xpecting a small, inexperienced group of people to do cold fusion is like expecting that I can successful perform open-heart surgery.
Jed, I liked you comments and referenced paper. I disagree with one example above.
Fleischmann and Pons did their work on a shoe string, off the books, and nobody was experienced when they did it. I know you are right in general but like the thought of the lone genius too. There have been quite a dew examples over time.
I'll admit, my interest has waned as well. As it's been over 5 years now since I've been tracking this story, it does seem at times that it will forever remain elusive. Nonetheless, it will always pique my interest, until there is irrefutable evidence one way or the other. And unfortunately, to me, that has not yet occurred. I suspect you still have some interest.
What would be irrefutable evidence (for you) that Rossi has nothing?
If you are on the fence now I can't see you ever getting off it, except in the unlikely event purple unicorns working e-cats materialise. To show me wrong state what (possible) evidence would convince you of a negative here.
wow. mary! only 1 more post and you have 1000 messages without anything significant in them. what an achievement!
Come on now, I think that's a bit harsh. I'm celebrating this worthy milestone in waffling reactionary shit on the internet, with a fitting tribute:
Jed, I liked you comments and referenced paper. I disagree with one example above.
Fleischmann and Pons did their work on a shoe string, off the books, and nobody was experienced when they did it. I know you are right in general but like the thought of the lone genius too. There have been quite a dew examples over time.
F&P worked for a long time well funded after the initial announcement. They were very experienced.
Oh come on! The internet is stuffed with fora and blogs hosting small groups of people holding wildly different views and arguing ENDLESSLY about them. Not with any hope of suasion or resolution; just because they are the sort of people who like to argue. No-one here expects their opponents to change their minds - they are here for the craic. "Worth the time " has nothing to do with it.
Yes of course it makes total sense that people with a high level of scientific education would debate daily for hours on end what they think is bogus, pathological science, hokum, woowoo etc. After all, they don't have studies to perform, we all know that Science has reached its conclusion, because what cannot be proven theoretically doesn't exist, and theoretical knowledge is complete, because stuff that would question its completion, simply doesn't exist! just look at LENR : a whooping decades-long nothingburger with an extra serving of nothing. This is not circular reasoning: ask any serious member here (that is, not one of the kookoo LENR-believers), they have thousands upon thousands of posts explaining all this. Too bad Science is over, otherwise they would put their powerful minds to further human knowledge. Alas! it has reached its end. And they're doing us all a service, spending all this time telling us that there's nothing there, otherwise people might be fooled into thinking there's something about LENR. That would be catastrophic!
Flat Earth fora and blogs are overcrowded with high level physicists spending hours daily telling that the earth isn't flat, you are so right about that. Therefore, it is very logical that LENR-forum is also populated with high-level scientific types spending hours every day telling either that Rossi is a scammer who successfully mass-hypnotized investors and scientists over the course of 10 years, or that "LENR isn't real lol", by random Pathoskeptic Joe / Likes Received: 3240 / Posts: 2853
Fleischmann and Pons did their work on a shoe string, off the books, and nobody was experienced when they did it.
Fleischmann was one of the most experienced, most distinguished electrochemists in the world. He was the ex-president of the Electrochem. Soc. and holder of the Palladium Medal, which is the highest honor in academic electrochemistry. Pons is one of the best experimentalists in the world. He was the chairman of the Chemistry Dept. at a major university. There were no two people in the world more qualified to do any sort of electrochemical experiment than these two, and no one more likely to succeed. It is true that cold fusion broke new ground, but most of the experiment is old ground. It is electrochemistry. Every failed experiment that I know about in detail failed because of known problems with electrochemistry -- not because of unknown problems, or problems unique to cold fusion.
(Granted, there are failed experiment I do not know about in detail. Perhaps they failed for reasons that even F&P would not understand. After all, many of F&P's experiments also failed.)
Richard Oriani was another world-class electrochemist, with a long list of honors and so on. He replicated F&P. He told me this was the most difficult experiment he did in his 50-year-career.
I have spent a lot of time in labs, and I have spoken with many electrochemists, and edited dozens of papers. When it comes to the advanced details of electrochemistry and other chemistry in these experiments, I do not have a clue what the experts are talking about. It is far over my head. I expect it is also over the heads of most scientists in other fields, such as the plasma fusion scientists who tried to replicate cold fusion in 1989. This is to be expected. A plasma fusion scientist can no more do electrochemistry than an electrochemist could design or operate a Tokamak reactor.
Yes of course it makes total sense that people with a high level of scientific education would debate daily for hours on end what they think is bogus, pathological science, hokum, woowoo etc. After all, they don't have studies to perform, we all know that Science has reached its conclusion, because what cannot be proven theoretically doesn't exist, and theoretical knowledge is complete, because stuff that would question its completion, simply doesn't exist! just look at LENR : a whooping decades-long nothingburger with an extra serving of nothing. This is not circular reasoning: ask any serious member here (that is, not one of the kookoo LENR-believers), they have thousands upon thousands of posts explaining all this. Too bad Science is over, otherwise they would put their powerful minds to further human knowledge. Alas! it has reached its end. And they're doing us all a service, spending all this time telling us that there's nothing there, otherwise people might be fooled into thinking there's something about LENR. That would be catastrophic!
Flat Earth fora and blogs are overcrowded with high level physicists spending hours daily telling that the earth isn't flat, you are so right about that. Therefore, it is very logical that LENR-forum is also populated with high-level scientific types spending hours every day telling either that Rossi is a scammer who successfully mass-hypnotized investors and scientists over the course of 10 years, or that "LENR isn't real lol", by random Pathoskeptic Joe / Likes Received: 3240 / Posts: 2853
Sorry - do you have a point to make?
leischmann was one of the most experienced, most distinguished electrochemists in the world. He was the ex-president of the Electrochem. Soc. and holder of the Palladium Medal, which is the highest honor in academic electrochemistry. Pons is one of the best experimentalists in the world. He was the chairman of the Chemistry Dept. at a major university.
I know. What I was saying was they were not experienced in LENR. So that they found anything was a bit of a fluke. It turned out the the original sample of Palladium worked better than later ones. Did they find out why?
They were not experienced i radiation and botched that side of things; but worse, others just concentrated on that mistake and ignored they had found excess heat. (Reminds me of some on this forum.)
Then after they were experienced, they managed to replicate their earlier work, but as far as I can tell failed to scale it up. In fact it doesn't look like it can be scaled up, hence the attraction of H/Ni.
.
I have spent a lot of time in labs, and I have spoken with many electrochemists, and edited dozens of papers. When it comes to the advanced details of electrochemistry and other chemistry in these experiments, I do not have a clue what the experts are talking about.
You may wonder how I go about copy-editing or translating a scientific paper when I do not have a clue what the expert author is talking about. I am glad you asked! The answer is: With caution. With the author's approval. I may make dozens of suggested changes but thanks to the "Track Changes" feature of Microsoft Word they show up in red, with my name on them. So, if I am wrong, the author can see that, and undo the change. I also usually send a long list of reasons why I made this or that change.
Authors should learn to use Microsoft Word. They should learn to use the Review tab, "Accept" or "Reject" changes feature.
Certain Scientists who Shall Not Be Named have accused me of editing their papers without their permission or knowledge. I suppose they do not know how to use Microsoft Word, because -- as I said -- the changes are in red with the name of person who made them. Plus, you can do a file compare.
If you do not use Microsoft Word, I can't help you. Not much. I will probably just send an abbreviated list of suggestions pointing out your worst problems. I can do LaTex but I do not know much about it and I do not think it has a "Track Changes" or file compare feature. Does it?
LaTex looks to me like a program from 1968.
@Jed
>> If you do not use Microsoft Word, I can't help you. Not much. I will probably just send an abbreviated list of suggestions pointing out your worst problems. I can do LaTex but I do not know much about it and I do not think it has a "Track Changes" or file compare feature. Does it?
For writing math, Latex is fantastic and I wouldn't touch a math intensive document with word. Actually if I would go about coloborate with a latex document I would version control it with for example git, that's
good enough.
I know. What I was saying was they were not experienced in LENR.
They were experienced in 98% of what you need to know in order to make electrochemical LENR work. The part they did not know, they asked Johnson-Matthey (JM) about. JM recommended the materials best suited to the goals of the experiment. That is, Pd alloys that can be highly loaded. That's what Fleischmann told me.
I suppose that if F&P or JM had been wrong, and if those materials had not been well suited, the experiment would not have worked, and we would never have heard about it. They were generally right about what they needed to do and how to go about doing it. Fleischmann had been mulling over this experiment since the 1940s, he told me. The results were not what they expected, but the electrochemistry and calorimetry went as planned.
Most of the people who failed to replicate make mistakes that electrochemists instantly recognized as mistakes. Some of the people who failed were arrogant, and thought that an electrochemist had nothing to teach them. That attitude is likely to lead to failure in any field. As I said in the paper referenced above: "From an electrochemist’s point of view, these people were trying to tune a piano with a sledgehammer." There was not the slightest chance these experiments would produce the cold fusion effect.
. "There hasn't been a single LENR/CF experiment I know of where both the mass of transmuted material and the quantity of created photons matched what was expected above background for the claimed amount of excess energy."
I suggest the author clarify what is meant by "quantity of created photons matched what was expected'
What energy of photons? Infrared? Ultraviolet etc
What assumptions these expectations are based on.
For writing math, Latex is fantastic and I wouldn't touch a math intensive document with word.
Good point. Doing math in Microsoft Word is a pain in the butt.
For those unfamiliar with the discussion, a LaTex equation looks like this:
\begin{equation}
H_{\textrm{in}} = \sum\limits_\mathrm{0}^T {\Delta W \times \Delta
\mathrm{t}},
\end{equation}
Not WYSIWYG.
QuoteI believe I know why they [IH] failed,
Which of several consistent failures do you refer to here? Far as I know, they have only failures -- Rossi and Mizuno... and I guess Boeing.
OK, I'll bite. Why did they fail?
Have they achieved any successes? If so, which and how do we know?
Last time I did some math was in my blog engine which knows latex, see c-lambda Which uses markdown with latex math extensions and computer language extensions. The last article I did however that was math intensive
(3-4 pages) I did with texmacs which is more close to WYSIWYG and outputs TeX and has a text based storage format well suitable for version control.
I suggest the author clarify what is meant by "quantity of created photons matched what was expected'
Other questions:
Expected by who?
Expected why? For what reason? If your reason is based on your theory, your theory must be wrong. Capisce?
Read history. In 1850, people did not "expect" radio waves, or that an x-ray could reveal bones in a photo of a hand. No one "expected" that imploding an 11 kg hollow metal sphere will cause a 20 kiloton explosion. Or that it can trigger a 50 megaton explosion. Expectation is no sure guide to what is real, or what is possible. It is only a suggestion. If you imagine we know everything, ask three expert physicists a basic question such as: "Why do radioactive elements decay at different rates?" You will get five different answers.
As Julian Schwinger put it, "have we forgotten that physics are empirical?" Yes, we have forgotten that. Plus, we suffer from the Duke of Albany's delusion: "We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long."
OK, I'll bite. Why did they fail?
A message here from Bocijn quoted Mizuno's description of why he thought they failed. I regret that I cannot find it easily, because I do not know how this message system works. I do not seem to have a copy on my disk. Mizuno told me some other reasons there might be a problem. The people at I.H. also told me about some of the problems they experienced that they did not have time to resolve.
Of course you never know whether you have found the problem until you manage to make it work. Mizuno could be wrong about what he thinks the problems were.
Perhaps if they had been able to keep at it for 6 months or year, they would have succeeded.
I have no knowledge of the Boeing tests.
Have they achieved any successes? If so, which and how do we know?
"Success " is a relative word.. depends how one defines it. "Know" ?? is also messy
What would be irrefutable evidence (for you) that Rossi has nothing?
If you are on the fence now I can't see you ever getting off it, except in the unlikely event
purple unicornsworking e-cats materialise. To show me wrong state what (possible) evidence would convince you of a negative here.
That is an unanswerable question. Suppose that you wanted to prove that aliens don't exist. So you ride a rocket to the moon and say "aha" they aren't here, so they must not exist, at least on the moon. Then you travel to Mars and do the same. The problem is, you have an infinite problem space to work out. You would need to travel to every potentially habitable planet in the known universe to confirm for each individual planet whether aliens don't exist. That presents a problem. It is quite difficult to prove a negative.
Jumping to conclusions is a cardinal sin, in my mind. That is not to say that we must therefore believe everything. That's also absurd. But when there is some evidence for a thing, the most rational position to take is to withhold strong conclusions until such thing is irrefutably proved. To me, in this instance, the only such irrefutable proof can come from the marketplace. The primary reason for this is that the scientific establishment has put up a remarkably effective blockade to peer-reviewed research and has instituted a remarkably effective reputation trap.
We know that el dottore has been dishonest with at least two of his business partners:
- he claimed to have misled Elforsk with a false failed experiment
- he came up with a fake customer for IH
We also know that Rossi has stretched the truth in some of his marketing. For example, claims of customers.
I will never invest a dime in a business owned by Rossi. I should also probably stay anonymous when talking about Rossi.
But I still wonder - what if he does have something.
At this point there is no cost for me to keep following this, other than time. And the entertainment is worth the time IMO.
So I look forward to the demo and the following discussions! [popcorn]
