Merged Cold Fusion Claims

[catsmate]

There are many theories for LENR and the 'validity' of any is yet to be determined. As to showing something works in theory, what must the theory be based on? Widom-Larsen claim that their theory requires no new physics and can explain John Huizenga's 'three miracles.'

Rubbish. WL "theory" is unmitigated nonsense, a fact this is obvious in the extreme to anyone who reads their "paper" and understands basic physics.

Well, Ben, you can write off that theory if you don't like it.

Anyone with a basic understanding of physics, and an open mind, wroted off their "paper".

It seems that invoking things "that don't actually exist" is a common practice when it comes to theories. Physics has a penchant for such. Strings, imaginary time, etc., are all invoked along with other dimensions. A heirarchy of particles has been compiled and the search is on for a particle that confers mass on things.

Then real physicists create hypotheses, make predictions and carry out observations and experiments to test them. Then the theory is modified to account for reality, discarded or validated.
Cranks pushing cold fusion and similar nonsense fail to carry out these steps.

Consider the knowledge base for particle physics. The experiments were done with particles having energies in the tens of kiloelecronvolts and greater. Can that be extended 4 orders of magnitude to particles with energies of, say, 2 or 3 electron volts?

???????????????????

 

[ben m]

Well, Ben, you can write off that theory if you don't like it. It seems that invoking things "that don't actually exist" is a common practice when it comes to theories. Physics has a penchant for such. S

No, no, this is worse. We know the properties of the nuclide 5He, we've measured them. It's unstable with respect to 4He (i.e., 4He + n --> 5He is endothermic), the energy input is measured at 11 MeV. It's got a lifetime of 10^-21 seconds---that's measured. In other words, 5He is not really a nucleus---a neutron and a 4He will get away from each other almost as fast as the speed of light allows them to.

Widom-Larsen don't seem to know this. Maybe they were thinking of the actinides, where you can generally add a neutron to anything, and blindly applied that idea to helium. They wrote down "4He + n --> 5He" then assumed that the 5He sticks around long enough (!) for "5He + n --> 6He". The former violates conservation of energy, the latter is impossible.

This is not speculation about unseen-things-that-could-exist-anyway, like the Higgs or strings. This is simply wrong, in the "the moon is made of green cheese" sense.

 

[pteridine]

Oh look an advertisement, that means a whole lot.

It means that there may be more information. There have been 16 ICCF conferences, alone. The last was this February in Chennai, India. At each, experimental results were presented. Have you classified all those researchers as frauds?

Many who immediately rejected LENR as fraudulent because it burst their respective bubbles are now trying to spin things so that if the effect is found to be real, they can pretend to be scientists. It will be interesting to see what John Huizenga, Nathan Lewis, and others have to say about it, should it prove out.
In 1989, Stan Pons had many immediately claiming to have seen the effect but hadn't reported it. On crucifixion of Pons and Fleischmann, all those who wanted a bit of the limelight became quiet and suddenly hadn't seen the effect, reaffirming the proverb "Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan." Lewis made up the "Lewis Rule" on the spur of the moment that required a 120% output to make the effect real. Steve Jones then weighed in with his opinions. Big physics was threatened and hot fusion research [Huizenga was from U Rochester; a big hot fusion player at the time] rooted out the heresy of two electrochemists using borrowed Palladium and observing an unusual result. All energy sources were threatened with obsolescence but the hot fusion physicists were most immediately effected, took the lead, and expunged the results from the scientific record. The final projectile was Huizenga's book that ridiculed the scientists and their results. The entire production should have been titled "Scientists Play Politics or It's All About [Research] Money."

 

[ben m]

Consider the knowledge base for particle physics. The experiments were done with particles having energies in the tens of kiloelecronvolts and greater.

Utter nonsense. We've tested the laws of particle physics at all available energies. I can think of particle-physics experiments dealing with phenomena at the nano-eV (ultracold neutrons), micro-eV (anomalous magnetic moments), eV (atom and laser), keV (Mossbauer effect, exotic atoms, etc.), and so on up to the LHC, and (at amazing energies but low precision) Pierre Auger.

 

[CORed]

There are many theories for LENR and the 'validity' of any is yet to be determined. As to showing something works in theory, what must the theory be based on? Widom-Larsen claim that their theory requires no new physics and can explain John Huizenga's 'three miracles.'

Screw theory. Nobody has yet demonstrated that cold fusion works in practice. If it really worked as claimed, putting the apparatus in a pressure vessel, boiling some water and generating electricity would be child's play, and extremely profitable. Do that, and you can let the physicists spend the next several years or decades figuring out how it works.

For some reason (could it be that it doesn't actually work?) nobody has managed to do this for 25+ years.

 

[pteridine]

OK. Widom-Larsen is out.
The Krivit site, invoked earlier, has a collection of theories. Theory will follow experiment and, should there be a successful experiment, many of those now clamoring for the gibbet for LENR will be clamoring for attention to their pet theory explaining the effect while lobbying the Nobel committee because they are so much smarter than those undeserving professors. Winston Smith will be rewriting scientific history so that future generations may admire the honest scientists who searched for truth. Likely there will be some revisions to the literature and a book burning or two to save scientists of note.

 

[pteridine]

Screw theory. Nobody has yet demonstrated that cold fusion works in practice. If it really worked as claimed, putting the apparatus in a pressure vessel, boiling some water and generating electricity would be child's play, and extremely profitable. Do that, and you can let the physicists spend the next several years or decades figuring out how it works.

For some reason (could it be that it doesn't actually work?) nobody has managed to do this for 25+ years.

Pons and Fleischmann boiled water in 1989. Funding has been virtually non-existent. Hot fusion has spent billions over 50+ years and "if it really worked as claimed, putting the apparatus in a pressure vessel, boiling some water and generating electricity would be child's play, and extremely profitable."

 

[Aepervius]

No, no, this is worse. We know the properties of the nuclide 5He, we've measured them. It's unstable with respect to 4He (i.e., 4He + n --> 5He is endothermic), the energy input is measured at 11 MeV. It's got a lifetime of 10^-21 seconds---that's measured. In other words, 5He is not really a nucleus---a neutron and a 4He will get away from each other almost as fast as the speed of light allows them to.

Widom-Larsen don't seem to know this. Maybe they were thinking of the actinides, where you can generally add a neutron to anything, and blindly applied that idea to helium. They wrote down "4He + n --> 5He" then assumed that the 5He sticks around long enough (!) for "5He + n --> 6He". The former violates conservation of energy, the latter is impossible.

This is not speculation about unseen-things-that-could-exist-anyway, like the Higgs or strings. This is simply wrong, in the "the moon is made of green cheese" sense.

Indeed , everybody knows that it isn't green cheese, but rather emmental.

 

[RobDegraves]

Theory will follow experiment and, should there be a successful experiment

If

 

[ben m]

It means that there may be more information. There have been 16 ICCF conferences, alone. The last was this February in Chennai, India. At each, experimental results were presented. Have you classified all those researchers as frauds?

I've clicked through lots and lots of papers, and seen lots of evidence, not of fraud, but of incompetence. I know low-background neutron detection, Pteridine, it's by job. I know systematic and statistical error issues in low-background counting experiments. It's my job. I know how to construct a counting-experiment that avoids unconscious experimenter bias. It's my job.

All of the neutron-detection experiments I've seen (SPAWAR, various post-Pons things, etc.) have been sloppy, miscalibrated, and mis-analyzed, in a way that makes me not believe their results. Simple as that.

Is there a paper I haven't read somewhere in there? Sure, lots of them. This is not my problem, this is your problem. Clean up your own house. Kick out the crackpots. Raise your publication standards. Figure out how to elevate that good paper so I don't have to read 200,000 words of chaff to find it.

That's what every other field has done. When there's a surprising (and well-constructed) experiment in cosmic-ray research, I don't have to read 16 conference's worth of unrefereed crackpot crap to find it. The good stuff filters to the top.

So, what has filtered to the top of the cold-fusion attention list? Crappy-detector-based SPAWAR, sub-undergrad-guesswork Widom and Larsen, and scammer Rossi. It certainly sounds as though the rest of it must be even worse, and my occasional wade into the conference papers confirms this.

 

[pteridine]

Utter nonsense. We've tested the laws of particle physics at all available energies. I can think of particle-physics experiments dealing with phenomena at the nano-eV (ultracold neutrons), micro-eV (anomalous magnetic moments), eV (atom and laser), keV (Mossbauer effect, exotic atoms, etc.), and so on up to the LHC, and (at amazing energies but low precision) Pierre Auger.

Terrific. If some of those neutron experiments were done in a solid metal matrix showing high hydrogen solubility, they may be useful in describing the phenomenon. If they were done in crossed laser beams, maybe not so much.

 

[Aepervius]

Many who immediately rejected LENR as fraudulent

When you start as a strawman, it doesn't go very far.

LENR is rejected because it has given no reproducible results, neither did it gives a falsfiable theory. It is neither ejected as fraudulent , nor is it immediately rejected.

Rossi is the one which might be fraudulent.

 

[pteridine]

I've clicked through lots and lots of papers, and seen lots of evidence, not of fraud, but of incompetence. I know low-background neutron detection, Pteridine, it's by job. I know systematic and statistical error issues in low-background counting experiments. It's my job. I know how to construct a counting-experiment that avoids unconscious experimenter bias. It's my job.

All of the neutron-detection experiments I've seen (SPAWAR, various post-Pons things, etc.) have been sloppy, miscalibrated, and mis-analyzed, in a way that makes me not believe their results. Simple as that.

Is there a paper I haven't read somewhere in there? Sure, lots of them. This is not my problem, this is your problem. Clean up your own house. Kick out the crackpots. Raise your publication standards. Figure out how to elevate that good paper so I don't have to read 200,000 words of chaff to find it.

That's what every other field has done. When there's a surprising (and well-constructed) experiment in cosmic-ray research, I don't have to read 16 conference's worth of unrefereed crackpot crap to find it. The good stuff filters to the top.

So, what has filtered to the top of the cold-fusion attention list? Crappy-detector-based SPAWAR, sub-undergrad-guesswork Widom and Larsen, and scammer Rossi. It certainly sounds as though the rest of it must be even worse, and my occasional wade into the conference papers confirms this.

OK, Ben. I don't affect publication standards and only read the papers. Any unfunded research area has to expect varying levels of standards, instrumentation, and number of experiments. I understand your position.

The latest from Rossi is that a 45 MW unit is under construction. There will be no way to sneak 45 MW into the system. If it works, it will be difficult to deny the phenomenon exists, bad neutron counters or not.

In your opinion, how do gel neutron detectors stack up with integrating spheres? If you saw a gel detector with, say, a dozen bubbles and an identical detector 20 feet away with no bubbles, could you conclude anything from that experiment?

 

[pteridine]

If

"If" what?

 

[ben m]

Terrific. If some of those neutron experiments were done in a solid metal matrix showing high hydrogen solubility, they may be useful in describing the phenomenon. If they were done in crossed laser beams, maybe not so much.

Funny thing is, I know of lots of competent experiments on the behavior of deuterium adsorbed on palladium. You know what those experiments show? Nothing whatsoever. They show that hydrogen chemically adsorbs on the metal, and desorbs upon heating, and has an interesting phase diagram, and an H-independent electrochemical potential, and does not emit helium, gamma rays or neutrons. Why do you ignore those experiments, pteridine?

All of that is perfectly in line with the predictions of quantum mechanics, and consistent with the quantum mechanical laws confirmed in the other experiments.

The few excess-heat results are outliers. It is very common to find that incompetent experimenters produce outlier results. I've got a stack of undergrad lab reports on my laptop in which this phenomenon is quite visible.

 

[attaboy]

You are the one claiming it works.

The burden of proof is upon you to support your assertion.

Read again! I said high probability - - - not certainty.
People on here are far too combative to be given much credence.

 

[ben m]

In your opinion, how do gel neutron detectors stack up with integrating spheres? If you saw a gel detector with, say, a dozen bubbles and an identical detector 20 feet away with no bubbles, could you conclude anything from that experiment?

I presume you mean a Bonner sphere? Integrating spheres are optical components.

I would never use a gel detector OR an Bonner sphere (or, God forbid, a SPAWAR-style track etch detector) for a high-precision experiment. They're for *dosimetry*, i.e. "am I in a neutron environment that's likely to kill me". That means that they give a linear-ish dose/response curve at high doses, and a "who cares, no one uses it for that" curve at low doses.

Let's pretend you said "a boron-loaded scintillation counter" nearby saw 20 verifiable, pulse-shape-selected neutron events, and a far one saw none? Show me the detector calibration series that verifies that this is not room-dependent, scatterer-dependent (was there a human---a big pile of neutron-moderating hydrogen---positioned near one of these detectors?) electrical noise, detector differences, etc. Show me the double-blind analysis and run selection procedure that verifies that the experimenter didn't take 1000 runs and cherry-pick the one that "worked". Show me the neutron source calibration. And so on.

 

[attaboy]

In other words you pretend and can't present. That shows what kind of poster you are, you don't have data and evidence. You have rhetoric!

'second rate sceptic', oh sir I wounded to the quick, rather than present data , you play grade school taunting.

Well played, if you want to show your lack of data.

You come on here with bits and pieces (or less) of what you call evidence, and then try to come up with a big case of skepticism. Meanwhile, you show indication that you know very little about what is going on overall with lenr. There's a lot more happening than just what Rossi does. But you don't even seem to be aware of that and I'm not going to take the time to educate you.
I don't claim to have great lenr knowledge either. But I've read enough to know that only a fool would designate Rossi's work to present as either an outright fraud or a smashing success.

 

[pteridine]

Funny thing is, I know of lots of competent experiments on the behavior of deuterium adsorbed on palladium. You know what those experiments show? Nothing whatsoever. They show that hydrogen chemically adsorbs on the metal, and desorbs upon heating, and has an interesting phase diagram, and an H-independent electrochemical potential, and does not emit helium, gamma rays or neutrons. Why do you ignore those experiments, pteridine?

All of that is perfectly in line with the predictions of quantum mechanics, and consistent with the quantum mechanical laws confirmed in the other experiments.

The few excess-heat results are outliers. It is very common to find that incompetent experimenters produce outlier results. I've got a stack of undergrad lab reports on my laptop in which this phenomenon is quite visible.

In the case of LENR, D2 or H2 is not just adsorbed on the metal surface, it is dissolved in the metal.
Why do you misrepresent those experiments, Ben?

 

[ben m]

In the case of LENR, D2 or H2 is not just adsorbed on the metal surface, it is dissolved in the metal.

Sorry, I spoke imprecisely. Yes, there have been thousands of experiments with absorbed D2 and H2 on Pd. Including (but not restricted to) experiments explicitly attempting to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's setup, and disagreeing with their results.