I tend to write about what is in front of my face. On LENR Forum, digressions on the thread, Rossi v. Darden developments Part 2, were finally split to new threads. So the following appears as if it were a new post. I will get to the topic at #Validity, after looking at the administrative aspects.
I wrote about this on Pseudoskepticism vs Skepticism: Case studies: — interested observer was writing entirely off-topic, it did not start with this post. Finally, a moderator did something about it, but … LENR Forum moderators, often, don’t show what they have done. Posts were moved to that thread that were responses to posts that are still in the RvD thread. No question, this is an improvement, but LF needs must faster and more reliable moderation. Off-topic continues to be the norm in the RvD thread, one reason why it has blossomed rapidly to 2455 posts. There is a problem with simply moving a post like this
It can be seen that the original post is 49841. It was originally positioned after 49840. 49845 is apparently a response to it, but now is orphaned, and makes much less sense. The pagination is now changed in the RvD thread. That is, any post after the moved posts might appear on a different page than when originally posted. For this reason, I now avoid linking to a page by page number.
This points up the importance of rapid identification of off-topic posts to be moved. My own preference would be that they would be visibly documented. That takes work!
Validity of LENR Science…[split] interested observer wrote:
All the talk about how to get and what to do with millions of dollars of research money for LENR puzzles me. The discussions of commercialization paths and scaling up power seem completely beside the point. This is table-top science, not billion-dollar installations. How about if any of the legitimate researchers builds a reactor of any size and power and delivers it to an independent laboratory with appropriate reputation and expertise so that they can unambiguously prove that the thing works? Don’t argue that this has already happened. Clearly it hasn’t. If it were to happen, funding will be no problem. However, if doing that is out of the question (and please skip the usual litany of lame excuses why this should be so), why does anybody continue to think this is a real phenomenon at all?
As is common with new pseudoskeptics, IO appears to have a concept of LENR and the LENR community as if it were monolithic. He is, of course, immedately tagged as ignorant, and that is obvious. His ignorance is not likely to be remedied by reading a few papers, the field is vast, and would he know what to read, i.e., what papers are important for his first and most specific interest: validity, i.e., some “real phenomenon.” I don’t know that there is a decent guide to this that would satisfy someone coming from IO’s position, which has layers of incorporated assumptions, and decades of information cascade backing those up. Yesterday, I pointed in a comment to an interview with Gary Taubes. As stated in the summary, “Gary gives long-winded, rambling answers, but there’s some good stuff in this episode if you’re interested in diet, sugar, and fat.”
There is also some very good stuff there if one wants to see how a science journalists ends up discovering and exposing “information cascades.” I will be returning to Taubes, but we must start with this: he worked his butt off to research and write Bad Science. Some writers in the field have searched for and found mistakes, or alleged mistakes, in his book. Taubes makes mistakes! But … there is no skeptical writer on cold fusion who knows more of the early history of the field, because of what he went through, than Taubes. His “partial list” of people interviewed has 257 names.
Anyone who is seriously interested in cold fusion, more than casually, I recommend Taubes and Huizenga. Start with the skeptics! Just don’t believe them, as to conclusions. Understand those conclusions! One of the brilliant things that Taubes mentions was a conversation with someone opposing him, giving the standard understanding of the cause of obesity. He asks, do you know the origin of the idea you are stating? Let’s say that the experts he talks with generally don’t. They can’t tell you where the idea came from, and their position is that everyone knows this. This bears a remarkable similarity to Bill Nye, the Science Guy, in his recent debate with a global warming denier. Bill could not state, simply, where his basic idea was coming from. And he was probably right! But also he was a follower, not a leader, politically obsessed.
Taubes, of course, had researched the entire history of scientific investigation of obesity. He knows where the ideas came from, how older ideas were set aside in favor of newer ones and, unfortunately for our collective health, the newer ideas were Bad Science. But highly appealing, and Taubes can explain the appeal, why what was probably dead wrong became a “scientific consensus.”
In the interview, he talks about how he moved into the study of nutrition: people told him, if you think there is Bad Science in physics, take a look at nutrition!
Let’s deconstruct IO’s post.
All the talk about how to get and what to do with millions of dollars of research money for LENR puzzles me. The discussions of commercialization paths and scaling up power seem completely beside the point.
If he’s puzzled about what is obviously happening, that’s a crystal clear clue to his ignorance. He has a “point” in mind. To him, the big question is whether or not LENR is real. So, of course, what he wants to see is “proof.” Something easy to understand. Now, it exists — or at least there are confirmed experimental results that show the reality of LENR by a preponderance of the evidence –, but it is not at all what he’s expecting.
It is not clear that he is aware of it, so far, I’ve seen no sign.
If LENR is not established as real, then, talk of commercialization and scaling up would be a waste of time. But “established as real” is actually not a fact — ever. It is a judgment, an interpretation, and then there must be an interpreter. To IO, it is not established. So it is natural for him to be impatient. Get to the point, man!
Iit took me several years of reading to begin to develop an understanding of what happened in 1989-1990 and later. I have condensed the most important part of this in my published paper. It is not difficult to understand, though anyone firmly attached to “they must be making some mistake,” may still refuse to accept the obvious. We have a current example, I will probably go over: Kirk Shanahan. But understand that Shanahan’s views are fringe, they are not accepted by anyone, other than some skeptics use Shanahan where it serves them. Shanahan only looks for what might be wrong, but ignores correlation, his view appears to be that correlation with garbage data is useless, but correlation, in fact, is what distinguishes signal from noise.
I will agree with IO in this: until the effect is under reliable control, most discussion of commercialization and “scaling up” is useless. The only reason for “scaling up” is an attempt to prove reality, whereas a scientific approach would be almost the opposite: to attempt to prove artifact. This would be done, most effectively, with replication, not with “improvement” by scaling up — with some possible exceptions.
This is table-top science, not billion-dollar installations.
To him, apparently, “table-top” means “easy.” Yet those who did succeed in confirming the FP Heat Effect have said it was the most difficult experiment they ever did. This was far from easy. In fact, when I see new claims, and they seem easy, that sets off alarms that they might have found Yet Another Artifact. They abound, it is much easier to find an artifact than to find the real thing. That is not a “proof.” Someone might get lucky and hit the Magic Combination. I simply don’t expect it.
How about if any of the legitimate researchers builds a reactor of any size and power and delivers it to an independent laboratory with appropriate reputation and expertise so that they can unambiguously prove that the thing works?
Look at the assumptions: does any “legitimate researcher” know how to build a “reactor”? However, he does say “any size and power.” So, has what he is describing been done? It would appear that he imagines it wasn’t done, ever. But what is SRI? It is an independent laboratory. Numerous times, they were retained to test devices and protocols. They did this over and over. But IO imagines it never happened, and probably because he thinks that if it happened, he’d know about it. Wouldn’t it be big news?
One might think so. But then we need to test our idea of “big news” with reality. It was not big news. Outside of those interested in LENR, it was almost entirely ignored.
IO has an idea of the thing “working.” He has in mind, I imagine, Big Heat. He wants “unambiguous proof.” But in real science, on the edge, difficulties abound. I’d bet he has never read an SRI formal report. They are full of hedges. With the millions of dollars they had (I don’t know actual SRI budgets, but this was not billion-dollar research), they did what they could. You want more, pay for it! The conclusion of that particular expert (McKubre) is one of someone who spent the latter half of his career, and he was already involved with palladium hydride and deuteride, as a professional scientist studying cold fusion, and what were his conclusions? Is there any respect for what should seem obvious? If someone in his position says it is real, it’s probably real, and you can bet on it. But did he say that “This is the energy future of humanity”? No. Not yet! The fact is that we don’t know that, and his work gave clues as to how to control the reaction, but not proven answers.
IO is looking for “proof” where what we have is a preponderance of the evidence. And “cold fusion” is not understood, it is a given that it isn’t explained. So a genuine skeptic will either ignore the whole field — perfectly legitimate to a point — or will become very interested in what is happening, what is generating effects that are being interpreted by researchers as “cold fusion”?
Don’t argue that this has already happened. Clearly it hasn’t.
I’m not arguing. I’m saying it, what I know. However, “it” is not well defined. IO has created a fantasy, it looks a particular way, it was set up such and so. His fantasy has not happened. However, something quite similar has, in fact, happened (and more than once). Independent laboratory. Check. Anomalous heat from a specific protocol. Check. Correlated nuclear product. Check.
Therefore send a check for $1 billion? No. One step at a time. What has been confirmed is not understood. How to control the reaction, to create reliability, is not understood — or if it is, the understanding has not been widely accepted. Maybe Bob Greenyer understands, though I kind of doubt it, don’t you?
If it were to happen, funding will be no problem.
I’m not going to agree with “no problem,” but, in fact, it happened and the result was funding. SKINR at the University of Missouri, an example, related to Energetics Technologies work, as confirmed as decent research by Robert Duncan, with experimental replication by SRI and ENEA. The work of SRI and ENEA, McKubre and Violante, led to $12 million in funding at Texas Tech, under the supervision of Robert Duncan. ENEA is, by the way, an independent laboratory, funded by the Italian government.
At this point, Industrial Heat has millions of dollars available for worth research projects, with more available if needed. So the basic issue is identifying worthy projects. It’s up to them! However, my goal is to see that they have decent advice, which I hope to crowd-source and filter. It won’t hurt, because they still are responsible for the choices they make. This was the original Infusion Institute concept: to create advice, not to make decisions, I consider central control in a field like this to be very dangerous. Each organization or agency is independent, but with communication, collaboration, and cooperation, much more can be done. Even if there are intellectual property issues and unfortunate habits of secrecy. Again, I never considered that Rossi was “wrong” to keep his methods secret. It was his right. However, there rest of us also had a right to our own opinions!
However, if doing that is out of the question (and please skip the usual litany of lame excuses why this should be so), why does anybody continue to think this is a real phenomenon at all?
Because Science. Controlled experiment. The usual.
It is not “out of the question,” and, as I have claimed here, it’s been done. Anyone who knows the field can fill in the details, and IO would know if he does the work to learn. I “think” it is a real phenomenon, because of the preponderance of the evidence. If someone can show a plausible alternative explanation for the data we have, other than “unknown nuclear reaction,” I’m all ears. Further, this is testable. That the reaction is not reliable does not mean that it is not reproducible, and there are protocols that work enough of the time to be able to test “nuclear.” Much of the early research was based on an obvious error, an assumption that if the reaction was fusion, there would be copious tritium and neutrons. No. Tritium is found, but roughly about a million times down from naive expectation. Neutrons, also, but about a million times down from tritium. These are not good [conclusive] evidences, they are circumstantial only (even though someone like Jed Rothwell will argue that they are convincing. Maybe.) I prefer stronger evidence, direct, not merely circumstantial, and it exists. And that is why I think that LENR is real.
“Lame excuses” betrays IO’s thought process. He is convinced that he is dealing with deluded “believers.” To be sure, those exist. That’s also obvious. “Deluded” here doesn’t necessarily mean wrong, it means that the way in which they “know” what they believe may be defective in some way. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Now, where will we go with this? My goal is to create some introductory documents. I will be looking for questions to raise, and sometimes, to answer. Overall, though, what I’ve said about above “proof” is currently subject to well-funded research, by experts, attempting to measure the heat effect and the known nuclear product with increased precision.
Two problems are immediately apparent. 1. Universities won’t touch it because they fear reputational damage (The Bologna EFFECT). 2. Independent testing labs like UL are very expensive places – and they don’t take on jobs for fun.
Otherwise it is a splendid idea.
It’s just not true. While the rejection cascade is still strong, there are universities that will support LENR research. Further, UL is irrelevant. Wrong lab. This was a quick, cheap answer. Instead of stating a real problem — where does the funding for this research come from — Alan just ignores the request to not make lame excuses. It was a naive, shallow idea, not a splendid one, though Alan is actually being sarcastic.
[responding to Peter Gluck, whose post was not moved, ]
The list [for research funding] should be produced by those that are doing the funding.
That is not optimal. Rather, researchers and reviewers in the field should product lists. In some cases, the funding sources will support that process. The actual funding choices would be by those with power to fund, it would generally be their responsibility, but the idea is to collect advice for them to review. In the original III (Infusion Institute Inc) concept, III would identify possible research projects, developing protocols or approaches, and would then solicit bids to do the work from labs. These would then be communicated to funding sources, who would choose what to fund, and any contracts would be between the funding sources and the labs. III would merely be a matchmaker.
What was missing from, say, the 2004 DOE review? An actual, specific, proposal for specific research to be funded. There was nothing of an appropriate scale to say Yes to, only something very general. (And the actual recommendation was to encourage specific proposals. One was apparently made, but it wasn’t fundamental, it was a detail — of interest to the researcher and even of general interest, but not designed to accomplish the most important goals. It was not accepted. And that one rejection then became a story of “impossible, they won’t.” Maybe not. But maybe they would!)
The problem- and Question is- can Bog Money help to get solutions and How?
In other words, what is missing?
… One of Peter’s better posts. The question is the one I’m trained to ask. Peter mostly writes about “what’s wrong”? (And then communicates “exciting news” with very little foundation or real exploration.)
Bog money. Yes, fill the swamp with it. Make sure it’s absorbent. On the other hand, soaked with all that swamp water, it may stink.
What is missing, mostly, is focus, clarity, depth, and the detachment of the scientific method. So let’s supply them! (There are researchers in the field who are careful scientists. Let’s support them!) As well, it appears that there are those willing to fund basic research, as distinct from extravagant claims. Peter has, unfortunately, come down on the side of extravagant claims, but maybe he’ll wake up! At least he is asking a decent question here.
That is why I said reserve 2M (i.e. 20%) for duplication, verification, and analysis and why I said 100W or 1kW levels. You can control that level on a lab bench with accurate controls and properly dump the heat. Much smaller than 100W and it is hard to convince people of scale ups.
What is appropriate depends on the specific nature and purpose of the research. For a commercial prototype, the levels given could be appropriate. For a scientific investigation, they are probably too high, by a good margin. Ideally, tests are designed by those who need to know answers. Rather, there tends to be an idea that researchers should design experiments to “prove” something. That takes them right straight out of science into something else, some kind of debate, and into polemic, cherry-picking of evidence, all that. Primary research will not allocate funding for “duplication.” The Texas Tech/ENEA collaboration, though, is secondary. it is funding two efforts, one at Texas Tech and one at ENEA, and they said they were looking for a third. In this case, because of the purpose, they are considering simultaneous confirmation, so their first paper will not be just one group.
Normally, though each investigation will be independent, and funded to do just what it does. If the results are interesting, then, it becomes possible to fund replication, but replication is different from primary investigation. With cold fusion, by the way, this has often not been understood, and general confirmations of some possible effect have often been called “replications” when they are not. Parkhomov did not “replicate” Rossi’s Lugano test. Rather, he did some work inspired by that test, exploring one possible aspect of it. All this has led to widespread confusion.
interested observer wrote:
why does anybody continue to think this is a real phenomenon at all?
If by “this” you mean Rossi’s claims, there are no reasons.
If you mean cold fusion in general, because it has been replicated thousands of times at high signal to noise ratios in over 180 major laboratories. Replication at high s/n ratios is the only way we can ever know that a phenomenon is real. There is no other standard. When you deny that a replicated effect is real you are no longer doing science. You have rejected the scientific method. Anything might be true, and anything might be false.
This is Jed’s standard argument. Overall, and generally, he’s not wrong. However, this never convinces in these discussions — unless it perhaps convinces readers not participating. The situation, which is complex, is presented as black and white: “real” or “rejected.” What is a “real effect”? Shanahan thinks there is a systematic artifact afflicting many cold fusion experiments. If there is, would that be a “real effect”? Of course it would! That is, there would be an effect (measured excess heat) with a non-nuclear origin. (Shanahan’s expressed position is that there is a chemical anomaly, maybe more than one.)
There is something quite basic, there is the reality of our occurring world. If I’m not convinced of something, I am simply not convinced. I don’t actually have to have any reason, this lack of conviction is an observation. However, the matter shifts if I claim that others are wrong. In that case, my lack of conviction starts to resemble a belief, and may well leave “science.” But I can disclose, with honesty, that what others are claiming isn’t convincing me, and then it’s possible to explore the claims, and we may be able to find exactly where it’s breaking down.
Yes, with ordinary science, a single replication with adequate precision is normally considered adequate to accept a claim until there is more evidence. However, cold fusion is not “ordinary science,” get over it. There is a very complex history, complicated by errors on all sides. Teasing reality out of that takes work, work that very few will invest, on either side.
interested observer went on, and I’ve already covered this on Pseudoskepticism vs Skepticism: Case studies:
Does anything new, or that was missed, come up?
Pseudoskeptics have a host of standard arguments, fair-sounding, that don’t actually address the science. They will, for example, mention the “conspiracy” theory of why cold fusion was rejected. It’s a pattern, commonly seen, and it showed up here. He is talking to a community as if the whole community shares the views of the most extreme within it. It’s highly offensive, effectively trolling.
If there’s one lesson we have learned over the last 28 years, it is that developing excess heat producing reactors without any attempt to understand the underlying processes producing that heat, is hugely unproductive and time wasting. Science proceeds by devising experiments to test hypotheses. Little progress has been made, or will be made by randomly changing parameters or scaling up a device. The top priority should be elucidating the basic science not blindly racing towards an improbable commercial reactor. Once we understand the basic science (e.g. the reactions responsible) it will be obvious how to engineer safe reliable working devices.
Straight-on, Hermes. Missing: “top priority” for whom? I will fill that in: for major funding. “Basic science” includes what it takes to bring along the mainstream. There are those who believe it’s impossible, until the “old guard” that rejected cold fusion dies off completely, but I suggest, instead, that this has never really been tested adequately. There are defects and deficiencies in the existing research, enough to allow toeholds of doubt here and there. How about fixing them? All that this requires is repeating, with improved controls, what was done before. The most obvious such investigation, I’ve written for years now, is measuring the heat/helium ratio. We now know how to do this with increased precision, both from the existence of better mass spectrometry, but also with knowing, apparently from the two experiments that did it, how to release all the helium. (Before, in most experiments, what was measured was helium in evolved outgas, apparently roughly 60%, and this created worrisome imprecision in the ratio. The helium was still highly correlated with heat, but I’ve seen skeptical objections from the imprecision (SRI claimed 10% on the ratio. That was obviously a seat-of-the-pants estimate, not a measured value — which could not be done from the single M4 measure.). So fix it, that is, supply what has been missing, and see what happens! I think Texas Tech is likely to publish in a major mainstream journal, I see no reason that they should go for less than that, that they should attempt to bypass careful peer review.
Alan Smith is clueless:
And what kind of armchair would you be sitting in while you did that? Right now, we have a territory but no maps worth a damn. If we had a map we could make faster progress for sure. But we are stuck with an unknown and unexplored continent, LENR Land. There are theories galore about what we might find there, and how we might find it – but few if any have proven to be reliable with (perhaps) some of the Pd/D work – which has a relatively long history of course. That helps.
So we need to explore and pencil in a few features on the map -ho? By exploring the territory – you see, exploration and map-making walk hand in hand.
Seems to me that Hermes is suggesting drawing a map, exploring the basics. Alan thinks we are “stuck.” No, he made that up. Alan is selling equipment for exploring NiH, for the most part. Nothing wrong with that, as long as people don’t confuse relative ease of some of this research with importance. However, LENR Forum is about LENR, and this was a specific discussion of research priorities, relating to funding. Alan’s common theme is that someone else is ridiculous. If some post is, in his view, off-topic, he might delete it. He never apologizes for mistakes. And here he was continuing an off-topic discussion, but he never liked the Rossi v. Darden discussions, because they might be bad for business. His business. Selling tools and materials for attempting Rossi replications.
His goal is not profit, to be sure. It’s to be right.
Replicated thousands of times in over 180 laboratories? Maybe so. But I wonder what the average COP is. Most of all I wonder if any one particular method has been replicated in a laboratory independent of the original workers.
(1) COP is irrelevant in scientific experiments, generally. COP only becomes important in certain kinds of commercial demonstrations, and it is mostly misleading. Any practical approach is likely to be able to self-power, with appropriate engineering. The excuses that have been given (avoiding runaway) are bogus. Rather, if one is controlling heat with heat, yes, one must avoid self-sustain, because all control will be lost. (Rossi’s claim of self-sustain might be, rather, some level of heat storage, but no Rossi work is well enough known to be sure). What infinite COP (self-powered!) requires is a real reaction, and slow enough heat release that the reaction maintains its own heat, with the heat being controlled by cooling, if not by some other means (such as fuel supply or stimulation). “Slow enough heat release” means insulation, so that heat is retained, and then there must be a way to lower the temperature.
(2) The SRI replication of Energetics Technlogies Superwave protocol considered 5% excess power to be significant. I do not know this as a fact, but it appears that the report, published in the ACS Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook (2008), pp 219-247, shows all cells run by SRI, there were 23. Of these, 9 had COP of less than 1.05. For the rest, COP varied between 1.05 and 4.00; however, this was based on excess peak power. What is a clearer statistic is total excess energy, higher excess energy was seen with lower peak excess power. The best run generated a calculated 536 kJ, with a peak excess power of 2.095 W. The ENEA section of that report does not appear to show all experimental runs, only listing six “successful” runs.
(The division of results into “successful” and “unsuccessful” could be creating the file-drawer effect, and I’ve been arguing for years that all results should be reported, at least in supplemental material. Otherwise, we can’t seen any reliability data. The lack of this data in 1989-1990 was a major factor, my opinion, in the rejection cascade. In any case, the “best” ENEA result shown was a 600 second period with output power of 7 W, with input power being 100 mW, for an energy density of 700 W/cm^3.)
What Nigel is pointing to is fuzziness in the definition of “replicated.” This really meant “confirmed,” in some way. This is all circumstantial evidence, and there are reasons why it has not been successful in overcoming the rejection cascade, except where a skeptic does an extraordinary amount of work to get through the Forest of Exceptions.
The Brillouin experiment has been replicated, but with the same experimental setup so any systematic calorimetry errors could lead to replicable false positives. Since there is an obvious possible cause for these not yet considered by SRI (at leat not mentioned in the preliminary report) that is a hole that will need to be closed before the work can be evidence of LENR.
This is the famous “moving target” — even though the argument is reasonable. The context was an effective denial that there had been replications, but … the recent SRI report is an obvious exception to that claim. Then there is a possibility of a systematic artifact. Which, of course, could apply to any replication. The replication could even be confirming the artifact, showing that it recurred, and then leading, possibly, to its discovery, if work continues. SRI Brillouin HHT report
I have written a review of this, and am waiting for some peer review before publishing it. It is actually on this site, with a password. I will consider sending the password to known persons who wish to support this by reading and commenting. Pending that, I’m interested in possible artifacts.
[a long collection of evidences of a kind of vicious ignorance, to wit:]
You wrote:
“Tritium is found, but roughly about a million times down from naive expectation. Neutrons, also, but about a million times down from tritium. These are not good evidences, they are circumstantial only (even though someone like Jed Rothwell will argue that they are convincing. Maybe.)”
Tritium yes, neutrons no. I do not know much about either BUT experts (especially Ed Storms) tell me: Neutrons can be produced at these low levels by known mechanisms, especially fractofusion. Highly loaded cathode material is under tremendous strain from electrochemical forces. It sometimes fractures. This could be the cause of the neutrons. I said “could be” — not that it surely is. Neutrons may have a prosaic source, so even if they are real they may not indicate a novel nuclear effect.
This may also be a problem with studies of neutrons from rocks shattered under pressure.
As you note, tritium has been found at much higher levels that neutrons, measured against the expected value from plasma fusion. In some studies there has been only a little tritium. This might be contamination from heavy water, perhaps concentrated by electrolysis. Those are iffy experiments. In other cases tritium has been detected at levels far too high to be contamination or concentration, with many blank experiments showing no tritium. Such as Storms, Bockris and especially F. Will:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/WillFGtritiumgen.pdf
Bockris (listed under Chien):
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ChienCConanelectr.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BockrisJdoestritiu.pdf
Every expert I have heard from, and every paper on the subject I have read says that results such as these are definitive. Again, that does not mean that all positive tritium studies are definitive.
Thanks, Jed. I wrote “not good evidences.” I have changed that to “not conclusive evidences.” Yes, the tritium evidence is strong enough to show something nuclear happening, my opinion, but what? I decided to focus on heat/helium because it brings together a nuclear product with the heat, and the correlation cuts through the noise. I hope much more work is done with tritium, though controlling NAE is probably a stronger priority.
So: just some summary points on this discussion.
(1) Abd has answered some of my points in his main article now, with arguments that cohere. However, they do not change my views, because they do not raise matters that I have not previously considered. Abd’s post gives the impression of a lack of symmetry – in that he would appear to believe he has a more complete and considered view of this specific matter than mine, and his arguments would seem to be more telling. Therefore, he argues, where I have contrary views I perhaps have a pseudoskeptic (faith-like, in this context) attachment to them. I see a symmetry here. I can (and would elsewhere – see below for the necessary conditions) reply to Abd’s reasonable comments with reasonable comments of my own giving opposite conclusions. Should I therefore be symmetrical in my summary of Abd’s stance – and reckon that his complete negation (in counter-argument) of my points implies a faith-like fixity of viewpoint? That would be very unhelpful to this discussion – nor am I willing to think that of Abd. But I get the sense here that on the soft evidence there may well be very different views that are difficult to move because there is a lack of real relevant data.
(2) The form of debate on this page I find difficult, because it is inherently non-linear. LENR forum for all its faults provides a linear thread of comment, with easy access, which can work well when drilling down to specifics and replying to other comments. Here, what I’d really like is to follow up each unresolved issue in a linear format and its own place.
(3) In this area of judgement, where hard data is not present, it is inherently difficult to weigh arguments. I’d find it interesting to catalog the various arguments (much as in the AGW debate some sites do) with a summary. Unlike the AGW debate where for nearly all of these contentious argument there is hard fact that supports specific interpretation – not 100%, because AGW relates to hypotheses still underdetermined by science to date, but enough to make the fringe skeptical opinions clearly unlikely – in this debate the hard fact does not exist for many of the arguments. Of course, the way to test that is to evaluate such an argument with hard facts attached. This is difficult. For example, over excess heat, there are very many experiments, each with different issues, and coming to a group judgement not possible unless the effects of selection and systematic error can be weighed. That just does not seem possible to me which is why I find it more illuminating to drill down into specific papers looking at all the evidence. So we get a catalog of arguments, but it will be written differently by those of different views. You’d in many cases need to leave at least two different summaries unresolved.
(4) My current view of Shanahan’s arguments is that I don’t know whether they specifically apply to LENR experiments. They certainly could so apply to many. Shanahan tends not to be interested in the limits of applicability of his ideas, which I dislike. Equally Jed and on evidence this page Abd seem not to be interested in the extent of applicability of his ideas, which I also dislike. For me the fascination is exactly in delineating that applicability however large or small it is. And the chances of its being either 0 or 100% – given that the ideas pass basic sanity checking – seem low to me. One proviso though is that if I look more deeply into it I may discover some killer problem not raised (or perhaps raised and not fully understood by me) by the many people here who dismiss Shanahan’s work.
(5) Perhaps Abd could progress the debate here by enumerating the areas of LENR evidence that are critiqued by the (experienced and knowledgable) LENR community. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I read, from those who believe LENR is very important – as those who think it probably exists must do, a normal variation in opinion with detailed and serious doubts about the relevance of given experiments, with reasons. That would help reviewers from outside to identify material that was relatively stronger, and also show that groupthink did not suppress the process of scientific debate within the LENR community. I am myself unclear as to what an LENR expert would consider the strongest evidence. Jed’s contribution to this has not yet helped me, though the McKubre isoperibolic series report (with high apparent excess heat) looks a good place for me to start since there is available much detail and Jed identifies it as being specifically convincing. I’m not certain that others would agree with Jed.
Response to this post is at http://coldfusioncommunity.net/Conversations: THH/#Another_conversation
Post updated beginning at http://coldfusioncommunity.net/validity-of-lenr-science/#03/06/2017
(in this case some weird glitch deleted the link target. That’s been fixed. Maybe I should use visible section headers with an id field, that way one could also find the page position with a text search….)
The goal of update notice comments is so that people receiving notifications will see a major edit. I think I should test the RSS feed/email notification, I haven’t.
Post updated beginning at http://coldfusioncommunity.net/validity-of-lenr-science/#03/05/2017
Hi Abd
You said I.H may have given
up on Rossi except for cleanup.
Can you tell me how J.T.
Vaughn has not been fired from I.H. for his screw ups
with Rossi since he runs I.H.
Or if Mr Weaver reads this he
could comment.
Regards
Sam
I don’t see any “screw-ups.” I’ve seen no gap between Vaughn and Darden. While IH has never commented on what they were doing, other than what is filed in Rossi v. Darden (and briefly in the press release in April, 2015), I have inferred it, and Dewey has more or less confirmed it. They set out to do something and they succeeded. Their mission was not fixed to some particular scenario, but created possibilities, which is what I’m trained to do, and so I easily recognize it. If Rossi had delivered what he promised, they would already be fabulously wealthy.
I’d have predicted industrial products on the market, easily by now. Remember Rossi was claiming to have this, already, in 2011! There was nothing that prevented Rossi from marketing devices in Europe, for example. The only excuse I could see is that Rossi was “tied up” with IH, spending his time personally. However, if the Rossi technology depends on the personal presence of Rossi, it is not a developed technology at all. It’s still a secret that he will not reveal to anyone, including his own “team.” Or, of course, it’s a fraud.
I don’t know that Vaughn is an “employee” of IH, to be fired like you imagine, Sam. He is a major investor.
IH became, in 2015, wholly-owned by IHHI, and you can see the list of investors on the British web site for IH Holdings International, Ltd. You can see the financial statement. They are doing quite well, thank you. So why in the world should Vaughn be fired, for executing a plan that, obviously, Darden approved? — and that resulted in major increased investment? (Not from Rossi technology, almost the opposite. Holding a hedge, though, would be piece of how they made that safe.) The plan: do whatever Rossi wants, “within reason.” Don’t accuse him of anything. Keep your mouth shut about his obvious lunacies. Sam, have you read the Rossi Hydro Fusion email from 2012? IH could see him, he was completely visible. They knew what they were doing. They stuck a clothes pin on their nose and went ahead.
It is possible, then, for legal reasons, that IH may not be able to recover their existing investment. They are fully prepared for that. It’s a risk that they consciously took on in 2012. I find the law on this a bit obscure, so I doubt that IH would be able to win a summary judgment for damages, that part of Rossi v. Darden will probably have to go to trial, unless Rossi will settle and IH accepts it. (I consider it likely that IH will move and will prevail for summary judgment on the Rossi claims.)
(It is also possible that IH will, in fact, win, at trial, a judgment against Rossi, and with a bit lower probability, against Johnson. Fabiani and Bass, even lower, but the decision to pursue the last two, I’d leave to the lawyers. That’s their professional expertise, and the popular idea of lawyers as greedy for fees is probably based on shallow experience. I’ve seen the reverse: lawyers do want to be paid, and well, but will attempt to earn that by avoiding unnecessary litigation. I think that Jones Day has made a few mistakes, but everyone makes mistakes. Even the best professionals.)
Hi Abd
Maybe replace and not fired.
Or they could have hired
someone better suited to
work with A.R.
I still think in the end we
are going to find this was
a big part of the partnership
failure.
Regards
Sam
@Simon.
There is nothing like getting caught out oneself (and,as often happens, very mystified for a while) to make one sensitive to these non-obvious issues. Of course when you know them they are obvious, but experts are seldom expert in multiple fields…
Remember also that the issue of RFI on the sensitive TC inputs is much worse, because much less easy to measure, and also less obvious, than the issue of input power mismeasurement. People don’t realise but high slew-rate large edges are always rectified to DC by amplifiers due to asymmetric slew-rate limiting. You can get round this by using good RF practice everywhere in your nominally DC amplifying chain, but people usually don’t – because high power RFI made of high slew-rate edges is not so common. These can creep in through any bit of metal not isolated in a Faraday cage (= metal box in this case) with feedthrough caps and LPF resistors on all connections through the cage. You can get effects from this stuff on supply lines or (worse) earth as well as signal lines.
I don’t want to say these issues are killers, they are not. But they are not normally found in calorimetry and require the right specialist attention. Hence I view is quite likely they are missed by both Brillouin and SRI – especially because surely if they have checked this (which is quite complex to be sure you have controlled it) they would say that they did,and there is no such statement.
1. The SRI report on Brillouin is not “scientific.” It’s a technical report from SRI-as-consultant to Brillouin, but it’s written very strangely for that purpose.’
2. SRI has not, to my mind, been proven as a scientific consulting laboratory since the departure of McKubre.
3. The Brillouin SRI report does not show any official SRI sign-off.
4. I consider all work that involves secret formulas or protocols to be commercial, not scientific, because there are intrinsic difficulties with replication. They are “news.” The best they can do is to attract investors who will presumably, then, do due diligence. I used to assume that this had happened with IH and Rossi. That’s how it looked! But, in fact, Rossi had been, with IH, the same as with everyone else. Everyone else backed out when he wouldn’t show the beef. Or he disappeared.
5. So Brillouin is interesting, as a claim to their present state of research, at least along one line. But I would never cite Brillouin as any kind of scientific proof of LENR. If it were truly important, I suppose I’d be in extensive conversations with them. I’m not, though it could easily happen. For my purposes, it’s not important.
6. (If there is a standard product available, involving secrets, it could be independently tested, as a “black box.” Yes, as pointed out by Simon, the power supply could be within the calorimetric envelope, and there are other ways (probably easier) to test the power in that signal, which could be reported. It would require NDAs, properly negotiated.
All this would require money. Who is going to provide it? Basically, the investors. It’s their money and if they are not supervising it, they are in a possible Rossivent. I wish them well. (Disclosure: I’ve been supported to a degree by an investor in Brillouin.) I consider the Rossi Affair to be tragic, not “evil” as Gluck imagines.
By the way, Parkhomov famously faked some data. Why? Well, his recording system was on a laptop computer, and the battery was running down, so he lost some temperature records. It wasn’t that important, he thought, to his conclusions, which were based on boiler water loss (and how he measured that is another story. Parkhomov used a cobbed-together home system, but did not take the time to make it more precise, which he easily could have done. He was, in fact, just tinkering. And then when he experienced thermocouple failure, quite predictable, he jumped to conclusions and mostly ignored the temperature data.)
So why was he running the computer on battery? I don’t think he has ever admitted it, and his data falsification was probably created to avoid making it obvious. So I don’t take Parkhomov seriously, sadly, he’s not willing to clearly admit mistakes unless absolutely forced to. He was probably running on battery because it was the only way he could read the thermocouple data. These were from a thermocouple in the middle of a heating coil, powered by an AC signal, which would then be induced in the thermocouple wiring, and to avoid most of this, he floated the data acquisition system, allowing him to make readings. He probably still had considerable noise.
Any electronics engineer would see this immediately. Right? Parkhomov wasn’t an electronics engineer, he was a physicist. This is why the best papers should be read by multiple experts before publication. Not taking the time for careful review, Pons and Fleischmann made some major mistakes about neutron detection in their first paper. When that was demolished, they had egg all over their faces, distracting from their primary finding, excess heat. Really, their first announcement should not have mentioned the word “nuclear,” and if someone had asked, they would have said, “Interesting idea, but we don’t have enough evidence for that. We have some anomalous heat of unknown origin, and we think this could be of high interest, if confirmed.”)
Many cold fusion papers were apparently rejected because they did not include an “explanation.” Cold fusion researchers, my opinion, should have strongly resisted that, for primary research papers. Leave that for the secondary reviews. Instead, they tried to include explanations, and papers were then rejected for including preposterous explanations — or so it appeared.
The rejection cascade created a series of social pathologies. That is all part of the full story.
Now, we have the opportunity — and apparently the funding — to return to roots, to answer the basic questions that should have been addressed more than 25 years ago, but that were lost in the frenzy. What I see is an opportunity for consensus, and it is already being expressed here and there. Even strong skeptics — pseudoskeptics, really — have agreed that the Texas Tech initiative is the way to go. Real science, increased precision, all that good stuff. My goal is to do what I can to support Duncan et al addressing all reasonably possible artifacts, and communication with them is open, I can ask questions and possibly more. Got any?
If we find anything here worth rattling their cage over, I will. Some of what they tell me I cannot disclose yet, but I can tell them or ask them *anything*. I make no demands.
THH – I’ve been thinking of the thermocouple problem and how to avoid the EMI errors, since of course with Brillouin the Q-wave is intended to be about as hard to shield as it gets. At the moment the only thing that might pass muster is a bimetallic strip moving one plate of a capacitor, with a coil across it and an oscillator driver. The signal would thus be AC and immune to the interference provided a PLL was used to lock on to the overall frequency. It’s possible you could get the same effect using a correctly-cut Quartz crystal (most such crystals are cut to minimise the temperature effect). You can now put the timing systems for these sensors into a Faraday cage and AFAICT you should be able to rely on them telling the truth in a very noisy environment. Luckily in this application we don’t need to have minute sensors or a very fast response, so they can be in sealed shielded tins. They are there to back up the thermocouples, and tell you if there’s a problem with them.
Since as you say there is no mention of extreme precautions, you’re most likely right that they weren’t taken.
I would expect that if there was an effect on the TC amps, then it could be found to exist by switching the Q-wave on and off and seeing the temperature change rate. If there’s a step-function that is faster than the thermal mass could sustain, then it’s almost certainly an induced error and not a real measurement. Even without the severe precautions, therefore, it should be possible to test for the need to take those precautions. If they’d done that test, I’d be surprised if they didn’t mention it.
There’s thus a possibility of this being a killer, but we don’t know. I hadn’t thought of this before….
It’s handled most easily by calibration. They use compensation calorimetry, a method that should be relatively immune to most artifacts. I went over the paper in detail and intend to publish that, but most comments I made were about the politics and presentation of the document. If there is an EMI error, it should be relatively easy to find, however. I’m not going to describe details. What they actually did, I find difficult to read, the paper does not seem to be well designed to communicate confidence other than “SRI Expert.” It doesn’t read like any SRI report I’ve seen before, but, then again, I’ve never seen an independent Tanzella report before.
Compensation calorimetry was used by Storms in his recent work. Part of the issue was that he was demonstrating the dependence of XP on temperature, and many isoperibolic studies I have seen make it difficult to see that. He was also looking at how XP continued after electrolysis was shut down (Heat After Death), and to do this, he needed to maintain cell temperature, since the natural cooling rate of the cell was substantially higher than the XP. So he set up compensation calorimetry, which keeps the cell at a controlled temperature, using a separate heater. Very cool, very simple to understand. I think this wasn’t used much because it looks like “power input” to the cell, so there goes the COP! However, maintaining temperature constant is not actually a power input, and it could mostly be done with very good insulation, and then even low XP could maintain the temperature. It isn’t done because that would be, for this class of experiment, a damned nuisance, complicating design and operation. (But, hey, maybe one would see self-sustain!). The resistor was DC powered. So was the electrolysis. No AC involved. This should all be low noise.
Abd – I’d like to expand on your comment about the SRI Brillouin replication.
This is the famous “moving target” — even though the argument is reasonable. The context was an effective denial that there had been replications, but … the recent SRI report is an obvious exception to that claim. Then there is a possibility of a systematic artifact. Which, of course, could apply to any replication. The replication could even be confirming the artifact, showing that it recurred, and then leading, possibly, to its discovery, if work continues. SRI Brillouin HHT report.
Abd, you are right that this is a different issue from that of replication. And that skeptics require both issues, and many others, to be covered. But calling it a moving target somehow implies that it is not a valid concern.
Before I comment on the specific artifact I alluded to, I want to address the issue of replication. The SRI work is valuable in that: (1) they are independent of Brillouin and this therefore excludes errors from one group with direct commercial interest. (2) This apparatus delivered the same results repeatedly in two different locations and over multiple setups. That basically means that with a finite amount of work the claimed effect can be either validated or shown to be artifact. However this type of replication, because it exactly replicates the calorimetry, replicates artifacts. I accept in this case that SRI are competent parties to make the standard elements of the calorimetry safe – they were involved in the original design and so essentially this is their stuff. But I don’t accept that they are immune from being deceived by non-standard aspects of this setup which has over the years been optimised by Brillouin for the effect – whether this is a non-standard artifact or LENR excess heat.
Which brings us to the matter of artifacts. This, for me at least, is not a moving target. I have noticed that LENR claims sometimes go with an experimental setup that is particularly difficult to validate. The addition of e-m stimulus in the form of pulses with high-power RF content adds enormous complexity to the validation process, because it enables a new class of artifacts which are particularly difficult to diagnose. RFI is just nasty. I know this from personal experience.
I was aware of the Brillouin work, and immediately remarked this, much earlier. You do not have to take this as evidence, but can understand if true that it makes me sure this is no moving target. I remember there was a remark in some earlier report (sorry I don’t have the reference) describing the effect of the “stimulation” and noting that the excess heat followed this. Indeed. What I noted is that the described stimulus, high power fast pulse edges, was precisely what would give the most severe EMC problems due to rectification of edges. That, for any researcher aware of EMC issues, means that you need a way to distinguish between apparent results caused by pulse rectification in sensitive DC amplifiers, and a genuine temperature change.
Also – less problematic but an issue if the pulse power is comparable to the claimed excess heat signal – and again correlating exactly with the conditions here – you need to have an accurate way to measure the pulse power when integrating the square of two waveforms with fast edges requires measuring equipment to be up to the job, and the result can be skewed by lead inductance.
There are ways to deal this – for example you can investigate time constants. You’d expect that any rectified injected DC had a different time constant from temperature variation – which would normally be slower.
For the power in issue you can (perhaps) have an effect significantly larger than the extra pulse input power. You can bound the errors in measurement by investigating carefully all the circuit parasitics, or you can directly measure the power out from given pulses.
All this can be argued. And while it will not be seen at first, it is a constant of this type of system and so controlling these potential artifacts is an obvious necessity. In any report claiming extraordinary results therefore, you make it much stronger by addressing these matters. Maybe, in this case, they have been addressed long in the past. In that case however any summary report (such as the SRI Interim Report) would at least note, as additional validation, that these matters had been considered and give a brief statement of how they were addressed though maybe suppress the details as covered elsewhere. Therefore I expect that SRI does not know of any checks in this area. I hope that in a future more complete report they can document such checks – which could be made. Until then this data has a plausible non-LENR explanation.
I should add that from the SRI data I note they say that shorter pulses give a higher relative power out. That is exactly what you’d expect if the issue is rectification of edges. But there are too many unknown parameters in this experiment, because they measure only part of the generated power, and because the effect of EMC issues will have some unknown dependence on pulse length, to gain any assurance from this – it is just a mild indication.
I have no idea whether this issue is in fact affecting the described results. But I can argue with confidence that it is a real issue until ruled out, and that I have seen no past report from Brillouin rule this out, nor did this SRI summary refer to such work. Therefore the LENR community, if wishing to have these claims taken seriously, should view this criticism as one that must be addressed and skepticism based on it as valid, not moving goalposts. More generally, there are many possible artifacts, and a proper concern for all of these can seem like moving goalposts when I’d argue it is just proper concern. This relates to the subtle issues of systematic errors, and selection of both experiments and results, that would need a further long post to address.
if the LENR community can show itself interested in all these issues, and address them, then it will allow them more accurately to distinguish real results from potential artifacts and also mean that the claims of real results (if any exist) are much stronger.
THH – I’d suggest that the problem with measuring the energy in those fast edges, which is as you say a major source of error, could be bypassed by measuring the DC power supplied to the Q-pulse generator. In any case, if the generator is inefficient then there is a problem getting more power out than is put in, anyway.
I would hope that people wouldn’t rely on the measured Q-pulse power for the reasons you state. Kit lies when you go outside its parameters, and we’ve probably all been bitten by that one. Digital measurements have their own sources of errors, with EMI being one and interpolation between time-steps being another. Using multiple different methods of measurement of the important parameters (for temperature, such as Mercury-in Glass, Alcohol-in-Glass, pressure methods as well as thermocouples or making a cup of tea) gives the cosy feeling that if they all agree then there’s probably no error. It’s still pretty hard to be absolutely certain, though, unless you get your cup of tea several times as fast as using the input power alone.
I have a pretty high opinion of the integrity of the Brillouin scientists. The inability to scale it up, though, and make a samovar of tea, does allow for a bit of suspicion that the measurements may not be as accurate as they think.
A personal example of problems in measuring high-voltage and sharp edges, where I thought I’d get around the metering errors, is my attempt to use a Copper calorimeter (sounds good, but it was simply a turned bar with a deep recess, and well-insulated) to measure the energy in the spark by the rate of temperature rise. This gave me an efficiency of turning input power to spark power of around 7% which matched the calculation so I was happy. Use that same spark generator in Hydrogen with a shorter spark-gap and multiple points, though, and its efficiency rises to around 70%, and it took me a while to realise that using control experiments. Red face…. Luckily I took the time to try to prove it wrong.
I did not imply that. “Moving target” is a social phenomenon. Debater raises concern A, as crucial. Respondent shows error in A. Instead of acknowledging that, Debater moves to concern B. This can proceed down an endless regress, because it is always possible to raise a concern, though some require Rube Goldbergian conditions. This is “moving target.” It does not imply or require that any of the concerns be “invalid.” However, as it can happen, it is ultimately a conversation-killer, it’s not surprising that people get pissed off. Addressing concerns is part of normal discussion process. However, with “moving target,” the goal of the debater is to win, to be right, and to crush the opposing position. The debater has a conclusion in mind, and is finding various ways to push it. Most common: error is never admitted, even when it become obvious to everyone (but the debater?).
If one is only concerned about the conclusion, which tends strongly to be black and white: reality or bogus? — then comments like “pseudoskeptic” and “believer” and “moving target” are irrelevant. But that is not my primary concern, my primary concern is community and social process, how small to large numbers of people can communicate, cooperate, coordinate, effectively and efficiently. Cold fusion happens to be a topic that I learned about. I am not attached to it being real, but I am sharing what I’ve learned, and that sharing is a necessary part of the community process I have in mind. What I’ve found, however, in person, is that it is relatively easy to establish the major point I make: the desirability of further research, and, as part of that, a generation of full attention to possible artifacts.
With heat measurements in cold fusion experiments, possible artifacts abound. The LENR Forum discussion is coming to those, to the real issues and questions. IO started out swinging, insulting the entire community, including the entire LENR Forum community. His message is thoroughly boring. But several persons upvoted some of his worst messages, the most deluded. That I find interesting, and anomalous. I investigate anomalies. Mary Yugo was obvious for this, given Mary’s history and stand. Your upvote was anomalous. What does that mean? My training is grounded in “empty and meaningless,” but you may answer.
This point should be made, though: excess heat tends to be a single measure, and then it might be correlated with conditions. I.e., excess heat has been correlated with input current and with loading ratio. Those are interesting and somewhat increase the probity of results. However, it’s also obvious that both might be associated with some artifact. The claims of mismeasurement of input power wrt SRI are old. I’ve gone deeply into them, as to some of the work. They are unlikely to be real, i.e., the likelihood is that SRI generally measured input power accurately. However, there are ways to demonstrate this. Were they used? Sometimes, yes; for example, with SRI P13/P14, there were two cells in series, a D2O cell and an H2O cell. All other conditions identical. Because they were in series, the current was identical. The history was different, but was identical for a long time before the famous excess heat current excursion. The loading was identical. And that current profile was run twice with no XP showing up with either cell. In the third run, a clear XP signal showed up. Now anyone with a creative mind can invent possible artifacts. One that came up in an extensive discussion on Wikiversity was that bubble noise was different, since hydrogen bubbles are much more buoyant. Bubble noise could in armchair theory create power measurement error. So Dieter Britz did a study with some actual data he had. No. Bubble noise is relatively low-frequency, and the 1 MHz bandwidth of the constant-current power supply was more than adequate to handle it. In addition, several cold fusion scientists, asked on the CMNS list, said that they had looked at the power signals with an oscilloscope. There was no high-frequency noise.
Now, The ET replication could have some possible issues, though the AC there was highly controlled. Turning to the Brillouin study, absolutely, it’s a concern. However, we don’d have a final report, only a preliminary report that doesn’t look like it was written for publication, except it does. It’s very odd, and I have written a review and am awaiting some comments from the knowledgeable and concerned.
The LENR community, as a full community, is quite interested in the possibilities of artifacts. You should see the discussions on the CMNS list! There is skepticism there surpassing anything you have written. While the CMNS list community has gotten increasingly ragged by accumulation, it is still a scientific list at core, but, when we are lucky, the real scientists, the best, the most professional, do sometimes comment. (And then Steve Krivit sometimes grabs it and publishes it, violating privacy and copyright.)
I was encouraged, in 2012, specifically to take on a skeptical role within the community. It’s not always popular! I’m about to write a review of a CMNS journal article that never should have been published there, at least as written. Remember that one of my favorite authors is Gary Taubes. Bad Science, and it abounds, and not just with cold fusion. Taubes went on to nutrition, bringing there his experience with physics (and he thought of and probably still thinks of cold fusion as a physics topic). The colloquial term for what he’s doing is “kicking butt.” And he’s having fun. Instead of just complaining about Bad Science, he started an Institute to do real nutritional research, and to him, “research” consists of trying to prove your own ideas wrong. Trying really hard. He claims that about 5% of “scientists” actually do this. The best.
Taking on a topic, Taubes investigates it obsessively. His interview, which does ramble — though the interviewer encourages him — goes into all that. I identify. When he investigates thoroughly, he ends up, in some ways, knowing more than “experts.” He not only knows what they know, he knows the history of the ideas — and they often don’t.
THH, you have some experience with this. I know what you wrote, and what you did with it, and you were tagged as obsessive, by someone who basically was lazy, from this point of view. What you did I respect, very much, and I understand how you became involved, and, yes, I’ve looked at your older history. To my mind, we have an opportunity, to engage in a discussion that establishes roots. Out of this discussion on LENR Forum (“Validity”) I expect to create educational resources, and that will include polemic, but with full consideration and multiple points of view represented fully, by the best writers, where possible. Mostly, this has not happened yet, other than scattered discussions with the only summaries I know of being published by me on newvortex. Most issues being raised in the Validity discussion have been raised many times. What consensus is possible? Where can agreement be found, because consensus is powerful. As long as there is only opposition and contention, nothing moves forward. The debates can be educational for the few who research the evidence, but not for most.
Cold fusion was called “the scientific fiasco of the century,” by Huizenga, that’s the subtitle of his book. Would it be valuable to create educational materials on the topic? Was that an exaggeration by Huizenga to sell books? Is it really just some stupid idea held by a few “die-hards” that don’t understand science? If this was proven, where is the killer review that actually showed this? If not proven, isn’t it about time that the issue of reality and nature of the Anomalous Heat Effect be resolved? It is not going to be resolved by hot air on blogs. However, it is possible to create political pressure, and buzz, as well, to attract the necessary funding for research. If there is education and research, if a body of public, recognized expertise is created, there will be fewer opportunities for frauds and scammers, who will only appeal to the ignorant, as they always have. IH’s goal was to “crush the tests,” i.e., to find out, and that example has probably created an environment where never again will a secretive and paranoid inventor be able to create the kind of support that Rossi created, unless he allows fully-independent testing before funding agencies and organizations put in any money more than needed for such testing. (i.e, it would be and should be still possible for some garage obsessive to find the magic formula, if one exists. But serious funding for commercialization will not arrive until the technology has been thoroughly tested to the real satisfaction of the investors. IH was very special and will not pull that trick again. This was one-off, and, I think, by design.)
I did not imply that. “Moving target” is a social phenomenon. Debater raises concern A, as crucial. Respondent shows error in A. Instead of acknowledging that, Debater moves to concern B. This can proceed down an endless regress, because it is always possible to raise a concern, though some require Rube Goldbergian conditions. This is “moving target.” It does not imply or require that any of the concerns be “invalid.” However, as it can happen, it is ultimately a conversation-killer, it’s not surprising that people get pissed off. Addressing concerns is part of normal discussion process. However, with “moving target,” the goal of the debater is to win, to be right, and to crush the opposing position. The debater has a conclusion in mind, and is finding various ways to push it. Most common: error is never admitted, even when it become obvious to everyone (but the debater?).
If one is only concerned about the conclusion, which tends strongly to be black and white: reality or bogus? — then comments like “pseudoskeptic” and “believer” and “moving target” are irrelevant. But that is not my primary concern, my primary concern is community and social process, how small to large numbers of people can communicate, cooperate, coordinate, effectively and efficiently.
I take your (social) point here. You are quite right that this is very off-putting. What I would add however is that we have a problem in an area where, with these experiments, there are multiple possible ways they can go wrong and no way to know which (if any) are actually happening. Ideally those conducting and commenting on the experiments would be interested in the hunt for errors. But, if not, those properly doing that hunt will not be liked. Because the process of finding possible errors is exactly one where you check first the most obvious candidate, and then move on till you have checked absolutely everything. Only then do you say: “Hmmm – interesting. Let us replicate”. Where checking is unclear – there might be an error – or not – it may well be that replicating is called for anyway. But, in that case, it can be replication with better instrumentation that controls the error.
Whether replication is planned or not the process of identifying possible errors is needed, and that must involve checking multiple mechanisms any one of which can be an issue.
This level of scrutiny is not used when experiments are on firmer ground, with known theory, because in that case the known theory provides validation and cross-checks so that it is much more difficult for random experimental anomalies to be confused with signal. Where there is no such predictive theory, and signal is anything unusual, then a much higher level of scrutiny is necessary.
There is, for any community, a great advantage in consistently providing such a high level of checking, which is that much effort is then saved not chasing things that seem interesting but in fact are shown to be experimental artifacts.
Regards, THH
The necessity of rigorous — and skeptical — vetting of experimental results is clear. It is, however, always possible to invent possible artifacts. To make real-world decisions, there must be a termination point, a place where we make the decision without total certainty. The degree of confidence required varies with the importance of the issue, and the possible cost of error. There is a process protection: there is no single conclusion necessary. The basic decision to be made is funding, and there are many sources of funding. My goal with Infusion Institute was to make advice available to funding sources. Not to make decisions for them. Structurally, this is the “judicial function,” not executive. The executive function is best, in modern society, distributed and not excessively centralized, overcontrolled. Modern society functions best through diversity, which mirrors the overall process of evolution.
My own suggestion is to, by all means, be skeptical. Be careful, however of believing the skeptical arguments. My training is to observe the evidence (i.e, verifiable fact, preferably actually verified, but we do accept testimony as a level of fact), and the arguments (interpretations, reasons, theories), avoiding conclusions until decisions are necessary. At some point, we might put our weight on the invisible bridge. That’s a choice, and then we see a result. Or we might put our weight on “conventional wisdom.” That is also a choice. And we walk or we fall, and that’s life. Or we stand in place, afraid to move. I prefer to move, once I have seen enough. And if I fall, it was my choice, I am responsible for it.
TTH,
I put an [OT] link in the playground to a different forum yesterday. It was in regards to the EMdrive.
I would only ask that you read it. Serious researchers will try to understand the entire range of errors and address them. Take a look please.