Comment Health costs (Score 1, Troll) 610
only matter if you're not willing to let people die. Then again most of Europe has some form of socialized medicine. Here in America we don't need to factor in the cost of health.
Once Augustine merged Aristotle and Christ, the rest was just a matter of time and a lot of math.
Do you do online banking and shipping? Same tubes.
So your advice is what? That women should hide their sexuality because there are deviants who will try to rape them or break into their cloud accounts?
A free society must protect the right of people to enjoy their freedoms, and where some small group of criminals and sociopaths attempt to destroy that freedom, the first words out of a free people's mouths shouldn't be "Well you had it coming you slut!"
That ideal world is a lot more distant of we just shrug and suggest people live in an live in an underground bunker if they want to be safe.
Camel is a nasty tasting meat.
google should have used a different animal that is far tastier.
Wait, PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Animals....... right?
Their measurements indicate more power is output than was input.
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.
If they are making consistent measurements, however, it could be very tricky to fake data which shows consistent rates of consumption for nickel-58 and nickel-60 given the starting abundance.
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.
You absolutely need to know what's in the black box before validating any claims of the owner.
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.
I'm not saying this is real... but when they really do figure out how he tricked them it's going to be really clever I bet.
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 measured the system with a known electrical input and no fuel, calibrated the measurement process showing they were measuring accurately to within a percent or so and then measured again with the fuel in place.
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.
and that the experimental protocol hadn't even been published yet. When it was published it stated that it took 2 months of electrolytic loading before the effect might occur.
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).
if these confirmers are reputable,
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.
You can't measure quantitative thermal output of anything with a thermal camera suspended in a room
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.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
