Validity of LENR Science...[split]

    Quote from can

    simply weighting it could at the very least be able to demonstrate that something very unusual is going on, without excess heat or nuclear products.


    Well, weighing it is not simple.


    In an electrochemical system you can measure the amount of hydrogen with the orphaned oxygen method. That gives the weight, but not the concentration, because the distribution is probably not uniform. You cannot weigh it directly. By the time you transfer the sample to a micro-scale, much of the hydrogen would be gone.


    Although the density may be great, most of the hydrogen is probably in a narrow band close to the surface, so the total mass is small.


    Unless you detect excess heat, you can bet nothing is going on. As I said, there is no point to looking for nuclear products in that situation. You are wasting money and time. It is possible some reactions are so small they do not produce detectable levels of heat, but you cannot tell the difference between that and a complete failure.

    Quote from Nigel Appleton

    Replicated thousands of times in over 180 laboratories? Maybe so. But I wonder what the average COP is.

    It is not a COP, because there is no causal connection between input power and output power. In many cases the ratio is infinite, because there was no input power. That is always the case with techniques such as gas loading. In any case, if you want to know the details I suggest you read Storms' first book, which has the table of results I refer to.


    I think the more relevant question would be: what is the signal to noise ratio in the best experiments. The answer is: very high. For example, at Toyota they observed heat after death with no power in and 100 W of output power lasting for several hours. That is easy to detect. They repeated that with 16 cells each, several hundred times, I believe. I don't see how anyone can argue that is a mistake. That project was closed down and the results were more or less hidden because of politics, stupidity and greed. (Some managers in Toyota decided they wanted 100% of the market share, and Johnson Matthey did not go along with that plan.)


    I would say than anyone who questions the results at SRI, China Lake, Toyota or the other leading labs knows nothing about calorimetry. No one has written a serious scientific paper giving any reason to question these results. The closest thing we have is Morrison versus Fleischmann, which is a farce:


    http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf


    Plus we have Shanahan and a few others, which is tin-foil-helmet class crackpot science. This is the Deus ex machina school of Just So Story science, where a magical factor fairy appears out of nowhere when you use deuterium instead of hydrogen. Clap to keep Tinkerbell alive!


    Since skeptics have not shown a viable reason to doubt these results, and since the techniques are all mainstream and the calorimeters have been in use since 1780, 1840 and 1900 (for different types), I would say the skeptics do not have a leg to stand on.

    Quote from Zeus46

    I don't think fixing a strain gauge to a cathode would be overly difficult?

    Cathodes are wired. They are connected to the lid of the cell. The weight has to be measured to 0.1 mg to be of any use. That would not show up in a strain gauge with the wire holding the cathode. Storms and others have measured weight changes by transferring the cathode to a weight scale. See:


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


    As I said, by the time you get the cathode to the weight scale a lot of the gas will have escaped. It is easier to measure the change in shape. This is a critical parameter.


    The orphaned oxygen method works pretty well. You have to have an airtight cell with a recombiner. A recombiner can be a source of contamination.


    Jed, as a skeptic, I have several legs to stand on. They have been rehearsed here before, so I will not repeat, but I'm always willing to justify comments in detail on another thread when it comes to documented specifics. It comes down, as I remember it, to you judging papers, or series of experiments, to be capable of only one interpretation and me pointing out alternates, which you dismiss. You seem to criticise skeptics for having imprecise non-LENR error mechanisms while the alternate LENR hypothesis, which is even vaguer, you accept.


    Now, it could be that my uncertainty here is pseudo-skepticism. It could be that your dismissal of mundane alternates is too hasty and your confidence wrong. We'd need to drill down to the differences in judgement call.

    Quote from oldguy

    and how would you separate the weight of the D and any Li or other material on the surface.

    I guess it would be insignificant compared to bulk loading of the cathode, if the quoted fugacity is correct.


    Quote from JedRothwell

    Cathodes are wired. They are connected to the lid of the cell. The weight has to be measured to 0.1 mg to be of any use.

    A suitably sized strain gauge could measure the resulting strain (ie. the extension) of the cathodes wire due to addition weight, and it would need to be much less sensitive than 0.1mg if you used a 1cm cube of Pd.


    Quote from JedRothwell

    The orphaned oxygen method works pretty well.

    Aha. I actually misread your comment about measuring weight vs concentration.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Now, it could be that my uncertainty here is pseudo-skepticism.

    No, it is ignorance. People like Fleischmann, Bockris, Oriani and Yeager were world-class experts in this sort of thing. McKubre is an expert who has devoted decades to this. You may think you know better than these people, but trust me -- you don't.


    If you think you do know better, I suggest you write a formal paper and have someone like McKubre review it. Be nice to him, and he may do you a favor and shoot it full of holes. You will begin to see how much you do not know. Unless you are a member of the tin-foil-hat brigades, which I do not think is the case. A tin-foil-hat guy such as Shanahan gets his arms and legs cut off like the Black Knight in Monty Python, but he still thinks he won! This paper cuts Shanahan to bits:


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


    Look around and you will not find any credible paper showing errors in the experiments. As I said, Morrison was the only one, and it is a farce. There is nothing better out there; there are a few even worse:


    http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf


    (Morrison's nonsense was actually published in the peer-reviewed literature, which shows that peer-review does not always work.)


    I have encountered many people who think they know better than professional experts at one subject or another. They don't, unless they have also devoted years to a subject, in which case they themselves are experts. I am not suggesting that credentialed people who are members of the Royal Society, who have international prizes named after them, and institutes named after them are always right. Of course they make mistakes. As individuals they often do. But not all of them, over many years. In other words, if you were right, and there were serious questions about these studies, that would mean several hundred world class experts made amateur errors in a field they worked in for decades. That is statistically impossible. It is like suggesting that 500 randomly selected, skilled taxi drivers will all accidentally drive into trees a 9:00 a.m. next Monday.


    By the way, before anyone says it, this is NOT -- repeat NOT -- an "appeal to authority," which is more properly called a "Fallacious Appeal to Authority" or "Irrelevant Authority." If you think I have made that logical fallacy, you do not understand what that term means. These people are actually experts, whereas an appeal to authority only applies when the people you point to are not experts. See:


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

    Quote from Alan Smith

    which particular scientific questions do you think we should be answering- there is a huge choice?

    I answered this already:-

    Quote from Hermes

    Experimental measurements will identify the mass, charge, energy, intensities, decay rates of LENR products.

    Once we know fuels and products it should be easy enough to identify reactions. Once we identify reactions, we can design reactors.


    I agree that you are making an appeal to experts, and in principle I'm all in favour of this. But unfortunately you have a very selected group of experts. These are all guys who have gone out on a limb stating they hold a view contrary to the majority. No-one not holding this view will become such a deep expert in the area - it is just too much time. And the number of experts looking at the same evidence and from expertise rejecting it is unknown.


    Personally, I like appeals to experts: but they must be made taking all circumstances into account, including the fact that over even issues that are settled science (e.g. global warming) you get some experts who have views that are outliers far from the rational judgement.


    As far as your weight of numbers argument there are some issues that partly (in my view could be totally) nullify it. These are:


    (1) selective reporting. Null experiments are much less often reported than positive ones. Sure, if a group has funding for specific work they will publish it null or positive. But if looking for excess heat in Pd-D systems or whatever they are likely, given a null result, to try different things until they get a positive result. They will not necessarily report all of the null attempts - especially if they rationalise these as experimental error.


    (2) systematic error. Good experimental protocols, and sensible calorimetry that leads to positive results, will naturally spread. If there is some undetected systematic error in these protocols applied to that calorimetry it will be replicated making multiple results of no more value than one. Normally, in science, the effects detected are predictive and even if how much the effects happens is variable there are parameters that can be predicted and aligned with theory. That cross-validation saves results from this type of error. In LENR there is almost no such cross-validation.


    The exception (to lack of cross-validation) is Abd's championed He/xs heat correlation. He and I take a different view about the strength of the current evidence for such correlation. However Abd and I both certainly reckon that getting better evidence of this (or lack of better evidence in well-conducted experiments that should from setup provide better evidence) would be valuable. You, I'm less sure because you reckon there is no question of non-chemical level effects here anyway from other work.


    So given the work in hand now, it seems possible that new experimental data will allow both of us to reconsider views. Otherwise my general points contradict your general points leaving a stalemate. Looking in more detail at the Shanahan/Morrison/others arguments might in principle help, and can be done by mathematically literate non-experts such as, possibly, I and you. Or a few others here. It requires a good deal of patience and the ability to stay focussed on one little agreed part of the picture, because at the level of detailed inspection needed to validate contrary arguments we need time enough to read references, check maths, etc. that makes it unfeasible to check a large amount of different stuff. Without that detail it is likely that judgements will be made in line with current views.


    I'm not rejecting a detailed look at your referenced material. Some of it I have already studied to some degree, though I find I can always get more out of stuff coming back to it, and I would not say i have got to the bottom of it. But my judgement of these matters would convince neither me nor you. My judgement of a set of contrary arguments from experts, of claimed experts, would convince me, if I spent enough time doing it, but possibly not you. You have stated that the issue is my ignorance, but you phrased this in a way that makes me not willing to accept your relative experience, because you believe it not plausible for this group of experts to be mistaken, and base your judgments on that. I differ from you in that.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    This paper cuts Shanahan to bits:


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


    No, it doesn't.


    It does attempt to associate my name with some guy's "random CCSH" thing. But since I have clearly specified I am concerned with a systematic or non-random process in my 4 publications on the subject, the adjective 'random' doesn't apply to my proposal. I prefer to use CCS/ATER these days.


    P.S. Since you talk about logical fallacies above, you should recognize that the paper you cite uses the 'strawman fallacy'.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    I have encountered many people who think they know better than professional experts at one subject or another. They don't, unless they have also devoted years to a subject, in which case they themselves are experts. I am not suggesting that credentialed people who are members of the Royal Society, who have international prizes named after them, and institutes named after them are always right. Of course they make mistakes. As individuals they often do. But not all of them, over many years. In other words, if you were right, and there were serious questions about these studies, that would mean several hundred world class experts made amateur errors in a field they worked in for decades. That is statistically impossible. It is like suggesting that 500 randomly selected, skilled taxi drivers will all accidentally drive into trees a 9:00 a.m. next Monday.


    No Jed, what you are describing is known as a systematic error, i.e. an error in the 'system'. In CF calorimetry, the error is to assume the calorimeter/cell is accurately modeled by a single equation. This error is propagated from researcher to researcher because they feel the current state of the art is the best available. The error is that it isn't. This is why systematic errors are such a nightmare to researchers. They do their best, but they miss a subtlety and get an erroneous answer because of it. When systematic errors are found, everyone has to go back and redo their data analysis in light of it. And it's more like 500 randomly selected taxi drivers exceeding the speed limit because their speedometers have a built-in flaw.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    I agree that you are making an appeal to experts, and in principle I'm all in favour of this. But unfortunately you have a very selected group of experts. These are all guys who have gone out on a limb stating they hold a view contrary to the majority. No-one not holding this view will become such a deep expert in the area - it is just too much time. And the number of experts looking at the same evidence and from expertise rejecting it is unknown.


    That is incorrect. I know exactly how many experts have looked at the same evidence and rejected it. That number is zero. I am not kidding or exaggerating.


    There is not a single published paper by any expert in calorimetry, electrochemistry, tritium or helium showing any substantive error in any of the major cold fusion studies. Not in the peer reviewed literature, and not in proceedings or anywhere else. I have read just about every paper published in this field. If there were such a thing, I would know about it. I am sure you cannot point to one.


    To be sure, there are many papers by nuclear experts pointing out why these results are theoretically impossible. There are papers by expert electrochemists pointing out errors in some of the unimportant papers. There are the papers by Morrison and Shanahan which I pointed to. If you read them, and if you understand this subject, you will see that they have no merit.


    There are books by theorists listing reasons why cold fusion should not exist in theory, but not one of them touches upon the experimental evidence, methods or instruments, or gives any reason to doubt the results. There is a book by Taubes which is the most preposterous garbage ever published in this field -- which is saying a lot. I described it briefly here, on p. 4:


    http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusion.pdf


    Let me add that most of the scientists who have published negative opinions of cold fusion are not electrochemists or experts in calorimetry, tritium, etc. Most are plasma fusion researchers. They have no special knowledge of electrochemistry, and they are no more qualified to critique it than an electrochemist would be qualified to critique a Tokamak fusion reactor. All of their critiques have missed the mark. All the experiments they themselves participated in failed for obvious reasons. See p. 10 and 11:


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


    There are also many editorials written by people at the Scientific American, Nature, the Washington Post, by Robert Park and so on. These people are Grade-A Certified Idiots who have no knowledge of cold fusion, as you see from what they wrote. They did not find any technical problems because they have no idea what instruments and techniques are used, what has been measured, or what it means. See, for example:


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


    http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?p=294


    This is the best they can come up with. That should tell you something. You might even conclude that cold fusion is probably real based only on the feeble, idiotic, and indeed largely nonexistent objections of the so-called skeptics opposed to it.

    THH:


    You should listen to Jed. His judgement in these matters is impeccable. If anyone can evaluate LENR papers properly, he is the guy. Take for example his analysis of the seminal 2013 Levi paper on Rossi's hot cat:


    "Just read this paper for the third time. This is a gem. These people think and write like engineers rather than scientists. That is a complement coming from me. They dot every i and cross every t. I can't think of a single thing I wish they had checked but did not." (Vortex-I)


    So stop arguing with the man.

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