Rossi vs. Darden aftermath discussions

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    The excess power was 5% of the input power, and (as shown) roughly proportional to input power.

    McKubre showed many other clear examples with lower input power. In some cases, output was 3 times higher than input. In other case there was no input (in heat after death).


    However, this ratio makes no difference. Even 5% has a high s/n ratio with the equipment used in these experiments.


    I selected this particular graph because it was convenient. It happens to be on my web page. I suppose you realize McKubre published many other graphs with much larger output to input ratios. If you do realize this, why did mention this non-issue? Are you trying to give readers here the impression that all of McKubre's results are at a low ratio?


    Quote from THHuxleynew

    That makes artifacts possible, and arguing that none such could exist complex. Hence not clear cut.

    No, it does not make artifacts possible. Artifacts are ruled out by using good calorimetry, calibration and so on. The fact that output rises in response to higher input is not an artifact at all; it is a known property of the effect, and the cause of it -- higher temperatures and higher current density -- is well established. It is predicted by McKubre's equation.


    Hence, it is quite clear cut. Your thinking, on the other hand, is muddy. You are ginning up non-existant problems out of thin air, and you are ignoring counter-examples such as tests with much higher output to input ratios. You are calling these figments of your own imagination "problems" and "artifacts." They are no such thing.

    Quote from lenrisnotreal

    Take these values and plug them into the inflation calc. Then add all the other millions spent by various groups during this time and you will get $100 million + in 2017 dollars.

    You should take the values that the hot fusion frauds have spent, and they have yet to reach ignition. I would be surprised if the value was less than $100Billion, which is a thousand times worse than what you're complaining about for cold fusion.

    Quote from guest111

    It is good to know that among your talents are Online Clairvoyant Psychiatric Analyst

    Ho ho ho..... I have not a degree but in Psychiatry but may be you will need a professional. Possibly a very good one.

    Quote from guest111

    That "list" of provisionals (and some undefined) goes back to 2010, and if ANY of them was ever converted to a real non-provisional (US or EU), those non-provisional would be searchable as well as the provisional reference.

    Ever think that those provisional could be incorporated and/or superseded by more advanced applications?

    In Industry is normal to make a Provisional when a research starts in order to fix a date and then apply for a patent if that research has ended up with results or to choose to not patent and maintain the secret.BTW that topic was discussed in this forum long ago.

    I selected this particular graph because it was convenient. It happens to be on my web page. I suppose you realize McKubre published many other graphs with much larger output to input ratios. If you do realize this, why did mention this non-issue? Are you trying to give readers here the impression that all of McKubre's results are at a low ratio?


    Of the results he highlights only M12 had much larger ratio - and that was 10% not 5%.

    With new advances in nanotechnology, it's possible there is some small low temperature effect when different materials are loaded into each other. However, much work on at least a theoretical level needs to be done to make this believable. That's why I say people should focus on substance over buzz.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Of the results he highlights only M12 had much larger ratio - and that was 10% not 5%.

    I do not know what you mean by "highlights." This is what he said:


    "For the thermodynamically closed and intentionally isothermal systems described here, output power was observed to be as much as 300% in excess of the electrochemical input power or 24% above the known total input power."


    McKubre, M.C.H., et al., Development of Advanced Concepts for Nuclear Processes in Deuterated Metals, TR-104195. 1994, Electric Power Research Institute.


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


    (Note that total input power includes the compensation heater with this calorimeter.)


    What is your point? Are you deliberately ignoring the high ratio results?


    What are you up to? Let me guess --


    The ratio makes no difference because it does not reduce the signal to noise ratio, but you seem to have latched onto this non-issue as an excuse to dismiss the experiments. I suspect that since the 300% results show you are wrong, and you do not even have that as an excuse, you have moved on to saying these results are not "highlighted" so we should pretend they do not exist.


    Jed: you are making assumptions about my motives here. I'm not willing to use results I have not looked at and checked all details of - since these matter. I'm assuming that the results McKubre highlights are the most significant ones, but if others are more significant no doubt someone else can highlight them as worth checking. And I'll happily look at other cases but it takes time and availability of detailed specific write-ups so please give me the best.


    Worth noting that of these two figures the 24% is relevant, not the 300% which means nothing since a transient power. Also worth noting that if the 24% includes non-equilibrium conditions, as is stated, it may go with much higher error margins - would need analysis. Which is why MK says he highlights the equilibrium cases of significant excess - and I agree.


    The percentage error here does matter because of possible anomalies which give percentage of input power errors, like CCS/ATER.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    I'm not willing to use results I have not looked at and checked all details of - since these matter.

    You should not reach conclusions about McKubre's work until you have looked at and checked the details. You should, at least, read the official publication from EPRI. You should not be discussing his work here if you have not read that yet.


    Quote from THHuxleynew

    I'm assuming that the results McKubre highlights are the most significant ones, but if others are more significant no doubt someone else can highlight them as worth checking.

    What is this assumption based on? Did McKubre tell you that? In what document is this "highlighted"? All of the results are presented in the EPRI document, Table 3.1. Note that in addition to the 340% excess in experiment P19, four other experiments produced ratios much higher than 5%: 52%, 53%, 24% and 30%.



    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Worth noting that of these two figures the 24% is relevant, not the 300% which means nothing since a transient power.

    Transient power? It lasted for 62 hours, after the cell produced 120 hours of excess heat. I would not call 62 hours "transient." There is no way the cathode could have stored that much energy.


    The lower number, 24%, is from the joule compensation heater. It is a function of the calorimeter design. The calorimeter cannot operate without it. It does not reduce confidence. On the contrary, it increases it. Joule heating can be measured with extremely high precision, so there is virtually no noise in it. Because it is measured with such high precision, you can subtract nearly all of it from the excess heat. There is also very little noise in electrolysis power, which can be measured with nearly as much precision & confidence as joule heating. Overall uncertainty is low. A low output to input ratio has little impact on uncertainty.


    You have no scientific basis to arbitrarily claim that 5% above electrolysis power is "low," "insignificant" or somehow questionable. That would only be true if electrolysis power was noisy. Furthermore, there are many examples of higher ratios, and they are not transient.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    The percentage error here does matter because of possible anomalies which give percentage of input power errors, like CCS/ATER.

    First, the percentage is not "error." Electrolysis power is not an error, or noise. It does not add much to uncertainty. Neither is joule heating power. 99% of both can be subtracted with confidence.


    Second, Shanahan's CCS effect does not exist. If it did exist, it would be seen in the data when people move the heat source in a cell, and during calibration. It also violates Faraday's law and thermodynamics. It is wrong for many other reasons listed by Marwan et al. In other words, you are invoking a crackpot theory to support your doubts about a paper that you have not read.

    Quote from McKubre

    The use of a conductive loss constant, k', requires further discussion. Conductive

    heat transport occurs because the electrochemical celt its contents, and the contents
    of the insulating, isothermal boundary of the calorimeter vessel are at a different
    temperature than their surroundings. An added complexity is heat transported
    through the pressure pipe that emerges through the top insulating boundary. Thus,
    depending on the ambient and cell temperatures, heat may be conducted into or out
    of the calorimeter. In view of the potential importance of conductive loss, the
    constant k' has been the subject of extensive analysis (not reported here) which
    indicates that, although several heat sources exist within the aluminum vessel, the
    3-31 value of k' is negligibly influenced by the spatial distribution of these sources     or the
    anticipated variations in the bath and air temperatures. Thus k' was treated as a
    constant, its value determined during the calibration procedure, as described below.
    For the calorimetric fluid flow rates used (approximately 1 g s-l), conductive power
    loss represented typically 3-5% of the total input power.


    3-31

    zeus


    Considering the specificity of the change in the heat distribution required to produce a CCS per my discussions, the McKubre paragraph you quote does nothing but ask the question: "If he had such data available, why did he sign off on the bogus "random CCSH" strawman in 2010?" The fact that his data that supposedly proved my theories wrong was never even mentioned suggests it actually wasn't relevant.


    All McK does above is continue the CF community's choice to ignore what I suggested.


    And of course, Jed is wrong as always.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    First, the percentage is not "error." Electrolysis power is not an error, or noise. It does not add much to uncertainty. Neither is joule heating power. 99% of both can be subtracted with confidence.


    Second, Shanahan's CCS effect does not exist. If it did exist, it would be seen in the data when people move the heat source in a cell, and during calibration. It also violates Faraday's law and thermodynamics. It is wrong for many other reasons listed by Marwan et al. In other words, you are invoking a crackpot theory to support your doubts about a paper that you have not read.


    Marwan et al's response was incomplete and partly wrong for the reasons documented in Shanahan's white paper - at least 70% of which I agree with. Perhaps you'd like to go through his critique and say in detail why it is wrong, on another thread?


    But, I should not have said error, I meant anomalous measured power.


    You should not reach conclusions about McKubre's work until you have looked at and checked the details. You should, at least, read the official publication from EPRI. You should not be discussing his work here if you have not read that yet.


    McKubre has a lot of data. I'm happy to take as "best case" any of these experiments other than those I know - and suspect are best case - M12, M13-14. I'll add M19.


    Unlike you, and others here, it takes me significant effort because:

    (a) I need to read it carefully

    (b) I don't assume the writer makes no mistakes, so I have to check everything and think around setups. Asking people to do this sort of work on say 30 experiments is just silly, when the most clearly anomalous results could be highlighted.


    Because MK is not an idiot I'm quite sure his most compelling data is written up in a research paper. So while the tech reports are needed reference they are not what should be read for purposes of asking whether these results prove LENR as you claim and I have not yet seen evidence for. Hence I look at papers. You are under no obligation to suggest specific better data but If you make claims it would be worth doing that. I'll look at M19 if you feel that the other conditions of that run are sufficiently controlled to make the headline measurements clearly anomalous. I'd trust MK more than you so I'd expect it then to be included in detail in some research paper - so referencing that would be more to the point. And, if it is not, that is probably because MK felt there were issues that made the results less clear-cut than those he does describe in papers.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Unlike you, and others here, it takes me significant effort because:

    (a) I need to read it carefully

    Do you think I have not read it carefully? I spend a month doing that, and then I asked the people at EPRI and SRI many many annoying questions. Before writing this:


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


    It may be wrong, but it took me a couple of months.


    Tom Passell of EPRI said that I may be the only person he knows who read the whole report and asked questions about just about every section.


    You, on the other hand, have not read it at all, as far as I can tell. Yet here you are pontificating about it.


    Jed: you make my point. I do not have 30 X a couple of months. Indeed I do not have a couple of months full-time work.


    It is an inherent problem. Do I trust your views on these papers? No on general principles, I would not trust even an expert who had outlying views from consensus without checking, since more often than not such outliers are wrong.

    No specifically because on matters where we have identical information and both looked carefully you have jumped to conclusions i think unwarranted (even though we have basically agreed the overall picture).


    Inherent because LENR was looked at by many a long time ago, but there were political and social issues at the time that made hasty judgments possible. Since then, the best judgement (the US panel) has been broadly negative but not conclusively so. Now, those supporting LENR are clearly outliers and there is no mileage in anyone not supporting LENR to spend any time on the field, so not considered judgement from experts as a group.

    Quote

    As I pointed out, in the 1950s, 80% to 90% of some transistor production batches failed. No one said transistors do not exist for that reason. The first attempts to clone sheep took thousands of attempts to achieve one success. No one said clones do not exist. The success rate of an experiment has no bearing on whether it works or not. That can only be judged by the signal to noise ratio. When cold fusion does work, or when transistors or clones work, the s/n ratio is high. The results are unmistakable


    You keep using that terrible analogy but the conclusion is correct -- the success rate doesn't matter. The success itself DOES. A few working transistors allowed testing which proved the concept. A single cloned sheep could be carefully studied to prove she was really a clone. A single long duration, controlled flight by the Wrights proved "man" could fly. So if you could get high power, high signal to noise, and long duration just once in a thousand experiments, you would get respect. As long as the result is aas clear as a transistor, a sheep, or a heavier-than-air flight. The problem is not that LENR doesn't meet stringent criteria like those OFTEN. It's that it doesn't meet them at all in an OCCASIONALLY replicable manner. I know you disagree but that is how I see it and much more important, it is how most scientists who considered it see it. The experiments you have cited as evidence do not, IMHO, rise anywhere near the level of a flying airplane, a sheep or a transistor. THAT'S the problem.

    You're basically hiding behind "most scientists think..." You cite tht there were "political and social issues at the time that made hasty judgments possible" but don't develop that incredible line of bullshit, because the top hundred electochemists of their day (you're not one of them) replicated the pons-fleischmann anomalous heat effect and submitted it to peer review >150 times. That makes the replicated event NOT AN OUTLIER, but your own position is the scientific outlier. In fact, there isn't even ONE peer reviewed paper that shoots down those 153 replications, not one. You like to give credence to Shanahan, whose work MIGHT shoot down half a dozen if he bothered to put together an experiment to show it's worth pursuing, but you don't give credence to the top electrochemists of their day. That's kind of an amazing distinction.

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