I guess though - for retracted LENR papers - I should reference Paneth & Peters as a venerable example?
The perpetual “is LENR even real” argument thread.
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Radon => radioactive radon decay products in air which coalesce on specks of dust etc.
Page 11 of the Storms/Scanlan paper discusses this, believe it or not they actually knew about it. As for your call for 'Papers please' ( For you ze war is over) you will find a whole list of references on the last pages of the paper.
BTW Vittorio Violante is a pupil of Lowell Wood who was in turn a protegé of Edward Teller. All part of the Los Alamos National Lab crew at one time. I suspect they know more about the measurement of particle radiation than me, and definitely more than you.
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The SAM model and I am pretty sure the SO(4) model as well are both perhaps very different in how they explain things, but do not need all the antiquated ideas which we are now slapped around the ears with to explain to us cold fusion cannot be real. That is what has been done to this field for 30 years or so now. The evidence is overwhelming that we have collectively been wrong about so many fundamental beliefs it is not funny even. In fact it is only showing me that we do not have a problem in science but a problem with humans believing stuff. Once we are schooled in a certain paradigm we want to keep that paradigm, because doubting it would be greatly upsetting for the psyche. That is why its called a paradigm shift and that is not nice, in fact it probably is very destructive and painful for most people.....Forgive me, Edo. You have not actually given any evidence that these two models are better than the (not so antiquated) rest of science. I mean bits are antiquated, obviously, like Newton's theory, but it moves and changes. In fact you have not even given me evidence they are as good as standard science, which has an excellent track record of prediction.
Words are fun, science is better.
As for paradigm shift not being nice that may be true for some people - maybe you - and maybe many of the LENR people here - but I think most scientists get excited by it.
examples:
- FTL neutrinos [1] - well they were not real - but when we thought they were real most scientists were very excited at the possibility and a whole new set of theories got generated to try and explain them
- Me, here. For some time, until about 5 years ago I read those excellent papers (I went on to do a quite thorough review on them - documented here somewhere) on electron screening [2] I thought there was no obvious way to get round the Coulomb barrier. My "paradigm" changed at that point. Which - I would point out - is more change in thinking than many of the older LENR people here have had... And - I promise - there was no pain for me. I was just very excited and happy and spent a lot of time digging out details from a forward/backward citations search.
- Spacetime as emergent property of entanglement [3]. You cannot get a bigger paradigm shift than this - and theoretical physicists (+ me, and I am sure many here) are very excited about it.
One area where you are right paradigm shifts seem very slow is not scientists but professional statisticians. It has been widely known since the 80s (Ed Jeynes [4]) that Bayesian probability theory is far superior to the "frequentist" view. Yet statisticians cling to bad maths.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…an-light_neutrino_anomaly
[2] https://journals.aps.org/prc/a….1103/PhysRevC.101.044609
[3] https://www.quantamagazine.org…antum-particles-20210907/
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92 groups is surely not incompatible with 500 scientists?
But if by replicated you mean - got positive results then we are compatible. No?I do not understand what you mean. You wrote:
1989-1990 > 500 scientists conducted funded CF research - without replicable results.
The results were replicable, as shown in the table by Fritz Will. Those are all positive results. He did not list the negative papers. (Note that I did list the negative papers, in my history review. I copied the evaluations by Storms and Britz, as noted in the paper. https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf)
I guess though - for retracted LENR papers - I should reference Paneth & Peters as a venerable example?
No, I meant only papers after 1989.
Well I'd guess that most false positives were discovered (by the competent teams) before papers went to press. Remember it is a long long time from doing an experiment to publishing a paper.
just one example (high profile)
That was not published. I meant published papers.
Let me add that you might not have been aware of the table from Fritz Will. However, that is no excuse for saying "without replicable results." Many others sources list replicable results published in 1989 and 1990. These include two books, the ICCF1 proceedings, the NSF conference proceedings, the review paper by Hagelstein, the history by McKubre and many others. If you had read any of these, you would have known there were replicable results. Obviously, you have not read of them, or any history of cold fusion. Yet you asserted as if were a fact that there were no replications. Again, I suggest you refrain from discussing things you know nothing about.
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The results were replicable, as shown in the table by Fritz Will.
Ok - I should have said - without replicable and certain results. I apologise. I see how it would have confused you.
There are lots of replicable uncertain results like CR39 tracks.
I know that - because had there been replicable certain results the google team would have replicated them again, successfully, and be very happy. And because it was what that guy at ICCF24 was pointing out. I am not relying on mainly my own research here which obviously is not as complete as others.
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These include two books, the ICCF1 proceedings, the NSF conference proceedings, the review paper by Hagelstein, the history by McKubre and many others. If you had read any of these, you would have known there were replicable results.
Well, I would perhaps if I'd taken the conclusions of pro-LENR review authors at face value and not looked at the details for myself.
I cannot claim to have looked at all the details myself, but whenever I have got excited about some new thing, and looked into it carefully, the results that seem so certain fade into... uncertainty.
I have not done it much recently. And when I have, perhaps because now I am more seelctive, things are different:
- The LCF NASA results. Look good to me!
- The LEC data. looks good to me!
Both replicable and interesting.
So you see, it is not everything I think is uncertain.
However the paper Alan posted just now from Storms showing radiation - yes that one was highly uncertain. I mean - it could be strange radiation + radon progeny. Or it could be radon progeny. Or, since I am no expert and just remember the radon thing (they made a deep impression on me - those radon progeny) from when we last had a case of mysterious radiation here, it could be something else...
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Ok - I should have said - without replicable and certain results.
You believe the results are uncertain, but the authors think the results were certain. You should not substitute your beliefs for theirs, or put words in their mouths. You should say something like:
"92 groups reported successful replications by September 1990. These included groups headed by most of the world's top electrochemists. All of the papers asserted that the results were certain. However, in my opinion, these researchers were wrong, and the results were not certain."
That puts things in perspective. It is very important that you separate what the authors said from what you say. The way you expressed it, the audience here might think these authors had doubts about their results, but they did not. They wouldn't have published if they had doubts.
Of course, replication can be replicating errors, like anyone else who decided to estimate liquid boiled in an electrolysis experiment ignoring the fact that foam/microbubbles has an unknown density << 1g/cc.
No, it is not possible the replications can be replicating errors. An error is always systematic. It is a problem with instrument or method. The groups in 1990 used many different systems and methods, such as flow calorimeters instead of isoperibolic ones, or thermistors instead of thermocouples. Therefore, they could not have replicated the same errors. They might all have made different errors, with the different systems. However this is statistically impossible, for the same reason 93 professors do not all have traffic accidents in a 1-year period. People do not make that many mistakes doing what they do for a living. Experts who have spent decades doing electrochemistry do not suddenly make idiotic or insane mistakes, such as the foam one you describe. Or any of the other errors you describe, such as Miles forgetting to exclude helium from the atmosphere. Experts do make mistakes, but not mistakes that middle-school science classes teach you to avoid, or that any 5 year old would instantly recognize (the foam problem).
If it were possible for 92 distinguished experts to make mistakes and publish papers saying "I have high signal to noise results" when in fact they had no results, the experimental method would not work, and we would still be living in caves. Science is predicated on the fact that when enough people measure X with high s/n ratios, that means X is true. That is the only standard of truth in experimental science.
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Page 11 of the Storms/Scanlan paper discusses this, believe it or not they actually knew about it. As for your call for 'Papers please' ( For you ze war is over) you will find a whole list of references on the last pages of the paper.
BTW Vittorio Violante is a pupil of Lowell Wood who was in turn a protegé of Edward Teller. All part of the Los Alamos National Lab crew at one time. I suspect they know more about the measurement of particle radiation than me, and definitely more than you.
Alan - I don't quite understand. you said all these other people replicated Storms. Do you mean it the other way round?
And since I've not read the other papers, and can only comment on Storms, no point making comments about them yet.
Let us just stick to Storms for this post. I don't think he was thinking clearly about radon. You are right, he mentions it (which is why I highlighted it - evidence direct from his paper). But nowhere does he consider the possibility of radon progeny providing either "slow change" results, or the main blocked by lead radiation after cycles of heating.
you know yourself how tricky, in high radon areas, where there is minimal air flow out of a lab, radon can be? And Storms did not consider it? He mentioned it even - without considering whether it could account for the other results. Weird.
THH
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Don't worry I expect that your expectation will be fulfilled.
Many see your scepticism as nitpicking to the point of trolling.
I don't, I presume you are still open-minded but clearly have an interest in LENR or you would not be on this forum.
But just out of interest, to take a different tack towards the positive side of things;
If you had to speak to somebody who has already decided that LENR is bunk (perhaps an editor of a science journal, or a person who decides on who gets funding for research) I would be interested on whether you would be able to make a positive case for LENR and what research or results you might want to present to them.
Cheers
PS - juts to continue this. I am only sounding negative here - because everyone else is fanclub-level positive. Anywhere else I'd be considered positive...
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Findings corroborated by Violante's work, and Bush and Eagleton, Matsumoto, Karabut and others. Very clear radiation signal well above background...
Alan - I don't quite understand. you said all these other people replicated Storms. Do you mean it the other way round?
As you see, I said 'corroborated' (confirm or give support to (a statement, theory, or finding) because they did different experiments and used different methods. And they are all top-class scientists (though of course they are mentally defective because they work/worked on LENR)
Let us just stick to Storms for this post. I don't think he was thinking clearly about radon. You are right, he mentions it (which is why I highlighted it - evidence direct from his paper). But nowhere does he consider the possibility of radon progeny providing either "slow change" results, or the main blocked by lead radiation after cycles of heating.
This is what he actually said about radon... and BTW, do you think that a man who designed fusion propulsion systems for NASA (before they were more or less banned for terrestrial use) doesn't know anything about it?
III.4 Radon
When a fan was used to circulate air around the GM and apparatus, the count rate
increased and then decreased when the fan is turned off. This change is attributed to
radon in the air that is made available to the surface, where it deposits. This extra count
rate was not present in the absence of the fan. Inactive samples, of which many were
studied, and the empty cell show a steady count rate at the normal background level. All
data was obtained in the absence of the fan. Figure 19 shows the behavior of a typical
inert sample exposed to H2.
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To be fair, I don't think Lonchampt did that? He did comment on the foam and say it made getting accurate results that way impossible.
Again, stop putting words in people's mouths. He said foam reduces accuracy. He did not say it makes accurate results impossible to the extent that no one can tell whether the water level has fallen 8 cm or 1 cm. If it were that bad, and accuracy was so low, F&P and everyone working with them would have seen that, and they would have abandoned that method.
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do you think that a man who designed fusion propulsion systems for NASA (before they were more or less banned for terrestrial use)
For good reason. Did you see the photo he showed of one his gigantic machines that exploded? Impressive!
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Again, stop putting words in people's mouths. He said foam reduces accuracy. He did not say it makes accurate results impossible to the extent that no one can tell whether the water level has fallen 8 cm or 1 cm. If it were that bad, and accuracy was so low, F&P and everyone working with them would have seen that, and they would have abandoned that method.
You are as always making assumptions Jed.
You don't understand - how can anyone know the density of foam/bubbles? Is this some new science - if so - where is it written up?
We are not talking about the water level, but the foam/bubble level - because in those last 10 min the tubes are all foam/bubbles (as you might expect).
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Again, stop putting words in people's mouths. He said foam reduces accuracy. He did not say it makes accurate results impossible to the extent that no one can tell whether the water level has fallen 8 cm or 1 cm. If it were that bad, and accuracy was so low, F&P and everyone working with them would have seen that, and they would have abandoned that method.
Lonchampt wrote (1): "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."
Lonchampt didn't made any video, so it was difficult for him to follow the water level during the long boiling period.
On the contrary, F&P made a video in which it's quite easy to distinguish the level between the residual liquid layer and the high column of foam built-up during the several hours of boiling which preceded the final boil-off (2). The video shows that, during the last boil-off period, the liquid level dropped about 1 cm only, not 9 cm (that is half the total height of the initial water columns) as supposed by F&P in the calculation made in their Simplicity Paper.
(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LonchamptGreproducti.pdf
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I will warn only once: no foam gate posts here. We will not go There again. Last warning. Next one will come with post deletion.
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You are as always making assumptions Jed.
You don't understand - how can anyone know the density of foam/bubbles? Is this some new science - if so - where is it written up?Anyone can know the approximate density by looking at the cell. If the density is so large that the waterline is totally obscured, you can tell by looking. As I said, a 5 year old could tell. If you asked her, "how high is the water now?" she would say: "I can't tell; there are too many bubbles." F&P would see there are too many bubbles, and they would abandon that technique.
We are not talking about the water level, but the foam/bubble level - because in those last 10 min the tubes are all foam/bubbles (as you might expect).
That is incorrect. They are not all foam/bubbles. If they were, no one could measure the water level and they would use some other technique. Also, by the way, you can tell the instant it has boiled dry. The steam stops coming out the top. Try this with a teapot. (Only don't leave it on the flame for long.)
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And possibly a ban...
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I will warn only once: no foam gate posts here. We will not go There again. Last warning. Next one will come with post deletion.
That is a little unreasonable. THH is making new claims, and raising new questions, which are -- at least -- plausible. He deserves an answer. The statements by Lonchampt are important, and should be explicated.
