Jed reports that LENR has been verified by a U.S. Government Lab. WOW!

Quote from Pierre Ordinaire

Am I getting Alzheimer or a Defkalion "demonstration" was shown at some ICCF and applauded by the mor... the assistants? If I remember correctly about this, they should have the balls to admit that they were fooled.

I was there. It was a "live video feed." Most people left. There is almost nothing to be learned from such that cannot be learned better from a written report. Seeing is not believing. Who was fooled? Specifically?

I was irritated by the choice of Hadjichristos to skip ICCF-18 in favor of running this demo.

I was irritated by so much ICCF time being taken up with useless fluff. I do remember the excitement of an MFMP member who believed he had figured out what Defkalion was doing. It seemed plausible, but MFMP knew, full well, that the proof was in experiment, not "exciting ideas." It indeed seemed like a great idea, spark stimulation. But is there a real effect? That demo "looked good." But who would imagine that the flow meter could be so incredibly far off?

Pseudoskeptics basically have a simple syllogism to operate from: LENR is impossible, therefore any demonstration of a low level effect is artifact and error, and any demonstration of a large effect is fraud. Q.E.D.

It's completely useless, scientifically, it is not scientific at all. It's entrenched belief. That a belief is entrenched does not make it wrong, it simply makes it difficult to discover error in it, because of the noise generated.

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Pseudoskeptics basically have a simple syllogism to operate from: LENR is impossible, therefore any demonstration of a low level effect is artifact and error, and any demonstration of a large effect is fraud. Q.E.D.

Seriously? Where does anyone say that? Cite please. Straw man-- nothing else. Nonsense.

@zeus46

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I won’t go as far as to say that all of this is impossible, but it is extraordinarily unlikely that any of this will pan out to be a part of our reality. The reason is that there are known, established physical laws that are not only obeyed, but that are a fundamental part of our understanding of the Universe.

Cold fusion — and hence, devices like the e-Cat — are almost certainly hoaxes due to their violation of the known laws (and well-studied phenomena) of electromagnetic and nuclear physics that have been established and are understood.

Really, you have a problem with this (from your cite)? The ecat is certainly a hoax and a scam. They are absolutely correct about that, at least.

Quote from Jami

How would you know? A "demonstration" is defined as "an act of showing that something exists or is true by giving proof or evidence." (not a native speaker, so I looked it up to be sure). By that definition, no "demonstration" of any form of LENR has ever happened. So your accusation is wrong.

People confuse themselves by using precise definitions when what was intended was not that. Defining a claim out of existence is totally rude, it simply involves shoving around the meanings of words to something different from that intended, as if the meanings of words is a fixed thing, a "fact," instead of words being defined as used, according to intention. In certain narrow contexts, precise, agreed-upon definitions exist. That does not hold here.

Setting that aside, the claim here by Jami is that there has never been any demonstration of LENR, which is, by the way, orthagonal to what was said, which was about a priori judgment, not a claim that a demonstration actually occurred. However, one of the meanings of "demonstration" that he cited was "giving evidence." So is Jami claiming that there has been no evidence presented of LENR, ever?

Notice that "evidence" is not the same as proof, though pseudoskeptics often confuse them. The question asked is "how would you know"?

This cuts to the source of knowledge. It's a great question, if actually asked, instead of hurled as some kind of accusation, itself.

There is a basic principle of common law, often neglected by pseudoskeptics: testimony is presumed true unless controverted. In actual legal process, a court will attempt to harmonize all the evidence, i.e., find interpretations of it that lead to harmonious conclusions, such that none of the evidence need be impeached. Because people do lie, sometimes that assessment is made. But testimony is as to fact, not conclusion (generally, other than "expert testimony," a special case.)

As an example of interest, there were a series of negative replications of the FPHE in 1989 (and into 1990, I think). We now understand why these replications failed to show the effect. That testimony, that experimental evidence is not denied (at least not by most of us, some do claim there was some fraud involved). Rather it is now understood as a part of the body of experimental evidence on the issue of what conditions lead to the effect. We now know that they did not set up at least one critical condition, loading ratio. The evidence is not impeached, but its significance is reduced. This is normal science.

I don't know any sane skeptic, with knowledge, who believes that there is "no evidence" for LENR. The position is untenable and preposterous. Skeptics may doubt the interpretation of the evidence, but that is on another level.

In 1989, for a time, it is said that half the discretionary scientific research budget was being spent in an effort to confirm/disconfirm cold fusion. The DoE was pushing this massively, and in a big hurry. Do we imagine that they did this based on no evidence? That review and the next by the DoE, in 2004, both recommended further research to address basic questions, and the 2004 review (18-member panel) was evenly divided on the issue of the reality of a heat anomaly. And then about two-thirds of those who agreed there was an anomaly considered that it was possibly nuclear in nature. Based on what? They actually talked about the evidence, both "sides," with the majority position on "nuclear" being that it was not "convincing," not that it did not exist.

(and that was a shallow review with no time provided to correct communication errors, errors of interpretation, and there were some real bloopers that made their way into the report. Blatant errors, with serious consequences. Just plain wrong! Not marginal or debatable)

This was accepted under peer review: http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0574.pdf. (my paper) It describes evidence. Does what it describes exist?

There is work under way to confirm this with increased precision. The funding may be as much as a few million dollars. "Confirmation" tells the story. This is based on evidence that already exists.

There is one researcher who is skeptical of many "cold fusion" claims, but he actually does the work -- and has some replication failures reported. However, what is his overall position, what has it become?

That there is a real effect, and he has seen evidence of it.

Experimentally, cold fusion is a difficult field. It looked simple, i.e, a jam jar with heavy water and two electrodes hooked up to a battery. Yippee! Cold fusion! It doesn't work like that. Electrochemists have said that this was the most difficult experiment they ever did. There are a host of arguments that seem plausible that are advanced to claim it's all a mistake. Those fall apart when examined closely. We have a scientist, here, arguing regularly, as to what he believes is the "systematic error" behind cold fusion. He's been published in journals. But he is practically alone, and nobody accepts his theory. That doesn't mean he is wrong, but nobody has confirmed his ideas experimentally, nor has he done the work himself. What it shows me is that the experts and others who are in a position to test his ideas are not impressed, not enough to actually spend time and money to check it out. Nor does he find funding for such. He is reduced to arguing on the internet. He never really engaged in a positive way with the researchers, unlike some other skeptics, such as the researcher I mentioned above.

So what are you up to, Jami?

Quote from penswrite

Quoted from above post:

"I won’t go as far as to say that all of this is impossible, but it is extraordinarily unlikely that any of this will pan out to be a part of our reality. The reason is that there are known, established physical laws that are not only obeyed, but that are a fundamental part of our understanding of the Universe.

This post was just below mine, and I did not write that. It was somewhere above. Hint about quoting posts here: If you highlight material in a post (perhaps all of it) a button then appears above the highlight (so highlight from the bottom!), that says "quote selection". If you press that button, then the selection goes into a buffer. If you then hit Reply to the post, the quoted test will be there, with a link to the original post. If all you want to do is add a comment before or after, there you go.

I will say in response to that that the idea that the universe has "laws" that are 'obeyed" is a human construct. It's not that it is wrong, the idea is extremely useful. But it is still a construct, and when we forget that, we fall into delusion. "Laws" -- which means simplified rules allowing the prediction of behavior -- are important to our "understanding." But whenever understanding takes priority over actual experience, reality has been lost. What we know is but a few pebbles on a vast shore....

"

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My facile reply to this argument: Few scientists I've known would mind seeing a "law" of physics broken.

Fun happens, when scientists confront experimental evidence that contravenes current laws of physics. Parties start. Money flows. And, occasionally, laws get changed. (Amen.)

Science.

This should be realized. Evidence does not contradict laws. Rather laws, as interpreted, make predictions that may not be confirmed. There can be error in many places in the process of "contradiction."

My sense is that cold fusion does not "violate" any laws, only some expectations based on shallow analysis, depending on approximations that did not hold under the conditions of the experiments.

This was actually the idea that Pons and Fleischmann had, that maybe there was some deviation between reality and the result of the approximations. They thought that there would be one, all right, but they expected it to be below measurability. And then that cell melted down.

However, their specific idea of the conditions that allowed fusion was incorrect. They believed that the high loading was responsible, and that the effect took place in the bulk. It appears that high loading is only important for creating the material conditions that actually allow fusion, and that the reaction is a surface reaction, at least in PdD, i.e, the FP Heat Effect. This is actually quite good news!

What they did that was so brilliant was to look where nobody had looked before. In fact, it appears the anomaly had been observed, but the significance was not understood. "Just one of those things that will not be explained!" (Mizuno's pre-1989 unexpected D2O boil-off from PdD, extended and continued for many days. Damn nuisance! Heavy water is expensive!)

Quote from JedRothwell

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
(Mizuno's pre-1989 unexpected D2O boil-off from PdD, extended and continued for many days. Damn nuisance! Heavy water is expensive!)

It boiled off the cooling water in the bucket. The cell was closed, with a recombiner. Nice take on the story, though.

]
Ain't that just typical of Jed Rothwell, he thinks he knows something?

Actually, Jed does know. He translated the book that I got my story from, and I get to see just how defective my memory is from about seven years ago, when I read it. There were two experiences. The early one was in 1978, and they lost up to 200 cc of heavy water. Now, that is worth over $100. Now, I remembered that there were two events before the FP announcement. There was that one and there was a cell that became an X-ray source, apparently. (this was a titanium deuteride cell).

The other event got a bit mixed up with this. This was in 1991. It was a HAD effect. The cell generated an astonishing amount of heat. This was a recombiner cell, closed, with oxygen remaining in the cell, so it was expected to generate heat as the cell deloaded, from recombination. However, it got much hotter than expected and stayed hot for an amazing period of time. The total heat generated was estimated at 114 MJ. For comparison, the deloading deuterium could generate about 150 KJ from recombination. Total energy input during loading and operation, before the HAD period, is reported as 260 MJ, most of which would be lost as heat pre-HAD. (There is an apparent error on p. 69, Jed. He says that the electrolysis/heater energy was 40% of the excess heat, but the total heat is 40% of the total input) This report is thus a bit confused, perhaps we can clear it up. What is obvious is that there was a boatload of heat, far beyond possible chemistry.

Mostly, Mizuno was looking for neutrons and tritium, common in those days. His results generally confirm the overall results. He doesn't measure helium, but from his heat and assuming it generated (mostly) helium, I summarize this as tritium is a million times down from helium and neutrons are a million times down from tritium. He does give some data that would allow a rough correlation, I suspect. He states it the other way around: heat is a million million times more than predicted from neutrons presumed to be from fusion. His tritium report is perhaps higher than my "million times down" would imply.

What keeps frying me in reviewing the research from the 1990s is how little attention was paid to correlating the results. Mizuno does measure neutrons, but did he correlate the neutrons with heat? One would expect a tight correlation across multiple times and experiments with similar conditions. However, then we have the neutron results from SPAWAR, which seem to very enormously with the *substrate* of a codeposition cathode. What in the world is going on?

Data! I want more data! This work was underfunded and underappreciated. Collectively, the community failed to focus on confirming significant results and nailing them down, distracted by a constant search to "prove nuclear." Ah well, Jed, that's my story, eh?

Mizuno dealt with very difficult conditions, it's shocking to read about it. He is one of the heroes.