A guy named Andrea Rossi has been promoting this device call the E-Cat that produces huge amounts of energy by nuclear fusion: specifically, that it fuses hydrogen and nickel to produce copper and energy. And now there is a claim that this amazing result has been verified, in a remarkably gushing and credulous review.
I am not a physicist, not even close. I am at best a moderately well-read layman. I also understand the general principles of fusion — it’s how stars work, it’s how heavier elements have been built up over the history of the universe from lighter ones. I might be willing to naively concede that maybe you can get two elements to fuse under conditions present on earth…but then I would ask, in my charmingly simplistic understanding of nuclear reactions, what about the left over bits? You say you’ve brought these two atoms together in a high-energy reaction, you’ve got oodles of power flowing out of this, don’t these reactions always spew out a few subatomic particles? And if there really is all this energy available, aren’t they going to be flying out of the collision with tremendous power, producing what we civilians call deadly radiation?
You’re running a small nuclear reactor, you claim, on a table top…and there doesn’t seem to be any shielding at all. And you’re claiming phenomenal power output.
To put this into perspective, the E-Cat tested by the researchers has an energy density of 1.6×109 Wh/kg and power density of 2.1×106 W/kg. This is orders (plural) of magnitude higher than anything else ever tested — somewhere in the region of 100 times more power than the best supercapacitors, and maybe a million times more energy than gasoline. In the words of the researchers, “These values place the E-Cat beyond any other known conventional source of energy.”
Again with my childlike understanding of these kinds of processes…if I were in a room with something burning with a million times the intensity of gasoline, even if it was a tiny quantity, I’d be worried about containment. Why aren’t these guys? They all seem to be assuming that there is 100% efficiency in the conversion of hydrogen plus nickel into electricity…but where does that happen in the real world?
Not being a physicist, though, I could be missing something, so I looked for someone who knew these things better than I do. Here’s Ethan Siegel confirming my intuition about cold fusion — not only would all the possible nuclear reactions from these components produce lots of γ radiation, but the reaction is so improbably and requires such high energies that it doesn’t even occur in supernovae.
There are photos of the old device there that look like they’ve been wrapped in a layer of tinfoil. To block γ radiation. Right. And the new version looks like a bit of pvc pipe.
I think I’m satisfied that this new cold fusion thingie is fake. They didn’t provide the evidence that would satisfy a biologist: the investigators aren’t all dead.
I would be behind lead-lined walls when testing CT scanners when I worked on image reconstruction software. And that was with radiation that was meant to hit people.
But he’s got meters and laptops and mysterious purple boxes with wires coming out of them and big, red buttons and everything! They just scream credible science experiment.
Ah, you’re just falling for the tricks of the evil oil companies, who want to keep all that cheap power from killing their business. After all, it’s not like those big companies would jump into the cold fusion game themselves, and find yet another way to make lots of money, while still making lots of money selling oil for all those things it will still be handy for. Nope, oil is the only thing that they care about, not making lots of money.
If there is a discovery of cold fusion, it would necessitate new ideas in physics almost by definition. So applying standard knowledge of physics to criticize such an idea seems odd. It as if Einstein says “I’ve discovered Newtonian physics is wrong” and you reply “Your theory doesn’t jive with Newtonian physics, so your theory must be wrong.”
I am not an expert in nuclear physics, but I do know a few things. One of the things I learned about nucleogenesis is that it takes more energy to fuse iron (atomic number 26) than the energy released by the fusion. This is also true of all elements heavier than iron, which include nickle (atomic number 28).
That right there would make me very skeptical of the claims of high energy produced by fusing nickle.
I had a similar reaction when I first heard about cold fusion. “That would be wonderful if true, but it just doesn’t mesh with what I know about the subject.”
@ rghthndsd: Nope.
Seriously, just NO. First of all, Einstein didn’t discover that Newtonian physics was wrong; he discovered that it was incomplete. For motion far from the speed of light, Newtonian physics is still what we use.
We understand really well how nuclear processes work. There are none in which you combine two nuclei and end up with one stable product and heat and nothing else. So to correct your analogy, it’s as if Oneston says “I’ve discovered that hitting a baseball with a bat causes it to fly off at the speed of light with no sound” and you reply “Your theory doesn’t jibe with everything we already know, so it must be wrong.” Thus not only showing that this new theory is worth ignoring, but that you also understand the difference between “jive” and “jibe” .
Mobius is correct: iron (Fe) is the peak of the nuclear binding energy. That means that synthesizing elements up to iron from lighter elements yields. Above Fe, it requires input of energy. So right there, you know that it is not only bullshit, but utter and complete bullshit. Another thing–I don’t think this is a reaction that would occur without the addition of neutrons–Cu likes a lot more neutrons in the nucleus to be stable than does Ni. This guy is an utter imbecile.
@Jonny Vector: If one uses Newtonian physics, it produces incorrect results. The error is tremendously small in everyday situations, so yes often times Newtonian physics still produces results which are accurate enough that they can be used. But these results are still very much wrong. See for example the history of the orbit of Mercury.
And we do understand very well how nuclear processes work. And this does go very much against all that we understand. My only point is that when someone says “I discovered something that goes against the current understanding of physics and chemistry”, saying “Your discovery goes against the current understanding of physics and chemistry and is therefore bunk” is not an appropriate response.
#4
Yes, but the problem is that we have no reason to suspect that the cold fusion claim is even tenable, having multiple reasons instead to discard the entire concept. Your approach seems to be that, since it is clearly impossible according to our current knowledge, we need to …throw out our current knowledge and get ready to believe?
Besides, there is a really basic flaw with attempting fusion with nickel. As soon as we reach iron 26, fusion no longer releases energy in the form of heat. It becomes endothermic, and hence drains rather than produces energy.
@Holms: “Your approach seems to be that, since it is clearly impossible according to our current knowledge, we need to …throw out our current knowledge and get ready to believe?”
Is there anything in my comment that suggests I think this? Saying “This is a bad way to criticize X” is not same as saying “I think we should support idea X”.
But you’re using standard models of nuclear physics to explain how to get energy out of a fusion reaction! You don’t get to just discard the parts you find inconvenient and keep the bits that give you energy for free.
And in non-cold fusion news, http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/10/z-machine-makes-progress-toward-nuclear-fusion.. Note the difference in the reports. The Sandia labs folks are announcing a baby step towards the goal and it is in what looks — to the lay person — like a real peer review journal, Physical Review Letters. Really, really, really not a physicist, but I’ve heard of Sandia labs. Note also the lack of over-blown adjectives.
Pipped twice already, nice. In my defense, replies 5+ did not exist when I began typing.
#8
But it is the appropriate response if the claimant offers no information beyond repeating the spectacular claims.
Also, I wouldn’t characterise the results obtained by Newtonian physics for mundane speeds to be incorrect in the slightest, as the discrepancies produced are orders of magnitude smaller than the precision of any measurement we can make.
When someone says they have discovered something that works outside the laws of physics they have to prove it, no one has to prove them wrong, although the fact that they are not floating off into space is pretty good evidence that the laws of physics are still working as advertised.
@Holms #13: “But it is the appropriate response if the claimant offers no information beyond repeating the spectacular claims.”
That is an appropriate responses, regardless of whether what is being claimed is ordinary or extraordinary. Claims that can be made without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. It doesn’t matter what the claim is about; that it is about cold fusion is completely superfluous.
“Also, I wouldn’t characterise the results obtained by Newtonian physics for mundane speeds to be incorrect in the slightest, as the discrepancies produced are orders of magnitude smaller than the precision of any measurement we can make.”
What an ugly universe you live in. In certain situations we have these (Newtonian) laws of physics, but in other situations they no longer apply and we need to use these alternative (relativistic) ones. Of course, the alternative ones always work.
#15
“What an ugly universe you live in.”
…What? You are weirdly antagonistic.
@Holms #16
That was a bit vague, but my guess is you didn’t follow why I was saying “ugly”. A basic principle in physics is that the laws of the universe should be universal – they should apply equally everywhere. You however suggest we should use two different sets of laws depending on what situation we’re in, when in fact only one set is needed to explain everything. That is ugly.
From the photos on the linked web site, it looks to me like a power supply connected to a heating coil wrapped around an insulator and covered with foil. A fine demonstration of electrical energy being converted to heat and light, but nothing more.
Well, I’m so sure it’s bullshit that I’ll put money on it. (I used to be a certified radiation worker and worked in a nuclear facility. Chemist, not a physicist, but familiar enough with this area of physics.)
@5, @7: I’m not an expert either, but surely you have to worry about the exact isotopes in question. Wikipedia indicates that Ni-62 is in fact the peak binding energy, followed by Fe-58 and Fe-56. Links off that (vague) article suggest they’re starting with lighter Ni isotopes. A brief Google doesn’t turn up a convenient table of binding energies for Ni or Cu isotopes, so maybe there might be an exothermic Ni=>Cu transition, for a suitable choice of isotopes, but I don’t know. FWIW, chasing links leads to a NASA page about the same idea, and I have a hard time believing NASA people are stupid enough to overlook such an obvious show-stopper.
As it happens, there is a Wikipedia article on Rossi’s device: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer. Objections from the physics world seem to revolve around overcoming the activation energy and/or lack of gamma emission. Whatever the merits of the basic idea, Rossi’s work seems undoubtedly to be a fraud.
OK, let’s look at some things we do know, and have verified experimentally:
1) The most common isotope of nickel is Ni-58; on Earth, it’s about 68% of all nickel.
2) The next most common isotope of nickel is Ni-60; it’s another 26% or so.
3) A fusion reaction between hydrogen and either of these isotopes–neglecting any assumptions about whether such a reaction is possible, so we’re just basing this on conservation of mass and charge–will give either Cu-59 or Cu-61. We’re told that copper is the product, so let’s assume that this is what is happening.
4) Cu-59 has an observed half-life of about 80 seconds, transforming by positron decay to Ni-59, which is unstable but has a half-life of about 75000 years.
5) Cu-61 is also unstable, having an observed half-life on the order of 3.3 hours. It’s another positron emitter, and decays to Ni-61.
So based purely on conservation of mass and charge, and on observations about the abundance and behavior of copper and nickel isotopes, it is really unlikely that the system works the way that Rossi claims it does.
Now, I will grant that the least abundant stable nickel isotope plus hydrogen will give a stable isotope of copper, but Ni-64 is less than 1% of nickel on Earth, and Rossi et al claimed to see 10% copper in a sample that started out as 100% nickel. That implies that either they’re wrong about what’s happening, or they’re spitting out a lot of positrons when they build up stable copper isotopes by multiple fusion/decay events.
rghthndsd @17:
We use a whole bunch of different sets of laws depending on the situation. I hope you’re not suggesting that NASA use quantum field theory on a curved spacetime to calculate trajectories.
@18 Carol nailed it. Physics is littered with observations that tend to boil down to difficulties seperating energy ins and outs.
#17
Or you didn’t convey your intended meaning well. Regardless, it remains entirely appropriate to use different formulae to describe motion if the situation being described is sufficiently different;note that this is not the same as saying that the physical laws themselves have changed.
@rghthndsd
Maybe cough up a specific example of the physics PZ wrote that would need to be different. And then compare it to the newtonian physics example, to see if that item is actually one of the conclusions that will remain the same on both models of physics.
Like, look at this newton example:
You are implying this is silly. It isn’t. Relativity basically does jive with newtonian physics. So if someone said “I’ve discovered Newtonian physics is wrong” and it gave predictions of everyday motion that don’t even match our observations of everyday motions, it isn’t silly at all to point out how it doesn’t jive with what we already know fairly certainly.
Your going to have to make this kind of distinction if you want your comment to be meaningful. As it stands, your comment is silly.
Holms #24:
“Or you didn’t convey your intended meaning well.” Agreed.
Rob #22, Holms #24: Yes, we do use different theories depending on the situation in practice, because as already noted Newtonian mechanics is extremely accurate in everyday situations. However we understand that there is an error term there, we understand why the error is there, and we understand the theoretical framework to correct it (on large scales – outside the quantum universe). This correction resolves old paradoxes, predicts new phenomenon that have been observed, and allows us to probe the universe in new ways. To then still call Newtonian physics “correct” is to me unacceptable, regardless of its use in practice.
It would be like that if they had new ideas or evidence to actually think about, which was then rejected dogmatically. But it isn’t like that.
Have we got the Newtonian Nit well picked?
Ever think that relativistic equations essentially become Newtonian equations at low speeds compared to light? Just like van der Waals equation for gasses approaches ideal gas law at low pressures and temperatures. It is just easier to use the forms without the corrections needed for extreme conditions for a large amounts of uses.
@brian #25
“Maybe cough up a specific example of the physics PZ wrote that would need to be different.”
I don’t have the time nor expertise to go through the 53 page report. Furthermore, my understanding is that the report is of an experimental nature – they don’t attempt to explain the results with theory. Please correct me if I am wrong here. Assuming this is the case, to give a specific example would then require a deep analysis of the report and new theoretical research. Certainly such a request is not reasonable here.
“So if someone said “I’ve discovered Newtonian physics is wrong” and it gave predictions of everyday motion that don’t even match our observations of everyday motions, it isn’t silly at all to point out how it doesn’t jive with what we already know fairly certainly.”
If someone has tried this experimental setup before and did not produce the same results, that would certainly be very valid criticism of this. But to my knowledge that hasn’t occurred.
Oh good grief. Are you one of those people where if on confronting someone who thought the earth was flat heard a reply that the earth is round would jump in and declare “You’re both wrong. It is actually an oblate spheroid”?
I’d just dismiss this stuff out of hand, because, it’s the 21st century: we’ve already discovered all “easy” ways of getting lots of energy out of things (getting energy out of oil is probably not “easy”, nevertheless…). At this point, anything more will require giant international efforts to make experimental fussion reactors in some quite French hamlet. It’ll never happen that we’ll all wake up next year to news of some overlooked genius inventing perpetual motion using a few transistors in his dank basement.
Well, as long as they didn’t know ahead of time that they would’ve been fried by radiation, I guess that means they’re safe.
Is this the first time you’ve heard of cold fusion experiments? Because you’re extremely gullible or just plain ignorant (or both). These things “happen” about every year as far as I can tell — maybe a holiday should be set aside for it — except the cold fusion part doesn’t actually happen, just the same old cranks aching for attention and scamming people for more “funding.”
@conscioiusness razor #33
I’m not sure where your second paragraph comes from. Have I given any indication that I think this result is anything but absurd? The only two points I’ve been arguing thus far are
1. Saying that an observation that goes against our current understanding is wrong because it goes against our current understanding is bad science; and
2. Newtonian physics is not correct (which is tangential at best and unfortunately arose from my example in #4).
Yeah, when you say shit like this:
There is no real observation here. This is just bullshit. If you think there’s a legit piece of physical evidence that this experiment has offered, which is being argued against as such, you’re not treating it like the absurd spectacle that it actually is.
You evidently want to pick a fucking nit, not based on anything anyone actually wrote, but based on some vague analogy you think this has between Newton and Einstein. But they are not even analogous. At best, you’re just confused. At worst, you’re trying to sow confusion. I’m trying to assume the former, for now.
And GR isn’t consistent with QM. So? Do you think there are a bunch of die-hard Newtonians here or something? Even if weren’t tangential, what the fuck would you be arguing about?
And I didn’t ask you to. I asked you for something to differentiate yourself from:
1)bringing up “newton was wrong” at a time when someone claims to have jumped to the moon
and
2)bringing up “newton was wrong” when someone claims to have warped the fabric of space.
To me it looks like you are the first one. Just tell me why, when you read PZ post, you thought you were being the second one. Or maybe you don’t, I suspect you just threw that out there without really thinking.
what gamma radiation does to DNA will be very familiar to old-school molecular geneticists interested in gene discovery.
What’s tiring is some of the defender’s of these type of “experiments” read too much sci-fi with the trope of the lone uneducated genius making some scientific major discovery and changing the world is standard fare. The fi part of sci-fi stands for fiction. Makes for a good yarn, but isn’t congruent with reality.
Therefore, any criticism is invalid, because nobody has replicated their experiment that they don’t give details on how to replicate. And if your version test produces no results, then you obviously did something wrong, you terrible doubting small minded person.
*end sarc*
Everything is true until proven not true method???
No it isn’t. That is exactly what should be concluded, that’s one major reason why we have “current understandings”, so that we can eliminate some things as wrong.
You’re even begging the question by giving this the status of an “observation”. It’s a claim.
@markd555
That’s not what they said.
@consciousness razor #35:
“If you think there’s a legit piece of physical evidence that this experiment has offered, which is being argued against as such, you’re not treating it like the absurd spectacle that it actually is.”
Because I find claims of cold fusion distinctively uninteresting and boring. What I find interesting here is the attempt used to discredit such claims. What I see being done here is certainly a very reasonable justification to say “I am not going to devote time and resources into investigating this further because it appears to go against everything we know and understand.” However then there is a jump made from this very reasonable statement to “therefore their results must be wrong”. That is what I find extremely objectionable, and those who make such a jump threaten to slow the progress of science. They will be correct (100-epsilon)% of the time (epsilon some real number > 0), but there is a possibility that they will be wrong and a revolution in science will occur. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen.
@brian #36: I’m sorry for being dense, but I don’t understand your comment in its entirety.
There is exactly zero test equipment present in the photo that measures the heat output. To do that you need some sort of calorimeter whether it be water or air based. Some ceramics that NASA has can be glowing red but picked up in your bare hands. They insulate so well that the thermal flow is extremely limited.
To measure the power out they need to measure the rise in temperature of either air or water flowing past the device at a known rate.
At the moment the experiments is BS.
@mark #39: I believe there setup is in their 53 page report. Is it not?
@brian #40: The point I’m making is that we use experiment to test theories, and the statement here is that this experiment goes against the current established theory and therefore the experiment is wrong. Without much analysis of the experiment and perhaps even attempts at replication, this is bad science. As I said above, it does not follow from this that one should devote resources to doing so.
“You’re even begging the question by giving this the status of an “observation”. It’s a claim.”
Agreed. Observation is perhaps the wrong word here. The setup and measurements are complex and to say “observation” implies (I think) that their are right. That is certainly not established.
E-Cat is a well-known scam in the community.
You still might want to check out http://lenr-canr.org/
And might be surprised about the terribly funded research on the topic.
http://iccf19.com/home.html
It’s not just some crooks experimenting in their garages.
@rghthndsd #34
1. This is wrong. The physics is very well understood and very well tested.
It is as if your next door neighbour were to claim that all the laws of thermodynamics were incorrect because his perpetual motion machine was giving out more energy than he was putting in.
rghthndsd @ 42:
Best get on to testing all of those perpetual motion machines, then… they could be right y’know – maybe the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is Juss’ Plain Wrong and nobody has noticed until now.
After all, if I assume my machine is a revolution in science and also don’t attempt to explain it theoretically, it’s unfair to use physics to say it won’t work… right? And, heck, if the current design doesn’t seem to work, next week, if I wind my copper coil counterclockwise, it might work! Can’t use physics to say it won’t!
It’s not even original science fiction–It sounds WAY too much like the atomic energy system used in E.E. “Doc” Smith’s THE SKYLARK OF SPACE–first published in 1928! In the Skylark series, a lone scientist at the Bureau of Rare Metals stumbles on total-conversion energy. The process uses copper, electricity, a strange metal in the platinum-iridium family called “X”, and the radiations from an unusual particle accelerator called the “whatsitron”. When Seaton (or his rival, DuQuesne) combines them properly, near-unlimited energy with no side effects. When anyone else tries it–BOOM! The details are, of course, different, but it sounds very much the same concept…
@Anri #47: You are misquoting me. Please see my sentence three up from the one you quoted.
Reading the “report” you’ll notice one thing they don’t do: run the same experiment with the same power with and without the “fuel.” Page 7-8 : “However, it was not meant to compare the operation of the loaded reactor to the dummy run. In fact, such a procedure would have required that the same amount of power be supplied to the dummy and to the reactor. Moreover, at the start of the measurements, there was no way of knowing what input power the loaded reactor would have absorbed. In fact, it is well known that some Inconel cables have a crystalline structure that is modified by temperature, and are capable of withstanding high currents only if they are operated at the appropriate temperature. If these conditions are not met, microscopic melt spots are liable to occur in the cables. So, there was some fear of fracturing the ceramic body, due to the lower temperature of the thermal generators with respect to the loaded reactor. For these reasons, power to the dummy reactor was held at below 500 W, in order to avoid any possible damage to the apparatus.” << this is pretty fatuous, why not repeat the dummy run afterward at higher power?
So the dummy run is at about half the input power as the"fueled" run. We will never know what their temperature system would have said at the same power for a real dummy run.
Then there is the fact that they have no real measure of the power output: thermal radiation from a black body calculation with some estimated emissivity? One burnt handprint smudge and the emissivity jumps upward. How much power is reflected back into the system from those metal bars surrounding the "reactor" ? Also, convection is hugely affected by the air flow geometry around the object. Their numbers are almost meaningless and because there is no comparison at either the same input or output power there is no way to check the calibration. They say they were worried about how hot everything is, there are plenty of calorimeter set-ups that can deal with hot stuff. You put it in a insulated box with water-cooled internal walls and measure the water temperature change at a known flow for instance. [ The last removes all of those silly emissivity calculations – the only way for energy to get out is in the water. Emissivity effects just show up as different internal temperatures.] Of course, if you let the water boil you've made yourself a real boiler-powered power plant.]
I am guessing that refection is the dominant problem, since radiation is T^4, making their low temperature dummy run really useless. The radiation calculation also ignores the sample shape and texture which means a significant fraction of the emitted light shines back on itself reducing the output radiation flux.
All in all, a lot of crap, even viewed from here.
You don’t need any expertise in physics, and you only need read as far as the top of page 7:
Nope, it is good science and skepticism. Make them evidence their claim properly. Besides, nickel catalyzes the reduction by hydrogen of many chemicals, and any oxygen present would be converted to water plus heat (steam if hot enough). My skeptical senses went to red alert.
rghthndsd @ 49:
My apologies, I did misinterpret that statement.
By way of amends, let me try to summarize your position to see if I understand:
You believe that it is possible that these people have made a paradigm-shattering breakthrough in the realm of physics, but that it’s not worth the time and trouble to investigate it.
Did I get that right?
@Anri #53: It depends on your definition of possible. I typically use such a word in a very logical sense, and in which case then your summary is correct. However I find that many other people use the word “possible” to mean something akin to “you know, there very well may just be something here” in which case your summary is off.
Aside from anything else, the “experiment” isn’t an experiment in any scientific sense, because the experimental materials (specifically, the E-cat) are not adequately described.
rghthndsd @ 54:
I’m not assuming any particular definition of ‘possible’ – I’m willing to go with your preference – I’m just trying to boil your argument down to a short statement.
Given that, have I summarized you sufficiently?
@Nick #51: Any actual study of the report is not what I’m complaining about. Any specific reasons as to why the experimental setup is flawed are of course great. Rather, it is the use of “this doesn’t agree with theory” to then immediately say the experiment is flawed is what I am objecting to. That being said, I don’t understand what is wrong with the quoted paragraph (although I have also not looked at the text which precedes it either).
rghthnsd, as xe admits, lacks the expertise to assess this drivel, but i’m sure xe has several advanced degrees in pedantry.
@Anri #56:
Sure, then as I said, if one uses “possible” in the logical sense, then yes you have summarized well. Of course, something being “possible” is very much insufficient reason to generate further inquiry. I am thinking of something like the teapot orbiting Pluto example.
Then object away, but as a practicing scientist for 35+ year, I’ll disagree with you. It is drivel from the get-go, and part of being a scientist is to be able to distinguish something that makes sense (tokamak fusion), something that makes one say “that is interesting” (original cold fusion by Pons and Fleishmann), and something that is so wrong it isn’t even wrong (this).
@Nick #58: I think you are suggesting that philosophy of science is an exercise of pedantry, and I find this to be a very reasonable position. It’s just not one I hold.
@57, rghthndsd
And I think what you’re missing is that not all such situations are equal.
Obviously science would not advance if everything was rejected which didn’t already fit into confirmed theories.
But that doesn’t mean that using known theories to conclude an error has no place.
I guess what people in this conversation need to do is clearly set out what place it does and doesn’t have, and why. Sounds like a lot of work, but it’s better than people going in circles with quips and not much mutual understanding of each other’s positions.
Yes, so you’ve said more times than I care to count, and it’s still a completely daft objection, as several people have pointed out to you.
Srsly? Here’s a guy claiming he has an invention which would revolutionise both nuclear physics and the global economy, which is supposedly being tested to verify his claims, and the investigators let him “intervene” on numerous occasions.
Rossi’s been dragging his machine out in the news every few years for a while now in order to con new people into giving him money. I suppose it’s progress that he had to get other people to push it now, whereas he used to just do press releases and not allow anyone to look inside the machine or know enough about it to try and duplicate the experiment independently.
Side-note, but it’s good to see that the crazies didn’t show up in force in response to Cold Fusion talk. It tends to be one of those issues where the “I want to believe!” crowd swarms in, like they did on the Ethan Siegel blog post’s comments:
@Nerd of Redhead, #60: The history of science is littered with people who have said that good science is wrong because it was completely incompatible with what was understood at the time. Even so, there are far far far more people who have said that bad science is wrong because it was completely incompatible with what was understood at the time. I have no doubt you are in the latter camp in this case.
But when both groups use precisely the same reasoning and come out with right and wrong answers, then the reasoning itself must be flawed.
No, they don’t. They only need to note that it is absolutely reasonable in this case, where the theory is well-understood, we do not observe all kinds of things we would expect to observe if it was wrong, and the “experiment” is a complete crock. Which they have.
Give them time; it’s only been up a few hours.
No, i’m not. I’m suggesting you know fuck-all about the philosophy of science.
@rghthndsd #42
I think that’s a fair point. Though we should be able to dismiss things completely sometimes. I’m thinking of the first 10 minutes of this talk by Sean Carroll:
(modulo the guitar playing intro). There should be things (moon-made-from-green-cheese theory) we can just say is bs, without doing any testing. It’s not the same as, say, when people criticized plate tectonics, or Boltzmann’s statmech theories.
@Nick: I don’t see how you can make such an assessment, and again reveals your all too willingness to jump to a conclusion.
rghthndsd @ 59:
My point is that checking agreement with theoretical frameworks is a very good way of making the judgment as to the question of if an experiment is worth pursuing or not.
To put it another way, how did you arrive at your conclusion that this isn’t worth pursuing?
What metric did you use?
@gakxz1: I agree with your statement, but the level of ridiculousness of the claim “the moon is made of cheese” is orders of magnitude above the claim of cold fusion. Where to draw the line between these two would be a matter for a completely different debate, I think.
@Anri #71: I agree with your assessment – agreement with a theoretical framework or perhaps an explanation as to how that framework is wrong would be good justification for pursuing something further. That is clearly lacking here.
Re PZ @ 11. Once upon a time, many lifetimes ago, or so it seems I was once a physics-math major at a rather prestigious university. PRL is about as *core* as it gets in physics. But one thing that non-scientists don’t get is that even when an article discussing a claim is discussed in the most acclaimed and core publications, it doesn’t mean that the topic hypothesis is as yet accepted and agreed upon consensus in physics. It simply means that there is a consensus that the hypothesis is worthy of attention. That is, if it is published in a top journal it means “let’s talk about this”; it doesn’t mean “yes, we think this is true”.
In this case, of course, I don’t think there’s much from Sandia Labs that is likely to be controversial from the POV of physicists generally. For that matter I don’t think there’s much from our cold fusion friends that physicists will have difficulty reaching consensus upon, unless it is how hard to laugh.
— TWZ
@rghthndsd
“What I see being done here is certainly a very reasonable justification to say “I am not going to devote time and resources into investigating this further because it appears to go against everything we know and understand.” ”
A considerable amount of time, money and resources were spent into investigating various cold fusion claims. (Plus several deaths from lab accidents)
They found that everything we knew and understand was working as expected.
Jochen Bedersdorfer@45,
Despite what you say, your first link seems to regard the “test” of Rossi’s magic transmuter as “definitive”, which doesn’t suggest that it’s recognised as a scam in the community – if you meant the cold fusion community.
Interestingly, following your second link and then going to the “history” page, we find:
Now what does that remind me of?
Unevidenced claim (even if truthful), so dismissed without evidence. It is irrelevant bullshit. I have seen no relevant argument from you. Read Asimov’s Relativity of wrong. That is where I, and other serious scientists, are coming from when we say “dismissed as crankism”.
@Nerd of Redhead #77: The claim you highlight, is it really one you disagree with? Would it really be worth our time to discuss such a claim?
@50 If Rossi wasn’t a scam artist, he would have pulled the oil or gas burner out of his home furnace and put his toy in. He claims that his energy use would be halved.
A reasonable discussion of the problems with using emissivity to measure temperature:
http://www.pyrometer.com/Tech/emissivity_technology.html
The above mentions the effects of reflections on measuring the temperature but in fact reflections are an even bigger effect on heat flux – think aluminum foil to keep things warm.
Of course the emissivity is used twice – once to get the temperature and again to calculate the heat flux.
(Note the errors in doing this don’t cancel (linear versus T^4) and are over different spectral ranges.)
Why is this claim worthy of ANY consideration.
Tokamak fusion. Known energetics, know methodology, engineering problems. Believe.
Pons and Flieshmann’s cold fusion, Energetically OK, mechanism implausible. More research (I gave six months for the energetics and neutron emissions to match. Hasn’t ever happened.)
This case. No energetics, thermodynamics say no. No mechanism. Crank at work.
Now, argue you case for….
Oh, and I should add reductions using hydrogen/nickel are common in the chemical industry. No reports of excess energy for 150 years. Why now????
@Nerd of Redhead, #80 – You completely don’t understand my position if you think I am arguing that this example of cold fusion is worth any further consideration.
I really don’t understand the physics and am not going to argue them, but my bottom line is that this claim is so extraordinary that until the experiment is fully repeated by a fully independent laboratory with appropriate measurements I am going to remain skeptical.
As far as the comment about Einstein claimed that Newton was wrong, my understanding is that Einstein was explaining the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, that showed the speed of light was constant. This was already counter to Newtonian physics. Newton was not wrong, just not applicable at these speeds.
You don’t understand your own position then.
Why is this claim worthy of any attention, given that it isn’t energetically possible, and the mechanism, if it really occurred, would kill the room occupants with radiation? Why should it not be dismissed out of hand?
Explain that using science, not just an opinion.
@rghthndsd
There has never been any revolution in science that has ever changed actual observations in nature. Baseballs did not stop moving in parabolic arcs because Einstein overturned Newton. The sun did not suddenly collapse into a black hole just because Relativity showed that black holes were possible.
Similarly, Newton’s equations did not stop accurately describing the orbit of Mars the moment Relativity came along.
And if the theoretical mechanism proposed for this finding is true, we SHOULD have seen evidence for it happening in nature, in stars and supernovae. And we DON’T.
If nickel-hydrogen fusion were actually feasible within these temperature and pressure ranges AND produces useful energy (note that BOTH claims are being made here, one of which would overturn all currently accepted physics, and the other of which RELIES ENTIRELY on the correctness of currently accepted physics to be valid), then quite literally the stars in the sky would not be shining the way we see them shine.
Hi,
It seems people here are still in 1989.
the evidence of the dead intern is a joke of tha period.
Now (since 1991) cold fusion is massively replicated and this is visible by more than 150 peer reviewed papers showing excess heat in LENR experiments.
http://LENR-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf#page=6
there are also many tritium evidence, a dozen of studies of Helium4 and heat, some on transmutation (recent replication of Iwamura at Mitsubishi are done in Toyota by Takahashi, and both published in refereed journal JJAP)…
I send you to this article published in Naturwissenshaften for a review of the domain
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00114-010-0711-x
http://LENR-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEstatusofcoa.pdf
Ed storms made few article for various population, from student to dummies, a book called “the science of LENR”, and recently he write “the explanation of LENR” where he mostly explain while current theories are mostly impossible, but after identifying what it have to be, he propose a naive theory based on :
– the reaction is aneutronic p-e-p fusion, d-e-d
– the reaction is neither in the Pd bulk, nor on the clear surface but in a complex localized structure in a zone where the composition is very complex : the NAE.
– the NAE is a multi-body coherent quantum object with many energy states which can absorb huge energy and dissipate by tiny quantum not bigger than x-rays
whatever it is ed Storms as a scientist base his reasoning on the evidences, and on some conservatism about physics laws. finally he conclude with a proposal to check. this is the good procedure, but it is exceptional today to have people who both consider that evidence are real, and that theory probably don’t have to be revolutionized everyday.
In fact his idea is simply a nuclear variant of the breakthrough observed in laser or superconductor physics.
now E-cat arrive in that domain.
there are work done by Piantelli, Focardi, Miley on NiH…
gas phase permeation is experimented by Fralick in NASA GRC, replicated in Uni Tsinghua and by JP Biberian.
there are work on powders, thermal shocks…
Read “the science of LENR” by ed storms to have a good review of what was experienced… experience looks different but the same pattern of behavior was observed, while the triggering was different.
In all case the material structure and composition, like in semiconductors or HTSC, seems the key to the success.
ENEA have recently identified some parameters
https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/36833/ExcessPowerDuringElectrochemical.pdf?sequence=1
this test is the second one, and some complication are simply the consequence of demand of skeptics, especially on the electric circuit which is now bullet proof and really independent.
the measurement of heat by colorimetry is also a consequence of the many critics of skeptics on the details of all flow and phase calorimetry ever tried, sometime for good reason (with Defkalion, debunked precisely by a LENR scientists, not by skeptic who were moaning on all without distinction).
this method, as you can see was calibrated on the blank and works well. even if the exact measurement are not perfect, the only important question is whether the active reactor produce more heat than the blank.
there is many critics most are not serious :
– isotopic conspiracy theory that have no interest for an hypothetic scammer who would prefer to show a tiny isotopic shift; a measurement error is however possible, but this is not important as the heat is the main nuclear ash
– , electric incompetence fuel some conspiracy theory about HF and power meter … despite the many cross checking to close those hypothesis
finally only one question looked serious, even if the author lost all credibility by saying he was sure…
not only he was wrong being sure, but he is sure wrong.
He proposed that the alumina which makes the body be transparent to the IR and have fooled the IR cam.
there was indeed some visible heat that passed through the alumina body, but the literature on alumina explains that the transparency of alumina is negligible above 7um of wavelength, in the domain that the IR cam is using to estimate the temperature. It is confirmed by the observation that the apparent temperature according to the IR cam does not change between dark and white zone of the body, proving that the light is not interpreted.
note also that the boss of Industrial Heat group, Tom Darden said in an interview that they (Industrial Heat) build the reactor (not Rossi) and one employee on IH told clearly that accusing the e-cat to be a fraud is accusing Cherokee fund (2bn fund) to drive a fraud.
The boss of Elforsk , the Swedish research consortium equivalent of US DoE or French CEA, said they funded part of the test, and are happy of the result, to the point that they will launch a research effort.
http://www.LENR-forum.com/forum/index.php/Thread/691-CEO-Elforsk-Magnus-Olofsson
of course as an executive he stay cautious but this is the second time he defend the test agains skeptic attacks
http://www.LENR-forum.com/forum/index.php/Thread/372-ELFORSK-answers-to-Sveriges-Radio-attack-against-their-work-on-LENR-and-E-cat/
I think that it is time to document.
for those who are interested I advise few books:
– Excess heat by Charles Beaudette (free as pdf); a good historical summary, with clear epistemology and calorimetry for beginners
– the science of LENR by Ed Storms ; the reference book about the methods, the results, the challenges , the pitfalls, and even the spectrum of theories
– Fire From Ice by Eugene Mallove : written by an insider at MIT this book explain well the first 2mont when all was frozen. a complement of Beaudette which is more general.
– the explanation of LENR by Ed Storms : a recent book that start by an experimental review, a theory review, then identify the problems with each family of theory, the constraints on good theory demanded by experiments and known physics and chemistry laws. finally it propose an interesting theory, to test…
– an impossible invention by mats Lewan, describe the saga of Andrea Rossi and the e-cat, his personality, his behaviors, the various test, troubles, … it not only make an historical survey , but also describe the dark side of his personality, not as the conspiracy fantasy of most skeptics, but as a story of an entrepreneur with a strong personality.
of course there is many small documents , but with google you will find where they are, or where to ask questions… Up to you to judge who is in groupthink, who follow observation, evidences, scientific method, who propose conspiracy theory to avoid considering positive evidences.
One should not expect that to came from any authority, as it is hard for most authorities and lords to admit an error so gigantic in managing scientific method.
I came across this at another site, but I thought it was a telling observation.
Cold fusion like this is quite literally alchemy.
Flat out traditional alchemy – the transmutation of one element into another using the methodologies and ambient conditions available to table-top chemistry.
The only difference is that the attention of the observer is drawn not to the material end products, but the energetics, of the reactions in question.
Just read through the report. The interesting question is why is the production curve flat? Presuming there is so much energy available that this test did not come close enough to exhausting it to show a decay, why not repeat with a smaller charge over a period of time (by independent researchers) that would show a consumption rate? THAT would be a step towards convincing me of a there there.
First off, I’m still *extremely* dubious. But the researchers doing the independent verification are from schools with good reps. If I had serious interest in this I’d pursue their names and find out their standing with regard to other physics work they’ve done before writing this off completely though. The fusion is not in nickel. The presumptive fusion is lithium-hydrogen with a nickel isotope shift being a result. Way, way implausible without some active detectable hard radiation during and after any such presumed transitions.
Odds I’d bet on are still that it’s some kind of sophisticated scam. The energy measurement and calcs required by being unable to get the details of the design or build a real calorimiter set-up point towards willful obfustication by the ecat people. But if the verifying team vets out there’s a ***small*** chance there could be something real. I ain’t investing until the process is independently repeatable openly.
— TWZ
@rghthndsd, #72
Why orders of magnitude, seems like the green cheese theory and cold fusion have much in common these days. Perhaps when cold fusion was first reported in the late 80’s, it should’ve been treated as something improbable, but still worthy of attempts at duplication (as indeed was the case). But now, what’s the point? We shouldn’t bat an eye every time someone buys a brand new voltmeter, hooks it up to the same decaying setup, and shouts eureka (I’m being facetious… but not by much)
Paper on hydrogen absorption by nickel. Funny how no fusion was noticed…..
Funny how no reports have surfaced in anything I have read in the scientific literature, and organizational magazines like Chemical and Engineering News. Jim, he’s still dead….
The beautiful thing about cold fusion claims is that they are supposed to be economically viable. And free market economics is not tied to “authorities” “manipulating” the scientific method.
Something as straightforward as this E-cat thing is something any hobbyist could do in his own basement following instructions from the internet. IF it works, it will spread. Big government and Big corporations can no more “conspiracy” it away than they can stop moonshiners.
So, within a few years, we will know.
Also, Nickel futures ought to skyrocket.
Excess heat alone is not the point of the cold fusion boondoggle.
Excess heat *capable of doing economically useful work* is.
Otherwise, even if true, its just an interesting bit of physics trivia.
@Nerd of Redhead #84: You are again asking me to support a position that I do not hold.
@Amphiox #85: “And if the theoretical mechanism proposed for this finding is true, we SHOULD have seen evidence for it happening in nature, in stars and supernovae. And we DON’T.”
There is a proposed theoretical explanation of this result? I was not aware of it.
@gakxz1 #89: It seems to me that arguining over the ridiculousness of these ideas larges boils down to a matter of opinion. At least I don’t see any useful way to quantify it. But just to be certain: I am not suggesting just because something is not absolutely ridiculous that it is worthy of study. This example of cold fusion is very much not.
Alain Coetmeur is an all-purpose cold fusion booster, as one can see here. The whole thing is typical of pseudosciences such as “parapsychology” and homeopathy: year upon year of claimed positive results, but the field as a whole never goes anywhere.
Then shut the fuck up. Your “point” was that it was non-scientific to dismiss the claims of the “paper”. I have demonstrated with several forms of evidence that it is the scientific position to dismiss the drivel as bullshit. You point is now what?
@johnwoodford
You were right – at least one of them is here, complete with an obvious cut-and-paste with linkspam and bad grammar. Which makes them about the same as every other Cold Fusion nutcase I’ve seen on the internet.
@Amphiox
Not to mention, as the Siegel post points out, it can come from other stuff besides fusion.
@Alain Coetmeur
1. But the measurement wasn’t really comparable to the unfueled blank: the temperatures/heat inputs were a factor of two different between the dummy and “fueled” test. In the dummy the radiation flux is comparable to the convection flux, in the fueled version it is 4 times as large. The dummy averages ~700K, the fueled case ~1700K. The output radiation fluxes are 80W and 1700W, respectively. The dummy control data is not a good calibration test in any way.
2. Why not also measure with a carbon coating on the alumina – it would have at least given a second comparison?
3. reflections are everything in terms of heat flux – again they should have run at the same heat input without the fuel.
This guy is probably bunk, but not because he’s not using shielding, but rather for ideas already outlined above in the comments.
Not all fusion reactions produce radiation that requires shielding. Helium-Tritium reactions produce only protons as output, which can be contained (and used for power generation) in a magnetic field. This does not produce neutron, gamma, or neutrino radiation which are the deadly ones.
We have an IR temperature gun a work. It can measure the temperature of reactors, pipes, etc. But a black patch on the object to be measured did wonders for the accuracy and reproducibility of the measurement….
rghthndsd @ 17:
They aren’t two different sets of laws at all. Newtonian physics is just an approximation to relativity. Taken in the limit where v^2/c^2 << 1, relativity reduces to Newton. Given that, just for a few examples, length contraction at the speed of a typical car on a highway is about the width of an atomic nucleus (~1 femtometer) and time dilation at those speeds is measured in hundreths of nanoseconds, there's no functional difference.
@brett
Like badly done calorimetry for one…
OK, if my understanding is correct, rghthndsd is well aware that this “cold fusion” device is bunk but he objects to the phrase “this must be bunk because it violates known principles of science” because they has accidentally or deliberately misinterpreted it to mean “known principles of science are absolute religious laws, therefore anything which violates them is false by definition” and has thus been complaining that it is invalid to dismiss Rossi’s claim as false by definition because it conflicts with known science, rather than to dismiss Rossi’s claim as false because there is no evidence that it’s true and the “known science” is known because of evidence that conflicts with Rossi’s claim thus indicating that it’s false.
Leaving aside their difficulty in communicating, I’m still puzzled by the strong assertion that:
rghthndsd
“The history of science is littered with people who have said that good science is wrong because it was completely incompatible with what was understood at the time.”
You’ve got a list then? it would be interesting to see how long that list is; and any of them from the last 50 years?
Crud, left out a rather important (if nonconsecutive) “ey” and now Crip Dyke is gonna murder me alive. :(
The italicized portion is pure bullshit. Any scientist knows that scientfic knowledge isn’t absolute. But, creobots and IDiots try to pretend it is.
Excuse me if this seems overly pedantic and useless. Only creobots, IDiots, and overly pedantic philosophs, try that level of absoluteness. Nothing cogent state here folks. Move on, nothing to see.
#105 – Sure, it’s overly pedantic and useless, but it sure looks like Jake pegged rghthndsd’s overly pedantic and useless argument/word game all the way through this string of comments.
It’s worth noting that there is a (well-understood) process which produces room-temperature fusion: muon-catalyzed fusion. This was predicted on theoretical grounds before it was observed (note the stark contrast with “cold fusion”). Unfortunately, it is not a practical source of energy, because muons are hard to make, and each muon catalyzes only a few hundred deuterium-tritium fusions.
Then Jake deserves a round of grog/swill and a bacon sammich on the house.
If you are THAT unaware, then you have no business participating in this thread.
Awwwwww.
That’s almost adorable.
All published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results I presume.
Actually Infinite Energy Magazine is the place to go for all that’s hip in cold fusion research. Not surprisingly the magazine also publishes material on other questionable scientific ideas. http://www.infinite-energy.com/
Eugene Mallove, who wrote a book on the Pons and Fleishmann experiments that started the whole cold fusion fad, Fire From Ice, was the publisher of the magazine. He was murdered in 2004. Not surprisingly his death was believed to be an attempt to hush up cold fusion research by some enthusiasts. However in 2011 three people were arrested in the case, one of whom, Chad Schaffer, pled guilty to manslaughter in 2012.
Just the title is a tip-off of not being realistic. There is no such thing as infinite energy. Unless the second law of thermodynamics is suspended by an imaginary deity….
My first thought is the claim of 1.5megawatt hours total over the 32 days of the experiment comes out to a continuous run of about 1.9kwh, or not far from the output of an electric heater on a wall socket.
@Nerd of Redhead #105: “Any scientist knows that scientfic knowledge isn’t absolute.”
But when you declare the result of an experiment wrong based solely on the fact that it disagrees with scientific knowledge, you are using that knowledge as if it was an absolute.
@dhall #106 “Sure, it’s overly pedantic and useless, but it sure looks like Jake pegged rghthndsd’s overly pedantic and useless argument/word game all the way through this string of comments.”
As I said earlier, I find this to be an entirely reasonable position to take. There is very little practical difference between my position and those of others here, the real difference is purely philosophical. And if that’s not your thing, that’s fine.
Only in your delusional mind. The quality of the evidence for and against must be determined. Thermodynamics, including nuclear. Solid and tested. Fuckwits claiming infinite energy against the never found wrong second law….Raspberry….Get real fuckwit. You have no case. There is nothing new for science here, just where is the con…
Nope, its purely ignorance. You don’t understand why science works, and philosophy doesn’t. as well. Something called evidence.
So, still in the wrong and will remain there until you supply EVIDENCE.
purely philosophical ≠ wanking
Chigau#117
QFMFT.
I retract my #118. Purely philosophical is wanking.
rghthndsd
Have you noticed that everyone else
how that works?
Nerd #119
ayup
I noticed that as soon as I hit “Post Comment”.
ragarth @98
Gamma and neutron radiation can be deadly but neutrino radiation isn’t. The website Astronomy Notes says:
Curiosity about how things work is anathema to a creationist.
No.
Firstly, NO ONE HERE is actually declaring the “result of the experiment” wrong, and your claim that it is is a flat out LIE. What everyone here is saying is that the THEORETICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE RESULT OF THE EXPERIMENT, ie that the observed heat is produced by FUSION of hydrogen with nickel, is wrong because it disagrees with scientific knowledge.
Second where do you think “scientific knowledge” comes from?
It comes from the accumulated result of ALL THE OTHER SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS EVER DONE. So the THEORETICAL INTERPRETATION of the results of this experiment is CONTRADICTED by the results of ALL THE OTHER SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS EVER DONE in this field.
That immediately sets the a priori probability of that particular THEORETICAL INTERPRETATION being correct or even close to correct to something very low.
And when scientific people (or indeed anyone other than a dishonest creationist) uses the phrasing “it’s wrong” it is understood implicitly that it means “likely to be wrong with a high enough certainty that I will for practical purposes* treat it as wrong unless additional new evidence demonstrates otherwise”. Your implication that “wrong” must mean “absolutely wrong” is the kind of absolutist thinking that a creationist would be proud of.
*Practical purposes here means I’m not going to be rushing to by stock in energy startups claiming to use this technology.
That’s how most of these things work. You put a huge amount of power in in one form (e.g. electrical energy with an “important soopersekret” waveform, or refined metals as “catalysts”), and get a huge amount of power out in a different form (e.g. temperature rise of a flow of water), or possibly some electrochemical reaction, and you look for an extremely small difference between the two energy flows and declare cold fusion. And this difference is usually on the order of the uncertainty of the measurements. And if it’s larger, it because a large DC offset is sneaking in along with the AC input power, or the heat losses from the device are grossly overestimated, or whatever.
Back in the early days of the Internet, I went head to head with a bunch of these guys on sci.physics.fusion. There was no getting through to them. It was, and still is, a religion to them. If somebody discovered something like “cold fusion”, they would have absolutely no problem convincing even the most diehard skeptic. I’ve been waiting 25 years, and I’m still not holding my breath.
Cold fusion? E-Cat?
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES YOU FOOLS
Al Dente @#122:
Actually, Randall Munroe calculates that it could be, in a highly unlikely scenario:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
Conclusion:
The idea of neutrino radiation damage reinforces just how big supernovae are. If you observed a supernova from 1 AU away—and you somehow avoided being being incinerated, vaporized, and converted to some type of exotic plasma—even the flood of ghostly neutrinos would be dense enough to kill you.
Rowan @ #31
*Looks sheepish* Maybe. . .?
sean carroll:
and:
Can somebody tell me why I recognize rghthndsd but can’t place which thread?
Nick Gotts,
you might want to check out this site:
http://news.newenergytimes.net/2014/10/12/rossi-handles-samples-in-alleged-independent-test-of-his-device/
The main investigator of newenergytimes has written extensively about Rossi’s E-Cat.
gog
Perhaps you’re thinking of “pedanticspeaker” who has a very similar obsession with perceived meaning.
Jochen Bedersdorfer@130,
New Energy Times appears to be the organ of Steven B. Krivit, who some other members of the “community” do not appear to regard particularly highly:
Now you certainly get fairly rancorous disputes even in genuine scientific fields, but this sort of thing doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? Combined with the lack of a viable theory, and of reliably reproducible results, it smells of pseudoscience.
Some here search a list of stupid claims agains good science by established scientists
one is here
http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html
but there are many.
on muon catalysed fusion, it is real but unusable.
Some people here says that the problem is that the theory is bad, even if the observation are OK…
not far from the good position.
simply it works, it is usable.
before that cold fusion, whatever it is, was not usable, was not easyly reproduced, but was clearly real and anyway frequently reproduced after hard work.
the most shocking is that nearly everybody, even wikipedia (who blacklisted all sources of informations, even naturwissenschaften, which don’t follow that view), is sure cold fusion is debunked…
in fact there was 4 critics, which are debunked with basic electrochemistry and calorimetry knowledge.
Negative result are not only proving nothing, but the cause of the failure are now well identified, from insufficient loading, bad calorimetry, stupid mistakes, bad precautions, contamination. with current knowledge most failed experiment would be predicted to fail. very few are simply bad luck, bad material, or unidentified mistakes.
about LENR scientist, don’t imagine that they support each others like mafia membres. they are an academic community with huge internal battles, many chapels, and they love to debunk the others experiments… peer review is bloody as it should…
however the problem is mostly that very few scientists are aware of the work of all others.
Edmund Storms, Mickael McKubre, JP Biberian are among the few who are very aware of others job. Edmund Storms is a good source because he nearly have read all papers, and is prolific author of papers and books.
about Krivit, he is only a journalist, and he fall in love with Widom-Larsen theory, while having a cat and dog relation with Rossi… he seem very emotional, with a tendency to conspiracy theory interpretation.
it is quite logical in a way when you face usual academic groupthink, to blam malevolence when you only have to blame selfishness and stupidity, emerging as groupthink and mutually assured delusion.
Anyway he is wrong… Rossi is not clear, but the 2 independent test are clear even when some try to muddy the water with conspiracy theories.
that story is fascinating about how a group can be sure of a fact, despite huge evidence against, and having no evidence else circular reasoning on his side. this is frequent, but hard to accept our brain is so weak.
epistemology and group psychiatry will make huge progress after the awakening to reality when LENR will reach the market really. Already internet bubble and Subprime crisis allowed some theory like Benabou groupthink, to emerge.
I expect Kuhn and Feyerabend to be extended on that basics. Today’s they are victim of straw-man argument.
@128, aarrgghh
also from the video is a quote relevant here:
I would be be far less sceptical if he submitted his research to peer review, rather than a stream of press releases. His MO is reminiscent of other cranky inventors – get as much money and publicity as you can before you get found out. Anybody remember the Steorn Orbo? This is something I would love to be wrong about, though.
Alain Coetmeur@133,
The list you link to includes both examples of claims that have not been borne out (nanobacteria, deep non-biological petroleum, Gaia), and people who were not ridiculed (Maiman, as the article itself admits, and most obviously Crick and Watson, whose results were immediately published and accepted. Not impressive.
Krivit, whoever he is, is certainly right about the Rossi “tests” – they are not a scientific experiment, since he refuses to reveal what the apparatus consists of, and allowing him to interfere with the procedure completely vitiates them. That you can’t see this is very telling.
The rest of your screed isn’t worth deconstructing in detail – just the usual crank’s whining about the purblind scientific establishment, and irrelevant appeal to philosophers of science (I admit it’s usually Popper – Kuhn and Feyerabend at least shows a little originality).
@Johnny Vector, #6:
No: Newton is wrong, in every reference frame, at both “relativistic” and “normal” velocities. F = ma is never true; F = dP/dt is always true.
The reason we still teach Newton is that (ma – dP/dt) is negligible in many applications–in some cases, smaller than the error margin of our measurements. So there’s no need to do a complicated calculation when a very simple formula gives an excellent approximation.
euh, about crick ans watson, you did not hear seriously their interview… one of the two is clear that they were attacked harshly. the sucess is only afterward, with the usual rewriting of history that Kuhn explain in detail.
about HTSC you did not know that it was published as footnotes in papers because it was forbidden in the body…
http://www.mosaicsciencemagazine.org/pdf/m18_03_87_04.pdf
you argument that it is not science because you don’t have the IP is ausual fallacy, quite desperate, liker the one of Pomp.
whatever science or not it is, science say that this industrial object, alien, radioactive, magic, or impossible, produce the heat that they measure… it could be a supernova, a gram of radium, a steam engine, science explain how to measure heat…
they don’t tel in detail what is the reactor, but it is the key that you forget, they describe the measurement apparatus and the method used to interpret the data. that is science, or better it is metrology.
Just recently I learned by engineers that their method is classic to measure heat production by very hot object…
if engineers do it that way, I’m reassured… I thought it was physicist doing calorimetry.
by the way did you know radium was proven by ice calorimetry ?
you should have read Excess Heat by Beaudette… very educative.
Krivit is a journalist and is emotional on that subject with a tendency to conspiracy theories… he hate Rossi, and is in love with Larsen theory. anyway he gather interesting documents, just have to take his opinion with care, and compensate is bias.
Alain coetmeur,
What interview? When and by whom were they attacked? What rewriting of history?
I didn’t say anything about it. My point was that the list you linked to contained several cases which did not correspond to the claim of good science being mocked – which indicates that there’s a shortage of good examples.
Crap. If you hide essential information about what you’re doing from your collaborators, you’re not doing science. If you hide them when you report the work, you’re not reporting science. And who the fuck is Pomp? You need to make considerably more effort to make clear what you’re talking about – and this is nothing to do with English not being your first language.
More crap. It wasn’t science, so science says nothing about it.
Why do you keep spouting complete irrelevancies?
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to notice that a supposedly independent test is not independent if the person whose claims are being tested is allowed to interfere with the test. When that person is a convicted criminal who has repeatedly promised to start selling working versions of his machine and failed to deliver, you have to be remarkably stupid to take the whole thing seriously.
cold fusion is bunk.
let me tell you about my cold fission device…
I’m still waiting for someone to produce a mold fusion device. I’m sure it would produce a lot of power.
@rghthndsd
Dear god, read some Kuhn! The entire reason we have paradigms is because they provide useful heuristics for determining what areas of research are fruitful, when to question experimental results as probably stemming from human error or quackery, when to dismiss something as so vanishingly unlikely that it should be presumed idiocy, etc. Paradigms can be overturned, but it involves an arduous process of convincing other scientists who are rightfully skeptical of your work. It’s an uphill battle to overturn a paradigm, but it should be, because most of the time, in the operation of normal science, our paradigms work. It is good science to automatically reject an experiment as error if it is contrary to our fundamental ideas about how physics works. Unless and until someone manages to get their paradigm-shattering theories taken seriously by doggedly showing everyone who will listen their solid evidence (perhaps stemming from experiment, although anomalous results are merely a puzzle which does not trouble the dominant paradigm if there is no alternate theory explaining them), we are justified in continuing to assume the usefulness of our current paradigms. To do anything else – especially to accept as possible any claim, no matter how contrary to our current scientific knowledge – is to waste everyone’s time and undermine useful heuristics for no good reason, and that would be bad science.
Greg Bear’s “Anvil of Stars” has a scene where the protagonists flee a supernova (triggered by the bad guys as a booby trap), and several of them are killed by the neutrino flux….
Brief addendum: The explanation in my comment #142 is exactly why journals ask reviewers whether a paper contradicts existing theories and how the paper’s conclusions relate to expectations and earlier research. Not because nothing that’s contrary to accepted consensus can be correct, not because contradicting existing research means your argument cannot possibly be true, but because going against what is already known raises the burden of proof. That is, it’s a strike against you unless your evidence is really good (and if your evidence is really good, then contradicting conventional wisdom counts in your favor, because you’ve discovered something very interesting).
#50 matches up with what I, as a layperson, am reading elsewhere. They are using an IR camera measurement as a proxy for heat production treating the setup as a black body using a dummy run with lower power as a calibration point? It’s not so much that using IR color measurement is necessarily bad but rather that if one chooses to go this route one would need to very carefully validate the calibration and this was not done.
GoatGuy at http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/10/third-party-report-on-32-day-continuous.html#comment-1625809908 discusses this and why it’s a problem in a way that made it (more or less) clear to me. Quoting GoatGuy:
All of this should be seen in the context of the fact that Rosi is involved in the testing in any capacity. As an analogy to illustrate why this is a huge problem, I think we can all agree that if the Randi Challenge was run in this way the million dollar prize would have been disbursed a long time ago.
Here’s a really naïve question on my part. Is there any heat engine cycle which will produce easily electrical power at greater than 65% efficiency? I would assume so because if there wasn’t this would be worthless as a power generation option, right? I mean, that’s the whole point of this being, allegedly, revolutionary, right?
If so, shouldn’t they be able to plug this setup back into itself and run it totally off the grid? If so, how come this obvious test has not been carried out? I mean, it’s not like Rosi hasn’t been pushing this for a bunch of years.
@145: Is there any heat engine cycle which will produce easily electrical power at greater than 65% efficiency?
Not my field, but from basic thermo: the maximum efficiency of any heat engine is limited by the temperature difference between input and output, and that difference is ultimately limited by engineering considerations. IIRC, the turbines of power utilities — who have an incentive to squeeze every Joule they can out of the steam — only manage efficiencies in the low 40% range.
So I would say about 65%: No, certainly not “easily”.
Hmm, so even if this worked as advertised (which is clearly very, very doubtful –even if Rosi did not already have a history as a scammer) it would still be useless?