F&P's experiments – 30 years after CF announcement

F&P's experiments – 30 years after CF announcement

In less than one month, on March 23, it will be celebrated the 30^th anniversary of the press conference held in 1989 at the University of Utah, during which Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons revealed the results of their electrolytic experiments and claimed the discovery of a nuclear phenomenon which produced anomalous excess heat, thereafter called Cold Fusion.

This thread is intended to provide a suitable place where the L-F members can discuss about the two founders of CF and their experiments in view of this important event.

Ref. Clearance Items

Quote from DnG

There are TV documentaries on this you may like to attach to this thread concerning the test,, the push to publish .. the names of the additional assssets assisting...

It may help with .. new to science, understand one of the many ways we each are introduced~

The thread title focuses on the F&P experiments. The 30° anniversary of the CF announcement offers the rigth opportunity to review them once again and reanalyze their results. I hope that it can be done by sticking to science and facts, and avoiding any ad-hom/conspiracy controversy.

The best visual document to introduce the subjects of this thread is the video of the F&P press conference held on March 23, 1989, at the University of Utah:

Quote from DnG

You can start a book at the last page but few would know the story. context out of place,, telling the story this way is always called an agenda, start at the first page .

The March 23, 1989 press conference of F&P is mentioned in the first paragraph of almost every history on Cold Fusion, regardless of their being pro or cons its reality.

My personal position is well known: I see no reason to believe in the reality of the F&P effect. I am aware that this position is not popular, to say the least, among the members of this LENR-forum, however this is the only place on earth where it is possible to see at which extent it is valid, by gathering constructive criticisms - based on facts and, hopefully, on new data - in order to better understand how the F&P results were obtained.

Over the past 30 years, F&P experiments have been considered by the LENR community as indisputable examples of good practice in conducting and documenting CF tests. But over the last decade more documents have been published on the internet which provides new info on these experiments. In particular, the publication of some videos allowed the public to directly evaluate the behavior of the F&P electrolytic cells during the most crucial phases of their boil-off experiments. This new evidences are in clear contrast with the results reported in some important F&P papers.

The 30° anniversary is a good opportunity to solicit informed and authoritative confirmations on the existence of these inconsistencies, which in turn could lead to a wider debate on the reality of the effect claimed by F&P.

Quote from DnG

I've read what you all wrote in here for the most part and the frustrations in the boil off. seems to me if one is looking for nothing exciting to happen from the start as they are tinkering, the need to keep accurate measurement was not so important. The push and help should be noted. The impatience had a part to play in this story..

That would be a interesting starting point.

Yes, impatience is an interesting possible cause of error. It could have played a role in speeding up the announcement of the boil-off results at ICCF3 of Nagoya.

The 4-cell experiment carried on at IMRA France, started on April 11, 1992 and lasted about 4 weeks. Therefore F&P saw the lab video in mid-May. For MF, who stayed in England for the whole duration of the experiment (1), it was the first time ever that he saw the behavior of those 4 cells during that specific experiment. I don't know if SP was at IMRA lab during that period and witnessed some of the boil-off phases.

In any case, impatience could have led them to erroneously conclude that the apparent lowering of the level inside the cells was due to a rapid vaporization of boiling liquid, deducing in this way the wrong value of excess heat reported in their paper to ICCF3 (2). They may have been too impatient to anticipate this alleged outcome to the IMRA management and submit a paper to the ICCF3 which was scheduled in October, only a few months later.

I wonder if the Japanese guest, who appears in the Truthloader video showing the date of June 23 (3), was invited after having deduced the apparently extraordinary results of the 4-cell boil-off test. In such a case, F&P would have completed their analyses of the raw data in a few weeks.

Regarding accuracy in the boil-off experiment, F&P wrote (2): "As it is possible to repeatedly reverse and run forward the video recordings at any stage of operation, it also becomes possible to make reasonably accurate estimates of the cell contents". Now, almost 3 decades after their experiments, it's time to understand what "reasonably accurate" means when referring to F&P's claims.

(1) FP's experiments discussion

(2) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(3) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from DnG

Odd how fast they remove content from the net.

Seems many of the Documentaries are gone ..including F&Ps

https://documentaryheaven.com/…-war-against-cold-fusion/

Too bad that the documentary you have linked (HEAVY WATERGATE The War Against Cold Fusion) is no longer available on YT. It would be important to keep as much as possible of the documentation produced during the 30 years of the CF history. Fortunately, people like JedRothwell, Krivit and, more recently, AbdUl Rahman Lomax have patiently collected a large number of documents and are making them available to the public. A praiseworthy activity.

I think a good way to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the F&P press conference is to recover as many of their old documents as possible, especially videos, and make them available on the internet.

For example, it would be very important to make public the entire lab video recorded during the April-May 1992 boil-off experiment. The short videos made public by Krivit and Rothwell contain only a small percentage of the original video (1).

There are probably many other F&P videos around. It's worth noting that some footages included in the Truthloader video (2), showing the F&P cells at IMRA France, come from a not identified "archive" (see t=00:28). Probably, the same archive provided some of the images shown in the "short clip" of the HEAVY WATERGATE video (3).

So, I hope that you and all the other L-F members who are interested in preserving the truth about CF will join my call to the people who is going to celebrate the 30^th CF anniversary at MIT, so that they make publicly available as much as possible of this kind of documentary material, starting from the full video of the 1992 boil-off experiment.

(1) FP's experiments discussion

(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OQu44UIC_s

(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZeuiblWD7w

Quote from oystla

A rare lecture of Fleischmann, "cold fusion - past, present and future"

The lecture you proposed is also included in an interesting and quite unbiased review (1) of some videos containing F&P speeches recorded in the first CF decade (1989-99). There is also a link to the list of other MF related videos accessible from wn.com (2).

Quote

Very technical, but worth while watching.

Yes, a very interesting video (3). I noticed that 7 years after the 1992 boil-off experiment, the wrong conclusions of the ICCF3 paper (4) retained a central role in his lecture:

- at t=27:10 he mentions the 4 kW/cm³ calculated on Page 16 on the basis of a wrong estimation of the boil-off timing (5);

- while, starting from t=27:45, he presents the same graph of Figure 8, which is based on a wrong synchronization between the lab video and the data log (6).

I wonder how many of the other results presented in that lecture were equally wrong.

(1) http://judavis.blogspot.com/20…old-fusion-1989-1999.html

(2) https://wn.com/martin_fleischm…ance&upload_time=all_time

(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOQ6Cphe5nE

(4) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(5) FP's experiments discussion

(6) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from oystla

To me the interesting part of the lecture was what happened in 1920's and forward to F&P discovery in the mid 1980's. (Some would say re-discovery)

The 1999 MF lecture is a historical document, as such any info he has reported is interesting.

But the most significant part of that talk is related to info about his own experience, especially the 1992 boil-off experiment. He once again recalled its two (presumed) results: a specific excess heat of 4 kW/cm3 and more than 3 h of "heat after death". These results are both wrong. Comparing the resources that F&P had at their disposition in 1992 (or even in the '80ies), with those available to the scientists in the '20ies or '30ies, the most reasonable conclusion is that F&P claimed to have (re)discovered an non-existent phenomenon.

Quote

Why they started the research etc. And as with many scientific discoveries there are a prehistory og overlooked lab results, og earlier controversial lab results hidden away etc.

You are right to complain about the CF results hidden away. However, the most important hidden results are those related to the cited 1992 boil-off experiment, in particular the cell voltage and cell temperature data logged during the one month test and the full version of the lab video recording.

Do you agree with me that the CF researchers, who are going to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the F&P announcement, should take this unique and last opportunity to disclose these important laboratory results?

Quote from oystla

On March 1989 there was a (premature) press conference of an interesting discovery. At the time I was a young student at the university, and watched it on the news. Shortly after, in May 1989, it was debunket thoroughly by the US physisist society. After that I forgot about it, until late 1998, when I discovered research was still going on, to my surprise.

After that I read a few papers, and a few books, and a lot of articles. I have been on and off the subject as a side interest ever since.

Interesting story. Mine is much shorter.

The day after January 14, 2011, important Italian media (1) reported that a group of physicists of the University of Bologna had publicly and successfully tested a system capable to produce 12 kW of excess heat using hydrogen and nickel.

In the following days, I looked at the many info (articles, pictures, videos, reports and comments) available on the internet and found that a crucial instrument, the only one fully identified with make and model in the calorimetric report issued by UniBo, didn't appear in any of the many images of the experimental setup. I reported this oddity on the Italian forum EnergeticAmbiente (2), attended by many people, including someone who was in strict contact with UniBo professors. So, I thought that in a few days that strange inconsistency of the missing steam probe would have been clarified by the academic testers. On the contrary, the issue was ignored by all of them and after a few months UniBo signed a research contract with Rossi to study his Ecat.

Well, at that point I got a quite clear opinion about what CF/LENR was. This opinion strengthened as I looked at the other Ecat tests performed in 2011.

Very recently, since last September, I started looking at the F&P experiments, finding that they were affected by inconsistencies of the same nature of those found in Ecat tests.

Quote

The mystery to be solved is not some boiling water experiment. This is not the mystery they discovered in the 80's, and is not the mystery that others have replicated. Others have replicated the original experiments, and variants of the original experiment and confirmed there are a mystery of natures that begs attention.

Your mysteries can be easily solved by fully understanding the 1992 boil-off experiment. If the two macroscopic results claimed by F&P in their ICCF3 paper - the same repeated by MF during his 1999 lecture - were lacking of any soundness, the most logical explanation of your mysteries is that even the microscopic results claimed by F&P in the '80ies were wrong.

Probably, the mystery of nature that begs attention involves human factors, rather than physical or chemical.

Quote

I am not really interested in boiling experiments, with the additional errors those may introduce, like the ones we have seen on Rossi nickel/hydrogen tests.

However, the Early experiments by professor Focardi and Piantelli also seem to confirm some Similar phenomenon is going on in nickel/hydrogen.

The first Ecat tests performed and documented at the beginning of 2011 were conducted under the full responsibility of the UniBo physicists, including Focardi. The same physicists participated as official UniBo observers to all the other tests conducted throughout the same year, during which they publicly confirmed the positive outcomes of these tests in dozens of occasions (reports, articles, interviews and conferences). Focardi was the most active in affirming the reality of the Ecat performances.

The only way I can explain this support is that Focardi and his colleagues were not reliable in their assessments of the energy performances of the Ecat. This unreliability can easily explain the claims relative to his early experiments.

Quote

So there are branches of LENR in different systems.

Interesting enough, Also the patent of F&P described Nickel as a candidate....

Evidently the human factors underlying the CF mysteries are common to any of its branch and are effective regardless of the metal used.

(1) http://www.banchedati.ilsole24…110115018FAA&refresh_ce=1

(2) http://www.energeticambiente.i…ala-11.html#post119167978