How do you convince a skeptic?

Quote from THHuxleynew

Well: Alan (for example) has here claimed, I believe, that he has a replicable experiment that generates gammas when it should not. That would, if so, be an LRE.

If his experiment is, in fact, replicated, that might be true. I cannot judge, because I have no idea what he is doing in his experiment. He has described the equipment, but not the procedures or results, and he has not said how easy or difficult it is to replicate.

The definition of "lab rat" is a little unclear in any case. Would that be an experiment that any high school kid can replicate? Or would it be something like replicating a Nicad battery, which takes a team of industrial engineers? Or would that be a tokamak, which cost billions but which can be replicated, and which work consistently? Would an LRE be like cloning a sheep, which works one time per thousand attempts? Is that not a valid "lab rat" experiment, even when lab rats are cloned? The answers are not clear to me. Heck, the questions are not clear -- never mind the answers. Actually, I think the whole discussion of lab rats is baloney.

Quote from THHuxleynew

If the historic experiments, as you have many times claimed, are replicable, many of them would be decent LREs.

They are indeed replicable, but like Nicad batteries, they can only be replicated by experts. The methods are described in detail. They take a year or two to replicate with manual methods. With proper equipment you could replicate one in a few days. See:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf

However, the historic experiments have not convinced you, even though they have been replicated at dozens of labs, hundreds of times. So even if they were performed again another thousand times, they still would not convince you. Perhaps you are saying they would convince other people.

Quote from THHuxleynew

You perhaps will claim that although individual experiments are not LREs, because they do not always work due to uncontrolled unknowns, the FPHE is replicated (by different experiments).

It is not clear to me whether the definition of an "LRE" is that it is easily replicated, or the success rate is high. You appear to be applying those demands to cold fusion, but they have never been applied to any other science or technology as far as I know. On the contrary, people usually expect that science will be difficult. No one ever says that Nicad batteries, Intel processors, tokamak reactors or Martian robots are difficult to make therefore they are not good experiments, or they don't exist, or something is wrong with them. It is unclear to me what might be wrong, or how anyone expects to do science without difficulties. This is like expecting to go to the North Pole without encountering cold weather, or writing a program without debugging.

The success rate for many early transistors was lower than it is for cold fusion, but no one claimed transistors did not exist. For early U.S. rockets in the 1950s, the success rate was far lower -- close to zero -- and the difficulty and cost were astronomical but no one claimed rockets do not exist. Rockets were good test beds for high atmosphere studies and for learning how to make rockets. They accomplished a great deal of science. So I suppose they were good "lab rats." Cold fusion is far easier than rockets were. It is far easier and more reliable than early 1950s computers, such as the IAS. That machine had to run programs again and again until they got the same answer three times, and this sometimes took hours or days. See the book Turing's Cathedral, by George Dyson.

Quote

the demand rises to 1 kW. (The ever-in-motion goalposts, or "Mary Yugo" standard.)

Can you link where MY or anyone said or wrote that a kilowatt is the minimum standard for accepting LENR as real? I don't recall ever seeing it and I suspect, like a lot of things, you are making it up to suit your narrative.

Quote from [email protected]

THH: there have been so many apparent positives that on further study prove negative,

***Really? Out of those 153 peer reviewed replications of the PFAHE, how many "apparent positives on further study proved negative"? You throw that out so glibly that it shouldn't take more than 30 seconds for you to come up with an answer.

Indeed, THH has often said this, as have other so-called skeptics, but they have never shown any error in any mainstream experiment, and they never will. If they could have, they would have, years ago. THH has never pointed to paper showing errors, because there are none.

To his credit, he did come up with a just-so story for the boil off experiments. Water condenses in small droplets, and steam pushes these droplets up and out of the test tube. Since the steam pressure is perhaps ~1.0001 times atmospheric pressure, this is utterly impossible. Anyone can boil water in a test tube and see this does not happen. You never measure 3 times apparent excess heat. You never see macroscopic amounts of water being driven up and out, and you would have to see quite a lot. So, this explanation is about as far from being science as anything can be, but at least THH made a brave effort to come up with something. Most skeptics never even try to justify their beliefs.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Can you link where MY or anyone said or wrote that a kilowatt is the minimum standard for accepting LENR as real?

No, I cannot. The search functions here are unusable. I can't even find my own messages! You'll have to take my word for it.

Quote from THHuxleynew

You perhaps will claim that although individual experiments are not LREs, because they do not always work due to uncontrolled unknowns, the FPHE is replicated (by different experiments).

I understand that but a LRE could be posed in a stochastic form: prepare this and with 20% probability an anomaly will be observed. That is good enough for an LRE, because the experiment repeated (with different materials perhaps) 20X gives a high probability of success.

Actually, the literature does not say there are uncontrolled unknowns, or that the process is stochastic. Some known factors are uncontrolled. McKubre, Storms and other describe the control parameters and necessary conditions in detail. When these conditions are met, the experiment works. It produces heat in predictable amounts. The problem is that it is often difficult to meet these conditions, mainly because of materials. (See Storms for details.) This resembles the situation with rockets. When everything works, a rocket will reach space and deploy the satellite. When something fails, the rocket goes out of control or explodes. However, the failures are not caused by "unknown" factors. The telemetry almost always reveals the problem. When a cold fusion experiment fails to produce heat, an expert can look at the materials and the data and tell you why it failed.

So this is an imaginary version of cold fusion. If things were unknown and stochastic, you might have a point, but they aren't so you don't. Frankly, I do not see much point to speculating about how an imaginary version of cold fusion in a parallel universe might work. I suggest you read the literature and learn how it actually works here on Planet Earth.

Why you set 20% as an acceptable level is a mystery to me, but this goal can be met in a predictable fashion. It takes experts, a few years, a fully equipped lab, and a barrel of money. When you spend a year or two testing and preparing ~100 samples of material, following published procedures, you will get between 0 to 5 cathodes that work 100% of the time. You will get 5 if you are lucky, or 0 if you start off with material that can never load or work. Testing will show it cannot work. You don't need to do the actual cold fusion experiment. All of the material may fail at the test stage, but if any passes, the cold fusion phase of the experiment will work.

Quote from THHuxleynew

If the historic experiments, as you have many times claimed, are replicable, many of them would be decent LREs.

Many scientists have replicable experiments with gammas. They avoided publishing this fact because they could not explain the gammas. On the other side 10000's of papers with a multiple of authors have claimed that the strong force causes what they measure even, if they knew it was wrong, just to avoid that the physics temple priests won't reject their papers. It is a well known fact that nobody ever measured a strong force, that is different from the magnetic force...

I would say that people like you are a risk for the world as you and e.g. Ascoli are for strange reasons trying to downplay well replicated scientific facts.

CERN is hunting for new money, ITER is spoiling it day for day. Thousands of physicists live on an income that is based on the so called standard model. When you once do understand the clean and elegant solution of physics in SO(4), then you will notice that a well organized physicists army did cheat the world for more than 50 years up to now, partially with claims that can be summed up as outraging nonsense!

We do not have to convince skeptics. We only have to find people that are not infected by conformism and are willing to rethink their position. Of course first they have to lear some small pieces of new math.

Wyttenbach's conspiracy-laden worldview fills me with worry that he actually has nothing.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Many scientists have replicable experiments with gammas. They avoided publishing this fact because they could not explain the gammas.

I assume you mean cold fusion experiments. Not, for example, Farnsworth Fusor reactors, which can be explained conventionally.

I have said that I don't know about most of these gamma ray experiments. I have not heard of them and they are not in my EndNote files. Meaning Ed Storms did not make notes about most of them, and the abstracts I have on file do not talk about them. You say the authors have avoided publishing. Okay, that's why I haven't heard about them. I am out of the loop, so I wouldn't hear about them unless they showed up at an ICCF or submitted a paper to JCMNS. Let me say -- with emphasis! -- that just because I don't know about a claim, that does not magically invalidate it. There are claims in cold fusion I have not heard about, and others I forgot about, and many others I do not understand.

Along the same lines, I have no idea what Alan Smith and Russ George are up to. I have no idea whether it is replicable, or whether it would be a good "lab rat," or even whether it works. I know they say it works, but I cannot judge whether they are right or wrong. People are often wrong. Russ George seemed offended that I did not take his word for it. He should have known that I never take anyone's word for anything. I cannot judge because they have only described the instruments, not the experiments or any of the data. Since I know little about gamma ray detection, I probably could not judge even if they published in detail. However, the fact that I do not know has no bearing on whether it is true or not! My ignorance, or your ignorance -- or the ignorance of the staff at Nature or the DoE -- are not valid reasons to reject a claim. Ignorance should never be taken as criticism or a rejection of a claim.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Can you link where MY or anyone said or wrote that a kilowatt is the minimum standard for accepting LENR as real? I don't recall ever seeing it and I suspect, like a lot of things, you are making it up to suit your narrative.

Talking of Mary’s famous 100W challenge...

Mary, how are you getting on with that Roulette paper, that you were asking Jed for a link to last week?

Better than the last time, hopefully?

Back then Jed reckoned you were doomed to go through life without ever understanding it...

... I wouldn’t call it moving the goalposts. It’s more like, not knowing anything about football in the first place, but running around and trying to explain the offside rule to everyone.

Quote from JedRothwell

Along the same lines, I have no idea what Alan Smith and Russ George are up to

Many of the significant result are present in a noisy area(0-200eV)

Close observation and statistical analysis

of this region while changing experimental parameters

appears to have revealed new insights.

It is possible that previous 'gammaless' investigations

did see transitory effects

but did not further investigate them

Jirohta Kasagi who has investigated cold fusion for decades asked

for investigations in the 0-50eV region at ICCF21.

Quote

No, I cannot. The search functions here are unusable. I can't even find my own messages! You'll have to take my word for it.

I see. So if someone critiques your claims, they have to have purely technical reasons and evidence to do so while if you cite something that likely never happened, we have to take your word for it.

BTW, you can always try: site:lenr-forum.com and the search term(s). Lets Google do some of the heavy lifting.

Quote from Bruce__H

fills me with worry that he actually has nothing.

Bruce-H has something in addition to vacuous comments.

He can use a calculator... he has shown that at least

For me the revelation that my homeland's icon

of physics, Ernest Rutherford, didn't know that much

was eyeopening... inter alia.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Many scientists have replicable experiments with gammas. They avoided publishing this fact because they could not explain the gammas.

I would say that people like you are a risk for the world as you and e.g. Ascoli are for strange reasons trying to downplay well replicated scientific facts.

That is a strange viewpoint. If there are replicable experiments with unexplained gamma emissions that is concrete experimental evidence of new physics.

Scientists really love new physics - even when they don't much believe it. You have only got to look ta the FTL neutrino reaction. Was there skepticism? Sure. But also a lot of people rushing to replicate, and a lot of theoreticians trying to explain. The predominant reaction was; "we expect it is not true - and it would shake up Physics - but would it not be great if it were". Do you notice any suppression?

Also, Journals love novelty - and anomalous results, well documented and replicable, are a sure fire way to get published.

Why on earth would any experimental physicist avoid publishing unexpected results?

I'm not aware I'm trying to downplay anything, and I believe you have given here no evidence of that.

Alan Smith ,

How are gammas differentiated from x-rays in your work?