On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
> Joshua Cude wrote: > > If the effect were real, it would not stall at the marginal level. > > > Many cold fusion results are marginal, but others are not. Even in 1989 > there were many dramatic heat events and some tritium production at > extraordinarily high signal to noise ratios. There were solid reports of > heat after death producing palpable heat 5 orders of magnitude higher than > any chemical source can account for. > Solid reports? There are anecdotal and apocryphal stories like this, but if they were solid, the DOE would not have rejected them. Anyway, 5 orders of magnitude in 1989? In McKubre’s summary in 2007, he claims only 2 orders. So in 20 years, the field has lost 3 orders of magnitude, even as the experiments have improved. It’s what I’ve been arguing. > > You do know that "marginal" means close to the margin of error, don't you? > Did you have some other meaning in mind?! "Politically marginalized," > perhaps? > > You seem to know something about this research. Surely you have read > McKubre, Fleischmann and Storms and seen the graphs. 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 <http://lenr-canr.org/index.html> will see you are > wrong. > I have a lot of respect for graphs, but when a field trying to prove millions of times higher energy density than available by chemistry, has to use graphs -- after considerable data reduction, I might add -- to prove it, it seems a little underwhelming. It may be ok for preliminary reports, which is why the world was taken by storm with P&F graphs in 1989, but after 20 years, we expect a little progress. And the graph itself shows less than 1/2 W excess power, about 5 - 10% of the input. Yes, the effect is well above statistical error, but well within the sort of systematic error or artifacts that are common in calorimetry. So I would regard the results as marginal. There's no a priori reason the reaction rate should fall so close to the input power rate, considering the 20 or 30 orders of magnitude it occurs above conventional expectations. And not just in this experiment, but in all manner of cold fusion configurations. More damning than the marginal nature of these particular data, is the fact that they are from 1994. The link on your web page is inexplicably to a 2007 presentation (which as standalone reading is pretty useless) but the data presumably come from McKubre's 1994 paper. So that means that the best example of non-marginal results in cold fusion, the ones that have pride of place on your web site, are 1/2 watt excess from 1994. I could hardly have picked a better illustration of the lack of progress in the field. The failure to scale the results up suggests the absence of a real effect. Furthermore, the light water control doesn't mean much when we're told some heavy water cells didn't work either (so how do we know some light water cells wouldn't work), and that some CF theories work better with protons, and that some CF experiments work better with protons. Finally, the correlation with current density is presumably believed to be related to the loading ratio, but that doesn't explain why the excess power drops instantly when the current is turned off (in the figure just preceeding your cover figure in the linked presentation). We know some electrolysis experiments show heat in the absence of input power, but why wouldn't they all show heat? Surely the deuterium does not instantly diffuse out of the Pd. > Let me remind you that repeating a lie does not make it the truth. Also, > most members of this audience are familiar with the cold fusion literature, > and they know your assertions are wrong. You are not fooling anyone. > > I’m not trying to fool anyone, but if what I write is so ineffective, I wonder why you can’t resist replying.
