At 11:31 AM 5/31/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:
... as long as Rossi uses his own designates to report measurements,
he will not be taken seriously. As soon as it would be visual and
obvious so anyone can see it, he would be rich and famous.
Cude has repeated this meme, it should be answered. Rossi did not
pick the Swedish scientists who observed, Mats Lewan did. And he
seems to have accepted any reputable physicist willing to look at the
work. Given their reputations, if Rossi were inclined to reject
anyone who would not be gullible, he'd not have allowed them to
observe. In order to maintain the fraud hypothesis here, I'd have to
assume that Rossi paid off Lewan and the other Swedes. It gets more
and more tangled. Occam's Razor.
As to visual and obvious, no, it would not be "as soon as." There is
a mechanism of fame, and it takes time, sometimes. Media ignorance of
the Rossi story is puzzling, but this happens. Consider the Wright
brothers. There isn't any doubt that this is highly newsworthy at
this time, it's either the energy development of the century, or the
most brazen fraud to hit with respect to energy production. This will
be noticed by history regardless, this is not one of a long line of
similar frauds.
It's credible that someone might find a way to make the phenomena of
low-energy nuclear reactions into a practical device. Surprising that
such a large jump would be made, but not incredible.
It is not necessarily demonstrated by the reports that the Rossi
device is practical, even if the effect is real. Suppose, for
example, that the reaction poisons its own nest, so to speak, that
the material would have to be, say, reprocessed once a day. This
could be completely impractical, but still real. However, it would
point toward lines of research that would have the possibility of
solving the problem.
Hence, if something happens to interrupt the Defkalion delivery
timetable, a separate demonstration could become extremely important.
Rossi should, I'd recommend, patent the device as a demonstration of
an unknown effect, not necessarily as a practical energy production,
which would then fall under "additional claims." He should dump the
theory entirely. He would, as to prior work, simply note that there
have been reports of unknown nuclear reactions, that these have been
controversial, and that his device is useful in attempting to confirm
and understand them.
He could immediately sell devices that would have this utility. Even
if it were to turn out that some prosaic artifact is involved. I'd
suggest that if *this patent* is rejected, he'd have a crackerjack
case in court. I know of one patent that was of this nature, a patent
for palladium alloy to be used in cathodes, and it was granted.
Cude comments, generally, as if LENR itself is not believable. Yet, I
noticed this from Wikipedia yesterday:
Norman D. Cook (Oxford University, England), "Computing Nuclear
Properties in the fcc Model.", Computers in Physics, Mar/Apr 1989,
pages 73-77.
[Article describes both a model and a computer program for
calculating three nuclear properties for any specified nucleus: the
rms radial value, the total Coulomb repulsion, and the total binding energy.]
Editor's note: Dr. Cook writes, "I have been engaged in theoretical
work in nuclear structure theory for many years, and am convinced
that there are enough unsolved problems at the level of nuclear
structure (quite aside from lower level problems) that, on
theoretical grounds alone, it would be quite premature to dismiss
cold fusion as theoretically unlikely."
In 2010, Cook revised his previous work on nuclear models:
How about a recent textbook, Models of the Atomic Nucleus, by Norman
D. Cook, Springer, 2010 (Second edition), which has a newly added
chapter on
LENR?<http://books.google.com/books?id=CwRGogWF5-oC&pg=PA175&dq=Low-Energy+Nuclear+Reactions+Norman+D.+Cook&hl=en&ei=y0bkTa2KB8vUgAfgs8zFBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false>[15].
Amidst the continuing debate, enough experimental work has been done
to establish the reality of at least some of the "anomalous" work
involved deuteron-loaded Palladium electrodes. Precisely what
conditions and ingredients and what quantum mechanical
rationalizations will be required remain topics for specialists to
thrash out, and further controversy can be expected. But "anomalous
results" have been reported several hundred times over the past
twenty years (reviewed in Storms, 2007) and the glib dismissal of
cold fusion as "junk science" in 1989 has been shown to be truly
"junk evaluation."
Springer published the first edition of the book in 2006, and Cook
doesn't seem to have written anything on cold fusion until 2008, so
he is not some long-term "advocate."
--<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EnergyNeutral>EnergyNeutral
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:EnergyNeutral>talk) 02:26,
31 May 2011 (UTC)
Cude represents a grad student level understanding of physics, a grad
student who has diligently studied to master a field, which means
stuffing his head with what's been known and theorized, and being
able to regurgitate it in a way to bring approval from experts in the
current state of his field.
He doesn't yet understand that science advances through recognizing
what is not known, not through believing what is assumed to be known.
We provisionally accept what is known, without belief, because we
need to have something to stand on, or we could not make progress. We
cannot question everything at once.
Obviously, science has come up with tremendous accomplishments in
extending theory to the point where it can make frequently very
accurate predictions, but the prediction of "fusion below detectable
levels in the solid state" was a prediction that had never been
confirmed, and, as Cook wrote in 1989, there were "enough unsolved
problems" that such a prediction must be considered a hypothesis, a
guess, based on approximations, not a basis, at all, for rejecting
experimental evidence.
The excess heat reported by Pons and Fleischmann was a reproducible
experiment. It was a difficult one, but so are a lot of experiments.
It wasn't understood, even by Pons and Fleischmann, meaning that they
did not originally fully describe what were necessary conditions for
the effect, hence, no surprise, many attempted replications did not
set up those conditions. However, I know of no example of a
researcher who persisted, despite initial replication failure, who
ultimately failed to find the effect. Most who failed gave up quite quickly.
The difficulty can easily be seen in the work of McKubre, published
in the early 1990s, where what would appear to be the exact same
conditions,the same instrumentation, the same cathode, even, produced
very different results, where, with two identical current excursions,
no anomalous heat was observed, and with a third, very clear, far
above noise, anomalous heat was produced. The chimera walked through
the lab, and was photographed. The same camera at other times showed
no chimera. Many people photographed their labs, having set out the
same bait, they thought, and saw no chimera, which proves? Others saw it.
It proves that the chimera is very particular. It wants not only
palladium loaded with deuterium, at above about 90% -- most labs in
the early days did not reach that loading, because of inadequate
palladium preparation, or because of inadequate time with that
palladium and that approach -- but it also seems to want some kind of
history of the palladium, perhaps some complex or unidentified
structures on the surface.
Many other people did succeed in photographing the chimera, and it
has certain characteristics. A skeptic may argue that these are the
characteristics of an artifact, and for at least one of the
characteristics, that's reasonable, in a way. Not for all of them,
and not considering controls and other conditions.
Let's go over the chimera traits, as it appears in electrochemical
PdD experiments.
1. Appears correlated with current density.
2. Appears under disequilibrium, probably due to deuterium flow.
3. Leaves behind helium in proportion to its total presence.
4. Leaves about half of the helium behind, trapped in the lattice,
near the surface. The rest mostly escapes in the effluent gases.
5. Disappears rapidly with hydrogen impurity in the heavy water. (The
figure I have in mind is that 1% is enough to poison the effect.)
6. Appearance and disappearance depends upon incompletely understood
characteristics of an experiment, such as the history of the cathode.
7. Appearance is reported to produce unexpected minor products or
secondary effects, such as transmutations other than to helium,
radioautographs on X-ray film.
8. No theory of chimera appearance has been found to be accurately predictive.
Because of its body heat, and the existence of a correlated nuclear
product, helium, multiply confirmed, the chimera is suspected to be a
member of the genera NuclearReactionalia.
However, other known members of this class will typically leave
behind droppings, such as radioactive isotopes or radiation. Thus the
chimera is likely to be a hitherto unknown species.
The pseudoskeptical position is that a new, previously unknown
species is impossible. The pseudoskeptics, unlike real skeptics, are
content to simply believe this, based on a trust or attachment to the
alleged thoroughness of prior exploration, and they find no need to
establish, by experiment, the true cause of the effects. Real
skeptics would, with phenomena like this, keep an open mind, as Cook
did in 1989. It appears that Cook, like many others, eventually came
to be convinced that there is something real happening here.
He's notable as a theoretical physicist who knew the inadequacies of
theory, back in 1989, and he's confirmed what I was taught by Feynman
in about 1963. The predictions of quantum mechanics were inadequate
to make precise predictions of the behavior of bulk matter, the math
is too difficult. Sometimes simplifying assumptions allow prediction,
even with high accuracy, but not always. The simplifying assumptions
convert many-body problems into two body problems.
Besides cold fusion, one of the experimental clues that these
assumptions could be off was Takahashi's early work with the
bombardment of PdD with accelerated deuterons. He reported evidence
of triple deuteron fusion at levels that were 10^26 higher than the
normal prediction, based on simple probabilities and the plasma
assumptions. Something in the solid state shifts things, sometimes.
That led him to look for possibly multibody effects in cold fusion,
hence his later theories. Most people in the field now seem to think
that the ultimate explanation will, indeed, involve some kind of
multibody fusion, or at least multibody participation in some way.
