As I said in my talk at Univ. of Missouri, "skeptics have to believe
that everyone studying cold fusion makes mistakes that are only
visible to a skeptic". Shanahan proves this point very nicely. The
attitude comes from an excessive ego without any compensating
humility. The reaction says more about the person making the
statements than about the subject of CF. Such people should be
treated like any irrational person is treated, i.e. ignored.
Ed
On Jun 3, 2009, at 1:56 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
On the Cold Fusion Talk page I saw this weird message from Kirk
Shanahan in a discussion of Duncan's visit to Energetic Technologies:
"Dardik et al, of Energetic Technologies have slides from ICCF12 and
a paper from ICCF14 (2008) posted on Rothwell's web site. In both,
they show an artist's drawing of their calorimeter, which contains
the thermocouples, which are designated Tcell and Tjacket. The
drawing and these designations are for what is known as isoperibolic
calorimetry. In the text of the ICCF14 paper, the claim to be using
a flow calorimeter, but what they show is NOT that. Isoperibolic
calorimetry is what F&P originally did and were criticized about in
the '89 DOE review. Storms has written several times that flow
calorimetry is superior to isoperibolic . . ."
This refers to Fig. 1, p. 3 here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DardikIultrasonic.pdf
Does he seriously think the Energetics Technology wrote a whole
papers saying it is flow calorimetry when in fact it is
isoperibolic? And that Duncan and McKubre failed to notice what kind
of calorimetry they use?!?
That's mind-boggling. The guy is losing it.
The drawing in question shows that they measures the electrolyte
temperature and water temperature in the jacket. It does not show
them measuring at the inlet and outlet temperature but I am sure
they do. It is a shame it does not show the other pair of
thermocouples to satisfy Shanahan's literal-minded approach. I
suppose he thinks they use itty-bitty red alcohol thermometers since
that is what the drawing shows.
More to the point, I have never seen a flow calorimeter in which
they do not measure electrolyte and jacket temperature in addition
to the flow Delta T. You might say that all flow calorimeter is also
used as isoperibolic calorimeters, as a backup I suppose, and
because why not -- you never know what the electrolyte temperature
might reveal.
(I'll tell you what it will reveal: when the electrolyte gets hot,
the reaction increases. You would not know that from flow
calorimetry alone because the flow Delta T temperature does not tell
you what the electrolyte temperature is. That's a complicated
function of how thick and conductive the cell wall is, along with
various other factors.)
I have to stop reading this crazy stuff.
- Jed
