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

  • Alan - that is a logically bankrupt argument you've just made.

    What nonsense. you are merely saying because you are right, I must be wrong. That is not only logically bankrupt, it is also ethically questionable.


    I have over many posts at various times merely pointed out that the evidence either way is shaky, that the proponents are either dead (MF) or reclusive (SP) and that the practical knowledge you base your arguments on is zero and that the experiments in question demonstrate effects which have been replicated in various ways countless (almost) times.


    You might as well argue about whether the statue of Lord Nelson in Trafalgar Square is wearing underpants. Answer- it is too far away to tell.

  • What nonsense. you are merely saying because you are right, I must be wrong. That is not only logically bankrupt, it is also ethically questionable.

    No. I am saying that I and ascoli have given clear arguments which you have not addressed. For example, you might want to point to the video and find this 600s segment with a 50% reduction in liquid level, or something.


    All I am saying is that you are wrong in dismissing the arguments on the basis of F&P's being wonderful electrochemists. That is not a scientific argument.


    F&P are not alive to defend themselves. But, were someone to critique a paper of mine, I'd want to answer the criticism directly.


    I'd accept that maybe F&P's work is no longer relevant to LENR. That would shut me up - why rake through history - though not ascoli who would argue that it has always been quoted as very relevant.


    THH

  • You really need to retire Stanley pons is still alive and all your concerns have been covered over and over for years by Jed and the crew of experimenters.

  • You really need to retire Stanley pons is still alive and all your concerns have been covered over and over for years by Jed and the crew of experimenters.

    OK - but Stanley is I believe not active in defending his old work with F - I agree he'd be an invaluable contributor to this discussion.


    "concerns covered" could you just summarise in what way?


    I feel a bit as though I am to be excommunicated because I have desecrated one of the deeply held beliefs of a religion - but that is not true. You understand the argument here? Why are the videos inconsistent with the boil-off enthalpy in that paper. It is a simple point to answer if in fact they are consistent.


    Or, you can just say that this specific result was incorrect. It makes F&P look bad - but they are no longer active in the field and Stanley (though it seems alive) is I think not likely to take an interest in our discussion here or add to it.


    It sort of amazes me how no-one is willing to give a clear counterargument to the foamgate idea: or even a suggestion about how foamgate could in fact be got round.


    Y'are all acting like skeptics who when presented with apparently irrefutable LENR evidence make a whole load of wrong arguments - easily contradicted, but then say "I don't know how its wrong - but I know its wrong! And people who believe it are kooks!"


    Only in reverse.


    THH

  • F&P are not alive to defend themselves. But, were someone to critique a paper of mine, I'd want to answer the criticism directly.

    JR reported (1-2) that he was helped by Pons for his "Review of the calorimetry of Fleischmann and Pons" (3), he published only 2 years ago, and repeatedly mentioned since then.


    On page 16 of his review, JR wrote:

    " The boil off method of calorimetry is simple compared the isoperibolic method, hence the title of the paper, “Simplicity.”

    It takes about 10 minutes for half of the water to boil away. We know it takes that long because they made a time-lapse video of the event with a time stamp on the screen. The time when the boil off was triggered was known. The time when the boil off ends, with all of the water gone from the cell can be clearly seen in the video.

    The video is on YouTube here:

    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn9K1Hvw434"

    Unfortunately, this is an old VHS video, and it is a copy of a copy, so the quality is degraded and the picture is blurry, but you can still see when the boil off events begin and end. The video is synchronized with the computer data of temperature and cell electrolysis input power."


    So, JR says, that despite the degraded and blurry (in his opinion) picture, "you can still see when the boil off events begin and end". Therefore he, Pons, McKubre, or any other expert in electrolysis could tell which are, for each of the 4 cells, the 2 frames of the mentioned video in which the boil off begins and ends.


    Moreover, since "the video is synchronized with the computer data of temperature" they could also tell which is the frame which corresponds to the vertical arrow on Fig.8 of the Simplicity paper.


    (1) RE: What is the current state of LENR?

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

    (3) https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofth.pdf


    PS - Did you see my previous reply to you and the mentioned video?

  • Great! Well it seems the correct resolution to this thread, instead of insults, is just for Jed to reference the video and the two points (10 minutes aprts) where it is clear the cell is 50% full and 0% full.


    I, and others, will then happily watch that segment seeing whether this is plausible.


    Ascoli is saying it is impossible to find such a 10 min segment because the level going down in 10 min at the end is foam not liquid.


    Robert Horst in that 2018 thread was agreeing.


    Jed could shut me up by doing this - then it would juts be:

    Jed says its liquid

    Ascoli says its foam.


    I find the argument that it is foam pretty convincing so maybe Jed (and SP) have some other argument I am not understanding.


    THH

  • PS - Did you see my previous reply to you and the mentioned video?

    I watched the video. It is popular fluff and highly inaccurate. I don't pay much attention to such things - if I did they would annoy me.


    Otherwise - you have made your point that F&P's boil-off phase calculation here seems very wrong when the video is closely examined.


    I don't go round speculating as to why its wrong. It is not a helpful thing to do with science. Just let them have made a mistake.

  • I watched the video. It is popular fluff and highly inaccurate. I don't pay much attention to such things - if I did they would annoy me.

    I know the video is a popular fluff story, but I directed your attention only to its short segment described in my old comment and which starts at 00:27 and ends at 00:54. Those images have been taken at IMRA lab in June 1992, a few weeks after the end of the experiment described in the Simplicity Paper. The camera was probably the same one used for the time lapse video of the "1992 boil off" experiment. The June video clearly shows that the cell is full of foam and that MF and a Japanese guest were looking at the cells.


    Quote

    Otherwise - you have made your point that F&P's boil-off phase calculation here seems very wrong when the video is closely examined.

    I don't go round speculating as to why its wrong. It is not a helpful thing to do with science. Just let them have made a mistake.

    I am also for the mistake, but not just one. In the simplicity paper, there are at least two huge mistakes, one for each of the two final claims of the paper: (a) 4 times excess heat and (b) HAD.


    Therefore, 2 out of 2 conclusions in the Simplicity Paper are wrong. And this was the paper which was selected in 2004 by 5 of the most prominent experts in the field to be submitted to DOE for demonstrating the reality of CF!

  • concerns covered" could you just summarise in what way? years of explanation from Jed, Alan and the crew and as far as being excommunicated, you were never a member!!!

  • (1) You quote the qualifications of two able electrochemists - and yet ascoli's argument is watching foam and cross-checling a video against a graph in a paper.

    Ascoli's arguments are based on nonsense and his overworked imagination. If he -- or you -- were serious, you would test these ideas with some simple experiments. For example:


    Get a graduated cylinder with a plug at the top similar to F&P's, which allows steam out but not droplets.

    Clean the cell carefully, with pure, distilled water. You can buy this at the drugstore.

    Put a resistance heater in a graduated cylinder, about 2/3rds down.

    Fill the cylinder with pure, clean water and place it on a weight scale.

    Turn on the resistance heater to a power level similar to the excess heat, so that the water boils.

    Every minute, measure the weight loss, and also measure the water level by sight.


    See if your estimate of the water level agrees with the weight loss.


    You can also confirm that all the water boils out, even when the waterline falls below the heater.


    You can also add salt to the water and confirm that no measurable amount leaves the cell, which means there are no droplets. Or, if some salt leaves the cell, that means your cell is not the same as F&P's.


    You have to clean the cell carefully and use pure, clean water to avoid surfactants in the cell. If you get excessive foam, such that you cannot see the waterline during boiling, that means there are surfactants in the water. In an electrochemical experiments, surfactants will kill the reaction. They will definitely kill cold fusion. There is no way F&P saw excess heat if there were surfactants in the water. Or air, or carbon dioxide. You do not have to avoid air and CO2 because they will not interfere, but if you were doing cold fusion you would have to avoid these and much else.


    You can also estimate the heat of vaporization from this, after estimating of heat losses from the cell walls by various methods.



    If you were to do simple, middle school experiments like that, you would see that your speculation and blather here is nonsense. You could do even simpler experiments, such as heating a nail in a flame and then using pliers to drop it into water. You would see the water only boils for a moment. You could do these things, but you will not, because you have no interest in doing actual science or understanding simple physics that people have known for thousands of years. Your only goal is to cast unwarranted doubt on the experiments by F&P, for some perverse reason. Your only accomplishment has been to demonstrate that you are both idiots and blowhards with inflated egos and severe cases of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

  • Ascoli's arguments are based on nonsense and his overworked imagination. If he -- or you -- were serious, you would test these ideas with some simple experiments.

    In your "Review of the calorimetry of Fleischmann and Pons" (1) you wrote: "Unfortunately, this is an old VHS video, and it is a copy of a copy, so the quality is degraded and the picture is blurry, but you can still see when the boil off events begin and end."


    Therefore, if you were serious, you would just tell us which are the time stamps on the video (2) when the boil off events begin and end.


    In the same review you wrote: "The video is synchronized with the computer data of temperature and cell electrolysis input power".


    Therefore, if you were serious, you would just tell us which is the time stamp on the video when cell 2 full dries and then you would show us how it corresponds to the position of the vertical arrow on Fig.8 of the Simplicity Paper (3).


    These are the simple and correct ways in which you should prove that my arguments are based on nonsense and my overworked imagination


    (1) https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofth.pdf

    (2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn9K1Hvw434  

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

  • Therefore, if you were serious, you would just tell us which are the time stamps on the video (2) when the boil off events begin and end.

    As I said, if you were serious, you would boil some water in a graduated cylinder and see for yourself how well the volume can be measured. Put it on a weight scale to get another simultaneous measure of mass.


    You need to avoid surfactants, as I said. They cause actual foam, as opposed to the imaginary foam you describe. There is never significant foam in an electrochemical cell. If there were, the electrochemical effect you are trying to replicate would not happen. Cold fusion definitely never happens with surfactants or other contamination. That is what Fleischmann, Bockris and many others told me.


    If you set out to deliberately boil water in a way that produces foam and makes it hard to measure the water level, I am sure you can accomplish that. Add a dab of Palmolive. You can always do an experiment wrong. For example, Jones did a "replication" to show that recombination is significant in a cold fusion cell. He did this with a cell with the wrong shape, fat and short, and with power levels about a thousand times smaller than anyone would use for cold fusion. Hey presto! -- recombination galore. As Mel Miles commented, he might as well have added palladium powder to the water to ensure full underwater recombination.

  • And round and round we go. I am so amused to see Ascoli65 clinging stubbornly to his imaginary denial of LENR while we are literally less than 20 minutes after a work presented by Dimiter Alexandrov, who began working in LENR during 2020, just showed excess heat on a constantan wire loaded with Deuterium of at least 15 times.

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

  • As I said, if you were serious, you would boil some water in a graduated cylinder and see for yourself how well the volume can be measured.

    The topic of this thread refers to the F&P's "1992 boil off" experiments, not mine.


    For at least 5 years, you have been challenging people here on L-F to find errors in MF experiments. For instance, you wrote (1): "You are talking in generalities only. In experimental science, you have to point to specifics. If the experiments by McKubre, Miles or Fleischmann are wrong, you have to say why they are wrong. Waving your hands and saying "there might be an error" is not valid, because that cannot be tested or falsified. A negative evaluation has to be supported with as much rigor and as many facts as a positive one. You have no facts. You cannot cite any specific errors. No skeptic has published an evaluation of any experiment showing errors. They lose by default."


    I've pointed to two specific errors in MF's major work on CF. In experimental science you have to answer to my specific remarks. Waving your hands and saying "boil this, boil that" is not valid, because it has nothing to do with my specific remarks about the errors made by F&P in writing their Simplicity Paper.


    (1) RE: How many times has the Pons-Fleischmann Anomalous Heating Event been replicated in peer reviewed journals?

  • Jed - I understand that, not looking at the video - you feel on theoretical grounds that this system should not have any foam. I am inclined to agree if F&P are careful as one would expect and neither of the electrodes nor the container nor the added lithium salt have soluble impurities or surface films and there is no complex reaction that could generate such from any of the cell components and nitrogen and CO2 in the air.


    Your argument is that ascoli is mistaken in seeing foam because electrolysis does not normally foam.


    That is a poor argument when the video quite clearly shows foam - as well as bubbles from boiling - look at the full video.


    Your suggestion that I do a kitchen sink experiment. That is silly: you must know that in the real world small changes in an experiment (e.g. surfactant residues) can change what happens, and anyway your recipe ignores the salts added to obtain conduction, for a proper replication we need those. We have definite evidence from the video, against your statement.


    THH

  • You need to avoid surfactants, as I said. They cause actual foam, as opposed to the imaginary foam you describe. There is never significant foam in an electrochemical cell. If there were, the electrochemical effect you are trying to replicate would not happen. Cold fusion definitely never happens with surfactants or other contamination. That is what Fleischmann, Bockris and many others told me.

    Lonchampt - on his faithful replication of the Simplicity experiment.


    When temperature reaches a value close to boiling, i.e. typically 99 to 101°C, we stop adding water to the cell, and we measure the total enthalpy necessary to evaporate the contents of the cell. The excess enthalpy is therefore given by the formula: Excess heat = A + L – D (6) Where “A”, “D” and “L” have the same definition as above. It is difficult to follow accurately the level of water during this period because of the formation of foam, so it is only at the end of the experiment, when the cell is dry that the excess heat can be calculated with precision.


    It seems, Jed, you are incorrect?


    Perhaps Lonchampt did it wrong - with surfactants. Yes he claims to have excess heat too.


    It is all very confusing.

  • I think this whole thing is fatuous. We have two skeptics throwing peanuts based on a paper written decades ago by two scientists who would probably not employed them as lab technicians. Based on ropey evidence too. Better men than these two tried to bring F&P down, and they only did it by lying to Congress about their own results.

  • I think this whole thing is fatuous. We have two skeptics throwing peanuts based on a paper written decades ago by two scientists who would probably not employed them as lab technicians. Based on ropey evidence too. Better men than these two tried to bring F&P down, and they only did it by lying to Congress about their own results.

    I agree, and have said many times, it's a tail chasing exercise, doomed to fail as the argument is circular, and moreover, irrelevant at this stage. We have seen irrefutable proof of excess heat. We will continue to argue for a long time of what is the process by what it happens, but the phenomena is real, and totally worth to keep studying and researching.

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

  • Jed - I understand that, not looking at the video - you feel on theoretical grounds that this system should not have any foam.

    No, I know for a fact it has no significant foam. I know because I have seen a clear, close up video of a boil off; because there is a photo of a boil-off at LENR-CANR.org; because Fleischmann, Bockris and many other electrochemists told me that bubbles are fatal to cold fusion and most other electrochemical experiments. Those are not theoretical grounds. They are observations and common sense.


    It is difficult to follow accurately the level of water during this period because of the formation of foam, so it is only at the end of the experiment, when the cell is dry that the excess heat can be calculated with precision.


    It seems, Jed, you are incorrect?

    Nope. I am right. I have seen boil off videos etc. Lonchampt was an engineer. When he says "accurately" he means to the nearest milliliter. You don't need to measure it that closely to confirm F&P's results. They are inputting 38 W and getting out 182 W. The water level measurement could be wrong by 30% and it would not affect the conclusion.


    Of course there is some foam from boiling. You would see that if you did the experiment yourself with pure water.


    You only need to measure the water level, and then measure it again 10 minutes later. The difference in 1 minute increments might be hard to measure accurately, but over 10 minutes, the difference is 45 g. That is a lot. It would be 9 g if there were no heat. Anyone can tell the difference between 9 and 45 g, even if there is foam from boiling.


    Perhaps Lonchampt did it wrong - with surfactants. Yes he claims to have excess heat too.

    It wouldn't have worked!


    It is all very confusing.

    No, it isn't the least bit confusing, as you would see if you tried doing it. Which you never will.

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