Which ICCF24 presentation is most likely to sway a skeptic?

THHuxleynew

I think it is very safe to assume that @gi06 knows exactly what was done.

Quote from Shane D.

I think we have about all the presentations in. Which, in your opinion, is the one with the best chance to change skeptical opinions? Say a skeptic gave you one, and only one, opportunity to show him/her what you consider the most convincing ICCF24 video...which would you choose? Not easy IMO. There were so many high quality presentations backed by solid lab work that would qualify, but alas, that mean ole skeptic specified only one.

After careful consideration, my choice is the US Navy led team (HIVER Electrochemistry Project). There are many reasons for my decision. They are a large and diverse group, drawing expertise from Indian Head, US Naval Academy, US Army, Dahlgren, NIST, and also recruited outside government labs to industry/academia. They approached the research from all angles; experimentation, theory/analysis, and material science. Basically, they are doing everything the field has been saying for 30 years would be needed to solve the mystery. Most importantly, they were quite successful, having claimed several times "we could do it over and over".

Other factors I considered is that this US Navy led team has already made PR inroads with positive feedback reporting such as the IEEE Spectrum article, so whatever they publish in the future is much more likely to be viewed without the bias we are more familiar with. Lastly, they have money/equipment/logistical support the old guard could only dream of, which will keep them teasing out the LENR secrets for years to come.

So Mr. Skeptic, here is my pick:

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I welcome this pick. Barham's presentation, describing the HIVER program, currently appears to be the most authoritative effort to solve the LENR mystery, and undoubtedly the agencies involved, NAVSEA and DARPA, have a chance to solve it in a short time. If they want to.

The third slide is the most important. It takes up the LENR field issues, primarily the "Lack of acceptance of thermal (heat) results". The first problem, "many calorimeter design", can be easily solved, just by focusing on the most representative of these designs. Which one? Well, the answer is suggested directly by the first page of the McKubre paper shown on the upper-right corner of the same slide: "Cold fusion: comments on the state of scientific proof". This summary reads:

Quote

From https://brillouinenergy.com/ne…e-of-scientific-proof.pdf

Early criticisms were made of the scientific claims made by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989 on their observation of heat effects in electrochemically driven palladium–deuterium experiments that were consistent with nuclear but not chemical or stored energy sources. These criticisms were premature and adverse. In the light of 25 years further study of the palladium–deuterium system, what is the state of proof of Fleischmann and Pons’ claims?

This summary is still valid, apart from the numbers of years which in the meantime has gone from 25 to 30+. It confirms that F&P's claims are still at the center of the entire CF/LENR controversy: "what is the state of proof of Fleischmann and Pons’ claims?"

McKubre complains that "criticisms were premature and adverse", but in his paper he mentions only the F&P article published in JEC in 1989. It's reasonable that, at that time, the 3 years spent by the two electrochemists studying their cells, were too short a period of time to properly investigate such a new phenomenon, even considering that they did it by spending only their own savings.

However, three years later, in 1992, F&P's experiments were much more mature and well funded. They had a well equipped and brand new laboratory in France. Therefore the experiments carried out by F&P in that year are the best candidates to solve the first issue listed in the 3rd slide presented at ICCF24 by the NAVSEA-DARPA initiative.

In conclusion, Barham's presentation at ICCF24 is an excellent candidate to influence the opinion of a LENR skeptic, provided that the program reported in the third slide is implemented in a coherent way, starting from the evaluation of the calorimetric issues of the F&P experiments carried out in 1992.

Quote from Shane D.

Well, so far you and THH have watched only 2 videos from ICCF24, yet already seem cautiously interested. BTW; there are at least a handful more left for you to see. Who knows, they may even lead to a Saul conversion, so be careful

It is only weird people (not saying who is this) who thinks skepticism equated to an inability to revise views based on evidence. It is a source of sorrow to me that thus far in 10 years of watching LENR/CF my views have not much revised - or rather some initial hope (not Rossi - who never caused me to hope - but WL theory) dampened on deeper investigation.

But I am fascinated by the strange characteristics of palladium or other metal lattice hydrides. Especially the possibilities in such for electron screening and other effects that amplify neclear cross-sections.

Do I think those look like a good basis for useful LENR? No. Could they? Well, unlike some of those convinced LENR is real I am never certain, and always willing to reconsider.

FWIW here are the problems as I see them:

Coulomb barrier - a big problem - but one for which many solutions are in principle possible. Also work both theoretical and experimental is ongoing investigating those. If that can be overcome we Have true LENR - but not necessarily an explanation for the FPHE (there I side with Ascoli when cells are open - no evidence - and when cells are closed the evidence is just not good enough for me to be sure - I am not Jed - though good enough for me to be interested).

Lack of high energy products. Not all LENR advocates require this - but most of the experimental results do because high energy products, if they exist even at low branching rations - are needed if FPHE and other excess heat anomalies are to be explained by LENR. I see this is the main negative in the LENR filed (as I say it does not apply to all LENR).

The gymnastics needed to make a theory that only allows reactions without high energy products is extreme. Quantum effects could leverage coherence to increase barrier tunnelling rates easily, However any subsequent nuclear reaction, if energetically permitted, will have nuclear-level excess energy created. How does that energy get thermalised? I am with Hagelstein in seeing that as the major issue. I respect anyone who puts real effort into solving it - in principle - as long as their solutions are coherent with known high energy physics experiments (we have a lot, and they deliver a large amount of coherent theory). While everyone agreed that theory is not complete, it explains results so far with exquisite quantitative accuracy. Any alternate theory must achieve that - and then go further. The woo-woo theories here that do not attempt to claim such predictive accuracy I have no time for. There is lots of scope for theoretical additions that can be shown equivalent to standard model/QM/GR (SMQMGR) nearly all the time (which gives you all of that prediction) and then which differ in some extreme cases. It is also easy to see that SMQMGR might be some approximation of a deeper better theory. It is a very high bar to ditch major components of standard model without showing that they emerge untouched as an approximation of some deeper theory. Of course I like many hope that space-time generated through entanglement - which loosely shows how GR emerges from pure quantum information processing - will give us that.

Finding some way in which thermalisation of high energy products could ever happen is tough - showing why it should always happen pretty well impossible. I continue to wait for some hypothesis that does this - without much hope.

Experiments. Jed looks at one set of well-conducted experiments and sees in them certainty. I do not. Jed looks at a whole set of experiments, a few of which are well-conducted, and reckons the well-conducted ones with positive results together enhance the chances of FPHE being nuclear. I do not.

In fact I see the "field" of LENR as not being a coherent scientific field. It includes companies like BLP that chase more and more obscure experimental setup anomalies, and gain funding from Mills's very poor theoretical efforts. Many different groups studying specific anomalies which do not seem coherent. Some can be real artifacts of the system studied, some can be systematic experimental errors, some can be unexpectedly high nuclear reaction rates. Grouping them together and trying to explain all from some nuclear theory seems unwise to me. So fra I think the LENR filed has no agreement as to which of these experiments show real effects, nor which of those effects are likely to be nuclear.

I think lack of certainty leads people to accept everything as nuclear. I agree with the lack of certainty - but not with the acceptance that everything should be nuclear.

Oh -and the minority viewpoints that say LENR is not nuclear, but nuclear-levels of energy coming from some woo-woo new energy source, I see us much lower probability than LENR.

THH

So - mostly I follow LENR because looking for clever ways to get round Coulomb barrier has real value independent of the rest. I can see lots of ways that the CB stuff can be addressed and progress made. I cannot see progress anywhere else.

Take the "mystery Tritium production" results.

I am neutral on what they mean. I do not know. if they are real, they can be characterised. That characterisation will both show them real, and give us ammunition for working out what they mean. It should be high priority (at least as long as they stay real) because it seems a relatively possible way to get definitive data that can relatively easily be checked. I'd expect more enthusiasm from LENR community.

THH

Quote from Shane D.

Had you and the mainstream had your way, this ICCF never would have happened.

I won't comment for ascoli. You have no evidence for mainstream science not wanting ICCF24 to take place.

All you might say is that mainstream scientists would look at the work there and say it is of very variable quality. Many (including me) might wish for a higher quality bar.

PS - I've watched all the videos recommended I think, except those Sam liked. I suspect he likes => I will not take them seriously.

I would much rather have a collection of research papers to read.

Quote from Wyttenbach

... never accept a lab visit to see LENR at action e.g. producing gamma radiation.

What does this mean? Does this mean that you have recently been seeing heat and radiation from Russ George style fuel?

Quote from Shane D.

Had you and the mainstream had your way, this ICCF never would have happened. There would be no talk of an X-Prize. No funding announcement from ARPA-E. The EU Horizon programs CleanHME/HERMES, and NEDO in Japan never would have happened. NASA would never have quietly continued FP's research, with no LCF space generation program today (with 25 dedicated researchers)...that may potentially be a game changer for space travel.

I doubt that any of this is true. The "mainstream" is much more adventurous than you believe. I see opinions like this often on this website. They are from people who have little experience of academic science.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Experiments. Jed looks at one set of well-conducted experiments and sees in them certainty. I do not. Jed looks at a whole set of experiments, a few of which are well-conducted, and reckons the well-conducted ones with positive results together enhance the chances of FPHE being nuclear. I do not.

Please stop with the bullshit. That is not what I say. I look at DOZENS of well conducted experiments at Los Alamos, China Lake, BARC, SRI, Texas A&M, Case Western, U. Minnesota and many other places and I see certainty. It is possible that one one set of non-replicated experiments is wrong. Even SRI might be wrong. But when the same experiment is done elsewhere with the same instruments, and again at other places with other instruments, that eliminates any possibility of experimental error. That is why replication is so important.

You keep putting words in my mouth and claiming that I say what I emphatically do not say. When I say the very opposite. When I cite not one set of experiments, but many independent ones. Either you have a poor memory or you are lying.

Also, there are not "a few of which" well conducted. There are hundreds, done by most of the top electrochemists in the world. People you have never heard of who now have institutes named after them. Such as https://chemistry.case.edu/research/yces/ There are not many top electrochemists. It is a small world.

Quote from Bruce__H

I doubt that any of this is true. The "mainstream" is much more adventurous than you believe.

You are both right and wrong. Cold fusion has always been a mainstream subject, but the mainstream is divided. Many mainstream scientists are determined to crush the research. Cold fusion has been suppressed by vicious academic politics. Researchers have been harassed, threatened with deportation and summarily fired. Their equipment has been smashed, covered with horse manure, and their lab notebooks stolen and destroyed. That is adventurous, but not in a good way.

Every researcher who replicated cold fusion was mainstream. Most were not just mainstream, but tenured, distinguished, crème de la crème mainstream. People such as Fleischmann, the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, Miles, who had awards from the UN and was a Fellow of China Lake, and so on. If these people had not been distinguished with lots of clout, they would have never have been allowed to work on it. An untenured academic who even talks about cold fusion will be fired. Even though Miles was a Fellow, when he published a positive result, they threw him out of the lab and gave him a menial job as a stockroom clerk. See p. 154 and elsewhere:

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

The people at the NHE lied about their own experiments and the experiments done there by Miles, as you see in that document. They are still lying, most recently at ICCF24.

Extreme politics and unethical behavior are not unusual in academic science. There are dozens of examples. Top scientists did all they could to stop Townes from inventing the maser and laser. In the 1990s *, people who talked about neural network AI were harassed and fired. It is now the largest breakthrough in AI history, by a wide margin. Academic scientists tend to have low morals because they are not punished for misbehavior. They are not held to account, the way programmers or engineers would be. They often lie, publish fake data, or steal ideas during peer-review. No one catches them or cares. That is what other academic scientists tell me, and they have given me many examples.

CORRECTION: Neural networks were verboten in 1970s and early 1980s, per the book by Martin Ford, and other books. I had the dates wrong. See the quotes below.

Quote from JedRothwell

Academic scientists tend to have low morals because they are not punished for misbehavior. They are not held to account, the way programmers or engineers would be. They often lie, publish fake data, or steal ideas . . .

I am not suggesting that programmers or engineers are good people. Or inherently moral. I have known scoundrels in the programming biz, and some psychopaths such as Steve Jobs. But here's the thing. Programming is consequential. Even an unimportant work-a-day task, such as the first ones I did, are consequential. The first thing I did was work on programs to generate water bills and other municipal billing. I played only a small part, not enough to cause damage. Other people checked and rechecked my work. If you screw up that kind of application, and accidentally send out a water bill for $999,999.99, or negative $1.20, all hell breaks loose. Customers wake you up with a phone call at 3 in the morning yelling about it. That happened to me! Even the most low paid programmer does things that make a difference to the customer. So programmers are held to account, and they learn to follow the rules. They give the Allan Shepard prayer, uttered just before the first manned suborbital U.S. space flight: "Dear Lord, please don't let me screw up."

People in all walks of life are moral or not. Ethical or not. Careful or careless, diligent or lazy. But depending on their jobs, these qualities will sometimes make a big difference, and sometimes they make no difference. Academic scientists often have evil character flaws that would bite their butts in another line of work. Perhaps that means S.O.B.s gravitate into academia, where it is safe to be that way. They wouldn't last long programming municipal billing systems.

Quote from JedRothwell

In the 1990s, people who talked about neural network AI were harassed and fired.

What are you thinking of here? I was heavily involved in neural network research in the late 1980's. It was a completely normal instance of a new field springing to life in an academic milieu. At least that is how it looked from the inside. By the 1990's it was completely mainstream. I do recall an early story of someone having trouble getting a PhD because a member of his examination committee thought that his results had minimal importance. But these things happen.

What do you want people to do? Not object to things that they think are low-impact and or possibly wrong? When everyone (academic research) is spending public money?

Quote from JedRothwell

Academic scientists often have evil character flaws that would bite their butts in another line of work. Perhaps that means S.O.B.s gravitate into academia, where it is safe to be that way. They wouldn't last long programming municipal billing systems.

Everyone thinks they have the hardest job. Much of what you say sounds to me like retroactive justifications for opinions you want to hold anyway.

The more your observations overlap into situations I have first-hand experience with the more untrue they sound. I remember your retailing some remark about academics only caring about their parking spots. That struck me then as so weirdly absurd that it could only be pushed by someone who has no insight or experience of academic science. I mean who cares about parking spots? There is no prestige in parking spots or anything like that. What people fight over is lab space, money, publications and so on. Not the sort of garbage you are talking about.

Quote from Bruce__H

What are you thinking of here? I was heavily involved in neural network research in the late 1980's. It was a completely normal instance of a new field springing to life in an academic milieu.

I have several books about AI by Martin Ford and others. Some technical, some histories. Ford writes broad reviews, and seems to know everyone. He interviewed many people in "Architects of Intelligence." They talked about the periodic reoccurring AI winters from the 1970s on. Some of them said that in the 90s, you would get in trouble for mentioning neural networks. You couldn't publish a paper mentioning that. I read that in several books. Here is one quote from "Architects."

MARTIN FORD: I was an undergraduate studying computer engineering in the early 1980s, and I don’t recall much exposure to neural networks at all. It was a concept that was out there, but it was definitely very much marginalized. Now, in 2018, that has changed dramatically. YANN

YANN LECUN: It was worse than marginalized. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s it was anathema within the community. You couldn’t publish a paper that even mentioned the phrase neural networks because it would immediately be rejected by your peers. In fact, Geoffrey Hinton and Terry Sejnowski published a very famous paper in 1983 called, Optimal Perceptual Inference, which described an early deep learning or neural network model. Hinton and Sejnowski had to use code words to avoid mentioning that it was a neural network. Even the title of their paper was cryptic; it was all very strange!

Minsky first put the kibosh on neural networks in 1969. See:

A Concise History of Neural Networks

“From the barren landscapes inside our personal devices come furtive anthems hummed by those digital servants who will one day be our…

towardsdatascience.com

QUOTE:

Minsky in his text laid out these and other problems with Neural Nets and effectively led the larger scientific community and most importantly the funding establishments to the conclusion that further research in this direction was to lead nowhere. The effect of this text was powerful and dried up funding to an extent that, for the next 10–12 years, no-one at the largest research institutions at the time and thereby the smaller ones too, would take on any project that had that had the doomed Neural Networks as its premise. The age now famously referred to as ‘the AI winter’ had begun.

Quote from Bruce__H

Everyone thinks they have the hardest job. Much of what you say sounds to me like retroactive justifications for opinions you want to hold anyway.

Programming is not hard. Not the kind I ever did. Nowhere near as hard as designing bridges or airplanes. I had no strong opinions about academic science. In the 1980s I hired some superb programmers from Georgia Tech, who told me about the shenanigans in academic programming. I figured that was an isolated case. I did not think deeply about it. Many years later, I talked with Peter Hagelstein, Martin Fleischmann, Mel Miles and others. They told me hair-raising stories about what happened to them, and what the opposition did to them. The account by Mel Miles I cited above is just one example of many. The books by Townes about the laser and many other histories backed up my impression that there is an ethics problem in academic science. Anyone who knows the history of cold fusion can see that!

Of course there is unethical behavior in every institution. But it is more common in some institutions than others. It ebbs and flows. It was practically unheard of in U.S. post-WWII aviation until the recent Boeing scandals:

Boeing Charged with 737 Max Fraud Conspiracy and Agrees to Pay over $2.5 Billion

The Boeing Company (Boeing) has entered into an agreement with the Department of Justice to resolve a criminal charge related to a conspiracy to defraud the…

www.justice.gov

It is obvious to me why corruption and incompetence are so rare in aviation. Because aviation is consequential! A programmer screwing up a municipal billing system is likely to lose his job. But the problems can usually be fixed with several all-nighter programming sessions by five or six beleaguered people. No great harm. Whereas when an airplane designer screws up . . . and then covers up, airplanes crash. People are killed. Billions of dollars are lost.

Quote from Shane D.

What opinions are you referring to that you see here often?

Alan Smith is number one. Then Jed, who has a whole closetful of stories about how the inability of LENR to make its case is totally expected because, you know -- Wright brothers! -- and how mainstream science rather than remarking on this lack of progress, should be admiring it.

I can go back and collect instances if you want. It might take a couple of weeks.

Quote from JedRothwell

You keep putting words in my mouth and claiming that I say what I emphatically do not say. When I say the very opposite. When I cite not one set of experiments, but many independent ones. Either you have a poor memory or you are lying.

Also, there are not "a few of which" well conducted. There are hundreds, done by most of the top electrochemists in the world. People you have never heard of who now have institutes named after them. Such as https://chemistry.case.edu/research/yces/ There are not many top electrochemists. It is a small world.

Jed: you cite Mckubre as a well-conducted set of experiments. I agree. I do not know of any other (replicated) experiments of that type which are anything liek as well-conducted.

As always we have different standards. Please either cite another well-conducted set which replicates Mckubre (rather than doing something different) or understand that I am saying what I mean and what you can with some differences over the meaning of words agree.

If there is something that backs McK up and is a real replication I'd like to know. My understanding is a whole set of people did experiments with varying results and possible error mechanisms. McK then tried hard to deliver definitive results on FPHE and deal with all error mechanisms. I am happy for you to cite your best other set of experiments to go with McK. I will tell you then whether I consider them as well-conducted. If I have missed something I would like to know.

I do have a poor memory for the details here - but I am pretty sure I would have have latched onto anything replicating McK that was as well conducted with the same concern to deal with errors. I am not lying, and have never deliberately (as the word as normally used) lied. Nor have I ever not admitted a mistake when accused of it. Your assumptions about my character are wrong - and I think in your heart you know that. It is just that you cannot understand why i do not agree with you over these matters.