full power through it. Really? They actually believed that? It won't burn out with full power in a cell with a lot of extra heat supposedly being generated, where the elements would get even hotter, but it will burn out without that extra power? Sure, you don't just flip a switch to full current, the inrush can burn it out. You ramp it up, slowly, to prevent shock, allowing it to heat. But avoiding doing a full-input-power control? What were they thinking? The song goes "they must have been drinking!"

I think I know. They knew that if they objected, they were off the team, and it's exciting to be a part of something so huge in possible consequences. None of these tests were done by truly independent experts, they were all selected by Rossi! There would be easy ways to find truly independent and trustworthy experts, but Rossi never allowed such, and, rather obviously, insisted on Penon for the GPT, an awful choice even if he were the world's foremost expert on calorimetry, which he certainly was not. "Nuclear engineer" sounds impressive, eh? That profession would not necessarily qualify him to investigate the heat production of these devices. It would not qualify him to think of and rule out artifacts -- and fraud.

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That is the key factor enabling the false positive results.

Could be. It certainly brings them all into doubt. Single-measure experiments suck. I've spent a lot of time with the SPAWAR CR-39 studies. Single-measure (the only result is on the CR-39 plastic radiation detectors.) They did, at least, do control experiments. But it's still single-measure, so the significance can be obscure. Fascinating, and, to my mind, deserves further study. But don't call the APS with it and claim "we have proof!"

{quote] Parkhomov went almost silent only popping up a time or two to note much less stellar results, but no reports. This fact combined with all the other negative replications are sufficient to cast doubt onto all of his results. There is not one high quality repeatable experiment demonstrating that it works.[/quote]I'm not going to argue with this. There may be some high-quality work, as far as it goes, but claims in that work remain modest. I think that a study fully characterizing the behavior of a series of fuel mixtures vs. temperature would be of high interest. And this is important: if carefully done, "negative" results can be just as important as "positive" ones.

One of the Rossi actions that offended me wrt the 1 MW test was the "disregard input temperature." This demonstrates a focus on positive/negative, success/failure, which takes it away from science and genuine engineering. This is connected with the whole 1 MW test instead of a large series of smaller tests. It's a circus, a show, and not what I'd want as engineering data. I'd want to know the most accurate possible measure of energy production. Sure, if it's necessary to set something aside, but input water temperature? What if the input water is live steam?

I'd want to know individual reactor reliability. All these things would be easier to do than the 1 MW test. And it appears that this is what IH wanted ... but Rossi insisted. And IH had decided not to confront Rossi until and unless it became completely necessary. He sued them, so it may be necessary, but they are still being conservative.
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There is no evidence that Rossi's formula outlined in his patent works. What more evidence is needed? Perhaps one could think he is a shrewd inventor who knows he must provide a non-working patent, but hold back a key ingredient from the patent (and his funding partner). The alternative explanation is much simpler: he has nothing held back. It doesn't work and people provide him all kinds of ready excuses. All he has to do is patrol the net a bit to find plausible cover stories generated by other people.

I have been aware of the duality since late 2011, I think. Early in 2011 I was under the impression that there had been too many validations, but then as details accumulated, this flipped and I concluded that, quite simply, we could not tell the difference between an eccentric inventor, a fraud, or -- this appeared for me very clearly with the lawsuit, reading the complaint -- a man heavily deluded, to the point of possible hallucinations. And I still can't tell. All three are possible.

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A man of conscience would admit to experimental problems, but he is willing to stand on false results over and over.

Yes. Now, this is also a mark of insanity! I've seen it in some very smart and very high-functioning people. There is a central story that overpowers everything else. The person may believe they have ten reasons why something is true. So if you are somehow able to discuss this with them, if they will even allow it, and you show that one reason actually leads to the opposite conclusion, the person says, "Okay, but I have all the other reasons." Do this with the next reason, and the response is the same. There are two problems: the size of the pile of reasons is a weight of impression, not objective, so it does not decline, and ... there can be an underlying reason that is a total killer. In my friend's case, the underlying reason was that "God told me." And he died for that, he was assassinated because of his heretical ideas. In Tucson, Arizona. It was tragic, because ... he was just plain wrong. In honor of his memory, I later much more carefully investigated his claims. It could be called the file-drawer effect. He looked only at positive evidence, and did not consider all that he looked at that did not show what he was claiming.

What we were talking about when he came to "God told me" was an issue of geography and the shape of the earth and the direction between two points. I knew what I was talking about, but he was so convinced that he was right that all the evidence was misunderstood in exactly the ways that would confirm his ideas. And he thought that what he was doing was "scientific," and everyone else was wrong. Bad sign.

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The central question for all to answer is how far do his lies extend?

This is obvious. Rossi is not a trustworthy witness or reporter. Mats Lewan is aware of this, but then seems to forget it.

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1. Is he incompetent at science or deliberately skewing results?
2. Did he lie in his patent and to IH leaving out a key special ingredient?
3. Did he swap out the spent fuel with Ni62 at Lugano producing a fradulent isotopic analysis?
4. Did he deny the IH expert access to the "customer" factory to protect trade secrets or to cover his lies?

And there is situation after situation like this. Rossi is the common denominator. Cold fusion researchers were very reluctant to publicly criticize Rossi, one reason would be the history of unfair criticism of cold fusion. However, if IH -- and Dewey Weaver-- are not lying, Rossi, if he had a real effect and knows how to create it, did not transfer this knowledge to IH. The reason would be obvious from his history. He did not trust them.

But he took their money. Never take money from people you don't trust, unless it is a complete done deal. I prefer to leave the Lugano fuel results as a contaminated test. Rossi should never have been allowed to touch the fuel after the test, nor to take the before-test sample, because any reasonable person would know that this would create suspicion of fraudulent alteration. In any case, absent correlation between shifts in fuel and the generated heat, those results are nearly meaningless.

If someone independently finds XP that can be sustained for long enough for a reasonable product to accumulate to become clearly detectable, it's an obvious test to do. But first you need the heat. Even if you only get it in a fraction of experiments, if that fraction shows enough heat to generate enough ash, finding ash correlated with heat, over a substantial series of experiments, will validate both the heat and ash measurements.

Storms thinks the ash from NiH is deuterium. He might be right. Difficult to detect as these experiments are normally done. But it could be done, partly by using deuterium-depleted hydrogen and then by running long enough.

Quote from axil

But Jack Cole has not undertaken a replication of the gainful (COP = 1.5) experiment documented by me356.

Apparentlly not. Who has?

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Jake Cole might be well served to verify me356 publically document Claims before he can say that there is no documented experiments showing overunity energy production in LENR.

This proviso also applies to MFMP.

I don't think that Jack said what Axil just claimed. He wrote:

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I put unverified claims in a box of interesting, but probably wrong until proven otherwise. Any assistance that me356 has provided others so far (e.g., Brian Albiston) has not resulted in any improvement in results. It is anecdotal, and this does not count as scientific evidence.

He was not talking about "documented experiments:" There are thousands upon thousands of documented experiments showing anomalous heat. How many are verified? Not nearly so many. There are experiments with results that have been confirmed. The me356 work apparently has not been confirmed, and that was all he was talking about.

It is a huge amount of work to actually do experiments. It's a lot more work than sitting at a computer spewing opinions. Jack is one who has actually done some experimental work. He's paid his dues. Axil is who? And, especially, who is Axil to tell Jack Cole what he should and should not do? While fibbing about what Jack actually said?

Axil is demonstrating here that he does not understand what is in front of him. Yet he has very strong opinions about things that he did not witness and does not document.

There is a way to recover, Axil. It's to apologize. Do anonymous internet trolls ever apologize? I'm trying to remember. Help me out here.

If we are inclined to do experimental work, we pick where to put that investment. We will often go for the latest, most exciting thing, which often fails to pan out. Or we could decide just to do some basic work, confirming something where the world might benefit from confirmation or disconfirmation. Or we might spend the time on something else. I never blame the skeptics for not doing experimental work. I do blame them for insulting those who do, but that's different.