How far are we from someone incorporating Storms method of inserting inert calcium oxide particles into LENR fuel into the material of the LEC?
I believe Storms himself is working on that.
JedRothwell
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Posts by JedRothwell
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A few years back I was invited to make a presentation at Cambridge University on the 'Reputation Trap' in LENR research.
This was the subject of an ICCF24 presentation:
Risk and Reputation - Huw Price, PhD | Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Bonn
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I think the moral of the story from us believer's standpoint, is that mainstream has flaws, but overall they do much good. But, they screwed up when it comes to LENR.
Yup. But it is even worse than mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Mainstream scientists compound their mistakes by attacking the people who make the discoveries. By refusing to look at peer-reviewed data, and never reconsidering. By offering preposterous arguments such as THH's claims about light and heavy water -- claims that anyone who has read the literature knows are wrong. Mainstream scientists use their power with decision makers and funding agencies to destroy their enemies. That is what powerful people do in any institution. They often fight against their own best interests. The dairy industry in New York fought tooth and nail from the 1880s to 1917 to prevent pasteurization. They killed off hundreds of thousands of babies, including my great-grandmother's. They were killing their own best customers, and frightening away parents.
Anyone can see that science usually works. Discoveries are made. Great progress is made. Yet we pay a terrible cost for the politics, stupidity, greed and out-of-control egoism of many top scientists. It is a betrayal of science.
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This is not persecution - there is hot competition for grants and publication -
Where "hot competition" is defined as what the MIT plasma fusion researchers did: calling the Boston newspapers the day after the announcement and denouncing Fleischmann and Pons as criminals, and demanding they be arrested. And then publishing blatantly fake data. Hot competition is threatening people with deportation on trumped up charges; breaking up experiments and dumping horse manure on them; destroying documents. Destroying peoples reputations in the mass media. Firing them. Destroying their careers and marriages.
Yes, the plasma fusion researchers did this to protect their grants. You are right about that. If this is your idea of acceptable "hot competition" your view of ethics is very different from mine. But we knew that already, because you repeatedly claim that I said one thing when I said the very opposite. "Jed looks at a whole set of experiments, a few of which are well-conducted . . ." when you know damn well that I look at dozens of sets of experiments at many different places, all of them well conducted. I don't look at poorly conducted ones. Apparently your idea of hot competition is to lie about me, evade the issues, make idiotic statements about heavy water versus light water when heat is measured outside the cell, and assert that someone somewhere may have made some sort of mistake and you don't know what it is but we can ignore the results because you suppose they might be wrong.
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But all of this business about corruption and low standards is not something I see around me. It's bosh.
Read Miles and Beaudette and you will see it. Talk to any cold fusion researcher and they will tell you about it. Perhaps you have not seen corruption because you have not been involved in something controversial such as cold fusion, or masers and lasers.
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Minsky was right about single-layer networks. He showed rigorously that the problems they could solve were not the sort that people felt were needed for important AI tasks.
Read the article. It is short. Minsky and the others knew about multi-layer networks. Minsky said they would not work. Quote:
All this came to an end in 1969 with the publication of a book “Perceptrons” by Marvin Minsky, founder of the MIT AI Lab, and Seymour Papert, director of the lab. The book conclusively argued that the Rosenblatt’s single perception approach to neural networks could not be translated effectively into multi-layered neural networks.
Conclusive but wrong.
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Back Bruce up here.
Jed - I published in that field at that time (late 1980s) and was not harrassed.Read the quotes again. They said from 1968 to the early 1980s.
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I remember your retailing some remark about academics only caring about their parking spots. That struck me then as so weirdly absurd that it could only be pushed by someone who has no insight or experience of academic science. I mean who cares about parking spots?
A bigwig college dean said that! At Cornell or someplace. He was kidding, but only partly kidding. His point was there is a great deal of petty disputation in academia. Every academic I have quoted that to wryly agrees. Woodrow Wilson, who was a long time academic and President of Princeton University before becoming U.S. President said, "academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low."
Fleishmann was a cynical person, because of his experiences in life. Especially the Gestapo beating his father so badly he died a few weeks later. He said he knew that he and Pons would be kicked out academia and vilified. He said that always happens. That is the main theme of Beaudette's book, "Excess Heat." Beaudette quoted him, in his conversation with Prof. Karin Caldwell, the granddaughter of Arrhenius, one of history's greatest electrochemists. He was booted out for some years for saying things the establishment disagreed with. Quote:
After the press conference, Dr. Caldwell came up to us and said, “Well, when my grandfather proposed electrolytic disassociation, he was dismissed from the University. At least that won’t happen to you.” I said to her, “But you are entirely mistaken. We shall be dismissed as well.”
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Everyone thinks they have the hardest job. Much of what you say sounds to me like retroactive justifications for opinions you want to hold anyway.
Programming is not hard. Not the kind I ever did. Nowhere near as hard as designing bridges or airplanes. I had no strong opinions about academic science. In the 1980s I hired some superb programmers from Georgia Tech, who told me about the shenanigans in academic programming. I figured that was an isolated case. I did not think deeply about it. Many years later, I talked with Peter Hagelstein, Martin Fleischmann, Mel Miles and others. They told me hair-raising stories about what happened to them, and what the opposition did to them. The account by Mel Miles I cited above is just one example of many. The books by Townes about the laser and many other histories backed up my impression that there is an ethics problem in academic science. Anyone who knows the history of cold fusion can see that!
Of course there is unethical behavior in every institution. But it is more common in some institutions than others. It ebbs and flows. It was practically unheard of in U.S. post-WWII aviation until the recent Boeing scandals:
Boeing Charged with 737 Max Fraud Conspiracy and Agrees to Pay over $2.5 BillionThe Boeing Company (Boeing) has entered into an agreement with the Department of Justice to resolve a criminal charge related to a conspiracy to defraud the…www.justice.govIt is obvious to me why corruption and incompetence are so rare in aviation. Because aviation is consequential! A programmer screwing up a municipal billing system is likely to lose his job. But the problems can usually be fixed with several all-nighter programming sessions by five or six beleaguered people. No great harm. Whereas when an airplane designer screws up . . . and then covers up, airplanes crash. People are killed. Billions of dollars are lost.
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What are you thinking of here? I was heavily involved in neural network research in the late 1980's. It was a completely normal instance of a new field springing to life in an academic milieu.
I have several books about AI by Martin Ford and others. Some technical, some histories. Ford writes broad reviews, and seems to know everyone. He interviewed many people in "Architects of Intelligence." They talked about the periodic reoccurring AI winters from the 1970s on. Some of them said that in the 90s, you would get in trouble for mentioning neural networks. You couldn't publish a paper mentioning that. I read that in several books. Here is one quote from "Architects."
MARTIN FORD: I was an undergraduate studying computer engineering in the early 1980s, and I don’t recall much exposure to neural networks at all. It was a concept that was out there, but it was definitely very much marginalized. Now, in 2018, that has changed dramatically. YANN
YANN LECUN: It was worse than marginalized. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s it was anathema within the community. You couldn’t publish a paper that even mentioned the phrase neural networks because it would immediately be rejected by your peers. In fact, Geoffrey Hinton and Terry Sejnowski published a very famous paper in 1983 called, Optimal Perceptual Inference, which described an early deep learning or neural network model. Hinton and Sejnowski had to use code words to avoid mentioning that it was a neural network. Even the title of their paper was cryptic; it was all very strange!
Minsky first put the kibosh on neural networks in 1969. See:
A Concise History of Neural Networks“From the barren landscapes inside our personal devices come furtive anthems hummed by those digital servants who will one day be our…towardsdatascience.comQUOTE:
Minsky in his text laid out these and other problems with Neural Nets and effectively led the larger scientific community and most importantly the funding establishments to the conclusion that further research in this direction was to lead nowhere. The effect of this text was powerful and dried up funding to an extent that, for the next 10–12 years, no-one at the largest research institutions at the time and thereby the smaller ones too, would take on any project that had that had the doomed Neural Networks as its premise. The age now famously referred to as ‘the AI winter’ had begun.
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Academic scientists tend to have low morals because they are not punished for misbehavior. They are not held to account, the way programmers or engineers would be. They often lie, publish fake data, or steal ideas . . .
I am not suggesting that programmers or engineers are good people. Or inherently moral. I have known scoundrels in the programming biz, and some psychopaths such as Steve Jobs. But here's the thing. Programming is consequential. Even an unimportant work-a-day task, such as the first ones I did, are consequential. The first thing I did was work on programs to generate water bills and other municipal billing. I played only a small part, not enough to cause damage. Other people checked and rechecked my work. If you screw up that kind of application, and accidentally send out a water bill for $999,999.99, or negative $1.20, all hell breaks loose. Customers wake you up with a phone call at 3 in the morning yelling about it. That happened to me! Even the most low paid programmer does things that make a difference to the customer. So programmers are held to account, and they learn to follow the rules. They give the Allan Shepard prayer, uttered just before the first manned suborbital U.S. space flight: "Dear Lord, please don't let me screw up."
People in all walks of life are moral or not. Ethical or not. Careful or careless, diligent or lazy. But depending on their jobs, these qualities will sometimes make a big difference, and sometimes they make no difference. Academic scientists often have evil character flaws that would bite their butts in another line of work. Perhaps that means S.O.B.s gravitate into academia, where it is safe to be that way. They wouldn't last long programming municipal billing systems.
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JedRothwell - The LENR X-Prize is currently only a proposal by Peter Diamandis.
Oh. But he is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board at X-Prize, so I suppose he has influence there.
XPRIZE Foundation Bio - Peter H. Diamandis M.D.<h2>Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of thewww.xprize.org -
I doubt that any of this is true. The "mainstream" is much more adventurous than you believe.
You are both right and wrong. Cold fusion has always been a mainstream subject, but the mainstream is divided. Many mainstream scientists are determined to crush the research. Cold fusion has been suppressed by vicious academic politics. Researchers have been harassed, threatened with deportation and summarily fired. Their equipment has been smashed, covered with horse manure, and their lab notebooks stolen and destroyed. That is adventurous, but not in a good way.
Every researcher who replicated cold fusion was mainstream. Most were not just mainstream, but tenured, distinguished, crème de la crème mainstream. People such as Fleischmann, the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, Miles, who had awards from the UN and was a Fellow of China Lake, and so on. If these people had not been distinguished with lots of clout, they would have never have been allowed to work on it. An untenured academic who even talks about cold fusion will be fired. Even though Miles was a Fellow, when he published a positive result, they threw him out of the lab and gave him a menial job as a stockroom clerk. See p. 154 and elsewhere:
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanlettersfroa.pdf
The people at the NHE lied about their own experiments and the experiments done there by Miles, as you see in that document. They are still lying, most recently at ICCF24.
Extreme politics and unethical behavior are not unusual in academic science. There are dozens of examples. Top scientists did all they could to stop Townes from inventing the maser and laser. In the 1990s *, people who talked about neural network AI were harassed and fired. It is now the largest breakthrough in AI history, by a wide margin. Academic scientists tend to have low morals because they are not punished for misbehavior. They are not held to account, the way programmers or engineers would be. They often lie, publish fake data, or steal ideas during peer-review. No one catches them or cares. That is what other academic scientists tell me, and they have given me many examples.
CORRECTION: Neural networks were verboten in 1970s and early 1980s, per the book by Martin Ford, and other books. I had the dates wrong. See the quotes below.
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Experiments. Jed looks at one set of well-conducted experiments and sees in them certainty. I do not. Jed looks at a whole set of experiments, a few of which are well-conducted, and reckons the well-conducted ones with positive results together enhance the chances of FPHE being nuclear. I do not.
Please stop with the bullshit. That is not what I say. I look at DOZENS of well conducted experiments at Los Alamos, China Lake, BARC, SRI, Texas A&M, Case Western, U. Minnesota and many other places and I see certainty. It is possible that one one set of non-replicated experiments is wrong. Even SRI might be wrong. But when the same experiment is done elsewhere with the same instruments, and again at other places with other instruments, that eliminates any possibility of experimental error. That is why replication is so important.
You keep putting words in my mouth and claiming that I say what I emphatically do not say. When I say the very opposite. When I cite not one set of experiments, but many independent ones. Either you have a poor memory or you are lying.
Also, there are not "a few of which" well conducted. There are hundreds, done by most of the top electrochemists in the world. People you have never heard of who now have institutes named after them. Such as https://chemistry.case.edu/research/yces/ There are not many top electrochemists. It is a small world.
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Smith, A. and M. Lilley. Anomalous Electrical Output From Room-Temperature Reactors (paper and PowerPoint slides). in 14th International Workshop on Anomalies in Hydrogen Loaded Metals. 2021. Assisi, Italy.
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Believers keep coming out of the woodwork, and this initiative, and the X-Prize, should draw even more out.
Is the X-Prize a sure thing? Or a likely thing?
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Di Stefano, A. Experimental Observation on the Lattice Energy Converter, preprint and PowerPoint slides. in ICCF24 Solid-state Energy Summit. 2022. Mountain View, CA.
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DiStefanoAexperiment.pdf
This version was revised a little. This includes links to the video and to papers and a video by Gordon and Whitehouse.
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These are straightforward but elegant and relatively simple experiments with clear and reproducible results.
That's good, but before nominating them, let us be sure they are independently replicated.
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Why stop working at 40C? I'd expect could go up to at least 80C
In my experience, most ordinary insulated containers start to leak significant amounts of heat at about that temperature. The curve starts to flatten out, making it isoperibolic instead of adiabatic. I mean things like hot water heater tanks, refrigerators, and beer coolers.
Perhaps there are specialized expensive ones for things like cryogenic liquids that can go up to 80 deg C.
In the tests by J. P. Joule you can see the curve starting to flatten. He knew that, and discussed it. He recommends using a large thermal mass of water. He said the measurements are still valid because you can compare ratios. Quote:
Previous to each of the experiments, the necessary precaution was taken of bringing the water in the glass jar, and the air of the room to the same temperature. When this is accurately done, the results of the experiments bear the same proportions to one another as if no extraneous cooling agents, such as radiation, were present; for their effects in a given time are proportional to the difference of the temperatures of the cooling and cooled bodies; and hence, although towards the conclusion of some experiments this cooling effect is very considerable, the absolute quantities alone of heat are affected, not the proportions that are generated in the same time.
Joule, J.P., On the Heat evolved by Metallic Conductors of Electricity, and in the Cells of a Battery during Electrolysis. Philosophical Magazine, 1841. 19(124): p. 260
In the adiabatic tests at Hydrodynamics, they heated steel drums of water by sparging steam. The water got very hot. I don't recall how hot but it was dangerous to touch. They ignored heat losses from the barrel and the machine. In some cases, the heat captured by the water exceeded input electric energy. When there was no excess heat, it was far below input. 85% as I recall. After the test they picked up the barrel with a fork lift and dumped the water into the parking lot.
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Here is a recent interview with Gordon and Whitehouse. It was made after ICCF24. They say there was great interest during ICCF24. They had to babysit the experiment and answer questions instead of taking coffee breaks.
Science and U: Exploring a New Historic LENR Invention with Dr. Frank Gordon, Harper Whitehouse - A Neighbor's Choice by David GornoskiIn this special Science and U episode, David Gornoski and physicist Dr. Weiping Yu are joined by Dr. Frank Gordon and Harper Whitehouse for a conversation on…aneighborschoice.com
