Monday, September 8, 2014

THE CASE OF THE WHISPERING AND STUTTERING OPERA SINGER (LENR Miniature)



This is an other easy lecture for Sunday or any other day- a sad but instructive story.

I am a good, disciplined customer of the industry that makes billions from milligrams. My hypertension, put in evidence 17 years ago is not curable and I will never be healthy again, however I am dependent on some medicines (Enalapril and Tertensiv) and I must take them daily otherwise I feel bad, hear strange noises and become anxious. So far so good, however the medicines have a side effect – generate nightmares. Some of them are really frightening and I get in situations and am confronted with such problems that the unique solution is to wake up early, drink my unique daily coffee and start reading my gmail messages. Most nightmares are about travel and paying the bill at the hotel. I have read a lot of serious literature about the interpretation of dreams including Jung’s famous book, but this helps not much. Quite usually the nightmares are connected to recent events or ideas discussed. This is the case with my strange dream of Sept 6/7.

As you already know my hobby is opera music, a great platonic love story. See please
because it tells a lot of true things and asks some interesting questions (BTW, never replied)

At Timisoara, my native town, we had a rather good opera house. Timisoara was the most modern and “Western” town of Romania, in my early childhood penta-national and tetra-linguistic, multicultural in the good sense. It happens that at the kindergarten I had a colleague, two years older than me, Jancsi I remember him well, he probably me not- I was too small and insignificant then. OK, this Jancsi became in 1992 the Director of the Vienna Stadt Opera and has kept this position till 2010:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioan_Holender
He is a genius, had a lot of successes and even triumphs- and I became quite envious- why he is an opera director and I am not? I also love opera, just because he is talented and I am not, this is the reason?
My God, if meritocracy will rule the world, what will happen to people like me? I am joking, however in this nightmare I became suddenly the full power director of a N-Metropolitan opera (I don’t remember if N was from “nano” or Nuclear?”)
 I want to tell you that once we have visited the real Metopera in 2000 due to the generosity of our friend Mike Carrell.

Met Performance] CID:333003
Samson
 et Dalila {194} Metropolitan Opera House:
 September 26, 2000
Samson.....................Plácido Domingo
Dalila.....................Denyce Graves

It was great; however my wife was already preparing her coming pulmonary embolism and had great pains.

The DREAM
I am the director, I will decide for everything. We will start with Aida and there will be lots of people making beautiful noises.
Surprise! The Sponsor of the Opera called me and told that who gives the money makes the rules and takes the great decisions: ”My son, your mission now is to make this tenor ,
Marco Diecibelli a famous singer. He is a student of Gigli and the fiancĂ© of my wife’s cousin- make him great, Pete, this is your priority. I am a nice man but if you do not succeed perfectly, addio opera! Hai capito, signore?
He was open and clear and I got his message, if it is a problem I will solve it- I know this well even in deep sleep.
I met the young tenor, good looking, and athletic, nice boy, just a bit fat. But he will be a perfect Radames, I thought and my dream was quite pleasant for a short while. But then Marco has started to sing—horror, a small barely audible whispering voice, and much interruption- he was speaking normally but stuttering when he sang, an unique misery! This will be a catastrophe even after two stages of radical improvement- I had a shock!
Marco confessed he was Gigli’s student just for one day, however his great ambition is to be a really great tenor. “It is my life’s dream!” Trouble, the sponsor was absolutely adamant but said “I pay what you will, just help Marco!” A professional problem solver is efficient when he dreams too. I called a specialist who has designed a fine audio aid, amplifier plus silence filter, many of these were manufactured and distributed freely to the public combined with some chocolate bonbons.
Marco’s first aria sounded quite so- with this excellent audio aid:
Fans of Marco have appeared soon- the aid was really good.
The sponsor was grateful and generous, I bought a flat.  I was the guest of honor at Marco’s wedding with the Sponsor’s wife’s cousin- a girl resembling Olive Oyl.
And I have enjoyed my job of Opera director till the alarm clock rang in the morning.

But now I feel guilty of cheating and if this dream will be repeated, I will leave the job and I will not save a whispering and stuttering tenor for any money! Honesty and professionalism are more important than making something impossible to seem possible.

This was the story, realistic but not subtle; now some comments.

 Two quotations without attribution from some recent messages re the limited enthusiasm of the world in accepting cold fusion/LENR plus my thoughts.

Pons and Fleischmann were geniuses, they developed a very sensitive calorimeter which permitted them to discover CF

Oriani closely replicated F&P with a better calorimeter that he built himself.

In retrospective it was an unlucky finding: prematurely, in the worst place, they came upon a most important new energy source, however in a larva form- under-developed. It was a historical bad luck; there are 3 kinds of discoveries; lucky, unlucky and cold fusion. 
Discovering FF was a formidable, bright performance! And despite all bad chances, the Founding Fathers and hundreds of their brave followers have succeeded to demonstrate the very existence of excess heat using this very poor tool. (Marco Diecibelli has a voice, muteness cannot be amplified) A wonderful heroic performance but the end of the possibilities, there.

When you find a phenomenon which is barely measurable, you have two choices: to develop more sensitive methods of measurement or try to enhance, amplify the phenomenon. These are choices-in-principle; in the electrolytic cell the phenomenon is sentenced to weakness and unreliability- the solution is to build a much better environment where the phenomenon gets its full power, flourishes and works for us... Use engineering and science.

The problems of the wet electrolytic Pd cells were not resolved simply because they cannot be resolved, it is impossible.

You have to understand what happened, for making the good and useful happen.

Peter


5 comments:

  1. about F&P one of their great error was to be to competent in calorimetry.
    their apparently simple calorimeter was based on decades of experience, which led to many detail that newcomers could not even imagine...
    the bubbling were strirring, and the current density was a key to avoid recombination.
    the hard vacuum dewar was a key to the reliability of the measurement as was the silvering of the neck that was avoiding to have the first centimeter of water bath where temperature was not stabilized at 0.01C unlike below change the heat transfer...
    the measuring of the recombination by refilling volume was another detail...

    their method was really cheap on component but very expensive in competence.

    their failure is well known in cryptography :
    being sure of something because you have absolute evidence, is not the same as being able to convince a third party who don't have all your knowledge, and worst than all, that don't trust you.

    Oriani or McKubre calorimeter are not better than F&P, but they are better to convince less competent and absolutely distrusting skeptics.

    the demand for tea kettle, for high power, is one of the symptom of those incompetent and distrusting skeptics.

    A symptom of people who don't trust science and instruments and prefer to trust their own eyes, or more probably symptom of people who refuse reality that they should understand, using arguments that they imagine can convince the mass of incompetent and undeducated people, who trust more their eyes than instruments they ignore.

    The war of skepticism against LENR is more how educated but deluded people try to abuse the less informed and educated people.
    People like Gary Taubes, Huizenga, tried to fool the masses , the media, with cargo cult skepticsm, like tea kettle fallacy (uselless/small phenomenon don't exist), plane crash fallacy (unreliable phenomenon don't exist), inverted popper fallacy (experiments that challenge theory are artifact, or if artifact impossible, fraud, and if fraud impossible unimagined fraud) because they were sure to be right but had no serious argument to support their claims.
    honest people are more dangerous than vested interest.

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    Replies
    1. Dear Alain,

      Thank you for this prompt and correct analysis.
      I had many open discussions these days about what we could call Reputation Management of LENR, including with intelligent and nice people, who are agnostic re CF waiting for better proofs.
      Some of them are usually trusting science and measurement but cannot accept that the instrument show 5 times nothing and once-
      something reasonable.
      People, honest are interested in both Truth and Value but in the case of LENR the focus is due to historicak reasons on Value. A new phenomenon can be a lab curiosity, perfect for a beautiful paper
      say in Science et Vie or an promising energy source- abundent, clean, cheap. Our duty is to make LENR valuable.
      Peter

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    2. reliability is our goal.

      like what I see on much less replicated EmDrive, which is a true question and a high risk, I have observed a scientific tragedy.

      I can understand that people who want to invest their retirement money, to make a business for living, to go alive on mars, ask of reliability of scientific findings.
      As we are engineers, I can immodestly say it is our business... I can honestly answer it is often hard to deliver.

      but if on earth there are people who should be curious on things that only happen when planets align or moon is on the good phase, who should accept to suspend their belief and their disbelief, it is scientists.

      today, thanks to funding committees and peer review, scientists are afraid to admit they don't know if it will work or not. they often take irrational precautions before showing interest, then when things get bad they refuse to admit they screw up... yet it is their mission to fail 99% of times, and cause a revolution once in a life...

      today the most incoherent observation is that scientists only search where there is good probability to find, even more cautious not to break theories where it is no dotted-line printed by the editor.

      crazy people who dare to search where there is incoherent evidences, hard to reproduce protocols, are those who should not, engineers, applied scientists , businessmen, retired scientists, garage inventors...

      young researchers in fundamental science are forced to follow the line of the party, or they lose their funding, their citation index, their prize expectation.

      cold fusion is a symptom of somethings that goes wrong with science.

      of course once we make a plane that fly with LENR people will believe us, but academic science is not there just to record kitty hawk success, or to copy Forbes news, not even to record the success of applied science.

      Academic science should lead applied science, engineers, businessmen, far away where no man have been before.
      It is just digging where there is cross on the map, and breaking theories where there is dotted lines.
      As if being wrong was a problem, and not admitting it was a solution...

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  2. Yes, you are right, Science has great problems with its policy, locally and globally, with the grants system and funding, with its leaders, the peer review system, the Medawar Zone and all .. I know them well, especially for my country. No ideal solutions exist. The peer review system is in the same class as democracy and marraige- full of defects but nothing better was invented.

    You say :
    cold fusion is a symptom of somethings that goes wrong with science

    Absolutely true, but prior to this cold fusion is a symptom that it is something very wrong with the kind of cold fusion originally discovered in its cradle

    To use a meaphor which is- if my memory is still working- very familar
    for you personally- how many bycicles with quadrat wheels will you sell per day?
    Peter

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