The perpetual “is LENR even real” argument thread.

Quote from Ascoli65

Jed, you are reversing the duty of the proof.

If the AC unit operation is a plausible cause, t

Is it plausible? Only if you can point to some evidence. Perhaps time-stamped power from the AC unit is asking too much, but can you show that the perturbations continued throughout the experiment? That they continued when there was no experiment in process? Do you have any data to support your hypothesis, or is it only speculation? Is there any way we can tell the difference between your hypothesis and Takahashi's?

The burden of proof is as much on you as Takahashi. Just because a hypothesis is more mundane, that does not make it more likely. It is actually extremely unlikely that there would be perturbations all through the experiment, and even when there was no experiment, yet no one noticed that. It is a sure thing they ran the temperature data collection before and after the experiment was performed. People always do that. They wouldn't turn it on the moment before commencing the experiment.

Give Takahashi and the others some credit for common sense. They must have some ability to do experiments. The guy is a professor who has been doing experiments for 50 years. The people from Mitsubishi there have been doing experiments for decades. Many outside observers have come. Someone would have notices if the temperature fluctuations were always there, and always of the same magnitude as the spikes.

Quote from JedRothwell

Give Takahashi and the others some credit for common sense.

Giving credit would conflict with an Ascolian prophecy and perpetual Dystopian worldview as evidenced on Fusione Fredda

an Italian website in 2017

apparently LENR became extinct with IH.. how could Takahashi dare to continue LENR after that?

"The last revival of the FF is destined to become extinct soon, perhaps with a certain media hype, at the conclusion of the judicial affair between Rossi and IH. But this will not put an end to the deceptive sirens, as shown by the latest issue of Le Scienze and the news of the NSA just posted above. The topic of this post, which takes its cue from the juxtaposition of ITER and Ecat made in the GSE magazine, allows us to widen the nominal topic of your blog to any other energy mirage that has seduced men, leading them unaware into the Planet of Balocchi, with the final results that we all know."

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Quote from THHuxleynew

Of course, maybe the continually logged temperature included 4 or 5 sensors all round the reactor? It is just that such details matter. It does show how small amounts of attention to these details (e.g. ambient air sensors distributed strategically around and experiment) can provide protection against skepticism.

I don't suppose you have spent much time in Japan? Detail is what they do.

Quote from JedRothwell

Is it plausible? Only if you can point to some evidence. Perhaps time-stamped power from the AC unit is asking too much, but can you show that the perturbations continued throughout the experiment?

Yes. For instance, graphs on page 14 of the Takahashi presentation at JCF20 (1) show that the TC4 oscillations continued throughout the entire time axes. This is exactly the behavior expected when the ambient temperature surrounding an experimental setup is strictly kept constant by means of an AC unit.

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That they continued when there was no experiment in process?

No, for two simple reasons. First, if no experiment is in process there is no needing to keep the ambient temperature constant. Second, even if the AC unit was kept in operation when there was no experiment in process, no TC4 down-spike could have been recorded, because the H/D pipe hit by the blown air and the connected upper flange were at the same temperature of the surrounding air.

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Do you have any data to support your hypothesis, or is it only speculation?

Yes. a lot of. For instance those contained in the above said presentation (1), confirm the AC hypothesis.

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Is there any way we can tell the difference between your hypothesis and Takahashi's?

The main difference between the AC hypothesis and the Takahashi's is that the first is plausible as confirmed by the published information, and the second is impossible, as shown by the same published information. In fact the regular series of down-spikes are perfectly compatible with the on-off operation of an AC unit, that we know was just above the experimental rig. Viceversa, this same behavior is incompatible with the Takahashi explanation of a random development of turbulence inside the RC due to a mystery AHE phenomena of nuclear origin, because anyone knows that hotter gases cannot induce temperature down-spikes.

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The burden of proof is as much on you as Takahashi. Just because a hypothesis is more mundane, that does not make it more likely.

Well, this contradicts the paraphrase of Alan Smith of the Takahashi's words about experiment, theory and explanation. See (2) for details.

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It is actually extremely unlikely that there would be perturbations all through the experiment, and even when there was no experiment, yet no one noticed that. It is a sure thing they ran the temperature data collection before and after the experiment was performed. People always do that. They wouldn't turn it on the moment before commencing the experiment.

You should read better the literature in your library.

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Give Takahashi and the others some credit for common sense. They must have some ability to do experiments. The guy is a professor who has been doing experiments for 50 years. The people from Mitsubishi there have been doing experiments for decades. Many outside observers have come. Someone would have notices if the temperature fluctuations were always there, and always of the same magnitude as the spikes.

Jed, I don't have 50 years of experience in doing CF experiments, but I've more than 12 years of experience in looking at the CF results claimed by as much authoritative professors as Takahashi.

In January 2011, a dozen of UniBo professors prepared, assisted, described, certified and confirmed for years the results of the famous first public experiment of the Ecat, and dozens of CF experts in the world, including you, believed and strenuously defended those results.

Strange things happen in the CF field, but I think their nature is psychological, not physical. They are happening since long, at least since F&P, the two pioneers of the field and indubitable world-class experts in electrochemistry, claimed to have achieved four times the input power, by ignoring the presence of foam in their cells.

After having followed the CF field, I am no longer surprised by anything

(1) https://www.researchgate.net/p…_of_Nano-Metal_and_HD-Gas

(2) RE: The perpetual “is LENR even real” argument thread.

Quote from Ascoli65

a dozen of UniBo professors

? A dozen?

Quote from Alan Smith

? A dozen?

Yes. Around 10 to 12. At least 10.

> Give Takahashi and the others some credit for common sense.

Very hard for an outside skeptic to do, given the dismantling of the living room proof he had. Jed Rothwell has tried to explain this away, but it defies all logic that someone who has 50W in and 300W out sitting in their living space for more than a few days would not just wheel it over to the nearest physics department and say eppur si muove.

I didn't know they had that many, and I know the sub-department well. I can think of around 6 at most who were involved, most only peripherally. Do you know the names of this 10.

Quote from Alan Smith

I didn't know they had that many, and I know the sub-department well. I can think of around 6 at most who were involved, most only peripherally. Do you know the names of this 10.

Yes. But, please, consider that writing "a dozen of UniBo professors prepared, assisted, described, certified and confirmed …", I mean that about a dozen people of UniBo (two of them were not actually professors) were involved in one or more of the listed activities.

Anyway, ten were the UniBo professors (or assistants) present during the January 14, 2011 Ecat demo. Beyond Focardi, three of them prepared the experimental setup (and/or the nuclear instrumentation around it) and issued the 3 experimental reports. Three other professors were in the Ecat working group. The two deans, of the Physics Department and the local section of INFN, were also present, supported the initiative and defended the claimed results. And finally Stremmenos. Ten people in total, well trained and informed about experimental physics, and in many cases with a long experience in CF.

Quote from Ascoli65

Ten people in total, well trained and informed about experimental physics, and in many cases with a long experience in CF.

You may have just breathed new life into the Rossi story.

I know only two Unibo people who were actively involved and one of those (Foschi) was a technician. Stremmenos had retired, others were spectators. Actively involved at that time (as distinct from spectating) were (from memory) Giuseppe Levi, Evelyn Foschi, Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson, Lars Tegnér and Hanno Essén

Only Levi and Foschi were employed by Unibo. And Assistant Professor Levi was the only one so titled.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Only in LENR field is this thought to be beneath the researchers

Not in my experience. But then I pay close attention to what actually happens, I don't just throw peanuts from a safe distance.

Quote from THHuxleynew

In order for extraordinary results to be taken seriously all that detail needs to be written up so others can critique it.

And in order to critique it, you have to read it. Which you must find beneath your dignity, because every comment you make reveals that you have read nothing and you know nothing. Most recently, your comment:

"Tritium: you assume a tritium concentration measured after the experiment higher than that before means tritium has been generated. That is clearly not the only explanation!"

Anyone the least bit familiar with any tritium study will know that it is measured before, during and after the test, and it is measured in every component that goes into the cell, and in the surroundings. How else could the experiment be done?!? No one "assumes" anything. They design the experiments to ensure the tritium is generated, and it is not there in the first place. People have been working with tritium since the 1940s at places like Los Alamos and BARC. They know how to contain it, or to keep it from leaking into a cell. They know how to detect it and ensure there are no dangerous levels of it. The methods are well established. The reactor safety protocols are directly applicable to a cold fusion experiment where the goal is to determine whether the tritium was generated, or whether it was present as contamination.

You would not make such weird, disconnected, ignorant comments if you had actually read anything. Either that, or you know perfectly well how the experiments are done, and you are trolling us.

Do you think LENR researchers perform at a lower level than those discussed in this Royal Society paper?

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.171511

A study of National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded early and mid-career scientists (n=3247) found that within the previous 3 years, 0.3% admitted to falsification of data, 6% to a failure to present conflicting evidence and a worrying 15.5% to changing of study design, methodology or results in response to funder pressure [22]. An overview by Fanelli [23] has shown that questionable research practices are as common as 75%, while fraud per se occurs only in 1–3% of scientists. These findings are alarming, yet quantification of these perverse incentives is vital if we are to understand the potential extent of the underlying problem, and formulate strategies to address it. This is an underdeveloped area, but one which is slowly growing—recent works by Smaldino & McElreath [24,25] have employed elegant dynamic models to demonstrate that even when there is no attempts at fraud or untoward research practices, selection based solely on published output tends to produce poorer methods and higher false discovery rates, a phenomenon they term ‘the natural selection of bad science’.

Suboptimal science and fraud can take myriad forms which renders it difficult to detect [26]. For the purposes of this article, we define fraud as an explicit ‘intention to deceive’ [27]. A more recent investigation [23] put the weighted mean percentage of scientists committing research fraud as high as 1.97%, with over a third admitting to questionable research practices. The same investigation found that about 14.12% of scientists reported observing fraudulent research behaviour in colleagues. Another study [28] found that 5% of responding authors claimed to be personally aware of fabricated or misrepresented data in a trial they had participated in. A study of bio-statisticians [29] found that over half of respondents reported being aware of research misconduct.

A 2012 [30] analysis found that FFP offenses rather than honest error accounted for 67.4% of retracted publications, with the rate of retraction due to fraud increasing 10-fold since 1975. An important question is whether scientists who are unethical (fraudulent) or sloppy (careless) may thrive and even outperform diligent scientists in a system driven by publish or perish pressure. As it is impossible to identify all unethical and careless scientists, one can perform mathematical modelling of science under different assumptions and find out how these scientists fare and what the implications are for the overall trustworthiness of science.

Quote from Alan Smith

Do you think LENR researchers perform at a lower level than those discussed in this Royal Society paper?

Probably not. The Royal Society paper describes incentives that cause bad behavior. Mainly publish or perish. Most of these incentives do not exist in cold fusion. If anything, there are opposite incentives. Researchers are usually in competition with others. No one competes with cold fusion researchers. Researchers usually want priority. Nobody wants to be first to publish yet another cold fusion breakthrough, because even the people in the field will disparage it, which all others will ignore it.

I am not suggesting that cold fusion researchers are more virtuous than others, or wiser, or less corruptible. I am saying they have got themselves into a corner where no one wants to corrupt them. The Royal Society paper describes problems caused the working environment. The culture. Cold fusion researchers have been expelled from this culture. If money were to flood into the field, and competition heated up, I expect they would soon be as corrupt as any other academic researchers.

I have long felt that academic scientists tend to be lowlifes and cheaters. Because no one holds them to account. Their results are seldom examined closely. No one tries to replicate. They get away with it. In other lines of work, you have to produce good results or you get fired. A lazy programmer who writes buggy programs will soon be fired. People do not replicate most scientific papers, but they sure do try to use programs. A banker who hands out home loans to people who cannot pay them back would get in trouble. After the 2008 subprime loan crisis, that is. See the movie or book "The Big Short" for details. There were many bad loans before the crisis because the working environment -- again, the culture -- not only allowed that, it encouraged that.