At 02:29 PM 6/5/2012, Peter Gluck wrote:
I hope to discuss a lot of LENR subjects
with our colleague Abd.
Today, now, here:
<http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2012/06/discussing-with-my-colleague-abd-about.html>http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2012/06/discussing-with-my-colleague-abd-about.html
starting to exchange ideas re Reliability in CF/LENR.
Far from agreement but this makes a dispute interesting.
I don't see that we are far from agreement, but
maybe Peter sees something I don't.
Here is the discussion, with my responses interspersed:
DISCUSSING WITH MY COLLEAGUE ABD ABOUT RELIABILITY
I have to apologize again, my old age weaknesses allow me
to answer to Abd only step by step, in fragments to his so well
ordered arguments. I have to recognize that in
our LENR circles, what he says is more happily/readily accepted than my ideas.
Perhaps. What that means, I don't know. Maybe
nothing. Peter, you have extensive experience,
which is to be respected. I'm a writer, so it's
my business to be effectively communicative. I'm still learning, though.
So, now about reliability.
[I wrote:]
Well, they *may be* inherent weaknesses of PdD
LENR set up by known methods. A premature
vision of an ultimate application can kill new
discoveries, allowing them to be dismissed as
worthless even if they are real, and if their
reality is in question, it's a double whammy.
What we need is Science, and it comes before
Energy, if we need reliability for Energy. *We
do not need reliability for Science.* It is desirable, that's all.
I think there definitely are inherent
weaknesses, uncontrollable hidden parameters in
the Pd-D cells and these are almost ubiquitous
in this system. and difficultly curable. I have
met similar things in my lab-pilot-plant
practice, something that went fine 1000 times
suddenly became impossible, a colorless product
(as it has to be) coming out red or dirty grey
with no obvious explanation first. Many times I
was thinking to write a report about occult
phenomena in technology, but then we found a
simple straightforward causal explanation and we
solved the problem by removing, killing that cause.
Yes. Until you identified the cause, it was
totally mysterious. Gremlins. Bad juju. Whatever.
The weaknesses of the Pd D cells are unusually stubborn,
Electrochemical PdD experiments are *extremely*
complex. With gas-loading, the complexity may be
reduced, but a great deal depends on the exact
structure of the particles or Pd material. And it
will change with loading and deloading.
I am firmly convinced that poisoning of the
active centers (NAE) by adsorption of gases that
are NOT deuterium (it seems everything goes not
only the very polar gases as I thought) explains
this long series of troubles. I will write a new
paper about poisoning these days. Nobody will believe it- just the Pd-D cells.
I'll believe it in that I consider it possible.
Why not? However, I don't see this as explaining
the difference between the first, second, and
third current excursions in SRI P13/P14, which
was a sealed cell. It's not impossible, though,
because the first and second excursions, showing
no heat, may have cleaned off the cathode.
It was crucial to identify the reasons for such
variability. The skeptics did not get the import
of variability, they thought that it meant that
the effect was down in the noise. However, that's
what SRI P13/P14 showed so clearly: the effect,
when it appears, is striking, not marginal. Of
course, sometimes there is an effect close to the
noise. But a strong, quite visible effect is one
of the characteristics of a successful
replication of the FPHE, not something
questionable, where we look at a plot and say,
"Well, see, it's a little bit above the noise
there, for a few hours." Maybe. Or maybe that is
just noise a little higher than usual.
Reality is really good if it is repeatable and it is bad when it plays
perfidiously hide and seek with us.
Ultimately, it appears, reality does play hide
and seek, at the quantum level. But I don't think
that's happening here. Regardless, reality is not
"bad." Period. It's just reality. We make up good
and bad. This is not you, but "scientists" who
reject experimental data because they don't see
repeatability in it are just fooling themselves.
What they don't see means nothing. Saying "I
don't understand this" is fine. Saying "you must
have made a mistake," is the problem, unless the
error can be identified. Not just guessed.
I agree with Abd re the premature vision- it is
not good to focus only and immediately on
applications and not explore the full richness
of the phenomena, process, and product, whatever.
It's not as powerful, and it runs the risk of an
enormous waste of time. Look, it was obvious from
the beginning that there *might be* enormous
promise from cold fusion. But it was also
obvious, within a few months, that this was not
going to be easy, at least not with the FP
approach. Yet people had done stuff for a long
time with no clear evidence of fusion, and
casting about to find a new approach was probably
not so wise, either, in the sense that it was likely to be obscure itself.
The deepest error that Pons and Fleischmann made
was in not disclosing how difficult it was, with
the original announcement, and, if not there, with the original paper.
For those convinced that LENR was real by the P&F
results, and by other confirmation, including
perhaps their own, pursuing more reliable
approaches did make some sense. However, if these
people were convinced it was real, and especially
if they had success replicating P&F, they might
consider the value of carefully studying what
they already were able to make happen. Some did that, perhaps. Some did not.
I do not get clearly and do not agree with what says Abd re
reliability in Science. It is about the
experimental results, these are used in the
very Scientific process as described
here:http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2011/08/how-does-apply-prof-piantelli-rules-of.html
and
here:http://egooutpeters.blogspot.com/2011/08/scientific-values-of-professor.html
There are many other papers about the scientific method and
solid results are necessary for developing understanding/theory.
Say, in 3 identical experiments we obtain 5,
10 and 0 units of Helium and only the second
gives measurable heat- what can we conclude?
This is a practical example, does LENR have a genuine scientific theory?
Not from that example!!! The correlation there is
quite weak, and, if this is a real CF
experimental series, I'd suspect that the heat is
close to the noise. That is, from the expectation
d -> He, we'd expect half as much heat with the
first as with the second, but you have only the second showing heat.
This is too short an experimental series to do
more than provide an indication, and the
indication here could be that one of the heat measurements is punk.
Real example, one of the two or three best:
Miles' work. Miles did a set of CF experiments
and controls. His full series as reported by
Storms involved 33 helium samples taken and
analyzed blind. These were samples of the cell
gases. Miles had data on heat generation from
these cells before the samples were taken.
Multiple samples were taken from cells, I
originally though this was 33 cells. Not. A
weakness, but not a disaster. (Better if all
cells had been treated equally, all cells were
identical, etc. There were some differences,
which actually weakens the result, i.e., included
in the series was some cells where something
quite different was going on, and that makes the
work look *less* conclusive. But I won't go into that here.)
Of the 33 cells, 12 were showing no anomalous
heat, and no anomalous helium was detected. 18
showed heat, and, from them, helium was detected
within an order of magnitude of the helium
expected from d -> He-4. The more heat, the more
helium, within experimental error. (The
measurements were rough, unfortunately, only order-of-magnitude detection.)
That leaves three cells. One experienced a power
failure and deloading and calorimetry error was
thus suspected, the other two were a
cerium-palladium alloy. They showed heat, but no
helium. What happened? We don't know. Nobody
followed up, the classic story of cold fusion.
Mysterious results, sitting in the record, with no follow-up.
This is a strong correlation, even with those
three anomalous results. Miles calculated one
chance in 750,000 of this happening by chance.
You could also look at the SRI Case replication,
reported in the 2004 DoE review paper. It was
poorly explained. When it's fully understood (I
had to read other papers to get it), it shows
this same phenomenon: no heat, no helium. Varying
amounts of heat, varying amounts of helium. SRI
also studied the time behavior of accumulated
helium, and did one experiment where they
attempted to recover all the helium (that's the
hard part!), finding a ratio of heat/helium quite
close to the theoretical value for d -> He-4.
In your page on Piantelli, you say:
the stage of observation and description was
so difficult and has consumed so many resources
and creativity- reward less- that CF remained
practically stucked here. The trend to
compensate and overcome this by many bold,
fantastic, disruptive theories (some 160?)
sometimes based on absurd hypotheses, but
without a trace of experimental proof,
including reactions with an astronomically low
probability was definitely non-Galileian.
It was largely reward-less because many
researchers were not looking at the treasure they
had in their hands, if they managed to
occasionally see excess heat. They bought the
idea that this was some kind of failure. No, it
was success. It was indeed difficult to arrange a
demonstration of the FPHE. However, it seems that
those who persisted did find it. Indeed, it may
have been most difficult for those who were lucky
and found it quickly! -- because it then
disappeared. I can imagine the agony. However,
the gold was in investigating the conditions of appearance and disappearance.
And if a practical application is possible,
setting Rossi et al aside, it will very likely be
from theory enabled by the presence of more data
from what should have been done twenty years ago.
The idea that it was necessary to get reliability
permeated the field, and that was an error.
Reliability would very likely follow from a successful theory. Or not.
(With Rossi, if that's real, the investigation
will follow and theory will be developed based on
that. Rossi, in a sense, got lucky -- if this is
real -- though he "got lucky" from what he says
was a thousand variations he tried. Essentially,
he explored the parameter space, trying lots of
combinations. It can work. In fact, I'm
suggesting something like that, only with
systematic exploration, with special focus on
answering extant experimental questions.)
This discussion has reminded me a paper I
wrote some 6 years
ago:http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2006/NET17.shtml
it is about cold fusion as a wicked problem.
You will see that my ideas have rater deep roots.
Yes. "Wicked problem." Peter, you caught the
disease, you looked at cold fusion with an eye
that only saw value in high COP (which is very
different from reliability, by the way, 10%
excess power, reliably, would be spectacular *for
the science*), and you compared a few thousands
of what you called "sick cathodes" with heat less
than 30% with "many thousands" of "dead
cathodes\". 30% of input power, with the FPHE, is
actually way above noise, more than adequate for
systematic study. Pons and Fleischmann, as I
recall, had a "dead cathode" rate of 5/6. The
practical implication of this is that one must
run many cathodes, and, from what I'm seeing
(Letts is graciously allowing me to watch his
work-in-progress), a "dead cathode" can become
"live" by continued electrolysis, sometimes. So
it's not the cathode that is dead, but the patience of the researcher.
The point is that one out of six is actually
fine, not terribly difficult, except for one
thing: it can take months to run one of these
experiments. So, if one is serious, one must run
many cells in parallel, which is exactly what
Pons and Fleischmann did in their later work.
I've been suggesting expanding this, by making
cells smaller and cheaper, the limit is the
smallest cell for which heat can be measured with
reasonable separation from noise. NASA is
apparently exploring cells-on-a-chip, with many
cells built on a substrate perhaps using
techniques common in electronics. I assume that
with the connections through the substrate,
individual cells can be run together with the
others, or separately, all being immersed in the
same electrolyte (if this is electrolytic, or in
the same gas if this is gas-loading.)
If research can identify markers of the reaction
other than heat and helium, it could be
*extremely* useful. For example, suppose that
active PdD produces a characteristic sound. (This
is reported by SPAWAR, by the way). It might then
be possible to monitor instantaneous reaction
levels, even more quickly than through
calorimetry. Monitoring IR emission could do this
as well. I've wondered about visible light. There
should be some, if palladium is being melted, as
appears in some SEM images of cathodes. (Etc.)
This kind of research would vastly speed up
engineering the effect, even without a sound theory.
*Without needing any new approach to be
invented.* Of course, if more reliable methods of
triggering LENR are found, great. I expect the
same kind of work can be done with NiH, for example.
More accurately, we define, in Science,
"reliability" in a different way than we will
in engineering, it seems, statistically.
(Sophisticated engineering actually does the
same thing, looking at failure rates, not perfect reliability.)
I think reliability in Science, engineering,
business, marriage, musical interpretation is,
grosso modo, the same overall. Statistical
reliability in engineering, production is about
a small proportion of under-quality pieces. A minimum is say 98.5% good items.
Depends on the nature of the application.
However, reliability of an effect is not
necessary in science, it is simply one more
characteristic that is measured, by accumulating
experience and quantifying it. X out of 100 cells
tested following Protocol Y were found to exhibit
anomalous heat above 5% of input power. Then we
look for associations present with X and not with
not-X, or vice-versa. We try variations, etc. And
we also run the *same* series again.
There difficulty is that electrolytic cold fusion
is extremely sensitive to seemingly trivial
variations in the material. This is one reason
why I think the most productive work will be with
electro-deposited palladium, because it may,
particularly with thin layers, be easier to
control that deposit. But there are still many
ways to mess it up, apparently. An advantage of
deposited techniques: generally cheap.
However my personal professional experience
comes from an extreme area where reliability =
safety and unreliability was deadly danger. As
an airplane pilot, I could not err two times-
working with hydrogen cyanide, phosgene and
vinyl chloride and other explosive or corrosive
stuff we have used very reliable vessels, pumps,
gaskets, the gas masks and the fire extinguisher
systems were prepared for intervention. At one
stage of my career I became an expert in dust
explosions and have learned a lot from the
terrible accidents investigated. In theory, many
engineering systems are going asymptotically toward perfect reliability.
It becomes possible with experience. One of the
big concerns about CF is that occasionally, heat
production has been enormous, cf. Pons and
Fleischmann's cell meltdown. However, if cell
performance becomes reliable, within a few
percent, say, such an outlier becomes quite
unlikely. That meltdown cell was bulk palladium,
a 1 cm cube. It would be interesting if someone,
taking appropriate precautions, were to run that
again. The worry: that the meltdown was at the
low end of what might happen.... but it's unlikely.
I also want to emphasize an important idea-
engineering is based on Science but comprises much more than Science.
Yes. However, Science makes Engineering more efficient.
There are many empirical or empirical-in-part
elements of Know-What, Know-How including Know
How Not! And Know Why, rules and best practices-
not all rational, quantitative and easy to get.
Technological reliability is a very complex and
sometimes tricky issue. It has to be ingrained
in the psychology of workers, users.
It's an engineering issue, which, I'm contending,
is not necessary for scientific research, except
as to techniques. I.e., the calorimetry for cold
fusion experiments should be engineered to be
reliable. And that can be tested and quantified. (And has been, repeatedly.)
The reliability argument against cold fusion is
a red herring as to the science of it. It's
only truly important in the matter of practical
applications. Even there, there can be ways to
move around reliability issues. Under some
conditions, many devices can be built into one.
However, if the units work or fail to work
together, then this approach can itself fail.
However, if that is so, then it's likely that
conditions can be found where all or most devices will work!
Cold Fusion is unreliable and has no usable,
predictive explanation or theory. It is low
intensity; low reliability and does not last,
usually. It is more similar to a shark than a
herring. I dont understand this idea with many
devices combined. Unreliable is unreliable in
science too. I apologize for this painful tautology.
Reliability through multiplicity comes from
microchip manufacture. As an example, some
techniques of making large memories produce
memory cells that fail in substantial numbers.
However, the chip may be designed so that the
cells are tested and interconnected to bypass the
bad cells. The necessary good cells are selected,
not created by tighter control of the process, which may be too difficult.
In the case of heat-producing cells, the real
problem is probably an ability to continue
working after time, and it's possible that this
might not be truly soluble. I was thinking more
of cells being made that are unreliable in the
sense that if you make a cell, it's performance
might not be predictable in advance and would be
known only after testing. But if you make a lot
of these cells, the process is likely to be
successful statistically a certain percentage of
the time. And if those cells are then
interconnected and used, with "dead cells" being
bypassed, one could make a device of any size from many such small cells.
However, if the problem of sustained operation is
the stopping point, then it might be possible to
make cells readily -- and automatically --
replaceable. Whether or not this would be worth
doing depends on details we don't know yet. Say
it turns out that an E-Cat works for a week.
Bummer. But if they can be made cheaply enough,
one might be able to make a module that consists
of a dozen E-Cats, and they are plugged into the
control unit, which selects which devices are
running. So the thing might run for three months,
and then you'd pull it and replace it, the
original unit would be reprocessed to rejuvenate
it. It might or might not be an advantage to
miniaturize the units and use more of them.
Rossi/Defkalion seem to be considering their
units as reliable, though. We'll see. I'm suspecting they aren't there yet.
How long they work is a separate issue, and,
again, might be addressed with engineering,
once the science is understood. Until then,
"engineering" is hit-and-miss, and could possibly take a very long time.
The system is ill, it exists but it is more a
source of troubles than a source of knowledge and/or heat.
You can think of it that way, and then have
nobody but yourself to blame for your depression.
How about, "the system is an opportunity to gain
knowledge, explore new realms of possibility, and
generate workability for the future." Yes, work.
So is about anything worth doing.
There never was a Cold Fusion Killer paper.
Reviewing all the peer-reviewed literature, so
far, I've noticed nothing that rises to this
level, not even "wrong." What uncontroversially
existed was rather widespread failure to
replicate. However, there was not universal
failure to replicate, and replications *of a
kind,* in the end, have outnumbered, as to
publication, the failures. That is, there are
widespread reports of anomalous heat in PdD under some conditions.
Cold Fusion/LENR exists with certainty, is
versatile and very diversified, supported by
good scientists- a Killer Paper cannot be
conceived/written.
Probably not. But I was, in another place,
suggesting to skeptics that they attempt to do
the Killer Research and write the paper. Indeed,
one of my goals in designing my experimental kit
was to make cheap verification of neutrons from
Project Galileo-type cells (originally designed
by Pam Boss of SPAWAR) easily available, because
then someone skeptical could cheaply verify the
effect, and then demonstrate the artifact with
controlled experiment. I'm not ready for that,
but expect to be within a year. (Note that Pam
didn't like my use of LR-115 as a detector, and I
understand her objection; however, LR-115 is
cheaper and easier to develop and interpret, in
certain ways, than CR-39, and should still be
able to detect neutrons through proton knock-on,
that's a standard usage for it.)
Cold Fusion is not dead, however a good doses
of reliability resurrection seems necessary.
No. Improvement in reliability is desirable, but
not necessary. I'm sorry to disagree here, but I
believe that this point is crucial. We don't need
some new discovery to make massive progress, we
only need to be willing to work with what we
have, with what is already known, and to explore
that and quantify it and the associated
phenomena. We have no study of the association of
tritium, for example, with anomalous heat, helium, and H/D ratio.
If it is technologizable as such or only after conversion to LENR+,
is a 2 .10 exp 16 cents question
When we have LENR+, whatever that is, we may do
things quite differently. Until then ....
I'm not waiting.
