Posted By: AbdThe only reason to do it is to convince dodo-head skeptics, which is not enough of a motive to spend the several hundred thousand dollars that would be risked. And from what I've seen, skeptics would *still* not be convinced, quite likely. Especially if it exploded.

And here I thought the lack of funding for CF was dodo-head skeptics. If so, I bet 15 kilowatts sustained for days or weeks would convince them. I'm not involved in funding but it would certainly convince me (if it wasn't some Rossi phony dog and pony show).

BTW, the idea that cold fusion has to be a product for sale to be believable is an idiotic believer argument that keeps being recycled. It's a really stupid notion. A very expensive (even if large, heavy and complex) one-of device that made impressive power for long periods without fresh fuel when properly independently tested would be convincing. The argument against the current crop of measurements is that it's easy to make an error when dealing with very low levels of power (or helium), especially if the energy measurements are thermal. The MFMP has reinforced this idea recently. They are muddling about in noise and it seems to keep them perpetually befuddled.

Posted By: Abd

Posted By: hairykrishna

Posted By: Abdd+d->4He, your example, isn't actually possible.

That is *probably* correct. However, there are *conceivable* mechanisms. The big problem with dd fusion is that we already know what is likely to happen if you single-body cold-catalyze dd fusion, you get the same branching ratio as hot fusion, it's demonstrated by muon-catalyzed fusion. To be more precise, d-d fusion would be expected to generate neutrons and He-3, which are not observed. But we do not necessarily know all possible *mechanisms* for d-d fusion, which is why we cannot rule out d-d fusion with certainty. It's unlikely, though, hence other possibilities are explored, including multibody fusion in various forms, plus, for some -- very unlikely also -- neutron formation and activation.

Simple conservation of momentum rules out d+d->4He. I don't know about the 4D stuff.

Posted By: Abd

If CF is real, why not build a big one?

For what purpose? It will not be more reliable because it is larger, it will simply be more dangerous. It will be impractical as a commercial application, so there is no motive there. The only reason to do it is to convince dodo-head skeptics, which is not enough of a motive to spend the several hundred thousand dollars that would be risked. And from what I've seen, skeptics would *still* not be convinced, quite likely. Especially if it exploded.

If by 'dodo-head' skeptics' you mean 'the entire nuclear physics community' then yes, that's it's purpose.

Posted By: AbdAnd anyone who has that money to spend on this will not spend it on a big bang. Why should they?

Because, at the moment, nobody in main line science believes them.

If they want funding to do something more clever about theory and optimization, they need to be convincing to main line scientists. I'm not suggesting seriously that a huge explosion is needed (though it would be interesting). I am suggesting robust levels of heat are required. Hundreds of watts for days or weeks in a small device without fresh fuel would be a good start. Rothwell says that has been done but every time I asked him to cite the work, he couldn't and instead told me I'm stupid for not finding the information on his giant web site.

A proper cooling system is an excellent device for measuring enthalpy properly (with a good calibration and blank run). It doesn't matter if it costs more than an insufficient and inadequate and unconvincing experiment.

I love quotations like this on artists' web sites, LOL!

Jan. 25, 2013 -On day 4, Prof. Hagelstein began with evidence, based upon PdD and D2O as the detectors, that de novo Helium 4 must be “borne” with energies below 10 keV or less, and that the upper limit for neutron production must be less than 0.01 neutrons/joule. Then, having demonstrated that destructive interference in the spin boson model prevents its use in CF/LANR, he corrected that, and expanded the Hamiltonian to now include coupling parameters and examined the quantum exchange characteristics based upon coherence.

Successful energy transfer was demonstrated to require interactions of all the atoms in the lattice. For further analysis, a donor-receptor system was then included. At that point, he showed how the Coulomb barrier need not be overcome, because by this method the factor is linear, rather than quadratic (needed for classical analysis of D+D interactions). Supporting this analysis is the Karabut data in glow discharge on Pd which yielded both diffuse emissions and collimated x-radiation. with beamlets of energy bandwidth which were consistent with the theory Prof. Hagelstein developed. Finally, he used the Foldy-Wouthuysen rotational operation, and demonstrated how this analysis is becoming assymptotic [sic] with what is being observed in CF/LANR, with the use of his corrected condensed matter nuclear science (CMNS) Hamiltonian. Finally, with the addition of nonlinear Rabi oscillations (which yields Dicke superradiance), his model was shown to also be near-complete and consistent with both the observed pulse emissions and the wide bandwidth.

The only things they left out are Rydberg hydrogen, Einstein-Bose condensates, and of course, dark matter. Also dog bones, qi birds, and unicorns.

http://coldfusionnow.org/2nd-week-summary-of-cold-fusion-101/

Posted By: maryyugo

Posted By: AbdAnd anyone who has that money to spend on this will not spend it on a big bang. Why should they?

Because, at the moment, nobody in main line science believes them.

That's not true. I've cited sources showing quite the opposite. They are ignored by ... dodo-head skeptics. Who mostly live *here* and in places like this. They include the editors of certain journals, that heavily committed themselves, editorially, over twenty years ago, to the concept that the whole thing was preposterous nonsense. They do not include the reviewers at mainstream journals like Naturwissenschaften (which has access to the best peer review, I'm told from those who have been through it that it's tough). They do not include the reviewers at many mainstream journals, just those most centrally important to most physicists, who, like Angus here, rely on them to filter information. I have little doubt that "most physicists" are still skeptical, but not necessarily because they are dodo-heads, but because they have not had the opportunity to become informed.

We saw what happened when a skeptical physicist, Robert Duncan, was asked by CBS Sixty Minutes to review cold fusion. He investigated, and was amazed at what he found. And from what he wrote later, and from his speeches, he had only found a fraction of what's known, he's still learning. He took a lot of flack for openly saying what he found. He's old enough and established enough not to care. His institution supported him. The reaction he got shows, in fact, why the cascade has lasted so long. People who violated the "rule" that you do *not* give cold fusion the time of day, were attacked by their colleagues. That's not a "conspiracy theory," it was a cascade. It's a social phenomenon.

If they want funding to do something more clever about theory and optimization, they need to be convincing to main line scientists.

Problem is, cart before the horse. Both DoE reviews suggested basic research to resolve open issues, under existing programs. The physics community, which, because of the massive hot fusion program, very much has a vested interest, consistently intervened to block all such funding through the DoE, which has never implemented the *unanimous* recommendations of it's own panels. (Clearly unanimous with the 2004 DoE review.) So the approach I'm working on is to present an alternative: if heat/helium evidence is already sufficient, fund other basic research to quantify the "parameter space," and provide some level of support for theoretical investigation. If the heat/helium evidence is not considered satisfactory, then, fund heat/helium replication at increased accuracy. After all, if this is "pathological science," increased accuracy should debunk it. At the same time, of course, efforts would be made to hypothesize and test alternatives, possible artifacts and to demonstrate the artifacts though controlled experiment.

It should be realized, and this is clear, that no artifact was ever proposed and demonstrated, through controlled experiment, to be behind the extensive heat results, nor behind the helium results, and *especially* not behind heat/helium.

{quote] I'm not suggesting seriously that a huge explosion is needed (though it would be interesting). I am suggesting robust levels of heat are required. Hundreds of watts for days or weeks in a small device without fresh fuel would be a good start. Rothwell says that has been done but every time I asked him to cite the work, he couldn't and instead told me I'm stupid for not finding the information on his giant web site.

Jed Rothwell is blunt, and you *are* stupid, or "obtuse" would be more accurate. But I'm not sure of the exact claim you are referring to. I don't know of any work that is "just like" what you just said, so my operating hypothesis is that the conversation was not *exactly* understood by you. You can send me an email for comment if you like. Jed is not always careful, and he's been dealing with "dodo-heads" for over two decades. I've disagreed with his comments, and strongly, on occasion.

Basically, the question is off. You are expecting large heat results, when the state of the art is low but significant results. There are plenty of experiments where energy out *greatly* exceeded energy in. Is that what you want to see? None of this, though, has proven sufficient to convince skeptics, like Richard Garwin, who simply fall back on "there must be some mistake," which is a very cheap shot. It can apply to any experimental result you don't like. *This is why we rely on wide and independent replication!*

A proper cooling system is an excellent device for measuring enthalpy properly (with a good calibration and blank run). It doesn't matter if it costs more than an insufficient and inadequate and unconvincing experiment.

You really don't get it. It would cost a *lot* more. Not just a little. The work is already done, by labs like SRI, with very accurate and reliable calorimetry, and with various kinds of controls -- including hydrogen controls for deuterium experiments.

I've written and have delivered a talk at a conference on the famous SRI P13/P14, which was the source of an illustration in the 2004 DoE review paper, about what it showed, clearly and conclusively, confirming Pons and Fleischmann and the general body of experimental data available at the time. It showed, in one chart that compares the response of a deuterium cell and hydrogen cell, to the same conditions, the strong response of the deuterium cell in excess heat, and a mere increase in noise in the hydrogen control. But what that chart did *not* show, and that should have been shown, was that the *same conditions* had been set up for both cells twice before, this was the third current excursion. Both times before, both cells showed no response. So P13/P14 showed, in one series, both strong response and missing response. The unreliability, right there. Clearly missing, twice, like all the negative replications. Then strongly present, unmistakeable.

If by 'dodo-head' skeptics' you mean 'the entire nuclear physics community' then yes, that's it's purpose.

No. A "dodo-head skeptic" is one who isn't going to look at the experimental evidence, and that's a "dodo" position, it's dying. There are nuclear physicists, who, in spite of opprobrium from colleagues, have investigated cold fusion for decades. Takahashi is one. Mizuno is another. Hagelstein is a physicist. And now, Robert Duncan is a physicist, and I've met others who are working in the field, one from China --- and there are many Chinese working in this field -- and a Russian physicist, Vyosotskii, is very active. There have been, in the past, many others. Norman Schwinger resigned from the American Physical Society because they refused to publish his work on cold fusion. Edward Teller immediately proposed a theory, a new particle, he called the meshugatron, because its behavior was so unexpected. Norman Cook is a solid-state physicist whose recent textbook on the quantum mechanics of the solid state covers cold fusion. I found a source where, in something like 1989 or 1990, he pointed out what I always knew to be correct, that we didn't have the math to make solid predictions about fusion in condensed matter.

No, there will be funding, I'm sure of that, but it will only go to physicists who are willing to do the heavy lifting. So far, the DoE has only funded, through your favorite, ORNL, Kirk Shanahan, to write an article that was *creamed* by cold fusion researchers in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring. Total waste of money. But the last gasp of the extreme skeptical position in the journals.

(Kirk Shanahan believes that there *is* an anomaly involved, some new effect, but it just isn't "fusion." So he has argued tenaciously against cold fusion since the early 1990s, on the internet. And has developed totally preposterous theories to explain away cold fusion results. This field has attracted it's share of wing nuts, on all sides. If there is a new effect, *what is it*? What the sociologists of science have pointed out is the amazing lack of curiosity on the part of the physics community. N-rays and polywater were debunked by controlled experiment that revealed the artifacts. That was *never done* with cold fusion.)

That is *not,* as some here have pretended, a "not proved wrong therefore true" argument. It is, instead an argument that cold fusion *was* never proved wrong, and that therefore the experimental evidence *for* it still stands, unrebutted. All that has been done is to assert seemingly-plausible reasons that it *might* be artifact, and those reasons collapse when the actual experimental evidence is known. So there we go.

I'll say this again. It's *over* in the journals. In 2002, Beaudette titled his book, "Excess heat, why cold fusion prevailed." That was *bold* for 2002. But he was right. The skeptical position retired about then, except for very few comments and papers. Positive papers on cold fusion had outnumbered negative ones, since about 1991, the Britz database shows that. Sure, confirmation bias. But ... what's the substance?

And if you look carefully, it is heat/helium. The responses to heat/helium *all* neglected or misunderstood the correlation. Miles' *heat* results were attacked by Jones, completely neglecting the correlation with helium -- which essentially confirms the heat.

The strongest skeptical argument in the early days was the missing ash. That ash was *reported* even by Pons and Fleischmann, but without correlation with heat, and P&F also did not realize that the helium *would not be found* in the bulk, except very near the surface. So that whole issue was confused until finally Miles showed the correlation. Once confirmed, that should have iced it. But it didn't, and it's obvious why.

The cascade had become firmly embedded, and unquestionable.

Posted By: maryyugo

Posted By: AbdStorms has concluded that there is only one mechanism, and that it will explain both PdD and NiH results.

There are NiH results worth explaining? Whose are those? Where are they published?

I hate to break it to you, since you think Storms is so reasonable, but he does think that there are NiH results, and thought that Rossi had managed to enhance those results. To be fair, he reported on NiH results in his 2007 book. It's long been around. It's simply not nearly so widely confirmed as PdD reactions. From the book, The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, p. 127:

Deuterium is not the only active hydrogen isotope. Nickel exposed to hot H2 gas was discovered by Piantelli to produce heat and nuclear activity. This behavior has been studied by Focardi and co-workers at the University of Bologna and University of Siena (Italy) for many years and has been replicated by Cammarota and co-workers.

and then he gives more details. He gives 10 references on this, of which five seem to be conference papers, some of which might be peer-reviewed, some not. The reports seem to go back to 1993, and did not begin in Italy. Nickel results were always a puzzle. Deuterium fusion is unlikely enough! But experiment is experiment. Nobody had proposed a plausible and confirmed ash, and that's still so.

Posted By: Abdhe does think that there are NiH results, and thought that Rossi had managed to enhance those results.

If Storms thinks anything about Rossi is credible, then he is more woowoo than I thought. As far as Piantelli is concerned, I browsed some of his reports and found them to be unconvincing.

Someone pointed out elsewhere that Rainey nickel has been around for decades and has been exposed to hydrogen and no nuclear reaction has ever been found. At the same time, some vigorous chemical reactions exist with these materials.

I wonder if Storms still thinks Rossi might have something. If he does, he hasn't been paying enough attention. I suspect that even Josephson is becoming skeptical of Rossi, especially since he made a direct email inquiry to Levi (about why he never repeated his no-phase change experiment) and received no reply at all.

Posted By: AbdThe skeptical position retired about then, except for very few comments and papers. Positive papers on cold fusion had outnumbered negative ones, since about 1991, the Britz database shows that. Sure, confirmation bias. But ... what's the substance?

If what you say is true, it is incomprehensible that copious private, if not government funding can not be found to do whatever experiments are needed in cold fusion. I am sure, if it were credible and properly demonstrated, that you could get one of the usual suspects formerly with eBay, PayPal, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, or similar or something like the Howard Hughes Institute or any number of university physics departments and graduate students to do experiments. And to do them properly. There is no shortage of billionaires and venture capital firms to invest in promising new ventures and they generally don't care what the academic or government establishment thinks and says.

Instead you have weirdo stuff like Ruby Carat quoted from Hagelstein which I cited above and strange (and to me meaningless) confusing web pages like the one from Swartz.

Where the brain has been fully anesthetized sensory feedback has little effect.

Well, I recently suffered a rather striking loss of hearing. I no longer can hear my children's mice squeaking. Are there mice squeaking here?