Where is the close-up video of Fleischmann and Pons boiling cell?

  • Fleischmann described such experiments, as did others. Read the damn literature. Stop asking me to spoon feed it to you. You won't read or acknowledge it even if I do. I have given you fact after fact, carefully sourced, but you have ignored or contradicted every one of them. Stop pretending you will suddenly start to do science instead of idiotic handwaving.


    You will not read, and you will not lift a finger to make your case. You will not even drop a hot nail into water. You will do NOTHING that calls into question the bullshit you and Ascoli post here. You will not read anything, test anything, or use one milligram of common sense known to people for the last several thousand years, such as how to make a tea kettle that does not spray drops out, or how to tell when all the water is boiled out of a kettle.

    You are wrong about my not reading things. I have read the simplicity paper in detail. You are right that I am slow and do not always correctly understand things. But - I admit it, and in any case I have found that those who are faster and claim to understand things usually have only a partial understanding.


    Also, my arguments, when based on ignorance, are easily contradicted. You could show me some other electrolysis experiment that uses a high power CC supply designed to increase cell power by 20X or more as the cell dries out to support your claim that the conditions here are all understood and expected in textbook calorimetry.


    It should be pretty obvious that if you need a 200V + PSU for a a constant current source doing electrolysis that normally operates at 5v or so - then conditions will be unusual when the voltage goes up to 200V.

  • You will not even drop a hot nail into water. You will do NOTHING that calls into question the bullshit you and Ascoli post here.

    Many people have pointed out that those old experiments are complex, require skill and money to replicate properly. Since what they do depends on the exact conditions - e.g. the resistivity of the deposits on the electrodes and how thick they are - I would probably not replicate it correctly even if I had this skill and money. So what good would that do?


    The google team, or NASA, etc, etc, would be in a position to do this.


    THH

  • You are wrong about my not reading things. I have read the simplicity paper in detail.

    Let me rephrase: You do not read and then acknowledge things. Even when I and others show you specifically where you are wrong, you never respond or admit you made a mistake. I could dig up the references to control experiments done with electrolysis. For that matter, you could do an experiment yourself. It isn't that difficult. But even if I told you exactly where these references are, I am sure that a week from now you would go back to saying such experiments were never done and would not work. Ditto your absurd claims that a hot object in a cell which melts plastic at 212 deg C does not boil away all the water. I do not think you actually believe that, but evidently you want stupid people here to believe it, because it undermines cold fusion, which is your bête noire. With regard to this subject, you are a political animal who will say or do anything to make cold fusion look bad.


    You seem to think that repeating something makes it right. Or perhaps you think that when people read your claims enough times, with no rebuttal from me or anyone else, that means you must be right. I don't know why you do this, but it is tiresome, impolite, counterproductive and a damn nuisance. It is a waste of time writing to you. I am not writing to you, but rather to other readers here, who might fall for your stupid tricks.

  • Let me rephrase: You do not read and then acknowledge things. Even when I and others show you specifically where you are wrong, you never respond or admit you made a mistake. I could dig up the references to control experiments done with electrolysis. For that matter, you could do an experiment yourself. It isn't that difficult. But even if I told you exactly where these references are, I am sure that a week from now you would go back to saying such experiments were never done and would not work. Ditto your absurd claims that a hot object in a cell which melts plastic at 212 deg C does not boil away all the water. I do not think you actually believe that, but evidently you want stupid people here to believe it, because it undermines cold fusion, which is your bête noire. With regard to this subject, you are a political animal who will say or do anything to make cold fusion look bad.


    You seem to think that repeating something makes it right. Or perhaps you think that when people read your claims enough times, with no rebuttal from me or anyone else, that means you must be right. I don't know why you do this, but it is tiresome, impolite, counterproductive and a damn nuisance. It is a waste of time writing to you. I am not writing to you, but rather to other readers here, who might fall for your stupid tricks.

    Jed, this is repetitive. Let me point out:


    Re electrode melting. We all agree that the boiling of the electrolyte is a runaway process in which the last phase occurs rapidly due to the muhc higher applied power at this point (evidenced from F&P paper asymptotic voltage graphs).


    None of us can know in these endpoint conditions how good is the thermal isolation of teh electrode or how high the power dissipated inside it due to transient deposits from the boiling electrolyte forming a high-resistivity film.


    If you believe you know this may I suggest you are overreaching. If you believe such unusual asymptotic conditions are well understood in the literature this is obviously untrue. The gunk deposited depends on the exact electrolysis done - and anyway who otehr than F&P tests with this "boil to dry under CC conditions with high power source". It is a weird thing to do.


    In this case we have not much to go on except pure physics and chemistry speculation (I claim to be your equal or better in that) and others who have done this precise experiment.


    The F&P data is not consistent with the video.


    You seem to think that repeating something makes it right.


    We are both repeating our points. You are not engaging with my arguments - except to say that "the literature makes clear" they are unrealistic. You do not address my counter-argument that the unusual conditions in this experiment are not studied in the literature - indeed could not be without precisely repeating the experiment.


    I am engaging with your arguments by pointing out that they do not apply - or that if they do you can easily demonstrate this and so shut me up.


    THH

  • Even when I and others show you specifically where you are wrong, you never respond or admit you made a mistake.

    I sometimes acknowledge I have made a mistake.


    Sometimes - I am just not sure. I stay not sure after your counter-arguments because they rely on assumptions I do not know are true.


    My position in these arguments is usually "there is no certainty" yours is "I am sure". So you have a much harder job than I to prove your position.

  • Or perhaps you think that when people read your claims enough times, with no rebuttal from me or anyone else, that means you must be right. I don't know why you do this, but it is tiresome, impolite, counterproductive and a damn nuisance

    Again - you are misunderstanding me.


    I don't think "I must be right" because I am arguing for uncertainty.


    You are arguing "You must be right" and think it is symmetric - I must be arguing "You are wrong".


    I am only arguing that your certainty is wrong.


    Often we do not know. In that case, somone giving an explanation is neither right nor wrong.

  • There is never any need for extraordinary proof. More to the point, the quality of being extraordinary is subjective. It is in the mind of the observer. It is not a scientifically measurable quality, and it cannot be quantified. Things that we see every day, and think nothing of, would have seemed extraordinary to people in 1970 (including me), and inexplicable black magic to people in 1600.

    I could not agree more. Specially with the underlined part.

    I certainly Hope to see LENR helping humans to blossom, and I'm here to help it happen.

  • Anyway, you said (2) that you "are formed to use scientific knowledge to resolve practical problems in each particular discipline". This is your chance to use your scientific knowledge to resolve this practical problem. Please, show me that I'm wrong in saying (3-4) that the vertical arrow in Fig.8 of the Simplicity Paper is misplaced

    I meant real problems, and more accurately, relevant problems, not imaginary, as the one you have so insistently attempted to create from your particular interpretation of published results.

    I certainly Hope to see LENR helping humans to blossom, and I'm here to help it happen.

  • Re electrode melting. We all agree that the boiling of the electrolyte is a runaway process in which the last phase occurs rapidly due to the muhc higher applied power at this point (evidenced from F&P paper asymptotic voltage graphs).

    No one is talking about electrodes melting. The paper says the Kel-F plastic plug at the bottom of the test tube melted. The melting point is 212 deg C, so the water covering the plug and the rest of the anode would be vaporized. As any observer can see that it was. The vapor stopped coming out. They confirmed this by looking in the cell after the test, and finding only dried lithium salts.


    None of us can know in these endpoint conditions how good is the thermal isolation of teh electrode or how high the power dissipated inside it due to transient deposits from the boiling electrolyte forming a high-resistivity film.

    It makes no difference how good the thermal isolation is. We can easily estimate the total energy that can be stored in palladium hydride assuming it is 100% loaded. Fleischmann and many others did this. Heck, I did this, in my book! You can too, but of course you will not do this, or anything else, even as simple as dropping a hot nail into water. There is nowhere near enough energy to boil off the water or the remaining water after electrolysis stops. More to the point, the maximum rate the energy is released from a cathode of these dimensions is 5 mW. As you would know if you read the papers, which you have not done. (Or perhaps you have an extremely porous memory.) See, for example:


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

  • It makes no difference how good the thermal isolation is. We can easily estimate the total energy that can be stored in palladium hydride assuming it is 100% loaded. Fleischmann and many others did this.

    Furthermore, with the bulk Pd-H control experiments, no excess heat is produced, and no anomalous boil off occurs. You can cause a boil off with electrolysis power, but -- as Fleischmann said -- that stops the moment the water falls below the cathode. The rest of the water remains, and the Kel-F plug is intact. There is no way deuterium could cause your imaginary thermal isolation problem but hydrogen does not.


    The chemical energy in 100% loaded cathode is the same with hydrogen as deuterium.


    If some kind of magical coat on the cathode made it possible for the cathode to store far more energy than 100% loaded palladium -- which is ridiculous -- the magical coat would be the same with hydrogen as deuterium. So you would see the same anomaly with both. Also, a coat would slow down the energy release. It would not enhance it or cause it to boil off water faster, or boil off more water after electrolysis stops.

  • It makes no difference how good the thermal isolation is.

    False.


    We know that power will be dissipated throughout the electrical circuit proportional to the circuit resistivity and current density. the electrodes, compared with the electrolyte, have high current density. They can have a high resistivity film (the deposits) in which significant power is dissipated.


    If the thermal isolation from the electrolyte is high the argument that the electrode can't get up to 200C while the electrolyte is 100C does not fly. It is possible. The electrolyte stays cooled by phase change. There is nothing to cool the electrode except conduction from the top.

  • The paper says the Kel-F plastic plug at the bottom of the test tube melted. The melting point is 212 deg C

    Apologies - I meant the electrode support melting (200C) not the electrode melting - obviously more difficult and not what was observed!


    The support - obviously - is in close thermal contact with the electrode, so the argument remains.


    There is indeed another argument that could lead to anomalous support heating, which is ATER. ATER is essentially undetectable except as some of the input electrical power turning into heat wherever the ATER is occuring. It can be bounded steady-state by checking total volume of H2 and O2 gas emission. Extrapolating those measurements to the unusual asymptotic boil-off phase when things could be different from normal cannot be done. One of the many ways in which this boil-off phase is difficult to be certain about.

  • I am only arguing that your certainty is wrong.


    Often we do not know. In that case, somone giving an explanation is neither right nor wrong.

    My certainty is based on the laws of thermodynamics, Faraday's law, and calorimetry going back to 1780, which could have measured many cold fusion results with confidence. My certainty is grounded in every chemistry and physics textbook published in the last 150 years. My level of certainty is what prompted most of the world's leading electrochemists to conclude that cold fusion is real by late 1990. For example, Prof. Heinz Gerischer, electrochemist and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry said in 1991, "there [are] now undoubtedly overwhelming indications that nuclear processes take place in metal alloys." (https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GerischerHiscoldfusi.pdf) He said "overwhelming." He did not say maybe or we don't know yet.


    YOUR assertions, on the other hand, are based entirely on imaginary bullshit that you make up, such as heavy water and light water in the cell affecting the performance of flow calorimeter and Seebeck calorimeters. You will not admit that is bullshit, but anyone with the slightest understanding of calorimetry will see that it is. You will not revisit or discuss these throw-away claims, or admit they are wrong. You will only come up with new ones, using the Gish Gallup technique.


    You imagine you know much more than Gerischer, Fleischmann or Bockris. Or Huggins, Oriani, Miles, or any of the others you have not read and know nothing about. You do not know more than they do. You have not come up with a single valid reason to doubt any of their work. Only physically impossible nonsense such as the claim that an object hot enough to melt plastic will not boil away the water around the plastic.

  • This whole notion of "extraordinary proof" is a bad idea. A half baked notion which is not part of science. Quoting Melich and me:

    Claim 1.5. “As many have said, extraordinary results require extraordinary proof. Such proof is lacking.”


    This is not a principle of science. It was coined by Carl Sagan for the 1980 “Cosmos” television series. Conventional scientific standards dictate that extraordinary claims are best supported with ordinary evidence from off-the-shelf instruments and standard techniques. All mainstream cold fusion papers present this kind of evidence.

    You are right. My sentence was incomplete, I should have written: "With respect to the extraordinary quality of proofs required for demonstrating an extraordinary claim such as HAD"


    The HAD claim is undoubtedly extraordinary: a mysterious nuclear reaction which keeps a cell at high temperature for 3 hours without any energy input. The quality of the proofs provided to support such an extraordinary claim should have been extraordinarily good as well. On the contrary, besides the two bold claims in the conclusions (400% excess heat and HAD), the only extraordinary characteristic of the "Simplicity Paper" is sloppiness, inaccuracy, deficiency and erroneousness of the results provided in it.


    BTW, what does it means "Cell dry" for you?

  • For Jed's certainty to be correct:

    1. ATER must be ruled out
    2. cathodic deposit electrical heating must be ruled out.


    Both in the atypical conditions at near boil-off so that measurements at other times cannot be relied upon.


    Even then - Jed's confidence is based on statements in a paper, and a corresponding video, which are inconsistent.


    THH

  • Only physically impossible nonsense such as the claim that an object hot enough to melt plastic will not boil away the water around the plastic.

    An object internally heated, and thermally isolated mostly from the electrolyte by bubbles and deposits.


    Not in that case physically impossible. Whether plausible - that is complex, and given how unusual this system is not found in textbooks.

  • I meant real problems, and more accurately, relevant problems, not imaginary, as the one you have so insistently attempted to create from your particular interpretation of published results.

    As for relevancy, the published results I refers to come from the same authors, the same cell and the same bubbling context which appear on the front cover of the comic book "Discover Cold Fusion" that you had recommended to me to get a better understanding of the field (1).


    As for the reality of my particular interpretation, well, you have just to use your scientific knowledge to demonstrate it is imaginary.


    (1) RE: Where is the close-up video of Fleischmann and Pons boiling cell?

  • They checked for cell dryness by looking at the cell. Anyone can see the instant of dryness; the steam stops coming out.

    Who looked at the cell during the "1992 boil off experiment"? The "Simplicity Paper"(1) reports that the authors only watched the lab video, not that they looked at the cell. Please, read the following excerpts [underlines added]:


    - In the abstract: "This has led to a particularly simple method of deriving the rate of excess enthalpy production based on measuring the times required to boil the cells to dryness, this process being followed by using time-lapse video recordings."


    - at page 13: "For the second value of the pressure, 0.97 bars, 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."


    - at page 14: "It is therefore necessary to develop independent means of monitoring the progressive evaporation/boiling of the D2O. The simplest procedure is to make time-lapse video recordings of the operation of the cells"


    - and at the same page 14: "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. We have chosen to time the evaporation/boiling of the last half of the D2O in cells of this type and this allows us to make particularly simple thermal balances for the operation in the region of the boiling point."


    So F&P just looked at the lab video to estimate the instant of dryness, not at the cells. They had the entire time-lapse video (1 shot every minute) available, which probably lasted 5 to 6 hours. They, or their collaborators at IMRA France, extracted at least 2 shorter versions (the ones that were later published by Krivit and Rothwell) containing the most critical segments before and around the cell dryness. Here is a synopsis of the position of these segments (2). These 2 videos are still available for us, so we can judge if F&P have correctly estimated the instant of dryness in Fig.8.


    Therefore, I ask you again: is the position of the vertical arrow marked with "Cell dry" in Fig.8 of the Simplicity Paper correct?


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

    (2) RE: FP's experiments discussion

  • You imagine you know much more than Gerischer, Fleischmann or Bockris. Or Huggins, Oriani, Miles, or any of the others you have not read and know nothing about.

    Most of the others I have read nothing (those 180 labs) about concluded that rather than try for a Nobel by getting sure proof of LENR they would stop - because the quality of the evidence was not enough to justify even a very high risk high reward gamble.


    A few continued.


    One or other of these two judgements is correct. I do not need to imagine I know more than the minority side of it, when I am agreeing with the majority.

  • Jed here has not got a leg to stand on in trying to justify the discrepancy between the video evidence and what is claimed.


    I look forward to his looking carefully at the evidence (it is admittedly a tedious process) and then either agreeing with you and me, or coming up with some better defence of his position than "they were experts who therefore know more than you do".

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