Posts by Rob

Quote from Alan Smith

It's probably time we interview Robert Godes, I'll ask him. I would like to remind JedRothwell that Brilluoin organized a live demonstration of their device at ICCF-24, although it was a far from perfect demo, as they had not tested the device beforehand for some reason. Carl Page has been close to this project since before ICCF-19, it's surprising that such a well-connected guy hasn't found them a commercial partner so far.

I don't think this description is accurate. Their device has certainly been tested, quite extensively. Brillouin runs their reactors over very long duration tests with continuous data collection, and this isn't secret, Robert has shown their control panel in his videos. I spoke to Robert at the conference and it was explained to me that they were having new troubles with arcing. My recollection is that they encountered troubles after transporting their gear to the conference and reassembling the system.

JedRothwell, just like in the story of the Wright brothers, who were concerned about their competitors seeing how their machines worked, BEC is concerned that any particular information they release might be useful to their competitors. This is not limited to scientific understanding, it also extends to business strategy. There's lots of potential commercialization strategies in the world of energy, and sometimes your competitive advantage is simply your idea about where to enter the market and how to capitalize. This is true across all industries. I think it's prudent that we not bash groups who are going about their work in this way. Even academics engage in some amount of secret keeping because of the competitive aspects of the research world. Lets be inclusive and supportive, the BEC team is all good honest people who want to see CF / LENR / CMNS enter the mainstream just like all the rest of us.

Hi JedRothwell, thanks for joining the thread and thanks for directing me to pages 32 - 36, I actually hadn't found this before and so I'm studying it now. As always, I greatly appreciate your help in analyzing these past works.

In his Baltimore lecture, at about 11:50 and again at 22:30, Lewis shows a table which resembles FP's table 2:

And he says, "here is the table, that is in the paper now published". Does he mean FP's paper? And where does that extra column come from? The one on the far right labeled "Voltage"?

I'll save my other questions for later, after I've done further reading.

Quote from Frogfall

If psychology is more up your street, might I also suggest you take a look at "critical windows" in the human ability to mentally model the world.

I find the thought of torturing kittens quite abhorrent - but there was a set of (in)famous experiments carried out many years ago that could shed some light on the human ability to accept (or even recognise) some concepts.

See: The surprising role of cats in the history of neuroscience.

Our minds are all damaged (or skewed) to a certain extent, in an infinite number of different ways, by everything we encounter whilst growing up.

Sadly, I suspect we are not really all that different to cats...

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I think the outlook is not nearly so grim. I think the concept of collective illusions is more appropriate for understanding cold fusion denialism.

It would help me a lot if I could find a collaborator with better understanding of physics and/or electrochemistry than me, and who has enough availability for the effort required. What I need help with is primarily just the Caltech segment (for the documentary I'm making).

I'm working from these papers:

- Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium (Fleischmann et al) (link 1, link 2)

- Searches for low-temperature nuclear fusion of deuterium in palladium (Lewis et al)

- Critical Analysis Of Cold Fusion Calorimetric Data Reported By Caltech Scientists (Miles et al)

- Calorimetric Principles and Problems in Pd-D2O Electrolysis (Miles et al)

- Calorimetry Of The Palladium - Deuterium System (Pons et al)

- The Calorimetry Of Electrode Reactions And Measurements Of... (Pons et al)

- How Nature refused to re-examine the 1989 CalTech experiment (Rothwell)

- Notes On Two Papers Claiming No Evidence For... (Noninski et al)

And from these videos:

- Nathan Lewis Explains How He Failed to Replicate Fleischmann-Pons, May 1, 1989

- Video of the Los Angeles ECS press conference (not available online at this time)

And I've interviewed Dr. Miles and Dr. McKubre, who have both been very helpful.

I've already made a lot of progress on this subject, but I keep finding more issues to track down.

If you, or someone you know, would be willing and able to help me with this project, feel free to reply here or DM me. Any collaborators will of course get credit for their work. This project is not for profit, just FYI.

EDIT:

I forgot to mention that I have probably every book which covers the subject.

Quote from orsova

The ISCMNS website has some quite extensive photo galleries.

Thanks for pointing this out, I've not explored this site at all.

Hi all. I'm interested in gathering up photos of the CF / LENR community over the years. Mike McKubre shared this one with me and it got me thinking that more like this could be pretty useful for a montage. Maybe we could setup a shared photo album for it.

Quote from Curbina

You must have gone pretty far down the Google pages to find this.

Ya, I might have just kept clicking deeper into the page results, or there was a specific term that brought it to the top page. I don't recall because it was a while ago. Thanks for parsing this for me.

I found this rather thorough article on cold fusion (written from a strictly opposed viewpoint), and I can't figure out who this is written by or what this website is for. Could any of you help me figure out what I'm looking at here? And who the author might be? Thanks.

Cold fusion - profilpelajar.com

Cold fusion

profilpelajar.com

Quote from Paradigmnoia

I built a Mizuno type mass air flow calorimeter,

Sounds like it would make a good Instructible article.

Is there an easy and inexpensive way to do calorimetry? Something that comes off-the-shelf ready to use, and doesn't require much skill?

Quote from Fm1

Starting to sound like ECW syndrome has infected the forum. Put a heater in my shed first, then talk about pie in the sky

The question was asked by one person, me. It’s rather illogical to cast this is as a trend throughout the whole community. Also, if you inspect the original question more closely, you’ll see that it was a question on engineering feasibility. Pretty much everyone replying gave well-grounded answers.

Assuming a future where LENR is solved, understood, and controllable, what would be the engineering hurdles involved in powering a jet airplane using on-demand H2 from electrolysis?

Water could potentially fuel the LENR reactor and provide the H2 for the jet engines. I assume a battery would be included to provide quick throttle response, and the LENR reactor would charge the battery. The reactor would have a mechanism of its own to ramp up/down the power to the battery to keep the battery from getting depleted/overcharged.

To convert heat to electricity, I assume the use of either a solid-state converter or maybe a stirling-type heat engine, I suppose it depends a lot on how much heat we can generate, so let's just assume a best case scenario: That we can generate as much heat as we want.

Quote from Curbina

Rob I think most of us here have overcome already that sentiment. Most of us here are aware Cold Fusion was given an improper treatment. That’s history, is well documented, and everyone interested and involved seriously and without a hidden agenda will agree with this.

On the other side, General non specialist perceptions and public perceptions are hard to change.

Trevithick and team google did as many others before did when presented evidence, they entered skeptic and fulfilled their own prophesy.

I would like to direct your attention to people with a complete different attitude. Dr. Luciano Ondir Freire, Nuclear Engineering researcher from Brasil, presented a poster at ICCF 23 and he took an active participation in many of the Q&A sessions after the presentations. I have engaged him on ResearchGate, and I congratulated him for his interest in this field, and he point blank told me he wanted to devote the rest of his career to this field. He has already published some papers, one in particular in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, that IMHO can be considered as a rebuttal to the Nature 2019 from Team Google, and that several months ago was one of the most read articles on that Journal (we mentioned it in one of our newsletters). This is the article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/…cle/pii/S1572665721008973

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Ah yes! I've been skimming this paper for the last several weeks. I was planning on using this heavily in my video.

Quote

there is and remains, a heated debate in the LENR community, about the degree to which anomalous effects have already been proven. But for everyone that says they are proven, please show me and others, the truly independent replications, uh, we were not able to find them. In fact, it was our experience that the LENR community either cannot teach, or will not teach, and that the failure to share the best of what is known, has impeded scientific progress.

Seems like he's placing the blame for the failure of the LENR research entirely on the LENR research community itself.

But I see about ~22-ish replications from 1989 alone, between the months of March and June. This is what I have in my notes, from Krivit's chronology in Fusion Fiasco, and from Lewenstein's Cornell Cold Fusion archive.

1. Apr 2, Csikai and Sztaricskai in Hungary confirm neutrons
2. Apr 10, Team at Texas A&M confirms excess heat
3. Apr 12, Kuzmin at University of Moscow confirms F&P effect
4. Apr 13, Washington University students confirm tritium
5. Apr 17, Walling & Simons report helium-4
6. Apr 17, Comenius University in Czechoslovakia confirm F&P effect
7. Apr 18, ENEA-Frascati confirm neutrons
8. Apr 18, University of Mexico confirm F&P effect
9. Apr 18, Stanford University confirms excess heat
10. Apr 19, University of São Paulo confirms neutrons
11. Apr 19, Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research confirm neutrons
12. Apr 20, University of Florida confirm tritium
13. Apr 20, Technical University in Dresden confirm neutrons
14. Apr 21, Institute of Space Research in São Jose dos Campos confirms helium-3
15. Apr 22, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology confirm excess heat, helium & tritium (two teams)
16. Apr 25, Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research confirm heat & neutrons
17. Apr 25, Texas A&M letter to Congress confirms excess heat
18. Apr 27, Case Western Reserve University confirms excess heat
19. Apr 27, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay confirms excess heat
20. May 3, Texas A&M confirms excess heat
21. May 23, Manne Siegbahn Institute for Physics in Sweden confirm neutrons
22. Jun 9, LANL validates Bockris / Texas A&M tritium
23. Jun 23, Storms & Talcott at LANL confirm tritium

What I conclude from all of this, is the Matt Trevithick either CANNOT READ, OR WILL NOT READ.

Quote from Curbina

Rob, I think you need to realize that this thread is rather old, first than anything, and that back then we engaged with Threvithick in an attempt to help them find a reference experiment, which failed because neither we could achieve a consensus, nor “Google team” was really interested in the research that already exists.

Exactly, they weren't interested in the research that already exists. Any COMPETENT engineer, or scientist, would know that you should always start a line of investigation from a position of something that is KNOWN TO WORK. This is an indication of either intentional failure, or total incompetence.

I'm sorry I wasn't around earlier, I would have liked to have been present for those original conversations.

Quote from Cydonia

Matt Trevithick never had a background in LENRs. He was in a way as project manager commissioned by Carl Page probably. That's why his tech mentor has always been mcKubre, a very overrated guy, in my mind.

However, TG's investigations have not been fully negatives, they have at least demonstrated that a "screening effect" alone was not sufficient.

However, if you think that TG has spent money sterilely, know that elsewhere in the world, sometimes this is the case too. In Europe, there is the Hermes project for example. Regarding Matt Trevithick, I remember having a good laugh when Hagelstein "bugged" him about the "Parkhomov" type replications at the last ICCF. Now so many around the world attempted the same way....

Actually, as I recall it, Matt is a student of Peter Haglestein.

Quote from JedRothwell

To answer your last question first: There is no chance that an individual working in isolation will achieve commercialization. That is about as likely as a person working at home, with his own money, launching a rocket to the moon.

To answer the other questions:

They should work harder at collaboration if they want to succeed. Collaboration with people who have suitcases full of money is the only way forward. Scientific research is expensive.

Most are not receiving any funding as far as I know. Personal funds only. They are also not getting anywhere, because they have no money or modern instruments. It takes them a year to do what should be done in weeks.

Without good papers they will never attract funding, or gain any recognition. They will die and be forgotten. In science, you have to communicate your results. People cannot know by ESP what you have done. Nowadays the internet is flooded with millions of scientific paper, so it is difficult attract attention. But if you don't even try, you will not succeed. It is like hoping to win the lottery when you do not even buy a ticket.

It is not quite as difficult to attract attention as it might seem, because people do come to LENR-CANR.org and other sites looking for information on cold fusion. They read well written papers. They do not read poorly written papers. I can tell how many copies of papers people download, although not the ones in JCMNS issues. I can only see the entire issue being downloaded, in most cases.

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I partially agree, and partially disagree. When I say "work in isolation", I don't mean strict isolation. What I've observed is that scientists in this field work primarily in isolation to build demos, and use these demos to convince investors. This process doesn't require collaboration, or expending time on writing good papers. The reason scientists write good papers and develop novel discoveries and techniques is because they have a stable job at a university. Take that away and what do you have? The field is forced into an undesirable situation where it will only attract scientific risk takers. And if your only payoff comes from demonstrating your idea works, the review and revision process is a costly waste of time which risks helping your competition copy your work.

Investors don't invest in good science papers, they invest in results. They invest in demos.

All that being said, I agree with you that there are incentives to doing good science, attracting collaborators via your published work, and getting useful feedback. I'm simply outlining my views on why some portion of the community may not feel incentivized to write good papers, and I think only an empathetic perspective like this will get us out of this mess.

Quote from Cydonia

I'm fully agree with you, already have done the same analysis since a while..

However why didn't you asked directly Carl Page at his ICCF ?

This deal was the consequence of his choices, no ?

In parallel, why he supports Brillouin ? Why he is close to Darden who failed too ?

You should investigate in this way, i suggest rather..

I didn't know any of this at ICCF-24. I didn't see Matt's ICCF-23 presentation until the last month or so. I'm a newcomer to the LENR scene, I'm working on this project on the side (I have a day job), and most of my time right now is dedicated to processing all the events of 1989 into a clear documentary with strong citations and an appropriately broad perspective – meaning, I'm not limiting my explanation to physics alone. That would not explain how we wound up in the paradoxical state that so many smart scientists are so incapable or unwilling to approach this subject without bias and see the evidence for what it is. To do that, we need a broader, historical and sociological perspective.

If I get the opportunity to ask Carl, that would be cool. My impression is that Carl didn't have much – if any – influence over the design of the study and how Matt was approaching this. Maybe in the future Carl could request that Google do a better job of selecting researchers who are known to be trustworthy, and who have already demonstrated an ability to run a successful LENR experiment. Obviously, the co-deposition approach would have been the clear winner of the selection process. Matt had the option to pick better approaches, so either he purposely chose not to, or he's clueless. Which is it? I want to know.

Have there been any critiques of the Google paper?

EDIT:
I should probably clarify something. I was only casually aware of LENR since sometime around 2008. A few years later I volunteered whatever I could offer to the team at Brillouin, and their request was that I make a theory explainer for them. This is the video I made. It could have come out better if I could have had more time, be even still, I'm proud of what I was able to accomplish for them.

Quite a few years past since that time, and I had expected that LENR would have broken through to the mainstream by now. Since that hasn't happened, I've come up with a new idea and so now I'm trying to become much more in touch with what's going on in this field, and why.

Quote from JedRothwell

Did he say that? That's silly. He is right that you can publish in Nature, but only if you meet four conditions:

1. You have to be with a very large, wealthy, influential place like Google.
2. You have to get a negative result, or a result you can describe as negative, even if it is actually positive. This is how MIT and CalTech managed to publish.
3. You have let the editors at Nature change you paper to remove nearly all useful information and make the result seem even worse than it was.
4. You have to agree that Nature will publish an accompanying editorial trashing your research and implying that others in your field are criminals and lunatics.

I have only met Trevethick a few times. I think McKubre and others have a favorable opinion of him. I do not know why, or what he might have done to deserve that, but as I said I know practically nothing about him, so he may have a done many good things. Perhaps the Nature publication is mainly the fault of Nature editors. I wouldn't know.

When he says the community "cannot or will not teach," I think he is partially right. Many researchers have held back results. Others have not made an effort to publish good papers. Some are incapable of writing good papers. No one knows that more than I do, since I have copy edited 297 papers, and there are about 100 more that should have been copy-edited, but the authors refused to let anyone help. Also, people cannot help much because they do not know much. There are many more unanswered questions in cold fusion than there are well-established facts.

JedRothwell Is there any incentive for these people to work harder at collaboration? Are they receiving any funding, or is everyone working from their own personal funds? Is there any payoff for writing a good paper? Or would it make more sense to work in isolation and aim for commercialization? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the community seems to be stuck in a catch-22. There's no rewards for sharing their work, it simply takes away from time they could be spending on their own research, and the only real payoff will come from commercial success. And we have these critics who are blasting the community for this situation, but the critics themselves created this situation! Am I wrong?

Does this paper by Google accomplish ANYTHING useful? Okay, so they developed new calorimeters. Cool. But was it actually useful or helpful to publish this work in the context of LENR research? Go ahead and publish a paper about your calorimetry, tell us about the good science you did, that's all great. But nobody needs another CalTech / MIT / Harwell. This does nothing to help science or the world, AT ALL. This is another PR attack on the LENR field. Google has the resources to leapfrog everyone in this field, so it benefits them to come out with a smear campaign to ensure independent LENR groups will continue to struggle.

EDIT:

Isn't this obvious? David Nygren does this community have stockholm syndrome? Why are we welcoming people who are working to hold us back?