Navy Research Lab, George Washington University, Feb 2011Dr David Nagle wrote: Sixty years of research work and $20 billion has been put into the hot fusion experimental reactor being built in France as a joint venture between the European Union, USA, Japan, Russia, South Korea and India,” he noted. “But the world will have to wait for 40 years to see this reactor become commercial and start powering our homes.”
Compared to ITER’s hot fusion reactor, cold fusion or low energy nuclear reactions has had only 20 years of research and spending of just $ 0.2 billion. “This is just 1 per cent of the amount spent on hot fusion
$200M seems to me a lot spent on CF research. Consider, hot fusion has incontrovertial evidence that nuclear energy is released, and understood theory about how this happens. Cold fusion has not one experiment that proves nuclear reactions take place, and no theory that is understood and predicts deifnite results. (W-L makes no definite predictions about when CF will happen).
Compare this with Polywell, or DPF, or even colliding FRCs. In each case there is strong doubt that the method will ever allow high Q, but known theory provides some wiggle room and a case can be made. (I am less sure a case can be made for colliding FRCs, but still).
Most here will know that I get annoyed by CF enthusiasts proclaiming the dawn of the age of aquarius. I accept that CF (LENR or CMNP if you prefer) is currently undergoing a resurgence of interest.
The smoke
The case as I see it. Many groups have been reporting anomalous heat from [H or D] / [Ni or Pd or Pt] systems for 20 years now:
FP
BLP
[many, many CF people]
Recently fashionable:
Brouillon
Rossi/DGT
Miley
There are some other results reported (Japan) of nuclear transmutations.
the gun
There is a half-baked (much better than nothing) theory (W-L) which claims low energy neutrons can be generated in metal lattices by extraordinary high local electric fields acting on electrons and protons.
There are some other (Hagelstein) quarter-baked hypotheses hinting at how LENR could happen. These are so flimsy they don't really count, but because the hypothesis contains some useful ideas it is publishable. The problem is not the useful ideas, but the fact that going from these ideas to LENR is completely speculative and unsupported.
Now I have a decent background in math & theoretical physics, fields, though not QED. I can (at least in theory) do QM, tensor calculus. I have never properly learnt nuclear physics and so I don't have the background properly to judge these theories. On the other hand I can read reports from those who do (e.g. Chubb on W-L), and I know enough to see where there are gaps.
That leaves me reckoning that the theories are valiant attempts to create a CF mechanism, none of which succeed. That does not make a CF mechanism impossible. But it means that as far as theory goes it is completely unproven.
The judgement here is subtle. If W-L theory predicted something else which had been observed the gaps in it could be forgiven, because it would be joining together previously unexplained observations.
But in reality W-L was clearly devised to try to justify the CF hypothesis. Its one apparent success is that it simultaneously claims to predict a gamma shield that would explain the general lack of high energy gamms from LENR. The point being that W-L predicts high energy gammas will be produced. No way out of it.
Now the difficulty with this prediction - gamma shield - is that it removes the one absolute and clearly testable result from nuclear reactions.
It is rather as though I am claiming an invisible friend with whom I can communicate telepathically. He tells me that he is blind and deaf. So the standard test (I win at poker because he looks at my opponents cards, etc) will not work.
The problem with my invisible friend theory is that there is no way anyone else can disprove it. There is a plausible reason for that, but still it is unfortunately convenient.
No smoke without fire
So far we have a collection of evidence which can properly be put together in two different ways.
(1) The LENR people have some mysterious not-understood effect which is real, probably some variant of W-L theory explains it.
(2) The whole area is a result of wishful thinking. W-L was worked out specifically to justify CF, it makes no new testable predictions. CF experiments all produce results within the bounbds of experimental error.
When I read stuff on the web I find it very hard not to believe (1). When I look more carefully at the evidence, and reflect on it, I come down stroingly on the side of (2).
I am myself a natural CF enthusiast. I would like free energy to exist. I like weird non-standard ideas. I loved the ultra high density deuterium experiments, and you don't get weirder than that. But then I put my own enthusiasm through the tough examination recommended by Thomas Huxley:
I ask who is doing this, the scientific mainstream, or the LENR community.Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
It will be strange to many here, but I believe the LENR community singularly fails in this necessary humility. Specifically, they are just not curious about their own experiments.
When a positive result is found it is trumpeted, and efforts are made to engineer a larger more impressive result.
That would be exactly right were this an engineering problem, with proven LENR and a matter only of optimising things.
It is exactly wrong if there remains the strong possibility that LENR is not proven and all positive results are in fact experimental error.
To prove LENR you need to do the opposite. Take a repeatable postive result and examine it minutely to determine possible errors etc. The result is a decent scientific paper. You don't have to mention LENR, just call it "anomalous heat generation in a Pt/H system etc".
More people then pile on the band wagon and we either have proven heat anomaly, or discovered error.
In 20 years, and $200M, of experiment, THIS HAS NEVER BEEN DONE.
So why the resurgence of interest now? I claim because of Rossi. In spite of his clear duplicity, and the fact that respectable LENR people would be very cautious about any of his claims, his PR offensive has an effect. It is now easier for people to believe other LENR claims than it was before. No smoke without fire...
But that is not because of additional scientific evidence.
I would like to be proved wrong. All it needs is (for example) for Miley to get off his back side and subject his claimed repeatable MIT demo experiment to standard science:
(1) Write it up in detail so we can see what it is
(2) Perform additional tests to try and quantify all possible errors. (Extra controls, extra measurements, etc).
(3) [He would want to do this] Write the scientific paper that will gain him a Nobel and set the world on a different path.
He shows no sign at the moment of doing this, and seems instead to be asking for money to commercialise the experiment. But he is capable (I think) of writing papers, doing experiments. So he could do this, if the results were as clear-cut as he appears to claim.
As could any of the many other LENR reserchers getting positive results over the last 20 years. For example, Piantelli's claimed astonishing results would be easy to duplicate and check for error.
Anyone wonder why we hear nothing of these checks? Does this sound familiar?
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This thread - just to differentiate it from others - is for discussion of the current LENR interest, is it scientific, popular, etc? Which of the two divergent views of LENR over the last 20 years is most plausible and why do you think that. It is not for discussion of Rossi.