Where is the LENR goal line, and how best do we get there?

Quote from JedRothwell

I hesitate to ask, but what do you think went wrong at U. Missouri's SKINR? They were not able to replicate convincingly, although Dennis Pease told me he thought they did replicate. Was that not a "dream team"? If so, why not?

Essentially everything went wrong from attitude to leadership. Energetics (and I) gave SKINR a beautiful start in a research park near Mizzou, and my good friend (and friend of LENR) Sidney Kimmel (SK) was extremely badly served at SKINR. I don't want to go into detail as some of it is very personal, involving good folk who are still hurting. Arik El Boher is a very capable engineer who helped design and operated perhaps the best experiment ever run in LENR (reported at ICCF10). Dennis Pease is a great guy - and is correct. I wish him well and will help if possible. Replications were accomplished at SKINR albeit not with the amazing results of the 2003 Glow Discharge or ETI-64 that I have spoken about so often. There was a significant diversion of effort away from what had and was likely to succeed (according to me ) but the failure at SKINR was of securing funding continuity to supplement SK's support for his eponymous research center. This failure was due to inexperience (and ill direction, and late attempts) in fund raising, and diversion of focus into - aaah - ethereal realms.

You can see why I do not want to say more at this time. But no ... SKINR was not any kind of "dream team" (sadly). And it was certainly not "my dream team" and had no members of it ... although we will certainly need a superwaves expert to succeed.

Quote from mmckubre

This failure was due to inexperience (and ill direction, and late attempts) in fund raising, and diversion of focus into - aaah - ethereal realms.

Thanks! I heard about most of this, except the ethereal part.

As I said, the equipment is at Dennis's house, close to the university. He bought all of the equipment for a nominal sum, far less than it is worth. I think he said some people had their eyes on the stuff and were chagrined when he bought it for a song, right out from under them. He wants to try again, and he is looking for a sponsor. It would be an inexpensive way to get a project going.

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What it will take to convince the skeptics, and bring mainstream science onboard.

I never understood this zeal to "convince" skeptics. WTF do skeptics matter? Sure it would help to have "mainstream science (whatever that is)" onboard. But you really need to convince investors and entrepreneurs. And the only way you will ever do that again on a large scale is with a bullet proof demonstration.

To whom it may concern - Dennis P has his hands full right now that will remain the case for the next year or so. The SKINR team accomplished more than has been published and got somewhat shafted at the end. The worthy experiments continue. Thats all I have to say about that.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

I never understood this zeal to "convince" skeptics. WTF do skeptics matter? Sure it would help to have "mainstream science (whatever that is)" onboard. But you really need to convince investors and entrepreneurs.

Many people who call themselves skeptics with regard to cold fusion are not actually skeptics at all. They are ignorant, biased, true believers. It is best to ignore them.

There is no way to convince "mainstream science" at present, because no mainstream journal, magazine or newspaper will publish results. They will only say that cold fusion was a mistake, fraud and lunacy, and it was never replicated. So, you need to start with a less-than-mainstream approach.

You cannot convince investors and entrepreneurs until you convince more scientists. This can be done, as we see from the vast numbers of readers from diverse organizations at LENR-CANR.org. Investors always send a scientist to review the results. You have to convince that scientist, which is impossible if he is a so-called skeptic. Sometimes they send a rational scientist instead, in which case you can convince him.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

And the only way you will ever do that again on a large scale is with a bullet proof demonstration.

There is no such thing as a bullet-proof demonstration. A pseudo-skeptic will always find fault with a demonstration or an experiment, even if he has to invent the fault. That is what you see in the papers by Morrison, for example, where he goes on for pages saying "you should not use a complicated non-linear regression analysis." As Fleischmann pointed out in his rebuttal, they did not use that technique.

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

Scientists tend to be persuaded by experiment rather than demonstrations. There are hundreds of bullet-proof experiments. No one has ever published a paper showing an error in any of them, so that makes them bullet-proof. If the person you are trying to persuade is not convinced by Fleischmann's boil off experiments, McKubre's calorimetry, or Miles' helium correlations, that person is not a scientist and cannot be persuaded. (Not a scientist with regard to this subject, anyway.) You are wasting you time talking to him. There are hundreds of thousands of other scientists, so talk to one of them instead.

Quote from Shane D.

And all along I thought trying to convince skeptics was a part of the science process. Just shows how little I know.

As I said, not the people who call themselves skeptics in this context.

Quote from Dewey Weaver

To whom it may concern - Dennis P has his hands full right now that will remain the case for the next year or so.

That is not what he told me. He said his hands are full with but with funding he can offload some of that work.

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You cannot convince investors and entrepreneurs until you convince more scientists.

Heh! Tell that to Tom Darden. Also Sidney Kimmel and several others I can't think of at the moment who invested in some claim or other for LENR or BLP.

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Scientists tend to be persuaded by experiment rather than demonstrations.

That's a bit hair splitting. How about demonstrations of experiments?

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Heh! Tell that to Tom Darden. Also Sidney Kimmel and several others I can't think of at the moment who invested in some claim or other for LENR or BLP.

When I last heard from them, Darden and Kimmel were still convinced that cold fusion is real. Darden does not think Rossi's claims are real.

I have no knowledge of BLP, or what the investors think.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

That's a bit hair splitting. How about demonstrations of experiments?

People who visit labs often see demonstrations of experiments. Except that experiments tend to stop and start unexpectedly, often just when a visitor shows up. Bockris described this. Someone will visit for 3 days just when it stopped working. That person will see nothing & go home, disappointed. At 3 a.m. the next morning it will start working again.

That is a nuisance. However, suppose you visit a lab and you see that the equipment is up to snuff, and the calorimetry is producing accurate and highly precise results showing a balance of input and output. Suppose you also see data from the same equipment showing excess heat at a high signal to noise ratio. That should convince you. If it doesn't convince you, you are not a scientist and you have no business visiting or judging the situation. A scientist should not have to see a phenomenon occur right then and there, before his own eyes, to believe it happened. There are vast areas of science where this never happens, and where it cannot happen. For example, no scientist ever directly observed:

The extinction of any prehistoric species.

The ice ages.

A super-nova explosion close up.

The surface of Mars, close up, in person.

Only a handful of scientists observed the first fission chain reaction of the Chicago-1 pile, but everyone who heard about it, believed it. Anyone who looks at McKubre's data should believe it.

Convincing an investor requires much more than convincing a scientist they send to evaluate it. They could get enthusiastic approval from the scientist but still decide it is not a viable business. They need to be convinced that they will make 10X their investment within a reasonable time period (5-10 years). They all remember losing money on investments because they invested too early. It is much safer to wait and invest once someone else has proven business viability.

Any market with enough potential to interest an investor is also big enough that the first mover in that market can not dominate it and shut out others. There is little risk to the investor in waiting for someone else to blaze the trail.

Even without the sigma associated with LENR, the investment bar would be very high because the time frame for understanding the underlying science is still unbounded, and no one has yet made any money off of LENR devices. A demo would need to be pretty close to a viable product before it would convince most investors.

Quote from JedRothwell

Someone will visit for 3 days just when it stopped working. That person will see nothing & go home, disappointed. At 3 a.m. the next morning it will start working again.

A muon a day keeps the investor away!

Quote from interested observer

I have learned something new about science. If something is published in a paper and there is no subsequent paper disproving the claims of the first paper, then the claims of the first paper are proven. So the secret to success in science is to make sure nobody reads your papers.

Who said that? That's nonsense. Claims have to be replicated before they can be believed. There are some exceptions such as the first fission chain reaction of the Chicago-1 pile, and the first explosion of a fission bomb, but these came as the culmination of a long set of previous experiments and the results were predicted. Also, the first explosion was widely observed by many people, some of them very far away, and there was no doubt it was nuclear, not chemical.

Also, no technically literate person doubts that the first manned flight to the moon was successful. That was not a scientific experiment in any sense. On the other hand, the tests of the moon rocks and data transmitted from sensors on the moon were scientific. They continue to this day, and they still yield puzzling results that have not been confirmed. Some data tapes thought to be lost were recently recovered which helped resolve one problem. See:

https://www.space.com/40875-ap…-caused-moon-warming.html

Other tests and experiments in science and technology were less convincing than people realize. Here are two famous examples of tests that worked, but only an expert could have appreciated that:

When the people at Bell Labs made the first transistor, they assumed it was amplifying the signal. But they were not sure of the until the next day (or a few days later -- I don't recall) when someone experienced with amplifiers suggested they set up a feedback loop, to see if it generated a sine wave. Which it did.

The first three tests of an airplane, on Dec. 16, 1903, would not have looked much different from many previous failed tests of airplanes, such as Maxim's in 1894. These previous tests failed because they were uncontrolled. The Wrights were successful for a long list of technical reasons spelled out by Wilbur Wright in an essay that I do not think many people would understand, then or now. They could see from the results that much longer, controlled, powered flight was possible. The fourth test was clearer even to amateur observers. There were actual amateur observers there, from the Coast Guard station. They could see it was flying in all four tests but they probably would have thought that previous flights by other people were also flying, which was not technically true.

Previous attempts at flight that looked liked flight to amateurs gave rise to many claims that the Wrights were not the first to fly. In a sense that is true; they were not the first. The first person to fall off a cliff was the first to fly, but not in a controlled fashion.