ENGINEERING IS THE WAY TO MAKE LENR USEFUL. (First part)

MOTTOS

Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been. (Theodore von Kármán)

Cold Fusion was discovered in a form, place, and time generating severe inborn problems to it. To solve these problems, it has to be re-invented. (Peter Gluck)

This is not a Motto; however I think that the optimal mode to learn from good and smart people is when and by disagreeing with them. Really, many errors are made by mixing differing things as friendship and admiration for somebody with not using critical, independent thinking – mercilessly, for his ideas. Obviously to be fair, you have to accept the same brutal treatment for your own, dearest ideas. If ideas are valuable and true, they will eventually win. Perhaps, sometimes after a painful process of evolution.

Recently (http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2013/12/cold-fusion-what-now.html) I have tried to find out what has concluded a Japanese paper about the most evil problem tormenting our field from its early childhood up to now- bad reproducibility. From the lacunar

information I got, it seems that the Igari-Mizuno paper has no conclusions of the good sort, neither positive (telling what you have to do) nor negative (justifying deep desperation)

However my friends are trying to help me. Their ideas and suggestions are diverse- but have in common the very stimulating

feature that I disagree actually with all. I have a simple explanation

for this situation- I consider they judge the situation from the side of the Problem, while I am already on the side of the Solution as promised for 2014. The name of solution is Engineering.  It would be naivety thinking they see it in the same way, but time will judge.

Hideo Kozima whom I consider as a brother after his visit at us in

1994 and whom I remember inter alia singing Mozart and this beautiful Japanese song with a splendid, cultured voice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKTRnO7SV68 wrote:

I would like to give you my opinion on the problem of reproducibility in the cold fusion phenomenon (CFP).
In my opinion, the CFP is a phenomenon of complexity and has no quantitative reproducibility but a qualitative reproducibility like the earthquake, typhoon, and so forth. It is enough to have a qualitative reproducibility to investigate a phenomenon. Your have to remember that almost all nuclear reactions in nuclear physics have only qualitative reproducibility. The simplest example of them is the alpha decay; we do not know which Ra nucleus decays at what time but we know the statistical law of alpha decay.

It is my pleasure if this letter is useful for your consideration of the problem of the reproducibility in the CFP. Complexity is the key word in the CFP.

Hideo is a scientist; if I translate his message in the language of technology- it says CFP cannot give anything of practical use. Qualitative reproducibility is, IMHO, a partial oxymoron. It is reproduced but when, how, if something occult, unknowable wishes.

I wouldn’t enjoy explaining this paradoxical concept to students.

Cold Fusion is and isn’t a natural phenomenon. In its potentially useful form it is man-made and has to be controlled, developed and used by humans. Earthquakes are studied not because they are interesting per se, but because they do a lot of harm to people and their assets. I dislike this association for CFP. In Romania we have a major catastrophic earthquake approximately each 40 years – the most recent ones being in 1977 and 1940. Time to be worried.

Hideo says complexity is the keyword in CFP. Very true but it has to be a complexity of the bad sort, a very chaotic one. Why should CFP be of so much higher complexity than many similar phenomena in Materials Science? I have concluded long time ago that cold fusion’s complexity is a toxic one, the presence of any gases that compete with deuterium/hydrogen is the cause of bad quality reproducibility. This simplistic, dirty idea was not accepted by my scientist friends because it is not scientific enough.

Then Ed Storms who was so helpful and generous during my visit at LANL in 1995 and who is trying so hard to explain the very basics of LENR up to now- Ed has also joined the discussion.

Cold fusion will be completely reproducible once it is understood. This is a phenomenon of nature that we presently do not understand. In addition, this understanding requires knowledge about both chemistry and physics, which is an unusual combination of skills.  People with a chemical background ignore basic rules of nuclear physics and the physicists ignore the basic rules of chemistry.  A time will come when properly trained people have the incentive to read the extensive literature and put the pieces together in a proper way. Only then will the effect be reproducible. Hopefully once Rossi puts a generator on the market, the system will wake up and give people the incentive to properly study the effect.

Now even if I well know Ed’s great merits and achievement and wisdom in the field, I also have almost formed a habit to –as respectfully as possible- to disagree with his ideas aimed to be part of solution.

As regarding his first sentence here, the reverse is also true, cold fusion must be made reproducible before it is completely understood. If cold fusion takes place in cracks as Ed tries to convince us then CF depends on a destructive process by definition, it is possible it can be understood quite well but not really controlled.

CF is too complex a matter for both physicists and chemists because the Solution is based on many engineering disciplines.

Ed calls cold fusion a “phenomenon of nature” however for us it is a human creation; take in consideration that Nature has only Solutions while we, humans have Problems too and these have to be solved,

I agree with Ed that only a commercial energy generator on the market can give back the lost reputation to CF and lead to the renaissance of the field. However I have strong doubts that Pd based wet systems will be ever more than a lab curiosity. 

(Hideo and Ed have then started a discussion about reproducibility and statistics, a bit apart from the main line of this discussion.)

Now a third friend, Mitchell Swartz enters the discussion. I have met Mitch in 1998 at Cambridge, Mass at a cold fusion meeting and I am reading with pleasure his excellent Cold Fusion Times. However, what he does say here happens to be for me like the  red color for the bull:

Alleged 'non-reproducibility' is not applicable to cold fusion for several reasons.  
First, the heart of the issue is that "reproducibility" is nothing but a euphemism for failure, used by those who are against the 25 year successful science and engineering of cold fusion.

   Second, for cold fusion, reproducibility obviously exists. As but one example, there were three (3) demonstrations of cold fusion at ICCF10 by John Dash, Dennis Cravens and Letts, 
and myself.  Three groups independently elected to begin experiments at a specified time (Tuesday) at MIT in 2003, and all got successful results.  That is reproducibility. Q.E.D.

   Third, another problem is that this is more complicated because reproducibility depends upon who does it and how.
Consider the art of glass making, or making cat-whiskers, or souffles, or bearnase or baked alaska.
Not everyone can do it. Are they reproducible?
   It depends who does it, and how much experience they have.
How about a kidney transplant?  or curing even an early Stage Hodgkin's disease by ionizing penetrating radiation.  Does anyone really believe that any and all readers of CMNS would get the same success for their attempting a kidney transplant into the pelvis of a 12 year old?  or that they would achieve the same 20 year disease-free survival if they had access to the machines (6 MeV linacs and the like) to treat the tumor cited above (which requires licensing and certification, of course, therefore).

  Fourth, analysis of 'reproducibility' is even more interesting showing how illogical it is, as a 'straw man' argument.
Consider that as regards 'reproducibility' there is even a possibly spatially varying activity for some systems.
  As an example, penicillin VK (an antibiotic used since WW1 against gram + bacteraciae when it replaced proflavine)
works successfully outside of the hospitals today in about 96 of every 100 infections.
It is very curative, whereas the untreated infections might have killed many of the patients as they did when they were the major cause of death in the early 1900's.
  There is much clinical significance because each of these cures are very significant to the people involved.
  But it is not completely reproducible at ~96%.     [ So is there utility?   I say yes. ]

  But consider, inside hospitals where nosocomial infections today are "winning" all too often, penicillin VK may only be effective against a very small fraction (maybe 1 in 3 or less), 
and at those locations infected patients die if not given superlative therapy(ies) to PVK.
  In one location, the antibiotic's effect is almost reproducible (although 'not completely' is it?), and elsewhere, in the hospitals festooned with nosocomial drug insensitive strains, it is a failure and not reproducible.
  So the drug's effectiveness is ---> spatially varying with respect to 'reproduciblility'.

  In summary, allegations of non-reproducibility in cold fusion (lattice assisted nuclear reactions) are today not logical, and are disingenuous because reproducibility has already long existed
 in several types of cold fusion systems (using probably similar types of CFP) for years.

I am completely unable to accept Mitch’s arguments or to synchronize with his mode of thinking; my impression is that he tries to kill the problem before and instead of solving it.

First he says (very correctly) that non-reproducibility is just an other name for failed experiments – and adds that this is just a hostile action of those (bad and stupid people) who are able to ignore the great and valuable achievements of cold fusion from its 25 years glorious history. How should call a correct, faithful CF researcher the same situation, say a series of experiments with 5 to 20% reproducibility? What is the connection between blaming the others and genuine failure?

Second argument very strange- episodes of reproducibility obviously existed once, then they exist today. Listen to this aria: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fccdGBi9JUs

It happened that Don Giovanni was faithful to a woman for three days, but if cold fusion can be called reproducible due to some short episodes of reproducibility, than Don Giovanni is really faithful, I think. As “winning” in the well known quotation by Vince Lombardi, reproducibility is not a sometimes thing, it is an all-time thing.

Third, reproducibility seems to be very subjective, needs special skills- OK, the truth is that even very most skilled people cannot achieve real reproducibility. The many examples from the medical domain are interesting but of no use, as long as experimental geniuses have not achieved high reproducibility

And fourth, an argument far over my head, variable reproducibility is not true reproducibility and the numerous examples from medicine have not much to do with the cases of cold fusion. Why should the demand for reproducibility be illogical today?  We want good heaters working reproducibly.

It is not polite and not productive to just negate others’ ideas.

It is not the first time and hopefully not the last time when I state

that engineering is the key to usable/useful cold fusion. Take in consideration that during this process of development it will be transformed in such an extent and deepness that the name of the field will change.

Hideo will be right then: complexity- just smartly organized will be

the keyword.

Ed will be right then, the phenomena will be well understood and controlled in a perfectly reproducible way.

Mitch will be also right then it will be illogical and unjust to call the phenomena irreproducible.

I bet with you that after the triumph of engineering in our field the ab ovo erronated name of cold fusion will evanesce surprisingly fast.

Peter

PS This paper was published on my Blog with the explicit approval

of two of my co/counter-authors and lack of protest of the third. My gratitude- the dialogs come from a closed Forum.