LENR FAQ (for Newcomers)

Quote from THHuxleynew

LENR FAQ for Studious Skeptics

LENR is real. People insisting it isn't real because of errors in Pons and Fleischmann's experiments have no place here. To engage in arguments with them gives SKEPTICS undue weight and distracts from useful study of LENR FAQ Circa 2022

Nuclear reactions occur in condensed matter systems of LENR, in both the 'wet cell' experiments of 1989 and the contemporary 'dry cell' solid state systems found in the Google/DOE/LLNL patent, NASA LCF, the Fusion Diode... Etc.

Post from GBG with libellous content removed.

Hardly a statement that would be helpful in an FAQ for skeptics?

I also suggest you leave off fraudulent data. You need very strong reasons in science to allege fraud rather than mistake. You do F&P a great disservice in alleging fraud, and you bring emotion into the issue, which poisons objective appraisal. No-one else here has called F&P experiments fraudulent.

I have tagged your post for the mods as being potentially libellous.

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Fraud WAS committed in the aftermath of F&P!

Eugene Mallove (chief editor of MIT at the time) has shown that and became a whistleblower. In short MIT forged their replication efforts and was untruthful in their findings. So yes, fraud is a thing in this field.

Just saying

Quote from Daniel_G

THH, I happen to think the vast majority of LENR reactions are real and a few more dodgy ones in the mix which I think is well known now.

BLP, Brillouin, certainly Mizuno, Biberian, Celani, just randomly in my head I missed many others, all do show some common threads. That’s where we are focusing our theoretical inquiry. So many disparate labs are showing some similar things and I interpret this as the initial stages of peeling back the veil of “easy” nuclear reactions.

Any scientist worth their salt will see this.

Big things are coming.

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Of course I hope you are right, and a fair answer to my question.

You are voting for gas-phase Ni-H I think. And certainly it is possible that H in Ni lattices does strange things.

It might be worth discussing the common threads - do they say anything specific about mechanism. In terms of calorimetry I see great diversity of methods with only one thing in common: the possibility of incorrect results from known causes specific to the methods used and not closed down by replication. (For Mizuno nothing wrong with the method, overall, we discussed it at length, what we found was lack of rigor in recording results which made the claims suspect. The key thing with Mizuno is whether replicators have found significant excess heat with better methodology - I wonder where that is now? Last I heard it was not encouraging. But I realise you will have more info than me!).

I agree a lot of people are showing similar things - I see this as a herd effect. Not even in a bad way. It is sensible to follow others who appear to be getting good results. I await just one of these people with clear good results (as Mizuno would have had could his "good" result" reactor have been measured similarly by third parties with better record-keeping). Or, maybe you or a replicator will have them!

THH

Quote from Edo

In short MIT forged their replication efforts

Fraud...is a bit much... just economical with the truth..

"averaging at 1 hour intervals" covers a lot of territory..

Quote from RobertBryant

Fraud...is a bit much... just economical with the truth..

"averaging at 1 hour intervals" covers a lot of territory..

Perhaps we should be as generous to them as we are to F&P. Read their whole paper, in context, work it all out?

And we should certainly not accuse people of fraud without a very carefully argued case. I mean - we allow much larger insistencies in most LENR papers without calling fraud. (Rightly).

0/10

Quote from Edo

In short MIT forged their replication efforts

Mallove 1999 didnt say forged or fraud

"Some would characterize the data manipulation in the sixteen author MIT paper of 1989

as mere “data fudging.” We do notn mince words: the use of improperly handled scientific data to
draw in the public mind and in the mind of the scientific community

a completely false conclusion about an emerging discovery of overarching importance to humankind

is high-level scientific misconduct, plain and simple.
We do not know for certain who unethically manipulated the
data, and that is not important, but it was, indeed, inappropriately manipulated.

“Inappropriately manipulated” is actually a very
charitable way of describing what was done.

We do know, however, that this erroneous study in the spring of 1989 at the MIT
Plasma Fusion Center was defended by then Plasma Fusion Center

Director Ronald R. Parker. Parker continues to play a leading role
in hot fusion. For several years after leaving the MIT PFC, he was
stationed at the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental
Reactor) in Garching, Germany. Since 1989, the U.S. Government
has funnelled billions of dollars into

magnetically confined thermonuclear fusion development on projects, such as ITER.

ThoughITER funding was recently killed by the U.S. Congress, funding of
tokamak hot fusion continues at MIT and elsewhere."

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

Quote from THHuxleynew

Read their whole paper, in context, work it all out?

They do not discuss this particular issue, but if you think you can explain it, go ahead. I would love to hear your explanation.

LENR FAQ for Studious Skeptics

Check this out!

From LENR Circa 2022

Quote

New technologies or experimental results do not always work the way people imagine, being better or worse for intended effects or even bringing comletely unforeseen effects.

Results point the following designs could be successful, in descending order of potential: aneutronic nuclear reactions using lattice confinement, aneutronic nuclear reactions using inertial along magnetic confinement, hybrid fission lattice confinement fusion, and fission reactions. -endquote j

Yet Ascoli65 and even perhaps THHuxley or even THHuxleynew think that their arguments concerning the 'Simplicity Paper' invalidates subsequent claims such as these.

Quote from JedRothwell

They do not discuss this particular issue

Perhaps MIT did"average" the H2O and D2O with the same'averaging'

using unequal time spacing

but I am skeptical..,

Anyone got the original MIT data? for H2O versus D2O..in 1989

Quote from Gregory Byron Goble

Here is a free Google Book link

In the mid 1980s I was searching for papers on ball lightning, partially to find evidence for possible self-confining plasma mechanisms (and, because of where I worked, I had free access to a large number of relevant peer-reviewed physics journals, stretching back for decades).

Interestingly, it was quite common to find papers in these journals where various possible fusion, fission, and transmutation mechanisms were openly discussed. There was certainly no sense of any particular topic being "excluded" from discussion, as being "too controversial".

Quote from JedRothwell

They do not discuss this particular issue, but if you think you can explain it, go ahead. I would love to hear your explanation.

I am sorry - I thought the LENR community had evidence that there was wrong-doing here ???

I have not seen this evidence. I agree, that minor inconsistency - varying some collection times on data points on a graph when they are all stated as 1 hour - is bad practice. I'd be critical of it in a published paper - just like I am critical of F&P's graph where you cannot see anything! (This is a worse sin).

I however do not dismiss F&P's data on those grounds. If you look back in the thread you will see that as soon as I knew the CC rail voltage was only 150V that bounded any problem and I said so. (They estimated 75V and from the "you can't see anything" graph that is consistent). But even 150V the whole time - v unlikely - they still have a X2 excess.

Whereas you lot - a lack of consistency in spacing of dots on a graph and you assume the evidence has no value? Without talking to the guys who generate it?

Quote from RobertBryant

Mallove 1999 didnt say forged or fraud

I was wrong... Mallove did say fraud..

TM 32.00

okay but in the case of the heavy water(D2O) situation these curves were utterly unlike one another

one had been radically shifted downward and it turned out later that

that was even worse than I thought I thought they'd just taken the whole data and just shifted it down

and I searched for a reason why that

would have been done and there was no reason

I did some detective work behind the scenes to find out if there was a legitimate reason

there was no legitimate reason and there never has been and never will be

and furthermore it has been analyzed by others in a more sophisticated way than the analysis I applied a

nd they found out that there was absolutely no way whatsoever of taking the data

from the preliminary July 10th version and going to the July 13th version which was 89

which was published and ever coming up with that by what is called a linear transformation

it had to be highly manipulated and in

other fields we would call that fraud and I state that it was fraud.....

Quote from RobertBryant

Perhaps MIT did"average" the H2O and D2O with the same'averaging'

using unequal time spacing

No, they said they did it with a simple program that converts analog lines to digital dots. Such programs were common in 1989. Those programs were simple compared to today's graphics programs. They scanned from left to right and put a dot at the midpoint of every vertical line, equidistant along the horizontal line, in some set distance apart. In this case, one dot per hour. There is no way the program would put more than one dot per unit of the horizontal line. It is obvious that someone manually added a bunch of dots. They are not even on the 1-hour horizontal distances apart. You could not write a computer program to do that even if you tried, I guess unless you used a random number generator for the first few hours.

It has nothing to do with the shape of the original data lines or the steepness. The data at later hours has the same shapes and steepness, but it has 1 point per hour, right on the hour marks.

Quote from RobertBryant

Anyone got the original MIT data? for H2O versus D2O..in 1989

It is in the paper referenced above, p. 23:

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

The MIT people converted that data to the dot format. They tried to hide the original version but someone sent it to Mallove. I guess whoever sent it was not in on the scam.

Thanks JedRothwell , robert bryant

Time for another personal anecdote, I think.

I actually knew one of the people on the CF replication team at Harwell, in 1989. I’d known him, socially, for a few years previously – although we didn’t work together, as we’d been employed in different divisions at AERE. (I know Harwell is a bit of a dirty word around here – but the place could be an interesting place to work, at times.)

By chance, I had actually left my job at the site just prior to the F&P announcement, and at the time of the replication tests was in the process of relocating across country, to work for a different employer. However, during this time I happened to bump into this chap at a social event in Oxfordshire – so it was nice to have a chat.

All staff at Harwell had to operate under strict confidentiality rules – but as I had only just left, and because it was something that was already known about publicly, he told me what he was working on. He was actually rather chuffed to be on the team – as it was quite a high profile project, and he knew the outcome would be more important than some of the more mundane stuff that he usually worked on. Obviously I asked him how things were going, and what he thought of the cells and the setup. He was necessarily reticent about giving out any details – but his attitude was certainly not one of someone who had already made up his mind. In fact he frankly admitted that the cells had been acting in a very peculiar manner.

One of the things I knew the team were concentrating on was the “neutron question”. For historical reasons, Harwell had built up a bit of a speciality in the measurement of neutrons. The site was still running the GLEEP reactor, at that point, which had evolved into a standard neutron calibration source – since the flux from the old pile was so damned stable. Labs from across Europe would send their detectors to Harwell for calibration – which was nice little side-business for an otherwise obsolete reactor. Neutrons are always tricky to measure – since all sorts of things can lead to false positives from detectors. However, I felt fairly confident that if any neutrons were to escape from the cells, the lab technicians at Harwell would be able to capture them.

By the time the results came out, I had already completed my move to a different part of the country. Of course the reports said that there were no neutrons, and no excess heat – and hence no nuclear reactions. Although I didn’t get to see the paper in Nature, at the time, I followed the articles that were printed New Scientist, and saw the furore unfold through the popular media of the day – although CF had already been pushed way-down in the news agendas, since the report coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall…

I was disappointed by the announcement, of course. It seemed that maybe the cells had not behaved as peculiarly as my acquaintance had thought. However it was clear that this wasn’t the end of the matter. Note that the original F&P announcement hadn’t been quite the shock to me that it appeared to have been to many other people. Yes, the claim of D+D fusion in a jam-jar was something of a surprise – but I’d been coming across evidence for “unconventional” nuclear reactions for years.

Anyway, a few years passed, and I bumped into my old acquaintance once again, at a social event elsewhere in the country (we were both members of a hobby society, and it was their national AGM). Of course I asked him what he thought about the outcome of the 1989 Harwell CF tests, expecting him to say something similar to the reports I’d read in New Scientist. But no. Instead the question seemed to make him quite uncomfortable, and he really didn’t want to talk about it. I knew, and understood, that he would be hampered by the usual levels of confidentially required of Harwell staff (we were frequently threatened with the UK Official Secrets Act) – but as the report was “in the open” I thought he could be a bit more relaxed about talking. Pushing a bit more, I discovered that he had not been happy at all with the way the tests had been reported – but being some way down the pecking order meant that he had been forced to keep his mouth shut. He was also quite adamant that I should regard any of his comments as “off the record”, and that if I wanted to follow any of this up I should contact David Williams, the project leader, directly.

This left me in a bit of a quandary. I wasn’t what I’d regard as being a “CF researcher”, so would have just been another member of Joe Public making a nuisance of myself. I also suspected that I would have been given the brush-off, had I tried pursuing Williams, even though my acquaintance reckoned he was quite an approachable chap. So I simply decided to keep my head down, and carry on with my own occasional hobby interest in the field. After all, I had my own work to do (which was complex enough on its own), and a mortgage to pay. Surely, I thought, someone more deeply involved in the field would be able to break the deadlock.

And yet here we are, three decades later...

Quote from Frogfall

brainwashed zombies

apparently ... but some anonymous personas.. are not so brainwashed..

Quote from Frogfall

and he really didn’t want to talk about it.

Perhaps if I asked Parker..politely.he might want to talk..for the sake of posterity

MIT NSE: Faculty: Ronald R. Parker

Quote from GRMattson

When you people write of the 'pseudo skeptics' do you mean someone like Richard Fynman and the events of that November day in 1968 when he interfered in Joseph Papp's engine demonstration with the terrible results? That was a case of approaching science with 'eyes wide shut'. He was so convinced of the correctness of his paradigms that he could not conceive of the engine being possible and was willing to meddle in the demonstration. That is the most dangerous skeptic. Ignore them at your peril.

He was so skeptical that he began a spontaneous experiment to test the hypothesis on the spot.

A good FAQ would/could be useful of course, but they exist in one form or another already, exemplified by a video made by Jed Rothwell, viewed many many times on YT.

Part if the problem with such a FAQ will be that if intended for non-scientists it will be deplored by some others for it's lack of scientific rigour, and if intended for scientists it will not be sufficiently accessible to non-scientists. If you think you can ride both those horses at once, have at it.

Quote from Rob

Given this is the case, I'm thinking of just making a new thread.

We can rename this one, no need to open a new one.