Merged Cold Fusion Claims

[manifesto]

Is non-usable heat like dessicated water?

Ah, you're trying to be funny.

 

[ben m]

I posted Hagelstein's most resent theoretical paper and in that paper there is a reference list listing all the experimental papers (the data) referred to in the paper.

OK, there are two ways to do this. If you want to be nonspecific about it---"Hey guys, what do you think in general about the whole field of cold fusion"---you're going to get a nonspecific answer, like "it's been 20 years of nonreproducible results from half-calibrated contraptions", which is what you got.

If you want to be specific---"Here is a particular paper I have read, here is what I think is noteworthy about it, what do you think?"---you'll find people willing to read the paper and comment. Along these lines, please note that I did comment in detail on the Hagelstein paper you chose to link to, and you show no sign of being interested, which does not make me eager to put in any work reading the next thing you link to.

Is that reasonably clear?

A) Don't expect your zero-effort post, linking to a survey of the whole field, to prompt people to dig (effortfully) into specific details in order to explain them to you. You want a detailed answer, ask a detailed question.

B) I commented on Hagelstein's theory. Did you notice?

 

[manifesto]

Did you even read to the end of the abstract?

I have read the paper, and I suggest you do the same before commenting on it.

It says that the concept was tested and found to be unpredictable, which is no better than random noise.

No, it explains why tritium is hard to detect and therefore gives poor reproducibility when distributions are averaged over the total time of electrolysis. The "bursts" get averaged out.

That's not a very promising foundation for a new theoretical system.

As I said, read the paper before commenting on it.

 

[Horatius]

Wrong paper.

Excuse me? The line about "Helium production during the electrolysis of D2O in cold fusion" was cut and pasted from your own post. The point was to compare it to the other claims that have been posted.

But completely missing the point seems to be your M.O.

B) I commented on Hagelstein's theory. Did you notice?

He apparently doesn't even read his own posts, so it's probably too much to expect him to read yours!

 

[bruto]

Ah, you're trying to be funny.

Only partly, I think. "Usable" is relative. Even if the heat is not much, and hard to obtain, it seems to me that a person trying to sell the idea would be miles and miles ahead in the job of persuading people of its merits even if he could design only a hundred thousand dollar coffee cup warmer.

 

[manifesto]

Excuse me? The line about "Helium production during the electrolysis of D2O in cold fusion" was cut and pasted from your own post. The point was to compare it to the other claims that have been posted.

I asked what is wrong with it, in singularis. And yes, different experiments focus on different measurements, depending on expertise, funding etc. However, they all show indications of LENR.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

I asked what is wrong with it, in singularis. And yes, different experiments focus on different measurements, depending on expertise, funding etc. However, they all show indications of LENR.

(my bold)

Can you cite pairs of peer-reviewed papers, in which the first paper of a pair reports specific "indications of LENR", and the second paper of each pair an independent confirmation of the same indications?

For avoidance of doubt, the second paper should report results which are quantitatively consistent with the quantitative results reported in the first paper (of each pair).

If you know of further peer-reviewed papers reporting yet more independent confirmations, of the "indications of LENR" reported in the first paper of each pair, please cite them too.

In fact, can you cite even one such pair of papers?

I've tried to follow the hard evidence you - and Crawdaddy - have posted in this thread recently, but have not seen anything as clearly and concisely presented as the 'pairs of papers' I just described. If - as seems to be the case - you think that LENR has been unambiguously demonstrated, wouldn't you have such a list of pairs (triples, more) of papers at your fingertips?

 

[ben m]

No, it explains why tritium is hard to detect and therefore gives poor reproducibility when distributions are averaged over the total time of electrolysis. The "bursts" get averaged out.

Well, to be honest---and I've talked about SPAWAR before, probably in this thread, it's all a moot point when only one specific kind of neutron detector is capable of seeing the signals you interpret as "neutrons".

Especially when the thing that you think "works" is the hard-to-use, hard-to-calibrate, zero-energy-resolution, godawful-time-resolution "track etch detectors" that are used in exactly zero mainstream low-level neutron counting experiments.

Track etch detectors have a place in the world, but careful and error-free diagnostics of a suspected bursty high-energy neutron signal? That's not their place. Not even close.

 

[catsmate]

I noticed the term 'believer'.

Indeed. As opposed to evidence.

Where does it states that the excess heat is "usable"?

Evasion.

I posted Hagelstein's most resent theoretical paper and in that paper there is a reference list listing all the experimental papers (the data) referred to in the paper.

Where are all those peer-reviewed paper you promised?

Example. There is no peer reviewed, not rebutted, critique of F&P's original claim of excess heat. This is a bit peculiar don't you think?

More evasion. And demonstration of continuing lack of understanding of science.

I agree, this is indeed remarkable.

Your unwillingness to accept reality? Indeed.

You are the only one talking about things that are "categorically impossible".

All I have done is point out that your stupid argument that would make a first year undergraduate laugh is no scientific basis to reject the Toyota findings. Findings that are supported by more than a decade of experiments including XRF, XPS, and SIMS. I imagine you will come up with some other ignorant reason that those results should be ignored too!

There is nothing more amusing than a nuclear physicist blathering about what is "categorically impossible". Until a few years ago, you people didn't even notice that certain beta emitters are influenced by sunspot activity.

The first published observation of anomalous effects in palladium electro-chemistry dates back to the 1920s, before your branch of science even existed. You religiously make statements about things being "categorically impossible" like some Mayan priest about to cut out some innocent's heart, while pointing to a few equations and a data set.

Thankfully we chemists, with a data set spanning centuries, are here to pick up the ball and actually do some research.

That's nice dear. Now where's the evidence? Surely after all these decades you should have something to show.

Ah, you're trying to be funny.

And you're evading the question.

But completely missing the point seems to be your M.O.

Deliberately I suspect.

He apparently doesn't even read his own posts, so it's probably too much to expect him to read yours!

Indeed. Nor does he seem to have read the "papers" he cites.

 

[manifesto]

No, it's not so peculiar at all. First, "not rebutted"? Why? Is the last word in an argument always right?

No. I meant "rebutted" as in proven wrong. You disagree?

There is no "not rebutted" paper critiquing Plasma Cosmology, either. (All this tells you is that the pro-plasma-cosmology people are more enthusiastic about writing rebuttals than mainstream cosmologists are about writing critiques. Sort of a case of "Because the fox is running for his dinner, but the rabbit is running for his life.").

We are discussing the biggest scientific controversy in modern time, still raging. The common knowledge is that cold fusion got thoroughly "debunked" as early as 2 months after the announcement. That's the historical context.

Also, no, there's nothing uncommon about this sort of consensus emerging outside of the peer-reviewed literature. Happens all the time. You won't find any peer-reviewed "critiques" of the amazing device-physics discoveries of Jan Henrik Schoen, although later reports on the affair make it clear that failure to reproduce Schoen's results and skepticism about his claims were widely shared in the relevant community. (And later Schoen was proven to be a fraud and stripped of his degree.)

Yes, and we are still waiting for the same to happen with LENR/cold fusion, don't we?

 

[ben m]

I asked what is wrong with it, in singularis. And yes, different experiments focus on different measurements, depending on expertise, funding etc. However, they all show indications of LENR.

The same is true of perpetual motion. Dozens of different experiments thought they saw "some sort of effect". Nobody sees the same thing someone else is seeing. Counting the number of PM reports is not a good way to tell how real PM is.

For a non-paranormal example: imagine, in 1992, someone claiming that Fermat's Last Theorem was nearly proven. "There are hundreds of papers claiming to have proven it. No one has rebutted them. Maybe no single one is conclusive but all together they add up to evidence that the approach is correct." Nope. (When Andrew Wiles proved FLT in 1993-94, it used exactly zero of the mathematics previously claimed as "proofs". All of the previous work was 100.0000000000% wrong, misdirected, and irrelevant to the question of whether FLT was true or not. In this case, it turned out that FLT is true, as shown by the one actual correct proof.)

You realize that these "indications" of "cold fusion" contradict each other? Rossi's claim that Ni+H fuses, if true, invalidates everyone else who uses H as a zero-fusion control for their D experiments. Iwamura's claim that D nuclei are migrating into heavy nuclei would disprove the Pons etc. claim that the D nuclei actually pair up into 4He and diffusing out.

Meanwhile, everybody and their brother is claiming that whatever effect they're seeing is inexpressibly delicate, and might fail for your lab, because maybe your palladium was refined during the wrong phase of the moon, which is hard to square with the claim (which you're hinting at making) that "oh, there must be lots of different types of LENR and we're seeing all of them")

 

[ben m]

No. I meant "rebutted" as in proven wrong. You disagree?

Imagine someone has done an experiment trying to detect, say, uranium decays. They turn on their uranium-decay detector and DAQ software and let it run. Unbeknownst to the experimenter, an undergraduate from the teaching lab next door has been in the habit of borrowing this detector's coaxial cable, using it for something else, and returning it. (But only on cloudy days; on sunny days this student skips lab to go surfing!) At the end of the month, the experimentalist sees only huge variation in the decay-rates seen in the data; he has no idea that his cable has been unplugged and replaced. He publishes a paper announcing a discovery: "CORRELATION BETWEEN AFTERNOON CLOUDINESS AND URANIUM DECAY ANOMALIES".

The paper will never be "proven wrong" in the sense that someone actually figures out why the correlation was present in the data. (The effect *really is* there in the data---the recorded U decay count rate really does read zero on cloudy afternoons.) The actual cause of the correlation may remain a mystery for all time. So is everyone forced to believe the correlation is real? Do we have to wait around for a "disproof"? Do we need a paper saying "U/CLOUD CORRELATION TRACKED DOWN TO EQUIPMENT OPERATION ERROR; PAPER WITHDRAWN"? No we don't, but a sensible scientist would be satisfied with the fact that numerous other labs (with better-tended equipment) see no such anomaly.

Here are some examples of well-documented "anomalies" that most scientists now believe to be experimental errors, on exactly these grounds (inconsistency with better-calibrated checks) despite no peer-reviewed document saying exactly what the mistake had been:

a) The LSND fast "electron-neutrino appearance"
b) The Ephraim Fischbach beta/sunspot correlation
c) The DAMA/LIBRA "annual modulation"
d) Many of the pre-Mainz "negative neutrino mass" measurements
e) The Price monopole
f) The PVLAS birefringence
g) The "ghost muons" at CDF
h) The Klapdor-Kleingrothaus 76Ge neutrinoless double beta decay

In each case, we have an effect claimed by some early experiment that cannot be true as claimed because of its failure to appear in better experiments. Unless there's some reason to believe a special-pleading argument---"LSND saw New Physics Effect #1, and the followup experiments missed it because of New Physics Effect #2"---it's perfectly fine to walk away from such a result with the conclusion that something went wrong.

In the case of LENR (and especially the early-1990s papers from inexperienced labs with hastily-built apparatus): yes, the lack of reproducibility is excellent evidence against the LENR claim; it may be even better evidence than the sort of published postmortem that you seem to be demanding (since such postmortems can, themselves, make mistakes, with fewer opportunities to check them). It'd be true for the "cloudy-day uranium" paper I suggest above, it's true for mainstream claims like those of DAMA/PVLAS/Klapdor/Fischbach/etc., and it's true for LENR.

 

[ben m]

Yes, and we are still waiting for the same to happen with LENR/cold fusion, don't we?

Thank you for the amateur psychoanalysis. You didn't seem to believe that scientists can discuss things (including reaching consensus that wrong results are probably wrong) without producing a peer-reviewed disproof, I gave you a counterexample in which scientists (correctly) reached a consensus that wrong results were probably wrong. Yes, the first example I could think of happened to be from the domain of fraud.

If you want to read that as "ben m is cheering for an LENR-related fraud conviction". In the case of Pons/Fleischmann/Iwemura/Hagelstein/etc., no, I would be overjoyed for someone to discover real low-energy fusion. I will be the first in line to buy a D-powered home heating system, first in line to write a DOE grant to study the new nuclear physics involved. Unfortunately there seems to be no actual cold fusion phenomenon; given that, I want crackpots to stop misreading the evidence on this point.

(In the case of Rossi, um, I'm sort of cheering for a fraud conviction.)

 

[TjW]

Thank you for the amateur psychoanalysis. You didn't seem to believe that scientists can discuss things (including reaching consensus that wrong results are probably wrong) without producing a peer-reviewed disproof, I gave you a counterexample in which scientists (correctly) reached a consensus that wrong results were probably wrong. Yes, the first example I could think of happened to be from the domain of fraud.

If you want to read that as "ben m is cheering for an LENR-related fraud conviction". In the case of Pons/Fleischmann/Iwemura/Hagelstein/etc., no, I would be overjoyed for someone to discover real low-energy fusion. I will be the first in line to buy a D-powered home heating system, first in line to write a DOE grant to study the new nuclear physics involved. Unfortunately there seems to be no actual cold fusion phenomenon; given that, I want crackpots to stop misreading the evidence on this point.

(In the case of Rossi, um, I'm sort of cheering for another fraud conviction.)

Fixed that for ya.

 

[Craig B]

Fixed that for ya.

Rossi seems to have served time in Italy for "fraudulent bankruptcy". More info here. http://freeenergyscams.com/the-e-cat-thermoelectric-scam-of-andrea-rossi-part-5a/

 

[leonAzul]

Did you even read to the end of the abstract?

I have read the paper, and I suggest you do the same before commenting on it.

It says that the concept was tested and found to be unpredictable, which is no better than random noise.

No, it explains why tritium is hard to detect and therefore gives poor reproducibility when distributions are averaged over the total time of electrolysis. The "bursts" get averaged out.

Hold on, here: the authors expressly say the phenomenon is not reliably detectable, and yet you continue to bang on about how the phenomenon is not being addressed nor exploited.

Tritium is not difficult to detect at all, whether by a chemist or a physicist. There is nothing in that paper that asserts such nonsense. Rather to the contrary, the authors of the paper conclude that there is nothing to be seen, although the inquiry developed some interesting questions about instrumentation.

 

[catsmate]

<gibbersnip>

Still waiting for you to post all those peer-reviewed papers you claimed showed cold fusion.

Rossi seems to have served time in Italy for "fraudulent bankruptcy". More info here. http://freeenergyscams.com/the-e-cat-thermoelectric-scam-of-andrea-rossi-part-5a/

Yeah IIRC he was convicted of five fraud offences in Italy in addition to the environmental offences over the Petroldragon scam.With the rumours of SEC and IRS interest in his affairs there may be a jail sentence in his future.

 

[Horatius]

I asked what is wrong with it, in singularis. And yes, different experiments focus on different measurements, depending on expertise, funding etc. However, they all show indications of LENR.

And of course, the point everyone else is making is that science doesn't work by considering one paper "in singularis". The results of one experiment have implications for the results of all other experiments that work in the same area, or that rely on the underlying science being (or not being) what we thought it was.

Your one experiment throws so much other physics into the trashcan that you can't simply discuss it by itself; you have to ask, "If all that other physics was wrong, why did we see the results we did for so long?"

Back when P&F first made their announcement, I was working as a student with a research group that was also working with things like hydrogen and palladium, and they did just that. P&F's results were so amazing that, if they were real, they would have affected almost everything this group had been doing. And yet, they never saw any such influence. Not before, and certainly not after, even though after, they knew they had to be looking for any such effects.

Meanwhile, everybody and their brother is claiming that whatever effect they're seeing is inexpressibly delicate, and might fail for your lab, because maybe your palladium was refined during the wrong phase of the moon, which is hard to square with the claim (which you're hinting at making) that "oh, there must be lots of different types of LENR and we're seeing all of them")

Exactly. If there really were this many different kinds of cold fusion lurking about, cold fusion would be easy to demonstrate, and almost everything we think we know about nuclear science would be wrong. Every experiment we've ever did (other than the cold fusion ones) would have either been hopelessly screwed up, or massively misunderstood.

So, what's more likely? That the Cold Fusioneers are wrong, or that every other scientist who's ever worked on anything that touches on any of these phenomena are all wrong?

 

[catsmate]

And of course, the point everyone else is making is that science doesn't work by considering one paper "in singularis". The results of one experiment have implications for the results of all other experiments that work in the same area, or that rely on the underlying science being (or not being) what we thought it was.

Your one experiment throws so much other physics into the trashcan that you can't simply discuss it by itself; you have to ask, "If all that other physics was wrong, why did we see the results we did for so long?"

Back when P&F first made their announcement, I was working as a student with a research group that was also working with things like hydrogen and palladium, and they did just that. P&F's results were so amazing that, if they were real, they would have affected almost everything this group had been doing. And yet, they never saw any such influence. Not before, and certainly not after, even though after, they knew they had to be looking for any such effects.

And as soon as P&F's claims were known everyone attempted to replicate their alleged fusion. There were literally hundreds of groups working on this (I was an undergrad and involved with one) all over the planet. The only result was a few accidents and a couple of people killed.

 

[Cuddles]

We are discussing the biggest scientific controversy in modern time, still raging.

I thought we were discussing cold fusion.