In 1983, a claim was made that ulcers were caused by bacterial infection. This paper is from 1997, analyzing the rejection and then growing acceptance of the theory: http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/Ulcers.one.html If interested enough, the second part is available by replacing "one," above, with "two."
It may be of interest, I don't know. I have no reason to believe nuclear physicists are fundamentally different than medical doctors and biologists.
Thank you, Dr. Storms, for your reply. I think THHuxley is offering good advice, though I could understand why you might be too fed up with everything to want to devote the necessary time.
I will offer a shorter and less technical perspective.
I know that I will never understand the various LENR theoretical explanations without a few additional years of math and technical education that I'm unlikely to obtain. So the theories, while interesting, are things where I have to say, "OK, if you say so." But then a contradictory theory appears and I'm forced to the same response.
But the excess energy is a straightforward result which is attributable to (1) a real effect not currently understood by the mainstream; (2) experimental error; or (3) fraud, which I include not because I doubt everyone here, but because I do doubt various people who have used LENR to obtain significant sums of investment.
So I confess I have no idea of how much skill is involved in eliminating potential error from calorimetry. I assume you are convinced your results are repeatable by a skilled experimentalist. The result of following the "mainstream is awful" group here is, I suppose, you get more free time, with the satisfaction of being a respected martyr in the community. The result of ignoring them, and seeking out people with the skills to replicate and perhaps tack down your results, could be more substantial. Unless I misunderstand, the skills needed are technical, and no understanding of theory is required. And THHuxley's comments on needing to convince people of what "must be" obvious are, I believe, well stated.
If I understand the point being made, Ed Storms, after a long career at Los Alamos, has published papers and books more than five years old, but no company or university is interested in exploring his cold fusion / LENR results. Is that an accurate reflection of the position of Dr. Storms and Alan Smith?
I will say this: y'all help me understand the importance of peer review.
Rather than demonizing thhuxley, perhaps the many participants in this research could observe and replicate staker, or build and disassemble their own living room heater.
See, e.g., https://www.sciencedirect.com/…cle/pii/S0360319922047140
"Ten hard-to-achieve but vital conditions are disclosed for a recognizable (measurable) Fleischmann-Pons heat effect; and these resulted in 100% reproducibility within this study."
True, the conditions are given as hard-to-achieve. But the statement is that anyone who properly follows the recipe provided gets the results observed. No replicator in public, though. Meanwhile, I read about how the Egyptians knew about cold fusion, and various wonderful theories explaining why everyone in mainstream physics is either wrong or a conspirator. After watching from the sidelines for several years, I find myself left with a vague sense of disgust for the field's participants, particularly the cheerleaders.
That's very kind of you, Curbina, many thanks.
Meanwhile, on the BLP thread:
QuoteThe feedback from expert reviewers will be of value to you.
Did you ever ask a cow about abstract painting?
At least a few times, when I read somebody in LENR saying, basically, "here, follow this recipe and replication is easy" I check back with them months and then years later to ask if they know of anyone replicating their work, or trying to, or planning to. Aside from secrets that can't be shared, I never am told of any. But there's a pretty reliable stream of breathless reports of new experiments that are also "easily replicated, if the recipe is just followed." As a wannabe science writer, I've given up on the field until one of two things happen: (1) a paper published in a reputable journal, including information on a prior experiment's replication by a different team, or following on to a paper published in a reputable journal, offering a replication of some work previously published in a reputable journal; or (2) a company making profit by selling LENR-based energy (BLP) or products (Aureon).
By reputable journal, I mean top-tier. It is my fundamental belief that an experiment demonstrating a technology that might save the world will not have difficulty getting published in a top-tier journal, if done properly. I understand that this must mark me as incredibly naive, to anyone who might care. So be it.
> 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.
Over on e-cat world, there is now a stream of comments hailing Bob Greenyer's most recent findings. I came here because my "this can't be real" detectors start firing when I hear about how the Egyptians solved all this with sacred geometry, adding a new layer to the already detector-triggering attitude that the US government and more-or-less all mainstream scientists actively suppress work that could save humanity. But I did expect to see comments on "O-Day" all over lenr-forum, either confirmatory, offering praise, or offering debunking. Nothing. Anyone?
Ammonia transport networks already exist and ammonia can be used as a hydrogen carrier and converted to hydrogen on-board or possibly used as a direct input to fuel cells (or diesels). It's clunky, but not as clunky as having every car carry around a ton of batteries to provide salable range figures. We are never going to live in a world where everyone runs extension cords to their cars parked on the street, even in permit only areas.
Sorry but I am quite OCD about keeping things on topic. This thread is for skepticism on LENR's very existence, and your comments are of this tenor. That's all.
About the collection of papers, you can spend months reading at https://www.LENR-CANR.org , and you will find some also mentioned along this thread, where we have been discussing the issue for a while.
When fishing, it helps to put a worm on the hook, rather than fish repellent. We all have limited time. "Jed Rothwell keeps a list" is not a worm. I described a suitable worm, and am done here. Thank you for your replies, and I'll check back in a year, probably.
I will view this, as an "informable person," not as evidence of your superior understanding but as something quite different.
Folks at the "informable person" level simply have to rely on consensus, for we have no way to analyze things except by going on behavior of participants. The way to inform such persons is straightforward:
"Smith, A., at the peer reviewed journal X, presented results Z. The results have been replicated by Jones, B. (see article in peer reviewed journal Y) and Johannson, C. (see article in peer reviewed journal X, Y, or Z). The experiments were identical, with the following unfortunate variation, and the results were consistent, as follows..."
It's very straightforward, no matter how annoying it might seem, or how many times its been done in the past. It could be assigned to a single control key on a keyboard. Or you can just send disagreements off to purgatory, which is also straightforward and interpreted by the informable as revealing what they needed to come to a tentative conclusion.
And surely you've offered this collection to every science journalist, so either all science journalists are part of the conspiracy to suppress this research or none wish to risk their reputations against the conspirators. I have no reputation to worry about and I'm f*cking bored at my job, so if I'm convinced I'll happily start on a course to learn more and if I remained satisfied I'd be happy to try to do a report on the replications. While I don't have the math or physics background to understand the theory, I'm not interested in theory but in observations far enough out of error ranges that, were I to take them to university professors, could not be explained away as experimental error.
A writing sample, showing a willingness to disbelieve official explanations: https://truthout.org/articles/…udden-acceleration-cases/
Please point me to the link at which Jed Rothwell maintains his collection of replicated experimental results. I apologize in advance for requesting the hand-holding.
Alan Smith> It began not as a way of depriving the world of cheap and clean energy, but of ensuring that the available money for fusion research went to the hot fusion crowd.
OK. Let's hypothesize that US fusion researchers collectively put their grant applications ahead of their childrens' future. Why have electrochemists not found funding? Is the electrochemist community similarly obscene?
Google provided funds to come up with replication and asserted they could not. Are they in on the plot?
ARPA-E is now providing funding; a credentialed name has an experiment that lays out a recipe for replication. Where is the one person on the planet with the skills to replicate the Staker experimental conditions who is publicly announcing that their lab is working on that precise thing? Perhaps it strikes the folks here as pointless.
I am offering you a layperson's attitude -- show me the same experiment done by two or more independent groups with the same results -- results widely considered "impossible" under what we think of as current theory -- and I will wake up. Show me a wide variety of experimental results that are all intriguing and I will continue to wait for what it sounds like ARPA-E and Google have both been asking for: a single experiment that any competent lab worker can conduct in order to demonstrate the phenomenon to themselves and others.
You can point to corruption within science and I'll agree you've found it; that will not change my mind. You can explain at a layperson's level the way in which evidence has accumulated and I will find it intriguing. What you would need to do to get me passionately involved is show me two or more independent labs doing the same experiment with the same "impossible" results. That's the way I think, and I suspect others think similarly, which is why Google and ARPA-E are asking for a reference experiment. The absence of one tells me there's no need (yet) to get particularly excited, and it's an easily remedied issue that no one seems to remedy.
Yes, I am referring to the Staker paper. You are saying that the reality of the phenomenon is no longer in dispute. Perhaps I am just thick, but what that would mean to me is that the subject would be taught in particle physics and/or other classes, and there would be no difficulty in getting peer review.
Perhaps you mean that those in the LENR community have collectively agreed that the phenomenon has been observed enough that there is no longer controversy as to the phenomenon's existence within the LENR community.
As an outside but informable observer, it is quite literally impossible for me to believe simultaneously that the reality of the phenomenon is no longer in dispute in the wider scientific community, and that there is trouble obtaining funding. I can believe one or the other, but not both simultaneously. As I said, perhaps it's just that I'm thick, but this is where empathy must come into play. All I can offer is that no letter to the editor would sway me, while reports of the same experiment performed in multiple labs with similar outcomes would get my attention. Science is replicable.
On the Useful Papers thread, within the past month, a link was provided to a paper which asserts reliable replication of Fleischmann Pons. Ignoring the paper's discussion of theoretical issues, the paper also lays out a series of steps that ought to lead to replication in any competent lab. It also indicates that such replications can be performed with a far less expensive material.
As a lay but "informable" outside observer, I find myself examining how I would respond to a letter to the editor signed by a bunch of respected people, versus how I would respond to two or three labs achieving and reporting the same results from the same experiment. My response to a letter to the editor would be to recall Rossi, to wonder how Brillouin can claim a COP of 3 yet apparently lose SRI backup, and to recall my amazement at how many years Brilliant Light and Power has been able to suck money out of Wall Street by repeatedly creating videos proving AFAICT that molten metal can boil water. My response to replication of the Staker results would be to go to the local office of my representative in Congress to describe what I'd been shown and to ask everyone I know to do the same. I can only assume that others outside the field would react similarly.
I often wonder how much television dramas have altered our perception of reality such that we have totally lost faith in anyone with any power or money. Do such people often behave badly? Of course they do. But do they care about the future of their own children, and perhaps even about the future of humanity? I believe they do, and it saddens me that so many people -- not just here -- have become so convinced that they or their community are the sole holders of any decency. To disagree with a consensus is absolutely not to be wrong. But when you find yourself in disagreement with the consensus, perhaps the most important skill is the empathy to understand why skeptics are skeptical of what you say, to put yourself in the shoes of others who don't know what you believe you know.
Some in the field seem to be grounding their opinions on the idea that there is a global conspiracy, or something effectively the same, to prevent humanity from accessing an available form of energy that would be a response to the climate crisis, and that this has been successful for thirty years. Anyone who makes that sort of assertion loses me immediately. I realize I might be wrong, as I realize we might all might be living in The Matrix, but I don't really care -- I comfortably put such assertions in the category of too unlikely to gain the slightest bit of my attention.
Jed, thanks for your reply. It would be silly of me to argue that corruption cannot exist in science. But wouldn't the sort of thing you describe just lead to people plagiarizing the potentially world changing results regularly discussed here, or fighting over priority. It's been decades since I left school, but when I was there it seemed like it was curiosity, not greed, that brought people into research. I'm sad that no readers have chosen to challenge your comment. This is a field in which some obvious charlatans and conspiracy types operate, but I remain interested precisely because of my respect for researchers who assert that there is fire behind the smoke, and say they've seen it with their own calorimeters.
There are so many separate issues here. Getting press attention, getting the attention of funders, publicizing various results. I think the way science is taught may be an issue; what is taught as science is the relatively stable views of reality that have earned a consensus based on complicated analyses that can then be boiled down to a layperson-suitable page in a textbook. Those views, I believe, are stable for good reasons. No one wants to pull support columns out of a massive structure if there are alternative approaches. Perhaps, as an outsider, I have a naive view of things, but I think scientific review is one of the few things that still functions in our society. That is, when papers are rejected by peer review, I tend to assume that there are valid reasons for rejection.
Science, I believe, is grounded on replication. It excites me when people offer recipes for reliable replication, and I continue to find it hard to believe that "impossible" results that are replicated by multiple groups under properly controlled conditions will not be treated fairly by scientific journals. And I think most science journalists are well advised to show appropriate deference to that peer review process. For that reason, I find it discouraging that some in this community seem to feel that they need an end run around that process in order to publicize their results.
I'm someone who truly wants to believe in the results being reported. But I don't think any sensible journalist would be moved by a letter to the editor, when they know that people invest a decade of their lives or more to learning enough about a narrow field just to reach the point at which they can offer an informed opinion. I'd listen to the folks who've put in that time, knowing full well that they're imperfect. And I'd be highly suspicious of anyone who told me there was a conspiracy among such people to suppress the truth. I'd ask why, and on an existential issue, I'd find competition to be an unlikely answer.
