Posted on 07/01/2011 10:45:05 PM PDT by Kevmo
If it all worked so well as its advocates claim, then put one of these power producing cold fusion cells in an electric car and take a few turns around the block. It will convince everyone.
***It doesn’t “work so well”, as Sinha even points out in THIS paper. But this electric car analogy is another fallacy of raising the bar for cold fusion that isn’t there for hot fusion. Why don’t we have hot fusion electric cars? Then why do you demand that cold fusion produce such progress?
It is possible that Rossi is moving forward into production and will settle the debate in that manner, but until that happens we’re stuck with inductive reasoning.
Not the way I remember it. As I read it, the APS's position was that global warming is real and a threat, and that a group of members tried to get that position changed to at least "neutrality" on the question, and failed. This was back at the height of "Climategate", and was coming out shortly after the release of the email cache. I'll do some checking back and see if I can find what I saw. I "think" it was on the "Climate Audit" blog.
And that is the whole point and what the entire bruhaha was over. A politically corrupt "leadership" tried to take the APS in a political direction. Most of the membership are capable scientists who do not think the role of the APS is to take political positions, except for the promotion of science, and that GCC was certainly not an area where any position was appropriate other than that the best science should be applied to the study of this issue just like any other issue... And that was the second part of the bruhaha that the membership believed that the science that was being reported was of very poor quality.
As for the Lord Monkton issue, thank you for bringing it to my attention. I would point out, however, that the issue regards the behavior of "The editors of Physics and Society, a newsletter of the American Physical Society."
This is a subchapter of the APS whose members are self-selected, and obviously it is attractive to the more politically inclined. It is a sad affair and reflects discredit on everyone. "Physics and Society" is, however, a newsletter and not a technical journal. That gives me small comfort because this rot will obviously spread and those involved are sacrificing their professional reputations in engaging in this nonsense.
And I would note the comment: “Those statements were typically not submitted to the rank and file for scientific peer review, nor were they typically voted on by the rank and file.” This is the whole point. The rank and file membership do have standards and have little tolerance for bad science whether it be for cold fusion or for GCC.
No one is claiming that hot fusion has demonstrated that it is or that it can be a viable controlled source of energy (as opposed to the uncontrolled energy that we know it can produce). It is very much a research problem, and so far there is no movement to claim results that are substantially at variance with generally accepted laws of physics.
The LENR crowd on the other hand has been making claims far beyond what any good physicist finds credible, claiming as you have repeatedly done, extraordinary levels of heat production, and claiming to see not only what no one else can see, but claiming to have a theory for why no one lese sees what they see. One of the immutable laws of physics that is pretty broadly accepted is that the laws of physics are the same in all laboratories. When you claim the amount of energy released that you have claimed folks want to see the somking hole, the moving vehicle or some evidence that the extra heat is not a fever in the brain of the claimant.
That is not at all true. Richard Feynman earned his Nobel Prize along with Schwinger and Tomonaga for developing the theory of quantum electrodynamics, which was the first good relativistic quantum field theory that we have. Feynman's real contribution was not to discard what folks already knew, but rather to develop an idea of Dirac's which extended Hamilton's principal of least action to reexpress the physics in the Dirac equation in quantum path integral formulation. This lead to a systematic method of doing perturbation theory, commonly called "Feynman diagrams."
This enabled Feynman to reproduce and extend the nonrelativistic calculation that Bethe had done showing how to renormalize the mass of the electron to eliminate the formal divergence of certain integrals.
Feynman's methods then led to systematic efforts to understand and explain away other divergences in the perturbation theory. These techniques were later extended by Glashow Weinberg and Salaam to develop "the standard model."
He is also famous for the "Parton Model" demonstrating that if the deep inelastic scattering data off of nuclei was accurate, then protons and neutrons had to have point like sub-consituents. This was early confirmation that those who were developing the "quark model" were on the right track.
At no time did Feynman claim he was discarding already accepted physical laws,and in fact he relies thoroughly on such things as relativistic invariance, charge conservation, maxwell's laws, spin and angular momentum conservation, guage invariance, the Dirac formulation of relativistic quantum mechanics for spin 1/2 particles, etc. If you read his lectures there is almost nothing there that was not pretty well understood by the early 20th centry.
I am the last person to try to diminish Feynman's genius. But Feynman's real genius was understanding what everyone already knew to be true better than everyone else and showing what else had to be true if these things were true. His intuition for how things worked was simply better than almost anybody else.
In short, thank you for mentioning Feynman. The contrast between that great man and those arguing for LENR could not be clearer. That is exactly my point. The LENR crowd do not talk like good physicists, none of them, and the contrast with Feynman is clear demonstration of that.
You really need to pay attention. The argument of the LENR crowd is that these effects are very subtle and difficult to measure. There is nothing subtle about the energy content of a ton of TNT.
Thank you for the link to Rothwell's book. The first thing I discovered was that in order to download it I had to fill in an application to find out my credit rating.[sic!] What is up with that? Needless to say, I did not take up the invitation and just read it (skimmed it actually- reading it is too painful, like trying to read the manifesto of some leftist organization) in its inconvenient on-line format.
Here is a claim in Rothwell's book: "This cathode produced 85 megajoules of heat after death, and at least 97 megajoules during the experiment, which is enough to drive an average U.S. automobile 27 kilometers....The actual total was probably hundreds of megajoules....... cold fusion appears to fuse deuterium to produce helium, releasing heat in the same ratio as hot fusion does. The comparison ends there...A hot fusion reaction that produces a watt of heat will also generate a deadly flux of neutrons, killing all observers....
I would only note that he does not describe much less explain this difference, then going on an irrelevant digression about what is wrong with hot fusion.
And if I had something that threatened to glow red and melt-down I would not be going home at night and coming back in the morning and saving my unwitnessed claims for some future date. I would be there with camera's and video cameras and getting every colleague from 100 miles away to come witness and take measurements. I would turn the lights off and get pictures of the red glow and I would get pictures of the boiling water and I would be measuring the temperature with a pyrometer and I would have every goddamned nuclear instrument I could beg borrow or steal.
Indeed. But the Monkton issue is by no means isolated, and, as the "Climategate" issue reveals, the physicist principles involved have been in the middle of corrupting peer review everywhere they have an "in". It may not yet have gotten to the mainstream journal (though I suspect it probably has). And AGW is also not the only area where highly questionable actions have been taken. Specifically, in the field under discussion on this thread, the physicists have behaved in a very underhanded fashion. Look up and study the treatment given to Peter Hagelstein for DARING to say aloud that he thought that CF (or more accurately LANR) just "might" be understandable and not in conflict with the fundamental laws of physics. A guerilla action was undertaken to deny him his career (and pretty much succeeded).
I'm a chemist, and my own profession is not as pure as the driven snow on the subject (witness the underhanded treatment of John Bockris, also regarding his work on LANR). But I don't think the rot has proceeded as far as it has in physics.
No one is claiming that hot fusion has demonstrated that it is or that it can be a viable controlled source of energy
***See your post 49. Second, hot fusion does work. We have a picture of it working. It is called Operation Greenhouse George.
At best your post 49 is disingenuous and this current post is backtracking. At worst it is a direct misrepresentation of fact, a lie. I’ll accept the disingenuous in order to believe the best about you.
LENR crowd on the other hand has been making claims far beyond what any good physicist finds credible, one else can see, but claiming to have a theory for why no one lese sees what they see.
***Well, let’s just look at some recent headlines of a Nobel Prize Winning Nuclear Physicist extolling cold fusion.
A Nobel Laureate speaks out on the Energy Catalyzer
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2738930/posts
Thursday, June 23, 2011 11:10:21 AM · by Kevmo · 65 replies
Cold Fusion Now ^ | June 22 2011 | Ivy Matt
There is also Yoshiaki Arata, winner of the emperor’s medal in Nuclear Physics. There are others.
When you claim the amount of energy released that you have claimed folks want to see the somking hole, the moving vehicle or some evidence that the extra heat is not a fever in the brain of the claimant.
***Again you make the assumption that all the energy was released in one instant, even though I have corrected this assumption to you in the past. Your credibility is falling through a giant smoking hole.
Kevmo: The way Richard Feynman won his Nobel prize was by disregarding an accepted principle, and later on he was vindicated.
AJ: That is not at all true.
*** You’re wrong again. Here, in Feynman’s own words. I’ll reprint some of his story here, which I found also posted online at
http://www.zag.si/~jank/public/misc/joking_feynman.txt
The 7 Percent Solution
The problem was to find the right laws of beta decay. There appeared to be two particles, which were called a tau and a theta. They seemed to have almost exactly the same mass, but one disintegrated into two pions, and the other into three pions. Not only did they seem to have the same mass, but they also had the same lifetime, which is a funny coincidence. So everybody was concerned about this.
....
At that particular time I was not really quite up to things: I was always a little behind. Everybody seemed to be smart, and I didn’t feel I was keeping up. Anyway, I was sharing a room with a guy named Martin Block, an experimenter. And one evening he said to me, “Why are you guys so insistent on this parity rule? Maybe the tau and theta are the same particle. What would be the consequences if the parity rule were wrong?”
....
So I got up and said, “I’m asking this question for Martin Block: What would be the consequences if the parity rule was wrong?”
Murray Gell-Mann often teased me about this, saying I didn’t have the nerve to ask the question for myself. But that’s not the reason. I thought it might very well be an important idea.
....
Finally they get all this stuff into me, and they say, “The situation is so mixed up that even some of the things they’ve established for years are being questioned — such as the beta decay of the neutron is S and T. It’s so messed up. Murray says it might even be V and A.”
I jump up from the stool and say, “Then I understand EVVVVVERYTHING!”
They thought I was joking. But the thing that I had trouble with at the Rochester meeting — the neutron and proton disintegration: everything fit but that, and if it was V and A instead of S and T, that would fit too. Therefore I had the whole theory!
That night I calculated all kinds of things with this theory. The first thing I calculated was the rate of disintegration of the muon and the neutron. They should be connected together, if this theory was right, by a certain relationship, and it was right to 9 percent. That’s pretty close, 9 percent. It should have been more perfect than that, but it was close enough.
....
I was very excited, and kept on calculating, and things that fit kept on tumbling out: they fit automatically, without a strain. I had begun to forget about the 9 percent by now, because everything else was coming out right.
....
The next morning when I got to work I went to Wapstra, Boehm, and Jensen, and told them, “I’ve got it all worked out. Everything fits.”
Christy, who was there, too, said, “What beta-decay constant did you use?”
“The one from So-and-So’s book.”
“But that’s been found out to be wrong. Recent measurements have shown it’s off by 7 percent.”
Then I remember the 9 percent. ....
I went out and found the original article on the experiment that said the neutron-proton coupling is T, and I was shocked by something. I remembered reading that article once before (back in the days when I read every article in the Physical Review — it was small enough). And I remembered, when I saw this article again, looking at that curve and thinking, “That doesn’t prove anything!”
You see, it depended on one or two points at the very edge of the range of the data, and there’s a principle that a point on the edge of the range of the data — the last point — isn’t very good, because if it was, they’d have another point further along. And I had realized that the whole idea that neutron-proton coupling is T was based on the last point, which wasn’t very good, and therefore it’s not proved. I remember noticing that!
And when I became interested in beta decay, directly, I read all these reports by the “beta-decay experts,” which said it’s T. I never looked at the original data; I only read those reports, like a dope. Had I been a good physicist, when I thought of the original idea back at the Rochester Conference I would have immediately looked up “how strong do we know it’s T?” — that would have been the sensible thing to do. I would have recognized right away that I had already noticed it wasn’t satisfactorily proved.
Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself. When people said the quark theory was pretty good, I got two Ph.D.s, Finn Ravndal and Mark Kislinger, to go through the whole works with me, just so I could check that the thing was really giving results that fit fairly well, and that it was a significantly good theory. I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.
He would never do what Siha has done, which is to trip over the laws of physics without passing mention.
***That is a straw argument. Sinha has not tripped over the laws of physics. His claim is legitimate in that ordinary physics experiments do not see the results that LENR experiments see in metal deuterides. If you accept the observation of 14,000 replications of excess heat then the next step is to explain the physics of that observation. If you do not accept the observation, then the discussion stops there.
Here’s a modern analogy. Farmers for centuries would report that rocks fell from the sky. Scientists said it was impossible. And yet, the observation still stood, and once the observation was accepted, the physical explanation for that observation changed the viewpoint of science. The observers were not wrong, the scientists were.
And if I had something that threatened to glow red and melt-down I would not be going home at night and coming back in the morning and saving my unwitnessed claims for some future date. I would be there with camera’s and video cameras and getting every colleague from 100 miles away to come witness and take measurements. I would turn the lights off and get pictures of the red glow and I would get pictures of the boiling water and I would be measuring the temperature with a pyrometer and I would have every goddamned nuclear instrument I could beg borrow or steal.
***And then your colleagues would say you are a crackpot. That is what has happened to some of those who reported their observations of this phenomena.
Oh but he has and I pointed out exactly where he did so.
AJ: These guys have not individually or collectively detonated a ton of TNT.
Kevmo: Yes they have.
***From the same journal that this article is yielded...
Indeed, as noted by Krivit [18] recently, there have been several unexplained “excess heat boil off” incidents
accompanied by significant energy release reported in LENR literature over the last two decades, starting with a major
explosion/meltdown incident involving a 1 cm cube Pd cathode that Fleischmann has discussed, all of which seem to
suggest that “runaway mini nuclear explosions” have all along been suspected to happen in Pd samples heavily loaded
with deuterium, but only on very rare occasions. A widely circulated but unpublished recent assessment of the LENR
field carried out by the US Defense Intelligence Agency [19] has even raised the question: “If rapid explosive energy
output can occur in one or several modes, could LENR serve as a high energy density explosive?”
...............
[18] S.B. Krivit, Cold Fusion, Chapter in Encyclopedia on Electrochemical Power Sources, Vol. 2, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2009, pp.
255–270.
Note that the author is a Freeper so I’m cc’ing him. Not that he ever responds to my posts...
Oh but he has not. Thanks for bumping the thread (T4BTT).
The trouble is that you don't understand Feynman's own words. Feyman stated: the neutron and proton disintegration: everything fit but that, and if it was V and A instead of S and T, that would fit too.
Now what Feynman is discussing here is the theory of Beta Decay - which by the way is a model, and not a law (this is a not subtle distinction that is obviously way way over your head), and what Feynman is saying is that the accepted model (which was based on scalar and tensor transitions - Fermi and Teller) was better fit by a model which relied upon vector-axial vector currents - and was the forunner of the standard model for weak interaction. And the rule that is being discussed is whether or not parity conservation in weak interaction was a good law, and it is now well-known that parity is maximally violated in weak interactions.
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