You believe 10 impossible things without a hint of evidence
Extreme apophenia
How do you convince a skeptic?
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Nothing specific in your whole post unfortunately.
Actually for you being specific is much more dangerous than apophenia.
"Embarrassing" is when THHuxleynew reads an arxiv paper by Durr et al,2015 and asserts SPECIFICALLY there is 6 figure precision in it
when there is only two figure precision stated in it
and then fails to admit his error
so much for the precision of QED/QCD ... perhaps one needs scepticism..rather than blind faith.. about the precision of current quantum physics
Wow Robert. You are very wedded to past errors - you pointed out that one (in beautiful color as now) at least 10 times on that thread, and now it seems you are back in the rut! Yes, that was an error. And, yes, I admitted it (though the posts there were a bit weird) so maybe you did not see my correction.
And, no, it does not prove your point that QED/QCD is no good. What it shows is that for that (or many) calculations QCD is not able to give very precise answers because of the lack of fast convergence and the complexity of the many-body problem. However, as I've also pointed out, QED gives stunningly accurate calculations (faster convergence). The key fact is that in both cases the theory is precise - and therefore the errors in the calculations can be bounded and the work to make them better is knowable (and tends to get done over time). Where is the quantitative error analysis for these closed equations claiming to calculate significant constants?
And you have no evidence that I've ever has blind faith about the precision of current physics. In fact, I've pointed out that QM and GR as currently formulated are sort of obviously wrong because they don't fit together and we need something along the lines of quantum spacetime where both come from some deeper underlying principle. And progress is being made in that - it is really exciting.
Where we differ is whether a fudged semi-classical equation not linking to the myriad of other observations all of which validate QED should be preferred just because it seems to give quite accurate results for a number not easily derivable accurately from QCD. If the guys promoting this said hey look - we have a theory which gives identical results to QED in all ways - but in addition it gives us a really quick and easy way of doing QCD calculations. Then sure, it would be highly significant. (In the same way as the amplitudihedron is maybe significant).
Do I like QCD? Not much, given its computational complexity. But it fits together with QED and the standard model as a structure that has high predictivity over a very wide range of phenomena. So something to replace it has to do at least that, or however much we like it, it fails the test of modelling reality.
It is ironic that on a site devoted to finding an explanation for experimental data not properly explained by conventional theories, quick fixes to high energy physics should be liked that are not compatible with QED and do not explain the vast amount of incredibly accurate predictions made by it (and, yes, many of the QED results are predictive) that have been observed. Let alone the similar evidence for QCD (which - admittedly - does not have the same ability to make accurate prediction). You have to think all the high energy physics guys are conspiring together (theoreticians - with no interest in experimental money - and experimenters). And that somehow they have all concocted an elaborate fake set of descriptions for observations that are nevertheless self-consistent.
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Extreme apophenia
Robert - apophenia and credulity are quite different things. Apophenia would be seeing patterns that are not there, but are not impossible, just unlikely. Credulity would be believing stuff that is impossible.
In this case I'm being skeptical, not convinced of a whole load of things that convince Jed. But Jed has very definite beliefs in the sense that he has quite a large set of scientific evidence that he thinks is incredibly well validated and therefore just must be true. When looking at specifics he sees certainty of (for example) an experienced calorimetrist making inferences from calorimetric experiments that I do not. Jed tends not to look for subtleties and shades of grey, nor to see that people can be highly competent and still have idee fixee that mean they go on systematically making mistakes.
Jed may or may not be right about me - but if so that is not me seeing non-existent patters - it is me refusing to see existing patterns. The opposite of apophenia.
When Jed says something is impossible that is not necessarily the case.
Jed and I have in many ways quite similar worldviews, I suspect, but we differ profoundly on this issue of trusting individual scientists. Jed does, I don't.
Jed will perhaps disagree with some or all of the above.
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In this case I'm being skeptical, not convinced of a whole load of things that convince Jed. But Jed has very definite beliefs in the sense that he has quite a large set of scientific evidence that he thinks is incredibly well validated and therefore just must be true.
I also have a large set of scientific evidence that has not been well validated, such as claims of heat from Ni-H systems, and many transmutation claims. I don't know whether that is true or not. Only a few claims in cold fusion are supported by many replications and incredibly well validated:
- The effect produces far more heat than any chemical reaction in continuous reactions. Up to 100,000 times more, and the upper limits are not know.
- The effect produces helium in the same ratio to the heat as D+D => He fusion (one plasma fusion path).
- The effect sometimes produces tritium. It is far above background, sometimes by 10+ orders of magnitude, but below plasma fusion levels, and it varies.
All other claims range from maybe, to who knows, to whaaat? -- such as Au and Ti cold fusion, or Smith & George's gamma rays. Pd on Ni is starting to look real to me, but I am still not 100% convinced, even though I just co-authored a paper making that claim. How's that for skepticism?! I write a paper and I don't even convince myself. You are a piker in the skepticism racket compared to me. You hardly know what the word means.
When looking at specifics he sees certainty of (for example) an experienced calorimetrist making inferences from calorimetric experiments that I do not.
I wouldn't call what Fleischmann, Rob Duncan or McKubre does "inferences." That would be like saying I infer what a word means when I translate a document from Japanese. No, I have been doing that for 40 years and I have many dictionaries, so there is no guesswork or inference involved.
Fleischmann et al. are not inferring anything. They are applying textbook calorimetry to the experiments, including techniques and instruments going back to Lavoisier in 1780, and Joule circa 1840, as Fleischmann himself pointed out. You are the one inventing magical inferences to show that this is wrong, even though it is the bedrock basis of chemistry and physics. As Fleischmann said, we are painfully conventional people. You are the radical, throwing away the textbooks, ignoring the facts, and inventing new-age science to fit your preconceptions and justify your bias against cold fusion.
Also, I have seen professional experts in calorimetry make mistakes. I only believe them when many of them do the experiment, achieve similar results, and reach similar conclusions. Experimental science must have replications. You, on the other hand, look at one experiment at a time, you ignore the totality of the evidence, and you invent impossible reasons to reject one piece of one experiment at a time. For example, you claim the boil off results might be caused by a phenomenon that no one noticed in the last 600 years -- even though it would be visible to the naked eye -- and you ignore the heat before and after the boil off. So you have invented one ad hoc impossible objection to one part of one experiment, and you reject the whole field on that basis. And you call yourself a skeptic!
Jed tends not to look for subtleties and shades of grey,
The pot calls the kettle black.
In this case I'm being skeptical, not convinced of a whole load of things that convince Jed. But Jed has very definite beliefs in the sense that he has quite a large set of scientific evidence that he thinks is incredibly well validated and therefore just must be true.
No, you are the opposite of a skeptic. A true skeptic questions his own judgement first. You have definite belief that incredibly well validated calorimetry from dozens of the worlds top experts is wrong because you think that steam can push droplets of pure water up a narrow, long test tube, removing 2/3rds of the water. That is about as far from skepticism as a person can get.
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Come to think of it, THHuxley is also wrong from thermodynamics. All of the water leaves the cell. All of the lithium salt is left behind. Therefore, all of the water vaporized. If some of the water cools at the top of the headspace and condenses into droplets, that would not change the heat balance. That would just mean the top of the test tube is radiating heat. If some of the droplets are magically pushed up and out of the headspace, that still would not change the heat balance.
What actually happens in same cases is that drops form and fall back into the electrolyte. That means the heat is not accounted for by vaporization, and more heat is produced than the numbers show. A properly done calibration always shows a heat balance below 1, because there are always losses unaccounted for.
If there were wet steam, that might show a false balance greater than 1. There was no significant wet steam in this cell, because if there had been, it would have removed some of the salt.
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THHuxley is also wrong from thermodynamics. All of the water leaves the cell. All of the lithium salt is left behind. Therefore, all of the water vaporized.
Yes, THH is wrong: (almost) all of the water vaporized. But it took several hours to vaporize the initial liquid content of the cells during the 1992 boil-off experiment. Only a few milliliters of water vaporized during the final 10 minutes considered by F&P in their calculation, the balance being just foam (1)!
The electric energy which fed the cell was sufficient to fully explain the experimental behavior.
So you and F&P are also wrong.
(1) FP's experiments discussion
Just a reminder.
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But it took several hours to vaporize the initial liquid content of the cells during the 1992 boil-off experiment.
No, it took ten minutes. You disagree, but you are imagining things.
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Ahlfors: If you read the old slides and see the arguments of people that only have kinetic physics experience than it is clear why the CF/LENR history went the wrong way.
Terms like coulomb barrier are only relevant in kinetic experiments. They have no value for LENR at all. The newest theoretical modeling of e.g. the proton internal forces/masses shows that magnetic and coulomb forces, on the nuclear level, are interchangeable and that all moving/rotating mass is added as magnetic flux.
This is the thing SM misses as it is pure potential based.
The SM arguments against CF/LENR have the same level as the historical Phlogiston discussion! Future history books of physics will have huge appendixes with a long list of all the fools and their arguments against CF.
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No, it took ten minutes. You disagree, but you are imagining things.
Ten minutes for vaporizing the initial water content?
You are wrong even with respect to what F&P wrote in their paper (1): "the cell would have become half empty 11 minutes before dryness, as observed from the video recordings (see the next section) and this in turn requires a period of intense boiling during the last 11 minutes."
So, the 11 minutes they claimed was referred only to half of the water content. Moreover, in their calculations on Page 16, F&P rounded this figure down to 600 seconds, but on the basis of their video it should have been at least 20 minutes (2) for an (apparent!) drop of less than half the cell volume. In reality, the equivalent liquid mass vaporized in the final boil-off phase was much less, because – at that point - the cell content was mainly foam, as shown in their experimental video (3).
They were F&P, who had a vivid imagination!
(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf
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http://newenergytimes.com/v2/archives/fic/facts.shtml
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/archives/fic/nen.shtml
If you need an LENR belief booster shot to counter the dose of negativism being meted out, these old Hal Fox editions of the "Fusion Facts" will do the trick. He was the first to start reporting on CF, only a few months after FP's (July 1989). His Newsletter was published monthly for the next 10 years. He died in 2012.
He gives in-depth, science based descriptions about what was going on around the field....almost as it happened. No need to wait for the next ICCF to learn what your colleagues were up to. Obviously a well connected, and respected man for him to have so many sources around the world willing to "tell all". Mallove appeared on the scene about then, and between the two of them, they covered everything extremely well. I get the impression there were few secrets during those times.
Take your pick of any edition, and read. It is all good, although the later issues had the "usual suspects".
I particularly liked the Oct 1990 issue, as it illustrates how, in the beginning, there were already many high quality researchers, from some of the best institutions around the globe having one success after another. They were seeing neutrons, tritium, XH -even while still under the publicly harsh criticisms of their mainstream colleagues. Tough bunch. -
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The goal is to find a solution to this intractable scientific question and develop a much-needed technology. You must be specific if you have claims of error, because most of these OG scientists have spent their careers answering every possible critique already, and specifics are out there.
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. Finding radiation or isotopic "ash" would also help. What is "large" and "long" enough can be argued but the more spectacular, the better for the cause. Of course, Jed will give impressive numbers to show that all this has been done.
But in addition to scattered occasional results which suggest reality for LENR, one also needs replication by unimpeachable sources. More than one would be helpful. The replicated experiments must be identical. The replicators must be able to disconnect from anything provided by the inventor and must operate the device as a black box, or alternatively, they can be allowed to dismantle it and "kick the tires." Or as one of the people who debunked Steorn used to say, "Let me take a screwdriver to it." I maintain this ultimate verifier would best be a government lab like Sandia.
Another possible next step for a company like Brillouin which has hinted that it is close to making actual boilers, is to make one, the larger the better, and turn it over to others for testing.
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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.
That has been done, hundreds of times. The problem is that so-called "skeptics" such as you don't believe it has been done. Or you don't understand what has been done. All of your statements here are ignorant nonsense, because:
You have no idea what "large power out" means in the context of a laboratory experiment. 1 W is large. 2 W is so large, Lavoisier measured it with confidence in 1780. That is the metabolic rate of a guinea pig, which is what he measured using the first modern calorimeter. Many cold fusion experiments have exceeded these power levels, sometimes producing 20 to 100 W. Yet you and others claim that every power rate has been small and somehow difficult to measure. That's preposterous.
http://genomics.senescence.inf…p?species=Cavia_porcellus
http://courses.washington.edu/biol462/2005Metabolism1.pdf
https://www.macmillanihe.com/r…/9780878936625_sample.pdf
You think that a "COP" has meaning. This is nonsense, because input power is not noise, and because many experiments have no input power.
Long duration. Most experiments produce continuous heat for days or weeks. Some have gone for a month. There is no chemical fuel in a cold fusion cell, so it could not produce measurable heat for even 10 seconds. There is only water and metal. All of energy input into electrolysis comes right out, and is accounted for. There are no chemical changes in the final state of the cell. But suppose we pretend the cathode was made of wood and there was oxygen available. A typical cathode is the size of a wooden match. The cell would produce about 1 BTU or 1050 J, and continue for about a minute. (This is what wooden matches are designed to do.) There are 43,800 minutes in a month. So: is the difference between 1 and 43,800 big, or small? Mary Yugo repeatedly said that such numbers are negligible. What do you think? (That's a time comparison, assuming the cell produces 18 W on average. The cell that went for a month produced ~100 W on average, so the ratio was actually a lot larger. But the entire example is imaginary.)
"Consumes little fuel" is nonsense to the fifth power. No cold fusion in history has ever consumed any chemical fuel. Not one nanogram. As I said, the chemical state in a cell is the same after an experiment as it was before, where the energy produced would sometimes require that you burn all of the books, papers and furniture in the laboratory to produce that much chemical energy. The nuclear product, helium, has been measured repeatedly with confidence. It is on the nanogram scale, but it can be measured with confidence using modern instruments, and some of the best instruments in the world have been used to confirm cold fusion helium production. Tritium has also been produced and it is far easier to detect, because it is radioactive.
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And you have no evidence that I've ever has blind faith about the precision of current physics
No evidence?? Who sees 6 figure precision in percentage accuracy.?
Stephan Durr wrote percentage precision ..... but THHuxley wrote 6 figure precision.
That is blind faith.
And, no, it does not prove your point that QED/QCD is no good
You can't read. I said CURRENT quantum physics.
The success/precision with the hydrogen electron is not current. That was half a century ago.
Since 2008.. 2015 ,, QCD/QED fails at the nuclear level ... despite all the superflops of the supercomputers.
Garbage in ... 2 figure precision out
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Robert:
Blind faith is believing something, or holding onto specific things repeating them ad infinitum in spite of evidence.
Science is about comparing hypotheses, admitting mistakes (which are always made) revising judgements.
Since 2008.. 2015 ,, QCD/QED fails at the nuclear level ... despite all the superflops of the supercomputers.
Garbage in ... 2 figure precision out
Delete the emotive language - I'd agree on QCD, computational issues v difficult, but of course not QED where it beats all others and is the most accurately validated physical theory:https://www.researchgate.net/p…es_in_highly-charged_ions
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You can't read. I said CURRENT quantum physics.
The success/precision with the hydrogen electron is not current. That was half a century ago.
Please see the 21st century experimental tests I referenced?
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They were seeing neutrons, tritium, XH
So where have all those seen neutrons gone?
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They were seeing neutrons, tritium, XH
They who? What are you talking about?
There have been a few reports of neutrons in cold fusion. Storms and others think they are the product of conventional fractofusion. Others have shown they are anti-correlated with excess heat, so perhaps they are some sort of precursor effect. In any case, they are rare, and I don't think you can draw conclusions from such sparse data. As I said above, many claims in this field, "range from maybe, to who knows, to whaaat?" I would put neutrons under "who knows."
"Whaaat" would include biological transmutation, by the way. In my opinion.
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It seems to me that the more pertinent question is not how to convince a skeptic that CF/LENR is real but rather persuading them why they should care. That is not a nonsensical concept. The field has been around for 30 years and has involved hundreds of researchers around the world and thousands of experiments. Despite this fact, it remains a nearly subterranean topic of science, scorned by some and ignored by most. This state of affairs is widely attributed to suppression, career destruction of people pursuing the topic, lack of funds, dying researchers, and so on. Perhaps these explanations are entirely correct and comprehensive. But, as people are fond of saying these days, it is what it is.
So the question skeptics who have no axe to grind still have to ask is: what reason is there to expect that this situation will change? According to Jed and others, we have all the verification of the phenomenon that one could reasonably demand and yet the status of the field is largely unchanged. What will be the state of affairs in this field five years from now? If it is materially different from where it is today, what is going to make that happen? What are we all waiting for? Heading back to the topic of this thread, I strongly doubt that changing the viewpoint of people like THH or SOT will make the slightest difference.
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Perhaps these explanations are entirely correct and comprehensive.
Exceedingly improbable. LENR being true is vastly more interesting, profitable and fun than it's not being so.
QuoteHeading back to the topic of this thread, I strongly doubt that changing the viewpoint of people like THH or SOT will make the slightest difference.
Exactly. I do have a few influential contacts but it is very unlikely that I would know of LENR news that would escape them, given how the internet and Google automatic searches work. In sketchy cases, I might influence the testing program these people would ask for, as I have in the past, but even that is a minor influence except when it keeps someone out of the Rossisphere or similar scams. Convince a few chairmen of physics or nuclear engineering departments in major universities and some principal scientists at prestigious major national labs that LENR is real and you will make progress. And I don't mean the "usual suspects." I also don't mean elderly statesmen or scientists past their prime who may have been at said prestigious institutions but are now retired or emeritus from them.
