On ECN's I would occasionally link to the NYT's articles written right after, and a few years post FPs, when someone like Popeye would claim: "CF was embraced by the mainstream from the beginning". Clearly, the reporting showed that not to be the case. You may make the argument that FPs got a 2-3 month grace period, but that is being generous. It quickly degraded into a mob mentality, with little in the way of fairness. Funny to see grown, and very smart men acting that way.
Clearance Items
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You may make the argument that FPs got a 2-3 month grace period, but that is being generous.
They didn't get a grace period. The first attacks by MIT and others were launched within days of the announcement, as Mallove described. On the day of the announcement, Fleischmann correctly predicted they would be throw out of the establishment (described in Beaudette's book).
It quickly degraded into a mob mentality, with little in the way of fairness. Funny to see grown, and very smart men acting that way.
This is typical primate behavior. It is common in all human and chimpanzee societies. History is full of examples. Of course people often act rationally. That is why we have civilization, and why our institutions often work well. But in some cases, people act irrationally. They are destructive, even against their own interests.
That is why, for example, the minicomputer companies drove themselves out of business instead of responding to the challenge of the PC computers. They voluntarily jumped off a cliff. A company such as Data General might have become Microsoft and Intel combined, but they were hostile toward the product instead. (I was dealing with them at the time, so I know what they did. IBM sounded them out about using their OS instead of Microsoft's. I don't know the details about what happened, but in the early days of the PC, Data General could have marketed their OS on their own, and captured the market. It was way better than Microsoft's.)
This is politics. All primates must engage in politics, as do many other intelligent species, meaning they all vie for power and influence, to have their way, and prevail over others. Chimpanzees, wolves and humans sometimes settle arguments and vie for power by fighting, sometimes even fighting to the death. They cannot do that every time, or the species will go extinct. So they have to have mechanisms for settling disputes short of these extremes, by influencing others, by kissing up to others, praising them, or frightening them, and by various other methods. Broadly speaking, we call this behavior politics.
Politics are not always a bad thing. When conducted with moderation and wisdom, they are essential. But when they go off the rails and hysteria replaces rationality, bad things happen. Such as World War I, the demise of the minicomputer industry, or the suppression of cold fusion.
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At the risk of being banned, I will say it again, there is no conspiracy against LENR. There never has been. It is simple to prove LENR conclusively and this has yet to be done, despite what you say Jed. And yes, during my ban I did spend much time reviewing the documentation you pointed me to. Unfortunately it comes down to the same issue over and over again. Calorimerty.
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If only you could find someone who is a world-class expert in calorimetry. I think then all our problems would be solved.
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If only you could find someone who is a world-class expert in calorimetry.
Or several hundred people! Plus people who are world-class experts in measuring tritium, helium and x-rays, and who published in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. Yes, if we had that The Real Roger Barker and Mary Yugo would be persuaded.
</sarcasm>
Note to people unfamiliar with the subject: we have had that since 1992.
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what make me sad is that not seing the evidence there was excess heat and tritium in pdD electrolysis, and no heat in Doral is possible for too many people, not even with a monetary agenda.
we should not feel ashamed here, skeptic, or believers, and today's newspaper, ministry decisions and TV news show me that incompetence, denial of evidences, shameless attack on realists, cheering of the deluded to avoid troubles, is mainstream.
no community of opinion have any lesson to give.
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</sarcasm>
Note to people unfamiliar with the subject: we have had that since 1992....</sarcasm>
Note to people unfamiliar with the subject: There are world-class experts, and also self-proclaimed world-class experts*... One needs to be careful when distinguishing between the two.
Eh, Mary?
*Sorry, but relevant links are (correctly) considered to be 'doxxing'.
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If only you could find someone who is a world-class expert in calorimetry. I think then all our problems would be solved.
We should try and find just such a person. Someone with solid experience in calorimetry.
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I can understand, that controversial topics like the LENR cannot exist without pathoskeptic trolls like maryyugo who doubt everything and confused apologists like axil who promote every nonsense - but it would great if this forum would work on their gradual elimination instead of proliferation of extremists at least.
Moved from another thread. Eric
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I can understand, that controversial topics like the LENR cannot exist without pathoskeptic trolls like maryyugo who doubt everything
Oh good! Then please: WHY is LENR a controversial topic?
Especially since, as per Rothwell, experimenters have been recording data indicative of more than a hundred watts sustained power for long periods and with no power input and they have been doing it for three decades?
I and people like me doubt "everything?" Gee, seems I don't have trouble with 99.99% of scientific claims. But I seem to encounter a hitch when I consider claims by the likes of Carl Tilley, Steorn, Defkalion, Rossi and well... those sorts. How do you explain that I mainly have trouble with those who later turn out to be crooks?
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Then please: WHY is LENR a controversial topic?
Especially since, as per Rothwell, experimenters have been recording data indicative of more than a hundred watts sustained power for long periods and with no power input and they have been doing it for three decades?
Politics. And in your case, willful ignorance. There are many similar examples in the history of science and technology.
There are no technical reasons for this controversy. There is not a single valid paper showing errors in any major experiment. There are only a few nonsense papers by crackpots such as Shanahan who think that a bucket of water can vanish overnight. It is ironic that you agree with him and support him. Normally, you would express contempt for people who believe such idiotic notions.
I and people like me doubt "everything?" Gee, seems I don't have trouble with 99.99% of scientific claims. But I seem to encounter a hitch when I consider claims by the likes of Carl Tilley, Steorn, Defkalion, Rossi and well... those sorts.
Cold fusion researchers are not those sorts. They were the sorts who were made Fellows of The Royal Society, Fellows of China Lake, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India, and a Commissioner of the French AEC. Distinguished scientists, in other words. If they had not been distinguished, they would have been fired. Many of them were fired anyway.
You do not doubt everything. You are a conformist. You believe what the establishment believes. When Nature and Sci. Am. declare that cold fusion is pathological science and the researchers are criminals, frauds and lunatics, you believe that too, and you never bother to read or understand the literature. As you yourself have said here time after time, you do not understand Fleischmann's papers. Indeed, you comments show you do not understand them. Yet you are certain they are wrong. So, your judgement is not based on the technical merits of the claim -- which you are manifestly incapable of judging -- but rather what people in power tell you to believe. If Nature were to endorse cold fusion today, next week you would tell us you believed it and supported it all along (as would Nature).
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crackpots such as Shanahan who think that a bucket of water can vanish overnight.
Link or it didn't happen. Of course it didn't. Like many other things you claim, you simply made it up. NOBODY wrote that but you in typical fashion of misquoting people and mis-attributing intent.
While I may have had a little influence in the development of investments in Rossi and especially for sure in Defkalion, I have absolutely no influence in LENR in general. Neither do most other internet skeptics. You made that up too. It's not politics that held back LENR. It's lack of clarity, lack of competence, lack of definitive and reproducible experiments and data, and crooks like Defkalion and Rossi and possibly others. Specious claims that don't bear out when examined, even from decent scholars and honest scientists -- those things don't help a whole lot either.
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Link or it didn't happen.
I already gave you the link. It is right here:
Rossi vs. Darden aftermath discussions
Shahanhan has said this many times, on spf, as he himself noted here. He does not deny saying it, so why do you? He says he found this out from a DoE website about swimming pools. Quote:
"That is nothing but an assumption based on wishful thinking [that the bucket evaporated because it contained a hot object]. Anything other that that occurring invalidates the use of water loss as a useful measure. Of course, that was the point of my first post on this topic on spf. My examination of evaporation rate equations put out by DOE for swimming pools led me to believe that it might be possible if the ventilation and humidity characteristics were correct."
I have absolutely no influence in LENR in general. Neither do most other internet skeptics. You made that up too.
I did not make that up, because I never said that. "Internet skeptics" such as you have no influence. On the other hand, Maddox, the editor of Nature, the spokesman of the APS, the editors of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the head of the DoE, and the plasma fusion researchers at MIT have a great deal of influence. They used it to clobber cold fusion. They accused the researchers of fraud and crimes, and they pulled strings to have many of them fired. They did this openly. They bragged about it. You can find their statements and boasts on the Internet. But of course you will not read them. Instead you will accuse me of making this stuff up.
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As always you misquoted. And your response is tangential to the question I asked.
I want to know where Shanahan says that a bucket of water can evaporate completely overnight without anomalous causes. WHERE DOES HE WRITE THAT? Not a link to a discussion -- a specific quote and the link to that specific quote. If you make accusations like you just did, you should be prepared to back them up SPECIFICALLY if you wish to get any respect.
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I want to know where Shanahan says that a bucket of water can evaporate completely overnight without anomalous causes. WHERE DOES HE WRITE THAT?
I have no dog in this fight but happened to remember some search terms that found what is I think the original quote from Kirk, here.
Kirk quotes Jed as saying in the report PDF: "A bucket left by itself for 10 days in a university laboratory will not lose any measurable level of water to evaporation." and Kirk goes on to assert that this is "nothing but an assumption based on wishful thinking".
The words attributed to Jed are indeed in the PDF.
There may be subsequent posts which go further, but if this is the source of the evaporation claim, as I read it, the most Kirk could be said to have asserted in this post is that the bucket in question COULD in fact lose a MEASURABLE level of water to evaporation.
EDIT - Doh, just seen Jed already linked to that post a couple of messages up. As you were - I'll go back to lurking...
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@Graphiker
The key word in Jed's quote is OVERNIGHT. Nobody claimed that the bucket would go dry overnight. That this was claimed is Jed's fantasy. Jed attends to often to such misquotes of people and it also extends to misunderstanding of people's purpose, diligence, and intentions. This habit does not improve his credibility in other matters about LENR. In fact, a bucket left for 10 days in a room may, under many conditions, lose appreciable contents to evaporation but it will probably not go dry. Unless, as Shanahan pointed out, there is a source of heat in it. Not necessarily LENR heat. More likely, chemical heat and stored heat.
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I want to know where Shanahan says that a bucket of water can evaporate completely overnight without anomalous causes. WHERE DOES HE WRITE THAT?
Right there! Right in front of your nose. He could hardly have said it more clearly:
"Anything other that that [heat release] occurring invalidates the use of water loss as a useful measure. . . . My examination of evaporation rate equations put out by DOE for swimming pools led me to believe that it might be possible if the ventilation and humidity characteristics were correct."
The subject was the evaporation of an entire bucket full of water overnight. He says that can happen if the ventilation and humidity charactoristics are correct. If you don't think that is what he means, ask him yourself. He has repeated this time after time.
He said it clearly. He means it. If you don't think that is what he meant, discuss the matter with him. Leave me out of it.
His claim is wrong. If the ventilation and humidity charactoristics were that extreme, the room would be like the inside of an oven or kiln. We know that room conditions were nothing like that in a Japanese National University in March in the 1980s. We know that the object in the bucket was a large metal cell too hot to hold, and that it remained too hot to hold for days. The only rational explanation is that the heat from the cell evaporated the water. Shanahan's hypothesis is: a bucket of water just evaporates sometimes; a hot object is not necessarily producing heat; that's just "wishful thinking." That is classic crackpot nonsense.
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The key word in Jed's quote is OVERNIGHT. Nobody claimed that the bucket would go dry overnight. That this was claimed is Jed's fantasy.
It is not my fantasy! This is what Mizuno wrote, and this is what Shanahan was discussing. It happened on April 27, 1991, and again on April 30. It is right here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTnucleartra.pdf
Of course you will never read it. I have pointed to this document several times, and you have no idea what we are talking about or what it says, so obviously you have not read it. You will not read it. You call this my fantasy instead. But anyway, that is what Mizuno said, and Shanahan just as clearly said he is sure this can happen at room temperature conditions "if the ventilation and humidity characteristics were correct." In other words, if the room is so hot a person in it would be cooked.
More likely, chemical heat and stored heat.
Sure. 85 MJ in 100 g of metal. Sure, that could be chemical and stored heat. It is only, what? -- the energy from 2 kg of gasoline, the best chemical fuel, plus 4 kg of oxygen:
https://www.scientificamerican…ts-weight-ratio-co2-fuel/
100 g versus 6,000 g. You are wrong by a factor of 60 but you are so incapable of elementary quantitative analysis, and so ignorant of grade-school level basic science, you don't even realize how wrong you are. "Most likely" she says, waving her hands, and coming up with an answer that is WRONG BY A FACTOR OF 60. Sure, and anyone can poll vault 360 m. It happens all the time. Any car can drive at 4,800 mph. That's just a little over the speed limit.
If you believe that, you too are a crackpot. But in this case you say that because you have no idea what the claim is, because you never bother to read anything.
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Your link leads to this:
QuoteDisplay More- Shanahan:
- OK, so I looked this over. Nothing in it to contradict anything important in my description. Lots of details that were posted to spf are not included, like the posts describing the broken windows and the use of a lab hood in an abandoned building...
But the key point is that Jed writes: "A bucket left by itself for 10 days in a university laboratory will not lose any measurable level of water to evaporation. "
That is nothing but an assumption based on wishful thinking. Anything other that that occurring invalidates the use of water loss as a useful measure. Of course, that was the point of my first post on this topic on spf. My examination of evaporation rate equations put out by DOE for swimming pools led me to believe that it might be possible if the ventilation and humidity characteristics were correct. As an anecdotal story, we don't have those numbers, so I choose to find the event unconvincing. It's an anecdote, so you can choose to believe what you like about it.
And I also assume a good chance of thermocouple problems as well, even though we were assured that it had been checked. Jed's writeup simply confirms that Mizuno confirmed a reading with another meter, but not that he used an independent measure. If the TC was malfunctioning, the second meter would still produce an erroneous reading, since a malfunctioning TC wouldn't care what meter was used to read it. Again we have insufficient information to truly make a decision.
See anything in here which says a bucket will evaporate OVERNIGHT? What am I missing here? He is saying a bucket of water left ten days will evaporate to some degree, the amount determined by conditions and could be quite a lot. What do you see?
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To admin: is there some string to discuss the forum software itself? The editor is doing all sorts of things I did not ask it to do. And it is a PITA to correct it in HTML.
