Posts by Eric Walker

Quote from Thomas Clarke

If we agree, and by LENR you mean "a collection of apparent excess heat phenomena within chemical + experimental error bounds, but not understand at the time" - then yes. LENR is timeless and sightings no doubt go back to the 16th century.

This seems like is a suitable understanding of LENR for the present discussion. By this understanding, I don't think LENR would be something that would have been discernable as a phenomenon until the awareness arose that there are nuclei and that different processes occur with them, as well as the invention of electricity and calorimetry and possibly radiation detection. So around around the start of the 1900s. Do you agree?

Quote from Thomas Clarke

If, OTOH, you mean by LENR: "credible evidence for extraordinary excess heat from nuclear reactions" the problem is that in the dim and distant past, before anything was understood of NAEs and the rest, such old sightings would be less well documented and therefore even less credible than modern sightings.

For the reasons mentioned above, I don't think we can go into the distant past.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

Inevitably, for a real phenomena with physical basis, with continued attention and collection of evidence, the phenomena will become, sharper, more reproducible, more understood. By far the best evidence will be recent. Which is why I see the historical bent of much LENR community discussion as profoundly negative.

With respect, this seems like one of those easy generalizations of scientific progress that Feyerabend sought to address. I'd argue that what we're looking at is a subfield in a very early stage, before normal science has taken over, and that people are still fumbling around to a certain extent. That happened with the discovery of chemistry and of radiation as well. This forum has focused on the NiH system because Andrea Rossi has brought a lot of attention to the field. That system is less understood than the PdD system, so things are in an Edisonian mode of exploration. And there are a lot of hobbyists (like myself) who do not feel fully committed to the methods of normal science in the present context, which makes things even more Edisonian than they otherwise would have been.

Quote from Pierre Ordinaire

My question is: how many more years do you need to show us something reproducible?

How does reproducibility have anything to do with the proposition that LENR was seen prior to Pons and Fleischmann?

Quote from Pierre Ordinaire

Probably the worst argument from the LENR crowd is that P&F were not the first to witness the phenomenon. Oh, no, they go back to papers at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Why is that the worst argument? I can think of far worse arguments. Also, what if it's true?

Quote from Thomas Clarke

That means I can't trust the judgement of LENR luminaries, nor of prominent skeptics. Reading stuff on teh internet I can find obvious bias in both.

This is very true. You can be sure there is a lot of dogma out there promoted with good intentions by advocates of LENR, and you will hear certain statements touted with great confidence about this or that. It can be very distracting to someone trying to sort out fact from opinion. I have gradually learned to ignore it (after wincing at it). I call such opinion-based claims "teachings." They exist not only in LENR; they are to be found in many human endeavors.

My own approach is catholic -- time allowing, I will consult any wild and crazy document that comes along that might have some snippet of truth, whether it is on PESN, in one of Josef Papp's patents, a claim concerning an HHO device, etc., on the assumption that there might be something interesting underlying it. I will also consult peer-reviewed publications. But I do not find them or mainstream opinions to be especially insightful on the topic of LENR, and I do not think the peer-review system is set up for dealing with something outside of normal science (in Kuhn's sense), so I find myself looking further afield.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

The motivation for deeply studying fringe evidence tends to be an interest in belief, or, less often, an interest in debunking belief. Neither case gives objectivity.

This argument seems to suggest that it is a worthwhile use of time to examine snippets of fringe evidence, taken out of context. With such an approach, the conclusions will often be superficial, because important details have been missed. If one is going to invest time in arguing against fringe claims, arguing from a position of knowledge is preferable. What acquiring such fringe knowledge implies about the objectivity of the person is something to be weighed in deciding whether to jump into the debate or not.

Quote from Thomas Clarke

In the LENR area, if it is real I'd expect good quality academic papers long before commercial product. But, then, none of these free energy companies seem likely to provide that within any feasible timescale, even from their own claims. (Nanospire and Brillouin make impressive claims but are very unbelievable).

It might take more patience or suspension of disbelief than one can allow, but I think there are some subtleties that need to be teased out in this instance.

The first subtlety is that you can have a real, complex, difficult-to-understand phenomenon that has yet to attract a large number of capable people who are grounded in a systematic, effective approach. To a certain extent one could argue that this was the case with chemistry itself for many decades, when it was alchemy. The alchemists saw some interesting phenomena, but it took the Enlightenment and empiricism to really hone the methods that were needed to explore it effectively. In addition, a field may already have attracted a few effective researchers, but the world was not ready for what they were saying at the time. Galileo suffered house arrest when he promoted heliocentrism. It took many years for the early pioneers in radiation to prove to everyone's satisfaction that radioactivity was real, and a lot of what they thought was initially wrong, hopelessly mixed up with what they had gotten right. Becquerel is credited with having discovered radioactivity in 1896; in fact Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor reported to the French Academy a very similar finding in 1858, and it is clear that he understood the implications, but this piece of history is largely unknown.

In this regard, I think society is not as far along as is implied by the story we tell ourselves, where we imagine that we finally have an empirically grounded science after all these years, free from the difficulties described above. It takes a lot of willpower to write off the accumulated findings in LENR studies, even if one has yet to see a study one considers flawless or above reproach. In short, one might be in a mode of writing off evidence rather than trying to understand it, however imperfectly it's been packaged.

The second subtlety to note is that it can take many years for an emerging phenomenon to become commercializable, as was seen with semiconductors. We have yet to know what exactly to do with superconductivity outside of a scientific context. We think it might be useful for certain kinds of trains.

Quote from Shane D.

Does it get any easier than that? So who is to hold these skeptical reviewers to account? Well, it seems no one.

I would not worry about it. The more intelligent skeptics often raise interesting points, which, as poorly as they may be communicated, are good to reflect upon. If LENR is the real thing, as I believe it to be, history will be the judge (and every last detail will be there for review since everything happens over the Internet now). If LENR is polywater on steroids, as these souls are inclined believe, history will be the judge of the deluded LENR people. It all works out.

Quote from Tarun

The negative results mean only two things:
1) Parkhomov never got excess heat.
2) He is holding some critical information.

I'm not sure whether Parkhomov got excess heat or not; it is possible he did not. Another possibility is that he did but was doing something he was unaware of. An example of this would be using nickel with some important impurity. One can think of other things.

[Removed sarcastic suggestion for Tyy.]

Quote from magicsound

The only difference was my use of Swagelok seals rather than cement.

You wouldn't happen to know exactly what cement Parkhomov uses and its composition?

Also, did you follow a different preparation process in any way? E.g., perhaps he used an acetone or aqua regia cleaning step that was omitted?

Quote from Mary Yugo

We might know more if I get the FOIA request information on the specified report.

Definitely interested in seeing what you find.

Quote from Mary Yugo

fansheeple

fansheeple, n. Portmanteau of "fans," "sheep" and "people."

I'm guessing you're from California.

Quote from Mary Yugo

What do you think Rossi was doing when he lied about associations with U of Bologna and Uppsula and with NI and Philips?

I was talking about Munson, not Rossi. In order for the statement to have been intentionally misleading, Munson had to intend to mislead (or he didn't do his fact checking and passed on a misleading statement).

Quote from Mary Yugo

Tested AT is intended to make you think "tested by".

I agree, although the context of how the phrase occurs and the intention of the writer are important. But when something like this is claimed and the testing turns out to simply have occurred on the premises of such and such a place, there is the possibility that the ambiguous statement was intended to mislead. Blacklight Power seem to have done this on several occasions with regard to testing carried out at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, calling them "Harvard tests." It seems the contractor carrying out the tests has never been affiliated with Harvard, so I'm inclined to think that the purpose was to lead to a mistaken association between testing of Mills's theory and Harvard.

In the case of LTI, the question depends upon Munson's intentions in mentioning the University of New Hampshire.

Quote from Longview

Not so useful for basic research on ULM neutrons seen in some LENR, and hypothesized as well.

These are probably not more useful than for making sure you're safe. (BTW, I recall an anecdote where Rossi was wearing one of these and one time found it full of bubbles, meaning there were a lot of neutrons at one point, but I don't remember the details.)

For anyone tempted to try, measuring neutrons accurately is difficult. As Pons and Fleischmann found out, it's not easy to get useful information out of even a more sophisticated health dosimeter.

Hi Sveinn,

Quote from sveinol

He is not measuring any energy in this experiment only timing, decay times and changing flux.

He appears to be inferring energy, and from this particle types, from the flight times -- e.g., "Improved two-collector time-of-flight measurements now show that the energy of the particles is in the range 1-50 MeV u-1" [1].

Just so I'm not misunderstood, I think the current he's seeing is interesting. But I do not think the inference of energies from the flight times can be given weight until Holmlid studies the same effect using standard, more accurate, approaches to measuring such currents. I would also suggest that he engage someone with expertise in this subject area, who will be able to make short work of it, rather than attempting to do it himself. In the meantime I find the speculation about kaons, pions, muons, etc., to be premature [2]. As one example, if Holmlid is off by less than an order of magnitude on the inferred energies, the particles might be alpha particles.

Eric

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.01332
[2] http://tempid.altervista.org/SRI.pdf

@pjs, thank you for the interesting and informed discussion of catalysts.

Quote from pjs

Although actual LENR tests are typically done in high purity hydrogen atmosphere

I don't think this is a safe generalization. LENR experiments range all over the map in what is done, including glow discharge in high vacuum and garage experiments where air gets mixed in and so on. Also, I hope anyone putting together experiments will not be too biased towards the idea that you need pure hydrogen; it may be that impurities in the air (or in the substrate) are either important or where everything is happening. (I myself wonder whether hydrogen does anything at all.)

Quote from AlainCo

the problem is that the first not to be rationa are the academic, the editors, the journalist...
they just don't publicsh informations.

The deal with journalists is a little more complex than the others. What a journalist does has a big impact on the news organizations publishing his or her stories. News organizations are not in the business of science, and any news organization that is not carrying out basic or applied research (i.e., all of them) will be wary of publishing against the scientific consensus, even if some of the editors and journalists have their suspicions about LENR. Just as I would be wary of taking a stand against the consensus of chemists on some topic in an official capacity, because chemistry is not at all my thing. For this reason the New York Times will avoid a story that could be construed to boost LENR, not because there's no one there who isn't a little curious about it, but because their business is news and not science, and it would be a little bit foolish of them, as a professional organization, to get ahead of the scientific consensus.

(NyTeknik's courage in this regard makes it stand out. I wonder if this is a Scandinavian thing.)

Quote from acalaon

As you say, the results seem to suggest that there is a sort of “even deuteron addition rule”, because many elements transmute producing X +2d, +4d and +6d.

Note that 2d are the same number of nucleons as 4He. In other words, Iwamura's results might be explained by alpha decay of heavier isotopes down to the ones that are found in abundance in his studies.

Hi Sveinn,

Quote from sveinol

This is not so fancy, digital oscilloscope saving current traces is all is needed, no spectrometer except if you can call lifetime measurement a spectrometer. Digital oscilloscope has very nice time accuracy.

My question is about calibration -- do you know how Leif Holmlid is doing it? To calibrate in such a scenario, you would normally measure a source of known decay energy. I do not see how he can with his particular setup, as it records the time from the start of a laser pulse to when a signal is registered by his oscilloscope. But a radioactive source is not normally triggered in this way -- you typically just wait for it to emit. That means you cannot accurately record the travel time of an alpha particle from a radioactive standard, because you didn't trigger its decay. I do not see any mention of blank runs or calibrations in his two recent draft papers on arXiv. Calibrations of this kind are so basic in the field of spectroscopy that no researcher, even especially one who has built his own time-of-flight spectrometer, would think to omit such a step.

When you use a weighing scale, you tare it to zero before you conclude anything about your weight. When you report a current of charged particles of such-and-such MeV u-1, you compare it to a current that you already know something about so that you know that your numbers are right.

If Holmlid is not calibrating against a decay source of known decay energy, can you confirm that he is simply reasoning from first principles about the pulse delay without the benefit of a calibration?