The perpetual “is LENR even real” argument thread.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Yes. You can however look at what is omitted, or imprecisely described, and consider the possible errors that might exist

    Nothing substantial is omitted or imprecisely defined in the leading cold fusion papers. They are written by consummate professionals who know how to write a rock-solid scientific paper. These are people who designed France's fission reactors, and India's atomic bomb. They are people with research labs named after them. They know how to do science, and how to dot the i's and cross the t's. Since you have not read these papers you have no basis to claim they omitted or imprecisely described anything. You made that assertion up, out of whole cloth.

    Since THH now believes the boil off theory, perhaps he can put on his tin-foil hat and fill in a few details that Ascoli refuses to enlighten us about. For example, why does the cell produce heat before the boil off, and after it, but not during it? Or have you people discovered errors in the calorimetry before and after the boil off? Since that calorimetry is totally different from the boil-off version, what errors have you found?

    Quote from Ascoli65

    Superb research? Not in the CF field.


    Quote from Alan Smith

    it was for the education of Ascoli.

    CF research is more 'superb' than Wikipedia.

    the basis of the "Ascoli field."

    to which is added a topping of foam.

    Perhaps Wikipedia has updated its 'education for Ascoli ' since 2017?

    It seems to be stuck in electrolysis.. the field has moved on..from 1992,,

    Ascoli65 said: January 20, 2017 at 6:08 PM

    Per sostenere che la FF(fusione fredda) è impossibile mi bastano le prime righe della pagina di Wikipedia sulla “cold fusion”

    Quote from JedRothwell

    handwave sophistry that cannot be confirmed or falsified, and that applies equally well to every experiment in history.

    That is the point isn't it. LENR has particular characteristics that mean these annoying "cannot be proved or falsified" things matter for it. In a way they don't matter for every other experiment in history:


    (1) every other experiment does not test an effect whose positive results are indistinguishable from random variable small errors.

    (2) every other experiment does not test a claim for an effect which makes no possible testable predictions. (there are some theories like this - but no-one takes them seriously till somone can find predictions that would falsify them).

    (3) every other experiment does not have historic claims for anomalous results which almost universally get smaller or vanish when tested with more accurate equipment.

    (4) every other experiment does not make a broad claim (nuclear reactions) on the basis of evidence vague (does Pd-H work as well as Pd-D? What about all those early controls where it seemed not to work?) and where all the sure thing evidence of nuclear reactions (high energy reaction products) just happens to be so reduced that it is invisible. That causes (1) and is highly unexpected - unless LENR is a collection of errors and misinterpretations in which case it is exactly as expected.


    I am summarising here, but the detail has been argued elsewhere.


    Does this mean I know the collection of LENR anomalies mean nothing interesting? No - how could I say that. Especially when there are real things in the area that make nuclear reactions easier than might be expected. But those working with LENR will communicate better with everyone else if they understand and accept the above negatives, instead of claiming LENR is proven but no-one other than the enlightened few believes it.


    Anyway - one set of clear replicable results: He, T, XS heat, high energy particles. And all the indications of pathological science vanish before experiment.


    Again - if the claims from ICCF24 are correct - relatively replicable clear experimental results that could not be chemical levels of heat generation - none of (1) - (4) matter and the world changes. I'd have thought those who unlike me are sure LENR is real would realise that and push for the validation that will finally prove LENR. these debates about old experiments, in that context - just don't matter. So why not just accept the old evidence is unclear and weight for the muhc better new evidence? that is the way every other scientific development works - the evidence gets better over time.


    I am awaiting this revelation. I think it possible - but the signs do not look good at the moment.


    THH

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Nothing substantial is omitted or imprecisely defined in the leading cold fusion papers. They are written by consummate professionals who know how to write a rock-solid scientific paper. These are people who designed France's fission reactors, and India's atomic bomb. They are people with research labs named after them. They know how to do science, and how to dot the i's and cross the t's. Since you have not read these papers you have no basis to claim they omitted or imprecisely described anything. You made that assertion up, out of whole cloth.

    Jed, you know I have read some of them. For example, to take the one you first recommended me, F&P From Simplicity to Complication... makes some very string claims of clear excess heat and has many necessary (for those claims) details missing. As I've detailed here before - or do you not remember? Do you want me to do it again here?

    Quote from JedRothwell

    They are written by consummate professionals who know how to write a rock-solid scientific paper. These are people who designed France's fission reactors, and India's atomic bomb. They are people with research labs named after them.

    First:

    This personalised worship of certain scientists is unhelpful. Judge evidence on its published merit. Check correctness (get an indication from where published) from quality of references and content of citations. That is the way science works, rightly. We do not fall down and kowtow just because a famous professor says something. The clear gaps in the F&P evidence shows that when an academic admired for work in one field gets involved in something else they sometimes make bad errors. It is a known phenomenon - perhaps past successes make people more likely to rush to incorrect conclusions.


    Second:

    Some of those classic experiments did dot is, cross ts - and had unclear evidence. Small effects which could be explained some other way, and have been. Your position is because these small effect cannot be proven to be something else - then they must be LENR. But that is logically wrong.


    Others of those classic experiments missed data or checks needed to eliminate possible errors. This is no shame - you need several iterations of an experiment, each with better instrumentation and/or methodology - to do this.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Since THH now believes the boil off theory, perhaps he can put on his tin-foil hat and fill in a few details that Ascoli refuses to enlighten us about.

    I've already answered these questions many times. Let's try again.


    Quote

    For example, why does the cell produce heat before the boil off, and after it, but not during it? Or have you people discovered errors in the calorimetry before and after the boil off? Since that calorimetry is totally different from the boil-off version, what errors have you found?

    The aim of the 1992 experiment, as reported in the abstract of the paper presented by F&P at ICCF3 (1) was to "present here one aspect of our recent research on the calorimetry of the Pd/D2O system which has been concerned with high rates of specific excess enthalpy generation (> 1kWcm-3) at temperatures close to (or at) the boiling point of the electrolyte solution." So the investigation concerned the boiling region.


    The conclusion are reported at page 19: "We note that excess rate of energy production is about four times that of the enthalpy input even for this highly inefficient system".


    This conclusion is wrong because the calculations at page 16 show that F&P completely ignored the presence of foam, which, as suggested by common sense and confirmed by their lab video, was present inside the cells during the last 600 s of the boil-off. This is a huge error, a +400% error.


    But, you ask: what about the periods before and after boil-off?


    Let's start from the second one. Conclusions at page 19 contain a second claim:"following the boiling to dryness and the open-circuiting of the cells, the cells nevertheless remain at high temperature for prolonged periods of time, Fig 8".


    F&P mention Fig.8 were they wrote "Cell remains at high temperature for 3 hours". This period represents the delay between a vertical arrow indicating the "Cell dry" instant and the downward slope of the temperature curve. Starting from ICCF4 this alleged phenomenon will be called HAD (Heat After Death). Well, looking at the lab video, anyone, capable of calculating a simple time conversion, will realize that the vertical arrows was mispositioned of more than 2 hours. Conclusion, there was no delay in the cell cooling, so no HAD. The phenomenon came from a blatant error of the authors.


    And finally, the period before boil off.


    The alleged excess heat are reported in Figs.6A to 6D. A few tenths of watt compared to a few watts in input. Let's say less than 10%. This excess heat, calculated in a very complicated way, was not mentioned in the conclusions.


    Is it real or not? Well, my answer is: there is no reason to believe that it is real, on the contrary there are serious reasons to assume that it is wrong. Why? Because it is an extraordinary claim coming from the same authors who made much more impressive and bigger errors in estimating the heat released during and after the boil off.


    In other words, the careful analysis of the "Simplicity Paper", compared with the evidences of the lab videos, clearly shows that the authors are unreliable, at least for this specific work. So the tiny X/H claimed before the boil off can be more reasonably explained by any possible error they made in the calibration procedure.


    Believing those four cells produced any excess heat before, during and after the boil off phase is only a matter of faith.


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

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    (1) every other experiment does not test an effect whose positive results are indistinguishable from random variable small errors.

    (2) every other experiment does not test a claim for an effect which makes no possible testable predictions. (there are some theories like this - but no-one takes them seriously till somone can find predictions that would falsify them).

    None of this is true. You made it all up.

    LENR CANR's ChatGPS came up with this about Teller:


    Bot: At the NSF-EPRI meeting in Washington DC, Edward Teller attended in a wheelchair due to a recent operation. Despite controversy surrounding cold fusion, Teller provided an example of an open scientific mind by freely entering the discussion instead of ruling out cold fusion due to lack of theoretical explanation. He suggested that a new particle, dubbed "meshuganon," would be needed to explain the observations reported by Pons and Fleischmann. This suggestion still may be the case.


    Notice the words "open scientific mind". In that same Nobel spirit, it would be nice if our resident skeptics would tell us what they think it would take for LENR to be real? Could it possibly lie within the boundaries of the Standard Model, or would it take something else like Teller's "meshuganon" particle?

    1989...Teller was quite open minded,,, but he was blind..

    he missed the meshuge foam 8o

    Teller's conclusion I would concur with...24 years later,,

    Its actually instructive to read the WHOLE proceedings

    rather than secondhand or CHATGPT interpretations of it

    Here.

    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRInsfepriwor.pdf

    A Catalytic Neutron Transfer ?

    by Edward Teller

    We have seen some interesting data during the last two days. They may not be

    statistically significant. Yet, if proved correct, some new phenomena may be at work.


    I say new phenomena and not Cold Fusion. Cold fusion is excluded for two

    strong reasons. One well-known reason is the Gamow factor. This prevents the

    reaction by many orders of magnitude.


    The second reason, of comparable force, is the relative frequency of the D +

    D -> He3 + n and the D + D -> T + P reactions. The rates should be nearly equal.

    But measurement of neutron production and triton production indicate that the

    second reaction is 108 or 109 times more likely than the first reaction.

    While there is some evidence suggesting the production of tritium, the 0 +

    D -> T + P reaction does not proceed in the usual manner: no gamma rays or Xrays

    are observed. Yet, they should be present due to the fast charged particles.

    Furthermore, the fast tritons should produce 14 MeV neutrons in interaction with

    the deuterium, and they are also not observed.

    Finally, the excess heat ascribed to cold fusion never occurs at the

    beginning of the electrochemical experiments. It is claimed to appear with a

    variable delay.

    If the production of tritium and of excess heat should be firmly established,

    a new physical phenomenon must be involved. I would like to propose a new

    particle which catalyzes the transfer of a neutron from one deuteron to another.

    In the reaction with the first deuteron, a proton would be left behind; in the

    second reaction, a triton would be formed.

    My friends have remarked that this proposal is "meshuge," which means crazy

    but not necessarily repulsive. I accept this criticism and call my particle

    Meshuganon.

    The most frequent argument against the meshuganon is that it does not fit

    into the systematics of new particles.

    An even stronger negative argument is that

    the Meshuganon does not explain the absence of gamma-rays, X-rays and 14 MeV

    neutrons. The contradiction with experiments is reduced because the energy of the

    D + D -> T + P reaction is delivered in two steps, rather than in one.

    In addition, a considerable part of the energy is carried off by neutral particles

    which can produce heat without giving rise to X-ray or gamma-ray emission.

    The Meshuganon designated as M should be neutral to escape direct

    observation. It may be produced in a small fraction of the D + D fusion

    reactions. These reactions could occur in very rare cases due to strong electric

    fields at cracks or surface irregularities. These reactions would account for the

    few observed neutrons. The doubly rare production of Meshuganons would eventually

    give rise to the presence of enough Meshuganons to catalyze the neutron transfer

    which then proceeds at a considerably higher rate. The mass of the Meshuganon

    would, of course, be limited by the energy available in the D + D reactions.

    My proposed catalytic chain involves two reactions: D + M -> (Mn) + P and

    (Mn) + D -> M + T. Here (Mn) stands for a neutral particle composed of a neutron

    and a Meshuganon. Its binding energy must be greater than the binding energy in

    the deuteron but less than the binding energy of the second neutron in the triton.

    The binding of a proton to a Meshuganon (MP), must not occur because the

    production of (MP) would break the chain. Since the Meshuganon has a mass

    comparable to that of an electron, one can describe its behavior in its

    interaction with nuclear particles according to the Bom-Oppenheimer method. It is

    plausible that in the field of a deuteron, the Meshuganon will have not more than

    one bound state. In that case, during a dissociation of the deuteron into a

    proton and a neutron, the Meshuganon will almost exclusively stay with the

    particle to which it is bound most strongly. Therefore, the systematic absence of

    (MP) as a reaction product is in no way absurd.

    It seems necessary to assume that the Meshuganon have a finite lifetime but

    can accumulate so that in the presence of this catalyst the energy production and

    the generation of tritium can proceed at an unusually fast rate. Models that can

    accomplish this may be constructed.

    In the presence of beryllium, the reaction Be + M -> (Mn) + a + a might be

    observed. In the presence of oonnee might expect U235 + (Mn) -> M + fission.

    This should yield observable fission-products and considerable release of heat.

    Neither of these reactions is a necessary consequence of my assumptions. The

    observation of either would be most interesting while the absence of both would

    make the hypothesis of a Meshuganon more unlikely to represent reality.


    My conclusion is that the experimental work on "cold fusion" should continue

    until a decision is obtained.

    The Meshuganon may give a possible but not a

    probable explanation. In any case, the experimental observations, if they are

    confirmed, must be explained by means that are outside of conventional nuclear

    physics.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    None of this is true. You made it all up.

    Jed, which of those statements - true for LENR effects - do you query?


    Let us start by the most typical and characteristic LENR effect - excess heat.


    1. You do a complex experiment.
    2. You crunch the calorimetry, compare active runs with control runs, and get a small energy excess or deficit, or neither
    3. If it is an excess you conclude you have LENR
    4. If it is a deficit you check your calculations, since you don't think that can happen.
    5. If it is neither you abandon that experiment and do another using a different electrode, or different methodology


    (1) every other experiment does not test an effect whose positive results are indistinguishable from random variable small errors.

    (2) every other experiment does not test a claim for an effect which makes no possible testable predictions. (there are some theories like this - but no-one takes them seriously till somone can find predictions that would falsify them).


    (1) You can see from (1) - (4) that of we had small random errors the positive ones would be seen as LENR. The level and negative ones would not contradict this.


    (2) Excess heat from LENR - that most reliable indicator - is not a testable prediction.

    (a) No excess heat does not invalidate LENR, since the LENR effect thus far is thought to depnds on fcators which cannot be controlled or measured except by doing LENR. (When that changes, LENR will become more easily replicable, a negative LENR result would prove for sure no LENR, etc, etc).

    (b) The LENR hypothesis makes no (absolutely no) prediction as to the magnitude of the excess heat effect expected.


    So: no way to prove LENR false. No prediction from LENR.


    THH

    Quote from RobertBryant

    In any case, the experimental observations, if they are

    confirmed, must be explained by means that are outside of conventional nuclear

    physics.

    No-one can argue with that. Much. Even if chargpt said it.


    The argument here is that those observations, over 50 years, have not been confirmed.


    (repeating an uncertain result is not confirming it)

    Quote from Shane D.

    Notice the words "open scientific mind". In that same Nobel spirit, it would be nice if our resident skeptics would tell us what they think it would take for LENR to be real? Could it possibly lie within the boundaries of the Standard Model, or would it take something else like Teller's "meshuganon" particle?

    In my opinion, you should restart from McKubre and THH.


    In his presentation at ICCF23 (1), McKubre provided the solution urging the field to "Replicate, Replicate, Replicate!!!" (slide 6).


    However, at slide 11, he admitted that in 30+ years the only replicated experiment was the "original Fleischmann Pons experiment", that is the 1992 boil off experiment reported in F&P "Simplicity Paper". Unfortunately, irrefutable evidences show that this experiment has produced no excess heat at all, and its conclusions are completely wrong.


    Here, it comes THH. I think, you should follows his advice (2):

    Quote

    "What gets me is Jed's insistence here that the great pioneers of the LENR filed are above that and their write-ups - often lacking detail (I include F&P in that - the simplicity - complication paper lacks an enormous amount of necessary detail) are proof perfect.

    Those now who are seriously trying to establish what LENR effects can be replicated would be better served with a less reverent attitude towards the LENR greats."

    In other words, an "open scientific mind" who really want to demonstrate that LENR is real, should first respect the principle of reality, and admit what is for sure not real, starting from the conclusions reported in the "Simplicity Paper".

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    The argument here is that those observations, over 50 years, have not been confirmed.

    That smacks just a little of desperation. Confirmed by who? You know that there have been thousands of observations of LENR processes and many conformations. To take a very recent example - that I follow closely and am involved in - the LEC results have been confirmed in different labs in different countries around the world. And the LEC effect had been seen long ago and many times (in particular in the huge amount of published work on electron emissions in radio Valve materials) but was then dismissed as 'secondary currents' without explanation. It's too early in the cycle for there to have been much about this in the public domain, but there will be. I'm sure that Ed Storms won't mind me mentioning that he has also seen LEC-like effects in the systems he works on and considers them to be one of the fundamental witness marks of LENR.


    More importantly, you espouse the view that without an accepted fundamental theory LENR cannot be proven. I beg to differ here, a theory or theories about LENR must arise from the experiments in the first place. All of science has its roots in speculative experimentation followed by disputation and occasionally acceptance and exploitation. Sometimes, generally where there there is no established river of cash to be disrupted, this process is quick, but there are many examples where established interests slow adoption of new discoveries down.


    99% of the universe we inhabit (at least) is a profound mystery, the fundamental content and interactions completely invisible to us. Many of the fashionable theories of cosmology are based on what we can see but require huge mystery fudge factors (dark energy, dark matter) to make them look coherent. But they are accepted in the main, because doing so does not - to use a Japanese expression - break anybody's rice bowl, in fact just the opposite.


    The way established interests can inhibit discoveries is well illustrated by this anecdote about flexible glass - from ancient history and Wikipedia. It isn't verifiable, but since flexible glass is used in fibre-optic cables we know it just could have been true. It just took a few thousand years to establish that fact.


    'Supposedly, the inventor of flexible glass (vitrum flexile) brought a drinking bowl made of the material before Tiberius Caesar. The bowl was put through a test to break it, but it merely dented, rather than shattering. The inventor repaired the bowl very easily with a small hammer, which he pulled from a pocket in his toga, according to Petronius. After the inventor swore that he was the only man alive who knew the manufacturing technique, Tiberius had the man beheaded. He feared that the glass would devalue gold and silver, since the material might be more valuable.@

    Quote from THHuxleynew

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

    Says the guy who repeatedly said that Clean Planet was making hydrogen combustion boilers, and then refused to engage with repeated correction. Also, the guy who watched half of Parchi's ICCF presentation and then launched into a critique of it, which included lecturing one of the researchers involved.

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