The Great 'Believer' Witch Hunt

(I also voted, in case you were wondering why there were two votes.)

They might not be anonymous to barty or another admin.

Here is a statement of opinion that you have missed.

Fine control and manipulation of the strong force and the constituents of subatomic particles: quarks, will bring advancements in technology that can scarcely be imagined. It will make Star Trek science look like kindergarten play.

Quote from Zeus46

ARE YOU A LENR BELIEVER?

The questionnaire allows only one choice, whereas I would select 2 through 6 in the affirmative, because there are such a wide range of claims in cold fusion. Some claims I am sure are true, others I doubt, and still others are wrong.

So, anyway, I did not respond.

Quote from Zeus46

You must really have read (and understood - Mary) at least three published LENR papers.

This is an excellent stipulation! I wish that all public opinion polls relating to cold fusion included this.

Just for clarity, I have read and understood more than three LENR papers:

Holmlid 1st paper

Lugano report (if you count it)

The F&P from simplicity through complexity to simplicity one

Various others, Japanese isoperibolic stuff

The guy W here likes who did ultrasonic cavitation stuff

And I've skimmed (< 30 min absorbing) a whole load of others

I voted no 6 but really the MCQ does not do justice to options. I would be somewhere between 5 & 6. There is some evidence, but my judgement on balance is that it is unlikely to mean LENR is real, though not impossible. So to reserve all judgement would be sitting on the fence. I'd be very happy to be wrong.

As for troll taunts. I find generally, even here, the pathoskeptic taunt (specifically when applied to those with a detailed technical contribution like Shanahan - whether you agree or not with his views), more problematic than the believer label. After all we do not call such people pathobelievers.

I think the label "believer" is generally used to mean the same thing as "pathobeliever." It carries the connotation of a faith-based religious belief that is untethered to empirical evidence. People who take the contents of physics books seriously are not put in a category of physics believers. It's true that the contents of physics textbooks are not contested, and that at a high level those of LENR papers are. At any rate, I prefer to call myself a "LENR watcher," as I'm both quite open to the findings in a specific study being shown to be due to artifact, on one hand, and there being something interesting, and indeed nuclear, going on in the experiment after all, on the other. Perhaps I am not a believer in the sense that the term is usually used.

I now see the world of things LENR in terms of specific studies. I think it is risky to attempt to aggregate conclusions over large numbers of studies without having carefully scrutinized each one individually: there are 90 papers showing that transmutation were seen, etc.

There surely is a contingent of people whose attachment to certain propositions relating to LENR is purely faith-based, as we have seen recently.

I voted for the weak evidence choice. Seems like the only rational response to me. I certainly don't see any strong evidence.

Edit - I guess "strong evidence" is a subjective term for many.

"Witch hunt" - I don't think there is any witch hunt agains LENR believers on this forum.

Personally I have fluctuated between strong believer and weak believer, largely due to Rossi and his antics.

Who on LENR-Forum can be labelled as a skeptopath?

Even MaryYugo, who may be the most skeptical commenter, is interested and looking for LENR and would likely be delighted to have LENR commercialized.

In fact anyone who is convinced LENR is not a thing would have no motivation to hang around this site.

Edit - I notice that currently one person has voted for "LENRs are impossible. Have you never read a physics textbook?" so is that humour? If genuine then why come to an LENR site?

“Skeptopath” is probably one of the most useless words around. It basically means anyone who disagrees with what you think to be true. As an example let’s look at AGW.

So is someone who does not accept the evidence for AGW a skeptopath?

Evidence for AGW is hundreds of times more than for LENR (tens of thousands of papers vs 153 peer reviewed papers for LENR according to Jed).

So isn’t an AGW skeptopath who labels someone who does not accept LENR as a skeptopath a hypocrite?

Similarly if an AGW skeptopath criticizes the scientific community for not accepting the evidence for LENR, is that not hypocritical?

The problem with such subjective labels is they are a slap down but not encouraging to free and open debate.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

I would say there were more people who had made up their minds Rossi was a scam artist on this forum, prior to waiting for solid proof.

It would be amusing if the derisive "Rossi's World" turned out to be true.

I already find it amusing to be labeled a "Student" at my age and with my experience.

Or on the other hand;

I would say there are more people who had made up their minds Rossi was the real deal on some forums, prior to waiting for solid proof.

Rossi generates a lot of noise, most of it from himself.

He chooses to do this and thus benefits from the adulation and support of his fans.

So then the other side of the coin is when another year goes by and his promises come to nothing then some of those erstwhile supporters desert him.

Some might even decide it was all a big fakery.

Rossi made his choices, he wants Rossi to be in the public arena but his actual devices are private and secret. Even the outcome of the trial after one year is private and secret.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

I would say there were more people who had made up their minds Rossi was a scam artist on this forum, prior to waiting for solid proof.

It would be amusing if the derisive "Rossi's World" turned out to be true.

I already find it amusing to be labeled a "Student" at my age and with my experience.

Scam artist is your phrase, not mine. I don't think it fits in the normal sense, nor do those here who think carefully. You have to be particularly unwilling to engage with fact not to know that he has consistently deceived (or in some cases only tried to deceive) business partners and those testing his devices. It would seem that he partly believes his own deceit - at least that is very possible - and such passionate conviction would help sway those who admire him into believing that he could not be a scam artist and therefore must have what he claims.

That binary argument comes from a lack of sophistication. Rossi can be both a transparent deceiver and also believe his own deceits. Contradictory? Yes. Go read Shakespeare or Freud and you will perhaps see many other examples of how humanity, at its core, embraces contradiction. It is just that Rossi exhibits this universal tendency in an unusual way.

The psychology here of Rossi is one of the fascinating things about this story - it is a real psychodrama.

http://rexresearch.com/stuff/stuff7/adamenko.pdf

The Proton 21 experiment informs us about the true nature of LENR. That nature is not based on the detection of excess heat, but on the way that LENR processes energy.

Quote

The Black Hole as an Experimental Artifact

A.K.: Now we are talking about things, which make ordinary physicists speechless and the existence of super heavy elements an axiom for us.

And we had a lot of such cases – after our experiments we gave our samples to other organizations and asked them to check them with their equipment. And we did not tell them what these samples were. They brought us reports and in a couple of months they admitted that they had no idea how such results might be registered, for instance during spectrographic examinations with lines which are impossible for these elements. "This is not according to textbooks!" they said. They overhauled equipment, tuned it, looked for malfunctions and obtained the same results. We told them how we got these samples and they replied: "So, why didn't you tell us!" We explained that we did it to keep the experiments pure.

But we have some things which could not be explained, for instance, "black holes

A.K.: They do not "light up" under any light.

Adamenko: There are various methods of to analyze substances. One is radiation by a beam of ions and registering reflected signals. We tore secondary ions away from bombarded substances and analyzed them. And after an explosion we saw how local sections (20-50 microns) appeared on a screen. They reflected nothing no matter how hard you bombarded them with ions. Not only did these smashed out particles of screen refuse to fly, but even primary ions did not return. These are regions which absorb absolutely everything, in any range of weight! Just imagine, you shoot a handgun and the bullets simply disappear. They are not reflected and they do not pass through. And moreover, the process of absorption has no visible manifestations. This could not happen according to the laws of classical physics. We gave this effect a temporary name – "black holes." We suppose these places contain the nucleus of some super heavy element which has "not grown yet" till its reaches its limits. A so -called "dump pit ."We spent more time bombarding these sections (up to half an hour), and only then did these "black holes" start to return some part of the ions. Probably, saturation had occurred. These are interesting subjects of study.

There is another assumption connected with these sections and it refers to cosmology. It is known that there is a great quantity of "dark" matter in the universe, and it cannot be detected by ordinary tools. It is possible that the "black holes" we observed are part of this matter. It may be made of the nuclei of super heavy elements.

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Explanation:

The ash of a LENR experiment contains activated metallic nanowires that are covered with Surface Plasmon Polaritons. This nanoparticle acts like a synthetic monopole tachyon. When this particle receives energy, the energy is reformatted by particle creation into muons. In other words, energy comes in and muons come out. This behavior has been seen in observations by Holmlid. This behavior has been predicted to occur in monopole tachyons as described in string theory.

The Inside Story:

Quasilocal Tachyons and Black Holes

http://slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/getdoc/slac-pub-11616.pdf

And following the link on page 19

The forces we analyzed in this section, which act to force excitations into the bulk

gravitational solution dual to the con¯ning geometry, may provide a gravity-side manifes-

tation of this phenomenon. This e®ect is similar in some ways to the description of black

hole evaporation via hadronization in [18].

Plasma-Balls in Large N Gauge Theories and Localized Black Holes

https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0507219v3.pdf

LENR is not as simple minded as many expect, but a complex cutting edge proof of many aspects of theoretical science.

I voted 5 and 6. Now 6 includes Ferrara and Lugano TPRs, and also ENEA's Rapporto41. I find some respectable researchers in the field that make me still suspend a definitive judgment. But I don't share the view of an evil mainstream science aiming at suffocating novelty. When I see that extraordinary claims such as those I quoted in the celani thread are ignored by mainstream science and I see Celani's funding zeroed by INFN, I am inclined to think that his peers have identified flaws (even though they may have not engaged in a public critique).

Otherwise his research -proving a repeatible tabletop nuclear reaction- would be worth the Nobel prize (physics and not peace please) or it should be proof that this was unjustly denied to F&P.

Quote from Zeus46

I have tweaked it to allow up to three votes.

I could only cast two votes. (No big deal but . . .)