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To make the Italians look less kooky, really what there is to claim here is that hydrogen, electricity and nickel powder can constitute a source of energy. It's pointless to point out that less energy is put in than taken out because combustion motors do that all the time were you not to count the fuel source.
The bottom line is if these scientists want to be taken seriously, they'll have to isolate their electrodes from any copper or iron, and run their test long enough to determine a consumption rate or a conversion rate if they are claiming to have a nuclear reaction at play.
It doesn't seem plausible. You would think someone would've discovered this dealing with hydrogen already.
You know, it's not that significant that the electricity put into the reaction is less then what was abstracted.
Again, the motor in your car achieves that.
What is significant is if the energy put into obtaining the fuel then putting that into play in the reaction leaves a balance that's worth going through all of the trouble to take nickel out of the ground and isolate hydrogen.
Very specific ratios of the products of fusion should be discernible. Instead of stopping the experiment because you had seen an electrical surplus, these scientists probably know that they should have established that a fusion reaction happened.
There's something very fishy about how cockeyed this is being done. There's no reason to conduct science like that in this day and age. Money is not an object.
To make the Italians look less kooky, really what there is to claim here is that hydrogen, electricity and nickel powder can constitute a source of energy. It's pointless to point out that less energy is put in than taken out because combustion motors do that all the time… were you not to count the fuel source.
The bottom line is if these scientists want to be taken seriously, they'll have to isolate their electrodes from any copper or iron, and run their test long enough to determine a consumption rate or a conversion rate if they are claiming to have a nuclear reaction at play.
It doesn't seem plausible. You would think someone would've discovered this dealing with hydrogen already.
I don't think the Italians are kooky, I think the reporters are kooky, just like the reporters that said a giant kraken killed ichthyosaurs and used their bones as art were kooky.
The giant, prehistoric squid that ate common sense
A real scientist would not be so dismissive of what Rossi has done until he knows what Rossi's little black frequency box is and does. Till that point its all speculation except for the measurement of the energy released and the energy that went in.
Pretty simple.
A real scientist would not be so dismissive of what Rossi has done until he knows what Rossi's little black frequency box is and does. Till that point its all speculation except for the measurement of the energy released and the energy that went in.
Pretty simple.
I don't think that a real scientist can conclude that anything spectacular has happened at all. The experiment was not set up to demonstrate that anything definitive had even transpired.
How much fuel was used?
"Barely any... about *a gram* of hydrogen... at an undisclosed pressure.
Couldn't account for the catylist.. I do know we found some of the nuclear byproducts that we anticipated... although we didn't take any time to calc ratios or isolate for contaminants... we still haven't."
Well, how much energy was produced? "We used a 'flux' as one of the most complicated aspects of our experiment, instead of a certain mass of standing water or anything common... so we don't know... AT ALL. We have reason to believe that it was enough and called it a day."
This is kook methodology.
There is no reason to have structured the experiment in this way, except to make an implausible claim garner the interest of folks like yourself, preferably with a big investment budget.
Extracting electrical energy from metals destructively doesn't need a press conference. It's called a primary battery. About $.35 at WalMart. In fact if we tally up all the Zn and Mn in the world and propose to make a lot of them --- it would also look like an impressive percentage of annual oil supply. No "nuclear" chemistry required. We don't really know MORE than that -- do we?
Hmmm
Nickel ---- check
Hydrogen --- check
Undisclosed Metal (platinum) for 2nd electrode -- check
Think that was the solar charged power source for Voyager wasn't it?
First rule in science is skepticism. You must prove what you state in an open way. Prove it in a manner in which the experiment or observation can be repeated. A 'black box' demonstration does not qualify. And certainly would not induce me to put any money at all into the project.
I know over-unity folks like to claim that there's this wall of close-mindedness, but if you half-ass that's what you should expect. What if science was based on excitement instead of standardization? This is the world which you are operating in. You should specify moles to determine the hydrogen fuel contribution, otherwise you don't know. Simple... take some measurements, account for well-regulated pressure into the system, do some math... undergrad shit.
They didn't measure the power input, they used a heater claiming operating wattages, turned it down, not off, then declared the show was over because it was blowing steam for *long enough*.
Why let the water undergo enthalpy if you are going to have a shot at determining the energy entailed... particularly in a flux (powered (pumped) flux?... or was this also not remotely standardized)?
If you can picture a scientific community with entrenched close-mindedness and some kind of disdain for amateur(?) science, endeavor to picture an enclave of witch-doctors who have been claiming supernatural alchemy well before modern science. This is the way David Copperfield sets up his 'experiments'. Why not distance one's experiment from a trick? <---- this is what experimental science is... vacuums, certainty, isolation, projections and outcomes. It is not merely awe. Science 'covers itself' from looking like slight of hand, so I question, 'why, other than for your adoration, would any 'inventor' make any claims on the basis of the above experiment?'
It is in this netherworld of physics that Rossi's system has appeared and, no surprise, along with it, a three-ring circus of media, science and speculation. At the center of the show is the E-Cat device which has been demonstrated a number of times and appears to be very simple.
One of the demonstration attendees, Bologna physics professor Giuseppe Levi, described as "an expert on nuclear physics, energy physics and sub-nuclear physics," has publicly defended Rossi and Focardi as well as the project.
There's now quite a furor over how the E-Cat might really work (or not), with some critics predicting that eventually the system will not perform as claimed and accusing the inventors of being deluded, or worse, frauds.
From the Forbes article:
If this device works as claimed, the world will change and not just a little but hugely and at every level of how we’re organized, how we make stuff, how we travel, and how wealth is distributed. And those changes won’t just impact the US or the Western hemisphere; they well transform the entire world because incredibly cheap energy is the ultimate game changer.
CONCLUSIONS TO DATE:
In regard to the question of whether the “device works as claimed”, there have been a couple of reviews of the data recorded by NyTeknik on the Oct 6 test. A couple of the most important summaries:
Jed Rothwell, referring to e-cat’s self-sustaining mode provided this response to an unsatisfied skeptic on the [email protected] mail list:
When the power went off, the reactor was boiling inside and the surface was
around 80 deg C.
Nearly 4 hours later, the reactor was still boiling inside. The surface was
still 80 deg C. … This was after 2.4 tons of cooling water went through the heat exchanger.
Deal with that! Explain it.
I would agree with everyone else that there was much that could have been improved the experiment, but the real point now it to understand the data we have and determine what information that can be derived from it with confidence.
It is interesting now how the skeptical criticism on the net seems to be switching from doesnt work at all to doesnt work with acceptable commercial COP. Are the skeptics now convinced there was large scale excess energy? In and of itself, this is a physics shattering breakthrough. It is clear from the data that the COP would have been much higher if the test had been run for a longer period. I am personally excited by the results and data from the experiment.
Ok, what I see is Rossi and others making claims. Now, they have stated that they have sold one of the machines, and have orders for 13 more. If this is not a scam, we will soon be able to apply the old Buick motto to this whole thing. "Ask the man that owns one".
If the answer is positive, then it looks like the whole world is going to undergo a rather rapid change.
Life's Little Mysteries reported on the E-Cat machine back in April, when Rossi and fellow physicist Sergio Focardi successfully demonstrated the device for a group of Swedish physicists. At the time, we explained that the Italian physicists are two of a handful of researchers around the world who have kept the cold fusion fire burning. These cold fusion devotees believe that there is a little-understood physical process occurring in their machines that produces a safe, clean and endlessly renewable form of energy. [5 Everyday Things that Are Radioactive]
The physicists who were invited to the demonstration in April gave the E-Cat a solid thumbs-up. It produced too much excess heat to have been originating from a chemical process, they wrote in their report, adding that, "The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production."
In the intervening months, Rossi has built a large version of his device that combines many smaller cold fusion modules. At the demo in October, after an initial energy input of 400 watts into each module, each one then produced a sustained, continuous output of 10 kilowatts (470 kW altogether) for three to four hours.
Rossi has not published any details about the inner workings of the E-Cat because the device is not patent-protected, but other cold fusion researchers have theories as to how the process works. Peter Hagelstein, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and one of the most mainstream proponents of cold fusion research, thinks the process may involve vibrational energy in the metal's lattice driving nuclear transitions that lead to fusion.
There are several close connections between the E-Cat and other recent experimental results, Hagelstein said, noting that the excess power seems to respond to lattice spacing in both experiments, vacancies within the lattice (e.g., spots where the nickel atoms are missing) seem to be important in both, the excess power seems to increase with operating temperature in relevant operating regimes and other connections.
"There is not sufficient reliable information available about the E-cat for a rational opinion to be made yet, in my view," Hagelstein told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. But because of these consistencies, "I am of the view that Rossi's claims probably should be taken seriously until such time as we have sufficient information that provides confirmation or refutation."
