Document: Isotopic Composition of Rossi Fuel Sample (Unverified)

    Quote from Hermes

    I find the conspiracy theories, conflict of interest theories etc., rather unconvincing. If there has been opposition to LENR I think the reasons are quite understandable and reflect the natural prudence of the scientific and industrial community.


    This is the 100th anniversary of the battle of the Somme, July to November 1916. 1.5 million men were killed in this battle. On the first day, the British suffered 57,000 casualties.


    This was perhaps the most extreme folly in human history. You talk about the "natural prudence" of the scientific and industrial community. Where was that natural prudence in the military in 1916? Where in the political system? Where was it in the banking system in 2008? Or in any establishment? I do not see it. Yes, of course sometimes people are prudent. At other times . . . as Winston Churchill wrote:


    "Accusing as I do without exception all the great allied offensives of 1915, 1916 and 1917 as needless and wrongly conceived operations of infinite cost, I am bound to reply to the question, What else could be done? And I answer it, pointing to the Battle of Cambrai. 'This could have been done.' This in many variants, this in larger and better forms ought to have been done, and would have been done if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war."


    - The World Crisis 1911 - 1918


    There is no reason to think that the physics establishment has some natural propensity to accept correct answers, or to root out error, or to do things right. There is nothing self-correcting about science any more than there is about computer programming, banking, farming or running a grocery store. Or conducting a World War. The scientific establishment is made up of ordinary people with ordinary prejudices and foolish notions. They make drastic mistakes as often as anyone does.

    Quote from IH Fanboy

    If IH is as confident as what you portray them to be, why do they not open up their evidence for inspection by the wider LENR community?


    I do not know why, but I suppose it has to do with the lawsuit and legal advice. That is only speculation on my part.


    Quote from IH Fanboy

    Do they have isotopic analysis results that were jointly secured, with an unquestionable chain of custody . . .


    I do not think they do. If they had positive evidence of this nature, I suppose they would pay the $89 million.


    Quote from IH Fanboy

    But my gut has me still leaning Rossi.


    This is your gut versus Rossi's data. The data wins.

    Quote from IH Fanboy

    But do they have negative evidence of this nature, which encouraged them to withhold the $89 million?


    Absolutely, yes, they do have negative evidence. As they described in the March 10 press release, they were not able to verify the heat from any Rossi test. As they said in the Motion to Dismiss, the measurements were flawed and the instruments unsuitable. There is no doubt about it in their minds. Based on the sample data I have seen, I concur. (They have much more data than I do, so I assume they have many more reasons than I know of.)


    It would be grossly irresponsible for them to pay $89 million.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Absolutely, yes, they do have negative evidence.


    But do they have negative evidence of this nature.


    Do they have isotopic analysis results that were jointly secured, with an unquestionable chain of custody, that show nothing of significance?


    The ERV report is being disputed. Given its disputed nature, the ERV report provides little clarity, unfortunately, even if it is released. Same with "Rossi's" data on calorimetry. Same with the ERV's data on calorimetry. Same with IH's data on calorimetry. We can't obtain certainty based on anyone's calorimetry because it is all being disputed.


    I happen to think the isotopic shift analysis would be dispositive. That is what was more interesting in the Lugano test, and what would be more interesting here as well. Assuming that the chain of custody is tight. And why IH would not ensure that such an analysis was done with unquestionable chain of custody is beyond me. I'm surprised that they were so laissez faire as it was with the chain of custody in the Lugano test. Do they not want to know the answer? I tell you if I had millions on the line, I would have had multiple witnesses observing the fuel insertion and extraction with video surveillance to back it up. Were IH representatives even present for the Lugano fuel insertion and extraction? Why didn't they do it themselves? Sigh.

    IHFB - it takes 1 minute of looking thru this forum to pick up your tainted trail. What is your deal? Unlike you, I post under my own name. Who is this person who you claim is posting in a style that is similar to mine? Where are they posting? What is this person posting?


    If you would spend 1/10th of the energy you spend trying to defend Rossi and use that energy focusing on holding Rossi accountable then you might end up with some forum cred when this is all over. Right now, you and your handle are heading for history's trash heap.

    Quote from Dewey Weaver

    IHFB - it takes 1 minute of looking thru this forum to pick up your tainted trail. What is your deal? Unlike you, I post under my own name. Who is this person who you claim is posting in a style that is similar to mine? Where are they posting? What is this person posting?


    If you would spend 1/10th of the energy you spend trying to defend Rossi and use that energy focusing on holding Rossi accountable then you might end up with some forum cred when this is all over. Right now, you and your handle are heading for history's trash heap.


    So no substantive answers then?

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Where was that natural prudence in the military in 1916?


    Jed, this is a strawman argument. It's easy to cherry pick an irrelevant example out the history books but this one did not even involve democratic discussion. I'm sorry but your interjection is totally off the point! You may not appreciate the point of view of the "physics establishment". But to compare such a diverse community with glory seeking generals of WWI seems "over the top". F & P alienated the physics establishment back in 89 because they claimed evidence for fusion and specifically gammas from neutron capture by protons. Nobody believes this today. The "physics establishment" was right. Indeed few today believe in d+d fusion. Again the "physics establishment" was right. I could go on...


    I suggest unless this community starts paying attention to physics, it will continue to alienate mainstream physicists. We will never persuade them that in rejecting ALL LENR claims they have thrown out the baby with the bath water unless we start understanding their objections. I think these objections are wrong, but they are not unreasonable. If their objections were the result of misguided reason, then perhaps more cogent reasoning will persuade them of their error. But insulting them by comparing them with WW1 military is likely to be counter-productive.

    My source confirmed that I may release the file:


    https://xa.yimg.com/df/newvortex/analysis+Rossi+fuel+sample+May+11.pdf?token=8z0ypbQ3XpU-uXyd2kEs05pB07GzqJDJZJSAncQTyp5ru3hsN3MR3Y0q6y_RnRWfVdrevv-daunHWOSe44Ze6fYUMeCvo2pagmUR8Wz9ldwV7SR2knthNwTDhQYDG5zIP0DUw6vq0JsCucYkWtg&type=download


    If that doesn't work, it is in the filespace for newvortex. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/newvortex/files


    So, more details. I am told by my source that it was received anonymously. Thus there is no evidence of authenticity, other than the file itself, and by followup on what information it contains. What I redacted before:


    The author is Bo Höistad. (Look under document properties in a good pdf viewer.)
    The file was created June 20, 2016, at 3:19:49 PM.
    The original title shows: "Isotope composition of a fuel sample obtained from Rossi May 11, 2016"
    And it has

    Quote

    The analysis is made by Jean Pettersson, Inst of Chemistry-BMC, Analytical Chemistry, Uppsala University


    Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson and Lars Tegnér Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden were, of course, on the Lugano team. Pettersson seems to be a reasonably common name at Uppsala University.


    Rossi was in Sweden around May 11. Mats Lewan has, May 16,
    https://animpossibleinvention.…ilding-plus-more-updates/

    Quote

    Last week, Andrea Rossi made a visit to Sweden, and apart from meeting with the team of professors in Uppsala, with me and other persons, he made a trip from Stockholm to the south of Sweden to have look at a 10,000 square meter factory building for sale.


    Enjoy. Honestly, the movie rights could be worth $100 million. Me, I'll be content with the popcorn concession. Wait! $100 million? Let me think about that.

    Quote from Dewey Weaver

    If you would spend 1/10th of the energy you spend trying to defend Rossi and use that energy focusing on holding Rossi accountable then you might end up with some forum cred when this is all over. Right now, you and your handle are heading for history's trash heap.



    May be you missed to spend 1/10 of your energy to save 10 (Rossi) Millions... Spending the energy now is even a bigger waste.


    Is this the actual IH business model??


    BDW: We can can only defend the truth (neither Rossi nor IH has it so far .. ) and never will believe any FUD of the IH spin-team!

    Quote from Hermes

    Jed, this is a strawman argument. It's easy to cherry pick an irrelevant example out the history books . . .


    I can give dozens -- hundreds! -- more examples from science, technology, business, banking, agriculture . . . You name it, I know of examples. I happen to have many books about folly, mistakes and failure.


    As far as I can tell, this sort of thing happens as often in science as it does in any other institution. There does not appear to be any especially effective or high level of "self correcting" behavior built into science, compared to other institutions. On the contrary, it is lower than, say, engineering, aviation or programming. The reasons seem clear to me. The cost of failure in aviation is higher than it is in physics. Make a mistake in aviation and you kill people and destroy hundred of millions of dollars in equipment. In programming, if you make a drastic mistake, you are fired. In physics, nothing much happens. You publish a short letter of correction in the next issue of the journal, which no one reads.


    One of my favorite examples of rejection by the scientific establishment was described in Townes autobiography, "How the Laser Happened." He describes the maser project:


    Quote

    One day after we had been at it for about two years, Rabi and Kusch, the former and current chairmen of the department—both of them Nobel laureates for work with atomic and molecular beams, and both with a lot of weight behind their opinions—came into my office and sat down. They were worried. Their research depended on support from the same source as did mine. "Look," they said, "you should stop the work you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not going to work. We know it's not going to work. You're wasting money. Just stop!" The problem was that I was still an outsider to the field of molecular beams, as they saw it. . . . I simply told them that I thought it had a reasonable chance and that I would continue. I was then indeed thankful that I had come to Columbia with tenure. (p. 65)


    Six months after they built the first maser, they completed another one and operated the two together in tests which proved the functionality of the devices and purity (regularity) of the signal. Skeptical opposition continued for a few years:


    Quote

    Before—and even after—the maser worked, our description of its performance met with disbelief from highly respected physicists, even though no new physical principles were really involved. Their objections went much deeper than those that had led Rabi and Kusch to try to kill the project in its cradle . . . Llewelyn H. Thomas, a noted Columbia theorist, told me that the maser flatly could not, due to basic physics principles, provide a pure frequency with the performance I predicted. So certain was he that he more or less refused to listen to my explanations. After it did work, he just stopped talking to me. . . . . . .


    I visited Denmark and saw Niels Bohr . . . I described the maser and its performance. "But that is not possible," he exclaimed. I assured him it was. Similarly, at a cocktail party in Princeton, New Jersey, the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann asked what I was working on. After I told him about the maser and the purity of its frequency, he declared, "That can't be right!" But it was, I replied, and told him it was already demonstrated. (p. 69)


    There are thousands more examples. Benjamin Franklin wrote a marvelous description of this.

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

    Speculation about science, LENR, at this point, is likely to be a waste of time, because the experimental evidence is too shallow


    What a pessimistic answer! The major purpose of speculating is to ask scientific questions not to answer them! The answers come from well designed experiments.


    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

    I have put serious effort, so far, into only one investigation, the confirmation of the heat/helium ratio with the FP Heat Effect


    I thought this was settled 15+ years ago by experiments is multiple laboratories (China Lake, SRI, ENEA etc.). Where is your lab? What does your investigation show? What do you conclude so far? Will you be publishing a paper?


    I note you are looking at the conditions that allow the reaction. One way which I have verified is to reverse the electrolytic cell polarity for a few seconds. After this treatment the temperature of the cell climbs (overtaking the control cell temperature).

    Quote from JedRothwell

    I can give dozens -- hundreds! -- more examples from science, technology, business, banking, agriculture . . . You name it, I know of examples.


    Jed I don't doubt you can find more examples. You do well to remind us of human fallibility. Your stories are informative and entertaining. But just because an individual or two, out of the millions have made errors of judgement, should not imply that the entire establishment is to blame. I pointed out, that with the benefit of hindsight, F & P made erroneous claims. Those errors are not cancelled out by you claiming that other scientists also made errors.

    Quote from Alan Smith

    In which case I hope not too many investors ask you for advice. Your estimate is a figure plucked from the air. Why not $10Bn . . .


    $1 billion is a reasonable, order-of-magnitude dollar amount, based on the cost of developing other recent technology such as hybrid automobiles, self-driving cars, or a major improvement to fiber optics.


    It might take $5 or $10 billion by the time you get through all the regulatory tests, and by the time you develop a wide range of devices. The first device should cost $1 or $2 billion I suppose. Martin Fleischmann thought so, and he knew a lot about industrial R&D.


    The cost of building a factory are as much as an order of magnitude larger. A semiconductor fab is the highest of high tech plants: "By 2016, the minimum capital expenditure budget needed to justify the building of a new fab will range from $8 billion to $10 billion for logic, $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion for DRAM and $6 billion to $7 billion for NAND flash . . ."


    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1264577


    I expect cold fusion devices will be roughly as exacting to manufacture as semiconductors. The physical devices will be larger than a CPU chip, but not necessarily more expensive or capital intense. The world will eventually need a few hundred cold fusion device factories, costing maybe $1 trillion in total. This cost is trivial compared to the cost of today's energy systems, which includes such things as coal mines, oil wells, tankers, fission nuclear plants, the power distribution grid and so on.

    Quote from Eric Walker

    My unstated purpose for asking you to outline your screening calculations was to learn at least one solid way of obtaining this.


    Here is the C code I use:-


    /* Returns gamow suppression factor in log10 units */
    double gamow(unsigned A, unsigned Z, unsigned A4, unsigned Z4, double Q)
    {
    double rs, rc, r, G, m;


    /* Estimate distance between 2 spherical nuclei when they touch */
    rs = 1.1 * (pow(A, .333333) + pow(A4, .333333)); /* Distances in fm */
    /* Estimate distance when supplied energy has overcome Coulomb barrier */
    rc = ((double)Z) * Z4 * 1.43998 / Q; /* fm */
    r = rs / rc;
    /* if r >= 1 there is no Coulomb barrier to cross! */
    G = r >= 1 ? 0 : acos(sqrt(r)) - sqrt(r * (1. - r));
    m = ((double)A * A4) / (A + A4); /* Reduced mass */
    return 0.2708122 *Z *Z4 *G *sqrt(m / Q);
    } /* gamow */

    Quote from Hermes

    JedRothwell wrote:


    Jed, this is a strawman argument.


    Okay, Hermes, you are new to this conversation, maybe. I'll assume you are. Yes, it was a straw man argument. Jed often argues that way, it is practically a trademark. So what? Jed is not a scientist, he's a writer like me, and his understanding of physics is sometimes spotty. His value is in his experience and his energy, which is extensive and sustained for decades. And he doesn't lie. He's just opinionated sometimes, and he's not unique in that, eh? Need a favor, researching a topic? Ask Jed. He has always, never failed, been helpful.


    Let's look at the substance here, which is not about Jed's style of argument. This is all off-topic, from the declared topic, but that seems to be SOP for this forum (and many others).


    Quote

    F & P alienated the physics establishment back in 89 because they claimed evidence for fusion and specifically gammas from neutron capture by protons.

    They demonstrated that they were not physicists, a horrible offense. That publication was actually a question, and they had an apparent radiation measurement artifact, which we may think an experience physicist would have noticed. The publication was rushed and given inadequate review. If we back up, they had other evidence, including tritium detection and helium. All of that was weak. What they actually had, and what was in their field, their expertise, was anomalous heat. They announced helium very early on (before Baltimore) but ... one helium measurement, no controls, inadequate, and the problem as it developed later was that the helium evidence, as it started to be found, contradicted their idea of a bulk reaction. And they decided to avoid it, to "only fight on one front at a time." -- or something like that. And that avoidance was noticed, and became another reason for dismissing them, especially for Park.


    Yes, their measurement error, combined with the alleged impossibility, created a ready excuse for rejection. However, their heat results were never successfully impeached. The artifact has never been experimentally identified, if there is one. Shanahan claims a particular phenomenon, itself an anomaly, i.e., something new is involved, he merely claims it is not nuclear in nature.


    The idea was strong that if there was fusion, there must be "fusion products," and those would necessarily be the products of classical d-d fusion, hence the "dead graduate student effect." However, this was based on limiting assumptions. For example, the found (and later confirmed) reality was a heat effect, not "fusion," per se. We can see this in Huizenga's note on Miles' 1991 report of a very strong heat/helium correlation. Huizenga realized the importance, clearly, but then said that he expected it would not be confirmed, "because no gammas." Again, this assumes the reaction d+d -> 4He + gamma.


    If that is not the reaction, the prediction of gammas fails. Pons and Fleischmann, in their original paper, did not actually claim "fusion," if one bothers to actually read it instead of relying on what thousands have written about it over the last decades, they claimed an "unknown nuclear reaction." And one cannot predict the behavior of an unknown reaction beyond understanding that it will probably not violate fundamental laws of physics, such as conservation of energy or conservation of momentum.

    Quote

    Nobody believes this today. The "physics establishment" was right.

    On that point, yes, of course they were, but missed is that Pons and Fleischmann admitted that.


    Quote

    Indeed few today believe in d+d fusion. Again the "physics establishment" was right. I could go on...

    You could, with no particular value. We do not know what the reaction is. As Schwinger noted, "the conditions of cold fusion are not the conditions of hot fusion." Someone might still find a way that d-d fusion operates that works. However, you are correct in this: few today are working on d-d fusion theories. Most cold fusion theory is looking at multibody fusion of some kind. I don't know what Hagelstein is working on right now, but Storms postulates the hydroton, would be a multibody phenomenon, involving more than two deuterons, Takahashi has calculated, using apparently standard QED theory, that four deuterons that find themselves with low relative momentum in a particular geometric arrangement, which seems ridiculously rare until one realizes that this is actually two deuterium molecules, and packing in some cavities might favor the cross-wise approach that is "tetrahedral symmetric," will collapse into a condensate (BEC) and fuse within a femtosecond, producing 8Be. 8Be will normally spontaneously fission within about a femtosecond, and that would generate a very hot gamma, and there isn't a lot of time for low-energy nuclear transitions to step this down to smaller gammas, so Takahashi is looking at possible halo states ... and all this is speculation, not founded in experimental evidence. To vet cold fusion theory is going to take much more evidence than we have.


    Quote

    I suggest unless this community starts paying attention to physics, it will continue to alienate mainstream physicists.

    What you are unaware of, Hermes, is that we know this. And we are paying attention to physics. When I submitted my paper to Current Science last year, I think the anonymous reviewer was a physicist. He rejected my paper immediately as nonsense.


    So what did I do? Whine and moan about stupid physicists? Try to get the section editors -- my friends! -- to overrule him or get me a "better reviewer"? No, he was perfect, a tremendous opportunity. I rewrote the paper, to address his concerns. And this is what we I find. When a physicist is given the evidence, with a duty to actually review it, they understand the problem. Robert Duncan is a great case in point. Are you saying that Robert Duncan doesn't "pay attention to physics"?


    Quote

    We will never persuade them that in rejecting ALL LENR claims they have thrown out the baby with the bath water unless we start understanding their objections.

    Preaching to the choir, here.

    Quote

    I think these objections are wrong, but they are not unreasonable.

    Of course not. Or, more accurately, the defect in reason was within normal behavior.


    Quote

    If their objections were the result of misguided reason, then perhaps more cogent reasoning will persuade them of their error. But insulting them by comparing them with WW1 military is likely to be counter-productive.

    Yeah, my thinking, more or less. Jed and I have been arguing about this for a very long time. But what will convince physicists is not exactly "more cogent reasoning," because reasoning always proceeds from assumptions. It will be experimental evidence, coming to them within channels that they pay attention to, showing that something is missing in their understanding, and challenging them to explain it. It will be their peers, one at a time, opening up the possibilities, becoming more familiar with what was largely hidden under the rejection cascade, which, for a time, made it almost a thought crime to even give the time of day to cold fusion. That did happen. This is all pretty well documented by the sociologists of science. The phenomenon is called an "information cascade" by social scientists, and this has been quite well covered in another field by a special name: Gary Taubes.


    I make this prediction: within two years, a major cold fusion skeptic will comment that his earlier conclusions were wrong, and there is something of high interest going on in these experiments. I have excellent communication with the fellow, but, again, no permission to disclose what has been said. Hey, that's actually another secret I've had for some time!

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