BLP is more complicated because they did a better job of muddying the waters with what *seem* to be acceptable tests... but when you examine the details, they are not.
So Mary, since you examined the details, why were BrLPs tests not acceptable?
ACS c&en : Cold fusion died 25 years ago, but the research lives on
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Where to start? I am not going to give you a detailed analysis -- Mills' crappola isn't worth the work. First, all of the work is paid for by Mills. Second, it isn't "clean". In the Rowan University work, you can't really tell what the fuel is, how they recycle it, and why it wouldn't be a chemical reaction. In the current demos, they put a humongeous amount of electrical power into a tiny space and get a bright flash. Really? I was short circuiting crap when I was ten years old to make a bright flash. The stuff Mills puts out (and his colleagues) is razzle dazzle which can only impress people who have not been trained in scientific method and who have not spent time in a lab. Let me know when they self sustain. Let me know when someone credible (like a government lab or a major university department) replicates it. Let me know when they provide a proper and clear energy budget of an experiment.
It's OK if you want to believe that BS, Shane. After all, you were very fond of Defkalion and Rossi, IIRC. Brillouin and BLP are very likely to end the same way, given enough time.
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Alan,
This (your A team) is very close to the my concept (and probably many others here) of a LENR dev. team. But I think you missed a person or 2 in your requirements, on front end a tech-writer. And on the back-end a sugar-daddy ( a top level manager). If this (a small team) was realized in a large company, there would be tidal forces at work that would be at play. But in my mind it's now 100 years later.My hope is that someone sitting at work one day with the same ideas can grasp one tenet and get it to move the tide in a long boring meeting. If a small shop can break this mold then great.
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Yes it seems even better.
Back to my epidermic reactions about physicists, there is a question of the hierarchy in the team.
For me the big error in LENR history was to put particle physicists and theorists (or any physicist) at the head, driving experimental program (often implementing it themselves).
The catch-22 (deadlocking) behind LENR is that as Ed Storms explains, experiments cannot be designed and interpreted without some kind of theory, but bad theory similarly prevent good analysis of experimental results.
The academic way to organize team as a hierarchy, inherited from Popper's way of mind, is that theorist ask experimenters for help to validate their vision.
My Engineering vision is that Engineers or experimenters calls theorist to design experiments and interpret them.
More than the exact composition of the team, this hierarchy may be the key to a successful team.I have found a comment of the chapter of Taleb's book Antifragile "History writteny by the losers"
https://plasubtil.wordpress.co…ry-written-by-the-losers/
Taleb's charge against usual academic vision of theory to practice model, moderated by the blogger's analysis.Quote from TalebPractitioners don’t write; they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position. (p. 220)
this blog cite a paper, I have cited long ago, promoting diversity rather than funding as the key parameter to breakthrough
http://www.plosone.org/article…71%2Fjournal.pone.0065263QuoteWe conclude that scientific impact (as reflected by publications) is only weakly limited by funding. We suggest that funding strategies that target diversity, rather than “excellence”, are likely to prove to be more productive.
If we can synthesize quickly the characteristic we diversely promote
- Diversity in the team
- Good management and communication
- Techniques to physics hierarchy
Is there a reason to reject one of the ideas here?
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An answer by Melvin Miles to S B Krivit article in C&EN get published today :
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i6/cold-fusion.html
Melvin Miles remind his work showing He4/Heat relation.
In contradiction to the recent letter by Steven B. Krivit (C&EN, Nov. 28, 2016, page 3) about the story “Cold fusion lives on” (C&EN, Nov. 7, 2016, page 34), there is ample experimental evidence that helium-4 is the major product resulting from cold fusion experiments. Therefore, deuterium-deuterium nuclear fusion is the likely process.
My experiments in 1990–95 at the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, Calif., showed a strong correlation of the excess heat produced and the measurements of helium-4 in the electrolysis gases. Later experiments at several other laboratories gave similar helium-4 results.
I worked closely with Martin Fleischmann on several cold fusion publications, and he always attributed the excess energy to a deuterium fusion reaction producing helium-4.
Krivit promotes the Widom-Larsen theory and always attacks experimental results which do not conform with his pet theory. This is shades of 1989, when cold fusion was rejected mainly because it did not fit with the nuclear fusion theories of physics. There are presently many competing theories explaining cold fusion. I do not know which theory, if any, is correct, but I like the variable mass theory first proposed in the 1930s (Fock and Stueckelberg) that Mark Davidson claims can explain nearly all the experimental cold fusion effects, including deuterium fusion to form helium-4 (J. Phys. 2015, DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/615/1/012016).
Melvin H. Miles
Ridgecrest, Calif.
