At 04:30 PM 2/25/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Yet you persist in calling these results "marginal." You are
either technically illiterate, or you are a liar. Anyone who
glances at the graph on the front page at
<http://lenr-canr.org/index.html>http://lenr-canr.org will see you are wrong.
That's P13/P14. There is another graph of this that was page 2 in
the review paper presented to the DoE in 2004.
Seeing these graphs in isolation, with a background if distrust and
rejection, can be less than convincing. The caption on that image
on your page, Jed, is accurate. But people will not necessarily
grasp the implications.
That's true. Perhaps I exaggerated. You do need to read and
understand the paper to grasp the implications of this graph.
However, I just meant that the margin of error bars are marked at
the bottom of the graph along with the blue line for light water,
and the red heavy water line is far above that margin.
Actually, that particular chart is less impressive, overall, than the
more common presentation of excess power vs. time and current. In
fact, knowing the data from the other graph, I wonder what this one
is showing. Current was ramped between levels, so my guess is that
the intermediate values are from the ramp periods, and you can see
where the current sat from the places where there are a lot of data
points at one particular current.
What P13/P14 have come to mean to me is that the third excursion,
together with the first two (flat calorimetry, deuterium and
hydrogen) showed the "rare beast." The first two excursions show
"replication failure." Nothing happened! This could have gone on for
a long time!
It took me until quite recently to really grok this. McKubre had been
watching these cells for months. Most of the time, he was seeing
nothing, but he then had a really good idea of what "nothing" looked
like. Then, suddenly, he sees this "anomaly." It is not small, it's
large, it's unmistakeable.
His overall excess energy was maybe only 5% of input energy or so.
That's far from impressive! Mostly I was interested, for the last two
years, in excess *energy* and wondered what all the fuss over power
was. Yeah, if the power level was high enough, maybe if it
represented more energy density than could have been produced by any
chemical storage, okay, but that was often less than clear. It takes
much more analysis, it isn't thick-skull-penetrating.
When I reviewed P13/P14 with Barry Kort, who was asserting that the
excess energy was mismeasured input power, and I looked for what this
would imply as to the *previous behavior* of the cell, I saw it. I
saw what probably made McKubre certain that he was seeing real,
significant, unmistakeable excess heat. I apparently passed some
information threshold, some place where it clicked. It's not that I
hadn't seen all this before. But I had never before seen it *all at
once,* and that is what it might take.
I can now imagine how to present this information in such a way as to
convince people who might be near the edge. No abstract presentation,
no matter how convincing, is going to convice Cude, he's made it very
clear that he's not going to believe anything short of a killer demo.
He doesn't care about normal science, which accepts lots of stuff
without "killer demos." It accepts based on preponderance of the
evidence, and the evidence is examined by people who are trained to
not be attached to outcome.
In any case, the experience with Kort, who turned out to be utterly
awful in his "attachment to outcome," helped me "get it." I'm
completely sold. McKubre saw clear, unmistakeable anomalous heat, not
close to noise, the opposite, clearly standing out, in that third
current excursion with P13/P14. My guess is that anyone who
understands the experiment and who isn't desperately clinging to an
impossibility theory would be likewise convinced. The trick is to
convey that understanding, cleanly and clearly, without the pile of
confusing additional information that is present in the original research.
(That's not a criticism of the original research! The data is
appropriate, in a complete report.)
I realize this graph is important for other reasons. That's why it
is on the front page, linked to the paper.
There are plenty of other graphs like this in the literature, with a
wide separation between the error bars and the signal. There are
many for heat and tritium in particular.
Yes, and I will now see many of those graphs with a new light.
Of course there is also tons of marginal data! I have probably as
much of it as anyone. There are authors who write "as you can
clearly see in Figure 5" when -- in my opinion -- Figure 5 is clear as mud.
They are familiar with the situation. Sometimes they may be deluded.
I will mention Oriani and say no more, except to say that maybe
Oriani found something and maybe he didn't, but he definitely did not
show a "replicable experiment," and it was utterly unsurprising that
Kowalski found what Oriani reported. Difference was only that
Kowalski recognized that his own data was not convincing as to the
hypothesis, but neither was Oriani's.
On the face.
In other words Cude has correctly characterized some cold fusion research.
Sure. Cherry-picking. It's also called "salting the mine." You pick
up selected samples, then claim or imply that they are representative
of the whole damn place.
But to go from that to saying that all research is like this, or
the field as a whole has nothing but marginal data, is outrageous.
This is like saying: "There are quack doctors, incompetent surgeons
who kill patients, and ineffective drugs . . . so all of medical
science is a failure. It is a con-job. We should tear down the hospitals."
Yup. And medical research, on which we risk lives, frequently has
results much less clear than the CF results and the conclusion that
it's deuterium fusion.
I would, in fact, readily stake my life on a medication that was that
well demonstrated as effective.
