These measurements indicate the researchers have created an almost cartoonishly bad "open calorimeter" that they do not calibrate at anywhere near the operating temperature despite their estimate of heat balance being acutely dependent on making multiple temperature-dependent corrections accurately.

If a fourth year engineering student handed this experimental setup in as a design project, and included the low-temperature "calibration" as part of the design, I would fail them.

They were not making continuous measurements. They were not allowed to look inside the device. Rossi was present during the "fueling" of the device.

So: ideal conditions for fraud. I wonder why that is?

If it was me doing it, I'd pre-load the device with isotopically enriched nickle when I constructed it. This would be mixed with and come out with the added "fuel". There are various ways of ensuring the mass balance is right (making sure some of the added "fuel" stays in the device) so the device would weigh the same before and after, but the extracted "fuel" would have an excess of 62Ni.

In this case, the claimed energy density is far outside the realm of anything achievable by chemistry, so if it was real it would be prima-facie evidence of something non-chemical going on.

That said, this this work is so obviously of poor quality--to the extent that I wonder if it was designed that way--I don't think it matters if anyone can look inside the box.

If the designed a closed calorimeter that they put the entire apparatus into, including an inverter, ran DC power into it, and measured the subsequent temperature rise, I could be convinced that something interesting was going on even without knowing what was inside.

Although I do agree that the claims being made are so extraordinary that even then it would be difficult to credit it as a real phenomenon.

The data on isotopic abundances were a result of tampering with the "fuel" at some point in the process, which is pretty simple to do. The fact that the "inventor" was present during "fueling" is a huge red flag.

For the rest: the work is of extremely low quality. The excess heat production is huge, and any simple closed calorimeter would have shown it in a matter of minutes. They instead built this bizarre "open calorimeter" (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and didn't even calibrate it at the operating temperature! This is particularly important when you consider the functional form of the Stephan-Boltzmann law: radiated power goes as T^4, so at half power they were "calibrating" at a temperature far below the one they operated at. And yet their energy-balance calculations require a whole raft of temperature-dependent corrections.

The experimental design is so bad--and I am saying this as an experimental and computational physicist--that I can't help wondering if it was deliberately designed to gull the gullible.

They did nothing of the kind, and if you read the paper you'd know it.

Their "calibration run" was at half-power (which given Stephan-Boltzmann and all is likely about 1/5th temperature) and their "calorimetry" depends on a number of complex temperature-sensitive estimates, so their "calibration" is meaningless.

They excuse themselves from doing a proper full-temperature calibration because they worried the iconel heater wires might melt in the absence of "fuel" which is a bogus and contrived claim.

There were preprints of both the P&F paper and Steve Jones' papers circulating the day after the press conference. They were sufficiently detailed to reproduce what P&F had done (the Jones paper was much sparser) and there was no clear statement of any "loading" requirement. There were a few cases reported where "loading" seemed to have occurred, but there was nothing like an unequivocal two month loading period.

Your comment implies that P&F ever described "the experimental protocol" but of course they never did any such thing. They described a whole range of things, and then claimed anyone who didn't get their results hadn't done it right.

Furthermore, as we dug into the work, it became more an more obvious that phenomenologically for the P&F result to be correct then both a) all of chemistry had to be wrong and b) all of nuclear physics had to be wrong. The work as reported was full of contradictions.

Koonin is on the right side of history with this "crime". P&F were wrong. They were wrong then. They remain wrong today. There have been no reproducible excess heat production experiments that have withstood ordinary academic scrutiny. The intriguing possibility of solid-state fusion has not been realized (more's the pity).

They aren't any more.

Seriously, the number of things they do wrong is huge, starting with the oxymoron of an "open calorimeter", which is what they have tried to build.

The odds of this result being experimental error are far, far higher than the odds that any new physics are involved.

The whole thing is terrible. If you designed a system to produce incorrect energy balance results it would be hard to improve on this set-up.

Resting the device under test on metal rails?

Your input power is some weird three-phase thing with additional pulses? Why not DC, since the primary purpose of the input appears to be heating the thing up?

Your "unfueled" test runs at half the input power of your fueled test, and your "calorimetry" depends on some theoretical estimation of temperature-dependent convection losses?

Then there's the temperature-dependent emissivity.

And there's the running for 32 days when you claim to be producing kilo-watts of "excess power"! If that was the case, the world's simplest bomb calorimeter would demonstrate the effect in seconds. So why didn't they build one?

The list goes on.

If a student at a science fair did a project like this as an attempt to create an "open" calorimeter set-up for some legitimate experimental reason I'd give them great credit. If they claimed they used the system and it demonstrated that energy was not conserved... not so much.

Progress is progress and "breakthrough"s only exist in the minds of the people who weren't paying attention to all the incremental steps that created them.

A factor of a hundred here, a factor of a hundred there, and pretty soon you're talking about orders of magnitude.

I'm over 50 and used to be a boy scout. I don't smoke, drink very moderately, help little old ladies across the street, recently came to the assistance of a young woman who was in a physical altercation with her boyfriend (which turned out to be her attacking him, but I didn't know that 'til I got involved) and just today used my pocket knife (which I carry because I was a boy scout) to help an elderly man deflate a beach ball he and his grandson had been playing with (by prying out the extremely stuck plug, not stabbing it.)

And I illegally downloaded a movie last night (there were extenuating circumstances, but still...)

So I'd say the FBI is going to be restricted to Amish who were too wasted during their rumspringa to download anything.

Greenpeace and other anti-science groups like the Republican Party all take this stone-age "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and "the friend of my enemy is my enemy" approach to human relations.

Roy Baumeister, in this truly excellent book Evil discusses idealism as a cause of evil, and Greenpeace are a pretty good representation of the logic he describes: if you believe yourself to be purely and ideally good, then anyone opposing you and anyone who helps them in any way must be purely evil. And what lies, threats and violence aren't justified in the name of fighting pure evil?

Baumeister uses actual cases (and lots of them) to show how false-to-fact this kind of thinking always is, and how much moral thinking is actually about delusions of evil rather than evil as it is done. Anyone even mildly interested in making the world actually better, rather than just feeling good about themselves while helping to make things worse, would do well to read this book. It does more for the study of good and evil than three thousand years of fact-free philosophical imaginings.

Furthermore, the statement by the bioethicist in the article is false:

I'm not sure why anyone would put it that way, since no one is out there having abortions for the purpose of supplying stem cells, and it is very nearly criminally irresponsible to suggest otherwise.

And if a pregnant woman elects to end her fetus's life wouldn't it be unethical not to use that tragedy to do some good for someone?

Another comparable case is the awarding of the 1998 prize to Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for the discovery of the muon neutrino when Reines had not been award the prize for the discovery of the electron neutrino. In that case, thankfully, Reines was finally given the prize in 1995.

I wrote a long vitriolic rant in response to this, and then rechecked your post and realized you were criticizing this position, not promoting it.

Which is at least a bit of a cautionary tale, that lazy people (hi) may well take you to be actually spreading the fear you are trying to prevent. Although since as near as I can tell people never actually listen to or read the words in any communication, but react purely to a few random emotional cues, there's probably nothing to be done about that.

This comment makes me wish you had a math background too.

You are actually doing math when you make the assertion that fusion "will always take more power to contain than it creates". You're doing lots of things, including physics and probably chemistry. Unfortunately, you seem to be doing all of them based on what your imagination tells you, and as we know from 300 years of science and 3000 years of pre-science, what "just makes sense" in our imaginations has nothing much to do with what is real.

You are correct to say that containment in stars is free. You have no basis for saying that it is impossible to produce an artificial containment that uses substantially less power than is produced by the fusion processes within it. That is a mathematical assertion about the physics of fusion:

Pfusion Pcontainment

That is the math you are doing, without any attempt to make it physically plausible.

Nor is the lack of non-stellar containment in nature much of an argument. Want to know what else doesn't exist in nature? Reciprocating steam engines. Repeating rifles. Spaceships. Digital computers. Yet mysteriously we have all those things, and more. It's almost as if humans, informed by physics, are capable of making machines that instantiate processes that otherwise do not exist.

Whether fusion is one of those processes remains to be seen. It is clearly a hard problem, but the jury is still well out on its ultimate feasibility.