Posts by JedRothwell

For the benefit of people who have not read the literature, let me point out some more problems with the hypothesis that heat is an artifact caused by the difference between heavy water and ordinary water.

The differences between heavy and light water are listed in the textbooks. You can plug the numbers into the equations.

BUT no one does this, or needs to, because people who measure heat in the electrolyte calibrate with heavy water. They use platinum electrodes or resistance heaters. So there is no need to adjust light water calibrations.

FURTHERMORE as I said, many calorimeters measure the heat outside the cell walls, where any differences could not affect the results.

If THH has read the literature, he knows this as well as I do. If he has not read it, he should not say anything in favor of or against cold fusion. No comments, no hypotheses, no speculation. Do not discuss a scientific subject you know nothing about. Do your homework, or shut up.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Jed - we are repeating ourselves. You don't understand my reasons for skepticism. That is OK.

I understand your reasons better than you yourself do. You have no rational reasons. Only excuses. If you had any, you would tell us what mistakes have been made. The fact that you only say "someone somewhere may have made some sort of mistake" or you come up with nonsense such as "a perfectly isothermal surface" tells us you have no reasons.

Quote from THHuxleynew

You believe I am a fool.

Anyone can see you are not a fool. Perhaps you are trying to fool others. I do not understand why else you would drown the discussion in absurdities such as "a perfectly isothermal surface."

Quote from THHuxleynew

I will repeat: because you are not acknowledging what I have saiod. The McK results are strong - but they are just one set of results.

Yes, and there are hundreds of other results from other researchers. They cannot all be wrong.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I will repeat: because you are not acknowledging what I have saiod. The McK results are strong - but they are just one set of results. Everyone makes mistakes, including McK, and sometimes nature surprises us.

Yes, this is one set of results. Are you pretending that the other results from Miles or Fleischmann do not exist? Are you playing the skeptic's game of looking at one result at a time, while ignoring all others? I see you are pretending the helium and tritium results do not exist, because they bolster the calorimetry and prove this is D-D fusion. You pretend there is only calorimetry, and no helium -- one result at a time! Or you will look at the tritium or the x-rays and pretend the calorimetry does not exist.

Yes, everyone makes mistakes. Every individual makes mistakes. But hundreds of professional scientists do not all make mistakes for 30 years, in ever single experiment. If such an unlikely event could occur, experimental science would not work.

Electrochemists such as Fleischmann, Bockris and Miles spent a lifetime doing experiments. They made hundreds of mistakes. Thousands. As many mistakes as I have made writing thousands of programs over the years. But here is the thing: when professionals make mistakes, they find the mistakes and fix them. That's what we do all day long, day in and day out. It takes months or years, but we get it right. How do I know that? Because programs usually work. You seldom see a commercial program come up with a drastically wrong answer. Because airplanes seldom fall from the sky. Our technology is all based on scientific research, and it is reliable because the science is right. (Mostly right.) We can be sure that Fleischmann, Bockris and Miles did not make catastrophic errors they did not catch, because their work stood the test of time. They did commercial applications, such as reducing damage in salt water, and the equipment they designed works. Mizuno and his colleagues designed nuclear reactors, using electrochemical techniques to test embrittlement. Their reactors work well. You are saying hundreds of experts did an experiment measuring heat, first done by Michael Faraday. Their calibrations and blanks all matched Faraday's result. They got hundreds of positive results exceeding Faraday, listed by Storms and others. You are saying that every single positive result was a mistake. A mistake they never found, despite their proven skills and knowledge.

This is absurd, but suppose they only got it right a hundred times. That would still mean the effect is real.

Quote from THHuxleynew

You believe calorimetry cannot have that sort of surprise.

Any experiment can be a surprise, but calorimetry has been done for over 200 years at a level that could have detected many of these results. It is simply not possible that every single expert in calorimetry who has detected cold fusion heat made a mistake. It is especially impossible because neither you nor anyone else has found any error in any major study. If there is one, where is it? Do you need another 30 years? There has to be some reasonable limit to your search for an error. A statute of limitations you might say, or skeptics will never accept any new result. You might as well be arguing that Ohm's law is still open to question. Or Curie's claim of radioactivity, that was also based on calorimetry.

You have had 30 years to find a mistake, but you cannot point to anything other than preposterous stuff like "a perfectly isothermal surface" -- which I am sure you know as well as I do does not exist, and is not needed. Calibration proves a surface is good enough and the effects of imperfection are small and accounted for. Every "objection" you have raised has been an obvious mistake such as this one, or an unfalsifiable vague assertion that applies equally well to every experiment in history.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Jed - We have argued the same thing for many years. I understand your POV.

It is not a point of view. It is textbook physics and chemistry going back to 1780.

Quote from THHuxleynew

You think these experiments,a nd teh people who did them, are perfect. I don't.

Don't be ridiculous. I never said anything like that. What I said was:

When hundreds of experienced, professional scientists do an experiment that has been done repeatedly for 200 years, some of them might make mistakes, but they cannot all be wrong. If that could happen, the experimental method would not work.

Furthermore, you have not found any errors in any major experiment, so your assertion is mere handwaving. You have to find specific instances of errors, not "someone somewhere might have made an unspecified error." That's not falsifiable. It isn't science.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Your first statement is conditional on there being no errors caused by temperature variations, because Seebeck calorimeter has perfectly isothermal surfaces.

That's ridiculous. There is no such thing as a perfectly isothermal surface. It only has to be isothermal enough that the error is not significant. Researchers always check for this by calibrating. As I am sure you know.

And how do we know researchers always check, and always calibrate? Because that is what the papers say. And because every researcher who did this going back to Joule knew what sort of errors can occur, and they made sure the errors are not significant. Joule listed them carefully. Every researcher I know listed the same errors Joule discussed (as well as others), and they all checked to be sure these errors were not significant. Everyone knows there are temperature variations. This was brought up repeatedly by skeptics, and answered in every single paper. F&P answered in detail. See pages 25 - 28:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofth.pdf

McKubre describes the use of Venturi mixers to reduce this problem to negligible levels. If you did not know that, read his papers more carefully.

If you have not read the papers, I recommend you do that before commenting, because everything you say is wrong and you make yourself look foolish. If you have read the papers then you know as well as I do that the problems you just listed have been addressed, and they are not significant. In that case, why do you say these things? Who are you trying to fool? Anyone who has read the papers will see you are wrong.

Quote from Bruce__H

You don't measure output power directly by, for instance, measuring the temperature gradient across incubator walls of known physical properties and so on.

I would call that a first principle method. That's what Fleischmann and Pons did. They calibrated, but they also did the physics. So did Melvin Miles, McKubre and others. It is more rigorous to do both. But it can be daunting to understand! See the great long equation on p. 3:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

My discussion of that equation, pages 21 - 23, 40 - 41:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofth.pdf

Fleischmann emphasized that you always have to calibrate, even when you do a first principle analysis.

Here are the slides from that lecture (starting at minute 11, as I said). This first slide shows 4 orders of magnitude, 2 from better metallurgy, ~2 from better ion harvesting (items 1 and 3 on the Scale Up Targets slide below).

Scale Up Targets add up to 10 - 14 orders of magnitude. These may not add up that much, because these are not independent variables, and because some may not be linear.

Frank Gordon discusses How To Scale up LEC Output begins here (minute 11):

Quote from GRMattson

It doesn't require a high drop. Check out the system at Ludington in Michigan.

True, but I think it is more cost effective with a large drop. The reservoir can be smaller and the turbines produce more power. The ones in places like Switzerland have large drops and they are supposedly cost effective and energy efficient. They have small, deep lakes. In Georgia you could only have large, shallow lakes for an equivalent amount of water and the kinetic energy. That's more expensive.

Quote from Seatrout

first they tell us to not have standing water then they do this..everywhere.

You are talking about pumped water energy storage. The problem is not a lack of water. Georgia has lots of water. The problem is there are no high mountains where a large drop between the reservoir and lower land produces a lot of energy. It works best with a deep lake with relatively small land area.

Georgia does have 2 GW of pumped storage despite that. However other states with mountains are better suited for this.

There has not been much pumped storage construction in the U.S. since the 1970s. See:

Most pumped storage electricity generators in the U.S. were built in the 1970s

Quote from THHuxleynew

If you ask: why should Pd-D be different from Pd-H? That is the wrong question.

Instead: why could Pd-D be different from Pd-H?

D and H have very different thermal resistance

This cannot affect measurements taken outside the cell, with flow or Seebeck calorimeters, or isoperbolic cells with the heat measured outside the cell wall. I am sure you know that, and I am sure you know the effect has been measured at high signal to noise ratios with these calorimeters many times. So you are not being serious here.

You are pretending there is a problem which you know damn well have been ruled out. All the other problems you list have also been ruled out. Anyone who has read the papers knows this. Why you make these absurd statements I cannot say. Most skeptics do it to sow doubt and make ignorant people think the effect does not exist. Is that your goal? Or are you so stupid you actually believe what you write?

I do not think I should respond to your nonsense again. I should not feed the troll. You will just post more nonsense.

Quote from GRMattson

The government wants to force more windpower, but not the standby storage such as water impoundment (my favorite).

The government cannot force anything. It does not tell the power companies what to do. It encourages or discourages various energy sources with tax policy, but that does not have a large effect. Standby water power is only available in a few places. There is no place in Georgia where you could use it. The land is too flat.

Quote from Daniel_G

Catalyst surface area

That's better. If you can fit it on the slide.

The videos are all listed here:

Technical Sessions, 15 videos uploaded so far . . . That link did not work. It linked to first video itself. Try this:

Go to https://www.youtube.com/ and then append this:

/playlist?list=PLU0NX-S-T1yXEsmSgXNGPI1lFcBOQWYoB

Short courses:

/playlist?list=PLU0NX-S-T1yVRx-yE_SA4E0UoTECy0cen

The videos do not seem to be in any particular order. When you display one of these lists, you can do a ctrl-F search for an author name.

I suggest the following revision to slide 7:

• 20 cm x 30 cm x 0.8 cm plate

• Reactant inside plate has ~40,000 cm2 of surface area

I assume that is what it means.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Well, there would be moist gunk at the bottom, probably. I am very reluctant to speculate about the exact characteristics except that it would conduct at least a bit, and the power pushed into it would depend on the applied voltage (how good is F&P's constant current source).

You don't need to speculate about anything. Graphs in the papers show that power dropped to zero.

Quote from THHuxleynew

When the experiment has no expectations - e.g. a LENR experimenter is expecting unusual things but cannot quantify what they are or how they depend on controllable variables - these unexpected and unknown errors will not be discovered.

Of course they will be discovered! In the calibrations. That is why people calibrate. Why would an artifact show up with Pd-D and not any other time? The choice of cathode material cannot affect the calorimetry, despite what Shanahan says. Even if it could with one calorimeter type, it could not with externally measured heat such as a Seebeck, flow, or Miles' China Lake calorimeter.

All cold fusion experiments now have clear expectations. With bulk Pd they will follow McKubre's equation, which is very specific.

They produce helium in the same ratio to the heat as DD fusion. This has been found every time helium was measured. That cannot be a coincidence. An artifact cannot cause helium to correlate with heat. An artifact that causes heat cannot also cause helium.

Many experiments produce tritium, which is irrefutable proof that a nuclear reaction is occurring. If you say "no, the tritium is also an artifact" then you have invented a new artifact, because an artifact that magically makes calorimetry fail (but not during calibrations) cannot also create tritium. An artifact that magically makes helium appear and correlate with heat cannot also cause tritium.

Many different types of calorimeters have been used. One artifact cannot affect all of them. You need three different artifacts for flow, isoperibolic and Seebeck calorimeters. As I said, you need one artifact for an isothermal calorimeter where heat is measured in the electrolyte, and another different artifact when heat is measured outside an isoperbolic cell with a copper jacket (Miles).

In short you are imaging artifact after artifact. You have imagined at least eight so far, all totally unrelated from one another. All undetected, and not a single one of them described by you. You are multiplying entities unnecessarily. Multiplying them like rabbits! You have not even suggested how these miraculous artifacts might occur -- because you cannot. As I said, you do not get a free pass. You must be held to the same standards as the researchers. If you wish to make a technical assertion, you must tell us in technical terms what it is. "There might be an artifact but I have no idea what it might be" is not falsifiable. You are not doing science.

Ockham's razor says you should not invent 8 imaginary, unrelated, unnamed artifacts when one unified explanation fits the facts. The explanation is that a nuclear reaction is occurring. All of the evidence points to it. None of it points to swarms of unnamed, undetected, impossible artifacts.

Quote from Bruce__H

This appears to be a miscommunication. By "control" I meant an identical but inactive reactor for the purpose of comparison.

That would be an interesting control, but not necessary. If Daniel_G provides a reactor, the researcher can put it inside a calorimeter, measure input power, and measure the output power the reactor produces. This will confirm it is producing excess heat (or not!) The researcher can do this without opening up the reactor. To ensure the calorimeter is working correctly, the researcher can compare the reactor to a resistance heater. There is no need to compare it to an inactive reactor.

Obviously, all calorimeters must be calibrated with a resistance heater, before and after testing a cold fusion reaction. Sometimes during the reaction, in what they call calibration on the fly. This can sometimes affect the reaction, boosting it, so you have to be careful when you do it. The resulting increase in power may seem like an artifact, but it is real. Fleischmann recommended this technique.

It would be convenient if the reactor were small enough to fit into an ordinary calorimeter. Presumably one of the larger types such as Seebeck or air flow.

Quote from THHuxleynew

For these electrochemistry experiments a good metric for results is COP - because nearly all the errors scale with power in, as do most artifacts.

No, they do not. You made that up. Furthermore, Faraday discovered electrolysis in 1821 and measured the heat from it with calorimeters well enough to establish Faraday's law, and Joule measured the heat from resistance heaters with calorimetry in 1841 well enough to establish Joule's law. Both of these calorimeters could have measured most cold fusion results with confidence. There were no artifacts in their measurements and there is no reason to think there are any artifacts in the measurements made by professional electrochemists today. They have not forgotten what Faraday knew 200 years ago. They are not less skilled than he was, and their instruments are not less reliable. Their calibrations all agree with Faraday's law.

More to the point, your claim that "there may be artifacts" is not a falsifiable argument. You have to be specific. You have to tell us what errors and artifacts, how they can be detected, in which cold fusion experiments they might have occurred, and why did they not show up in calibrations. Waving your arms and saying "there might be artifacts somewhere" is true of every experiment ever performed. There might be an undiscovered artifact in Newton's prism experiments showing that white light includes all other colors. But until someone demonstrates this artifact, we have to assume Newton was right.

Your claim that there might be an unspecified, undetected problem somewhere does not get a free pass. You have to prove it as rigorously and as quantitatively as the cold fusion researchers prove their claims. They show calibrations and other proof. You need to explain why these calibrations do not prove what the researchers claim.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I don't know whether you think the graph you have posted tells us how marginal were McKubre's results? It tells me nothing. I need to know the power out as a fraction of power in.

I suggest you read his papers.

Quote from THHuxleynew

My point is that that fraction, which was claimed high by F&P, was much lower with McK.

F&P used higher temperatures which produce a larger reaction. They designed their calorimeter to allow high temperatures. Others who used higher temperatures also produce a larger reaction. McKubre deliberately held the temperature steady at a low level, with isothermal calorimetry. He knew this would reduce the highest power, but he felt it would increase precision and accuracy, which increases the signal to noise ratio. Fleischmann criticized him for this design decision.

Quote from Bruce__H

I'm not sure that this is even possible if researchers are working with sealed black-box reactors (for instance, would you know whether or not your controls are adequate?)

I think it would be possible to draw conclusions from sealed black-box reactors. You would know whether your controls are adequate because they work. They control. Or they don't. Many people have no idea how automobile engines, transmissions and brakes work, but they know that their control via the accelerator and steering wheel are adequate because the car stops and starts and goes where they want it to.

I think this would be possible, but it would be pointless. Before the device is sold, it will have to be examined by government agencies and places such as UL. I have seen the UL submission forms. You have to tell them absolutely everything about the device, including complete blueprints and a list of where every component comes from. Every screw and every wire. They take apart the whole thing, and test it by many different methods. Government regulators also do this. In short, you are never allowed to keep any secrets. The government would never allow you to sell a device with an unknown source of energy. It would demand a theory accepted by most academic scientists. Perhaps people can sell or hand out LECs under the radar, but not larger devices.

So, you must file a patent before letting anyone see the device. Since you will have a patent filed (not granted yet), when you give the machine to others to test, you might ask them to sign a temporary secrecy agreement, but I see no point to making it a black box.

Quote from Gregory Byron Goble

[Originally Scheduled for Feb. 11, 2010], Army Research Labs, Adelphi, MD

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See my comment about Benyo's presentation:

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RE: LENR FAQ (for Newcomers)

Here is another example of results totally at odds with claims by THHuxley. See minute 13 of Benyo's presentation describing the collaboration with U.S. Naval Surface Warfare division. The H2O control cells produced no heat. 6 out of 7 of the D2O cells produced heat ranging from 250 mW to 1500 mW. The calorimetry was excellent. Contrary to everything THHuxley asserted this is very high heat, in the sense that no competent scientist with any properly constructed calorimeter could miss it, or…

JedRothwell

Aug 12th 2022