I'm afraid you are wrong. People of untroubled faith as you call them accept all the tenets of their faith without question. It's a bit like Newtonian mechanics as far as they are concerned. It is totally apparent to me that Jed has doubts about a number of aspects of LENR work. He doesn't duke it out with 'proper' scientists over this too often, possibly because he is diffident about doing so, but no way does he strike me as someone who swallows the bait, the hook, and the line.
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Jed, my message was addressed to you because you were vociferously arguing against various straw-man positions you claim I hold. My statement about many cold fusion supporters was just that - a statement about many cold fusion supporters and not a statement about you. I can probably name a bunch of them if I felt like attracting a bunch of buzzing hornets, but why bother? Certainly, the comment applies to the remaining Rossi supporters who all (accurately or not) consider themselves to be cold fusion supporters. Certainly you don't think their belief is based on scientific principles or logical analysis; it is ludicrously blind faith. You rant about how critics don't read the literature and aren't qualified to hold opinions. I am quite certain that the same criticism holds in spades for many LENR supporters who frequent these websites as well. But they don't have to qualify to hold their opinion, do they?
If you weren't so self-righteous and defensive, it would actually be interesting to try to understand where you ultimately stand on cold fusion. Obviously, you have a voluminous spiel on how it has been proven without a doubt, is supported by the creme of the crop of electrochemists, has been victimized by brutal political sabotage, and so forth. But once we are past all of that, you mostly seem to be saying that the phenomenon is very difficult to invoke on demand, not obviously of any ultimate application value and may or may not be developable, and in any case is unlikely to get anywhere for various reasons. But perhaps those are not really your views. It is hard to tell because you are too busy flailing at anyone who says things you don't like to allow any interchange to get past the first round before flying into a rage.
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I'm afraid, in one important way, you are.
Your views both those I support, and those I don't, are held (or at least expressed here) with a level of certainty I note in those religious people who take untroubled certainty from faith (others have great doubt and faith that emerges from inner struggle, which is rather different).
The "certainty of untroubled faith" people are fanatics in the sense that they believe unconditionally and without choice, though often the things they are fanatic about are life-affirming and so this fanaticism is a positive force.
I have to agree with you THHuxleynew. I too feel Jed has a certain zeal towards CF. Whenever you question him on CF e.g. evaporating buckets or calorimetry, he'll point you to some literature. I've heard this position before by religious fanatics who will tell you of a particular book which has all the answers as well. Also I am finding it a bit disconcerting that Jed is singling myself and @maryyugo out for particular attention.
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Won't the original P&F tests down to mismeasurements and poor calorimetry?
Not to my knowledge. Where did you read this? What paper lists these mismeasurments and poor calorimetry?
As far as I know, the only paper that attempted to find errors in any experiment by Fleischmann and Pons was Morrison's. It covered some of their later experiments. I do not think it has any merit. As I said, you should read it and judge for yourself:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf
I am pretty familiar with the literature, and I don't know of any other technical critiques of Fleischmann's work. Perhaps you know of a paper that I have not read. So please tell me where you got this information.
When I say I am "familiar" with the literature I mean that I have 4,391 cold fusion papers on my disk. I have read at least the abstract and conclusions of every one of them that is in English or Japanese. These were collected by Dieter Britz, Ed Storms and me. I doubt that we missed many others, or that we missed any important papers. Britz, Storms and I classified them in various categories and added summaries and abstracts to an EndNote relational database. Plus I use X1 Desktop Search to find them. So I can find them fairly easily. A critique of the first paper would be important, so I would not have overlooked it.
(You can see most of the items in the EndNote database here: http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=1081)
There are many papers that say the results were theoretically impossible. But as far as I know, there are no papers that show errors in the calorimetry. Fleischmann was an expert in calorimetry and electrochemistry. You would not expect a Fellow of the Royal Society to spend several years making stupid mistakes doing something he has done for decades. But it could happen. You cannot rule that out. Fortunately, they were subsequently replicated at ~180 other major labs, in thousands of tests, so we can rule that out. We can be sure they did not make a mistake.
They did make mistakes measuring neutrons, as they themselves quickly admitted.
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Whenever you question him on CF e.g. evaporating buckets or calorimetry, he'll point you to some literature.
Surely this is the conventional thing to do in science?!
I've heard this position before by religious fanatics who will tell you of a particular book which has all the answers as well.
With regard to evaporation, let me point to I. M. Freeman, "Physics Made Simple," p. 63 and 179, "Heat of Vaporization." This is a textbook. It does not have "all the answers," but I recommend it. I do not think that referencing a conventional, high-school level physics textbook can be compared to religious fanatics pointing to a holy book. For one thing, you can find the same information about evaporation in many other sources. But far more important is that you can put a bucket of water into a room and see for yourself. I encourage you to do that. You do not have to take my word for this, or look in any textbook.
Given these differences -- especially the fact that anyone can test this -- I think my assertions are about as far removed from religion as any assertions can be. I see no resemblance. Are you sure this is similar to religion?
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THHuxley wrote
Most (modern) religions are monotheistic. Hinduism is an exception.
Too more exceptions. Buddhism... and GUTCP.
Compare Dalai Lama / Randell Mills
"Buddhist cosmology establishes the cycle of a universe in the following way: first there is a period of formation, then a period where the universe endures, then another during which it is destroyed, followed by a period of void before the formation of a new universe. During this void, the particles of space subsist, and from these particles the new universe will be formed. It is in these particles of space that we find the fundamental consubstantial cause of the entire physical world"
"The Universe has no beginning or end. The Universe oscillates endlessly with a cycle of a trillion years from a minimum radius where it is mostly matter filled, to a maximum radius where it is mostly energy filled and back again ."
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THHuxley wrote
"The "certainty of untroubled faith" people are fanatics in the sense"
The certainty of being able to 'debug' something borders on jihad..
Have you deleted that post on the Mizuno thread yet? It might come back to bug you repeatedly.\\
"It is academic, because the IH replication failed. Still, I'd like to debug this. But not sure I have the motivation to spend long amts of time on it given the IH work."
How is the debugging of Mizuno's work going?
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I can probably name a bunch of them if I felt like attracting a bunch of buzzing hornets
Okay, name one.
Certainly, the comment applies to the remaining Rossi supporters who all (accurately or not) consider themselves to be cold fusion supporters.
You need not name any of these. Just name a supporter of the Fleischmann Pons effect Pd-D cold fusion who fits your description, if you would please.
If you weren't so self-righteous and defensive, it would actually be interesting to try to understand where you ultimately stand on cold fusion.
I am not self-righteous and defensive. This is cognitive dissonance on your part. You are reading in these emotions where they do not exist. I have been doing this for many years, and I used up my quotient of these emotions long ago, like a high school teacher who has seen it all.
Obviously, you have a voluminous spiel on how it has been proven without a doubt, is supported by the creme of the crop of electrochemists, has been victimized by brutal political sabotage, and so forth.
A "voluminous spiel" might also be described as extensive knowledge of the subject. I do not think I have that, although I know more than you do, and more than Mary Yugo does. I once spent a week at Martin Fleischmann's house. Compared to him, I know practically nothing. That goes for the other electrochemists I have spent time working with.
(I do know how to write and edit papers better than many of them.)
ut once we are past all of that, you mostly seem to be saying that the phenomenon is very difficult to invoke on demand, not obviously of any ultimate application value and may or may not be developable,
That is not a contradiction. Many laboratory phenomena are very difficult to invoke on demand. For example, it used to take thousands of attempts to clone a single mammal. The success rate for cold fusion has always been much higher than this.
Surely, plasma fusion seems even less developable than cold fusion, despite the billions of dollars that have been spent on it. Until recently, self-driving cars and neural network artificial intelligence seemed unlikely to have any practical use for decades. They are making rapid progress now because corporations are spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing them. If corporations were to spend hundreds of billions on cold fusion, it might soon become practical. Granted, that is not a sure thing. Nothing in science is ever a sure thing. Researchers have spent roughly $500 billion on cancer research since 1971. Unfortunately, according to some epidemiologists, the survival rate from cancer has hardly improved. The diagnosis can be made earlier, which makes the 5-year survival rate longer.
Quoting the book "Prescription for a Healthy Nation:"
"Overall, cancer mortality in the United States is unchanged in the last 25 years and higher now than it was in 1950 (even after taking into account the aging population) because a rise in the number of people developing cancer has swamped any improvements in treatment. As recently as the mid 1990s, an expert trying to measure the benefits of medical care ignored cancer because he considered the effects of treatment negligible. ...
. . . [A] task force assembled by the public health service . . . refused to recommend screening for lung cancer or diabetes. Even if people with these chronic conditions go to doctors for their problems early, most will continue to deteriorate."
NCHS, Health, United States, 2003, quoted p. 136
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Your views both those I support, and those I don't, are held (or at least expressed here) with a level of certainty I note in those religious people who take untroubled certainty from faith (others have great doubt and faith that emerges from inner struggle, which is rather different).
Perhaps you mean my assurance that the laws of thermodynamics are correct; or that a bucket of water will not evaporate overnight in room temperature conditions; that chemical reactions cannot produce much more than ~4 eV per atom, and certainly not thousands of electron volts per atom; or that 10,800 seconds are significantly longer than 6 seconds, and no one could accidentally mismeasure 6 seconds and think they were actually 10,800. Yes, I am very, very certain of these things.
There are certain scientific laws, discoveries and theories that I would bet my life on. So would you. So would anyone. Indeed, we all do bet our lives on these things when we fly on airplanes or go in for surgery.
However, if you imagine that my certainty extends to the whole corpus of cold fusion literature, you are mistaken. You are unfamiliar with my views. I have often expressed doubts about large chunks of it, for example in this paper, where I described much of it as "baloney:"
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf
Here's the problem, as Arthur Clarke described it. We know that half of what we think we know is wrong, but we don't know which half.
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@Jed: I don't share your predilection for insulting individuals and picking fights with them, so I will refrain from naming names. But the request does expose an interesting fact about the so-called LENR community. My exposure to it over the past 6 years has been driven and dominated by the Rossi story. During most of that time, I don't think there was an obvious distinction between Rossi believers and general believers in the FP effect. On most sites, the former were a majority subset of the latter. In any event, all the websites were dominated by people who were first and foremost Rossi believers. For those of us who weren't exposed to the community before Rossi, we had no idea which people were there before Rossi. Certainly, it appears as if most of the "old guard" were on board with Rossi for most of that time. You, for example.
In the past year, obviously there has been a sharp bifurcation between the Rossi-ites and the CF people who have rejected Rossi. Being fairly new to this board, I am still sorting out who belongs in which camp. But now that we are discussing all of this, it may well be that the people I have been talking about as religious fanatics and serial believers (in every free energy claim) pretty much exclusively come from the present-day Rossi believer community. Most assuredly there are LENR believers who are not Rossi supporters and are not fanatics - Shane and Eric as examples. Perhaps it is most anti-Rossi LENR believers. So maybe I can't name names after all if we exclude Rossi supporters. That's reasonable to me. Like I said, the bulk of my exposure to this community was in the form of Rossi supporters and now that there are plenty of LENR supporters who are explicitly not Rossi supporters, then I am comfortable to limiting my withering remarks to just the Rossi supporters. As I have said on multiple occasions, I don't have any quarrel with LENR supporters in general. Like you keep telling me, I am too ignorant to judge them. On the other hand, anyone with a lick of common sense can judge Rossi supporters.
One more comment: I guess I am pleased that your incessant need to hurl insults and personal attacks is not based on any emotional response. It is just your hobby. Good for you!
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I don't share your predilection for insulting individuals and picking fights with them, so I will refrain from naming names. But the request does expose an interesting fact about the so-called LENR community.
IO,
Jed is probably the most public LENR spokesman at this time. That is not an easy job with CFs history, and the charlatans like Rossi that prey on it, so it is commendable that he has taken it on as robustly, and intelligently as he has. Sure...he gets a little testy at times, but who would not after patiently answering hundreds of questions...some of them ignorant, and lazy, that with a little reading they could answer themselves?
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I have different perspective reading those exchanges.
I follow antivax thread and see the despair of experienced biologsts and doctors, statisticians, facing people who are so sure there is a conspiracy and seeing evidence in circular reasoning and motivated blindness.
I see the same on glyphosate ware where farmers, and biologist, face activists...
and so on on many subject, where half of the time the error is supported by media, if not by laws.
Are there article about "cargo cult skepticism" ? Beside the few article of Jed, and the book of Beaudette...
Never forget that Semmelweis died in an asylum despite undeniable statistics, and the facts he demonstrated by observation, and experiments, where known to illiterate mothers and nuns.
Stupidity is not a question of intelligence. Intelligent people can be negatively intelligent, like Parks, Huizenga, Lewis.
I admit I'm rotating, so the real value and sign of my intelligence depends on my phase (I'm in depressive phase, but LENR is too real to change my point).
For highly imaginary intelligence, there are good theory, where people are sure of their rightness as much as skeptics are of LENR being non-existent, and believers that Doral showed excess heat. Guess who have best imaginary intelligence here
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THHuxley wrote
"The "certainty of untroubled faith" people are fanatics in the sense"
The certainty of being able to 'debug' something borders on jihad..
Have you deleted that post on the Mizuno thread yet? It might come back to bug you repeatedly.\\
"It is academic, because the IH replication failed. Still, I'd like to debug this. But not sure I have the motivation to spend long amts of time on it given the IH work."
How is the debugging of Mizuno's work going?
Lack of motivation...
Better evidence and I'll look more.
Basically, I read it like this:
M has these eye-wateringly good results from a complex (and hence not bomb-proof) setup with no obvious errors. IH came in and investigated, with better test methodology and M's help, wanting to get a positive answer. IH failed and gave up. They would not do that just because two electrodes happened to be duff (M would tell them that, and they would repeat).
Now perhaps IH is still involved and we will be surprised. I await that with interest.
The chances that IH would give up on this if they thought is anything there and IMHO vanishingly small. While they are not universally competent they have so much more info than we do from this paper that i would not on evidence so far want to second guess their judgement.
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Perhaps you mean my assurance that the laws of thermodynamics are correct; or that a bucket of water will not evaporate overnight in room temperature conditions; that chemical reactions cannot produce much more than ~4 eV per atom, and certainly not thousands of electron volts per atom; or that 10,800 seconds are significantly longer than 6 seconds, and no one could accidentally mismeasure 6 seconds and think they were actually 10,800. Yes, I am very, very certain of these things.
There are certain scientific laws, discoveries and theories that I would bet my life on. So would you. So would anyone. Indeed, we all do bet our lives on these things when we fly on airplanes or go in for surgery.
However, if you imagine that my certainty extends to the whole corpus of cold fusion literature, you are mistaken. You are unfamiliar with my views. I have often expressed doubts about large chunks of it, for example in this paper, where I described much of it as "baloney:"
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf
Here's the problem, as Arthur Clarke described it. We know that half of what we think we know is wrong, but we don't know which half.
Jed: my point was that fanaticism is not about being right or wrong. It is about holding views with absolute certainty. Where the statement is purely about math or very well validated science then I'd have the same level of certainty as you (not not call such logically tautologous, or near as, belief fanaticism). But as soon as that gets applied to the real world, for me, questions and caveats prevent such certainty. You do not prove lack of fanaticism by arguing correctly that your fanatically-held views are in fact true.
I'm not saying even that you are a fanatic, but you often express yourself as a fanatic here, and have a similar resistance to doubt.
In the cases you cite (e.g. bucket of water) the uncertainties come from the things either not considered, or assumed, in your reasoning. Thus: was it room temp? Was there a wind? was there a cat/dog/poltergeist/careless lab assistant? Poltergeist stands for all the things that seem weird and have mundane but unexpected and unknown causes. Did Mizuno just forget some crucial issue?
Scientists don't like anecdotal evidence because of these issues, also don't trust single unreplicated results for similar reasons.
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THHuxley. Said " they have so much more info than we do from this paper"
Actually there is more than enough information in the paper.
It isn't dud electrodes that stopped IH. It is something else and its intimated in the paper.
One of those 'unsaids' Its been staring me in the face for weeks and I only just realised it.
Silly me! But it won't take long for others to "unbug".. As long as IH has few competent people it won't take long.
The race is on. Why has Mizuno been shillyshallying around for three years to write the paper?
He must have secured finance already or be pretty close to it for the next step.
He can't just rely on patents. Otherwise they will be worthless.
Might be seeing my LENR greenhouse heater sooner than later.
God Bless.You and Hikoboshi
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Alain wrote "depressive phase"
"Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s…cle/pii/S0168583X17306286
which is far above what can be achieved in the thermal heating experiments”.
The barrier of the aristocrat Charles Coulomb has been overcome.
Science for the proletariat. Marchons, marchons!
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My depression is about the rationality, and capacity to work together, of all sides around LENR, critics, supporter, researchers...
those who are not already locked in their beliefs are as easy to organize as a herd of cats on a fishing boat.
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IH came in and investigated, with better test methodology and M's help,
I know some of the details of this work. I would not describe this as better test methodology. Perhaps you know more about it than I do, but it does not look better to me.
I think that to date, the best calorimetry applied to this experiment, and the best results, were reported in Mizuno's preprint. I hope to help arrange additional tests of this reactor type.
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my point was that fanaticism is not about being right or wrong. It is about holding views with absolute certainty.
Who does that? Surely not me! If you think so, you have not read my book or my papers. See, for example:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf
I'm not saying even that you are a fanatic, but you often express yourself as a fanatic here, and have a similar resistance to doubt.
No, I do not. This is projection on your part. Or cognitive dissonance. I resemble Martin Fleischmann in that I am a painfully conventional person. I do insist that it is impossible for a 10-L bucket of water to evaporate in room temperature conditions overnight, but that is common sense. Anyone with an aquarium will know that. Anyone who puts out a bucket can confirm it. Frankly for you or anyone else here to question that is extreme fanaticism. In any other context people would say you are as crazy as a flat-earth society member.
In the cases you cite (e.g. bucket of water) the uncertainties come from the things either not considered, or assumed, in your reasoning. Thus: was it room temp? Was there a wind? was there a cat/dog/poltergeist/careless lab assistant?
I went over all of these points time after time, here and elsewhere. I wrote most of them in the introduction, and I pointed to that document again, and again. Did you read it? You are demanding information that I have already spoon-fed to you and others. Your demand is annoying, and rude. Furthermore, you questions are absurd. For the entire 10 L to evaporate, the room would have to be so hot it would be uninhabitable.
Let's go over this again. Here is what I told you already, please read it this time:
The room was in a Japanese National University, in Hokkaido, in March. There is a photo of the room on p. 30 of my book:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf
You can look up average temperatures in Hokkaido. As I said, Japanese National U. laboratories were unheated in those days. The rooms had gas heaters which were turned off at night. It got cold in them.
Of course there was no wind. Read the description of where the cell was placed!
As described in the book and in my introduction, there was no lab assistant. Mizuno and I made that very clear, and we explained why: it was a national holiday. Also, the water evaporated several times, on several days, so even if there had been a "careless lab assistant" he would not be so careless as to spill the water repeatedly. You should have figured that out yourself, from the description in my intro.
There are no dogs or cats in National U. laboratories. They are not allowed. I am sure you realize that, and I do not appreciate such flippant comments. This is a serious discussion of an important scientific finding.
Poltergeists do not exist.
There was a large steel cell immersed in the water that was so hot you could not touch it. It remained that hot for days. Anyone with the least knowledge of everyday physics -- indeed anyone who has cooked or used fire in the last 3 million years -- will realize that the hot object is what made the water evaporate. That much water could not possibly evaporate without a source of heat. If you have any doubt about that, I urge you to put a bucket of water in a room for 24 hours, measure how much evaporates, and report back.
If you seriously think wind could cause the entire bucket to evaporate, I suggest you put a fan on the bucket and test this hypothesis.
You might also put a metal object with a ~100 W heater in it into the water.
If you want more information, read the book, or at least read the introduction.
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Back after the 2 weeks ... ehm, vacation.
@ JedRothwell,
When I say I am "familiar" with the literature I mean that I have 4,391 cold fusion papers on my disk. [omissis]
(You can see most of the items in the EndNote database here: http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=1081)
There are many papers that say the results were theoretically impossible. But as far as I know, there are no papers that show errors in the calorimetry.Sorry for my intrusion. Your database also contains this paper: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LeviGreportonhe.pdf
So, I think that a more careful presentation of these papers should have been:
- among the 4,391 cold fusion papers on the disk, there is at least one paper, written by reputable scientists and reviewed by many experts in the field, that is full of calorimetry errors, thanks to which it was stated that a tabletop device produced 12 kW of excess heat for 40 minutes;
- but for all the other 4,390 cold fusion papers, written and reviewed by as much reputable scientists and experts, there are not, on the web, as many extra documents (videos, pictures, emails, interviews, etc.) that allow ordinary people to check on their own, and decide with enough certainty, whether the excess heat (usually much more exiguous) reported in these papers was correctly measured or not.
