Saturday, May 5, 2012

THE CONCEPT OF “MISCOVERY” AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR LENR

New words are necessary in a world of ever increasing diversity, complexity and hostility; however it is quite difficult to generate
them. In English, I have succeeded only with ‘ego-out’ and ‘memecracy’. The main cause is that the most fantastic clumsy, sweet, hateful. creative, well sounding, obscene etc., words are all already used as names of rock bands, in the realm of modern music, anyway.
This was the case now too when I wanted to use ‘miscovery’ for a type of event that has happened during the life of LENR. See please http://miscovery.blogspot.com/ a blog dedicated as expected to music sharing and discovery,
A miscovery is a discovery plagued by bad circumstances, that has appeared in a bad place, at the wrong time- and this makes a lot of harm to its evolution.
It can be a discovery, so radical and disruptive that it even wounds itself. It can generate ideas and methods that are knocking down the society’s favorite dogmas (for example scientific dogmas) like bowling balls hitting the pins. And it is well known that dogmas are fierce vindictive enemies. Social hostility is not good for the development of a discovery or of an innovation.
Sometimes a discovery is metamorphosed in miscovery only due to some inborn weaknesses, or due to some destructive character straits of its discoverer. Many combinations of such causes are possible in practice.
Exactly as, according to Cipolla’s Second Law: “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person” (surprising but true, ask please Koalemos!) the probability that a discovery will become an unhappy miscovery does not depend on the value or the extent of useful applications of it. Bad place, wrong timing, too surprising ideas or author(s)- all these can act synergistically, in the worst sense.
Now, it is important that a discovery converted in miscovery should be a discovery with problems- ergo working for solutions trying to change its fate and not a discovery with troubles, just whining and blaming others.
After this introduction we can discuss about the miscoveries in LENR, I am not very happy to do this but I have already accepted that our dear field of study, LENR also has had its miscoveries, from the very start. I am not waiting for much sympathy for this writing; my discovery that the wonderful great idea of Fleischmann and Pons was a miscovery- is miscovery per se. Many colleagues will consider that I am simply not smart enough to see that Cold Fusion was an innocent victim of the ill-will, envy, incurable dogmatism and long term oppression of the Big Bad Scientific Establishment.
Should I really risk and dare to call the discovery of Cold Fusion- later LENR per se by Fleischman and Pons a miscovery? Actually it was an epochal event but one that can show its formidable potential only many years later after going a long way of trials and errors and of high hopes and deep disappointments.
Could we really find a metal more disadvantageous than palladium with its huge solubility for the isotopes of hydrogen, thus making the inactive bulk to desperately fight for deuterium with the active surface?
Why was it discovered in liquid phase and not in gas phase, when even the purest water has myriads of impurity atoms?
Why it was electrolysis which is unable to protect the surface of cathodes from the adsorption of alien gases that compete with deuterium for the sites in which the “good” reactions take place?
Why this story does not started on Aug 16 1989 when Piantelli has discovered anomalous heat from a nickel-hydrogen system?
It is relatively easy to answer only for the last question; Piantelli knew well about the Fleischmann-Pons discovery and was inspired by it.
However, despite some creative approaches to work with other metals, the great majority of the (few) courageous and in a way heretic researchers who continued to work in LENR, were nad still are, generally palladium addicted and made thousands of experiments using this very platinic and expensive metal. Piantelli had no followers and get step by step the experience of the loneliness of the long distance runner.\
I am rational, secular and skeptic, therefore the words “curse, cursed’ are not in my vocabulary; however soon it became obvious that something like this exists for LENR, the experimental results in Pd-D are not well repeatable/reproducible. But this was only the most visible part of a general problem. Due to the understanding of science this made LERN vulnerable to attacks- if it cannot be reproduced then it is only pseudoscience- plus other nasty insults. People have a natural fixation for certainties and this is based on practice, is vital. An engine or a brake working, say, 70% of the time is DANGER! Despite some outstanding undeniable results, the reputation of LENR was eroded, down to the level as serving mainly as a bad example.
However it has to be recognized that a triad of troubles- low intensity, low reliability (reproducibility) and short duration was present in all experiments with very few exceptions that could not be understood or repeated.
If these weaknesses are inherent to the Pd-D system, if they are curable at all, has Pd-D LENR a future, scientific (will it be understood?) and/or technological (applications of any kind)- all these are very open questions. If somebody has answers, please… 

MANY BRIGHT LENR THEORIES WERE MISCOVERED.

If there are problems with the experimental results, due to the necessity to use the scientific method, these are reflected in the functionality of the scientific theories worked out for the Pd-D variant of LENR.
First quality theories predict and it is not very difficult to understand why this category is missing.
Second quality theories prohibit, this includes explanations why sometimes the experiments don’t work. I know no other explanation (even qualitative) than my idea that LENR takes place in active sites and these active sites are occupied by the gases from the omnipresent air. It is a very unsuccessful idea
that was never taken seriously. Only experimental; reality uses it to make bad surprises. Thanks Piantelli the Ni-H systems do a very thorough cleaning by repeated deep degassing of the working surfaces.
Third quality theories explain what has happened and we have many of them, based on diverse ideas and principles and approaches. They explain how the nuclear reactions take place in conditions in which this is impossible according to older theories. Or, on the contrary, existing verified theories just were not well understood and actually they tell that LENR is natural and even unavoidable- so everything is fine. It is a noisy competition between these theories.
The first cause of why I say that these theories were miscovered is that they are not (completely) testable due to the situation in the experimental field.
The second is even more serious, LENR does not need such theories that explain usually only one step as particles valiantly go through the Coulomb barrier; actually LENR is more complex and needs a bunch of explanations and theories. The process cannot be understood with some miracle particles or associates of them and a tormented Hamiltonian is only a part of the solution. Even in my paper from 1992
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GluckPunderstand.pdf
I have asked theorists for something greater and more realistic i.e. including the topology, the nature and the mechanism(s) of the reaction. I have seen only one compound bunch of theories of this kind-  Piantelli’s already known by many of you. See the scheme from Piantelli’s 2010 Pontignano Poster  

Defkalion also says that their process is a dynamic stage of multi-stage set of reactions.
My young friend from Rio, Daniel Rocha, has found the best analogy – LENR is similar to photosynthesis. Multi-step, multi-stages, multi-phase,  lot of dynamism.

NANOMETRIC POWDERS SOLVE 66% OF THE PROBLEM

It is an exaggeration; actually the high art of nanotechnology has solved 2 problems from 3 ones hitting Pd-D LENR systems and that clearly only in one case- Piantelli’s anomalous process. Good reproducibility, working in self-sustaining regime for almost 2 months continuously. However low intensity remains, despite a remarkable progress- 50-70 Watts. maximum. This would not be a disaster per se but it seems it is an inherent limit for preformed
nanostructures even in the most advanced cases-as Ahern for example.
The unavoidable conclusion is- nanopowders, pre-formed nanostructures are much better than any Pd-D system, can give a lot to Science but nothing or almost so to Technology. This implies that even the most developed systems will NOT be able to scale up. I already feel the accusations of fatal mental narrow- and short-sightedness for this statement. OK, I take the responsibility and promise to make intellectual sepukku in the very moment when a purely nanometric transition-metal-hydrogen system will be used commercially. And I will do this even post-mortem. It is researcher’s bushido.

ANDREA ROSSI TURNS A DISCOVERY IN A MISCOVERY.

I have defined the problem/mission of Cold Fusion, later LENR from the very start as becoming a very important source of energy. I have tried very hard to understand what happens, why, and especially, why not,
It is strange, kind of joke of Fatum that the Solution came from outside the LENR community, from a really unusual individual.
Andrea Rossi has succeeded to do what was very difficult to be imagined after say his first two experiments he has converted his discovery in a miscovery.
He brought in an entire army of little green credibility eaters.
It is a great enigma why he was not able to get a patent for his discovery. I wrote a lot about his art to doing and not doing things in the same time. His phobia of competition has forced him to irrational things. As long as he really accepts a COP=6 for his E-cat (2, financially thinking) there are obvious troubles with his engineering and development.
However, all these things are of secondary importance. Rossi will go as we all are going, but the E-cat and its descendants will remain and generate energy.
And Rossi’s miscovery was and is a very important one. It has to be understood in the context of LENR, its history of more than 23 years, of its being a mixture of victories and failures, failures being the more continuous phase. Rossi has found a solution. Perhaps he has lost parts of this solution but in long range this is not essential. A torch was ignited and the flame is going on.
The great problem is what has Rossi found, discovered, created?
Philosophically speaking not technically. I tell you how I see the things: LENR is a very difficult, insoluble problem- there is no solution for commercialization inside the simple Ni, nanometric at its best plus hydrogen, system. You can do what you wish; it will not work at a commercial level. This is a ‘be or not be’ problem.

I believe in the efficiency of my problem solving rules: http://egooutpeters.blogspot.com/2012/02/problem-solving-quasi-desperate-appeal.html
Rossi whose strength is that he has passed many times through desperate situations in his life (a great advantage, I know this!) surely knows, at least instinctively, these rules.
For creating a commercial LENR system- using the Piantelli know-how plus increased energy density- he has applied first Rule No. 5: “NOT what we know, but what we don’t know, is more important for solving the problem.” This means Rossi was aware that the solution is not hidden somewhere in the already published many LENR papers, patents and reports; it is also not in the brain of some great authority from the field. Instead, he has made many probably hundreds, of experiments (here I believe him!) Edisonian style and step-by-step and/or luck-by-luck has found something of value. In the realm of the unknown.
He has used well Rule 18: “Do NOT accept the premises of the problem, change them as necessary and possible”
Rule 18- is essential in showing the difference between mathematical problems with rigid unchangeable premises and real life problems - for these the premises have to be changed in the favor of the problem solver, of the Solution.
I have used this old story: http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/62.html
as the best example for this Rule.
It seems the problem is insoluble, Father and Son cannot please
everybody. Actually the Donkey was not drowned.
I have created a continuation to the story in the very spirit of Rule 18.
“In the evening, tired and angry, Father and Son go to the pub. They tell the story to the keeper (owner)- a wise man.
The keeper says: 'Something is missing here. buy or build a cart and put that Donkey to pull it. You can both sit on the cart and nobody will scorn or offend you." 
This is the direct way to apply Rule 18- ADD something to the premises. Rossi has added some chemical compounds, he calls them the Catalyst, I prefer “functional additives.”
Ergo, Rossi has found, discovered LENR+ and we have to thank him for that.

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT
If we continue to mix the story of the cart and that of Rossi; suppose Father and Son have bought or built a faulty cart, too fragile and uncomfortable, with the wheels not well lubricated so the poor Donkey had to make great efforts to pull it.
A smart and skilled neighbor has fixed the cart, oiled the wheels
so now everybody was happy. For slow thinkers like me and for those not fond of allegories here I want to tell that Defkalion has found a better + than Rossi’s +. Possibly, but not probably like Broccoli.nitrate vs. Cabbage sulphate.
Too many analogies and metaphors seriously harm your mental health and intelligence and patience- therefore this is the END.
This is he  end of the writing not of LENR+, because very hot LENR+ Greek style is just starting, preparing to conquer the commercial markets.

Peter

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