"Vortex Based Mathematics by Marko Rodin"

reply to post by buddhasystem


At what point in time did he become a cold fusion fanatic?

Originally posted by Mary Rose
'results'"

From the above link:

McKubre at SRI International expressed his view on what happened at Caltech:

The way that Nate Lewis conducted his calorimetry was just wrong. It was amateurish and silly, actually. What he did was change his calibration every day to make sure that the excess heat was zero; he changed his calibration with the assertion that the answer is zero, so by definition he observed zero every day, even though he had to change his calibration constant to do it.

I think it was a semi legitimate thing for an ignorant and impatient man. Every day they came in, and the calorimetry was either producing positive excess heat or negative excess heat, both of which were unbelievable to Lewis, so that what they did was change the calibration constant so that it went away.[ 25]

Also from the above link:

Dr. Melvin Miles, then the lead electrochemist for the U.S. Navy's China Lake cold fusion team, conducted his own post-mortem on the Caltech cold fusion bungle. Miles concluded in a letter written to John Maddox, editor of Nature, that, "contrary to the claims of [Lewis and Miskelly at Caltech], a study of this nature is completely incapable of proving that no anomalous power was produced." [ 23]

In his paper published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry, Miles concluded the following with regard to the Caltech results:

An excess power effect develops that becomes as large as 0.076 W after 161 hours of Pd/D2O + LiOD electrolysis. The excess power density of 1.0 W/cm3 Pd for this analysis of the N. Lewis study is in excellent agreement with our experiments (1.3 W/cm3 Pd at 200 mA/cm2) as well as with the results reported by M. Fleischmann et al. in 1990.[ 24]

Any comments on Dr. Melvin Miles' and McKubre's observations?

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

F&P’s paper was sloppy, and they even forgot to include the name of their grad student. The errata were longer than their original paper

So the original authors F&P probably made more changes to their paper than MIT did.

Have you seen F&P's paper?

Originally posted by Mary Rose
My print-out of the cover page for this has one line of writing along the bottom edge of the paper and under "Paresh Agarwal - 22.012" that is cut off. Can you tell me what it says?

It's more than one line. It's apparently a description of the cold fusion test pictured from 2003 and some contact information. It's not in text form so I can't copy and paste it, it appears to be in image form.

You can probably adjust your printer settings to "shrink to fit" or just scale the printer settings to 85% to make it show up on the printout.

Originally posted by buddhasystem
Apparently, this method is exceedingly tricky and prone to false positives. Scratch the surface a little and you get wrong reading. If there is a little more radon gas in the room (which is easily produced by concrete walls), this can create an elevated background and a false positive again. Quite shaky imho.

If they were just getting random tracks I'd be unconvinced, but I'm not sure how to explain this as a false positive:

www.science.org.au...

In their latest experiment, Mosier-Boss and Spzak placed wafers of CR-39 against the electrode. When they examined them after running the experiment, they discovered that regions nearest the electrode were speckled with microscopic pits, while those further away were not. A control experiment without any palladium chloride in the solution produced only a few randomly scattered tracks that could be accounted for by background radiation.

Originally posted by Mary Rose

An excess power effect develops that becomes as large as 0.076 W after 161 hours of Pd/D2O + LiOD electrolysis.

Any comments on Dr. Melvin Miles' and McKubre's observations?

Yes. Do you have any idea how small 0.076W is? it's 1315 times smaller than the amount of power used by a single 100W light bulb, and they only saw that after 161 hours.

Finding a possible extraneous source of 0.076W could easily be overlooked. For example, if they had lights on in the room and didn't account for the lights, that could account for 0.076 watts. I'm not saying that was the source, I'm just saying the effect is so small it could be a lot of things that might be easy to overlook.

If I was the experimenter I'd try to scale it up so the effect isn't so insignificant.

And regarding Mallove saying Parker accused P&F of Fraud, here's what they said:

www.newenergytimes.com...

Parker: I’ll just tell you about the neutrons, Okay.. That’s really important, Okay. They’ve taken some data. They didn’t even take it themselves, they had people take it for them. They published it in their paper and they claimed that it showed the presence of neutrons from their experiment. The data is patently, has been patently falsely interpreted. Neutrons are not present at anywhere near the level their own data shows. They’re not there. They’ve misinterpreted their results. They falsely interpreted their results. Whether they did this intentionally or not I don’t know, but they did not present—interpret their results correctly. It’s a key point in their paper.

Tate: Specifically what they’re claiming, that it was neutrons they were creating. . .

Parker: That they were creating neutrons from their experiment. Their documentation unfortunately shows that not only was it falsely interpreted, but there were no neutrons at anywhere near the level they claimed. You can use the data in two ways, to show that they falsely interpreted it, but also that there weren’t neutrons at the level they claimed.

Tate: So at best it’s misinterpretation and at worst it’s — as you were saying. . .

Parker: It’s fraud.

Even when Tate paraphrased him he characterized it as "at best it's misinterpretation and at worst it's fraud". In the context of that they were discussing, the lack of neutron data, and the fact that P&F had an errata list longer than their paper so by their own admission their paper had tons of false stuff in it that needed to be corrected, I don't find that characterization to be unreasonable when you put it in context. It's not like they just accused P&F of making the whole thing up, they were focused on their claims about neutron data, which they didn't have, and yes they used someone else's data. It was very messy and very sloppy. If Mallove is making a big stink out of this, which he is, it gives me further reason to question his credibility. I think P&F would admit they didn't get their own neutron data. See slide 5 of the Paresh Agarwal powerpoint you just asked about, which talks about P&F not having their own neutron data.

Originally posted by Mary Rose
Have you seen F&P's paper?

No, have you?

I think this is it:
www.sciencedirect.com...

Buddhasystem might have access, but it would cost me $31.50 to see it!

Why, do you doubt that it has lots of errata as stated by Paresh Agarwal?

reply to post by Arbitrageur


If they pressed the electrode against the surface, they might have inflicted subtle surface damage. I'm only saying this to emphasize how subtle the effect is -- I don't know, of course, if anything like this happened.

Chlorine has an unstable isotope Cl36 and if there was any accumulation of chlorine next to the electrode, for whatever reason, irradiation of plastic could have occurred.

This is a seriously difficult measurement. I'm not saying at all they did it wrong, but it doesn't nail if down for me as a physicist.

Originally posted by Mary Rose
reply to post by buddhasystem

 

At what point in time did he become a cold fusion fanatic?

I think you are quite capable of THAT kind of research. Read up.

reply to post by buddhasystem


You made the statement. Explain yourself. What do you know and how do you know it?

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Where is this July 10th version and the July 13th version?

From page 12 of the .pdf document if you click on:

"MIT and Cold Fusion- A Special Report"

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Why, do you doubt that it has lots of errata as stated by Paresh Agarwal?

No, I was wondering about you. On the one hand, you needed to see for yourself. On the other hand, you seemed content to take someone’s word for it.

The following link will open a copy of the Scientific Correspondence between Fleischmann, Pons, and Hawkins and Petrasso, et al. in the journal Nature in 1989 regarding the disputed Fleischmann-Pons gamma ray spectrum:

”MIT’s Allegations of Fraud”. A screen shot of the first paragraph:

reply to post by Mary Rose

Mallove got a reply about that which appears on page 38/57 of that pdf:

www.newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/ColdFusion1989/MIT/MIT-ColdFusion-SpecialReport.pdf

The difference in the two results is an
indication of the error intrinsic in the measurement. The implicit
assumption was that we were looking for a fast turn-on of the
anomalous heat production and so it was legitimate to subtract
out a slow baseline drift caused by depletion of the electrolyte.
Whether this is a correct assumption is arguable, but in any event
the main conclusions stand: We detected no significant difference
between H2O and D2O, and in both cases any excess power
would have been less than 79 milliwatts, the level claimed for a
similar experiment by the Utah group. Our paper estimates the
uncertainty of calorimetry measurement as 40 mW, and so you
are free to posit an excess heat less than this level it you wish.

This explanation is actually consistent with the New Scientist article that nothing happens for a while, and then something starts happening, and that's what he was looking for:

www.science.org.au...

When an electric current is passed through the solution, deuterium atoms start to pack into spaces in the palladium's lattice-like atomic framework. Eventually, after a period of days or weeks, there is approximately one deuterium atom for each palladium atom, at which point things start to happen.

Quite what happens or why isn't clear. Whatever it is appears to release more energy, as heat, than the experiment consumes.

So he was looking for the reported sudden increase and he didn't see one. And he admits that the uncertainty of the experiment is 40 mW.

Moreover the MIT folks go into some detail about all the difficulties in creating successful calorimetry experiments of this nature.

Additionally, plenty of people whom Mallove didn't accuse of being biased also had difficulty replicating the P&F experiment.

Mallove also claims that cold fusion is being commercialized. But it's not, that I know of, unless you count Rossi, but we have no real proof from him of anything.

reply to post by Mary Rose


I read large parts of both papers... Looks like Petrasso nailed them down cold with the spectra.

The cold fusion team basically goes on to disavow the spectrum they had first presented as evidence.

I still think that this thread diverged way too far from the discussion of that charlatan Rodin. I understand that he's in fact boring, because he doesn't even have a problematic gamma spectrum or anything... You see, it's fun to read a real paper and think about real or possible artifacts in the data... With Rodin, we don't have such luxury. There is that stupid "divine" sudoku and he's going to cure all decease with it. Period. Baha'i. Whatever.

Originally posted by buddhasystem
I still think that this thread diverged way too far from the discussion of that charlatan Rodin.

This thread is about the larger picture of the history of free energy technology at this point. Rodin's endorsers and peers in the field from history have been dismissed as frauds, delusional, or otherwise unreliable. So, naturally, an examination of this history is in order.

newenergytimes.com states in "On the Allegations of Fraud Against Fleischmann and Pons":

Another senior scientist at the MIT plasma fusion center, Richard Petrasso, was quoted two years later in the March 17, 1991, issue of The New York Times that MIT was mistaken to allege fraud. “I was convinced for a while it was absolute fraud," he said. "Now I’ve softened. They probably believed in what they were doing."

Originally posted by buddhasystem
He was a teacher of science journalism and a fanatic of cold fusion.

From page 10 of "MIT and Cold Fusion- A Special Report," where Mallove presents the sequence of events of his experience with the cold fusion controversy at MIT:

In 1991, I thought that both cold fusion and hot fusion could play a complementary role in the energy economy of the world—even though neither technology had been developed to the stage of commercial devices. I offered that opinion in Fire from Ice.

Originally posted by Mary Rose
From page 12 of the .pdf document if you click on:

"MIT and Cold Fusion- A Special Report"

The text which accompanies this image of the two pairs of graphs is:



I will search for the analysis done by MIT graduate Dr. Mitchell R. Swartz next.

Originally posted by Mary Rose
I will search for the analysis done by MIT graduate Dr. Mitchell R. Swartz next.

I need the article "Re-Examination of a Key Cold Fusion Experiment: 'Phase II' Calorimetry by the MIT Plasma Fusion Center," Fusion Facts, August 1992, pp. 27-40. Fusion Facts was a newsletter that merged with the Journal of New Energy, a quarterly journal, in December 1996. I doubt that I'm going to find this article online.

Originally posted by Mary Rose
newenergytimes.com states in "On the Allegations of Fraud Against Fleischmann and Pons":

Another senior scientist at the MIT plasma fusion center, Richard Petrasso, was quoted two years later in the March 17, 1991, issue of The New York Times that MIT was mistaken to allege fraud. “I was convinced for a while it was absolute fraud," he said. "Now I’ve softened. They probably believed in what they were doing."

One point of discussion I've seen come up in the free energy field is sincerity, and topics like the difference between fraud and misinterpretation.

Rodin may have sincerity in common with Pons and Fleischmann, perhaps all three really believe what they present. But P&F at least presented some kind of evidence. What makes Rodin stand out to me is the complete lack of any evidence for nearly all of his claims. The only claim he seems to have evidence for is that he made a torus shaped coil, but there's no evidence it has magical properties or black holes.

Even if the P&F research was poor science, and most agree it was pretty badly done science regardless of the way cold fusion turns out, the complete absence of evidence from Rodin is still far worse. It's really sad you have to be so focused on endorsers, but I can see why you are because that's about all he's got, he's got nothing else.

Having Bearden as an endorser is something I'd personally try to hide rather than brag about, because he's never done what he said he would do. If Bearden actually made something that worked, I could see why people would want him as an endorser. But as it stands, it's more like a case of one delusional person endorsing another delusional person (If we give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're delusional instead of frauds. Rodin is delusional, I'm not sure about Bearden, but certainly if he's not even able to power his own house with his contraption he's probably a few french fries short of a happy meal if he really thinks he's going to give the world free energy).

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Rodin may have sincerity in common with Pons and Fleischmann, perhaps all three really believe what they present. But P&F at least presented some kind of evidence. What makes Rodin stand out to me is the complete lack of any evidence for nearly all of his claims. The only claim he seems to have evidence for is that he made a torus shaped coil, but there's no evidence it has magical properties or black holes.

The only evidence of the effectiveness of his technology - if it could be verified in the public record - is the military using a variation of the coil. But it can't be verified in the public record, since it's secret, I would presume. And we probably don't have enough information about it to do a search, anyway.

Originally posted by Mary Rose
The text which accompanies this image of the two pairs of graphs is:

I think the keywords in the text are, ". . . the two sets were 'asymmetrically treated.'"

Too bad I can't locate the analysis by MIT graduate Dr. Mitchell R. Swartz.