At 11:27 AM 6/3/2011, Joshua Cude wrote:

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Jed Rothwell <<mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com>jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The data clearly shows that some cells produce heat after death, and other do not. What does not make sense here is your demand that all cells do this.

It's not a demand. It's an identification of an inconsistency.

So? The implication is that consistency of results is a requirement for an effect to be considered real. That's not a scientific proposition.

This can point us to the nature of the controversy here, it is about the difference between physics, which views itself as a hard science, and "softer" sciences, where absolute and accurate predictability are often lacking. Yet unpredictability can be found within physics as well; in particular, any chaotic phenomenon may be unpredictable.

In this case, though, the unpredictability of cold fusion results, with FPHE-type experiments, is probably due to the extreme difficult of controlling all the exact conditions. SRI P13/P14 shows that there is a clearly distinguishable phenomenon, anomalous heat, standing well above the noise (about ten times the error bars, it's very clear), with unknown conditions causing it, since in the three runs, with all known specific conditions, except for specific history, being identical. (If this experiment was re-run, with the *same history*, would it show the same results? Probably not, because it would not, then, be *the same cathode.* The cathode is altered by the history, that's part of the problem.)

"Inconsistency" of results is a known characteristic of the FPHE. So no single experiment establishes the conditions that set it up. You might, sometimes, get spectacular results, then you try what seems to be the same thing, and nothing unusual happens. *This condition is not contradictory to the reality of the effect, it merely shows lack of control of conditions, and the chemistry of the surface of a palladium cathode is more complex than I care to describe.*

Physicists intensely dislike messy conditions, they design experiments to avoid them. But the FPHE, as initially known, arises in very messy conditions, simplifying the conditions did cause the effect to disappear. Later work found other conditions that also produce a heat effect with palladium deuteride, with, apparently, more reliable reproducibility. My own opinion is that these other conditions show the same phenomenon, but what's happened is that the experiment has been broken down, in effect, into a very large number of very tiny experiments run at the same time. Nanoparticle palladium can be thought of as one experiment per nanoparticle. So the overall experiment is averaging many, many individual "runs."

But I have not analyzed nanoparticle results, personally. I'm just pointing out what is a possibility. I'll note that nanoparticle, gas-loading, results have tended to be low, quantitatively, meaning to me that most of the "individual experiments" -- each nanoparticle -- is doing nothing. I.e., most experiments are "failing." But, then, the overall experiment averages together all the results, showing, if there are consistent results, a significant effect that *sometimes* arises. And then the engineering effort attempts to find ways to enhance that effect, to make it more reliable, which will raise energy yield.

Lomax referred to a specific experiment, and even a specific slide from a presentation. This was held up as particularly good evidence for CF. I examined that slide and was puzzled by one aspect. Here's what I wrote:

It's held up as an example of what stands in the way of recognition. If you see that slide, what do you think? If you knew, seeing the slide, that the same current excursion took place three times, that the cathode was already, before any of these excursions, heavily loaded (about 90%), would this shift your understanding of what it means?

"One problem I have with those results. When the current shuts off, the heat dies immediately. It seems implausible that the deuterium would diffuse out of the Pd that quickly. I would expect a more gradual decline. Especially with all the reports of heat after death. That points to artifact to me."

heat after death occurs with some techniques. I do see, by the way, some HAD in that experiment. Just not a lot. Look at how the heat falls, it "bounces." The effect, first of all, is not much seen under equilibrium conditions. When you have high current, you have continual activity of deuterium at the surface, and it's a surface effect, apparently. What is going on inside the lattice, deeper, doesn't appear to matter, except that if there is low loading deeper in, the deuterium will rapidly migrate there. So to have very high loading at the surface -- 90% is very high, it used to be thought that 70% was the most you could get -- you have to have high loading throughout, that's all. When the current is rapidly shut down, the deuterium will immediately begin to migrate out, the surface loading, right at the surface, will drop drastically, that would happen in a flash (right at the surface). My suspicion is that the FPHE effect occurs when sites are *overloaded*, that the surface, itself, is *fully loaded* and then when a site becomes, just for a flash, *overloaded*, the effect shows up. I'll also note that the environment in which the heat effect actually appears is unknown. It may involve, for example, oxides, some researchers think that. My point is that turning off the current *can* result in an immediate change in deuterium "pressure" in the first layer of palladium, that which is immediately exposed.

What you are doing is seeing a mystery, and concluding "artifact." But what artifact? That's the question, isn't it? I've seen people come up with possible artifacts for this work. Really lousy, weak explanations, that conflict with the rest of the experimental data *for these experiments,* and with what's generally known to electrochemists as to the techniques. You are welcome to try. From what I can see, you have better knowledge of physics than some of those who have tried, maybe you will do a better job. http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cold_fusion, and take a look at the subpages, there are some debates there that should be refactored, eventually, so that the conclusions can be easily seen, right now they are just long debates.

So, given that some cells show heat after death, meaning the deuterium does not diffuse out of the Pd right away,

No, there is an assumption here. Suppose that the effect appears at, say, 90%, and that the SRI cells are *just above that, a smidgen." So you turn off the electrolytic pressure, and the effect immediately disappears, as the loading goes quickly below the required level. Suppose that in another experiment, the necessary loading is the same, but the cell reaches 92%. Turn off the juice, the loading starts to go down, but it takes time to pass the turn-off threshold.

And the actual explanation may be completely different. Basically, the issue with almost all the CF research is the ability of experts to use calorimetry, a very old and well-understood technique. There are aspects of it that are difficult, and newbie mistakes to be made, but there are also experts, and among them were Pons and Fleischmann. McKubre, as well, was highly skilled, and used a different technique, and that's a whole topic of its own. What has been missed in a lot of review of the field is that SRI was retained as a consultant to investigate cold fusion on behalf of EPRI, which had urgent and important reasons to know the truth. And McKubre was a professional, charged with providing evidence and analysis to them, which is what he did. The SRI work was, thus, *a neutral examination.*

But in the mythology that grew up, positive results were ascribed to "believers," to expectation bias, etc. Expectation bias would not explain P13/P14, nor only the most marginal of cold fusion experiments.

how could it be that in this particularly good experiment, the deuterium could diffuse out seemingly in a matter of seconds.

That chart has a scale of hours, the horizontal scaling is 24 hours per division. "Seconds?" Joshua made that up. This is flow calorimetry, practically nothing would be seen in "seconds," unless the effect were huge, which this was not. As I recall, this may have been 5% excess heat. The "deuterium" does not need to "diffuse out," which would take a long time. It only needs to drop below a critical value, which is a level of loading that is extremely difficult to get and maintain.

If you look at the excess heat with the highest current level, it is already, slowly, declinging. That could mean that it is at very close to the critical level. If you look at other experiments, you will see that often the level of heat varies wildly, even with constant current, this particular experiment was unusual in the relatively stable level of heat. So, how fast did the heat decline. Look closely at the chart. At the top of the falling heat plot, the dots, the measured values, are to the left of the dotted line that is the input current drop, and toward the bottom, they are to the right. I estimate the fall time as greater than one hour. Now, is it plausible that the surface conditions in a loaded palladium rod could alter greatly in one hour of the loss of excess loading pressure?

This, again, demonstrates my point. To understand a chart like that of P13/P14, to really "get" the implications, is quite unlikely for someone who just glances at it. If you are ready to believe, you might look at this chart and go "Wow! That's incredible." And if you are ready to discount and reject, you can look at it and quickly make up all kinds of reasons to reject it. As Joshua just did. And if nobody walks you through this, you will then believe that you had "good reasons" to be unimpressed. It's how the mind works, it's like clockwork.

Hence my suspicion that the biggest problem with DoE 2004 was that there was no extended back-and-forth, no discussion, questions and answers and more questions and more answers, so that the reviewers thoroughly understood the claims. It's very clear that they did not, whether or not the claims are real, or the objections of the reviewers are real. Some of them, at least, we can see, didn't understand the claims themselves, and the evidence presented.

The process was flawed, not what I'd expect to allow a sea change in opinion to appear. In fact, if we compare the events of 1989 to those of 2004, the review panel was *drastically* different from 1989. The report states that the conclusions were "much the same," but the only way that statement makes sense is to interpret "conclusions" to mean the *funding* conclusions. But in 1989, the conclusions were a political compromise, forced by Ramsey's threatened resignation if the report were made more gentle. In 2004, they seem to have been a genuine consensus. In 1989, what the panel came to on excess heat, in 2004, would have been unthinkable. Half the 2004 panel thought that the existence of a heat anomaly was "conclusive" or "somewhat conclusive." Really? Half? That is completely inconsistent with an opinion that there is no evidence for the heat effect!

So we'd need, then, to look at the individual reviewer comments, and we only have some of them. Some reviewers, it's clear, were not willing to look at the evidence, they had already-existing opinions, and they acknowledged this, pretty explicitly.

This is not science, this is politics. The science will be worked out in peer-reviewed journals, just as the DoE panel recommended. But some journals still, apparently, reject anything about cold fusion..... but some are eating their lunch, and that will not continue. They will wake up, even if only to print a negative review. But they'll have to have one in hand first. Want to write it, Joshua? Think you could handle the reality of a review for a major scientific journal? Ready to look like an idiot? Or a genius, for that matter?

It suggests that the explanation being used to explain it is wrong. That there's an artifact.

What explanation? There is an *anomaly.* An anomaly can be caused by an artifact. Okay, *what artifact*?

Your evidence doesn't actually suggest that, but I can understand why you would thinks so.

> Nature does work the way you demand it should. This is experimental science. You have to take the results as they are, and not dictate what they should be according to your theories.

Yes. Obviously. But one picks theories that are consistent with results and rejects those that aren't.

Sure. However, the theory of "unknown artifact," which is what your hypothesis amounts to, is not satisfying, because it is not falsifiable. There can be an "unknown artifact" with any experimental result whatever, no matter how careful the work. It's lazy.

What artifact? What possible error could explain the results? Be aware that it's easy to come up with some explanations that seem possible, but that conflict with the rest of the data. You would have to actually study the whole set of data about this experiment and this class of experiments. It's work.

The situation when P13/P14 was done was that there had been only preliminary reports of helium associated with the heat. What P13/P14 and the published data shows is that there is an FPHE, but nowhere near enough was known to give any clear explanation for it. The SRI data eventually showed that heat was critically depending on loading ratio, and that it was, statistically, correlated with current density. Great. But none of that bears critically on mechanism or cause.

Later, SRI work was an important part of the body of evidence showing heat/helium correlation, and nailing it down to close to the expected value for deuterium fusion, and the heat/helium work in general establishes a strong presumption, that PdD work, FPHE, is caused by the conversion of deuterium to helium. That can be called fusion regardless of mechanism, and the mechanism remains unknown.

>> We were discussing a particular experiment in a particular report. Is there a graph in that report of that 1994 experiment that reports heat after death?

> No, because that experiment did not produce heat after death, as I noted previously. You need to stop demanding what is not there.

There is what may be HAD in the graph, but it's close to the noise, if not down in it. Basically, HAD, like the rest of the FPHE, isn't crisply predictable. Often, when we see HAD, the heat generation *starts* with the shutdown.

Not a demand. An observation. If deuterium in Pd produces heat, why does the heat vanish instantly when the current is shut off? In this experiment.

Because what produces the heat is not deuterium alone, it is deuterium at a certain loading, under other conditions that are not well-known. Notice that Joshua has translated an hour to "instantly." He's absolutely not being careful. He looks at the chart, invents objections based on his prejudices, then holds on to them as if they were facts. He's confused his stories about the facts as if they were facts, what actually happened.

> You need to stop pointing to black birds as proof that red ones do not exist.


That's not even close to what I said. I am not saying heat after death has not been observed because it was not observed in this experiment.

First of all, there is some HAD in this experiment, maybe. Just a little.

I'm saying if heat after death occurs, and is attributed to the deuterium in the Pd, then it would seem implausible that the heat would vanish in seconds in another experiment. So, I'm questioning the attribution of the observation, not the observation itself.

"Seconds." How about an hour? The heat is indeed attributed to "deuterium," but the presence of deuterium may be a necessary but insufficient condition, and that's obvious, since in many other runs, the same deuterium, the same rod, the same apparently loading, the same current, no excess heat appears. And no excess heat appears with the hydrogen control, the heat just gets a bit noisier with higher current.

The observation is one of an *episode* of anomalous heat. What is the "attribution"? By never being clear, a pseudoskeptic like Joshua simply maintains the state of argument.

The line of argument, itself, is mere assumption. While it did not do so, there is nothing intrinsic that allows us to predict the behavior of the FPHE in such a way as to determine, in advance, what behavior is "plausible." Experimental results are experimental results, "plausible" or not, and, indeed, the really interesting ones may be those which are considered "implausible." "Implausible" is a judgment, reasoning from existing knowledge and theory, and can easily incorporate unwarranted assumptions and errors. Such as assuming a drop in "seconds" when that is not at all what the chart shows. Joshua probably thought that the scale was in minutes, not hours. He might have wondered, had he been more careful, why they would have divisions of 24 minutes! (and it still would have been a minute to drop, not "seconds" Further, now that we can understand that this chart shows that the excess heat effect lasted for three and a half days, does this change the perception?

It's more like you pointing to flying red birds and claiming that it proves they are lighter than air, and me pointing out that I caught some black birds, and weighed them, and they are heavier than air, and they can fly too.

Eh?

>> The DOE panel would have heard about it, but they were not convinced.


> Some of panel members were convinced, and some are not. The ones who are not convinced made logical and factual errors similar to the ones you are making.

Only one said the evidence for nuclear reactions was conclusive, but *some* not being convinced is all I need for my argument.

Sure. A total of one-third were thought it was "convincing" or "somewhat convincing," as I recall. But the report juggles "convincing" and "conclusive." Now, it's very obvious, gather a collection of "experts" in related fields, who are *not* familiar with the evidence, hand them a pile of it, and talk to some of them for a day, many, many are going to remain "unconvinced," and it doesn't really matter what the evidence is, as long as it is not a total killer demonstration, which doesn't exist for PdD LENR. The evidence is complex and takes a long time to absorb and understand, and, in the process, anyone will encounter hosts of interpretation errors, and it takes time to clear those up.

Again, this is how the mind works.

You said:


"I do not think any scientist will dispute this. ...An object that remains palpably warmer than the surroundings is as convincing as anything can be…"


It was hypothetical, and written after the DOE panel, so you could not have said that if you thought such a demo had been available.


You can squirm all you want. You effectively admitted that an isolated device palpably warmer than the surroundings would be a good demo, and that it has not yet been done.

There is one approach that can do this, because a difference of 4 degrees C can be palpable. It's really expensive, turns out. I've thought of offering it, but I'd probably need some kind of subsidy or investment to do it. The original work, Arata, used 7 g of nanoparticle palladium alloy, to produce a 4 degree temperature differential, which, from his published work, is maintained for the length of the experiment, after loading, about 3000 minutes. I don't know what happens after that (he supposedly sends the contents out for helium analysis, no reported results that I know of, and, yes, all this sucks compared to what I'd want to see.... but that's Arata, the Grand Old Man of Japanese physics.) To do this as a demo, I'd probably need to use more material, to get a higher temperature differential. This would be an expensive little puppy. Who is going to pay for it?

Instead we have calorimetry, but Joshua wants something he can hold. ("Palpably.") And suppose that this were not possible? Suppose that the effect is, by its nature, not reliable like that. Suppose that I could make a hundred of these cells, and only a third of them showed "palpable heat"? This is what Jed has been saying: nature does not arrange itself for our convenience. Sometimes we have to use sophisticated techniques to tease out what's happening. It's done with medicine all the time, that's a "soft" science, even though we care very much about solid results!

> It is not possible for you to see what is connect to what inside of a Tokamak reactor, or in a robot explorer on Mars.


Quite right. I said as much. Many experiments require indirect observations, and second hand observations, and in those cases, reproducibility, theoretical consistency and predictability, scientific unanimity or at least consensus all work together to build credibility.

"Reproducibility" can be understood in a way to make it impossible, with a whole class of results that are routinely accepted being, then, cast into doubt, or it can be understood in a way that recognizes that control of conditions, enough to make results very stable, may not be possible. In that case, statistical analysis is used.

Cart before the horse, here. If there is "scientific unanimity," is credibility then built? No, scientific unanimity requires careful process, where each element in a chain of logic is examined carefully. You know, I can't predict which way a coin toss will come down. Does that mean that I could not detect, with a bit of work, a biased coin?

Suppose, to give a CF example, I run a hundred cells. Suppose that (this isn't generally done, unfortunately, for separate reasons from its desirability) each cell is identical, and the cells were previously designed to follow an approach known to produce, at least sometimes, the effect, and they are all treated the same, with the same current profile. Suppose that two-thirds of these cells produce some clear level of anomalous heat, and the rest produce none (above noise).

Is this a reproducible experiment? With these facts, you could try to reproduce it, in a narrow way: you'd run a cell, and you might easily see nothing, and then you'd easily say, "replication failure." In fact, your report would be just one more instance in the series.

Now, let's add something to the experiment. We take samples of the effluent gases and measure helium in them. We send those to an independent lab for analysis, and our excess heat results are determined before we know the helium results, and the lab does not know the heat history of the cells, these are simply numbered samples.

Suppose we find something. All the cells with no heat show no helium above background (which is well below ambient, by the way). The cells that show excess heat show helium correlated with the heat, i.e., generally, the more heat, the more helium.

Okay, you, in your single cell, saw no heat. So suppose you also measured helium, in the same way. You find no helium. This supposed "negative replication" is actually a confirmation, once we have an independent result to compare.

This thought-experiment has been performed, in reality, though not with those numbers and exact conditions. What the thought-experiment shows is that an effect can be "unreliable," and specific results "not predictable," but the effect can still be seen as real and the evidence for that as conclusive.

And, frosting on this cake, if the heat/helium ratio is consistent with prediction from deuterium fusion to form helium -- as it is -- then we have, in addition to some independent confirmation of the excess heat and helium results, evidence for a nuclear reaction "between deuterons to form helium," as Storms put it in the Naturwissenschaften review.

Now, Joshua does not believe that the heat/helium evidence is conclusive. He'd like to see (or would he hate to see, in reality?) more careful work done. I'd love to see that, too, but that work is difficult and expensive. Who, again, is going to pay for it?

The 2004 panel recommended research under existing programs to resolve unanswered questions, and this would certainly be one of them, that is, it's "unanswered" from the point of view of those unconvinced skeptics. So what happened? What happened is that scientists did submit proposals, the proposals were rejected, because the skeptics still have political power and absolutely don't want to fund something that competes with what they want: more funding for hot fusion and high-energy nuclear research.

Politics. But this situation is shifting.

But some claims, if real, can be demonstrated in a simple and obvious way. CF and heavier than air flight are two examples. When such demonstrations should be possible but are absent, and there is no reproducibility, theoretical consistency, or scientific consensus, then it is reasonable to reject the claims until better evidence comes along.

No. I've shown why such rejection, while it might make sense from a practical point of view, makes no sense as to the science of the thing. It may be, forever, impossible to create practical demonstrations regarding cold fusion (let's set Rossi aside!), yet the science could be completely valid and could contribute to our scientific understanding. The question is not the "rejection of claims." The problem is the rejection of experimental evidence, giving preference to standing theory that is alleged -- falsely -- to predict otherwise. That freezes theory into a condition that does not allow its careful examination.

> It is true that a few researchers do lie, and some are incompetent, but in a group of professional researcher as large as the cold fusion cohort it is statistically impossible for them all to be incompetent.

It's only about twice the size of the polywater cohort, and probably smaller than the homeopathy cohort, and certainly smaller than the UFO cohort, so I'm not buying it. There are many examples of large groups of scientists being wrong. And to repeat, if CF is right, then a much larger group of scientists would have to be incompetent.

No, not incompetent, but perhaps holding some opinions outside their competence. CF does not take place under plasma conditions. It takes place in very unusual and rare conditions, which rather obviously are not common in nature. Any highly loaded palladium deuteride out there in some rocks?

The real experts, as far as I can tell, in 1989, said that it was possible. Not "probable," they were not believers, but they simply understood what Cook noted: there were unsolved problems in the solid state.

Of course you're not. And I'm not obligated to believe Dardik's tiny electrode produces .5 W for 4 days without any power input, if he can't take it out and prove it in a thermos of water.

Eh? In other words, radically change the experimental conditions, something else happens? This would prove what? That a piece of palladium deuteride, sitting in a thermos of water, doesn't do anything? Didn't we already know that?

(There was a ton of work with loaded palladium deuteride from before, it wasn't a terribly uncommon substance, it was a convenient way to present a high density of deuterium for bombardment experiments. And mostly it didn't do anything unusual. But, apparently, once people realize what might be happened, some looked back and then what had simply seemed to be unexplainable occurrences made sense. Mizuno had a couple of these incidents he wrote about. From later understanding, somehow these samples loaded to higher ratios than normal, we can guess.)

No, back to basics: is there an FPHE? Remember, a pile of experts, in 2004, some of whom were clearly not going to agree to anything that might make CF look possible, were half agreed that, yes, the evidence was conclusive, there is an anomaly.

So we have an anomaly, an unexplained appearance of heat, under some known conditions (in this case, highly loaded palladium deuteride). So the scientific question then becomes what is causing this, and that question starts by controlling conditions and increasing what is observed.

People looked for tritium. Tritium has been found, but it's an anomaly of its own, it is not well-correlated with excess heat. They looked for neutrons. They found none or very, very few. And, though it wasn't expected to be a major product, they looked for helium. They found it, correlated with the heat.

The skeptical panelists in 2004 did *not* understand the evidence, at least those who discussed it didn't, and that's clear. Joshua is unconvinced. Fine. What explains the experimental results that we have? There are experimental results showing heat/helium correlation. What artifact could explain this?

Whoever could find the artifact and, more, demonstrate it, would become famous. Consider Wood and N-rays!

But this is very unlikely, because lots of people have tried and failed. It's never been done. Nobody has shown the "FPHE artifact". RAther, there has been speculation and assertion, but no controlled experiment. The objections to P&F's approach have been met by using alternative methods. Differing controls have been used. Nobody has shown the artifact, but twenty years later, Joshua is still claiming what *nobody* has shown, as if it were a scientific consensus. Where is this consensus documented, where is it covered in a peer-reviewed review that actually examines the issues, rather than what can be found, some tertiary sources that mention this alleged consensus as if it were a known fact, based on real scientific process?

>> But heat can be demonstrated simply and visually. . .


> It can, and it has been.


Not as simply and visually as you have described and wished for. Not simply and visually enough to persuade a panel of experts.

In one day. Take those same experts and expose them to a week of process of review, where each detail would be covered in a report that they would sign, as to their personal conclusions, for which they'd take professional responsibility, and there would be a very different conclusion.

And, frankly, that's what the DoE should do, if they want to find a true scientific consensus. What they found in 2004 was no more than a toe in the water to find out what almost-knee-jerk impressions of experts would be.

I saw that P13/P14 graph a hundred times before it dawned on me what it was showing, it took being involved in a debate where it was alleged to be some kind of proof of "bubble noise" as the source of the heat anomaly (i.e., mismeasurement of the input power due to unconsidered current noise), requiring me to examine the original report in great detail, before I got it.

Someone like McKubre knows what I'm saying, because he lived with this for years. But someone who has no experience with the work is not going to notice this unless they are led by the nose, carefully, through the whole process. Only a few will see it quickly.

And, again, that's just how the mind works.

There is an important point here: why did McKubre not emphasize the extreme variability that P13/P14 shows. Why did he not provide the experimental data, in his summary presentations, showing the other two runs with no heat?

I can guess. Because, for years, the political claim, the complaint, about cold fusion was the alleged lack of reproducibility or reliability. By pointing to the other runs, the unreliability would be made very, very clear. I don't know if it was deliberate -- I should ask him!, and I'd guess not -- but there may have been some kind of protective instinct operating, to de-emphasize what, he knew, was evidence that could support a bogus argument.

In fact, making the unreliability clear is *essential*, because this, then, makes all the "negative replications" into confirmations of what is reported, which, more completely understood, is that PdD *sometimes* shows heat and helium correlated, that it *sometimes* shows evidence of fusion taking place at room temperature.

The "unreliability" -- which is obvious from most PdD work -- becomes part of the claim or report, not something *contradictory* to it!

(There are other approaches where this doesn't necessarily apply, there are some approaches that may -- I'm not making a claim here -- be more "reliable.")

Reply via email to