I’m okay if my enemy is bad

The effort to dig up dirt on IH continues on Rossi’s blog. I covered this a week ago in A word to the wise is sufficient – a hint to the foolish is proof.

Then, it was Anonymous and “Leanne Tuffy” Now, it is Leanne, or is it Joanne? She seems a bit unclear on her name.

Leanne
June 10, 2017 at 9:50 AM
Dr Andrea Rossi,

I discovered that Cherokee Investment Partners LLC, the company that owns Industrial Heat and is owned principally by Tom Darden and John Mazzarino, is liable for the catastrophic environmental disaster happened during the remediation and re-vitalization of a brownfield named “ZENECA SYTE- CAMPUS BAY”, in Richmond, California.

Not even Rossi claims any more that CIP owns IH. The claim that Darden and Mazzarino “own principally” Cherokee is probably false, but I’ve never seen ownership stats on Cherokee. As to Cherokee being liable for that “catastrophic environmental disaster,” this appears to be false. Bad start when the first paragraph is so densely wrong or so poorly established.

The poor grammar and spelling (site as “syte”) are SOP for Rossi blog socks as are various other usages (Taxpayer with a capital T, the use of “nothing,” etc.)

What happened is that they got financing for enormous amounts of money of the Taxpayer and after getting this big money they remedied nothing, re-vitalized nothing, but built houses upon the poisoned land of the brownfield.

I don’t think so. The story that Shane D. found has it quite differently. I have not seen figures for the financing of that project, nor has “Leanne,” apparently.

What Cherokee routinely does is to create an LLC for a project. They put in perhaps $25 million, other investors toss in their nickels, and then loans and grants are obtained. Some of these projects fail. “Taxpayer money”? Sometimes. In this case, as we will see below, the LLC involved with this project declared bankruptcy in 2012, I confirmed that. The major debt was $42 million from a loan, not taxpayer money. Without doing more specific research, I cannot tell if the LLC (Cherokee Simeon Ventures) received any grants. From the Law360 coverage of the bankruptcy:

EnviroFinance said that Cherokee Simeon failed to honor its loan obligations due to a flurry of interferences.

“Shortly after the loan was made, things started to fall apart for [Cherokee Simeon], EnviroFinance said. “A citizens’ group prodded the Department of Toxic Substances Control to take supervision of the property, and the remediation effort appears to have been more extensive than [Cherokee Simeon] expected. In addition, the real estate market fell apart and [Cherokee Simeon’s] financial condition worsened.”

As a result, Cherokee Simeon could not progress on the rehabilitation project, the firm said.

This is the story according to the company suing Cherokee Simeon. That is probably what happened! Back to “Leanne”:

In that field, upon which they built houses, the Department of Toxic Substances Control has found carcinogenic substances, hidden under the houses. I knew this from a person of a Citizens Committee, made after cases of cancer appeared with anomalous statistics in the area.

This appears to be a distorted rumor from what Shane found. Leanne is probably lying, telling a story derived from news. It does not appear that any houses were built.

This person informed me that Cherokee Investment Partners LLC, after the Department of Toxics Substances Control has published a report with the results of the discovery of the risk of cancer for the population, has filed for Chapter 11 (bankruptcy) in the State of Delaware of their “front company”, named Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC, that they used for the “job”. Obviously the money collected from the Taxpayer disappeared.

The bankruptcy was filed in 2012, long after those problems were found. Cherokee Simeon was not charged with toxic waste violations, rather those charges were against Zeneca and the University of California.

Who is the “they” that used Cherokee Simeon? That is not a “front company,” it’s an actual remediation project company. If this is actually a Cherokee company (which seems possible, this is the kind of work they do), this is how they do it. “Front company” implies something that is not at all evidenced here.

When one of the project LLCs goes bankrupt, Cherokee loses their investment. If they actually made money “disappear,” they’d be in very hot water. In a bankruptcy, the creditors will be searching for any “leakages.” Basically, when one of these LLCs loses money, Cherokee loses money. They make money, overall, based on the balance, for when projects succeed, they can become very valuable. Some fail!

Now: I wonder how Cherokee Investment Partners LLC can still be qualified to receive public funding by means of their their society ” Brownfield Revitalization LLC”.
Cheers,
Joanne

CIP didn’t go bankrupt. This particular project failed, the most likely reason being that cleanup was going to be far more expensive than anticipated. This extremely fuzzy thinking is common on Planet Rossi. So … ele brought this promptly to LENR Forum. At one point, ele claimed not to read JONP. Yeah, right. And Rossi surely never mentioned “Johnson Matthey.” They made that up, those greedy bastards. Heh heh.

ele wrote:

[quoting the entire post by Leanne/Joanne]

Googling I have found also some interesting links with millions dollars of public money about that Brownfield Revitalization LLC:

I’m presenting the links more compactly, and giving the award sums. This is a series of awards to Brownfield Revitalization LLC, which provides loans for remediation projects. I’m also sorting this by year

2007 $92 million
2010 $56 million
2011 $50 million
2012 $50 million
2013 $43 million
2016 $70 million

If I understand well the average amount of public money given to that compeny was about 50M$/year for 6 years this sum up to about 300M$ !

Well, not necessarily. Is this an allocation of public money or is it something else. Perhaps the intrepid researcher here could get a little curious. These are NMTC Awards. TC means “Tax Credit.” From the About page of the Awards web site.

The CDFI Fund achieves its purpose by promoting access to capital and local economic growth in the following ways:

2. through its New Markets Tax Credit Program by providing an allocation of tax credits to Community Development Entities which enable them to attract investment from the private-sector and reinvest these amounts in low-income communities;

These are not cash grants. Rather, it appears that this program allows a CDE to provide financing for projects at lower interest or taking on higher risk, through allocations of tax credits (making the investments more attractive). Ele has completely misunderstood this. These are not “taxpayer dollars,” as such. No money is given to the LLC receiving the awards, just an allocation of tax credits which they may then provide to investors according to the rules of the program.

WOW !
more documents can be found:
[Google “Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC”]
So the content of the comment in the Rossi Blog seems real !

It seems real to those who have no clue what they are looking at, but are simply looking for dirt or what seems like dirt to them.

Rossi had attracted the interest of a group of investors who run a multibillion dollar company, apparently quite successfully, and he spat in their faces. Not so bright.

I found, through the search above, a ruling on a motion for sanctions against Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC for an alleged bad faith bankruptcy filing. The document does give a little information. Yes, this is the same Cherokee (i.e, affiliated with Cherokee Investment Partners, though there are many related Cherokee funds). (The motion for sanctions failed.) Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC was a joint venture of Zeneca and Cherokee Simeon Holding Company, LLC. Originally the latter was the managing partner, but in 2011 this was taken over by Zeneca.

I’ve been attempting to find out what ultimately happened to that Richmond property. There is no sign of taxpayer money going into it. Cherokee Simeon Venture withdrew that bankrutpcy petition and appears to still be operating. See this 2015 meeting requesting reduction in assessed value.

There is weird stuff in the search. There is a pages claiming that there is a women’s clothing store called “Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC.” The address of the store is a toxic cleanup site. Dun and Bradstreet.

Aha! Proof!

Proof of what, I have no idea, but WOW!


 

Update

A more detailed newspaper story on the history of Zeneca / Campus Bay, Providing the history that UC Berkeley, owner of the adjacent contaminated propery, had joined with Simeon Properties as a partner, and Cherokee Investment Partners and Simeon created the joint venture that later filed for bankruptcy. However, as was surely missed by our intrepid wanna-be Sifferkolls, that bankruptcy petition was withdrawn. From the article:

While the university was legally responsible for cleaning up the legacy of California Cap, AstraZeneca—the giant London-based pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturer—was held liable both for the Stauffer site and for contamination at RFS that had come from the Stauffer plant. 

Aha! Proof! A U.K. based chemical company! The plot thickens. Zeneca was also a partner in Cherokee Simeon.

Now, notice this: if one buys a contaminated site, one can become responsible for the cleanup, and at the time of purchase, the full expense of that may not be known. Doing what Cherokee does is then very risky, though ultimately beneficial. This would be the equivalent of a Cherokee LLC buying the PetrolDragon Italian properties, if we want to compare with Rossi’s history, as has now happened on JONP.

Reviewing this, it is completely obvious why Cherokee uses special-project LLCs for this investment: it would otherwise be way too risky, one failure could take it all down. The ultimate result is public benefit, but there is also a risk of public loss: these cleanup operations can attract grants, and sometimes a project that receives public funding fails. They can and do take out loans, mortgaging property. There are various missteps in this that could create more legal problems, but this is common in business.

However, entirely contrary to what was claimed on JONP, Cherokee did not cause the toxic waste problem, but attempted to support remediation. The citizens advisory groups were not angry with Cherokee, at all. The University of California took most of the flak, and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, which had asserted jurisdiction, and which was seen as inadequate (which could have come from their concern being water quality, due to toxic chemicals leaching into the Bay, possibly fixed, at least for the near future, by the burial and capping which was done

The plan the water board approved for cleanup at the Stauffer site proved controversial from the start, in part because it called for burial of most of the hazardous wastes on site rather than their removal to an approval toxic waste disposal landfill—the costlier option chosen by the university.

Possibly as a result of community pressure, jurisdiction ultimately devolved to the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), an agency staffed with a wide range of scientific experts.

As a result, the Stauffer cleanup cost expanded dramatically and probably unexpectedly, and, as reported above, there was also a drop in real estate values, leading to possible Cherokee Simeon Ventures insolvency, hence the Chapter 11 protection issue. I still have no information on current status of the project, most Google hits are old.

So on JONP:

Leah
June 10, 2017 at 4:16 PM

Dear Dr Andrea Rossi:
I read the comment of Leanne of today: now we can understand all the falsity and the hypocrisy of the “Minime” of Darden ( JT Vaughn) when in his deposition said how scandalized they got when they read about your past!!!
Please win for us all against this gang,
Godspeed,
Leah

LENR Forum dislikes detailed examination of issues, but then tut-tuts when users, instead, simply express reactions, like, “What idiots! Pure Planet Rossi!” However, the solution: point to analysis elsewhere, like here! Increasingly, LF moderation is not tolerating evidence-free or misleading posts like those of ele.

So what is Leah talking about? There is no mention in the pleadings of Rossi’s Italian environmental disaster; my first thought was that “Leah” was thinking of Krivit, who is not mentioned anywhere in the case that I’ve seen (beyond a mention of him, mispelled, by APCO’s McLaughlin in an email to Rossi)

However, someone has possibly read the Vaughn depositions (there were at least two) and there is plenty in the depositions that has never been cited in the pleadings, such that I’d have noticed it. Slogging through this stuff can take high motivation. So who would be highly motivated?

The Vaughn depositions are listed on this study page. (Eventually I would hope to condense that; as can be seen, there are many exhibits from the same depositions, but they may include different deposition transcript pages. As the case stands, it is a colossal mess. However, depositions are generally text files and can be searched with the site search facility — many documents are images, not text. I’d say that the court system is about two decades archaic and primitive.)

“Petroldragon” is mentioned in the deposition of Rossi.

Not, apparently, in any Vaughn deposition, and I also looked for other terms with no success. However, anyone is free to point to what I might have missed due to the nonspecificity of the “Leah” claim or some inadequacy in my search.

It would not be surprising, and would not show any hypocrisy. Cherokee, and Vaughn — corporations cannot be “hypocritical,” that requires being human — did not cause the Zeneca-Campus Bay mess, it was created long before Cherokee existed. Rossi created the PetrolDragon mess, by commission or omission. People can argue about whether it was his “fault” or not, i.e., may assert “excuses,” but — no Rossi, no PetrolDragon disaster. Cherokee and Vaughn are not remotely close to that level of responsibility. Legally, they are not responsible for cleaning up the Zeneca site, rather than lies with those who caused it (Zeneca has inherited that responsibility from Stauffer), and then, that failing, with those who own the property, and the closest Cherokee Investment Partners gets to that is that they are investors in a joint venture that bought the property, so they can lose their investment. Zeneca is a large corporation, now AstraZeneca

with assets, according to Wikipedia, of $60 billion. However, notice: AstraZeneca did not buy the property, but Cherokee Simeon Ventures did; they are investors in CSV. The company most in trouble over Campus Bay would be AstraZeneca. How did that arise? Stauffer Chemical.

Stauffer was bought by Imperial Chemical Industries, which, in turn, divested itself of its bioscience businesses, creating Zeneca. And that is how Zeneca ended up holding the bag.

The wreckage of the past lands somewhere. It is only relatively rarely that we can find someone clearly responsible for cleaning it up, and possessing the means. Lack of caution about environmental damage was routine, until recent years.

Qur’an, about those who came before: “for them is what they earned, for you is what you earn.” 

Look around! I point to what is obvious for me, with what I have seen, and I attempt to make it possible for others to see what I’ve seen. That can be quite unpopular: in my training, there is a saying, “If they are not shooting at you, you have not done anything worth wasting bullets on.”

If I err here, or anywhere, please: corrections are welcome. I am responsible for what I create, including all my errors and omissions. Taking responsibility is how we create a future worth living into.

Blaming others is how we maintain being stuck in the past. It is, practically by definition, disempowering.

 

 

 

 

Author: Abd ulRahman Lomax

See http://coldfusioncommunity.net/biography-abd-ul-rahman-lomax/

37 thoughts on “I’m okay if my enemy is bad”

  1. Tom – I’ll also put an answer on the correct thread, but here you say:
    “Your argument here is that PV cells – unlike all other materials – are asymmetrical and absorb more than the radiate when temperatures are identical.

    You base this on the idea that the photon/ electron energy transactions are also asymmetrical. Specifically you think that because the energy goes away when a photon creates a hole/electron pair then this energy is not available for the reverse reaction and therefore this cannot happen.”

    The reaction itself is symmetrical, but because we take current out of the PV, the material required to go in the other direction (that electron/hole pair) is swept out of the semiconductor. Once they are in the conductor either side, with effectively no band-gap and thus no holes, then no recombination is possible. That this works at near-optical frequencies and quite a way down the IR spectrum should be obvious, from the commercial devices available. It even works down to around 100meV for the MerCaT devices, though since they are intended for detection of IR they are normally cooled to LN2 temperatures in order that the self-generated signal from its own temperature does not swamp the desired signal. It should generate somewhere of the order of a microwatt for the 1mm² die that is available (and there’s a half-size one also available that I’ve seen).

    It’s not the material, but the structure of the PV that makes it asymmetrical. The internal electric field makes the electrons go one way and the holes the other. In this way, symmetry is broken, and a similar broken symmetry is required in order to beat 2LoT. I’m calling this a diode function since I’ve been working largely with electronics for a long time and this is a reasonable analogy, but broken symmetry is maybe a more-precise term for others. That broken symmetry has to apply at the single-transaction level, since once we need to deal with larger numbers then the statistics start to apply and the conversion rate will go down, probably to around zero. The reason for this is that the transaction in one direction increases the chances of the reverse reaction happening, because we now have a different charge distribution.

    The essentials of the symmetry-breaking strategy are that we need to start with a symmetric transition between two forms of energy that have different properties (in this case, the photon is uncharged and the electron/hole pair have charge). We apply a physical bias to the energy-form that will be affected – in this case, an electric field will split that pair if the field is strong-enough. The energy that is produced has to be removed from the system for each and every successful transaction – in this case that energy goes down the wires to the load.

    For the nantenna, things are slightly different. That requires an initial stream of photons to build up the resonance in the antenna part until the diode (which is far from perfect) starts to conduct. After that, each additional photon will increase the resonance voltage enough to pass a bit of current through the diode in one way more than the other and produce some DC out. A perfect diode is not needed (though of course it would give improved output) and the main thing with the diode is that it’s fast enough. Basically, what we’ve got is a high-frequency (THz region) crystal radio.

    Mostly people have tried to leave the energy in the same form (for example the Brownian ratchet, where it’s mechanical energy and the accumulation of energy leads to an increased probability of the reverse reaction happening) and so they fail. I’ve also seen this tried with accumulating charge, with the same result. The broken symmetry that is expected does not happen – it’s hard to beat the statistics. I thus settled on the different properties of each side of the transition as the way to produce an asymmetry where one would not naturally exist. A PV does this nicely, and has the advantage that we absolutely know the principle works for near-optical frequencies and that various devices are available or are being fabricated for mid-IR and for LWIR.

  2. Since photons have no information as to the source temperature, and will travel from cold to hot equally as happily as hot to cold, then converting them to electricity without a second heat sink is not only possible but is actually what is happening in a standard solar cell. The “obeys 2LoT” tag that is applied to solar cells is actually wrong, since the source temperature and the destination temperature are only relevant as regards how long that PV will last and how efficient it is.

    Since photons have no information as to the source temperature, and will travel from cold to hot equally as happily as hot to cold, then converting them to electricity without a second heat sink is not only possible but is actually what is happening in a standard solar cell. The “obeys 2LoT” tag that is applied to solar cells is actually wrong, since the source temperature and the destination temperature are only relevant as regards how long that PV will last and how efficient it is.

    Except that a solar cell at a given temperature will not concert photons at the same temperature into electricity. It will radiate as much as it receives.

    Your argument here is that PV cells – unlike all other materials – are asymmetrical and absorb more than the radiate when temperatures are identical.

    You base this on the idea that the photon/ electron energy transactions are also asymmetrical. Specifically you think that because the energy goes away when a photon creates a hole/electron pair then this energy is not available for the reverse reaction and therefore this cannot happen.

    So let me address this final point – on which the rest of your argument rests. The emission of a photon depends only on the existence of a hole/electron pair. As you know we can calculate, for any specific state, the occupancy statistics for a semiconductor. The number of hole/electron pairs will depend on the bandgap, and the external field, and the temperature. With zero external voltage we have photon emission governed by the temperature and the Planck statistics – you guessed it – this will lead to emission similar to that from a grey body at the same temperature (the actual emittance will be the same as the absorption, and both these quantities vary with material details.

    With non-zero external voltage we get different statistics – but in that case there is energy transfer to or from the PV cell if the PV current is non-zero.

    So we have a situation where if your idea does not work, it does not work. if it works, it works. That is obviously no paradox, but also not helpful.

    However, consider the individual transactions again. The photons emitted depend only on the electron/hole distribution in the cell. That does not magically change much because an electron exits the cell via an external load. So we have ab initio a balance between emission and absorption in the case that the PV temperature and the photon distribution temperature match. In this balance, electrons will move both ways, depending on the balance between emission and absorption, and there will be a noise output voltage commensurate with the PV cell temperature. This movement is balanced and therefore the distribution, and hence the emission rate, does not change.

    single photons don’t have temperature

    Only if we know the photon energy. If all we know is that the photon comes from a given source with a given temperature, the photon does have a temperature, corresponding to its probability distribution. Looking at one photon gives us a specific energy which may be higher than average. Or lower. That individual behaviour does not help your PV cell argument since the claimed non-reversibility of the transaction in the PV cell depends on electron distribution statistics and those relate to the ensemble.

    Single particle systems can (with low probability) break 2LoT. But not larger systems. You are thinking that in the PV cell case you can apply this single particle exemption. You cannot, because the whole point is that the different photons in a BB spectrum are all independent and cannot all be high energy (for example). So the probability of such breakage in macroscopic systems such as a PV cells is infinitesimal. And for a single transaction, although 2LoT can be broken, on average it is kept.

  3. Tom – sorry, run out of “reply” space.

    You said “OK. So I think the point you make here is that black-body photons, at some fixed temperature, can be used to extract energy for use at some (higher) temperature. In other words once energy is photons, you think that it can be turned without a thermal sink at a lower temperature into low entropy energy such as electricity or mechanical work.

    I disagree. In order to proceed further you would have to indicate precisely how you intend to do this. I am confident I will be able to explain why this does not work.”

    Yes, this is precisely what I am saying. Any photon, once emitted, does not carry with it any information as to the temperature of its source. It is just a packet of energy. If you want to know the temperature of the source, or gain other information about what it’s made of etc., then you need a succession of photons from the same source and plot the spectrum. One photon on its own, though, tells you nothing. This is really one of the important observations. In the same way, when a photon is emitted it can have no information about where it will get absorbed. Some photons recently received are from 13.8 billion years ago (or at least this is what is claimed), and that photon cannot have predicted that it would end up in a telescope on Earth.

    The photon is thus just energy with maybe a polarisation in the waveform. It is independent of its source and independent of its destination. It is simply there. If we can change that photon into electricity, then again the source is totally irrelevant. The electricity can run a lamp, a heater or any other device and again is just energy which really doesn’t care what the destination temperature might be.

    If we use a PV to collect that energy, then the temperature of the PV is largely irrelevant, though of course as a PV gets hotter it becomes less efficient. If we use an antenna, then again that works simply on geometry to build up a resonance and the temperature is largely irrelevant, with the caveat there being that normally they expand when heated and we don’t want it to melt. If we make a conductor in the right shape, though, it will receive a stream of photons of the accepted wavelength which can then be rectified.

    In order to change random (heat) energy into directional energy, we normally need a second heat-sink because we are dealing with random directions through the system, so we get the directionality by directing the heat to a colder heat-sink. Some of the energy is given out as usable energy to do work, some is rejected into the colder sink, and Carnot gives us the relative quantities based on hot-sink and cold-sink temperatures.

    Since photons have no information as to the source temperature, and will travel from cold to hot equally as happily as hot to cold, then converting them to electricity without a second heat sink is not only possible but is actually what is happening in a standard solar cell. The “obeys 2LoT” tag that is applied to solar cells is actually wrong, since the source temperature and the destination temperature are only relevant as regards how long that PV will last and how efficient it is.

    If, for a PV, you specify that the temperature of the source must be higher than that of the PV in order that it will work, then this breaks causality. How does the PV know where those photons came from? How will it decide not to work if they come from a LED in your deep-freeze? If it’s a cold day in New York, will the telephones stop working going outwards to Atlanta? It’s not reasonable to suppose this, and to specify that the source and destination temperatures matter when we’re dealing simply with the photons they produce.

  4. It is difficult to remove all the group concepts from the discussion. Entropy, temperature, variations, noise etc. all assume inherently that we’re looking at a statistically-valid number of transactions.

    That is not in fact true. You can define temperature in terms of entropy and energy. Both concepts have a valid, though not often used, basis in terms of the characteristics of individual trajectories of single particles. In a quantum system if the number of distinct states is small then 2LoT is not precisely followed – there will be departures of low probability – but it will nevertheless on average be followed. But the underlying concepts all work fine at microsopic level.

    For this underlying probabilistic nature to 2LoT to turn into a macroscopic breaking of the law you need some dependence between the statistics of multiple particles, so that they all happen to occupy low-probability macroscopic states simultaneously. But that can be described in terms of the product state space, and therefore corresponds to an increasingly low overall probability as the system scales up.

    1. Tom – I’m sorry but I can’t see the physical validity of the temperature to a single particle all on its own. You can say maybe that the kinetic energy is 1.5kT, except that until it actually hits something it will simply have a certain kinetic energy in the frame you are seeing it in – that energy is not absolute as well as being a bit uncertain.

      On the other hand, if the photon energy has gone down the wire, the energy cannot be in two places at once so the photon cannot be recreated from the electron/hole pair. There will be other photons created from the store of heat energy in the system, true, but that individual bit of energy has gone *somewhere else*. Again, rather than use the statistical view, I’m following one single packet of energy from its start as a photon, to the electron/hole combination, to the packet of electrical energy going down the wire.

      It’s very hard to get away from the statistical thinking, because that’s the obvious way to deal with heat, and in nearly all situations it is valid and gives the right answers. It took me a long time to see past that to the follow-the-rabbit view I’m putting forward here, which is only valid in fairly tightly-specified situations. To get that situation, you need to change the random chance of a particular transaction to being more-probable to happen one way than another. Since the initial chance is no longer completely random, then the mathematics of random chance will no longer fully apply. The maths might predict something absolutely precisely, but if it’s not describing the physics then the mathematical prediction will be wrong.

      Of course, the best way to demonstrate that this view is valid within the confines I’m predicting is to actually make the device and test it. Or, to be more precise, make them, since there are currently 4 structures that need testing.

  5. So, sadly, this wasn’t the teenager complaining about something disallowed, but more of the 10-year-old asking the question “why” until people give up trying to answer and reply “because it is!”. Still, I had books, so could keep on asking why without annoying people.

    For the record, I’d hope you note that my replies to your interesting questions have never had that form. Thus you have not yet made any point that I cannot give an informative and interesting conventional (2LoT holding) answer to. In some cases however the exact answer requires details that will need some time and effort to explicate. I am in principle interested in doing this but will apply only a small fraction of my time to it, so proper answers will in some cases be delayed.

    1. Tom – I appreciate your continuing engagement with this. I hope the new answer to Abd makes my point a little better. A while back, I’d have totally agreed with you, but then I saw the system from the point of view of the single-transaction only, and in the instant, rather than as a group effect over a period.

      The really interesting point about the water-to-ice transition come from the observation that a body will naturally radiate all its energy away until it reaches zero-point (absolute zero temperature), unless it receives energy from somewhere else. As such, then providing we don’t have that incoming energy then the water actually tends towards a more-ordered state. It’s almost as if things are trying hard to get rid of their disorder but keep getting gifts of it from the rest of the universe. Alternatively, it’s like you’re trying to clear your old clothes out of the wardrobe and put them on the doorstep of someone you think may need them, and when you wake up in the morning there’s another bag of old clothes on your doorstep from someone else….

      It is difficult to remove all the group concepts from the discussion. Entropy, temperature, variations, noise etc. all assume inherently that we’re looking at a statistically-valid number of transactions. When we’re dealing with heat, those words describe what happens at human scale extremely well. The difficulty in thinking other than in those terms is maybe why this hasn’t been discovered before – our language simply dissuades us from thinking along those lines when talking about heat. We can talk about individual energies for electrons and other fundamental particles, but when we’re talking about heat we don’t think of it as an energy vector (or a collection of random energy-vectors), but use the statistics which deal with a group of random directions and a distribution of speeds.

      What I’m asking you to do is to look at the individual energy transaction. If we have enough of them, we can assign a probability, but for one transaction it will either happen or it won’t. As far as we know, the photon to electron/hole will either totally happen or totally not happen – there is no halfway house where it partially happens. If we have an electron/hole pair in a strong-enough electrical field, then they will split and will no longer be able to recombine as they would naturally do in the case where the field was not there. Without the field, the electron would be knocked out of its orbital, fly some distance away against the electrostatic attraction of the ionised atom, then come back and drop into its orbital again and emit a photon of the same energy that came in but in a random direction. With the field, the electron goes one way and the “hole” the other as an electron drops in from the neighbouring atom (in the direction of the field being more -ve) and leaves a hole behind it (that implies a real or virtual photon between those two atoms as well, but again that’s a rabbit-hole I haven’t followed). Let’s leave it as an electron and a hole for the moment…. The electron and the hole reach the conductive layers either side of the semiconductor, and then if a load is connected to the PV they will leave the PV totally. That removes the possibility of the recombination of the electron/hole pair, because the energy to do that and emit a photon is no longer in the PV.

      We have a sequence of events that turns a photon from any direction into electrical energy of a single direction, and once the first event (photon capture) happens then the rest will happen automatically, though in a real device there are losses. This happens for each photon that is absorbed, though of course they may not all be absorbed. That we can rely on it working is evidenced by the number of solar panels around.

      This is the viewpoint from the single-transaction level. It doesn’t mention temperatures, equilibria, or any statistical information except for the chances of that photon being absorbed in the first place and then the chances of that energy actually reaching the electrodes and thus leaving the PV.

      Maybe the best way of putting this is that if you keep with the statistical descriptions, there is no solution to the problem, and 2LoT will be seen to be inviolable. Changing our viewpoint to the individual energy-transaction level, it can instead be seen that the solution is very simple – in fact too simple to appear that it can be true. Unfortunately, the words we normally use mostly have an implication of large numbers of transactions or an extended time (thus more transactions). We need instead to deal with one transaction, here and now.

      1. The really interesting point about the water-to-ice transition come from the observation that a body will naturally radiate all its energy away until it reaches zero-point (absolute zero temperature), unless it receives energy from somewhere else. As such, then providing we don’t have that incoming energy then the water actually tends towards a more-ordered state. It’s almost as if things are trying hard to get rid of their disorder but keep getting gifts of it from the rest of the universe.

        But that is only true if the rest of the universe operates as an absolute zero vacuum sink.

        The error in your thinking here – which I pointed out above perhaps too concisely – is to imagine that radiation has no disorder. The natural progression for a hot isolated object is to shed heat as higher entropy radiation until the thermal energy is spread out evenly (in a more disorderly way) across the universe with everything (object and radiation) at the same low temperature.

        1. Tom – and when everything has reached that same low temperature, there will still be radiation emitted from that body because it is not yet at absolute zero. At the same time, the radiation it receives from the rest of the universe is now equal to the radiation it is emitting, and so its temperature stops falling. There is not a sudden cessation of all radiation because there is a thermal equilibrium. The equilibrium is not static where nothing moves at all, but instead one where there is a defined amount of EM radiation available in the intervening spaces. We can plot the spectrum of it, since some photons will be high-energy even though most will be low-energy. If we instead plot the total energy in that body, we will find that (apart from HUP) then it will fluctuate as it emits each random photon and receives each random photon.

          At that point, kinetic energy is being transmitted as EM photons. If we can change the direction of those photons, then we can have the kinetic energy going in the same direction, and that’s the sort of energy that we can do work with.

          1. I’m going to cut up your answer to show where I agree:

            Tom – and when everything has reached that same low temperature, there will still be radiation emitted from that body because it is not yet at absolute zero. At the same time, the radiation it receives from the rest of the universe is now equal to the radiation it is emitting, and so its temperature stops falling.
            Correct. This is the situation of maximum entropy.

            There is not a sudden cessation of all radiation because there is a thermal equilibrium. The equilibrium is not static where nothing moves at all, but instead one where there is a defined amount of EM radiation available in the intervening spaces. We can plot the spectrum of it, since some photons will be high-energy even though most will be low-energy. If we instead plot the total energy in that body, we will find that (apart from HUP) then it will fluctuate as it emits each random photon and receives each random photon.

            Correct. this is what you see when you look at a system in equilibrium at some constant temperature.

            At that point, kinetic energy is being transmitted as EM photons. If we can change the direction of those photons, then we can have the kinetic energy going in the same direction, and that’s the sort of energy that we can do work with.

            OK. So I think the point you make here is that black-body photons, at some fixed temperature, can be used to extract energy for use at some (higher) temperature. In other words once energy is photons, you think that it can be turned without a thermal sink at a lower temperature into low entropy energy such as electricity or mechanical work.

            I disagree. In order to proceed further you would have to indicate precisely how you intend to do this. I am confident I will be able to explain why this does not work.

  6. However, if you consider turning water into ice (which is a more-ordered state) then all we need to do is allow the heat energy to leave the water. Most people do not see this as a paradox, but I do, since unless you keep feeding heat energy to an object it will naturally radiate it all away until it reaches absolute zero.

    Simon: I’m almost feeling like a proper post here to answer your various points, since 2LoT seeming paradoxes are subtle, interesting, and really require more than a quick to and fro in comments to do justice.

    However I’ll pick off low-hanging fruit. Ice is indeed more ordered than water. To obtain this you need to transfer the heat of liquifaction from the water to somewhere else. The heat moved out will of course increase the entropy of whatever it moves to. For example, if you consider radiation, the entropy increase is carried by the radiated photons which as you know have a specific temperature that characterises their thermodynamic state. Such radiated entropy only succeeds if the surface the photons eventually hit is lower temperature than the water – otherwise reverse radiation will mean no heat is lost.

    If you think this is a paradox it is because you have an incomplete conception of what number of ways actually means in physical terms.

  7. If you start with 2LoT, then Perpetual Motion is impossible. If you start by saying PM is impossible, then you end up with 2LoT. It’s a circular argument.

    That is true. But the argument for 2LoT being universally true does not depend on PM, and is very strong. 2LoT is, mathematically, a tautology. You can then ask how and whether it applies in specific cases: each such case can be specifically shown to embody 2LoT.

    In fact 2LoT is not really a law, just an experimental observation that the universe is not in the most possible disordered state, and that given reversible transactions (as you find in equilibrium systems, and as all physical interactions seem to be), more disordered states are overwhelmingly more likely than less disordered states.

    We have looked on RG at how 2LoT applies to the two cases of harvesting heat using a PV cell or a diode. In both cases the theory holds. With the diode you can see how the real properties of diodes are such as to make this happen. With the PV cell we do not have any such specification but given the cell radiates as much as it receives this will be so. I can see this does not convince Simon – but I’m not sure that a more detailed semiconductor analysis, with occupancy statistics of each energy level etc, would help to inform him more: his issue is that he sees the photon / hole-electron pair transaction is being inherently non-reversible. If that is true, then 2LoT is indeed wrong.

    So perhaps the way forward to better enlightenment is to consider more carefully precisely what does it mean for any microsopic physical change to be non-reversible?

    1. Tom – it looks like you haven’t understood my argument. In a semiconductor, the photon to electron/hole transaction is perfectly reversible, and is happening all the time in both directions. This has been known a long time, as is the effect that if you oxidise Copper and put in in the sunlight, then the Copper Oxide on the surface will generate some electricity. It took Einstein to explain it, for which he got his Nobel prize.

      We have effectively an AC where one way we have a photon and the other way we have an electron-hole pair. If the electron/hole pair is split by an electric field then they cannot recombine and therefore the photon cannot be recreated. The electrical field is thus the diode function. Once the electron/hole are each in the conductors either side of the semiconductor, then they can no longer recombine, since they are at some physical distance apart. Getting the physical structure correct, and the layer thicknesses optimal to produce power, is what designing a PV is about, given that the electron or hole can recombine with their opposite when they encounter one. We thus want them to be swept out of the semiconductor as fast as possible to reduce the chances of that encounter, so we improve the crystal structure (boundaries delay the movement) and make the field high, and get the layers thick-enough to produce enough transactions and not so thick that too much recombination happens.

      The oscillation is the dance between photon and electron/hole pair. The diode function is the removal of the electron/hole pair so they can’t recombine. This applies to the solar cells you can buy just as much as the structures I’m proposing. If that energy is going out through the wires to the load, it is simply not available to recombine and make a photon. CoE again.

      If you have a standard solar cell out in the sunlight, then it will reach a certain temperature. If you then connect a load to it, I predict that it will cool down. It will still be hotter than its local environment, but the difference will decrease. This is a simple consequence of CoE. I think no-one has measured it, though – I’ve found no reference to it anyway. It’s on the list of things to test, but getting acceptable measurements is difficult and it’s obviously true, so it’s some way down the list.

      It is true that disordered states are overwhelmingly more likely that ordered states. We have however many ways to produce ordered states (that diode function) and these are the basis of our technology. However, if you consider turning water into ice (which is a more-ordered state) then all we need to do is allow the heat energy to leave the water. Most people do not see this as a paradox, but I do, since unless you keep feeding heat energy to an object it will naturally radiate it all away until it reaches absolute zero. The Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us this. I found this a surprising conclusion from the logic, but it appears to be a Truth.

      Of course, I’ve played fast and loose with the concepts of AC and of diodes, which may be a step too far for some people, but if there’s an oscillation and I have a diode function that will allow one direction and disallow the other (both ways don’t need to be perfect stop/go, but more one way than the other) then the probabilities are skewed for the system. This then provides some sorting. You’ll find such sorting methods in use all over the place if you look, and allow yourself to take the concepts of “oscillation” and “diode” with a somewhat wider range.

      1. Simon, you are making a theoretical argument, and you already know that you are using non-physical abstractions, like AC and diodes. You then attempt to soften this by claiming that the diode doesn’t have to be perfect, merely to bias the direction of flow. However, this is not a quantitative argument. Maybe with an almost-perfect diode you can get an almost-real effect.

        You should easily be able to measure a proxy for the cooling effect. It would be the generated power! You could then calculate the expected cooling from the PV thermal mass and compare it with the expected heating from known variables (i.e., total energy flux absorption). I doubt that it would be measurable, but … I haven’t done the math.

        you consider turning water into ice (which is a more-ordered state) then all we need to do is allow the heat energy to leave the water. Most people do not see this as a paradox, but I do, since unless you keep feeding heat energy to an object it will naturally radiate it all away until it reaches absolute zero. The Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us this. I found this a surprising conclusion from the logic, but it appears to be a Truth.

        First of all, you have misstated the case with ice. If water is at a higher temperature than its environment, it will radiate as you state and under some conditions it will freeze. There, there is a local decrease in entropy, but overall, considering the full environment, there is an increase. It will not radiate until it reaches absolute zero, unless it is in an environment at a temperature of absolute zero. You are commonly stating these matters without being clear, and the errors are not trivial, they betray a lack of depth. Because I know you are capable of more than that, I suspect something is stopping you from immediately or quickly recognizing your own errors. That’s not at all abnormal, but you can do far better, I believe that, or I wouldn’t bother telling you.

        Rather than attempt to measure current from a closed-system rectenna, where you might get a clear result, but which might be very difficult, rather set up a rectenna test where you can vary the temperature of the rectenna and/or heat source. Look for predictable variation, and then you should be able to extrapolate this to no-flux conditions. You would also look at noise and at the possible falling of measurements into the noise. The point of experimental science is to measure what actually exists.

        You are still, here, attempting to argue that your effect should exist. That could be expected to be a doomed effort, even though we are sympathetic; you are reasoning through analogies that appear to us to be defective. I’m attempting to save you some time and money by pointing to what might be testable that might make it unnecessary to beat your head against a very difficult problem, where failure would teach you nothing but “I couldn’t do it.” If you measure the actual behavior of real devices, what you see will not be theory, but reality.

        And if there is some amazing discovery lurking there, you could still find it. As well, do the work well, it might be publishable. Failure to create a 2lot violation, in itself, would be boring. A belief that you have created one could be almost as boring, for all the common reasons. As I’d hope you would know, the goal of experimental validation of your own ideas is to prove them wrong, which is the opposite of what fanatics do.

        1. Abd – the example of the solar cell in sunlight was not intended as an example of 2LoT violation, but that the conditions are different when you connect a load to the PV and when you don’t. When you connect the load to the PV, then energy leaves the PV and so it does not get so hot. This ought to obvious from CoE considerations, but it is not normally considered. The difference in temperature should be easily measurable, as well, being several degrees. Encapsulation of the PVs you can buy makes attachment of a TC a bit difficult, though.

          The concepts of temperature and of thermal equilibrium actually do not apply at the individual transaction level. This is an important observation, but is difficult to internalise given that we are used to both in daily life. When you are talking about a flux, that is also a summation of a lot of transactions, whereas for an individual atom it either receives a photon and emits an electron/hole pair or it doesn’t. The flux has no meaning in this situation. To take account of the flux we have to have an extended time in which to count the number of photons.

          Where I am narrowing my focus to what happens in the individual transaction, the terms you are using to refute it (and say I’m sadly mistaken) largely have the connotations of large numbers. This is where the difference is, and why most people have a problem with what I’m saying as well. Our concepts for heat energy are defined in terms of large numbers of transactions. Since I started at the same point you’re thinking from, with the implied (but not obviously-so) large numbers, I recognise the problem but had thought that once that semantic problem was pointed out then some degree of satori would result. If the words you use have the implications of large numbers attached, then you will miss my point. It is essential to consider only one transaction at a time. It took me a very long time to see that point, too….

          Unless a body receives radiation or conducted heat from the environment, it will radiate its heat (according to Stefan-Boltzmann) until there is none left (barring the zero-point energy). I found this surprising, in that the natural state of a body is that it will cool down and what stops it doing that is the energy it receives from the environment. Here I am specifically looking at a large number of transactions over time. If I’m looking at radiation only (because it’s simpler) then for an individual atom in that body it will (for some reason) radiate quanta of radiation of random size with a specific probability until it has none left (save zero-point, of course). Since we know that a charged body emits radiation when it is accelerated, that may be the reason for the radiation, but that’s only a suggestion and I haven’t chased down that rabbit-hole yet. It is interesting that the concept of temperature does not apply to a single particle on its own, though, and we need the interactions between a group to both produce the radiation and to define a temperature.

          What we see in daily life, and what we measure, all depend on large numbers of transactions over a period of time. Physically, there is no such thing as temperature at a point in time – it can only be defined over a specific non-zero sample-time. At a point in time (if such a thing actually exists, but that is another question…) we only have velocities of particles, and even then we have the HUP making those a little uncertain. The terminology you are using, to politely say that I’m messing up, includes temperature, flux, noise-levels, variation, heat, entropy, thermal mass, current…. All dealing inherently with large numbers, and for the individual transaction, these are all actually irrelevant. It’s hard to get away from them, though. It’s built-in to the language we use to understand what’s happening.

          So we have that 10-year-old asking “why does heat move from hot to cold?”. And the answer is obvious – it just does, that’s the way it is, and it can’t be changed because that’s the way Nature works. I’ve shown however that for each individual transaction there is no such directionality evident – it’s random. The temperature in the different locations has absolutely no effect on that transaction. The reason we see heat moving from hot to cold is the result of the “spreading-out” of the energy-levels by a lot of individual and random transactions. At the individual transaction level all we have are energy-vectors and momentum-vectors, and temperature has no meaning at this level.

          If I can skew the probabilities on an individual transaction into going one way in preference to the other, then then sum of a large number of transactions will also be skewed. We know from experience (distilled into the 2LoT) that if we try to do this with large numbers of transactions simultaneously then we can’t skew the probabilities without cost, and that all such attempts have failed. You can’t beat the probabilities after the event – they have to be fixed for each and every individual transaction in order to have an effect.

          With the PV, and ignoring the minor probabilities, a photon comes in and produces an electron/hole pair. That electron/hole pair is then split by the inbuilt electrical field, and each part moves to the collection electrodes. If they are not allowed to move from there, the electrical field will build up and negate the inbuilt field, so this provides a limit to the open-circuit voltage available from the PV (but there we’re talking about a large number of photons and some time). If we connect a load to the PV, then those electrons and holes can move outside the PV (of course, in the wires it’s only electrons moving). Such movement reduces the countering of the internal electric field, so allows another electron/hole pair to be split to the collection electrodes. Each individual transaction is skewed by the internally-generated electrical field, without which we wouldn’t have a solar-cell that worked. The sum of all those skewed transactions is that we get unidirectional energy out of the PV whereas the incoming photon can be in any direction, even from the bottom of the PV towards the top (this is why some PV designs have a mirror at the base-level, to reflect the photons that would otherwise pass through the structure, and give them a second chance to get absorbed).

          The PV thus takes energy with any direction (as photons) and outputs some of that energy in a single direction. This is precisely the property we need to overcome the limitations of 2LoT, in that each photon is individually dealt with and the packet of incoming energy in any direction is converted to a packet of electrical energy on the output terminals. Providing we attach a load to the PV, that energy leaves the PV and the reverse reaction is not possible. We know that the photon to electricity transaction is biased in one direction, because there are millions of working solar-cells in the world.

          If we regard 2LoT as in stating that the direction of energy will tend to become randomised (which is actually a pretty good definition and is obviously true from probability considerations) then the humble solar cell, that you can easily buy, is in fact breaking 2LoT. A photon from any direction will result in an electrical charge in a single direction. It’s also obvious that you can also mathematically show that it doesn’t break 2LoT because the Sun is a lot hotter than the PV and so there is an obvious energy flux from the Sun to the PV, and so you can rest assured that 2LoT reigns supreme after all (and this is the route most people take, except crackpots like me). However, when you narrow your viewpoint to only individual energy transactions (and remove the concepts that have inbuilt reference to large numbers) then the diode function is clear.

          We can’t destroy energy. That’s an axiom, but I can see no evidence of it being broken anywhere. All that is lost when we use energy is the directionality, which we need since in order to move something from here to there we need directionality. The 2LoT tells me that directionality is easily lost, and probability theory says the same, and these statements are obviously true. Toss a fair coin or an unweighted die enough times, and we can demonstrate those probabilities. Paint a single dot on a boule and toss it enough times, and the loss of directionality of energy can also be modelled. If however I toss a subtly-weighted die (it doesn’t need to be overwhelmingly weighted) then over enough throws the probabilities mount up for the preferred face to be up when it stops spinning. If I roll a bowl (as in English game of bowling) then it will curve according to which side the weight is, and there will be a higher probability that, when it stops, the weight will be at the bottom. We don’t need a perfect diode – it only has to be good-enough, but it does need to act on each individual transaction.

          To see the problem clearly you need to shift your viewpoint from what we spent our lives experiencing and what we were taught of the reasons such things happen. We need to remove the terminology that inherently refers to large numbers of transactions, and only use language suitable for a single transaction at a time. The problem is simply that of making a single quantum of energy go in the direction we want it to. The solution is to find a system that takes in energy of any direction and, quantum-by-quantum, tends to redirect it in a uniform direction. If the solution works (with a defined probability) for one quantum of energy, then it will work for any number of quanta and our probability then becomes a predictable output of usable energy. The PV is one of the set of solutions for the problem. The others, so far, are mostly somewhat harder to actually make, though one that is easier to make does rely on some sneaky quantum physics – that’s also being tested.

          Again, thanks for continuing to engage on this question, despite obviously thinking I’m totally misguided (same goes for Tom). It shows me where my explanations are inadequate (and of course I think I’m right, otherwise I’d collapse in deepest humiliation). The language we normally use tends to hide the underlying reality, since the words often have an assumption of statistically-valid numbers, whereas to beat it you need to use individual energy transactions and only individual transactions. This change in viewpoint is not easy to achieve. As I said, I’m an engineer so I want something that I can measure in order to settle the question as to whether my view is closer to Reality than the view I learned during my education. As such, I will be making the things, since I can’t buy them ready-made. I can’t make a nantenna or get hold of one ready-made, so no point in aiming at that. Also notable is that those arrays wear out pretty quickly and they cost way too much for the power they generate – they’ll demonstrate the principle but are not practical. Given the low level of power-generation, the temperature-drop will also be extremely hard to measure with the kit I can afford. It’s far too easy, therefore, to dismiss the results as experimental error, and for that reason it’s not worth bothering with nantenna arrays. Let’s face it, would you or Tom be convinced by a few microwatts of electrical power available from a single temperature-reservoir, where you can point to unevenness of heating and thus thermocouple effects, and there is no measurable temperature-drop? As I see it, you’d only be convinced by the correlation of temperature-drop with power-out, where the temperature-drop is far larger than experimental error. Anything less can easily be dismissed as bad experimental technique, systematic errors etc.. As such, the tests you’re asking me to do are precisely the ones that wouldn’t convince you of the results. Not much point in that… it would be cheaper and easier, for sure, but is a waste of time.

          I don’t know if the IR-PV will work when it starts in thermal equilibrium. Logic says it should, and I want to test that. If I was certain of the answer, I wouldn’t bother testing, which is of course why nobody has done it. It’s so obviously disallowed by 2LoT. But then, LENR is also disallowed by the mainstream nuclear theories.

          Incidentally, if you want microwatts of power from a single reservoir, Robert Murray-Smith can sell you the paints to make one (he’s not ripping people off on the costs, either), or will tell you how to make them. It hasn’t convinced anyone…. Like the nantenna, the power available is too low to be useful, though commercial devices have been available for around 7 years.

  8. Thanks, Abd. I think Eddington would have been a good guy to have a conversation with.

    The social problems with acceptance of the LENR data is something that I have taken notice of, and of course changed my strategy as regards what evidence would be needed for my project. I could state that the “real” 2LoT is that, unless you take special precautions to either conserve or put back the directionality of the energy you are using, then the energy will tend to gain random directions at each transaction. That definition needs polishing.

    Until maybe a year or two ago, I’d also have panned the possibility of Perpetual Motion of the second kind (that’s the useful one where you get power out, rather than just keep running which is pretty useless). I’d been taught it was impossible after all, and had seen no successes – all the historical ones had mysteriously disappeared (or the dog ate them) and couldn’t be subjected to any sort of test. All you have is reports. I wasn’t at all worried about that impossibility, either, since I hadn’t really inspected the underlying assumptions and it seemed obvious it can’t be done – after all, heat always goes from hot to cold. The reason why I dug somewhat deeper is that I became part of R-G and I needed to explain to people why their pet Free Energy projects didn’t work. Thus I needed to ask the question “where does the energy come from?” and, because of CoE, I also had to ask “where does the energy go to?” as well. That second question is not often asked. I thus found that the words for energy and work were not quite sufficient, and led to fuzzy thinking. In the Free Energy world, in any case people often confuse energy and power, and confuse the measured voltage with the power delivery, and make all sorts of definition errors. I thus needed better definitions so we could count the joules in and out and account for every one. Hence the introduction of the concepts of PE Work, KE Work and Displacement work. Later still I realised that work and energy are actually the same thing and the name only specifies how the observer regards things. Displacement Work was the joker in the pack in that it’s counted as work but actually isn’t. In this way I could quickly determine whether some inventor’s idea (passed to me under NDA) was actually going to do anything useful.

    So, sadly, this wasn’t the teenager complaining about something disallowed, but more of the 10-year-old asking the question “why” until people give up trying to answer and reply “because it is!”. Still, I had books, so could keep on asking why without annoying people.

    If you start with 2LoT, then Perpetual Motion is impossible. If you start by saying PM is impossible, then you end up with 2LoT. It’s a circular argument. We haven’t seen a real PM machine (yet) so it’s easy to accept that 2LoT applies. However, the impossibility of PM is an axiom – there is no prior justification except that we’ve tried to do it and always failed. PM is a Black Swan. Never seen one, guv!

    The sheer number of Free Energy experiments and the number of scams that get funded (even the ZPE projects which are the “scientifically-justified” experiments hunting for Free Energy) tells us that there is a widespread feeling that PM is possible. I think ZPE is actually not physical, but actually a problem in the mathematical description, so it will not become available, but I’m open to being proved wrong. Still, having set out my basic assumption that mass/energy is conserved, why can’t we use it again? That in turn led to the directionality definition and the reasons for 2LoT having such almost-universal applicability, but also led to seeing the loophole when using photons or individual particles, and that movements of energy are not dependent on the source and destination temperature. Now we’re back to something electronic, and I do have some experience there. There is however a big social problem to get over before the answer would be accepted – it is after all a very simple answer to what those Free Energy researchers have been hunting for for a long time and produced all sorts of weird machines and devices. Too simple to be the truth. This is why an absolute slam-dunk demonstration device is needed. If you don’t believe me, then test the thing yourself…..

    Meantime, the data I need to do a precise design doesn’t seem to actually exist – I’ve looked for it for a long time. It also seems unlikely that it would have been measured. Another Black Swan, maybe…. As such, to get the measurements I need to build the device and test it.

    It’s worth noting that even this recycling of energy will have limits. it’s very good for running houses etc, but the limits will be of the order of a kW or so because if you cool air too much you get icing. Yes, it will produce power and air-cooling at the same time, which will be nice in hot countries. We’ll most-likely need big power-generation as well to run the factories, so LENR (or some other nuclear power) is still needed.

    LENR requires that same level of demonstration, where it becomes unreasonable to reject the reality of LENR because the data is so good. I’m pretty certain that Plan B will validate LENR and thus kick-start the research on theory and practice again.

    The H. Pylori story is a good one. Luckily his hunch that an antibiotic would fix it turned out to be correct. My risks are nothing like that – I get the pension whether I work or not, and what does an old engineer fill his time with? More engineering, of course, since it’s fun.

    1. Apparently another guy tried the same trick, eating h. pylori, only it may have been resistant, in any case, he was sick for years. (correction: that was from Wikipedia, but the source did not support that. It may have been months, two courses of treatment rather than one.)

      So, sadly, this wasn’t the teenager complaining about something disallowed, but more of the 10-year-old asking the question “why” until people give up trying to answer and reply “because it is!”. Still, I had books, so could keep on asking why without annoying people.

      Yeah, been there and did that. “Because it is” is not an answer to why, and 10-year-olds know that. However, consider Black Swans. Why are there no black swans? Of course, we don’t actually know there are not, but if we have never seen a black swan, we have no particular reason to think they exist. If someone sees it, and reports it, then there is a reason. So as to perpetual motion machines, the basic experience is that we have never seen one — at least not that we recognize as one. That is a perfectly ordinary reason to think they don’t exist. It is obviously not an impossibility proof, so an honest answer to “why can’t they exist” might be, “I don’t know. Maybe you can figure it out.” Or THH is explaining why, but you don’t like it. His explanation doesn’t seem, so far, to be “because it is impossible.” Rather, it simply looks at the probability of a rearrangement that decreases entropy. It’s low, so it could actually happen, but it’s like the house odds. The house can lose, but … usually it doesn’t, and with many gamblers, it’s quite reliable: the house wins.

      I am suggesting that you look at the behavior of a photovoltaic cell with respect to net flux. If you put a PV cell in sunlight, the example you give, you have a flux, a flow of energy from the sun to the cell. Your intuition is that the cell must be cooling from the current, and I think that is correct, in that environment. That is, the current is extracting energy from the cell. However, this would be swamped by the heating of the cell by the sun and by the inefficiencies. Vastly swamped. It might be detectable, though, but this would not demonstrate 2lot violation. Energy is flowing from hot to cold and some small fraction of that is being diverted.

      Then you have an idea about photons and rectennas. If the output of a rectenna varies with the flux, rather than with the absolute temperature, your idea falls apart. Low flux is an abnormal situation, it is not how and where such devices as rectennas are tested. With a PV cell, operating from visible light, the source is normally at far higher temperature than the cell. Heating the cell such that the normal emitted radiation is visible would probably destroy the cell.

      From the Second Law, I expect that if there is no flux, there is no net PV or rectenna current. That is circular as a proof, so it is not a proof, merely a reason to suspect this. On the other hand, if the rectenna uses a perfect diode, it could generate power from the noise. Imagining a perfect diode is imagining a 2lot violation.

      I’m not getting into the reversibility argument, it’s too complicated.

      Plan B, yes, was designed to create what had long been demanded: a reproducible experiment. That already existed, and had been confirmed, but it was old news. It is very difficult to publish papers on old news, even though I was allowed to do it with Current Science. What was new with my paper was the understanding that heat/helium was already a reproducible experiment, done by redefining the nature of the experiment and what was needed to be confirmed. Not reliable heat, but a reliable ratio. The heat can vary all over the map, and it can actually help, because self-controls are created, otherwise-identical experiments that differ only, as far as is visible, in the heat generated and helium released.

      (If the cause of the heat variability can be identified, then a fundamental problem in cold fusion would be identified. I don’t expect that, beyond seeing various techniques that improve results, but that still don’t create full reliability.)

  9. Updated with more information and commentary, the history being clarified. The Zeneca-Campus Bay “disaster” actually shows clearly what Cherokee does — support environmental remediation projects, a very risky business — and what they do to survive in that toxic environment. What Cherokee does with what Planet Rossi calls “shell corporations” issuing “toilet paper stock” is what works, allowing investors to safely support these projects without betting the farm on each one. Zeneca bought a disaster, but probably did not realize the extent of it, and when they did, it looks like they reached out to Cherokee for support, and Cherokee invested, cooperating with Zeneca (and the University of California). And mistakes were made, apparently. That’s what happens when we set out to accomplish large goals. However, what happens then? Do we run away, blaming everyone else, or do we shoulder our burden and take on possibility? Cherokee Simeon Ventures, which is, after all, a joint venture, not solely Cherokee (and apparently not even managed by Cherokee any more), still exists, has not gone through bankruptcy. This is common on Planet Rossi: a reality is asserted based on some impression or idea.

    Rossi had this idea that he had won the lottery by creating a masterpiece, starting with dumping Hydro Fusion. He had the idea of creating an “independent customer” to induce IH to release the reactor to him and allow him to set up a faux GPT. Then, having created this imaginary customer — a true “shell corporation” — he wrote and talked as if it was not him, with claims like “they” would not allow access to IH, and thus he could do whatever he pleased with the “customer area” with no supervision. When did he get the idea to build — or claim he had built — a heat exchanger? Regardless, once the idea existed, he treated it as a reality. His defense against claims of perjury or criminal fraud, in the end, may be insanity. (An insanity defense is irrelevant to civil fraud.)

    What he did was not utterly different from what true innovators do: persist, against major obstacles, in what they declare as a goal. But most true innovators do not lose track of the difference between a possibility and a reality, and don’t cross over into blatant deception, staying with mere optimism.

    Simon, you are working on a very-much-fringe idea. You are aware that it’s fringe. I may think you are face-palm idiotic with regard to it, but … you have not, at any time, lost sight of the difference between what you have and proof. You are quite aware that it’s a long shot. This distinguishes you from fanatics like what we see on Planet Rossi. Because you remain grounded in reality, we can have conversations about this and other ideas, there is a basis for agreement. And we both can discuss issues with THH, who may think we are both nuts. Except I don’t think he holds that idea, or at least not firmly. He’s willing to look, which is the most that I expect from skeptics, and I don’t blame them for not looking at claims of a dragon in the garage. Even if there is one.

    If I think there is something real to LENR — and I do, though I would not call it a “belief” — it is up to me, in my ontology, to guide and educate, to share what I know, or think I know, that might lead me to that position. It’s about “evidence,” not “proof.”

    Meanwhile, I’m heading for Miami in less than two weeks. I decided to wait for the Washington visit to my return, it makes some things a bit easier. I’ll see Rossi, I assume, and hope his health holds up. I am not and have never been a “Rossi hater,” even though I recognize the damage he has created and is continuing to create.

    My message for those who “sustain” him is to read the case documents, understanding the difference between testimony upon knowledge, and opinion and judgment. When we approach these documents with established beliefs, we will tend to miss major aspects of them, seeing only what confirms what we already believe. This is very normal human behavior but is not inevitable, it loses its power when it is distinguished. Some people probably need training in order to recognize this.

    1. Abd – most people think I’m face-palm crazy on my project, so you’re definitely not alone there. So far, though, no-one has successfully attacked the logic, but rely on standard theory to say it won’t work. However, consider a silly question – why does heat move from hot to cold? Actually, it doesn’t, and what we measure to happen (that it always does) is an emergent property of the statistics of a random walk. As with other questions such as LENR, though, we need to ask Nature the question and not rely on theory to be right just because it’s consensus. Also like LENR it’s not easy to set up the conditions (it requires sub-micron engineering and some bits of atomic-scale), but unlike LENR I expect that if we get the fabrication correct it will work the same each time. Tom probably thinks we’re both crazy, but he’ll make his mind up once the data is in. However, since he’s talking and he’s the calibre of person we’re going to need to convince in order to get LENR into mainstream Physics, then the information he brings is useful.

      I find the nuclear explanation the least-crazy one for LENR. I can’t think of any other explanation for the heat/Helium correlation or the Tritium generation. There’s a problem that our theories don’t have a way in which it can happen, but then there have only been a few theorists thinking about it over the last 28-odd years, and for superconductivity it took around 3 decades to work out why that happened even though anyone could show that it did happen. Not having a theory is not a bar to proving the reality of some effect.

      I hope the Miami trip yields some insights. Hopefully you’ll experience the Rossi Unreality Field up close and gain some understanding of that. If he turns up….

      I expect most of us approach these legal documents with some inbuilt assumptions. There’s such an amazingly-large amount of words. Most people won’t have the time to read, understand and cross-correlate the data there. We expect lawyers to tell the truth, but obviously that’s a bad assumption. I’m not engrossed in the court case – the science side was pinned a while back. I would however like justice to be done and for the case to be wrapped up quickly now. I can’t remember how much money you said working LENR would be worth (the odd trillion dollars/year?), but it’s a lot of money we’re not saving because Rossi wanted to fool people.

      I see a lot of problems from both belief and disbelief, in that both tend to blind people to what is actually happening. See what the data actually says, instead.

      1. Hi Simon,

        I agree entirely with your sentiments here.

        One caveat: what the data says is always subject to interpretation. And interpretation often requires judgement, and this will inevitably depend on prior belief – which we all have no matter how much we try not to.

        In most cases of new science the evidence is clear enough that after a bit of unclarity nearly all will agree (you will never get all agreeing, but the outliers are recognisably that). In some cases (e.g. AGW) the unclarity can last a long long time because the evidence is complex and the uncertainties – in the case of AGW that would be the response of clouds to global temperature change – are real. But, in the case of AGW, you also see unusually strongly held prior beliefs that align with politics, so even when the science is certain enough erroneous judgements occupy a lot of political space.

        With LENR, the evidence is unclear because there is a lack of simple reproducibility, and the observed data has all so far been marginal when from the hypothesis this is not what you’d expect. Whatever the reason, given this lack of clarity prior beliefs will inevitably color judgements.

        In the Court case there continue to be fascinating science aspects – for example the exact limits of what dissipation might be possible from Rossi’s probably non-existent heat exchanger. Rossi does these shallow analyses (with more than the usual number of mistakes) and expects them to work. In the heat exchanger case this is not true, although the reasons for this are complex and interesting. In the process of working that stuff out I learnt a whole load of heat transfer theory, Reynolds and Prandtl numbers, which is actually very neat but previously I’d never absorbed. It is fun to extend one’s expertise.

        I don’t plan to do the heat exchanger analysis here. Let Wong defend himself in Court first.

      2. Hi Simon,

        I’ve posted the hole in your theoretical nantenna to harvest ambient heat energy argument on your RG blog. It may however need some more elaboration before you can see that it is general.

        Best wishes, Tom

        1. Tom – thanks for having a look and thinking about it. I hope to have real data fairly soon so I’ll either be correct or wrong in my contentions. It’s not something I want to clog up Abd’s blog with, though, although it does have enough parallels with LENR to be interesting. Are our theories correct? Once we can practically show that LENR is undeniably happening, then our theories will need to be changed in order that we can explain it.

          Theory is the distillation of experimental results which allows us to predict what will happen if we go outside the bounds of what has been already physically tested. If we do anything different than we have done before, then we really can’t say that the results will be as predicted although naturally we expect that to happen. Even in factories, scaling-up from lab-scale to manufacturing-scale normally brings up problems. In baking, a recipe can be doubled or halved generally without any problems, but scaling-up further generally requires adjustment of the relative quantities of the ingredients. Theory is thus a guide, not an absolute. There’s a lot more that we don’t know than there is that we know. I tend to focus on the anomalies where theory isn’t quite correct, since it’s fun. If LENR is undeniably proven to happen so that people of your calibre accept that it happens, that’s going to lead to a new and hopefully better description of Nature that is closer to reality, and it’s hard to predict what that will lead to. Even if we don’t achieve low-cost electricity through LENR, the results could be just as dramatic in another direction.

        2. It’s perfectly okay to post links to other blogs, assuming the absence of offensive abuse, and would be appreciated if they are cited.

          Okay, here it is. Because I think the question and the answers are “nifty,” a technical term I won’t bother to explain, I intend to post there, but, briefly, the explanation of why heat moves from hotter to colder is nice, but then various assumptions are incorporated that may seem reasonable but aren’t. That is, they are assumptions, not observed facts. At least one stands out for me: the idea that it takes no work for a mirror to change the direction of motion of a photon. One of the difficulties in the 2lot ideas is a blending of micro (particle or single photon interactions) with the macro (where the Second Law holds, statistically. The “no work” concept is a macro concept, it does not apply on the micro scale. On a micro scale, each interaction follows conservation of energy, aside from quantum fluctuations (which can locally, on a micro scale, appear to violate CoE). Changing the momentum of a photon requires work. Consider how the work is generated: it is assumed that the mirror is stationary (in the direction of motion of the photon). It is not stationary, nothing is. When the photon interacts with the mirror, momentum is exchanged, the mirror will recoil. I find it useful to think in terms of relativity: the energy of a particle is relative to the motion of the particle, and this is relative, depending on reference frame, not absolute. In any case, the mirror will be moving from Brownian motion. It is not fixed in position, such a physical state would require work to maintain against all the perturbations. If the mirror is in a uniform environment, i.e., temperature the same on both sides, there will be no net force required, but for each interaction, there is an exchange of momentum. The mirror will be vibrating, and someone so motivated could calculate the frequency. Feynman’s analysis of quantum ratchets proposed that the ratchet itself, if sufficiently sensitive to harvest Brownian motion, will operate randomly. In a gedanken experiment, we may imagine ideal operation not attainable by objects made of matter instead of thought. The Uncertainty Principle violates our wish for a stable and orderly world, creating cognitive dissonance.

          For a nantenna to harvest infrared energy, there must be a flow of energy. You imagine a flow, and that imagination then leads to a prediction of energy harvesting. In fact, heat flow is energy flow, i.e., the net travel of kinetic energy packets. If a system is at uniform temperature, and not subject to a flux externally generated, there is only minimal energy flow, as required by the UP, and the direction of that flow, at any moment, is random. IR photons are travelling in one direction and in the opposite direction. You want to harvest the energy of vibration, which requires, then, a perfect diode, which, of course, doesn’t exist.

          Your outcome, Simon, is the result, the logical consequence, of your assumptions. The problem, then, is not with your “logic,” but with its incompleteness.

          Experiment, as you know, will trump all this theoretical consideration…. but what I predict from what we have considered so far is that any energy flow created will be “down in the noise,” like Brownian motion. As the scale increases, the average net energy harvest will decrease. It would be amazing if any energy harvest can be detected at all, but with extremely sensitive instrumentation you may detect what would be expected from quantum fluctuation.

          Your analysis of heat flow, though, I find quite useful and correct. I’ve attempted to make some points about what is claimed to be LOT violation, by translating “temperature” into “probability distribution of kinetic energy.” It seems to boggle some minds that were educated before I was. One approach to cold fusion theory, followed by Takahashi and Kim, suggests that Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) may form at room temperature. That is considered preposterous because BECs require extremely low relative momentum, close to absolute zero. The question, though, is rate. The rejection of the idea never actually considers rate. Kim indicates that we don’t have enough knowledge of the distribution of deuterium particle velocity in palladium deuteride to calculate the probability of low momentum interactions, like collapse into a BEC. If Takahashi is correct, if a BEC forms with two deuterium molecules (electrons included), this will 100% fuse, forming 8Be, which ends up as two helium nuclei, and no radiation (other than alpha, and that’s still a problem, not yet explained). That fusion process is a quantum ratchet of a kind. I.e., normally, BECs would form and break up with no apparent effects. So they are not observed. Observing them is way difficult because the observation process would perturb them. So we think they “don’t exist,” though theory, in fact, predicts that they must exist at some rate and for some time. “existence” incorporates assumptions about persistence. If BEC formation, though, allows fusion, (and Takahashi’s math seems good to me, but I’m not qualified to judge), a drastic and observable change has occurred.

          The collapsible configuration does not occur in pure deuterium, because the molecules would dissociate before reaching the possibly required Tetrahedral Symmetric state. Confinement or constraint from a catalytic environment that increases the probability of BEC formation may prevent dissociation by restricting the degrees of freedom of motion of the deuterium atoms.

          It’s an idea, and to my mind the least offensive to known physics of the cold fusion ideas on the table, but … there is little direct experimental evidence, beyond observation of hugely increased multibody fusion in PdD under deuteron bombardment, and the prediction of helium formation at the observed heat/helium ratio. There remain major problems, such as how the energy is down-converted to photons or particles below the Hagelstein limit of 20 KeV. Takahashi proposes previously unknown nuclear halo states to allow the energy to be stored for enough time to allow the release of photons in a series of nuclear transitions.

          1. Thanks, Abd. Tom and I are having a good conversation on R-G and are finding the underlying reasons for disagreements. This is really helpful, and is leading to new insights (at least for me).

            For those who are interested, the conversation is at http://revolution-green.com/heat-move-hotter-colder/ .

            Energy poverty is widespread in the world, and most of the traditional ways of getting it have downsides of pollution, spoliation of the environment, or are simply too expensive. Reducing the various costs of energy-production is the big problem that I think we need to solve, since once we’ve got the costs down to a fraction of today’s costs then a lot of things become economically viable. We can collect water from the air and run indoor farming in any climate, and live comfortably anywhere on the planet. We can recycle the waste from our societies and reduce the need for mining to a fraction of today’s amount. There should be fewer wars over resources, and in any case the people (and their inventiveness) will really be the main resource. This is the underlying reason why LENR research is worth that 1% chance of it succeeding, and why I support such research. I’m also interested in clean and compact (and safe!) fission ideas, fusion (if it arrives in my lifetime, of course, since it’s only 20 years away now…) and of course my own project. A 1% chance of success has a very good payback.

            In the end, it depends on the experimental results. Experimental proof of LENR to a higher quality than we’ve previously had is obviously necessary to convince the majority of the sceptics that there is really something there which can’t be ignored. If we get that, then that improves the chances of LENR being useful. In turn, that should make the world a safer and better place for a lot of people, with very few downsides.

            1. Yes, I am learning from the discussion as well. In particular, I now have an understanding why Second Law arguments are so persistent. As I wrote there, we can be personally offended if someone tells us that what we might want to do is impossible. Impossibility arguments are fundamentally defective, if taken as proof. A more sober discussion would consider probabilities. Start with Wikiquote on Eddington:

              It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
              New Pathways in Science (1935) Ch. V Indeterminacy and Quantum Theory, p. 105

              Eddington is here writing about a normative concept of physics, distinct from what “physicists” may say or do, because it’s obvious that some physicists do claim “perfect determinism,” or write commentary that appears to assume it. Eddington also writes about that, with sarcasm:

              The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

              Eddington is describing a social reality, and it’s important for our purposes, as those exploring what appears to be “fringe,” to understand that reality. What’s the basis for it? And why do some of us find it so offensive?

              These are actually social and psychological questions, not scientific. There is, in the realm of engineering (which is an interface between science and society), what may be called “heuristics,” or “economics,” i.e., how we assign attention and resources. As could be much better known — some useless arguments might be avoided — there is no definitive “proof” that the Second Law is inviolable, and, in fact, when we look more deeply, the Second Law — as simplistically understood — is trivially and routinely violated. But Second Law supporters then point out that the alleged violations are not actually violations — and “actually” here is subjective, not clearly grounded in experience and logic — and I gave the example of a set of coin tosses I ran with my daughter, to explore the concepts of probability and prediction and what we mean by success and failure. I would predict, from my concepts of reality, that the ratio of heads to coin tosses would approach 0.5 as the number of tosses increases. In fact, I tossed a coin at least seven times without getting one head. As the number of tosses increased, the ratio stayed rock solid at 0. That’s a 100% error!
              (That this beautifully demonstrated some aspects of reality to my daughter was the kind of accident that I have come to appreciate deeply, I could not have predicted the actual outcome, I merely rode with it, always accepting each result and making it mean whatever I chose.)

              The Second Law is statistical in nature, and therefore it cannot predict individual events, only the probability distribution as the number of events increases. That appears to create a “loophole” in the Law, but, in fact, this is part of the real Law (if there is such a thing as a “real law,” laws being our interpretations of reality, not reality itself).

              Absolute impossibilities very naturally offend us, particularly the inner teenager, who refuses to accept “the way things are,” and who rebels and argues for what is ultimately personal freedom. Some of us have managed to maintain that rebellion beyond ordinary adolescence. Feynman was one of these. The trick, and what made him a great scientist, is that he did not fall into rigidity, always maintained curiosity, never fell for one of the alternatives, the Scylla and Charybdis of rebellion or conformity.

              So what I’m saying to Simon is that he’s right, in certain ways. The Second Law is commonly explained very poorly. THH is going deeper and actually providing an argument for the Second Law as a consequence of the math, but that’s an argument, not a proof. It merely rationalizes the Second Law as falling out of a concept of random behavior. Some cool and simple ideas have come up and have become fairly plain to me, and quickly (compared to how long it usually takes me to approach a subject). The idea of a diode, for example, the “concept” of a diode, and how a diode might be simulated in a primitive simulation, might as well have Perpetual Motion Machine written on it. If we could make a perfect diode (no forward resistance, infinite reverse resistance … or a “very good diode,” where these are outside certain bounds), we could harvest energy from the vacuum, we could harvest energy from temperature itself, which, as I’m sure Simon has noticed, would not violate conservation of energy, on the face. More deeply, I suspect it would. But when people argue against some suggested demonstration of 2LoT violation on the basis that it would violate the Second Law and therefore must be bogus, they are making a heuristic or economic argument, rooted in probabilities at best, not a “logical argument.”

              And that is probably, on occasion, infuriating. And the teenager wants to show that they are Wrong.

              This is Essence of Teenager; it is probably written in the genes.

              Instead of trying to suppress teenage rebellion (I have had seven of them), my goal is to empower them. So to Simon, teenager-at-whatever-age, I suggest creating efficient tests.

              Instaed of trying to “harness” an “effect” which might be imaginary, to produce significantly measurable cooling by extracting energy from heat, with very low probability of success (from normal engineering considerations), rather look at much more easily measurable characteristics of photovoltaic cells or nantennae, which can be done, it only requires being careful and planning well and, perhaps, getting as much help as possible.

              Underneath Simon’s proposal is a concept of certain semiconductor structures converting photons to direct current, which, of course, requires rectification, some kind of diode. Okay, under some conditions, PVs do that. What conditions? What is the actual known behavior, in close detail? In some cases, that behavior may be available from a careful analysis of data sheets, based on manufacturer testing of their products.

              Simon appears to think that making something new is necessary, but he only expects this from his analysis of what already exists, an analysis that appears to be based on incomplete knowledge. That can be fixed, and it can be fixed either experimentally, or from trusting the experimental results of others (such as device manufacturers, who rarely lie on data sheets, engineers depend on that data, strongly — and then verify it all with actual measurements).

              The idea that we need something new for a breakthrough has caused vast mischief with LENR. Progress, I came to consider, by a few years ago, would come when we looked far more carefully at what we already had, rather than accepting the idea that what we already had was “real” but inadequate — which was based on social tests, not a scientific ones — and rather than attempting to fix the “social problem,” by telling skeptics they were wrong, and attempting to prove that to them, we did not nail the science, as science, as if there was nobody to convince, no point to prove, only a deeper experience of reality to explore.

              That is happening, for this concept of tightening measurements, as taken up by others, was accepted for funding, and my argument was that, as an attempt to confirm with increased precision what had already been widely reported, this was likely to succeed in some way or other, generating useful results.

              For me, a failure to confirm the heat/helium correlation, in experiments done under the best of conditions, by scientists dedicated to science rather than “being right,” and with high levels of knowledge and experience, would possibly save me a great deal of wasted life. What’s that worth? From my assessment of the evidence that exists, success is likely, and I do not define success as “proving” one thing or another. I want to know what the damn ratio is, or whether if, with a population of experiments, showing the Anomalous Heat Effect, the helium data is scattered as would be expected if the cause of the AHE is independent of the cause of helium levels.

              To come back to an Eddington quote:

              Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. … And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left only with pointer readings.

              Excess heat is the “pointer reading” based on calorimetry. Under some conditions, it would simply be a proxy for the input power necessary to maintain constant temperature. What I want to know is the relationship of that reading, regardless of what might be causing it, with helium measured in the outgas — or otherwise recovered and measured. Just readings, data, numbers. Not “fusion” or whatever.

              What I suspect, but certainly don’t know, is that a careful review of what already exists would show to Simon that his concepts of how photovoltaics work are defective, and the defects lead him to think that they imply something that a fuller understanding would pull the rug out from under. Why do I suspect this? Obvious. Eddington said it. The conclusion is effing crazy! But this is not a proof, and Simon was not crazy to ask the question, and pursuing actual answers, solidly grounded — not deduced “logically” from a set of premises, will create real knowledge for him, far deeper than a naive acceptance of the Second Law would create.
              What is broadly accepted is usually correct, in some way. Not always. There was a discussion of the history of h. pylori as a cause of stomach ulcers, on LF, where we can see the denial of a pseudoskeptic, who minimizes the resistance to acceptance of what had actually become obvious — to the few who actually experimented instead of resting on “common knowledge.” I’ll be covering that, it’s a fascinating case, full of drama — and bravery and determination to overcome obstacles at high personal risk.
              Rossi showed — and impressed many — with an imitation of that, rooted not in reality but in hubris. Here, Simon, you are willing to take risks of loss of time and money, and I congratulate you for that, and hope, as well, to increase the efficiency of that work, so that possible loss is minimized and more than balanced by an increase in understanding, understanding not just for you, but for all of us.

      3. Actually, it doesn’t, and what we measure to happen (that it always does) is an emergent property of the statistics of a random walk.

        Right. Not all the laws of thermodynamics are primary, but appear as the scale increases.

        Rossi was causing damage to LENR research, because pathways that didn’t show commercial promise, but might have scientific value, were not being explored. Being an obvious fraud (deliberately appearing so, in Jed and Mats’ analysis) was also causing damage, with some lumping it in with classic LENR and more careful approaches. IH has already succeeded in pulling off the covers, and showed that they were not interested in “fake news,” going even to lengths that many or most would consider unreasonable or even foolish, to nail it. While we cannot say from the results that it has been proven that Rossi has nothing, IH demonstrated that the probability of something truly useful there, worthy of massive investment, is quite low.

        As to your other ideas, they are off-topic here except for the general topic of fringe or beyond-fringe. So I’m not opening up a discussion channel for them. You mention, however, “logic.” Logic operates from premises, assuming a coherence to reality, i.e., “logical consistency.” That is, itself, a premise, practically an axiom. To apply logic, we must have clear expressions (or fuzziness can take over and anything can be “logically proven” by manipulating language). You seem to expect or even believe that one of the laws of thermodynamics will be violated, but this is logically deduced from what experimental result? You are attempting, it seems, de novo experiment to show something you expect from “logic,” but I haven’t seen that process; it seems you have a thought-experiment that has “results” outside of normal expectations. If so, you already have your result in mind. This isn’t “wrong,” and this kind of expectation can create an appearance of results, particularly if the experimental work is only exploratory and not disciplined by a clear understanding of the scientific method. Pons and Fleischmann were wrong, actually, as to what they expected from their experiments, this is a part of the cold fusion story that is not much told. However, a breakthrough resulted from their error. Because they were looking where nobody had looked before (at the very-high-loading condition in palladium deuteride), they found an unexpected effect. Because of their expectations, they did not understand it and, to some degree, misrepresented it. They made many mistakes, but they were also experienced scientists and their calorimetry was probably the most advanced on the planet. (0.1 mW precision is claimed for it).

        They actually did things that when I started working with calorimetric data, I wanted to do, and thought anyone would do, but … it isn’t done! They inferred the power of a heat source without waiting for equilibrium, by using the rate of change of temperature with a known and calibrated thermal mass. Exploring this method shouldn’t be “fringe.” It’s just measuring heat! However, the frenzy and fervor of searching for Big Heat and Clear Nuclear Signals led to very little work being done to nail down the original findings, since obviously, good calorimetry wasn’t considered strong enough evidence to bowl over the physicists. I consider that tragic. Science was lost in favor of defending positions. Pons and Fleischmann themselves fell into this polarity, abandoning helium study, when helium would have been a fantastic way to validate their HAD, boil-off experiments. And they never published their early helium measurements — that they had promised, and that failure, which must be assumed to be deliberate, strengthened skeptical opposition. They totally screwed up with the Morrey collaboration, that is well-documented.

        If I could have my wish, it would be that Pons shows up at ICCF-21 and talks about the errors, and accepts a standing ovation that arises in the full light of history, warts and all. Instead, it seems he hides, though there are hints of communication here and there. Fleischmann faced his fate with good humor. I’d still have wished for more.

        1. Abd – I largely try to keep my project off your pages, but since that is my main driver at the moment the odd bit slips in. Like LENR, the predictions of what we will be able to measure in order to confirm it are well-defined. If we don’t measure that then it’s simply wrong. With LENR, if Plan B does not produce heat then it could be said that the experiment simply didn’t work, but if it produces heat and there is no correlation with Helium production then that would show the LENR hypothesis to be wrong. The results are the results, and trying to fool ourselves is wasting time. If, as I expect, there will be sufficient cells producing heat and the Helium is well-correlated with the heat produced, then than really pins LENR down to a nuclear process and we need to work out why. Saying it is not allowed by theory will not be reasonable – it happens and so the theory needs changing.

          For Rossi, IH have shown pretty conclusively that there is no heat produced, and that thus the whole of Rossi is empty claims and fraud. Proof of a negative is not possible, but we’re now pretty certain that Rossi’s bad measurement methods were deliberate. Certainly, this has diverted a lot of resources around the world into “replicating Rossi”, and thus wasted time and money on some ideas that have never been replicably shown to work. This waste continues with the court-case. Though I hope you have an interesting time at court, and bring back some insights, it’s really wasting IH time and resources that would otherwise be used for advancing LENR. Though IH were obviously prepared to lose the $10.5M to get the proof they wanted, I doubt if they expected to be sued as well.

          I’d thought that P+F expected to get a nuclear reaction, by pushing beyond what had been previously done. Maybe that “not much told” story could do with a link…. Then again, if you don’t know that something is “impossible” then you wouldn’t do the experiment in the first place. We need people who try the impossible.

          For Hollywood films, the scientist has an idea, runs the experiment and it all goes to plan. In real life, experiments don’t go that way. If you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before, you will make mistakes. Millikan’s experiment measuring the electron charge using the movement of charged oil-drops in an electric field was something no-one had done before, and his lab-books show the number of times it simply didn’t work out. The oil-droplet size wasn’t even enough, he couldn’t track the movements accurately, stuff like that. It took a year to get the whole thing working right. Pushing the boundaries is hard.

          In academia, there is the kudos of being the first to announce some discovery. P+F (or maybe their university) were thus under pressure to announce their findings, since they knew they weren’t the only ones working in that area. All they wanted was another 5 years to be certain…. Still, there was that promise of Free Energy (or at least very cheap) without nuclear waste to get rid of. I suspect the commercial prospects were too tempting, and thus we got the situation we did. It was and remains against theory, and it was easy to make mistakes in replication, and thus became “fringe” if not well beyond.

          Some things need to wait until the right person comes along to drive it. It seems to me that you are the right person for LENR and thus you’ll drive the experiments in a way that avoids the errors of the past. Of course, the data is the data and it’s possible that it may show a different story than we hope for, but achieving clarity is important for future research.

      4. I see a lot of problems from both belief and disbelief, in that both tend to blind people to what is actually happening. See what the data actually says, instead.

        What the data says is nothing other than the data. Failing to understand this is the source of many disempowering errors. In my training, it’s accepted that we will have “beliefs,” which tend to be, at origin, emotional reactions creating general expectations of continued reaction, but which also become high-level abstractions supporting the original reactive patterns. What is done to release us from these prisons is to distinguish “what happened” from “what we made it mean.” Experimentally, in the training, we see what happens when people do that, it is, quite obviously, profoundly liberating.

        So how do we distinguish the difference between “what happened” and “what we made it mean,” or our interpretations. It’s actually obvious, in practice. We use different language for these two descriptions. “My mother said [quote]” is a “what happened.” While memory can be plastic, shifting based on reactions and interpretations over time — so we will tend to remember the language that supports the interpretations we created, and especially that will justify our emotional reactions — the reality of practice in human transformation is that the practice of “telling the story,” with a discipline that confines it to what actually happened (which initially takes skilled coaching) frees us from reactive patterns. The reactive patterns become quite visible as such.

        My learning has long been rooted in exposing myself to the data, letting it “speak for itself,” without demanding that it mean anything other than the data itself. I can connect this, easily, with what Feynman did with physics and life. It’s not a quick process, necessarily, it is not for the impatient, but “the reward of patience is patience.”

        Ideas and interpretations still arise — “the human being is a meaning-making machine” — but they can be recognized as what they are, at least one step removed from data, from reality itself. And then we tell stories, creating meanings. None of the stories are Truth, but they might sometimes point to it or otherwise empower us, and so, in training, we learn to create empowering stories, stories that inspire and create possibilities to explore and stand for. These stories can be considered Myth.

        So I now have an acceptance from an AirBnB host in Miami. I wrote in my application that I was visiting Miami to attend a trial. He wrote: “Cool I’m a public defender.” So I’ll be staying with a lawyer. So I wrote: “This is going to be fun,” and he replied, “I agree.”

        This is all quite deliberate for me. How do I know it’s going to be fun? What if something Bad Happens? This has become my routine experience. It doesn’t seem to happen much, with a declaration like this, but when something happens that could seem bad, it is then commonly converted into a breakthrough experience …. how about this for a trip out of Comfort Zone:
        https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-sentence-we-can-add-to-the-lock-screen-of-a-mobile-phone-to-increase-the-chance-that-it-will-be-returned-if-found/answer/Abd-Ul-Rahman-Lomax

        If you can’t read that, let me know. Quora Moderation, I just found out, collapsed that Answer in February, in spite of massive page views and upvotes. This kind of erratic (and pedantic) moderation — with no notification to the author — is why I have largely abandoned Quora, which has been gradually alienating its core writer community. The writer community is excellent, but saving content elsewhere is highly recommended.

  10. I suppose it’s not unreasonable that Rossi should forget what sock he started off with and sign the wrong name at the end. He’s under pressure, after all. He may also be a bit unwell – maybe not well-enough to attend the trial on the 26th….

    For the Cherokee ventures, since they’re going for projects that others haven’t touched, it’s also not unreasonable that they should fail now and again. Obviously, though, more succeed than fail since they’ve made a lot of money overall. Since Rossi is also trying to do the “impossible”, it should also be expected that he gets the odd failure too, but the problem, as Pweet says, is that all of his projects have failed. Looking at the trends, it seems Cherokee is a net wealth-source and Rossi has been a net wealth-sink. Where a Cherokee project succeeds, though, land is remediated and becomes usable again, which is something that keeps on being useful and creating wealth. Note that wealth is what’s there, and money is a way of accounting for and valuing it. Money can be created at the stroke of a pen (it’s what banks do), but wealth has to be worked for.

    It seems Rossi’s patron wasn’t bad, whether you look at the patron being IH or (with a stretch) Cherokee. No excuses for Rossi.

    1. “Bad” actually does not have any substantial reality in my ontology. It’s a judgment, of limited utility. “Bad” is a major part of the world view of all kinds of crazies and fanatics. “Bad hombres” becomes a political slogan. It was obvious from reading the Rossi Complaint and doing very little research that Rossi did not understand how Cherokee worked and obviously did not consult an attorney, in 2012-2013 — or he was lying and his own attorney had not done due diligence (and may ultimately face sanctions for that). Rossi’s understanding of business and life and science is terminally shallow, that became obvious long ago. But maybe he is a great tennis partner for his wife. Has he taken steps to protect her from his own mishegas? I’m looking forward to seeing his face in person, and the faces of others involved. My main concern is the future of LENR and of humanity. It all starts with people.

  11. The succession of tested working and then abandoned devices from Rossi gets longer, with quackx, using weird wrong spectrometric calorimetry (I could give details of why wrong from the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05249.pdf), now his pride and joy. And the others? For example the original ecat – used in the spectacularly successful 1 year test and available to Rossi to license or sell in half the world?

    The difficulty with these arguments is that Rossi having nothing that works is so transparently obvious. Any one argument you choose to demonstrate this is ignoring a whole raft of other similar evidence and stating what does not need to be stated.

  12. I hope Leanne and Tuffy spend half as much time searching Rossi’s previous excursions into the business world and arrange that into a neat and enumerated file. I wonder how many pages that would be?

    Just to list a few of the documented events which come to mind;
    How he dudded the US Department of Defense for millions of dollars with his amazing thermo-electric converters, which by all reports did nothing.

    How he dudded the Italian government by pretending to be building a recycling factory in Italy to convert rubbish into worthwhile products, oil and energy. As it turned out, the only thing he recycled was other people’s money into his own money, and left a huge pile of toxic waste behind for others to clean up.

    How he dudded Defkalion Green Technologies by selling them a license to produce e-cats, which they never managed to make work. (hmm,. that has a familiar ring to it.)

    How he dudded numerous paid up licensees by taking their license fees and then refused to supply them anything to sell in order to maintain their status as a licensee. (Of course he didn’t. He never had anything to supply them.)

    How he dudded a previous licesnsee (HydroFusion) by supposedly sabotaging test results in order to shake them off to make way for a higher paying licensee (Industrial Heat). (as per Rossi’s email to IH boasting of his ‘masterpiece’ of manipulation. Although it’s hard to imagine what he needed to sabotage since the results would have been negative in the normal course of events.)

    And of course, most recently when he dudded his last well cashed up partner (Industrial Heat, yes, the same ‘Industrial Heat’ which he dudded Hydrofusion in order to get them on board), by selling IH the Intellectual Property for eleven million dollars and then not supplying all the IP they supposedly paid for, sufficient to get the product to work. Well, he couldn’t supply that of course, for the same reason he couldn’t provide it to Defkalion. He doesn’t have it himself! He never did, and he still doesn’t.

    If he had anything, he would now be viewing the exit of IH as the biggest stroke of luck of his entire life. Think about it:
    IH, having bought the 1MW plant for its full price, moved it to America and paid for a 12 month test to prove what a magnificence it is, and paid for a nuclear engineer to act as ‘Expert Responsible for Verification’ to verify that it works as per specification, and then write up a report on it, and then find that the COP averaged above 60 for the entire test! How good is that?
    And then, after all this, IH decide that are no longer interested.
    Mr Rossi should be jumping for joy. He now has a device which has been operated and tested for one whole year and certified to have an output as reliable and consistent as a Swiss watch, with an average COP ten times higher than even he expected. And he has a detailed report by a qualified ‘nuclear engineer’ no less, which certifies that all is as he has claimed it is; a sheer magnificence.
    And best of all, since IH are no longer interested, Mr Rossi is now free to sell this magnificence to the highest bidder.
    He must be ecstatic! On the basis of the ERV report, it is worth billions! Yes. Billions with a capital ‘B’ !
    And yet here he is dragging IH’s sorry ass through the courts trying to extract another 89 million dollars from the horse he just beaten half to death.
    Where is the logic in that?

    Oh, I see. Mr Rossi knows that similar to all his other magnificent inventions, his amazing 1 MW e-cat doesn’t work at all, so better to try and get the best value possible right now before the sponge deflates.
    As everyone knows, once you take a sponge out of the oven, if it deflates, it’s finished. You cannot re-inflate a sunken sponge and the 1MW e-cat is cooling off and deflating fast.
    1MW e-cat;- Present market value, close to zero. And Mr Rossi knows it.

    1. I expect to see the 1 MW plant go up for auction. I doubt that its value is zero. IH could also auction the IP transferred to them. Rossi’s unilateral declaration that the License is revoked has zero legal impact. IH would simply ignore it. IH (or a bankruptcy receiver) could also auction the license, and, in fact, if Rossi were by some amazing fluke to win a judgment against IH, IH would probably declare bankruptcy, and the License would be a major asset, and normal practice would be to auction the assets. Of course, Rossi could buy it back. So what would he be willing to pay? If he were not willing to pay as much as IH invested, he’d be more or less acknowledging that it wasn’t worth that.

      The market is the judge. Heh! That is one Planet Rossi truism that is actually useful.

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