Later on I will be moving some of these posts to How do you convince a skeptic?
The answer to that (How do you convince a skeptic?), I think, is starting to become obvious...You can not! It is going to take a market product to open their eyes.
Brillouin Energy Corporation (BEC) updates.
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You must be specific if you have claims of error,
THHuxleynew is rarely specific
Because when he is specific.. he is prone to error... embarrassing error
Skeptics are fond of vagueness and broadness .... eg "measurement error" "difficult interpretation"
However real scientific critique deals with specifics of measurement and specifics of interpretation
as for BrilloE... have they really identified H4? and for that matter ..neutrons? and at what level and by what method?
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What exactly does convincing a skeptic entail? What would like a skeptic to hold to be true? For that matter, Shane, what is it that you beiieve? (By that I mean something more detailed and specific than “LENR is real”, which is sufficiently vague to include all sorts of things and exclude others.)
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Okay, there are at least four problems with your hypothesis:
- Calibrations show there is no apparent excess heat except when the palladium is highly loaded and when it produces heat before and after the boil-off. Your recondensed water hypothesis cannot explain that. Why would the heat turn off just before boiling, and then turn on again after boiling? The methods of calorimetry before and after do not depend on lost water.
- The effect would have to be large enough that the moving droplets would be visible. They are not. No one sees droplets move up.
- This would happen as often with ordinary boiling or electrolysis as it did in this experiment. All test tubes of this shape would be subject to this error. Such test tubes are common. They are not subject to this error. If they were, people would have seen this long ago, and it would be common knowledge.
- What would be the mechanism? What pushes the water up? You said it would be steam. I suggest you calculate what the steam pressure would be, given ~100 W of boiling and length and width of the top of the test tube. You will find the pressure is far too low to cause a measurable effect.
These problems do preclude the mechanism you propose. You have to come up with some other mechanism that is physically possible. Otherwise you might as well say that invisible unicorn farts cause water to leave the cell unboiled. Waving your hands and making impossible claims about events that no one ever observes -- and that would be readily observable, if they happened -- is not science.
1. that does not contradict the hypothesis. This explains high boil-off large excess heat - and that is not observed except in boil-off! That condition could be related in complex ways to electrode chemistry and hence loading.
2. Show me a paper saying this? (
- just thought I'd Jed you).3. Not necessarily. There would appear to be some special effects related to high electrode loading. The issue is whether these are physical and chemical, or nuclear. I'm saying these results do not rule out physical/chemical.
4. I do not know the details of this mechanism, nor do I make any assumption (as you seem to) about drop size. I see no problem in liquid phase water being pushed upward by small vapour pressure: consider clouds? How can you prove these things do not happen?
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What exactly does convincing a skeptic entail?
Well, showing them plenty of high quality experiments, done over a 30 year period by well qualified scientists across the globe, should at least spark some curiosity. It did me.
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THHuxleynew is rarely specific
Because when he is specific.. he is prone to error... embarrassing error
Skeptics are fond of vagueness and broadness .... eg "measurement error" "difficult interpretation"
However real scientific critique deals with specifics of measurement and specifics of interpretation
as for BrilloE... have they really identified He4? and for that matter neutrons? and at what level and by what method?
I am specific when I know what errors mechanisms exist (specifically). Rossi's demos are unusual in often providing that. Other high SNR LENR claims show tantalising hints of being error, by existing in complex systems with known and difficult to quantify error sources (e.g. Brillouin Q pulses). The results do not scale as you'd expect: e.g. continuous Ni-H excess power becomes much higher relative to heating power when reactor has thermal resistance to ambient reduced, or an oven is used. If such scaling sanity checks passed, LENR results would immediately be taken much more seriously.
The case where errors mechanisms can be quantified and proven from write-ups is rare. For obvious reasons. Where I depart from many here is that I see most of the world as neither disproven (e.g. specific error mechanism known) nor proven (some one-off non-replicable independently results indicate highly novel physics).
Robert: if you consider errors to be embarrassing then perhaps you don't like physics? They are natural, and inescapable. Writing up a decent paper takes a very long time (for me anyway). I post here very quickly. I expect errors. And I doubt others here put more time in, so I expect errors from them too. An interest in errors is necessary. Detecting interesting errors is all about validating or not validating patterns, a noble cause. If you have tried to do this much you will be aware of the dangers of apophenia that we are all prone to have. LENR is fascinating as either exciting new physics or a wonderful case of apophenia (the two are not mutually exclusive of course).
You are free to judge my posts here as specific or not as you like. I have not been that interested in stuff here for a while, having commented in detail on nearly all these things previously (and have fun finding that, I give up!) so they are less specific now than has sometimes been true, but still by site standards I think I do OK.
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For that matter, Shane, what is it that you beiieve? (By that I mean something more detailed and specific than “LENR is real”, which is sufficiently vague to include all sorts of things and exclude others.)
All I can say for certain, is that I do not believe in Rossi!
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23 posts moved to How do you convince a skeptic?
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You'd need a good write-up considering all such issues before you took such claims seriously, hence anecdotal comments don't get us very far.
Well back to Hoaxly slang. 4 times above background needs more likely a recalibration of your brain/thinking and not a discussion of error bars...
detector temperature sensitivity (not always considered, though any experimental scientist familiar with the detectors would do this)
atmospheric contamination
Did you ever see atmospheric contamination going into a glow discharge tube...?? 3-He could do it but they did not measure it...
T-sensitivity would shift all lines. I believe even my cat would see this...
Isotopic composition:
contamination
misinterpretation of lines
If new lines occur the miss interpretation would be to see them not the wrong assignment as for a new peek we don't need this. We just compare two spectra....
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23 posts moved to How do you convince a skeptic?
That's good. It is good that you can re-arrange messages and create new discussion threads. Please do that when the discussion veers away from the original subject. I hope it does not take a lot of effort on your part.
The message handling software in this forum has many problems. I find it difficult to locate old messages. There seems to be no overview (outline feature). Threads not recently accessed seem to vanish. However, the ability to move messages around is a plus. I have to give credit to whoever wrote the software here.
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Please do that when the discussion veers away from the original subject. I hope it does not take a lot of effort on your part.
It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.
Some of the difficulty searching the forum you mention, comes from insufficiently tagged threads. I have gone back and added more catch words/phrases to some. Something to keep in mind for those starting threads.
Another tip for newbies; click "Forum", on the Menu Bar, and select "Latest Posts". It will list the last 30 threads. That covers most of the current active threads.
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There is no COP and no power level that will satisfy Seven_of_twenty. 1 W, 10 W, 100 W . . . whatever is reported will not be enough. Whatever the signal to noise ratio is, it is too low. He and the other skeptics invoke the AGPM mechanism: Automatic Goal Post Moving, also known as finding the end of the rainbow. Whatever is achieved is automatically too low. Along the same lines, it does not matter who replicates, or how many labs replicate, because any lab that replicates is automatically declared ineligible. The researchers may have world-class reputations. They might be people who made the national tritium lab at Los Alamos, or the people who run the largest reactor and the national nuclear research lab in India. It makes no difference. When they report a cold fusion effect that proves they are incompetent so we can dismiss them. You can have 180 labs replicate. That only proves 180 labs are wrong.
The first part is complete nonsense as well as irrelevant. Nobody outside of a small number of ardent believers and a rare billionaire investor cares in the least what I think. Most funding sources have no idea I exist.
QuoteAlso, by the way, there is never any need for Seven_of_twenty to look at the evidence. It has to be wrong, or he would look at it, and he doesn't look, so it must be wrong.
Complete nonsense again. What I write gives ample proof that I not only read but understand what I choose to read. The only scintilla of truth in the statement is that I rarely look at very complex theoretical papers or convoluted experiments involving small amounts of heat. And rarely, like anyone else can, I make errors when I try to browse a source too fast. I always admit to those errors when someone highlights them convincingly.
I don't have a lot of time for this. I think the probability of a new and useful power source having being found is small (still, not zero) and my main interest is in how people believe and how they spin what they read.
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What I write gives ample proof that I not only read but understand what I choose to read.
There are a few .. SOT.. exceptions to this generalisation ..
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The first part is complete nonsense as well as irrelevant.
The whole thing is nonsense, but it is your nonsense, not mine. You are the who claims it is difficult to measure 5 W. You just finished talking about reactions that "consumes little fuel." How about no measurable fuel at all?
Nobody outside of a small number of ardent believers and a rare billionaire investor cares in the least what I think. Most funding sources have no idea I exist.
That has nothing to do with it, but in any case what I said applies to many other "skeptics."
Complete nonsense again. What I write gives ample proof that I not only read but understand what I choose to read.
Oh give me a break! You just wrote:
"The scientific question about whether or not claims to excess heat from LENR nuclear processes are real or not is hardly intractable. One obvious way to resolve them is to find an experiment which yields large power out, large COP, long duration and consumes little fuel."
This is grotesque ignorance. It shows that you have either read nothing, or you have not understood the most basic facts about what you have read. "Little fuel"?!? Is that supposed to be a joke? "Large power out"?? You have no clue what that means. You have no standard that makes a meaningful distinction between "large power" and "low power." These are empty words. You do not realize (even now I am sure) that 20 to 100 W is the high end of experiments, and that is roughly ~10 to ~50 times more power than scientists first measured 240 years ago. If that is not "high power," what would be? 5 W is "high power" measured by the signal to noise ratio. As I said, you might as well say a kilowatt is not high. It is no more difficult to measure 20 W than 1 kW. It is actually easier.
See:
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Anyone with a science background should be skeptical about any individual LENR claim, just as they should be skeptical at any claims which seem to contradict the current scientific understanding, at least until they can be replicated. Definitions: "Skeptical: not easily convinced; having doubts or reservations." "Gullible: easily persuaded to believe something; credulous.". I think most people here are properly skeptical, most ECW people are gullible (or just not mentally equipped to form a rational opinion).
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This is grotesque ignorance. It shows that you have either read nothing, or you have not understood the most basic facts about what you have read. "Little fuel"?!? Is that supposed to be a joke? "Large power out"?? You have no clue what that means. You have no standard that makes a meaningful distinction between "large power" and "low power." These are empty words. You do not realize (even now I am sure) that 20 to 100 W is the high end of experiments, and that is roughly ~10 to ~50 times more power than scientists first measured 240 years ago. If that is not "high power," what would be? 5 W is "high power" measured by the signal to noise ratio. As I said, you might as well say a kilowatt is not high. It is no more difficult to measure 20 W than 1 kW. It is actually easier.
Broken record, Jed. So here we are again, you can spout off all you want, but despite the potential for trillion dollar industries if what you claim is true, nobody gives it much attention outside of the "usual suspects." Oh sure, you may have a few million dollars here and there from one billionaire or another but absent spectacular results, they will soon loose interest as has most of the "main line" scientific community. And while my attitude and that of most skeptics doesn't matter in any way to the success of LENR, yours does. Your exorbitant claims and pompous style of discussion hurt your cause.
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So here we are again, you can spout off all you want, but despite the potential for trillion dollar industries if what you claim is true, nobody gives it much attention outside of the "usual suspects."
People pay no attention because they don't believe it. They don't believe either because they have never heard of it, or because they are scientific illiterates who have no idea what "high power" means in the context of laboratory calorimetry. People like you. You would be surprised how many important people are as ignorant as you are. See the book "Bad Blood" for examples.
hey will soon loose interest as has most of the "main line" scientific community.
I believe you mean "mainstream." As I mentioned in another thread, you should read the history of neural networks in AI. They are the main reason AI has come alive and Google and others are making billions of dollars. For 20 years, there was such strong opposition to neural networks, you could not get a grant or publish a paper about them. Young researchers who talked about them would be fired. So, the view of the mainstream is not a reliable guide to what is good science. Especially when most of the mainstream critics have read nothing and know nothing, and they repeat the kind of nonsense that you inflict on us here.
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Anyone with a science background should be skeptical about any individual LENR claim, just as they should be skeptical at any claims which seem to contradict the current scientific understanding, at least until they can be replicated.
That's true. Cold fusion claims that have not been widely replicated at high signal to noise ratios should not believed, in my opinion. The question is: how many replications are needed? And how high should the s/n ratio be? That is partly a matter of opinion. Some people will say 3 quality replications are enough. Others may hold out for 5, maybe even 10. However, where there are dozens or hundreds of replications, but you still don't believe it, you have crossed the line from science into voodoo.
Honestly, I don't follow my own rule here. There have been more than 5 replications of biological transmutations, but I still don't know what to make of them. My excuse is that I do not understand these experiments well enough to judge them myself, and I hesitate to believe (or disbelieve!) claims that are over my head.
For that matter, conventional experiments that agree with current scientific understanding should not believed until they are replicated. I suppose it is human nature to lower the bar for them, and believe them more readily, but that's a bad idea. That violates the scientific method, and it has often led people to accept results that turned out to be wrong. You should apply the same rigorous standards to all claims, whether they agree with current understanding or not.
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Complete nonsense again. What I write gives ample proof that I not only read but understand what I choose to read.
Um wat? Probably the best example of you “understanding what you choose to read” is the Roulette paper...
Ya know, I keep looking at the Roulette paper and I don't see 100W out without input power for days? Which text or figure from the paper has those results exactly? That's before we even get to replication. What is it with this zeal to cite papers that don't seem to show what the proponent SAYS they do? At least not in any overt and obvious manner.
Of course, that wasn’t the first time you struggled to get your head around that paper...
That paper seems clear to me, but you said you don't understand it. So I explained it to you, twice. I cannot think of a way to explain it any more clearly. I am afraid you must go through life without understanding this experiment.
There are other papers about heat after death, but if you don't understand this one there is no point to reading the others.
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To go back to Brillouin, I had a few exchanges with Firshein and I'll share the technical part (something is happening on the funding side, but the funding side is confidential up to the point it is not).
Mostly, as Tanzella said at ICCF21, they are working on a new mass-flow calorimetry set-up that they believe would produce results that would be much harder to dismiss than the current complex isoperibolic set-up. It is moving forward and has taken precedence over the isoperibolic set-up, hence the lack of COP announcements.
