Posts by Rob

I've met Matt. We've spoken. Both he and his collaborator Ross are unwilling to go on the record. That to me indicates some dishonesty. And Matt is now working for a VC that is only investing in plasma fusion. So here he has shown up, shit on the entire community, designed a purposely flawed study, used it as an opportunity to grandstand over us claiming, 'if we can get published in Nature, obviously you could have too'. And thanks to Matt, we have more bad journalism like this one:

Google’s $10 million cold fusion project has failed

It may have dealt the decades-old pipe dream its final blow.

futurism.com

The subtitle quotes, "no evidence whatsoever", however, this quote doesn't appear ANYWHERE IN THE PAPER. And the journalist then goes on to conclude,

Quote

the new research all but kills the hope that cold fusion could one day power our world.

This is also completely unfounded. But has the Google group taken actions to correct this bad journalism? OF COURSE NOT. They're happy with this conclusion.

I haven't read this thread entirely, it's too long and unfortunately there's too many things I have to do.

David Nygren why are you being polite to Trevethick? In this presentation, he openly spits on the entire community when he claims it "cannot or will not teach", and he adds that his group was able to publish in Nature, so they've 'proven it can be done.' This man is a snake, he is posing as a member of the LENR community, when clearly he's here to sabotage the entire field. He claims they filtered for bias, by selecting only researchers who have ZERO experience with LENR. This is obviously scientific schlock, he hasn't filtered for bias against cold fusion, but instead designed a study that was destined to fail from the very beginning. Why would anyone be kind and friendly to such a snake?

Working towards theories is good. Bickering over community conduct is a distraction. Eppur si muove.

This new Wikipedia article on Lattice Confinement Fusion appeared recently, and claims:

Quote

Lattice confinement fusion requires energetic deuterons and is therefore not cold fusion

Lattice confinement fusion - Wikipedia

Seems a bit dishonest to me.

A new CF video was posted yesterday. Somehow this person thinks cold fusion experiments have never produced significant excess heat. Easily the most boneheaded thing I’ve heard recently.

Quote from Alan Smith

Rob You might like this pdf version of a ppoint for a lecture I delivered at Trinity College Cambridge a few years back...'Why scientists oppose cold fusion,' Written 5 years ago -not much has changed.

OPPOSE COLD FUSION A SMITH.pdf

Hey Alan Smith, is there anyway to get the video or audio that goes with these slides?

Quote from RobertBryant

can you do 4D animation? as in the u,v and x, y planes?

I've never heard of 4D animation in this sense, and I'm not seeing relevant google results. My tool of choice is Blender, so it's 3D animation which is technically 4D when you include time. I'm looking at your images but I don't understand it yet.

I think my question wasn't fully understood. It's documented in Krivit's Fusion Fiasco that multiple experimenters had complained to the DOE that the ERAB choices were obviously biased, and the panel members were fully aware of this as they wrote about it in either their documents or letters to each other. So my question is whether anyone has attempted to write up something of a portrait of each member, which would be a collection of their quotes from before joining the panel, as well as their background and what sort of connections / affiliations, either to institutions or research groups, that would potentially make for some bias.

The reason I'm asking about this is because I'm basing my views of the ERAB panel (at this point) almost exclusively on what Krivit has written (I'll be reading Beaudette's book soon, I'm working on Mizuno's right now), and so if I tell someone, "this panel was so biased", I actually don't know much about most of the people who were on the panel. It's a bit tricky for me to uncover the connections these people had to plasma fusion research.

By the way, if anyone has a strong grasp on this stuff and wants to work more closely with me, I'd welcome it. I have a lot on my plate with this project, it's not just reading and asking questions. I'm also an animator, and I'll be generating animations to explain the essential concepts in the video: the physics, the LENR theory, and the sociology / history.

JedRothwell has there ever been any effort in documenting the preexisting bias of the members, and/or their conflict of interest by being associated with hot fusion research?

The back and forth between Curbina and THHuxleynew has been very helpful for getting some understanding of the methodological considerations for this research path.

Quote from Frogfall

Going back to the Martin Fleischmann interview, from IE (linked by Gregory Byron Goble )

Fleischmann's reference to Francis Bacon is very important here. Bacon's publication of the Novum Organum in 1620 was a landmark in philosophical and scientific thought. In it he criticised the Aristotelian method of Deduction that was regarded as the proper way to enhance knowledge at the time. Aristotle had basically said that by thinking deeply enough, and by making various assumptions, which appeared logically correct to a skilled philosophical thinker, it would be possible to reveal truths about the natural world. Francis Bacon insisted that the only way to gain information about the natural world was through direct observation, and by testing any ideas that are prompted by those observations by carrying out actual physical experiments. The Baconian method formed the original basis for what later became known as the scientific method.

Francis Bacon was well aware that human nature would drift towards the internally Deductive, rather than the externally Inductive, and that a formal method was needed to counter that drift. He wasn't against deduction in its proper place, and was aware that it was central to areas such as mathematics and theology, but he knew that natural phenomena needed to be treated differently.

Now read this piece, published only last week, in the Guardian - written by Sabine Hossenfelder:

https://www.theguardian.com/co…sics-particles-physicists

Basically, the "natural drift" has reoccurred - and some areas of science have reverted back to Aristotelian Deduction.

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Wow, this article is fantastic. I could litteraly read the last 2 to 3 paragraphs in my video to help build support for the social construction aspect of science, which is pretty much the key to understanding how the 1989 ERAB panel was able to both draw the wrong conclusion, and set the world on the wrong path.

Quote from Curbina

I just recalled that Mats Lewan in his book about “il dottore” (an impossible invention) wrote a very good entry level chapter to explain chemical and atomic reactions and how LENR differed from both. Regardless of what happened with that story years later, that chapter of the book could help a lot on getting ideas for what to tell newcomers interested in LENR.

Purchased. Thanks for the recommendation. If you got any others, please send them my way.

Okay... But the topic is just whether or not ultrasonic transmutation proves the existence of LENR. I guess the answer is a definitive "yes"? So if I gave a TED Talk, and I showed people the ULTR experiment and the results, and I said, "See? All sorts of new elements, this proves LENR is a real effect", I would be right, and then CMNS would be welcomed into the CMP world with broad acceptance? I'm idealizing my example here but hopefully you understand what I'm asking. Politics of science aside, am I understanding the physics concepts correctly?

The thread topic is history, not present day experiments.

Trying to figure out where in the past the idea first appeared and how it became established orthodoxy that fusion can only occur in a plasma.

Some of these replies have been really helpful toward that goal, thank you! I’m hoping the thread will stay on topic so I don’t have to filter out a lot of tangents and digressions.

Can we move axil ’s reply? It’s unrelated to the topic.

EDIT:

Sorry, this part seems relevant. A little tangential.

Quote from axil

By the way, iron cannot be formed using fusion. Iron formation needs a supernova and lots of time in a heavy neutron thick environment.

Quote from Alan Smith

Rob

I admire your enthusiasm, but do avoid starting too many threads on closely related topics. It's sometimes called 'flooding' - not a term I am fond of but it gives you the picture I am sure. This forum has a tradition of very long threads on a general theme, which at least enables a reader to get an overview. Twitter we are not.

I see. I’m not trying to flood. I prefer concise over long and voluminous. I can’t read fast, so I consider it valuable to have short threads with a tight focus. The downside of the alternative in my view, is that valuable information is harder to find and obscured for future viewers. Maybe the topics are related but I wouldn’t want them jumbled up. As I’m referring back to these, it will be faster for me to access the reply/info I’m seeking.

Quote from Curbina

AFAIK Nature has accepted one Cold Fusion Paper (1989, Steven Jones, direct antagonist of Fleischmann and Pons). It also published the 2019 Paper on revisiting cold fusion, which was negative with a positive after taste.

Ya... That's a good starting point. Do we know of anyone else who tried to publish in Nature? Did we save their rejection letters? JedRothwell, do you know?

Okay, so then it's a long list of journals that are not accepting papers? What would be the top 10 or 15? Nature and ... I guess that's the only one I know.

EDIT:

Maybe it would be helpful to focus on just US journals for the moment?

Which journals are still refusing LENR papers? I’d like to have a comprehensive list and understand more fully where things stand on this front.

Can someone show me actual journal rejection letters? The more I can collect, the better.

Frogfall I edited my post to fix the mistake. Sorry about that. It’s funny, I’m so focused of LENR, sometimes I forget about fission entirely. Lol