OMG! Anomaly! Must be LENR!

This is from a beautiful little sequence on E-Cat World, showing the best of what such a forum can do, and hinting at the worst. Just because it looks hot, I’m leading with the video that was posted:

Heh! I look at that oven and think Ewww! I want one!

In any case, this video was posted in response to Lava Flow LENR in Nature? (P. Oeoht)

The anomaly is flowing lava remaining hot, even becoming hotter further away from the source, a volcanic vent. Aha! LENR!

Now, cool: it’s pointed out that some explanations advanced for this phenomenon are … dumb would be a polite word. Aha! Pseudoskeptics! However, just because someone is dumb doesn’t make him or her wrong. Nor the reverse.

(If anyone does not understand how that video relates to the issue, ask! There were supposedly papers discussing the heating of lava as an anomaly, but the search terms given came up with nothing. That commonly happens when a poster has read something, possibly misunderstood it, and then wants to refer to it without making sure. This allows errors to propagate.)

The blog post came from discussion of the Storms video,   Nano-gap Hydroton Reaction Proposed by Ed Storms in New Video (Cold Fusion Now)

In that discussion, f.sedai asked:

I wish that Storms would explain why he believes LENR occurs naturally.

The topic here is a Storms video where he explains his explanation of LENR. Does he claim that LENR “occurs naturally”? Actually he says nothing in the video like that. What he points out is that LENR must follow natural law, like everything else. Having a transcript made this easy to check. Searching it for natur, I find:

4:57 ● the more ways in which Nature has to do something the easier it is to occur and the more often in nature. this occurs in nature very very seldom, and it’s very very difficult to duplicate and so therefore it must be something fairly rare and therefore very unique and therefore I’ve said that it really only has one way of doing this and unless you have precisely that arrangement, that Nuclear Active Environment, it’s not going to happen.
[…]
18:40 ● […] I also say that cold fusion has to follow all the laws of nature as we presently know and love them.
19:09 ● they cannot violate any law of nature, chemical or physical. the only problem is if there’s something missing in those laws, so it isn’t that they’re conflicting with anything. it’s just that we don’t have all the pieces yet. […]

Yet people rush to address p.sedei’s question. To be sure, Storms has talked about biological transmutation and a video from 2011 was linked.

As is common in discussions like this, no details were given in the reference, so to understand the significance, one must watch the video. In it, Storms provides evidence for biological transmutation, citing the work of Vysotskii, which is quite interesting, looks like good work, which in a sane world would then lead to confirmation attempts. The world is not sane when it comes to LENR.

In the other direction, is it appropriate to “believe in” natural LENR without confirmed evidence? (“Nature” here must mean occurring without human intervention, though Vysotskii is intervening, the idea is that some natural organisms may have the capacity to catalyze LENR. If one wants to look into this, go to http://lenr-canr.org/index/menu/menu.php and press the Search button and enter Vysotskii or pick him from the menu. There are many papers.

Some of these experiments could be done by an amateur, if the cultures are available. Obviously, one would communicate with Vysotskii. Don’t wait until he passes on (though he seems quite healthy).

I’m pretty sure that Storms would immediately reject the “lava LENR” idea, and recalescence would be something I’d expect him to immediately bring up.

Zephir, who linked to the video, in the lava lenr thread, was largely correct:

The heat of lava can be indeed powered with radioactive decay or even LENR (after all, the LENR research started when Jones started to analyze the mineral springs near volcanoes for content of 3He). But the above observation can be explained by low thermal conductivity of lava and basalts – and also with latent heat of crystallization of many minerals.

Okay, some history here. LENR research did not start as described. It started when Pons and Fleischmann decided to look for evidence that the calculations of fusion rates in condensed matter, based on the assumption that condensed matter could be approximated using 2-body physics (as works with plasma fusion), might be a bit off, that condensed matter conditions might alter fusion rate. They apparently began this research in approximately 1984, and at some point that year, they experienced the famous melt-down that they could not explain with chemistry. And they were chemists, world-class.

Steve Jones became interested in the idea of natural fusion (not LENR!), based on 3He anomalies. So he attempted to see if he could find fusion in PdD, looking for neutrons. He thought he found something, later I think he retracted that work and what we now know is that neutrons are very rare in PdD LENR (and probably arise, my opinion, from very very rare secondary reactions, as suspected by SPAWAR — deuterium-tritium fusion, as I recall).

Steve Jones was extremely skeptical about the FP claims, he was there voting them down at the infamous APS science-by-vote meeting. He was one who believed, apparently, that if there was fusion, there must be neutrons, all of which proceeded from a very limited idea of what this “unknown nuclear reaction” might be.

Now, someone not familiar with the field, coming along and reading that ECW discussion, what will they derive from it? Will it expand their understanding or will it confuse them? If they are skeptics and have some understanding of science, will it impress them with the knowledge of the ECW community in general?

What is missing on ECW, and, generally, on LF as well, is review generating conclusions or analysis of the opinions expressed. These forums discuss, ad nauseum, they do not generally find or express consensus.

That won’t happen by itself, it takes facilitation and structure and a recognition of the value of the work involved.

This then contributes to everything becoming political, and anything contrary to the “correct” view — according to some community — becomes “fake news” or “obviously biased.” There are some organizations now dedicated to vetting rumors and verifying — or debunking — them. And they themselves are then attacked if their conclusions are disliked.

When we care more about reality than about our own opinions (our opinions are *never* reality, and the best assessment is from a consensus of the informed, it is not an individual thing, nor the province of a narrow group), we will then begin to make rapid progress in every area.

 

Author: Abd ulRahman Lomax

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

2 thoughts on “OMG! Anomaly! Must be LENR!”

    1. Thanks, David. The goal here is depth, with some extraction of meaning in brief summaries and teasers. The deeper goal is fun. A party! Yay! The deepest goal is known only to reality itself, and some get hints.

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