Posts by THHuxley

It seems that this legal stuff is easy to misunderstand: though Wyttenbach above goes beyond the call of duty in doing so.

(1) There are (effectively, in terms of these documents) three separate actions:
(a) Rossi vs IH (very weak, it seems)
(b) IH vs Rossi (could be strong, but much uncertainty because of information not revealed)
(c) IH vs third parties Fabiani, Bass, Johnson (weak, it seems)

Then, the documents we see are either Motions to deny (MOTD), or initial complaints or answers to them. the compalints and answers contain evidence (in fact they must contain a rough overview of the evidential arguments, though not necessarily all the evidence that will later be unearthed). The MOTDs contain only legal arguments and cannot address facts (except to say that they not claimed, which is one of the possible legal arguments).

Wyttenbach gets (a) and (c) confused when he thinks this MOTD has any direct relevance to (a). It might have indirect evidence only inasfar as it gives an indication of the likely future evidence from the third parties, and it does not have much even of that since an MOTD contains legal arguments not facts.

So, basically, the MOTDs have very little interest unless you want to know which claims (on purely legal grounds, facts irrelevant) are likley to be dismissed.

However the MOTDs (if upheld) can cause the case to be revised and strengthened so they resulkt, down the road, in juicy new facts emerging.

Bob, in an MOTD denying an allegation would do no good.

All they can do at this stage in the legal process is to argue that even if all facts alleged are true, the complaint is vacuous and so must be dismissed. But it is true that they cannot lie so there might be some slight info to emerge. I actually think that the IH case at the moment against these 3rd parties is weak on purely legal grounds. They have not made much of a case yet. The strong third party case would be against Penon, who seems to have gone to ground, and of course there is a strong case against Rossi himself. But who can tell? I guess IH reckon if they can get the 3rd parties involved they will spill beans pretty effectively, so these MOTDs actually matter.

Eric will correct me if I've got details wrong in this summary from memory (am I right that the MOTDs are answered only by the complaints being revised, which happens after the judge has ruled on the MOTDs? Or is the order different, so that the judge rules only after MOTD and revised complaint?)

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Other responses seem to say there are possibilities of a chemical / electrical source, but not a really defined hypothesis. Heater wires and materials changing into conductive phases can only be considered if the power source is uncontrolled and perhaps the melting locality fairly small. I.E. heat concentration. I am assuming that the power input was controlled to "X" levels. A certain wattage input for example. How else would one be able to calculate excess power if it was not?

I'd need more information. Most power sources will be constant voltage and the instantaneous power supplied can be very high. Calculating power is not the same as controlling it, and many of these experimental setups will not even be measuring power under transient conditions when heater resistance changes over a small amount of time. You need high time resolution V and A measurement to do that.

Even if input power is strictly limited (an assumption I'd not make) local heating is common in such systems. It is teh same mechanism as a fuse. As one part of the wire heats up it hogs more power and there is a runaway effect where most of the supplied power is dissipated in one small part of the reactor. That can generate very high temperatures: just as a fuse does. In the process part of the coil melts and then vapourises.

Mainly though this question is underdetermined. I'm not confident in the above scenario - but without many more details I'd not be confident in attributing "melt-down" to new physics. The whole point about thermal runaway events is that they are difficult to characterise and the high transient temperatures can make unusual things happen.

My own experience with the real world is that "unusual things happening" is quite common and results that seem incomprehensible can in the end by tied up and understood: but not with limited observation.

You'd have to qualify what was meant by reactor meltdown - e.g. which bits were melting.

Then, one cause would be heating coils shorting or forming necks and generating high transient local power. Under some circumstances this could also be high transient global power. These designs have small thermal mass and are susceptible to high temperatures on power overload, especially locally.

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Indeed they used the plant in Doral as a show room for their rich friends, and they collected a lot of money in this way. They began to complain about the test only when the time to pay had come for them.

More Planet Rossi. These assertions are either provably untrue, or just speculative. IH were clearly unhappy about the test from well before its end. And while during the test period investors visited the plant, how could that not be? Rossi, for good or ill, was a large IH investment. Whatever caveats they made, and perhaps particularly because of those caveats, investors would want to see it. Had IH used Rossi to promote investment without the strongest of caveats they would be in trouble with investors (as they clearly are not).

IH happiness with Rossi and all his doings would naturally correlate with whether they had ever validation of his technpology. Lugano, while from the start problematic, would have seemed like half-way validation and reason to hope until they realised the calorimetry error that accounts for both excess heat and "acceleration" in excess heat. A known bust Lugano result, together with failure to measure excess heat from internal tests, would indeed make IH complain. But not publicly, they are more professional and disciplined than Rossi in that respect.

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IH accepted the first three reports of the ERV during the 10 months of test from Feb 2015 to Dec 2016, and have paid the ERV for the same reports. If they considered them just garbage, they should have complained before the last report. Fabiani worked for IH and he send them his data. They say that he didn't send his data only the last time they asked for them, but what about the other times? They did not say a word about his work, all was good for them before the suit.

This Planet Rossiesque logic is obviously popular on some blogs, but it does not wash.

This is all speculation (including what I'll suggest) and so "should have complained" is a bit much.Without full information we cannot be sure what a proper response would be, and this implies that we know and they are remiss.

But, for a guessing game:

throughout this test IH would have had two (proper) aims:

(1) Don't rock the boat, and keep to the letter and spirit of their contract, just in case Rossi actually came good on his promises, or their internal tests showed the elusive Swedish academic endorsed Lugano-type performance. In either case their duty to their shareholders then would be to pay the $100M and grab a revolutionary working technology.

(2) Don't do anything to endorse a probably corrupt and deeply unhelpful large-scale demo, and keep their noses clean in case of future legal argument from a Rossi with no working technology who is a strong fantasist.

It is clear that from their POV until they had internal tests showing Rossi's stuff working a one-year GPT would be useless. See the difference. Rossi promotes the test in terms of its PR value. IH see the test in terms of does it help their validation and development of the Rossi technology. The two viewpoints are quite different.

From public info I can't easily say how well IH achieved these two aims, but they don't seem to have done badly, and I certainly can't say what else they "should have done". Maybe I'm just less sure of things here than the all-seeing inhabitants of Planet Rossi?

Previously, with the IH document, we had seen only one side. It is unusual for views after that to stay the same after reading both sides.

Here they do.

I'm not sure, given what is now public, that anyone here is libelling Rossi. Fair comment is not libel.

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I beg to disagree - the Rossi's secretive attitude indicates, that he doesn't care if he's actually trusted or not, once the premature revealation of information could threat his future profit or influence in development of cold fusion at least. Isn't it quite apparent from all "public demos", which were done with him so far?

That might be the case if Rossi cared about what "snakes" and "scientists in labs" or indeed the wider world thought. He needs his JONP/ECW mediated set of fans. They are specially chosen, and relatively uncritical. He lives in his own bubble.

Rossi has conducted public demos whenever he wants to energise fans, or gain new ones (and also possibly when he needs to convince investors). He has always been secretive about anything he does not want public - for example any monitoring of tests outside what he arranges himself. His fans always find excuses for this, or shrug it off as the eccentricity of a brilliant saviour of humankind.

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I really don't know why he would think his doing this kind of stuff will help him out in court. Maybe he thinks the jury...if it ever comes to that, reads his JONP?

I don't think Rossi really believes in the legal process. He has always seemed to think public opinion (of his adoring followers) more important than anything real. It takes a while to realise that this is really it - Rossi just does not think facts matter, if he has admirers. As though he lives in a belief-powered bubble isolated from reality. Which is more or less what he experiences, i guess.

Of course like everyone he needs money, given all those condos to keep in good condition perhaps he needs more money than you are I. So it helps if he can persuade some adoring followers to give him money.

For either of these reasons his unsubtle propaganda makes sense. After all, at this point in time, anyone likely to believe Rossi must be pretty easily convinced.

This is a terminological issue.

I would define COP as the "true" budget, with errors making an error bound, positive or negative on this.

Where COP is defined as some abstract number ignoring some known errors we get erroneous figures, as has been the case with Rossi's experiments.

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So if one measure COP 0.98 for the dummy knows that is over estimating the input or underestimating the output energy of about 2%

Or both by 1%, or overestimating input by 3% and overestimating output by 1%, etc. Assuming that errors only work one-way is unwise, and therefore (if you adopt this artifical known wrong definition for COP) assuming that COP < 1 for a system with energy in = energy out is unwise.

In fact, making any assumptions about Rossi's apparatus is unwise, the ones that have been properly investigated, like Lugano, have known very clear issues.

Jed,

You blew your top when I said they should not be trusted.

I've read at least one of their papers, yes.

Well, that would only make this "obviously" if all such losses were on the output side. A big departure for Rossi when he has verified mismeasurement the other way round so many times. Maybe there is something about dummy measurement that reverses his errors?

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Who the hell are you to judge? You do not even know the names of the people who did these tests, or their C.V.s. Two of them, Ernie Yeager and Arata, have chemistry institutes named after them, and international prizes in their names. One was the Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission and another was a member of the French Atomic Energy Commission. Another was the top U.S. expert in tritium detection at the PPPL and Los Alamos. Fleischmann and Bockris literally wrote the book on 20th century Modern Electrochemistry (that's the title).

It is clear from the unquoted bit of my comment that I'm not disputing whether they are masters of their field. It does not matter whether they are this or not. No-one can or should be trusted in science. Only in religions is such importance put on enlightened individuals.

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obviously a dummy has COP < 1

It seems like Rossi's instrumentation on the dummy is wrong as well, or he'd know, for a dummy, COP=1. Exactly.

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I think that the real basic working of a forum is to be open to various voices in a democratic way.If you don't agree with somebody why don't you try to answer with effective and sound arguments ?

There is a narrow line between trolling and uninformed (repetitive) democratic opinion. In your case we have with great detail answered every one of your questions over Lugano, showing you where and how you and Levi (whose analysis you follow) are wrong. It may be that you just don't understand this stuff. Fair enough. But you talk as though you do understand it. And you come back weeks after the detailed technical discussion where you comprehensively failed, sounding as though in fact you had won that discussion and we are somehow avoiding it.

This has happened several times over, and I can't blame people here if they get tired of the repetition on other threads. If you have genuine new tech comments go make them on the relevant technical thread where we can refer to the past detailed explanations as needed.

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You [Shanahan] are the wild-eyed radical. You reject calorimetry and thermodynamics, the experimental method, and the very basis of the scientific method which is that when experiments conflict with theory, experiments always prevail.

So, reading the last page:

@Kirk: I don't mean that your argument per se is subtle and complex. however, quantitatively, how much it applies to some experiments is certainly that. It is clear as I stated that it applies (by an amount that can be calculated) to other experiments. So I'd answer questions:

• Does it [Kirk's hypothesis] apply, in a way capable without stretch of explaining otherwise anomalous results, to some experiments? Yes. And clearly so.
• Does it apply in that way to all claimed excess heat calorimetry? No
• Could it in principle so apply to all (F&P styles, open and closed cell, calorimetry) yes, but a careful look at conditions might in some cases make that look unlikely in practice. I'm not sure.

@Jed. I cannot agree with your quote above. When you argue high excess energy that means nothing if it can be generated by a relatively small calibration or other experimental error. Your quoting the headline figures would not convince any careful person: i hope they don't convince you, but in that case why quote that form rather than something that seems more compelling? Further, it is just not true that experiment is always preferred to theory otherwise in schools the many pupils who obtain wildly innaccurate chemistry results would be rewriting history books. You will argue that F&P were masters of their field and can be trusted. I disagree, when it is rewriting books that seems implied no-one should be trusted, and all experiments must be carefully repeated and checked by different people. The result of that process, for these experiments, is unclear.

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No, his arguments are not plausible.

That blanket statement is what I find unhelpful. You have specific arguments that counter Kirk's arguments. Following the previous long debate the matter was not clearly resolved. My best understanding at that time was that his ideas certainly (in the sense of being a plausible mechanism) applied to some cells, possibly applied to others. As for physical plausibility I rate that medium, but note the irony in anyone advocating LENR and then dismissing other hypotheses is physically implausible. Just as the arguments for LENR are subtle and complex, so the arguments for Kirk's mechanism also are. They should (like LENR) be treated with some skepticism, but not dismissed. And in any case Kirk has two bites at this cherry. He can claim an error mechanism not considered, if it in principle fits the evidence, without providing exact physical details. Only fair, since the competing LENR mechanism has no exact physical details.

If you had a killer argument I would agree with you. But your arguments above are all conditional (on assumptions about experiments) or subjective. I'd respect your judgement on this issue more if you allowed the applicability of Kirk's arguments to be variable instead of this binary choice.

Kirk,

I agree with all your points, and the key issue that MS data can have so many false positives you need and expert analysis before a given peak is not explained as false positive (and even then it could be contamination). Where these papers make extraordinary assertions without full data and a lot of expert discussion they are just unsafe, but in a way that naive readers might not recognise.

On a minor issue: is SrD4 likely? SrD2 would stick together nicely...

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Sorry, but without hard coordinated work the cold fusion will always remain esoteric phenomena, which manifest itself just with occasional COP ~ 1.2. What's worse, there is still way too many people, who just want to have it so as a status quo.

Let us suppose that LENR exists. If so, and what you state is true, then it is most unexpected. Naturally different experimental setups will show very different sensitivities. COP of 1.2, if the 0.2 is an LENR effect, can trivially be changed into COP of 1.6 as MFMP indeed are doing by altering thermal insulation.

A (shortish) summary of the old arguments between Kirk S and others broke out on another thread:

Starting with a very strong comment from Jed here and a reply from Kirk here.

Reading these posts is revealing. It shows why LENR advocates such as Jed have some work to do before being taken seriously. I remember following an earlier and longer incarnation of this argument (also on here). I could not easily conclude what was correct because both sides presented their arguments and dismissed or ignored those of opponents. I'm not saying this happened equally in both directions, but it was frustrating because I was trying to follow through specific arguments to their conclusion where either it would be clear that one of other poster was lying (never my first idea, and in this case never true) or the difference in judgement or fact discovered that led to such divergent views.

There is no dishonour in different people coming to different conclusions based on the same set of evidence. They should be able to agree on most facts, identify facts in contention (there were not many such in this case) and then drill down to the differences in judgement that result in such different overall conclusions.

There is also the prior belief issue. (I'm using belief here in a Bayesian sense to mean inductive likelihood of propositions given all previous observations). If you reckon based on diverse strands of evidence that LENR effects very likely happen you will properly weight uncertain evidence of possible LENR differently from if you have no such prior belief. With no LENR prior belief, evidence that is strongly contrary to a normal interpretation of physics and has no predictive supporting theory would be seen as most likely experimental or interpretive error. This is one of the key things that makes debate about LENR sociologically complex, and allows people of good will and considerable expertise to come to very different conclusions.

What annoys me is the lack of courtesy and clarity in these debates. Consider the type of checking and probing that happens in the best peer review. It is a flawed process, as we are all flawed people - especially so since done for free and not everyone is altruistic enough to spend lots of time with no reward - but still it is valuable. Peer review has some safeguards not present here. Personalities are removed from the issue, and comments are polite. Reviewers are supposed to have some expertise in the matter reviewed. That will always be variable, but the overall quality is not too bad: thus one reviewer in three typically gives really well-informed constructive criticism (on average, in my experience).

Peer review on LENR suffers the same prior belief problem. The LENR community, by definition, are self-selected as those who have positive LENR prior belief. Not necessarily 100%, but much higher than the mainstream default of "this behaviour is extraordinary and therefore requires extraordinary evidence". Those mainstream scientists who are active in the LENR debate will have a negative LENR belief the bar remains extraordinary because they have seen nothing that convinces them. Otherwise they would cross over to LENR community - as a very few have done. Those who continue to be interested, and contribute to the debate, will either have positive LENR belief or some other reason to be interested in making negative statements.

This is inevitable, and also problematic. Whether LENR is pseudo-science, or science that a biased establishment is too blinkered to appreciate, or new science that is just beginning to be appreciated by an establishment slow to change, getting good critiques from skeptical informed people will be hard. Critiques from non-skeptics will inevitably be less helpful if the wish is to strengthen the scientific case for LENR.

I think there are differences here in what the LENR community wants. Some feel that there is no point trying to convince a biased mainstream community. The peer-reviewed evidence is already cast-iron, those who do not look at it will not look at more. Those who look at it and are not convinced are pseudo-skeptics. Others feel that the complex nature of LENR phenomena is a real intrinsic characteristic that has made progress hard, and stronger evidence can be obtained, but has not yet been. They think getting this strong evidence is of great importance.

Regardless of that, when engaging in dialog about the evidence, details matter. Kirk here has a specific contribution to make. He has a well-argued case that some (he would say in principle all) LENR liquid-phase calorimetry has an additional error mechanism that is not taken into account. His arguments are plausible but it is very unclear precisely what is their scope and applicability. They clearly apply to some experiments. They clearly apply much less (how much less is open to debate) to others. Delimiting that is interesting.

The most depressing thing for me, here, and it is very deeply depressing, is the way this dialog with Kirk goes. Both sides are obviously tired, having replayed this dialog many times before and reached entrenched positions. Yet the matter at hand here is evidence in the public domain that is mostly all agreed, and analysis that can be critiqued by anyone with decent 1st year university maths and physics. Why cannot both sides drill down to those real differences that inform the sharply divergent opinion? In the sequence of posts starting with those I've linked Kirk does a better job of sticking to the train of argument, not throwing round personal comments, and addressing all contrary points made. But that is mostly because Jed is not interested in careful reworking of the analysis here, and impatient with views he believes clearly wrong. There are also a few points that Kirk does not follow up.

From the previous, much longer, thread you get plenty of arguments on both sides. I see no reason why these cannot be considered, patiently, cross-referenced, with both sides responding until an agreed position, or agreed set of differing judgments, is reached. I don't believe for a moment that Jed or Abd or Kirk are dishonest, or incapable of thinking about clear matters of physics, and they all have an interest in establishing what is true.

I'm unusual in this debate, in that what most interests me is not one side or other winning, but the process of establishing belief. It is a wonderful product of enlightenment thinking - one thing of which humanity can be proud, and which in human history is quite unique. In this post-truth era it might seem to be threatened - but I do not believe this. Whatever happens with politics the value of scientific exploration and robust challenge to find new better scientific theory will remain. You can see from this that as my pseudonominal character I care more about the search for truth than its outcome. I don't by this mean that I'm any less opinionated and biased than the next person - we are all human - but I do care more about correcting bias than persuading others I'm right.