On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com>wrote:
Cude>>To the extent they believe cold fusion is real based on existing measurements, then in the opinion of mainstream science, they are mistaken. Every last one of them. Lomax> As Rothwell said. Cude is simply repeating a common myth. That mainstream science regards CF as a mistake is a fact you have admitted. Not a myth. >Polywater and N-rays were not debunked by negative replications. Negative replication is quite unreliable when one is dealing with a previously-unobserved phenomenon. What works is positive replication with, then, additional controls to show the origin of the observations. By that standard, according to Rothwell, Focardi was debunked. (See accompanying post.) Where does that leave Rossi? > With polywater, the clear refutation appeared, not from failures to create polywater effects, because there could be a million reasons for that, but from actual replication, showing the reported phenomena, then with further analysis showing the prosaic origin. True. This turned out to be somewhat easier with polywater, but if I get the drift of a parallel discussion I have only glanced at, there are still those who cling to the reality of polywater. In any case, there are a great many pseudo-sciences which, like CF, are much more difficult to debunk, and which are likely to persist indefinitely: homeopathy, straight chiropractic, perpetual motion, telepathy, and so on. > The FP Heat Effect is quite clear, frequently, standing well above noise. Artifacts frequently stand well above the noise. The effect is not sufficiently clear to convince a panel of experts that it is real. > It does not go away with more precise measurement, that is another myth. Well, some people did not see it. And it is clear that the results have gotten smaller in time; just look at the tables in Storms' book. Surely, experiments get better in time, not worse. Rossi's claims are bigger, but his experiment is much worse. You can see the flaws from the internet, even though he hasn't published them, and has kept critical parts secret. > In the case of heat/helium ratio, that is, the correlation between excess heat and helium measured, Storms analysis is based on the work of twelve research groups, and there are no negative reports. Twelve groups? His correlation ratio does not use data from 12 groups. And none of the data he uses after Miles has been subject to peer-review. Rothwell says 7 groups have replicated Miles. Which is right? Anyway, how did 12 groups do this experiment that, as you say elsewhere, only graduate students do, if there are no graduate students working in CF? You're not making sense. And 12 groups did the experiment, and yet no peer-reviewed results are good enough for Storms? Also, one group admitted the helium results were not definitive. > Tritium is not (well) correlated with the heat, so it doesn't explain the heat. However, tritium being produced would be a clear sign that, sometimes, something nuclear is taking place in the cells. That's a stunning result, from the point of view that such reactions are impossible! Except that the results vary by 10 or more orders of magnitude, completely destroying the credibility of the measurements. > It's the same with SPAWAR neutrons. Because the rates are so incredibly low, they tell us nothing about the reaction, and I have no idea if they are correlated with heat, those neutron measurements did not look for heat. SPAWAR has not been reproduced, and the results are too weak to be convincing. Anyway, you've got tritium that doesn't account for the heat, and now neutrons that don't account for the heat, so there must be another reaction that does. Multiplying small probabilities does not make this scenario seem any more likely. > Of course steam can be heated to higher temperatures. Steam being evolved from water boiling will always be at about 100 degrees, that's a consequence of the phase change. The water being boiled will be at 100 degrees at atmospheric pressure. To raise those two temperatures, yes, it takes pressure. But that doesn't mean that you cannot coninue to heat steam beyond 100 degrees! Right, but in Rossi's device the steam is always 100C. If it were dry, and the power were a little above what is required to produce dry steam, then the temperature would exceed the boiling point. > I'll confess that I don't read most of his writing any more, so malignant has it come to be in my eyes. The truth hurts. > Yes. That was partly a replication failure. An experiment like this raises some doubt, but what is obvious is this: the experiment did not exactly reproduce the conditions in the Focardi work. Sure. Now you say that. Now that you think Rossi is CF's latest saviour. What happens when Rossi fades away like Patterson? > So, while this experiment raises some level of doubt, it certainly does not "prove Focardi wrong," as Cude cavalierly claims. No. Not me. Rothwell. I guess you really don't read what I write. You just imagine something you can argue against and go at it. I said Rothwell was pretty certain Focardi had been proven wrong, and he argued the point at length. An accompanying post gives chapter and verse. Now he thinks Focardi's results are the bees knees. The point was that Rothwell's certainty is nothing to take very seriously. > But he's done worse than this, he's claimed that Gozzi, for example, refuted the heat/helium results, Once again, you're attributing to me things I have not claimed. I merely pointed out that Gozzi, after at least 5 years of work on the experiment, admitted that his helium results were not definitive. Miles results were crude and unconvincing, as evidenced by the fact that most people are not convinced by them. They don't need refutation. Failure to reproduce is enough to remain skeptical of them. Gozzi, who was peer-reviewed failed to reproduce. The groups Storms used to calculate a correlation were not even peer-reviewed. The results therefore remain unconvincing, not refuted. And I should add that peer-review is a very low barrier, given the sort of thing that gets published. But it is kind of a minimum to be taken at all seriously. > Cude isn't worth the electrons pushed to respond to him. And yet, here you are responding. You have responded with 10s of thousands of words, probably a hundred thousand, to someone not worth the effort. One more contradiction among the many you have shown.
