Tiny Bubbles
Perk up, Abd
You Geyser
Not Seeing
What you Mist
HHO Mist
“For those who have not witnessed the HHO as it comes out of the water, here it is. You cannot help but notice the gases popping out of the water. The mist you see is the wet gas. It was not visible until we moved it into the sunlight. This is not hot water.”
Mist Opportunity
The Miles-Fleischmann Calorimetry Model is the central technical model of isoperibolic Cold Fusion calorimetry. This model has a term, Pgas, that accounts for heat lost through the venting of D2, O2, and D2O vapors. The model assumes that all the vented D2O is in the vapor phase, and none in the condensed (liquid) phase. This does not appear to be a generally safe assumption.During operation of the cell, D2 and O2 gas is bubbling up. When bubbles break the surface, they "spritz" some droplets into the air, much like carbonated beverages do. When cells are run at elevated temperatures (as they often are), there will also be some amount of steam, fog, or mist in the air space. Some amount of moisture in the liquid phase will be swept along with the D2, O2, and D2O vapor as it vents from the cell. But water in the liquid phase does not carry off as much heat as water in the vapor phase. When the lost water is plugged into the Miles-Fleischmann Model, the formula will assume that the amount of heat lost corresponds to that for water in the vapor phase. For every mole of water that was vented in the liquid phase (as steam, fog, or mist), 45 KJ of heat will be left behind, to show up as anomalous "excess heat."
There is no express term in the Miles-Fleischmann Model for heat from nuclear reactions; rather there is a term, Pex, for leftover heat not accounted for by any other explicit term in their model. Pex could be from any number of imaginable processes not expressly modeled in their energy budget equations. One possibility is that Pex could be a placeholder for Pmist, which needs to be expressly incorporated into their model.
Title: There's a Kind of Spritz
Artist: Abd, Moulton, and Dieter Britz
Composer: Les Reed, Geoff Stephens, and Barsoom Tork Associates
YouTube: There's a Kind of Hush - Herman's Hermits (Rare Clip-Synced Version)
There's a kind of spritz all over the fusion cell.
All over the cell you can hear the noise of bubbles in fizz.
You computed the mean.
Just the buzzing hiss that nobody else could hear.
There's nobody else and Kirk's the one who's breaking your spell.
So listen very carefully.
Closer now and you will measure the mean.
It's all been a dream.
La-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la
So listen very carefully.
Closer now and you will measure the mean.
It's all been a dream.
The crackling sound that you will hear
Is popping bubbles in your ear
Fizzing there forever and ever.
There's a kind of spritz all over the fusion cell.
All over the cell you can hear the noise of bubbles in fizz.
Yeah, they're popping in hiss.
Spritz! "They're crackling," says Britz.
Spritz.
CopyClef 2011 Les Reed, Geoff Stephens, and Barsoom Tork Associates.
Resurrection Hackware. All songs abused.
There's a Kind of Hush — Herman's Hermits
posted by Moulton | 6:26 AM
39 Comments:
Cool, Barry. Are you aware of the HHO work that you took the video from? I already acknowledged that there could be a little misting or splashing inside a cell, but the issue is what escapes.
What you show is not a cold fusion cell, that was very-high-current electrolysis of water, looks like it's not an enclosed cell at all, and like the electrolytic current is ''extremely'' high.
You are correct. If there is mist escaping from the cell, and if there is a correction term for this mist that assumes it was vapor instead of mist, there will be apparent excess heat. Now, has this ever occurred? Any evidence?
I'm not seeing any at all from you, just this ridiculous HHO video, that only shows (in very exaggerated form) what was already acknowledged). This is pure polemic and theater.
(Applause)
The chap who took that video does have on his site some references to Cold Fusion, but mostly he's focused on using ordinary hydrogen fuel in vehicles.
The best evidence I know of for the presence of unaccounted mist in the vented gases is all those reports from experimenters who were finding remarkably high levels of "excess heat" that correlated with high rates of D2 evolution and high cell temperatures. At this point, the most likely explanation is that they were venting a fair amount of mist, and therefore finding "anomalous" Pex that would have been accounted for by Pmist had that term been part of the model for the balancing the energy books.
For some light reading, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7269/full/462126a.html
This might mean a little more to you if you realize that Nature famously promised to not publish anything more on cold fusion. The editor wrote that "cold fusion is dead."
That editor is dead. Cold fusion is still an active research topic. I expect no mushroom clouds, though I've suggested avoiding any approach that might rapidly create a lot of NAE. Just in case.
I heard they tried it at Los Alamos, i.e., explosive compression of highly loaded PdD. But getting it "right" without knowing the CF mechanism is awfully unlikely.
That's funny.
Jeff Hecht lives in Auburndale (one of the 13 villages of Newton). He's right down the road from where the Picards live (in Newtonville).
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one around here writing whimsical pieces on the subject of Cold Fusion.
Any evidence?
McKubre at SRI, who had already switched to the closed cell design (for obvious reasons) was trying to keep the spritzing electrolyte off his catalytic recombiner. In a 1994 paper, McKubre wrote, "The collapse of deuterium and oxygen bubbles above the electrolyte surface projects liquid a considerable vertical distance during the operation of the cell at high current. In the absence of suitable precautions, the head space of the cell would fill with LiOD saturated mist, possibly affecting the recombiner function."
McKubre goes on to describe how he rigged up an inverted Teflon umbrella to keep the spritzing electrolyte off the recombiner.
In 2005, Kowalski addressed the same issue, writing, "The challenge presented by ejection of liquid water is indeed very serious because the latent heat of evaporation is large. Mist ejection, at the rate of 50 milligrams per second, results in the overestimation of Pout by 2260*0.05 = 113 W. This, however, is only one possible explanation of discrepancies."
So the phenomenon of electrolyte forming a saturated mist was recognized as early as 1994, and was still vexing people like Kowalski as late as 2005.
Yet those were the only two papers I could find mentioning it at all. It seems odd to me that this issue, which almost surely spoiled a substantial number of experiments, isn't documented as a likely contribution to calorimetry error.
Barry, "almost surely" is based on your assumption that misting is a real problem in most real CF experiments. You found two kinds of exceptions, where misting was, indeed, a real problem. McKubre is running true closed cells, where misting is not a calorimetric problem, it's a safety hazard. Kowalski was doing plasma electrolysis, an extreme-condition method that has severe misting problems, as he noted. He's really cooking with gas!
I've never heard of a normal CF cell that was "smoking," i.e., where visible mist was seen venting. It's a reasonable question, for sure, but to jump to a conclusion that a "substantial number of experiments" have likely been "spoiled" is quite premature, don't you think?
Definitely, you've come across a good question to ask, and it could even be a possible source of error for ''some'' experiments, but elsewhere you proceeded to dismiss twenty years of work because of your speculation. People would see mist if it was happening. Your reaction to your own idea has been to assume that they wouldn't see it, or would pass it off as unimportant. These are expert electrochemists, often, accustomed to making difficult measurements of heat. You think they'd miss the import of mist if it were happening?
As to whimsical pieces on cold fusion, stick around. There are vast troves of material to work with. Huizenga's book was called "Cold fusion, scientific fiasco of the century," and it was, indeed, a fiasco, in many ways.
On of my horror reactions on Wikpedia happened when I realized that there is this huge story, covered in many reliable sources, full of drama and interest, that was almost entirely missing from the Wikipedia article, and attempts to create additional articles to cover it adequately were routinely deleted as attempts to create "POV forks." The two major web sites for information and news on cold fusion were blacklisted, themselves actually notable (covered in reliable sources!), for no good reason.
Material from recent reviews in peer-reviewed mainstream journals, supposedly the gold standard for Wikipedia sourcing, was being removed, but material from media sources, older, was being maintained. Contradiction of sources that actually confirm each other was being synthesized.
It was awful, and when I started to work on it, I found out why.
I've never heard of a normal CF cell that was "smoking," i.e., where visible mist was seen venting.
Note that the chap who made that video said he was unable to see the mist until he moved his cell into bright sunlight.
I reckon that a substantial number of experiments have been spoiled by the presence of unnoticed and unmeasured mist that was not properly accounted for in the energy budget.
People would see mist if it was happening.
The mist is reportedly hard to see unless the cell is in bright sunlight.
That chap who made the video was running a very high current, and he couldn't see the mist until he moved his apparatus into bright sunlight.
It's not an assumption they would not see it. It's a report from a chap who was looking to see it.
Do you ever drink ginger ale? I can feel the effervescent bubbles more easily than I can see them.
But even if they can't easily see the mist, they would have included a term in the model for it, and included a way to measure it.
The place to write about the sociology of science is in the articles that discuss such things. That's where work like that of Bart Simon might belong.
You want to suggest I write about the sociology of science on Wikipedia? At the moment, I'm blocked. The usual. But I don't have time anyway, even when the block falls away tomorrow and I don't build resources on Wikipedia, just like I don't, any longer, build castles of sand.
And the blocks come tumbling down, eh?
Yes, sand castle wash away, pipe dreams go up in smoke, and the sands of time run out.
unless I'm at the beach with my kids, of course. Then I build sand castles, because I, too, will wash away and now's the time.
I dunno whether to say "Nem zich a vaneh!" or "Gei pishen ahfen yam."
Am I correct to read that as a peevish remark? Are you getting peeshed?
Odd occasion for it. Care to share?
Both expressions roughly translate as "Go jump in the lake," but the second one ("Go pee in the ocean.") is also a remark about the futility of doing the impossible.
Nature is relentless that way.
But on a more serious note, I did a simple calculation comparing a perfect constant current source working into a variable resistive load to one with a linear slew rate.
I did this for a nominal constant current of 2 A working into a load that produced an average of 5 V (corresponding to 10 W total DC power in). Then I let the voltage swing 2 V peak-to-peak around that 5 V and assumed a linear slew. That gives a triangular sawtooth voltage instead of the square wave for a perfect (instantaneous) constant current source.
The actual slew rate (slope of the sawtooth) doesn't matter. Only the peak-to-peak excursion matters.
So for a 2 V peak-to-peak sawtooth riding on a 5 V DC base, the total power going in works out to 10.5 W.
In other words, a 2 V peak-to-peak excursion with a linear (sawtooth) slew introduces 0.5 W of AC power on top of the 10 W of DC power.
So high frequency perturbations in the resistance which cause corresponding sawtooth slews in the voltage can add a significant AC power component that cannot safely be ignored.
I went back to McKubre's EPRI paper and took a second example, from § 3.4.2, where, at about 700 hours into the experiment, he reports a whopping 1.2 W of excess power.
At that point, he was running the cell at 7 A and 6 V for a DC power of 42 W. Again I assumed 2 V peak-to-peak voltage fluctuations from the bubbling, and integrated the linear slew of the triangle (sawtooth) wave. This time I got 43.8 W total power, or 1.8 W AC power. In § 3.4.3, McKubre reported 1.2 W of excess power, which is a bit less than what I got for assuming 2 V peak-to-peak excursions.
It looks to me like Richard Garwin was right. McKubre wasn't measuring input electric power correctly, because he wasn't accounting for the slew rate of a real power supply. The correction for a linear slew rate is a function of the peak-to-peak voltage excursion and the associated current excursion, which can be modeled as a linear slew. It turns out the actual slew rate doesn't matter, as only the shape of the triangle (sawtooth) wave matters. No matter how fast or slow the slew, when you integrate over time it takes for the slew to complete its rise or fall, you get the same amount of AC power.
It's ironic that this mistake appears in an EPRI report, as EPRI is the Electric Power Research Institute. You'd think the would know how to compute AC power, as their revenues depend on it.
Hey Moulton, these are good alternative hypotheses you come up with, but they're easily measured quantities. They also have partial lid technology these days to shield droplets from escape, along with easy ways to measure vapor and mist.
I have an idea. Why don't you, in your capacity as a citizen, call the people in http://3.ly/ARLcf and talk to them about what they are seeing. The NRL scientists, led by Kenneth Grabowski, were able to find a large recombination error in some of the SPAWAR results (although it was less than 50% of the excess heat.) There are a wealth of scientists on that page who are listed in public directories, and will pick up the phone and answer questions about cold fusion, because it's part of their job as scientists to do so. Let me know if you need help finding their telephone numbers.
Do you agree to spend an hour on the phone talking to some of them?
The mist issue mostly goes away with closed cells, as long as they don't vent from overpressure. But all those historic runs with open cells are now suspect, since there is no way to figure out how much mist was vented.
In any event, the problem of measuring AC power going into these cells seems nigh intractable. (This issue is taken up in my newest blog post.) And this issue affect all cells with electrolytic action where there is copious bubbling of dissociated water.
How about "historic runs" where helium was measured at the same time? How about the unlikelihood of mist escaping a cell with only small holes at the top and low gas evolution rate? Sure, there would be some splash as bubbles pop. So?
As to power supply noise, this is purely speculative, Moulton's calculations assume very high noise to get a still fairly small error, when excess heat results often exceed that level. And control experiments that would be expected to see the same noise problem (hydrogen and dead cathodes also bubble!) don't show excess heat.
Historic runs with copious venting also had to account for atmospheric helium seeping into the system over the course of experiments that run unattended for weeks and weeks. In a large campus or laboratory building occupied by any number of independent departments, how do they know who else in the building is futzing around with tanks of gases typically found in a high-tech chemistry lab?
Abd, if you are not satisfied with simplifying assumption that make the calculus tractable (and why should you), then you can always go back to first principles and solve for the power by Maxwell's Equations. You can also eliminate the problem of the slew rate of the Kepco power supply by using a Van de Graaf generator as your constant current source. Now, I'm quite sure the mathematical complexities of doing that are well beyond both of our pay grades, and we can both return to preposterously dimwitted flights of fancy to escape the difficulties of solving Maxwell's Equations for a Faradaic RLC circuit operating with steady-state DC current plus gas discharge riding on top of ohmic white noise up to 1 GHz.
I thought I answered this, but.... I won't get paranoid until this happens more than once.
Miles sent his samples off to be analyzed by an independent lab. They didn't know which cells had heat and which didn't. Perhaps you should look at the heat/helium work before opining about it. His work was done at China Lake, not a campus, but, sure, there could be variations in atmospheric helium, but there is no sign in the data of any leakage, much less a little transient extra helium.
Barry, your comments are dense with irrelevancies that appear designed for nothing else than to make you look smart, to those who are ignorant. 1 GHz noise, supposedly from a power supply that is slew-rate limited, and, obviously in amounts enough to dissipate some real, measurable power in the cells? It's just polemic, the kind that you actually hate when it's been, in the past, directed at you by those who wanted to ban you.
Apparently what comes around goes around. You could stop this now, or not.
Okay, I recovered this from browser history. A little redundant with the above.
Barry, you are clearly not familiar with the helium work. It is not vulnerable to leakage, overall. And leakage would not explain correlation with heat, it would only introduce possible error into the helium measurements. You are simply grasping at straws.
Why so desperate? I conclude that something deep in you is threatened by the idea of cold fusion, so that you are unable to examine the evidence neutrally, reflectively. Skeptical investigation is one thing, but advancing one cockamamie theory after another, or even some reasonable theories, but asserted as if they were demonstrated fact, is quite another.
You are behaving like a fanatic, at the same time as you apparently believe that anyone accepting that cold fusion is demonstrated by the experimental evidence must be a fanatic. Why?
I could care less if CF is real or not.
What I care about is 1) how good a job we are doing as science educators (mainly at the Museum of Science), and 2) how affective emotional states arise in the course of a learning journey and how those affective emotional states modulate the learning process.
You and Ed Storms have helped me in that second objective, because I had never previously noticed quite so much cockiness, surliness, churlishness, and hubris in the second quadrant of the emotions and learning model.
Apparently you've never looked in a mirror. Many times I've seen hubris and arrogance from certain people upon encountering what they don't understand, but believe they do. Barry, the history at Wikiversity will become very clear. That necessary for the project you undertook.
It's not about you, it's about the process. The whole CF affair, the "scientific fiasco of the century, will be increasingly examined, in great detail, and no matter what one thinks about CF, it's obvious that normal scientific process broke down. You are manifesting part of the reason why. Perhaps I am as well. To be fair, you are also reading the literature. That is more than a lot of skeptics.
I don't understand the theoretical model for CF.
I'm not sure there even is one.
To the best of my knowledge. no one has ever developed one.
But I do agree that something broke down with respect to the application of the protocols of the scientific method.
I'm still puzzling over exactly what went awry.
There was, originally, no theoretical model for CF, beyond "unknown nuclear reaction."
there are now some "plausible theories," none developed adequately to have much predictive power.
But there is one model that developed, that is confirmed, and that has high predictive power. It is not a model of mechanism in a mature sense, it is more like the older science, you know, before we thought we understood How Things Worked.
CF of the palladium deuteride type converts deuterium to helium with practically no by-products, just heat. How it does this is unknown. Some of the conditions are understood, such as very high loading. But Storms claims that no theory is established, and he's clearly correct.
We may consider the deuterium -> helium model established because of heat/helium correlation. It's very strong, and on the money. It's over, Barry, you just don't know it yet because you clearly haven't looked carefully at this evidence. The model predicts that if one sets up CF experiments with good calorimetry, and measures helium with ordinary precautions, that the helium will be correlated with the excess heat, at a value within experimental error of 23.8 MeV. This has been shown many times, and there are no negative replications.
Storms claims that no theory is established, and he's clearly correct.
No theory. Nothing to understand.
That's why I don't understand CF. There is nothing to understand because there is no theory.
I've looked at the evidence for a theory. There is evidently no theory Even Storms says that.
No theory, no understanding.
Nothing to understand.
Like Richard Garwin, I'm waiting for replication by means of a recipe that works consistently.
Meantime, have you hooked up that VU Meter yet?
Barry, this is dumb. There is a theory, it's clear, I gave it, it is merely not complete.
Unknowns are part of science, and the question is what models we can develop with predictive power, even if some things remain unknown.
If you want to know "what went awry," here it is.
To know what happened it is not necessary to know if CF is real or not. It is really just necessary to know, literally, what happened. And what did not happen.
The skeptical and "believer" or neutral points of view will be different as to what happened, initially, but the evidence, the historical records, and analysis of them, tells a clear tale.
I'm not unbiased, though I did start out reasonably skeptical and thought that cold fusion had been debunked. When I found that it had *not* been debunked, I was still skeptical, but more interested. When I became more familiar with the evidence, it was all over.
The "debunking" was more or less what you have been doing: finding some theory to provide a prosaic explanation, as a possibility, for CF results, then considering that the responsibility was on the CF researchers to prove their case. That may have been true, to a degree, but is not enough to close a scientific controversy. It is necessary to actually confirm the null hypothesis, not merely propose it.
Nobody ever successfully showed the artifact in Fleischmann's heat results, they merely asserted various theories to explain it, and these theories were unsatisfactory, as to all the evidence considered together, and as evidence continued to accumulate, it became more and more unsatisfactory.
The case was entirely different with N-rays and polywater, where controlled experiment or definitive findings pulled the rug out from under the original reason to suspect that these other things existed.
This is well-studied and well-known among sociologists of science. CF was a fiasco. Not just a mistake on the part of Pons and Fleischmann.
I have seen, again and again, in media sources, and some tertiary scientific sources, the claim that nobody was able to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's work. You know enough to know that this, at least, is just plain false, in substance. The Encyclopedia Britannica even makes that claim!
Replication doesn't prove validity, though it sure helps. It may simply be demonstrating some systematic error. But, then, the exact nature of that systematic error is very important to not only hypothesize about, but to demonstrate.
I have no idea that it was the responsibility of the hot fusion community to prove cold fusion bogus. However, the general scientific community should have worked actively with CF researchers to identify the problem. Instead, funding was cut, access to resources and grad student labor was cut, publication was drastically inhibited, and anyone working in cold fusion was subject to ridicule. Worse than your atrocious song parodies, real professional disgrace and consequences.
(continued)
Barry, this is dumb. There is a theory, it's clear, I gave it, it is merely not complete.
Unknowns are part of science, and the question is what models we can develop with predictive power, even if some things remain unknown.
If you want to know "what went awry," here it is.
To know what happened it is not necessary to know if CF is real or not. It is really just necessary to know, literally, what happened. And what did not happen.
The skeptical and "believer" or neutral points of view will be different as to what happened, initially, but the evidence, the historical records, and analysis of them, tells a clear tale.
I'm not unbiased, though I did start out reasonably skeptical and thought that cold fusion had been debunked. When I found that it had *not* been debunked, I was still skeptical, but more interested. When I became more familiar with the evidence, it was all over.
The "debunking" was more or less what you have been doing: finding some theory to provide a prosaic explanation, as a possibility, for CF results, then considering that the responsibility was on the CF researchers to prove their case. That may have been true, to a degree, but is not enough to close a scientific controversy. It is necessary to actually confirm the null hypothesis, not merely propose it.
Nobody ever successfully showed the artifact in Fleischmann's heat results, they merely asserted various theories to explain it, and these theories were unsatisfactory, as to all the evidence considered together, and as evidence continued to accumulate, it became more and more unsatisfactory.
The case was entirely different with N-rays and polywater, where controlled experiment or definitive findings pulled the rug out from under the original reason to suspect that these other things existed.
This is well-studied and well-known among sociologists of science. CF was a fiasco. Not just a mistake on the part of Pons and Fleischmann.
I have seen, again and again, in media sources, and some tertiary scientific sources, the claim that nobody was able to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's work. You know enough to know that this, at least, is just plain false, in substance. The Encyclopedia Britannica even makes that claim!
Replication doesn't prove validity, though it sure helps. It may simply be demonstrating some systematic error. But, then, the exact nature of that systematic error is very important to not only hypothesize about, but to demonstrate.
I have no idea that it was the responsibility of the hot fusion community to prove cold fusion bogus. However, the general scientific community should have worked actively with CF researchers to identify the problem. Instead, funding was cut, access to resources and grad student labor was cut, publication was drastically inhibited, and anyone working in cold fusion was subject to ridicule. Worse than your atrocious song parodies, real professional disgrace and consequences.
(continued)
I hate to be the one to break the news to you, Abd, but there is no theory.
I looked. Not even Peter Hagelstein has been able to come up with one. And he's tried very hard.
What didn't happen is pretty clear.
Replication didn't happen.
Theory construction didn't happen.
Reliable predictions didn't happen.
What I'm doing is looking for a unified theory to explain the observations. That's what we do in science.
Hagelstein is looking in one direction. I'm not gonna compete with him.
I don't think the explanations I've been looking for are uninteresting or disappointing.
There is a lot of stuff going on in electrical systems that's hard to understand.
Maxwell's Equations are hard to understand. Double-layer capacitance is hard to understand. Noise power is hard to understand. But at least there is some theory to reckon.
CF can't be debunked because there is no theory to debunk.
At least in the case of Phlogiston, there was an actual theory that Lavoisier overthrew with his Oxidation Model.
There is nothing to overthrow in CF because there is nothing there. It's a quest for a theory that hasn't found one yet, probably because there isn't one to find.
What I can overthrow are some faulty assumptions, such as the one that all the vapors in the Pgas term are accounted for. Clearly mist was omitted, and that threw off the energy budget model.
What I can overthrow is McKubre's assumption of no AC noise power. Clearly there is AC noise power, and leaving that out throws off McKubre's energy budget model.
Both of those missing terms can be added back in to their respective models.
And, I suppose, the reviewers at EPRI might be admonished to pay attention to the most important thing in the survival of the electric power business, which is to properly bill the customer for the true amount of AC power drawn out of the mains.
"I hate to be the one to break the news to you, Abd, but there is no theory.
"I looked. Not even Peter Hagelstein has been able to come up with one. And he's tried very hard."
You are mistaking the lack of theory as to mechanism for the lack of any theory at all. Hagelstein knows that fusion is taking place, he is not in doubt about that at all, and that is a "theory."
Have you talked with Hagelstein about cold fusion? I have, you know.
The theory is that deuterium is fusing to form helium, by an unknown mechanism, releasing 23.8 MeV per helium nucleus formed. The theory is that this is the source of the excess heat. Thus each of these variables predicts the other.
On what grounds can you then claim that "there is no theory?" Because Barry says so?
This model is explained in Storms Naturwissenschaften "Review": "Status of cold fusion (2010)," and is important enough to be much of the abstract:
"The evidence supports the claim that a nuclear reaction between deuterons to produce helium can occur in special materials without application of high energy. This reaction is found to produce clean energy at potentially useful levels without the harmful byproducts normally associated with a nuclear process."
He goes on to state:
"Various requirements of a model are examined." By that he means "theory of mechanism." Likewise when he refers, earlier in the abstract, to "plausible theories" that "have been suggested," he's referring to theories of mechanism. But none of these have been completed to the point of being able to make much in the way of testable predictions.
However, the "fusion model" I've described is testable, and makes verifiable predictions, that have, in fact, been verified many times, that are being routinely verified and used, and there is no contrary evidence at all, with any probity. Find a peer-reviewed paper in a mainstream journal that contradicts this conclusion, if you can. Good luck. You can find plenty that assumes it, now!
What didn't happen is pretty clear.
Replication didn't happen.
Eh? Are you saying that other people didn't report excess heat in highly loaded palladium deuteride? Are you crazy? Here you are trying to find fault with those reports, but now you deny that they even exist?
Theory construction didn't happen.
Oh, it happened all right. Storms says that the problem isn't lack of theory, it's too many theories. But no cigar yet, and what does that mean? It means, Barry, that there are still some things we don't understand. Yeah, I know it's hard to accept.... but it's true.
Reliable predictions didn't happen.
You are simply denying what's been said to you, with references. Run CF experiments. Measure excess heat and helium. Keep adjusting the experimental conditions according to the state of the art, so that you do see excess heat. (This could, theoretically, mean using the same inferior calorimetry that's allegedly used by others, but if you do this, also try to get the real numbers too.)
Measure and report helium production for all the experiments. Prediction: the helium will be within experimental error of 23.8 MeV.
You are simply denying that this model exists.
What I'm doing is looking for a unified theory to explain the observations. That's what we do in science.
Deuterium fusion explains the observations. Now we need to explain the deuterium fusion!
One step at a time, Barry. It's going to take years of theoretical work, I predict, to find the mechanism. And that work requires physicists as well as others. And it won't happen if the basic phenomenon, fusion, is ignored.
But it won't be ignored, so it will happen. You can huff and puff but you ain't blowin' this wall down.
An "unknown mechanism" is not a theory. An "unknown mechanism" is the absence of a known mechanism which is the absence of a theory with explanatory and predictive power.
You can't falsify an "unknown mechanism" because there is nothing to falsify. It's equivalent to a belief in a deity or gremlins who work in mysterious ways.
I believe in The Process of Enlightenment, which I assert "works in mysterious plays." But I have no idea how to go about writing the script for such a play. As far as I know, the dialogue has to write itself.
I claim there is no theory because no one has presented one. They have instead presented a statement that they have no idea what's going on.
To say they have no idea what's going on is to say they have no theory. What they have is a belief that something is going on.
There is no known mechanism, no testable predictions.
A lot of people have reported their energy books didn't balance. Of course they didn't balance. They left out a bunch of hidden transaction fees, like spritzing mist and AC noise.
So what else is new. There are hidden costs and hidden fees and hidden taxes everywhere.
By the way, what is the solubility of Helium in water?
I am going to predict that in a matter of weeks we will have two or three plausible theories of interesting but non-nuclear theories, with testable predictions, to explain the otherwise unexplained heat (from sloppy bookkeeping) and the helium (from alpha decay or dissolved helium).
And you are quite right that no one can blow down your impenetrable wall of text.
In the end, I predict you will tear down that wall, Mr Lomax, all by yourself,
"Theory" is testable, falsifiable. You don't like "unknown mechanism" -- which I agree is not a theory of *mechanism* -- fine. Propose one. Get from deuterium to helium without fusion.
The theory is a theory of fuel and ash and energetic result. That's testable.
"Unknown artifact" is also not a theory, then, right? So what is your theory to explain all those "errors"?
You are seeing me as unreasonably certain, you identify that as arrogance. However, Barry, you seem awfully certain to me, look at those predictions of the future.
You are, as it seems to me, denying the obvious. Heat/helium correlation near 24 MeV, with deuterium available as fuel -> fusion. Now we look for mechanism.
Widom-Larsen propose a series of reactions involving neutrons. Okay. But if the result is deuterium, and little else, we call it "fusion." At least I do!
There is a proposed mechanism, but it's not complete. That is, if we can get to condition TS, which has a requisite energy far lower than was thought to be required to overcome the Coulomb barrier, Takahashi, a hot fusion physicist, using quantum field theory predicts fusion, 100% cross-section, within a femtosecond. Can we get to TS? More accurately, since TS isn't exactly physically impossible, merely rare, what's the incidence of TS? We might take CF as evidence of that incidence. But, Barry, there are other theories too.
The math is horrific. I assume you were aware of this, right? The math to predict the behavior of quantum systems larger than two bodies is generally beyond our capacity to handle, unless approximations are made, and when we are talking about some "exception" that occurs very rarely, approximations demolish our certainty.
Takahashi did the math for a symmetric configuration, simplifying it. The real reaction might not be so cooperative. But, from Takahashi -- if his math is verified -- we know that there is a physical possibility here. How possible? Barry, the only evidence is that we *do* have fusion. The occurrence of TS is something that Takahashi doesn't even attempt. He's got enough problems trying to figure out what this beast would actually do. Where does the energy go? What happens if fusion takes place inside a Bose-Einstein condensate? Do you think anyone knows?
You wrote: "You can't falsify an "unknown mechanism" because there is nothing to falsify. It's equivalent to a belief in a deity or gremlins who work in mysterious ways."
Barry, you are denying the obvious, again. "Deuterium fusion" can be falsified, even if the mechanism isn't known for the fusion. It's very simple.
Run the experiments, with exact replications. Follow what all those who came before followed, i.e., do what it takes to get the same results. Use the same calorimetry, if you think their calorimetry is in error. *Come up with the same results* using the same methods. And measure the helium. Then show that, either the helium is not correlated, or confirm that it is and find the linkage that isn't fusion, and prove it with controlled experiment.
You wanted to know why this gap exists, between what some believe and what others believe. Here it is, and you are complaining about "walls of text," but simple text doesn't convince you any more than more extensive text.
(to be continued)
(continued)
The CF work was never shown to be artifact. You may not realize it, but what you've done is pretty similar to what skeptics have been doing for twenty years: thinking up possible prosaic explanations for this and that result, but never explaining the forest, except with psychological theories, i.e., "They come up with these results because they are so attached to the idea of free energy."
That's a theory. It's falsifiable. But the skeptics don't test it. They just assert it with all the other speculative theories, with no experiment behind them, and often in blatant contradiction to experimental results, and we've been seeing this from you, over and over.
You are still asserting that power supply noise is the cause of McKubre's results, even though the input energy he calculates from the power supply is confirmed by the calorimetry, *which is independent.*
(You've confused calculations of excess energy with calorimetry. Calorimetry simply measures heat.)
You are demonstrating imperviousness to evidence, and you have been doing it over and over, and yet you wonder why there are these differences in understanding? Look in the mirror. There is the answer to your questions.
I claim there is no theory because no one has presented one. They have instead presented a statement that they have no idea what's going on.
Barry, look at this, it's obvious. This isn't about fusion, it's about communication, and, yes, about emotions, about how we "know" what's true.
Is what you just wrote, which I quoted, true?
It's true that some have said that they don't know what is going on. But that's about one part of the picture, not about the whole picture. They can, and do, also say that they know what's going on.
That is, they know it's "fusion," because they know the fuel and the result, with reasonable certainty. They don't know how the fusion works. You focus on what they don't know. But theories are about what we know, or seek to know.
But you refuse to accept that there is even a theory as to the fuel and the ash. You demand mechanism. But there is a theory.
The fuel is deuterium and the ash is helium, and this explains the excess heat, which follows from the laws of thermodynamics. Mechanism is irrelevant for this calculation.
By the way, I've asserted this many times, that the mechanism is irrelevant to this calculation, you have never agreed with it. Is it true?
You may desire, ardently, to find the "error," but that doesn't mean there is no theory. The theory was passed by the peer reviewers at Naturwissenschaften, that's got to stick in your craw. You ranted "biological journal," which you ought to know is highly misleading, right?
There is a long list of phony claims you have made in these discussions, they are accumulating. A few of them you reluctantly dropped. Most of them you simply stopped asserting once it became Too Effing Obvious, and you then exerted all your cleverness to find a new one.
You are behaving like a fanatic. And that's also obvious. However, you are now swimming against the current, and that will shortly become entirely apparent.
"Theory" is testable, falsifiable. You don't like "unknown mechanism" -- which I agree is not a theory of *mechanism* -- fine. Propose one. Get from deuterium to helium without fusion.
You can't get there from here. Many have tried, all have failed.
Rather, if you genuinely got to Helium, you got there from somewhere else. Perhaps you got there from alpha decay of something else in the soup. Perhaps you got there by liberating helium from solution in the electrolyte or from solution in the solid materials.
So what is your theory to explain all those "errors"?
Profoundly sloppy science. Sloppy experimental work, but most demonstrably, sloppy modeling. The theoretical models of the energy budget were found, time and again, to be lacking important terms for mundane processes that were manifestly present but omitted from the accounting. That's why the books didn't balance.
In the space of just a few weeks, we found mist being tallied as vapor and we found AC noise power being left out of the model for balancing the energy books. That's just sloppy workmanship.
When I worked up a quick model of the AC noise power for a constant voltage working into a sinusoidally varying resistive load, I made an algebraic error. I plugged in 2π radians for the upper limit of the integral, rather than the period, T, in seconds. That left me with a formula for which the units were watts/sec instead of watts. ScienceApologist instantly spotted that error. And I should have known better. I neglected to make sure the units in my solution were of the correct dimensions. That's how peer review works.
CF can't get peer review because there is no model or mathematical analysis to review, and no precision predictions to test.
Now I have illustrated that time-varying resistance introduces AC noise power going into the circuit, and I have provide two distinct examples to demonstrate how to model and estimate the amount of noise power. And I have also proposed an inexpensive way to detect and measure the AC noise power using a VU Meter. Your scope also shows peak-to-peak voltage, which gives you some numbers to plug into the linear slew model.
And those models can be refined as necessary to capture the true characteristics of the noise power, which you can probably hear as crackle, clicks, or hiss if you tap the audio frequency voltage swings and feed them into a high-impedance pre-amp and simply listen to the noise on your HiFi.
Then, once you have the amount of heat going in as AC noise power, from the rapid dissociation of the electrolyte, see how much dissolved helium is released from solution, at the rate of 1.5 mg/Kg (that being the solubility of helium in water).
Run the numbers, Abd. Run the numbers and see what you get.
Barry, look at this, it's obvious. This isn't about fusion, it's about communication, and, yes, about emotions, about how we "know" what's true.
It's about a specific style of communication which I frankly had never encountered before.
Since this is a communication style that doesn't have a name (as far as I know), I'll coin a name for it.
Abd, your style of communication — which is to bury your dialogue partner under a blizzard of words in which you endlessly present your fabulous vision — is what I shall henceforth call a textual wallucination.
Barry, over and over, you state as fact what is blatantly false. For example, "cold fusion can't get peer review." CF papers are being published under peer review, roughly two per month. Criticism is having trouble getting published, but Shanahan's letter was published last year.
When your misting theory is shown to be inapplicable, you simply dismiss it and ignore that there is no possibility of significant misting in many experimental designs. Likewise your power supply noise theory, which is blatantly contradictory to the calorimetry in the very work you were citing as evidence.
You dismiss helium without having shown any awareness of the real finding: not merely some helium, which could easily be questioned, but helium correlated with excess heat.
Sure, a radioactive contaminant could produce correlation, but at the value for deuterium fusion? And you are now repeating your earlier totally bogus radon contamination theory.
Do you recall that it was shown that if heat/helium were the result of radon contamination, the supposedly contaminated heavy water would be spontaneously boiling only less than a month earlier?
You are showing a common phenomenon among fanatics: it's a kind of paranoia. I've seen it, up close:
"I have ten reasons why my idea is true. They couldn't all be wrong. The first reason is Reason A."
*"Reason A is false, because ...."
*"Even if you are right, I have nine other reasons. For example, Reason B."
*"Reason B is false, because ...."
*"Even if you are right, I have nine other reasons. They could not all be wrong."
Paranoids are expert at coming up with reasons to believe what they believe.
Some of your mentioned alternative theories are possible minor objections, none have been shown to be significant. What you are finding is a simple manifestation of a common reality: published papers do not explain absolutely everything that has been considered, and sometimes alternatives -- such as radon contamination -- are so preposterous that they were not even considered at all.
I'm not going to waste time calculating things that others have covered. The idea that helium is being liberated from solution by electrolysis is an obvious one, negated by analysis of the solution. Your hypothesis of "sloppy work" is not falsifiable, because it can be used to explain anything.
And this is exactly why the perception of CF bogosity has persisted among the ignorant. Once that theory became fixed in the mind, it was then easy to dismiss all the work, all the reports, no matter how cogent.
You post, all by itself, betrays your arrogance, your certainty of "impossibility," but that alleged impossibility has no scientific basis at all. Your profound belief in impossibility is what generates all your effort to dig up alternate theories, no matter how impossible, and your fervent belief in them in the face of all evidence. There is a name for this:
Pseudoskepticism.
I think we are done here, I think enough has been shown to make the matter clear. Next step is organizing and documenting for educational purpose.
You are right. You never met anyone like me. Except, of course, yourself. You fully deserve what you have been experiencing. You got what you were asking for.
Good luck.
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