Posts by quizzical

Quote from Eric Walker

In principle, neither! But in practicality, kind of anti-Rossi, since he has not brought any sustained, credible evidence to bear on his claims, and he has done much in addition. But I'll be grateful for any good argument from either side of that whole divide.

I don't know what "he has done much in addition" means but I suspect that you meant "he has done much in addition to hurt his credibility" or something like that, and I agree. Regarding arguments, I'm with Mats Lewan. What counts are facts (or "Nature") as he puts it. There are arguments in both directions although at the moment I would agree that the over-riding evidence makes Rossi look bad. However, there is also a lot of circumstantial evidence that Rossi may have something. I don't have any dog in the fight, as they say,

Quote from Eric Walker

With regard to funding, "we" are MFMP and any funders of me356. And with regard to time, "we" are the participants on this and other forums, occasionally veering off into untethered speculation about this or that thing that so-and-so did with lithium. It is a concern of mine as someone who wants rigorous science, and not untethered speculation, to be applied to LENR, including the open source variety, so that it can be moved forward. It should be a concern of yours as well.

Thanks for lecturing me on what should be my concern.

Quote

There are clearly two partisan camps that frequent this and other forums. It is not "telling" of anything in the slightest to remark on that fact, or to note that you always vote for pro-Rossi posts. I agree that it is the truth that we should seek!

I agree with you that it is the truth that we should see, but pointing out that there are are two partisan camps and that I (or you) may (or may not) be a member of one only distracts from the discussion.

P.S. Which camp are you a member of the pro-Rossi camp or the anti-Rossi camp?

P.P.S. I am neither "pro-Rossi" nor "anti-Rossi". However, given the massive amounts of contradictory and missing information, I am quite willing to remain open-minded. It costs me nothing!

Moved from the me356: Photos of AURA control unit thread. Eric

Quote from Eric Walker

Not sure what this remark is about, but I'll continue to express my views along with everyone else here. I'll even read what you write, despite the fact that you vote for posts purely along tribal lines.

This remark is very telling. What "tribes" are you talking about? I thought that we were here to seek the truth (despite the fact that for example in the case of Rossi there are massive amounts of missing information which we expect will be revealed at the trial) and also to learn more about LENR.

Quote from Eric Walker

It 100 percent makes a difference. When someone is known and has a reputation on the line, they will want to behave in ways that will maintain that reputation in the future. When someone posts anonymously on the internet, there are no such implicit checks, and in the an unlucky scenario we risk wasting time and money on needless speculation. Clearly.

Eric,

I have no idea where this comes from. Who is "we" who are "risking time and money"? As far as I know the only people risking time are MFMP while the only people risking (very small amounts of) money are MFMP and those who support them (I'm one of them). Why should this be a concern of yours? And of course this kind of risk is precisely the kind that you NEED to take if you are doing research or trying to make progress.

Quote from BobHiggins

Actually the details of the Patterson cell are pretty well known. Dennis Cravens was working with CETI during that time. In fact, Dennis still has an original Patterson cell with its beads. George Miley also had access to the Patterson technology and has been working on it for years. Patterson did not go to his grave with the secret. Patterson lost the secret. He began with surplus microbeads from NASA that had a finite supply and in a short time there were no more. Also, the plating solution supplier he was using changed their (proprietary) plating formula and the new recipe did not work. During this period, Patterson was grooming his grandson to run CETI. When his grandson died, Patterson lost any motivation to make a business of this technology (he didn't need the money). So, Patterson went to his grave not knowing "the secret". Sad story.

Bob,

Thanks for confirming what I previously stated.

Quote from Eric Walker

Gerard, to the contrary. There have been many instances over the last 28 years of researchers presenting interesting and credible evidence for LENR, openly, in the manner of science. The present situation is comparable to that of the Patterson cell, which was a proprietary technology, knowledge of which Patterson took to the grave, except that we knew something about Patterson whereas we know little about me356. But even if this situation is far from a novel one except to the extent that we've humored the claims of an anonymous poster on the Internet, let us hope nonetheless that MFMP's rigorous testing of me356's reactor gives us bona fide evidence of something interesting going on.

It will be a milestone if MFMP are able to verify kilowatts of excess power, which would be something new.

Eric, to the contrary. I completely agree with Gerard McEk's comments and have to disagree with your comments on the Patterson cell.

(1) As far as I know the Patterson cell was not independently tested.

(2) As far as I know the Patterson cell was not reproducible (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterson_Power_Cell). In fact, I believe that Jed Rothwell mentioned that Patterson himself lost the ability to make it work and wasn't sure why.

(3) Very few Pd-D experiments (at least possibly until recently) have been reproducible. Only a fraction work, and it's not known why (see U. of Missouri results) although speculation has been made regarding the preparation of the Pd. Of course for those that do work, the COP is very low and not predictable and the power level is very low.

(4) We do hope that "MFMP's rigorous testing of me356's reactor gives us bona fide evidence of something interesting going on". But we don't need you to tell us that.

(5) You're right that kW excess power (with COP or order 10 not say 1.2) is a game-changer. I'm sure that was implicit in Gerard's comments.

(6) Knowing who Patterson is (versus knowing who me356 is) makes no difference at this stage. It certainly didn't help with the Patterson cell, although it's true that some researchers claimed to have learned from the information provided by Patterson and CETI some ideas for how to make their own devices (which are still not reproducible, with convincing excess heat, or sustainable in terms of total excess energy production).

(7) My understanding is that if this independent test is successful (actually I believe that they are testing two different devices based on the same technology but configured differently in that one is stand-alone and the other is hooked up to a heating system) then the next step according to Bob Greenyer was to have many more independent tests by universities and commercial labs.

(8) It's true that there are several other players (e.g. Mizuno, Clean Planet, and many others) who may have something approaching this technology under development. However, as far as I know there have been no independent third-party, live open-science tests of these devices.

I for one am quite excited about the prospect of these tests, even if, I am concerned by the unwillingness by me356 to share his technology, as well as by the possibility that it may not work.

I should add that even if me356 does not share his technology but instead concentrates on commercialization (e.g. selling heaters) during the next year or so as he claims he will do, this will indeed STILL be a major breakthrough for LENR!

On a more positive note my impression from reading about the most recent ICCF conference is that there has been some significant progress since the one I attended (especially in Japan) including the work by Mizuno et al, and Mitsubishi.

Quote from oldguy

As someone who has worked with LENR (cold fusion) I find little to be grateful to Rossi for.

MFMP did not start due to Rossi but an attempt to look at MF's systems. It has morphed into a non-electrochemical study. Their work in the field is not very useful to others and I have not seen any innovative papers come out of them or materials to develop the field.

Most of the LENR seems to have suffered greatly in wake of Rossi's claims. I know of several researchers who had been quietly and slowly working away who ended up "put things on hold" because of Rossi's claims of extreme power levels. Why work on systems of a few watts when others claim MW? You just wait and see since if it was real then in perhaps 2 years it would be commercialized. (2 years of reduced effort when you are on your own funds is not too long if you have been working away for 25+ years) Even now if Rossi really had what he claimed, he could quickly commercialize it himself instead of just spending money on lawyers, condos, toupees and fake tans. Just a simple 1kW unit at COP>10 would be immediately useful and improve the lives in third world countries. He wants to just dangle carrots in front of people to pull his own cart when much of the world is starving.

"new flourish" is not useful. You look to hype, glitz, and extreme claims, but the truth is science and technology advances in the journals, papers, and sharing of knowledge. The work in LENR has been and continues to be done in small labs across the world and there is much real work done and shared within the LENR community. My guess is that you have never even attended an ICCF meeting or talked with those doing the work or tried to load hydrogen into a piece of metal but just sit and count hits on a blog.

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I applaud and appreciate the hard work of the the lenr "old timers" but I'm afraid that it has not yet born fruit, even after 28 years (22 years when Rossi came on the scene in 2011). I won't go through the details of the problems with many of the experiments, including those who are well-funded (e.g. SKINR institute at the U. of Missouri). I've also recently attended at least one ICCF meeting and I was impressed by how little was still known (hundreds of theories, no reproducibility, very weak often marginal effects). I was even more impressed (perhaps I should say depressed) by the secretiveness of the researchers (which blocks progress and hides errors), and by the fact that, despite the lack of funding etc. the researchers did not cooperate more. Ed Storms has recently claimed that he has made progress with fuel (Pd) preparation but my impression is that he has not revealed all of the details, although my hope is that he will be able to do so. I believe that he is funded by IH. I also don't understand the secretiveness of Piantelli (MFMP stated that it was because of concerns regarding the safety of his Ni-H technology) despite the fact that he has apparently achieved 10's of Watts (or more) excess power and has also obtained clear evidence of nuclear processes (high-energy protons etc.). However, ignoring Rossi for the moment, there appears to be a ray of hope in the work of me356 (which will be openly tested shortly by MFMP) and Suhas (same) since these are apparently kW scale with COP of order 10. It's clear to me that me356's work was inspired by Rossi, and even based initially on replicating the Lugano test, and I suspect that the same is true of Suhas. It will be interesting to see if, during the next 3-6 months, any of these (e.g. Rossi, me356, Suhas) or others (e.g. Bob Higgins, Alan Smith, David Fojt) pans out.

Quote from sigmoidal

This is such a grossly inaccurate and confused perspective, but I believe it clearly indicates the 'tribal' thinking that leads to the irrational and ultimately detrimental (to LENR research) support for Rossi.

3) Unfortunately, Rossi is an admitted scammer. The overwhelming evidence is that his 'stuff' is fake.

Can you Rossi supporters not see 1) how tribal and superficial your Rossi cheerleading efforts are and 2) how counterproductive to the field of LENR research it is to defend the extraordinary malpractice of Rossi?

I'd ask Rossi's supporters to try to imagine (for only a brief minute) that Rossi has scammed the field from the very beginning. Now, with that hypothetical fact that you are imagining (if only for a minute), I'd ask you to think about the implications to the LENR field given that this is true (if only hypothetically and for a minute). Do you see the damage?

The evidence that Rossi has been scamming all along, from Petroldragon, to Thermo-electric devices, to all things E-Cat, Doral, and to Quark-X is overwhelming, in my opinion.

If you can grasp this, perhaps you could imagine that exposing Rossi's behaviors is a helpful step, overall, in exploring LENR.

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I think I understand your 'indignation' and conviction that Rossi is a scammer. However, while I'm open to this possibility, I do not agree with you that the overwhelming evidence is that this is true and that his 'stuff' is fake. There is too much evidence on the other side (Focardi, Piantelli, Brillouin, tests by IH, earlier tests by Levi, recent reports of positive results by me356, Parkhomov, Suhas and others).

More importantly, even if Rossi is a scammer, I absolutely do not think that he has harmed LENR research in the least. In fact, LENR research was 'dead' when he came along and despite the fact that it is now 28 years since Pons & Fleischmann's announcement we still do not have commercial level reproducible LENR. If anything, I think that Rossi has significantly revived interest in LENR, and his work has led to the re-invigoration of LENR research.

This forum seems to be a goldmine of both information AND misinformation. Even more amazing are the certainties of some of the posters regarding the knowledge and beliefs of (a) the Lugano professors and (b) ECW posters and readers. For reference I am posting the following link which is part I of David Nagel's report on ICCF20:

http://www.infinite-energy.com…agelIE131%20ICCFPart1.pdf

which contains extensive information on Ni-H based research on LENR.

It also includes a summary of the conclusions of MFMP regarding the Lugano test which seems to indicate a COP > 1 (e.g. 1.13 at low power and 1.32 at high power).

Based on this analysis, it appears that there is at the very least some uncertainty regarding the results of the Lugano test, even if there were problems with the test.

Perhaps more importantly, it seems clear to me that many other researchers (Parkhomov, Brillouin energy, me356, Suhas, Holmlid and others) are obtaining positive results (e.g. COP > 1) along with indications of nuclear effects.

I might add that there were several tests before the Lugano test (two conducted by Levi and/or others) of AR's technology which gave strong indications of significant energy gain. (At least one, perhaps both melted down.)

Alan's info regarding recent progress by the Lugano researchers (coupled with "rumors" regarding Fulvio Fabiani) also seem to indicate that additional progress is being made by researchers studying systems which are closely related to Rossi's (and IH's) patents.

All this being said, regarding the court case, I do find it very odd that the information released so far is so confused and does not compellingly support Rossi's claims regarding the Doral test, which suggests to me that Rossi does not have nearly as strong a case as he has claimed from the beginning. As Bob Higgins noted, if his technology works, then his main concern should be the IP, and it's not clear how this court case will help him with this. At the same time, I remain deeply suspicious of IH for a variety of reasons, e.g. their excessive use of shell companies, badly written contract, stringing Rossi along for one year, strange 'anti-scientific' comments by their consultants regarding COP and conservation of energy, excessive secrecy, history of 'shady' brownfield deals, and attempts to patent and raise funds for technology (which they claim they don't believe in) behind Rossi's back.

Quote from JedRothwell

This is entirely your imagination. I.H. has done nothing wrong. Their motives are entirely above board. You can argue they were too gullible, and not careful enough, but there is not a shred of evidence they did anything wrong or tried to steal anything. The notion that they are trying to steal the IP is ludicrous, for the reasons I gave previously. They could never get away with it. They know that as well as I do.

What you claim is false equivalence, without any argument or evidence to back it up.

Jed,

Perhaps you can explain why IH filed patent applications behind Rossi's back on his IP, which they now claim (and you claim) does not work and never worked.

Also, since you seem to know so much about IH, can you tell us if the other researchers they have given support to are currently under NDA and whether or not IH lays claim to the resulting IP?

Quote from interested observer

So I have been told that there are hundreds or thousands of observations of LENR, a hitherto unknown nuclear process. Can someone present a phenomenological description of LENR? What are its defining characteristics?

As far as I'm concerned the definition of LENR is in the name - Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, e.g. the observation and/or production of nuclear reactions using (as input) much lower energies than would be normally expected based on theories and experiments which only correspond to (in the case of experiments) or take into account (in the case of theory) two-body reactions along with the effects of the long-range Coulomb repulsion between nuclei and the short range of the nuclear force. Presumably, many-body effects, and/or screening play an important role, but there could be many other processes going on as well. I note that some (such as Storms) have given other defining characteristics (such as it does not follow the expected pathways for nuclear fusion, or does not produce significant radiation) but I consider the much broader definition implied by the term LENR to be more scientifically useful and interesting.

Quote from THHuxley

Quote: “After reading all of the claims by some posters of fraud on Rossi's part, I think that at least for the moment it is worth repeating that - if I understand it correctly - the MFMP analysis does not rule out the possibility of a COP > 1 (around…

I know that there's not much point in my replying to your rather long-winded comment, especially after your distortion of my statements. In fact, all of this discussion comes down to "prejudice" in the sense that I am "prejudiced" or biased in favor of the possibility of LENR and/or LENR+, and apparently you are biased against this possibility, and so would only consider it seriously if there were stronger evidence. You also seem to enjoy posting rather long-winded comments "explaining" these "facts" to people. While I would expect that while we would both consider ourselves to be objective and scientific in that we would only be convinced if there were strong, replicable, scientific evidence, this seems to be the main difference between our positions, not as far as I can tell any superior knowledge or wisdom on your part. In any case, I don't have much interest in reading non-technical comments in which the authors reassure themselves that they are the only objective ones, and while there are some good technical comments on this forum, at some point they become repetitive. It is for these reasons that ECW is in many ways more useful - the "replicators" don't need extensive gratuitous comments explaining to them why Lugano was wrong or LENR is impossible and has never been proven to work, and so it is very good that these excessively repetitive and tendentious comments are censored. (Although I would point out that there are plenty of scientifically critical comments there as well.)

Here's a quote from your post which appears to me to summarize your position: "There are three different issues here that get conflated. Most of the people here, and pretty well all on ECW, are convinced by weight of evidence from other experiments that some supra-chemical effect delivering excess heat exists in metal-hydride systems. (Not all would think it likely to extend to NI-H, but none could rule out the possibility that there is some related effect to that they think proven). A few here such as me, and many off this blog, don't see the evidence presented so far as in any way persuasive."

OK. That's fine. Although how you can tell what is in the minds of hundreds of anonymous posters is beyond me.

Also, if the evidence is so far from persuasive then why do you waste so much time "attacking it"? I'm sure that others can figure this out, especially since we have already had extensive discussion and analysis of the Lugano test.

Getting back to the general topic of metal-hydride systems. Have you read the Focardi and Piantelli papers? Are you familiar with the recent work of Piantelli in which he claims excess power (without any input) for months of around 100 W? Are you aware that Clean Planet in Japan now claims 100% reproducibility? These are experiments that were carried out by LENR researchers (Iwamura, Mizuno) with a long scientific background in the field. Based on these works, as well as many others, I still believe that there is a significant probability of supra-chemical effects. However, I am still not "convinced" that this is necessarily the case.

Also, since you seem to be making a distinction between non Ni-H and Ni-H metal hydride systems, I assume that you are also referring to all of the Pd-D work of Fleischmann and Pons, McKubre, Miles, Bockris, Cravens, Letts, Swartz, Fralick, Boss, Szpak, Forsley, Takahashi, etc. which you don't find convincing as well. In this case, perhaps you and Abd (or some other expert on Pd-D) should have an extended discussion.

Quote from BobHiggins

The simple fact is that the co-analysis used in the latest evaluation of the Lugano data by MFMP does NOT rely upon or use the actual emissivity of the alumina - it is irrelevant to the excess heat analysis that was performed.

Bob,
After reading all of the claims by some posters of fraud on Rossi's part, I think that at least for the moment it is worth repeating that - if I understand it correctly - the MFMP analysis does not rule out the possibility of a COP > 1 (around 1.15 - 1.3?). This is consistent with recent work by Parkhomov, Songjiang Chen and several others, as well as the recent report of Tom Conover. (Also, MFMP itself believes that in similar work it has seen a "signal" at least twice.) So, perhaps Rossi's "recipe" is not so bad after all?

P.S. If the Lugano professors made an error in their analysis which led to an inflated estimate of the COP, and also didn't choose to test it using self-sustained mode, is this Rossi's fault?

P.P.S. For those pathoskeptics here who have already decided that everything is known about Rossi's techology, even though they have no firsthand knowledge about the one-year test (I'm excluding Jed Rothwell because apparently he claims such knowledge even if it is not firsthand) I'm a member of the open-minded (not "closet-minded" as Jack Cole suggests) "minority". Judging by the small number of regular - and extremely repetitive - posters on this forum compared to ECW, as well as by the relatively high quality of a number of the posts on ECW, I would guess that the readers/posters on ECW are neither a minority nor are they any less technically qualified or knowledgeable than those who post here.

AlainCo,
This is very helpful. I wonder when we will get more news on the conference. Hopefully within the next week. I am particularly interested in knowing more about the work of Celani. JP Biberian mentioned an output of 25W but did not mention the input. It would be nice if the conference could post the slides of the presentations somewhere, as well as videos of the actual presentations, as was done for ICCF19. My impression is that the JCMNS proceedings can be very late (a year or more?). On the other hand, in a number of cases in the past authors have provided their manuscripts before publication.

Jed Rothwell wrote, "I do not understand your confusion.If the gadgets work, and Rossi sells them, I.H. will also sell them because they have a license."

Jed,
This is twisted thinking and a distortion of what was said (by Abd) AS USUAL. Abd was talking about Rossi selling plants in Sweden, where he has a license and IH does not. So, I repeat (BTW, the question was posed to Abd in response to his comment, and not to you), how does IH make "billions" if Rossi sells plants in Europe?

Also, if IH doesn't know how to make it work but Rossi does, then how can IH sell plants?

P.S. If Rossi can sell plants in Europe without violating the license agreement and there is still a court case going on which involves at least in part the license, why the hell (to use your terminology) would he bother to sell plants outside Europe?

P.P.S. Abd as our resident lawyer, did mention something about the "right of first refusal". Does this apply if Rossi sells plants in Europe? Again, perhaps our resident lawyer can explain the legal details to us morons.

Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

If Rossi actually sells products, IH stands to make, as a result, billions, because they have a License. <b>&quot;</b> He is not…

IH does not have a license to sell in Europe. So how do they make "billions" from Rossi's sales????? Is the license contract between Rossi and IH so slanted in their favor, that they make money from HIS SALES without any involvement on their part?

This sounds to me just like the "double-talk" Peter is complaining about on his blog!

Alain,
When I click on the Google link it indicates that the patent application was filed on 9/23/2014 and published on 7/28/16 but is still pending. Has it been granted or is it still pending?

Quote from quizzical

Ed Storms,
I completely sympathize with your comments. But I still think that there are two interesting questions which remain to be answered:

(1) How many neutrons were claimed to be produced in the experiments mentioned by MFMP which were…

I've just realized that I may have given a rather poor example when I cited the presentation at ICCF17. It turns out that 11 papers of Prof. Alberto Carpinteri, including 8 on piezonuclear reactions, were retracted in 2015 (see http://retractionwatch.com/201…-journal-he-used-to-edit/) by the journal for which he used to be Chief Editor ("Meccanica") apparently because of conflicts of interest in the editorial process. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Carpinteri

Is this an example of poor science, or a highly political editorial process in Italy, or both?

Ed Storms,
I completely sympathize with your comments. But I still think that there are two interesting questions which remain to be answered:

(1) How many neutrons were claimed to be produced in the experiments mentioned by MFMP which were presented at ICCF 17?

(2) Is the number of neutrons much larger than would be expected from standard physics calculations of the effects of an impact/shock, e.g. without taking into account some unknown and/or not well understood screening and/or many-body effects?

My understanding is that in most if not all of the experiments you cited - including some experiments presented at ICCF18 by Carpinteri (see http://iccf18.research.missour…ydrogen_Embrittlement.pdf) which if I remember correctly were one of the first experiments MFMP together with HUG set out to replicate (they were unsuccessful) - the number of neutrons in the original experiment was relatively small and not much above background and so even if the original experiment was correct it would not require any "exotic" mechanisms to explain. On the other hand, MFMP seems to be pointing to an experiment presented at ICCF17 which produced copious neutrons, e.g. much more than could be explained using "standard" mechanisms due to shock. Am I wrong about this? If this is so, then the successful replication of this experiment WOULD prove clearly - in contrast to the earlier experiments in which extremely small amounts of neutrons were produced - that nuclear reactions CAN occur in condensed matter at low temperature/energy.

I don't care if you want to label it "hot" fusion because neutrons are produced or "cold" fusion, but in my book if we have an experiment in which nuclear effects occur to an extent which is orders of magnitude more than expected by standard theory, then this is LENR. Or at the very least it is condensed matter nuclear science, and is worth investigating.

Note: I have just corrected the experiments I mentioned, it was ICCF18 and the presentation (see link above) was given by Dr. Alberto Carpinteri.