[SPLIT]Older LENR Experiments were bad, good... in general

Quote from THHuxley

(1) Claims of excess heat at lower temperatures which are not so compelling: but if you consider they are

If you do not find the results compelling I think it is a waste of your time to read the paper carefully. To put it another way, if you do not find the results compelling, I do not think you do not understand them.

Quote from THHuxley

(2) Vague claims of excess heat during a runaway event with no detail where there are many unconsidered issues and the results are clearly unsafe.

I find nothing vague about these results, but again, if you do, I suggest you ignore them. There are other papers about the boil off events, but there is no point to reading about them if you reject them out of hand before you start, as "vague." Boiling and phase transitions have been well understood by chemists for a long time, so I do not understand why you find them vague, but you do, so forget it.

I do not see what safety has to do with scientific merit. An above-ground nuclear bomb test is unsafe but it proves the reaction is real, and that it exceeds the limits of chemistry -- which is also what cold fusion experiments do. These experiments were safe as far as I know. I suppose safety would depend on the laboratory setting and equipment in which they were conducted.

Quote from THHuxley

It is not really a paper describing new results,

The author is dead, so you cannot expect new results from him.

As I said, as far as I know, the skeptics have not published any papers critiquing Fleischmann, McKubre, Miles or the others. They have groused, as you do, without making many falsifiable claims. It is hard to know how Fleischmann could respond to the notion that a phase change (boiling) is "vague." It seems fundamental to me. But anyway, while there have been no formal critiques, here is an analysis of some of the informal critiques that have circulated regarding isoperibolic calorimetry. Perhaps you will find it useful. It may answer some of the questions you raise:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/B…Pjcondensedl.pdf#page=402

Quote from THHuxley

McKubre is easier to understand

I'd like us to look at the strongest evidence.

That is a matter of opinion. Carefully considered, scientifically based opinion.

Quote from THHuxley

Do you still go for the Fleischmann paper?

I suggest you read several papers by both, and also papers by Miles and Storms, and the first book by Storms. Also the review by McKubre:

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

I suggest that you read 20 or 30 papers and some books. Read them carefully, with an open mind. You may need to read some textbooks on electrochemistry or calorimetry. I recommend Hemminger and Hohne for the latter. Give some thought to the subject for a reasonable amount of time, say six months. Then you may know enough to judge the results.

If you intend to read one paper and based on that, you hope to judge whether cold fusion is real or not, I think you are wasting your time. I have seen other people do that. You can read the 2004 DoE reviewers' statements when they tried to do that. That is a parlor game, not science. In your first reading of McKubre or any other paper, you will make many, many stupid mistakes, and you will jump to unwarranted conclusions. Unless you happen to be an electrochemist or someone with years of experience doing calorimetry, you are certain to misunderstand and get it wrong. In 1989 and 1990, nearly all of the world-class top experts in electrochemistry (around 100 people) successfully replicated Fleischmann and Pons. They got it right, because they knew what they were doing, and they knew a lot about the subject. You don't know a lot, and you are not in any position to make snap judgments about what they did. So if that is what you plan to do, don't bother.

Quote from JedRothwell

Other methods of calorimetry have been used to confirm the effect. I think every major method listed in Hemminger and Hohne have been used. It is not possible that every major method of calorimetry has major errors that experts are unaware of.

Sono-fusion is LENR on demand, easy to measure and simple to understand.
That's why especially THH doesn't like the irrefutable work of Stringham. Thus I post it again.

Here the latest overview paper of the Stringham : iscmns.org/CMNS/JCMNS-Vol15.pdf#page=62

Already in 1995 LANL - Los Alamos National Laboratory confirmed the ratio heat/bubble=He produced. (JED told us, many times, about this fact too...) Stringham counted the cavitation/fusion bubbles, which are in line with the heat produced. As the maximum COP is close to 4, we also must not discuss about marginal significance... Read conclusion point 5. The other measurement is the photon count of the Bremsstrahlung (fig.5) which clearly indicates the nature/intensity of the process.

Sono-fusion is LENR, albeit the underlaying process is more like hot-fusion!!! Thus it is politically very risky to discuss these facts ... More experimental details are given in the older paper: lenrcanr.org/acrobat/StringhamRlowmassmhz.pdf

and more actual with COP: lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StringhamRwhenbubble.pdf

Quote from Mary Yugo

It's not possible indeed that every major method has major errors. It is however very possible that isoperibolic calorimetry has major errors when used with very low levels of heat production and/or comparatively brief experiments.

These are not "very low levels of heat production." As I said, Lavoisier and Laplace were measuring these levels of heat production in 1781, with good reproducibility and enough precision and accuracy to detect many cold fusion reactions with confidence. (They were measuring guinea pig metabolism, which happens to be roughly on the same scale as cold fusion often is. They correlated the heat with CO2 production by the animals, and showed that the ratio of heat to CO2 was the same as it is with combustion.)

The experiments are not brief. Most of them run for weeks. Some have run for 3 months, producing heat continuously the entire time. At no time in the history of science would several weeks be considered "brief." Your characterizing them as "brief" has no logical or factual basis. You just made that up, I think.

A "brief" experiment with modern instruments would last for milliseconds. Or perhaps for 6 seconds, which is how long tokomak tests used to last. Do you dismiss tokomak fusion results because the experiments last less than a minute?

Quote from THHuxley

With respect Jed, I'm not yet judging result

Yes, you are. You said that a phase change result is vague. I disagree.

Quote from THHuxley

Your response to my initial remarks is an appeal to (your) authority.

That is incorrect for two reasons. First, I cite other people, not my own authority. Second, you do not understand the definition of the logical fallacy sometimes called "appeal to authority." You mistakenly think that pointing to actual authorities in a field constitutes this error. That is not the case. Pointing to actual authorities such as Fleischmann and Bockris is a valid argument. The error your refer to would only apply if I pointed to non-experts or people who are not qualified.

The error is more properly called: Fallacious Appeal to Authority, Misuse of Authority, Irrelevant Authority, Questionable Authority, Inappropriate Authority, Ad Verecundiam. See:

http://www.nizkor.org/features…/appeal-to-authority.html

Quote from Wyttenbach

Sono-fusion is LENR on demand, easy to measure and simple to understand.
That's why especially THH doesn't like the irrefutable work of Stringham.

Strinham has not been independently replicated as far as I know. Some people think his calorimetry is weak, for reasons beyond the scope of the discussion. I would not call his work irrefutable.

Quote from JedRothwell

Some people think his calorimetry is weak, for reasons beyond the scope of the discussion. I would not call his work irrefutable.

Who are the some people??

The calorimetry is simple, because You can start/stop the reaction any microsecond You like. His setup works like a simple coffee water heater. Run it one minute and measure T... But we can argue about the wrong thermometer...

Quote from THHuxley

We are still on the level of preliminary remarks, without cutting to the detail of the paper, but I cannot let this rest.

In an open electrolytic, cell generating H2 (or D2) and O2, and reaching boiling point, we are in a completely different domain from at least two different issues (maybe there are more, when I look at details):
H2+O2 recombination
boiling and calibration changes from that

Most cells do not reach the boiling point. Most are held in a narrow range of temperatures, around 30 deg C.

H2 and O2 recombination occurs outside the cell (in an open cell) or in the headspace (in a closed cell). It can be measured and accounted for with high precision in either system. It never occurs in the electrolyte and it does not raise the temperature of the cell as a whole any more than electrolysis does -- by definition, it can't. Obviously, it contributes no heat to an open cell. You can easily measure the deficit from it, during a calibration.

In a closed cell, calibration is always performed with recombination. You can't avoid doing that; you can't turn off recombination. Obviously, if a boil off experiment is planned, calibration is always performed with a null boil-off. So the experiment never encounters a "completely different domain." It is always done in the domain that was calibrated for.

There are boiling cell experiments, as noted. Both boil off ones, and ones that continuously boil for weeks or months. However, it is not inherently difficult to understand these, or analyze them. Boiling reactions can be accounted for with great accuracy. People have studied the vaporization of liquids in detail for a long time. It is well understood.