HOW LENR TECHNOLOGY FIRST?

An answer in part   to my old question; “Why Technology First?” put in Infinite Energy 1^st issue, March-April 1995, p 26

In the most recent two Ego Out publications I have tried to demonstrate that closed minded Scientism is equal to death of progress in LENR. If Scientism is an anti- or non-solution, then it is my duty to offer a viable alternative; I am a technologist, but the solution is in no way closed minded Technologism the idea that technology can solve all our problems. Or, thinking that LENR can be converted, first in LENR+ and then in a working energy technology without understanding thoroughly some advanced scientific principles. The problem-solution is more complex, more interesting and even more beautiful.  

Yesterday, my friend Yiannis Hadjichristos wrote: “we need not to think technology in use as a sum of certain engineering (mechanical, chemical, electric, electronic etc) issues as most people believe. Technology includes also culture, business, ethics etc as always applying within a certain society and political framework.”

This morning I read about a great conference for emergent technologies: “EmTech MIT is where technology, business, and culture converge.”  This conference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emtech has a section for energy too,

and I bet that soon there LENR will be a serious rival in popularity there to shale gas/oil. A bit of patience, please.

This philosophy is in the spirit of: http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2011/08/technology-mon-amour.html

It is kind of ‘best practice’ for the Defkalion R & D team.

Just to mention en passant, recently, after Prof Y. Kim,  an other  very prestigious Cold Fusion-LENR personality has visited their labs and his essential conclusion was: “it is obvious you have a robust device which generates heat on demand”. More at ICCF-18

It is not a mystery why the technological awakening of what has appeared as Cold Fusion came so slowly and why, even today it is understood and acknowledged by so few. The history of CF/LENR is a series of alternatives and options.

The first one was birthplace and parents. Exactly as for humans

for scientific fields also, geography broadly defined, is destiny. You need to have great care with choosing well your parents. the country, town and house where you start your life because these

circumstances are determining if you get privileges or misery.

I dare to say that unlucky Cold Fusion had chosen a non-technological place electrochemistry- and I say this despite the fact of having worked near to huge electrolysis plants (Borzesti, OLTCHIM), having a over 20 years collaboration with the Romanian lead acid battery industry and being good friend with

Prof. Liviu Oniciu- once our best fuel-cell specialist. But let’s consider the facts, electrochemistry the branch of chemistry that deals with the chemical changes produced by electricity and the production of electricity by chemical changes- it can be technological for chemistry or for electric current, but NOT for thermal energy. Plus, electrochemical systems are impure and overly impure. Temperatures are limited due to the presence of water, while high temperature electrolysis systems with molten salts proved to be unmanageable- very early in the history of the field- I remember a discussion about this with Liaw at ICCF-2.

Cold Fusion was discovered in an electrolytic cell- bad luck! Why not in a gas-phase system, say a catalytic reactor? Perhaps because it would be difficult to observe some (first weak) excess energy there.

Could it be better if, say Piantelli had discovered cold fusion first and not Fleischmann and Pons? Impossible to answer and also useless- the great merit of the two great electrochemists is understanding and announcing the immense potential and possible future of cold fusion as a new energy source. They had a dream despite of making the discovery in a place- that in retrospective is perhaps the worst alternative possible.

Piantelli has discovered the unexpected heat effect in the frame of a biophysics experiment 146 days after F&P- however a few years later his cell was quite technological- gas phase, high temperature,

hydrogen in contact with a “processable”, clean(able) nickel surface. He had allies- Focardi and Habel plus their teams but no

followers with creative ideas i.e. the sort that considers the achievements of their model just a starting point from which they have to discover new ways. Piantelli has applied systematically the Scientific Method http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2011/08/how-does-apply-prof-piantelli-rules-of.html and has obtained results of paramount importance- but still in isolation and with no real scale up to LENR+, the enhanced process. In the field, the Pd D effort was

 much, much greater than that on the Ni-H gas phase line. Electrochemistry used for nickel is not more technologizable than the F&P Cell. Randell Mills CIHT method is an exception in principle- it produces electric energy- however it seems the way from mWatts to MWatts is long.

Just to remark that new technologies besides being cultural can be very difficult wicked problems with traps.

The functional theory of technologies

In the good old times before the information revolution technologies were mainly mono-functional – doing an unique thing-as well as possible- transport, transfer or transformation

of matter and energy. For information technologies the Swiss Army knife multi-functionality is the rule- see PCs or smartphones

for example. However multi-functionality is a major global trend, a definitory technological virtue. DGT has started collaboration in an early stage with a diversity of major industries for applications

For classic LENR the main desired function- generation of excess heat is not fulfilled well being weak, incontrollable and evanescent.

Weak thermal signals could be treated in two ways:

1) enhancement by empirical trial and error using radical methods and changes- first of all abandonment of the “cradle” and of the culprit metal, palladium,

2) improvement of calorimetric measurements; calorimetry owes a lot to cold fusion; the reverse is not exactly true. The very precise

measurements have proved beyond any doubt the existence of LENR (science) but have not helped LENR to scale up and become a technology. Metrology has consumed too many resource es despite its passivity as solution of the weakness problem...

However it would not be justified to call this option an error. The immediate aim was to demonstrate that the excess heat exists- fast

so the longer. The longer http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html less traveled way (enhancement) could not be taken from practical reasons, cold fusion being engaged in uphill battles

for survival.

The general option for PdD and the relative lack of popularity of NiH system again cannot be qualified as error; the story is much too complex, multilevel, multifaceted and multi-egotistic...

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. (Henry Kissinger)  Please try to understand what can a clear mind do- really not much.

It is too much for me too; therefore I will use an other quotation here:

Mistakes are a part of being human. Precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.” (Al Franken)

Even more, mistakes are a part of being a researcher and being unavoidable when you do not have all the data and you never have them all- you are working and creating in highly non-ideal

circumstances. This non-ideality, endemic for the LENR field

leads to a limitation of the scientific method- as also shown here:

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.  (Robert M. Pirsig)

As more options are available now, errors become possible- I have written a lot about these. And unfortunately errors are more than additive:

But slight mistakes accumulate, and grow to gross errors if unchecked. (Jacqueline Carey)

I dare to say that both Scientism and any form of myopic Technologism would be very costly errors (as long as we accept that Energy- plenty, clean, healthy cheap is the aim. The only correct approach is hybrid- scientific and technological.

applied inventive and smart complementarity. 

Also it has to be accepted both continuity and discontinuity. similarity and difference between LENR and LENR+

Very soon facts will demonstrate that insisting in considering

the Scientific Method as panacea for the troubles and difficulties and problems of the field can be described by:

To err is human; to persist in error is diabolical. (erroneously attributed to many authors, actually a Latin proverb borrowed from the Greeks)

Once a psychologist friend has tested my personality. One of the conclusions was that I have many weak points but naivety is the most dangerous of them.

I believe that at ICCF-18 a paradigm change will take place and

a new era of collaboration and progress will start.

Peter