Posts by THHuxley

Quote from Wyttenbach

They believe that QM is able to describe everything within condensed matter! This claim even might be true, but just for the for fine structure and not for the basic rules!QM itself is based on rules, which exclude the detection of underlying phenomenas - which truly exist based on Maxwell's theory.Further on QM is local only and does not work very well for dynamic processes. Try once to describe the transient water memory structures with QM!(One reason why many QM'ers just deny them...)

I'd like to see evidence for even one of these assertions: which I do not recognise.

I guess you could argue that non-relativistic QM - by definition - is local. But that does not apply to relativistic QM, Which is just fine and properly genralises Maxwell's equations in a way that explains quantum-scale phenomena. You can always argue that QM is not yet properly unified with GR, although there are various possible ways to do this.

It is a fascinating area, see: http://nautil.us/issue/29/scal…hanics-swallow-relativity

You do not however get very far with it is you start off by ignoring the work that has already been done, and is proven successful from experiment.

I have not seen anything in Mills's work that helps with these very large issues, and I don't think they are what you mean.

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08418v2.pdf

This paper contains experimental results (which are unsurprising and I expect are correct) described with such a loss of context that nowhere does it say at what temperature they are obtained. However since they need a superfluid bath for this to work it will be very close to absolute zero.

The argument against BECs being a mechanism for LENR - it is obviously attractive - is that we see claimed LENR phenomena more often at high temperatures, and never see LENR increasing as temperature decreases. Whatever new mechanisms might enable QM coherence (and it is a big ask, as those seeking higher temperature superconductivity have found) this is the opposite behaviour from that which would indicate a BEC mechanism.

Quote from Charlie

You guys ever notice that whenever one of you say something the rest go against it even if they are on that side. Why would any of the people arguing it does not work want to come to this site 50 times a day just to counter argue someone's idea of how it may work.

Charlie,

As somone who tends to be a debunker I can answer that. Internet sites like this tend to be fan sites, where the object is admired. In this case people here would believe or hope LENR exists and come to see what new proofs and applications have been found.

For any normal technology the question of existence is not at issue, however how good the tech is, or whether commercially it will ever be successful.

In the case of LENR that existence is at issue, were it 100% clear (or even 50% clear) vast scientific effort in universities and industry throughout the world would be given to it.

LENR advocates look for a bullet-proof repeatable way to show that what they have is something real and beyond chemical effects. No-one to my knowledge has yet found this silver bullet, though many hope to do so.

In this situation skeptical views are as valuable (in some ways more valuable, because rarer) as non-skeptics "maybe this will work" views. Whenever an apparent but false strong positive case (e.g. Rossi) is successfully debunked this allows those seeking true positives to concentrate on best evidence so far without being distracted by something that is plain wrong.

As for interest. Some people are interested in finding things out, resolving mysteries, without having a strong ulterior motive. Of course many people on sites like this do have an ulterior motive, they would only be interested in data showing LENR real, or only interested in data showing it false. But, while it remains unclear, you will also get people (like me) whose motivation is understanding things that don't make sense. I guess that is not really open to people here without strong technical skills: but then a lot of the people here do have strong technical skills.

Regards, THH

Quote from optiongeek

It's not just Mills' claims. Real companies with real business models and real reputations at stake are backing Mills. The CTO of Columbia Tech (a company with 200 employees, all of whom have a job on the line and every interest to avoid the scandal of a fraud) has personally verified the reaction as Mills has claimed. You simply don't fool an expert like this in his own lab when you vaporize thick tungsten using the power of two hair dryers. Are you saying the CTO is in on the fraud or is he simply confused?

This type of reasoning has oft been used, and is never correct. That is, maybe Mills has what he claims, but this argument does not in anyway validate it.

No-one need say the CTO of Columbia Tech is either a fraud or confused. He may be simply human, and wrong in how he judges Mills and his work. In science this happens all the time and is not a big deal. In fact it is expected. Outside science it is sometimes related to major frauds, where convincing people turn out not to have what they claim and to have lied. More often, convincing people just don't have what they claim with no fraudulent intent.

There is something about the intersection of science with business that makes misjudgment more likely. I guess it is because most people reading Mills, or meeting him, don't judge what he claims by the standards needed in science, where 99% of claims are false and finding the 1% real is a noble and unending pursuit.

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Appreciate the reference to Carroll. However, I find the easiest way to believe in impossible and mutually contradictory things is to read my Quantum Mechanics! Electrons are simultaneously point charges and everywhere at once. Impossible & mutually contradictory? Check and check. An electron has infinite mass density but a finite amount of angular momentum. Impossible & mutually contradictory? Check and check. Space is empty yet filled to the brim with "virtual particles" that wink into and out of existence whenever deemed necessary to solve an intractable mathematics problem. Impossible and mutually contradictory? Check and check. Poor old Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Impossible and mutually contradictory? Check and check. If you ever get tired of all this impossible stuff, Mills' theory is highly satisfactory. Things just make good sense in a very concrete way. You can step out of the "Looking Glass World" and back into reality where math is no longer a devotion but the tool it is meant to be.

If this is an argument for Mills it is a very bad one. Theoretical Physics is profoundly simple and beautiful, but not intuitive or concrete.

Why should it be? Our physical intuition comes from 3D interaction with macroscopic objects over a lifetime of learning the effect our interventions have on an external world.

There is no reason relativistic speeds should obey the same intuited laws, nor quantum scales. In fact no reason physics should obey at all our limited operational intuition.

If you look at the maths of QM it is so very beautiful and coherent, because simple. And it leads ineluctably to things very different from our intuition, and very precisely in accordance with experiment. So you want something more concrete. Fine, but that does not make you right, and it is an attempt to make the universe bend to the shape of your conceptualisation, when better would be to attempt the opposite.

"Electrons have infinite mass density but finite angular momentum". Neither statement makes any sense, except as an analogy. The spin of an electron is weird and described by spinors, which you can't conceptualise without a bit of matrix maths. The angular momentum of electrons, like their mass density, comes from the QM wave equation and what you say is not applicable because it uses macroscopic physical concepts.

QM is highly counterintuitive: as is GR. That is no reason to dislike it. It is neither impossible nor mutually contradictory. If you delve deep into the apparent contradictions you find such beautiful symmetry and consonance that I am confident it will disabuse you entirely of these anthropocentric feelings.

THH

The first sentence in the abstract is now discredited. A pity since it is the "this could be real" hook upon which the rest is hung.

The JMP saga is interesting because the legal case and the PR case are quite different.

Legally I don't think it matters, directly as long as no-one has lied. The GPT does not need a customer. If, for example, JMP is owned by another (UK) shell company, then what Johnson said could be correct. Given the tangled web of what has been said I'm not confident about this but doubtless it will resolve itself and either Johnson is in a very bad position, or not.

Morally, Rossi lying about the customer looks very bad. The definite evidence of this will come out no doubt. This then is relevant legally, indirectly, because of "unclean hands" and fraud. Since IH says Rossi represented this customer as real to them, and Rossi hoped to extract $89M from them on the strength of valuable working product, that would seem directly relevant to fraud. That is the IH counter-suit more than Rossi's claim of course. I think (not sure) the legal definition of unclean hands is broader even than fraud, but don't claim to know how it will work here except it is not going to help Rossi!

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In any case, Annesser looks either untruthful or not very competent as a lawyer.

Another possibility is that he is being given impossible and contrary instructions by Rossi (which I consider very likely) and doing the best of a bad job.

THH

I'm with Alain that if em-drive and LENR (as poorly understood new physics) are real then they seem to have almost nothing in common.

They do however share one feature: they require significant new theory and have experimental evidence that is marginal and not accepted by mainstream science. They will therefore both attract people who find that combination attractive.

As physics: emdrive breaks conservation of momentum, and has nothing to do with baryons. it could perhaps relate to some modified version of GR. It uses energy and distance scales which don't make quantum corrections look likely.

LENR does not break anything except plausibility. The collection of phenomena attributed to it cohere more with various types of plausible experimental error than to any single new theory. But if it exists then it would seem to be related to some weird characteristics of solid-state lattices.

You can never deny a possible link between two areas of not understood new physics, but in this case even if either one of these is real I'd put the chances of the other being not real at a good deal higher than that they are both linked.

Happy New Year, try to forget politics, THH

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Why not? The scientists should look for all possible sources of inspiration of future progress - in the same way, like me. They're even payed for it with compare to me.

Because you assume:
(1) that this demo was presented to scientists in a form they could derive information from (as a working third party testable setup)
(2) that (if it was so presented and accepted) it worked when tested third party

Without both those things true your inference does not hold and it is an example of how sloppy logic can distort the arguments about LENR.

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second, the link is three years old, so that they already did it

That is not a logically correct inference!

To answer these points:

The big one. This demo as billed has clearly broken conservation of energy by 500% closed system with no calibration or assumptions needed. F&P experiments never did that, or anything like. To say that scientists would ignore this is both highly impolite and just wrong. It is true that most would react as I've done, and reckon it is probably a magic trick. But, this experiment is easily checkable under third party conditions and it would not require any money, nor much effort, to check this was for real in any lab. There would be many people willing to do that, and once we had some credible third party validation the thing would spread with bigger better validators taking an interest.

As for the others. This is not a competition to see what is the most likely error mode. Given my point about magic there is no way from this video that any positive conclusions can be drawn. If this guy is forthcoming he'd find third party testers.

Just a few points:

• Nothing prevents some localised boiling (and it could be nucleation from a reaction) so this is no argument against reactants
• Coil device could contain high energy density batteries, in theory could be a big deal, as I said in practice not likely
• I did not mention the liquid. If alcohol we have only half of energy needed for any given temperature rise. So that is another thing to remember
• I don't quite understand your point about thermometers. If one thermometer can be mislabelled so can another...

The video is great: slick and just like a magicians trick!

But of course we are trying to evaluate this as science. Before any analysis:
(1) If this things works as billed it is bomb-proof and will get this guy a Nobel Prize etc pretty quickly. Maybe he does not want such acclaim, but if he is not by now very famous it leads me to suspect there must be some issue with this experiment.
(2) I'm no good at detecting magic tricks. Therefore if there is any subterfuge here i would not find it. Based on (1), i'd expect there is such, or else we have a major announcement very soon

Analysis:
(1) ammeter measurement should be ignored since in presence of HF pulses that type of instrument will give highly erroneous readings. (This is not the classic RMS vs average issue, but the fact that RFI kills ammeters)
(2) total energy available from 4XAAA cells = 20kJ (as W says above)
(3) total energy needed to heat up 500g water is 2kJ/K. So we have max 10C rise from these batteries

Caveats (and remember I'm no good at magic, so I'm probably missing the obvious one):

• Liquid might contain chemical reactants that heat it up
• Coil device might contain batteries (unlikely IMO, but can't rule out)
• Thermometers might be much more sensitive than claimed - so actual rise is not more than 10C.

THH

It is like the psychological research that shows you get more vandalism in an estate that already has broken windows.

The argument for preventing persistent trolls is that they lower the tone and make other trollish contributions more likely. Although all the 100% trolls like K could be personally filtered many will not do this, and pour encourager les autres applies...

Happy Christmas to all (except the trolls)

THH

I don't like banning much - but Keieueue's contribution here has been so consistently appalling that I'm inclined to agree in this case. Anyway it is for mods to decide...

K, before being banned, compared his trolling with the people here (me included) who say negative things about Rossi.

The difference is that the negative comments about Rossi have both direct facts and inferred "best guess" from facts in support. Both of these get complex, and the "best guess" inference will inevitably be controversial. Another difference is that being positive about Rossi pretty well guarantees being negative about IH, and vice versa, so negativity here is not unmixed.

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Let's assume that AR goes on and wins this court case and IH has to cough up $89MM. What would need to happen to support that?1. Proof would be shown that a real customer existed that paid for and used the heat supplied by the e-cat There was a real customer and it worked. 2. Johnson setup the papers on behalf of this customer. He created the legal entity and necessary documentation for the customer.

The 89M contract, if found valid, says nothing about presence or absence of customers, so this is not quite right.

IH's counter-suit for fraud depends in part of the non-existence of a customer, but the 89M depends only on the validity of the contract and that the test is legally a GPT, and has (legally) a positive outcome. That would require that the calorimetry was competent and proper, but says nothing about the customer.

randombit0: your questions have all been answered before, but I'll give direct answers below, in case this helps.

Quote from randombit0

If IH knew from the beginning that this test was the GPT from Rossi's point of view (whereas they considered it just a test for which they would not pay a cent), why they accepted this situation?

They could not "know" this. Rossi had told then clearly that it was something different, which they could not properly object to, and in fact which might just possibly provide useful information if Rossi were telling the truth. I said that IH suspected Rossi would play dirty (they might have been so naive they did not but I doubt it).

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Why they did not put the record straight instead of carry investors around the plant? I can't believe how you can consider this behavior as a fair attitude!

What record is not straight? How can you possibly know what they told investors? You should ask Dewey, who was one of them, he has explained in detail what IH told people... (Rossi is probably a flake, they had not managed to get his stuff to work, etc, etc).

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What do you really know about the calorimetry?

Based on documented analysis of Lugano on threads here, provably more than you...

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Have you ever read one of the four Penon's reports?

Yes. I've read the very embarrasing one that Rossi published which contravened standard test report protocols glaringly. I'm sure, since you have read them, you don't need me to remind you which but if needed I'll do this?

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You are jumping to hasty conclusion, following IH's words, which are not confirmed by any evidences.

Not true. I'm paying attention to what Jed has said, and (separately) IH. They would not lie because that would be most unwise. And Rossi has given nothing in answer. That is unwise, if he has any answer, because there is a decent chance this case will never reach Court.

I am also wondering why you think Rossi (Johnson) seemingly lied about the JMP parent company, ownership, etc, etc?

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I would remind you that Lugano was a team. Not one person. Any more grubby little libels will be deleted.

It is an undeniable fact that the Lugano report analysis was wrong (theoretically) in a way that explains both the COP=3 and the acceleration in COP - the two things highlighted in the report as being inexplicable without some new to science heat source.

The physics behind this is not that complex, but equally, for somone not highly expert in the field, it would take some effort and independent thinking to get your head round.

In a team you don't expect this effort to be done by more than one person. Others then, relying on the one who has done the work, can check it seems superficially OK and agree.

That is how you get these errors: not every member of the team investigates independently every bit of the analysis.

So: Alan - while I agree with you that there is no evidence for skullduggery - the fact that the Lugano report was a team would not prevent one person from influencing the result. And the fact of the team does not validate the results in the way it would if every line of the report was independently vouched for by every member of the team.

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I can't believe IH was so naive, I think it's really impossible that they did not get things straight with Rossi from the beginning of the test.

On the contrary. knowing what some of us suspected, but all now know, of Rossi's business relationships and his talent for (what was it - "exaggeration"?) I think it would be just about impossible for anyone to get anything straight with Rossi unless they gave him everything he wanted no questions asked.

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I don't know why "IH says" must be more credible than "Rossi says".....

To take just the most recent of the many obvious reasons: IH have never boasted in an e-mail that they have lied to a prospective business partner and faked a test to get out of it, calling this behaviour "a magnificence".

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I really find absurd what IH says about the Doral test, I don't believe they didn't consider that the test was the GPT from the very first moment.

I think you are confused. There is no doubt that Rossi wanted the test to be considered the GPT - though in the written evidence to get it started he certainly made clear that it was something quite different (a PR stunt with a "real" customer). I'm sure IH were well aware that Rossi would represent this test as a GPT to try to get his money. That does not mean they thought it was the GPT and they seem to have been quite careful to ensure that it was not.

Whatever else you think, it is clear that the calorimetry (all under Rossi's control) would not be proper for any test of performance with $89M riding on the result. Regardless of what any contract said. There are rules about fairness etc and obeying the spirit of the agreement, which in this case was clearly meant to be a safe way to establish that Rossi's stuff worked, and equally clearly was not safe.

Of course that is the moral case. The legal case is simpler - this was not the GPT.

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I'd say Penon is responsible for his report. While we haven't seen the report, I'm assuming it exists since otherwise IH could just say they haven't received a written confirmation of the Guaranteed Performance by the ERV.I don't think anyone needs to confirm the data was measured by Penon. All we need is a piece of paper written by Penon that says "I confirm Guaranteed Performance of the plant as defined by [...]"

If the test is legally viewed as a valid GPT then IH have enough circumstantial evidence of dirty dealings (we don't know the strength of the direct evidence) to make the matter of how Penon generated his report crucial. He will not, we presume, be there to defend it. It it likely can be proven that he was not on the ground much. So: this is a weak point in Rossi's case. Like most stuff here we don't have enough info to know how weak, and personally I think the legal argument about this not being the GPT, from evidence already disclosed, is very very strong. In that case this does not much matter.