Kahuna wrote:tomclarke wrote:Kahuna wrote:For giggles, I did a little research on Steve Krivit to see how skeptical (or gullible) he might be with the Italians. I came across a paper he presented on LENR to the American Chemical Society a little over a year ago. It is summarized in this 15 minute video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i5MXRitINU
From the contents, I expect him to represent the sentiments of many on this thread quite well. He seems appropriately skeptical and knowledgeable in the LENR field (does not believe it is fusion). I will be very interesting to see what he is allowed to see and what his take on it all is.
Steve Krivit is a confirmed cold fusion believer - in the sense that he thinks all the experiments with possibly anomalous results that the CF people have done so far prove there is something nuclear going on.
He states this 3/4 of the way through the presentation above.
However he is rightly skeptical about whether this collection of anomalous effects can be attributed to D+D fusion.
So I would not call him a skeptic, just a believer with a different set of beliefs.
Compared with "true" CF people he will be more inclined to believe Rossi et al. The true CF people don't think H2 + Ni can do anything, because it is not deuterium. Krivit however is convinced that something weird and nuclear is hapenning, he thinks it is W-L like neutron capture, so from his POV there is a good likelihood the Rossi device works.
Now, some here will argue that Krivit's prior beliefs are correct. But it is undeniable that the will be less skeptical of Rossi et al than either a mainstream scientist or a mainstream CF researcher.
Best wishes, Tom
Thanks for your insights on the possible bias of Mr. Krivit. I guess what I was most encouraged by was his apparent commitment to the scientific method in the research instead of the "formulating of facts to match theories" as practiced bu SRI. So I expect he will be an honest broker of information for the most part.
I think almost everyone looking at CF is an honest broker of information, but I have no idea of Krivit's experience looking at experimental errors and false positives. In fact I would be really interested to hear the evidence on whoich he says "we knows that nuclear reactions are occurring".
Anyway, it will be interesting to see.
My judgement of the Rossi experiments so far is that they split into:
(1) high flow rate low deltaT. Results trivially met by thermometer in contact with copper tubing where this is also in thermal contact with heating element.
(2) Steam output. Results met by combination of wet steam and heater switched to higher power for longer time than reported. Both phenomena have positive evidence from the Ny Technik video (though I have not checked the analysis which did this in detail - perhaps a Rossi believer should do this to make sure the people analysing the video are doing it fairly).
(3) short bursts of high power can be result of genuine chemical reaction (which we would expect) in reactor on heating.
These three effects seem to explain all demos so far with no requirement for anything else, or even fraud, though there are other obvious problems like variable water flow rate which apply to some of the experiments.
it is worth noting that this type of cell, water cooled, electrical heating in, can very easily give anomalous results if the output thermometer is not in thermal contact only with water, or if water in contact with thermometer does not mix well with all water. A better experimental setup would comepletely remove these experimental errors, but we have not yet seen it - to my knowledge.
Best wishes, Tom
PS - even the reactor heating Rossi office for 1 year is possible. Any e-cat will (electrically) heat its surroundings. We do not have info about how much heat is produced by the E-cat office heater...
