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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Dec. 21 - Dec. 27, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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That was a bit... strange.
Huw Price, a professional philosopher who happens to be one of the founders and the Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (the one in Cambridge, UK), wrote a piece which is quite optimistic about cold fusion in general and Andrea Rossi in particular.
I don't follow LENR research closely, but Rossi seems like one of the least trustworthy people in the field, which speaks poorly of Huw Price's judgement, since he especially emphasizes the plausibility of E-Cat.
I'm very OK with using "sociological" factors to make judgments about these things. Rossi has been involved in a number of extremely suspicious operations and did a stint in prison for fraud. Here's a skeptic's look at the "independent tests" verifying Rossi's device.
LENR is under-populated. Independent of whether it is valid or not the social effects dominate the scientific ones.
Also interesting: The Fleischman-Pons-Effect may be unreliable in general but the heat/helium ratio is claimed to be stable.
Added: I don't think the paper by the swedish physicists is smelly either (except in so far as it mentions the E-Cat): Nuclear Spallation and Neutron Capture Induced by Ponderomotive Wave Forcing - note that the specific resonance frequency of the effect could explain the unreliability of the experiment.
It may appear strange that one of the authors Rickard Lundin is an astrophysicist but he well established there (look at the citations) and does have significant experience with interactions of ions in strong fields.
Saying this implies that you know what the proper population level is. How do you know?
Social effects dominate the attempts to build a perpetuum mobile as well.
In this I rely on the evaluation of Huw Price who surely has a much better grasp of the field(s) than I do.
Indeed strange. Following up on the linked citations finds things that smell pretty dubious.
Could you link to the citations you find smelly?
Top comment here on the Alexander Parkhomov replication: http://www.e-catworld.com/2014/12/30/alexander-parkhomov-on-calibration-in-his-test/
Claims that this: http://animpossibleinvention.com/2015/10/15/swedish-scientists-claim-lenr-explanation-break-through/ bolsters the case smells like typical aggrandizing claim since it is not a replication, but simply a speculative paper on the causal mechanism if such an effect exists. As has been repeated many times, no one is questioning that the energy is there, it's the mechanism by which it actually provides excess power at low temperatures that is under question, see the comments thread in the next big future piece here:http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/06/chinas-lenr-is-getting-excess-600-watts.html#soa_062bbe85
A review of the more credible replication does cause an update in the positive direction, but only a small one: http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue118/analysis.html