Jed Rothwell on an Unpublished E-Cat Test Report that “Looks Like it Worked”

Quote from Mary Yugo

SO you didn't say you knew on "first principles" that one of Rossi's "reactors" made excess heat and that this could not be reasonably doubted? Are you going to make me dig out the quote?

What is your point here? Are you saying that I claim to be infallible? Have you heard me say I have never made a mistake? Obviously, I have been wrong about Rossi and various other experiments. I will be wrong again in the future. Cold fusion, like all new science, is a mixture of truth and error. The only people who are never wrong about new science are those who never try to understand, and never venture an opinion.

I don't worry about being wrong from time to time. I would worry about being closed minded, or unwilling to re-examine the evidence. Most of all I would worry if I realized my views break the rules of science, and fly in the face of the scientific method, the history of science, and common sense. That is how I would describe your views.

You apparently think it is possible for hundreds of professional scientists to measure heat ranging from 50 mW up to 120 W, in thousands of experiments, and every single one of them was wrong. Every one, every time! Because if even one was right, that makes cold fusion real. No one would argue it is impossible for one or two scientists to do calorimetry wrong. But you are saying that many of world's top experts in calorimetry and electrochemistry got it completely wrong, not just once but in test after test, year after year. As I said, it that could happen, science would not work, and civilization would not exist. We humans would still be living in caves.

This notion of yours puts you far into the lunatic fringe. You are denying the whole basis of the scientific method, which is to say, the replicated experiment as the irrefutable standard of truth. You are saying that science does not work. You are the oddball here, not me. As Martin Fleischmann said, we [cold fusion researchers] are painfully conventional people. You are the one who questions the scientific method, not me.

Even now possible to prove that the Earth is flat and the Sun revolves around the Earth using the possibilities of geometry.

Quote from cam

I have already promised to investigate five lenr by means of exfor, where all nuclear reactions are archived.

Obviously they are not all archived, because cold fusion is a nuclear reaction but it is not archived. It could not be archived in any case, because no one understands the nature of the reaction well enough to fit it into a standard database yet.

You resemble the drunk who drops his keys in the shadows but looks for them under the streetlight, because it is hard to see in the shadows. You know darn well that cold cannot be in this database. You pretend to look for it, but only as a way to point out -- again and again -- that you don't believe it exists. This is circular logic. You prove only that the people who compile the database don't believe it exists. We know that. We knew that before you told us. We got the message. So you can stop posting this nonsense.

@Eric Walker

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I take an opportunity to link to the Wikipedia article on electron capture.

I take the opportunity to inform you that weak interactions are only spontaneous processes, present in all beta decays. You can't get it artificially, but in huge experimental sets. Cross sections of weak interactions are around 10^-25 barn.
You should read something about weak force.

Quote from cam

I take the opportunity to inform you that weak interactions are only spontaneous processes, present in all beta decays.

I take the opportunity to help you to revise this position in light of new information, by reading this discussion.

Some quotes for your edification: "Be-7 decays purely by electron capture (positron emission being impossible because of inadequate decay energy) with a half-life of somewhat over 50 days. It has been shown that differences in chemical environment result in half-life variations of the order of 0.2%, and high pressures produce somewhat similar changes." And: "a 2004 paper measures a 0.8% reduction in half-life for Be-7 atoms enclosed within carbon-60 cages." And: "Other cases where known changes in decay rate occur are zirconium-89 and strontium-85, also electron capturers; technetium-99m ("m" implying an excited state), which decays by both beta and gamma emission; and various other "metastable" things that decay by gamma emission with internal conversion."

Changes in weak-interaction decay rates in response to changes in the chemical environment, brought about by human beings with parents and maybe children as well.

I ask you once more what I asked in an earlier post: suppose you have a nuclide unstable against electron capture or beta decay. What in your estimation will happen if there is a momentary surge in electron density?

Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Russia
they are also interested in research LENR

@Jed Rothwell

Quote

Obviously they are not all archived, because cold fusion is a nuclear reaction but it is not archived. It could not be archived in any case, because no one understands the nature of the reaction well enough to fit it into a standard database yet.

At least five lenr-canr are certainly archived in your mind. Let Mary Yugo and me know them.

Quote

You prove only that the people who compile the database don't believe it exists.

I prove that GANS doesn't believe in cold fusion. The database EXFOR is GANS.
Let me joke:
outside exfor there is no salvation.

Eric Walker

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Changes in weak-interaction decay rates in response to changes in the chemical environment, brought about by human beings with parents and maybe children as well.

Haïssinsky (1957)
La Chimie Nucléaire et ses Applications.
page 93:
9. Influence de l'état chimique
What you have found is well known; you can find it in a nuclear handbook dated 1957.

Quote

suppose you have a nuclide unstable against electron capture or beta decay. What in your estimation will happen if there is a momentary surge in electron density?

We are not allowed to estimate; we can only read experimental findings. If you are interested, I can find the examples where the chemical environment can influence beta events a bit.

Quote from cam

We are not allowed to estimate; we can only read experimental findings. If you are interested, I can find the examples where the chemical environment can influence beta events a bit.

Sure one can estimate. It's called a thought experiment or an ansatz. It's something that physicists do regularly. But for those unable or unwilling to make a guess, there are experiments, as you say. Mizuno is an experimentalist reporting on experiments that show evidence of something that looks a lot like electron capture.

Quote from cam

@Eric Walker

I take the opportunity to inform you that weak interactions are only spontaneous processes, present in all beta decays. You can't get it artificially, but in huge experimental sets. Cross sections of weak interactions are around 10^-25 barn.
You should read something about weak force.

You should read something about the electroweak force.
If LENR produces a combined electroweak force, then your assertions about the weak force are invalid.

CAM,

Wrt "I prove that GANS doesn't believe in cold fusion. The database EXFOR is GANS.
Let me joke: outside exfor there is no salvation."

Don't you see the insanity in your statement?

It does not "prove" a belief in any direction.

It only reports objectively What is known. And what is yet not understood, therefore not reported. GANS don't take an opinion on science.

But by your arguments it would go like this:
1. We OBSERVE something mysterious in nature, like the accelerating expansion of the Universe, let's call it "dark energy", since we don't know the excact mechanism.
2. Now you check your EXFOR database and find nothing of dark energy. But it must have some nuclear interactions if the observation is true.
3. Therefore you conclude the observation must be wrong, or Else it should be listed in EXFOR.
4. So your final conclusion is that dark energy is junk science, junk observation. "GANS does not Believe in dark matter and dark energy, since EXFOR don't has it"

Dear CAM,

Or by your full name Camillo Franchini, also known as 'fusionefredda'

I suggest it's time you find some other and better arguments against the possible existence of cold fusion or Anomalous Heat Effect, than your EXFOR insanity. It does not contribute to anything.

Quote from Mary Yugo

No we don't. Lugano was mismeasurement or deceit or both. Clarke showed clearly how the "COP" (inept naming) probably was one.

Obviously You missed some part of the story... TC could not explain why the outer Rods temperature could raise superlinear. Also the mfp replication showed that the rods temperature must be much lower...

The only thing TC agreed at the end was, that we can make no assumption about the COP (he once quoted it to be in the range of 1-4).

But from the rods we get a worst case of 2.

Jed Rothwell wrote to Mary Yugo:

"You apparently think it is possible for hundreds of professional scientists to measure heat ranging from 50 mW up to 120 W, in thousands of experiments, and every single one of them was wrong. Every one, every time! Because if even one was right, that makes cold fusion real. No one would argue it is impossible for one or two scientists to do calorimetry wrong. But you are saying that many of world's top experts in calorimetry and electrochemistry got it completely wrong, not just once but in test after test, year after year. As I said, it that could happen, science would not work, and civilization would not exist. We humans would still be living in caves."

Yes, it is entirely possible. It occurs when 'groupthink' predominates. In the case of cold fusion calorimetry it arises specifically because the researchers don't study their methods' noise sufficiently. They eyeball their calorimeter's baseline and say "OK...the error is the baseline variation." and then they stop. Then a 'mythology' develops that "all the errors have been explored and there's none left", and all attempts to move beyond that are ridiculed and lambasted. If the baseline noise is, in fact, NOT the primary error component, then a mistake has been made and it is compounded by enforcing the mythology.

Case-in-point: I looked at Ed Storms' cold fusion data in 2000 and, using a trivial assumption, but working out the consequences of that, showed that at least in his data a trivial variation in calibration constants (which are experimentally determined numbers and thus contain 'error') wiped out his supposed excess heat signals. But even more, I showed that the variation was systematic, which is a clear sign that I was on the right track. But the cold fusion community has actively attempted to suppress my findings when they should have been attempting to incorporate them. The problem I outlined applies to any type of calibration, but the community leaders have refused to recognize this (in the face of simple math) and instead have resorted to extreme methods to justify their ignoring the issue. So, we have today a field where 'hundreds of researchers' are getting it wrong because they prefer their mythology to the facts. As a consequence we have NO confirmed excess heat in any cold fusion experiment.

You grossly underestimate how often this scenario is repeated in the real world. The primary difference with cold fusion is the level of fanaticism the proponents have in maintaining their status quo. I repeat, the problem is failure to admit a systematic error has crept into the field.

With regards as to how science works...normally, when a systematic error is pointed out, the researchers affected by it bang their heads on the desk for a few minutes muttering "Why didn't I see that?", after which they go and see what they have to do to incorporate this new knowledge into their efforts. And science goes on just fine.

Quote from kirkshanahan

In the case of cold fusion calorimetry it arises specifically because the researchers don't study their methods' noise sufficiently.

That is what you claim, but your claims are physically impossible. See:

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

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

Quote from Wyttenbach

Obviously You missed some part of the story... TC could not explain why the outer Rods temperature could raise superlinear. Also the mfp replication showed that the rods temperature must be much lower...

The only thing TC agreed at the end was, that we can make no assumption about the COP (he once quoted it to be in the range of 1-4).

But from the rods we get a worst case of 2.

Obviously you have confused the story immensely. Please explain your position clearly, with examples.
The data shows clearly that the COP was 1, within the range of errors.

Quote from kirkshanahan

It occurs when 'groupthink' predominates.

If ever there existed an instance of groupthink, it would be the community of physicists who have refused to think beyond their narrow-minded view regarding LENR.

Quote from kirkshanahan

They eyeball their calorimeter's baseline and say "OK...the error is the baseline variation." and then they stop.

No we don't. There are plenty of examples of transmutation and isotopic shift evidence to back up the anomalous heat observations.

Quote from kirkshanahan

But the cold fusion community has actively attempted to suppress my findings when they should have been attempting to incorporate them.

This is a fairly comical instance of the pot/kettle analogy.

Quote from kirkshanahan

The primary difference with cold fusion is the level of fanaticism the proponents have in maintaining their status quo.

Ditto.

You write with remarkable contempt and emotion. Why is that when I raise the topic of cold fusion / LENR with my scientist friends, the reaction is always similar? Even extreme? One time shortly after Dennis Bushnell of NASA came out in support of LENR, I reached out to a scientist friend at NASA--a very conservative and polite person whom I've know for my entire life--and he reacted in a tirade of expletives about his negative views on cold fusion. I had never witnessed him react in such an emotional and angry way. What is it about this topic that brings out so much angst and fear from you folks?

Quote from JedRothwell

Obviously they are not all archived, because cold fusion is a nuclear reaction but it is not archived. It could not be archived in any case, because no one understands the nature of the reaction well enough to fit it into a standard database yet.

The Nuclear Science References available at BNL contains most experimental papers in nuclear physics. It does not have the tag LENR, you are right there, but funnily enough you can search for 'Cold Fusion'. The problem is that the conventional Nuclear Chemistry (I would use that here) definition is heavy-ion reactions producing super-heavy elements at low energy, resulting in few free nucleons in the exit channel. For traditional nuclear data i have a summary of links on our Nuclear Physics (yes! Physics) web site:
http://www.nuclear.lu.se/engli…ear-physics/nuclear-data/

Jed wrote:
" 'kirkshanahan wrote:In the case of cold fusion calorimetry it arises specifically because the researchers don't study their methods' noise sufficiently.'

That is what you claim, but your claims are physically impossible. See:

lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEcommentonp.pdf

lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MarwanJanewlookat.pdf"

The first publication was addressed immediately by a following publication. The refs. are:

Shanahan, Thermochimica Acta 387 (2002) 95.
Storms, Thermochimica Acta 441 (2006) 207
Shanahan, Thermochimica Acta 441 (2006) 210

None of Storms' comments were accurate. It is also of historical interest to note that in his 2007 book, Storms' claims to have rebutted my comments and references the original paper and his rebuttal, but fails to reference my reply, which was published with his full knowledge immediately after his paper. ("Maybe if we don't talk about it, it won't really exist...")

The second is the infamous paper by the 10 authors (discussed extensively previously here) who used a fallacious strawman argument to attempt to discredit my comments. Strawman arguments don't refute anything, so my original comment stands.

The refs. are:

Marwan and Krivit, J. Environ. Monit., 11, (2009), 1731
Shanahan, J. Environ. Monit., 12, (2010), 1756
Marwan, et al, J. Environ. Monit., 12, (2010), 1765

Jed's response clearly shows exactly what I was saying. He cites two papers by CFers that purport to rebut my original comments, but which both miss the mark (badly in the second case!). But to those who are interested in preserving the status quo's mythology, only the fact that replies were made counts, not whether the replies were correct or not. QED

Quote from kirkshanahan

Case-in-point: I looked at Ed Storms' cold fusion data in 2000 and, using a trivial assumption,

I thought we live in 2016 now... Do you see any improvement, as some out in the field report COP's well above 100!