9 ms·

The E-Cat has been replicated?

46 points by pjkundert 11y ago

brudgers 11y ago
"E-Cat" is short for "Energy Catalyzation" which is more or less cold-fusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
- clock_tower 11y ago
  Thanks. I was wondering what this was about; my best guess was the CueCat from one of Joel Spolsky's old columns...
  - emcrazyone 11y ago
    hahaha, I was thinking the exact same thing, literally cue cat and all too. Even funnier is my undergrad degree was, originally, applied physics before switching to EE. I follow science when I can but boy do I feel out of the loop sometimes. Reading your post gave me a nice chuckle.
    - clock_tower 11y ago
      Glad you liked it! I just checked, and CueCats are as low as $7 on eBay. Barcode readers convert barcodes to plaintext (and barcode printers go the other way), so CueCats are good for more than just scanning ads... I wonder if there's room for a CueCat Users' Group. :)
readams 11y ago
Note that the "replication" seems to have been done by an organization that had set out specifically to produce this result and not by any sort of reputable scientists or lab. The announcement here is on the web site of a pro-E-cat book. Needless to say, don't start celebrating the birth of the overunity era quite yet.
- tankenmate 11y ago
  What makes me most happy here is that they are releasing what they claim is a rather complete "recipe"; this should hopefully lead to independent replication, hopefully by sceptics and hopefully many more replications.
  - leaveyou 11y ago
    "It's impossible to replicate" especially if you don't want to. There always was and still is a very strange negative fervor around this topic on hacker news and if everything goes well I think we should probably dig up all those excessively negative and accusative posts and ask for a follow up. I still remember those "This is a scam ! Rossi is a fraud !" even if no one was asked to invest and no one complained of being defrauded and all the public demonstrations were "obviously flawed" and everyone knew how to measure excess heat better than Rossi.
    - Oletros 11y ago
      > "It's impossible to replicate" especially if you don't want to. Let's start the conspiracy theories > There always was and still is a very strange negative fervor around this topic on hacker news Strange? When there is no single proof of it, even by the ones stating that it works and there is no single plausible theory then there is nothing strange in the negative comments about that
      - leaveyou 11y ago
        yep, denial mode. there is no proof. no one is credible. it's a scam. there is no theory. things didn't happen before we had theory for them. what a bunch of scientific bigots.
        Oletros 11y ago
        Yes, or it is a conspiracy or people is in denial. How luck we are for having people like you that can see the light. Time to move on and stop wasting time with such nonsense
clort 11y ago
In fact, if this is replicated by independent engineers and they just published the actual method required.. it seems that Rossi will have lost claim to any money he could have made by actually making these devices or patenting them. I guess that nobody will need him, nor will they need to pay him any money to use the idea.
- paulhart 11y ago
  He has a (US) patent already. https://www.google.com/patents/US9115913 https://www.google.com/patents/US9115913
  - api 11y ago
    If they have patents, why don't they publish a real scientific article on this with all the information needed to replicate? This stuff is permanently in my 'put up or shut up' category, and putting up means true independent open replication by more than one party.
    - pknight 11y ago
      A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted. Which is kind of an interesting thing in an of itself. I think for controversial stuff, you simply won't get scientists to budge no matter how transparent or rigorious the reporting. If the stuff turns out to be true, there will be a long delay before acceptance. I no longer believe that open replications make much difference either (there have been open replications and I still don't know anything more). They are focussed on industrial and consumer installations instead. I'll start really believing if people are using this in the real world and that's the strategy they have I think. So wait and see is what I do.
      - xenophonf 11y ago
        A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted A/K/A the scientific process, which is why experimental scientists publishing results with 5-sigma confidence intervals also painstakingly account for all of the different ways they could have screwed up, e.g., the recent gravitational waves paper, the Higgs boson discovery, etc. It goes the other way, like those guys who thought they might have discovered FTL neutrinos (but it turned out to be errors in either the apparatus or their analysis, I can't remember which). And there being a real-world production with industrial and customer installations doesn't guarantee the absence of snake oil. How many millions of dollars were squandered on the ADE 651? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
anoonmoose 11y ago
Off-topic but related: Lately I've been following the newest installment of the Steorn saga, and this E-Cat technology popped up in my travels. Some background: this company Steorn has been claiming to have made over-unity/free energy/whatever devices for some years now, but for some reason they never actually deliver. Well, this time, they took a bunch of pre-orders for, basically, a cell phone charger with unlimited life, and they even sent a few out. The only confirmed delivered unit has been to the owner of an E-Cat news blog. It has been extremely amusing to watch the owner of the blog and the readers come up with justifications for why their unit doesn't work. Funny stuff, if you think free energy idiocy is as funny as I do. http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/02/24/ecw-ocube-testing-week-3-thread/ http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/02/24/ecw-ocube-testing-week-...
mikeash 11y ago
Why is this so difficult? Isolate the machine in a box where the only connection to the outside world is two wires. Draw power from those wires until you've pulled more energy than any known storage system could possibly provide. Boom, done. Of course, my question is rhetorical. The answer is obvious: it doesn't work. If it worked, it would be easy to demonstrate.
- readams 11y ago
  That actually doesn't work, as there's a long history of people hiding batteries in their fake overunity devices. You can also have devices that might have other forms of stored energy that might be slowly depleted, such as mechanical strain being relieved, chemical reactions taking place, etc. You can also have devices that work by taking advantage of solar power in a subtle way or other external effects.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    This thing is supposedly a fusion device. Run it until you've drawn more energy than could possibly be provided by burning an equivalent mass of hydrogen, and then you know it must be a nuclear effect. If it can't provide that much energy, then it's a worthless fusion device. I can accept that such a test may not be totally 100% definitive. But if the device is real then it could definitely pass. The fact that they're fucking around instead of just doing the obvious shows that they're full of it. Edit: regarding potential external effects, these devices are supposed to put out a megawatt of power. There's no solar trickery that's going to let you fake that.
    - admax88q 11y ago
      Yes, random internet guy has the answer. > If it can't provide that much energy, then it's a worthless fusion device. A fusion device that produces more energy than you put in but doesn't produce a shit ton of energy right now is a useful breakthough in fusion.
      - drjesusphd 11y ago
trhway 11y ago
even unrolling 3M tape generates X-rays. https://youtu.be/LQBjRF9mX1Y?t=250 https://youtu.be/LQBjRF9mX1Y?t=250 I as anybody want the cold fusion to work (and i believe that palladium experiment 20 years ago did work, and that there is something to their approach), yet "medical" X-rays from heated hydrogen gas/Li/Ni interface doesn't struck as something unexpected or pointing to any physics outside of chemistry and EM.
aetherson 11y ago
I'm genuinely curious as to why HN so regularly has articles about various "wouldn't it be great if this worked but obviously it never will" scams/inventions/measurement errors on the front page. Is it because there is a contingent of HN voters who are true believers in this stuff? Is it "point at the silly people and laugh"? Is it some kind of attempt to make a meta point about credulity or discuss scams or something?
- pjkundert 11y ago
  I'm actually surprised at the "Hmph. Of course, it doesn't work" responses... I was quite intrigued by the Gamma signature from a device operating at bench-top temperatures/pressures, and with low energy inputs. I'm thinking that the mounting evidence for a set of previously undescribed low-energy nuclear pathways is quite interesting!
- guscost 11y ago
  Maybe all of those are a factor. Personally, while I try to maintain skepticism about big claims like this, I don't like to dismiss an idea offhand just because most other people have previously dismissed it. Others are probably willing to extend the same courtesy even if the particular claim is unlikely to hold. Just curious, would you put the EM drive[0] in the same category? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster
  - api 11y ago
    The EmDrive is actually less physically plausible than the E-Cat if you get into it, since reactionless propulsion is identical to perpetual motion and/or infinite energy. Someone had a nice explanation of this over on Reddit but I don't have a link handy. Basically if momentum is not conserved then you can build kinetic energy without bound on finite power or something like that. The only way the EmDrive could work is if either (a) we are really wrong about some fundamental stuff, or (b) it's not actually reactionless but is pushing against something "exotic" like dark matter or dark energy. E-Cat or anything like it (LENR) would mean new nuclear physics -- some way of bypassing the Coulomb barrier at low energies via some novel probably quantum mechanism. But fundamentally it's not violating anything as foundational as a conservation law. We know the energy is there via E=mc^2 and all. We just don't currently know of any way to get at that energy at sub-plasma temperatures and pressures (and for the proposed fusion reaction in the E-Cat, by no known physical means). LENR would require new physics but would not break existing physics. I do recall reading some interesting stuff about how some of the gas giant planets seem a bit warmer than they should be, and that if LENR were a thing it would provide a possible explanation for some anomalous heating observed in astronomical observations.
tetraverse 11y ago
So, what happens if you disconnect the electrical power input and connect the output back into the input. The device should continue to run for a measurably period until the 'cold-fusion' fuel is expended. "The measurements of electrical power input were performed with a large bandwidth three-phase power analyzer. Data were collected during 32 days of running in March 2014. The reactor operating point was set to about 1260 oC in the first half of the run, and at about 1400 °C in the second half. The measured energy balance between input and output heat yielded a COP factor of about 3.2 and 3.6 for the 1260 oC and 1400 oC runs, respectively." http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor-verified-by-third-party-researchers-seems-to-have-1-million-times-the-energy-density-of-gasoline http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reacto...
maxxxxx 11y ago
The E-cat definitely triggers all my bullshit detectors. Has there ever been a case where somebody had this fantastic invention but never let anybody take a close look but the invention was actually legitimate? The only one I can think of is the Wright brothers who didn't show their flyer for years until the patents were finished.
- brudgers 11y ago
  Greek fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire
SaberTail 11y ago
I'm not sure what they're trying to show with their gamma ray spectra. To me, they all look like a potassium-40 peak (at 1460 keV), with a bunch of Compton scattering at lower energies.

46 points by pjkundert 11y ago

"E-Cat" is short for "Energy Catalyzation" which is more or less cold-fusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

clock_tower 11y ago
Thanks. I was wondering what this was about; my best guess was the CueCat from one of Joel Spolsky's old columns...
- emcrazyone 11y ago
  hahaha, I was thinking the exact same thing, literally cue cat and all too. Even funnier is my undergrad degree was, originally, applied physics before switching to EE. I follow science when I can but boy do I feel out of the loop sometimes. Reading your post gave me a nice chuckle.
  - clock_tower 11y ago
    Glad you liked it! I just checked, and CueCats are as low as $7 on eBay. Barcode readers convert barcodes to plaintext (and barcode printers go the other way), so CueCats are good for more than just scanning ads... I wonder if there's room for a CueCat Users' Group. :)

readams 11y ago

Note that the "replication" seems to have been done by an organization that had set out specifically to produce this result and not by any sort of reputable scientists or lab. The announcement here is on the web site of a pro-E-cat book. Needless to say, don't start celebrating the birth of the overunity era quite yet.

tankenmate 11y ago
What makes me most happy here is that they are releasing what they claim is a rather complete "recipe"; this should hopefully lead to independent replication, hopefully by sceptics and hopefully many more replications.
- leaveyou 11y ago
  "It's impossible to replicate" especially if you don't want to. There always was and still is a very strange negative fervor around this topic on hacker news and if everything goes well I think we should probably dig up all those excessively negative and accusative posts and ask for a follow up. I still remember those "This is a scam ! Rossi is a fraud !" even if no one was asked to invest and no one complained of being defrauded and all the public demonstrations were "obviously flawed" and everyone knew how to measure excess heat better than Rossi.
  - Oletros 11y ago
    > "It's impossible to replicate" especially if you don't want to. Let's start the conspiracy theories > There always was and still is a very strange negative fervor around this topic on hacker news Strange? When there is no single proof of it, even by the ones stating that it works and there is no single plausible theory then there is nothing strange in the negative comments about that
    - leaveyou 11y ago
      yep, denial mode. there is no proof. no one is credible. it's a scam. there is no theory. things didn't happen before we had theory for them. what a bunch of scientific bigots.
      - Oletros 11y ago
        Yes, or it is a conspiracy or people is in denial. How luck we are for having people like you that can see the light. Time to move on and stop wasting time with such nonsense

clort 11y ago

In fact, if this is replicated by independent engineers and they just published the actual method required.. it seems that Rossi will have lost claim to any money he could have made by actually making these devices or patenting them. I guess that nobody will need him, nor will they need to pay him any money to use the idea.

paulhart 11y ago
He has a (US) patent already. https://www.google.com/patents/US9115913 https://www.google.com/patents/US9115913
- api 11y ago
  If they have patents, why don't they publish a real scientific article on this with all the information needed to replicate? This stuff is permanently in my 'put up or shut up' category, and putting up means true independent open replication by more than one party.
  - pknight 11y ago
    A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted. Which is kind of an interesting thing in an of itself. I think for controversial stuff, you simply won't get scientists to budge no matter how transparent or rigorious the reporting. If the stuff turns out to be true, there will be a long delay before acceptance. I no longer believe that open replications make much difference either (there have been open replications and I still don't know anything more). They are focussed on industrial and consumer installations instead. I'll start really believing if people are using this in the real world and that's the strategy they have I think. So wait and see is what I do.
    - xenophonf 11y ago
      A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted A/K/A the scientific process, which is why experimental scientists publishing results with 5-sigma confidence intervals also painstakingly account for all of the different ways they could have screwed up, e.g., the recent gravitational waves paper, the Higgs boson discovery, etc. It goes the other way, like those guys who thought they might have discovered FTL neutrinos (but it turned out to be errors in either the apparatus or their analysis, I can't remember which). And there being a real-world production with industrial and customer installations doesn't guarantee the absence of snake oil. How many millions of dollars were squandered on the ADE 651? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651

anoonmoose 11y ago

Off-topic but related: Lately I've been following the newest installment of the Steorn saga, and this E-Cat technology popped up in my travels. Some background: this company Steorn has been claiming to have made over-unity/free energy/whatever devices for some years now, but for some reason they never actually deliver. Well, this time, they took a bunch of pre-orders for, basically, a cell phone charger with unlimited life, and they even sent a few out. The only confirmed delivered unit has been to the owner of an E-Cat news blog. It has been extremely amusing to watch the owner of the blog and the readers come up with justifications for why their unit doesn't work. Funny stuff, if you think free energy idiocy is as funny as I do. http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/02/24/ecw-ocube-testing-week-3-thread/ http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/02/24/ecw-ocube-testing-week-...

mikeash 11y ago

Why is this so difficult? Isolate the machine in a box where the only connection to the outside world is two wires. Draw power from those wires until you've pulled more energy than any known storage system could possibly provide. Boom, done. Of course, my question is rhetorical. The answer is obvious: it doesn't work. If it worked, it would be easy to demonstrate.

readams 11y ago
That actually doesn't work, as there's a long history of people hiding batteries in their fake overunity devices. You can also have devices that might have other forms of stored energy that might be slowly depleted, such as mechanical strain being relieved, chemical reactions taking place, etc. You can also have devices that work by taking advantage of solar power in a subtle way or other external effects.
- mikeash 11y ago
  This thing is supposedly a fusion device. Run it until you've drawn more energy than could possibly be provided by burning an equivalent mass of hydrogen, and then you know it must be a nuclear effect. If it can't provide that much energy, then it's a worthless fusion device. I can accept that such a test may not be totally 100% definitive. But if the device is real then it could definitely pass. The fact that they're fucking around instead of just doing the obvious shows that they're full of it. Edit: regarding potential external effects, these devices are supposed to put out a megawatt of power. There's no solar trickery that's going to let you fake that.
  - admax88q 11y ago
    Yes, random internet guy has the answer. > If it can't provide that much energy, then it's a worthless fusion device. A fusion device that produces more energy than you put in but doesn't produce a shit ton of energy right now is a useful breakthough in fusion.
    - drjesusphd 11y ago

trhway 11y ago

even unrolling 3M tape generates X-rays. https://youtu.be/LQBjRF9mX1Y?t=250 https://youtu.be/LQBjRF9mX1Y?t=250 I as anybody want the cold fusion to work (and i believe that palladium experiment 20 years ago did work, and that there is something to their approach), yet "medical" X-rays from heated hydrogen gas/Li/Ni interface doesn't struck as something unexpected or pointing to any physics outside of chemistry and EM.

aetherson 11y ago

I'm genuinely curious as to why HN so regularly has articles about various "wouldn't it be great if this worked but obviously it never will" scams/inventions/measurement errors on the front page. Is it because there is a contingent of HN voters who are true believers in this stuff? Is it "point at the silly people and laugh"? Is it some kind of attempt to make a meta point about credulity or discuss scams or something?

pjkundert 11y ago
I'm actually surprised at the "Hmph. Of course, it doesn't work" responses... I was quite intrigued by the Gamma signature from a device operating at bench-top temperatures/pressures, and with low energy inputs. I'm thinking that the mounting evidence for a set of previously undescribed low-energy nuclear pathways is quite interesting!
guscost 11y ago
Maybe all of those are a factor. Personally, while I try to maintain skepticism about big claims like this, I don't like to dismiss an idea offhand just because most other people have previously dismissed it. Others are probably willing to extend the same courtesy even if the particular claim is unlikely to hold. Just curious, would you put the EM drive[0] in the same category? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster
- api 11y ago
  The EmDrive is actually less physically plausible than the E-Cat if you get into it, since reactionless propulsion is identical to perpetual motion and/or infinite energy. Someone had a nice explanation of this over on Reddit but I don't have a link handy. Basically if momentum is not conserved then you can build kinetic energy without bound on finite power or something like that. The only way the EmDrive could work is if either (a) we are really wrong about some fundamental stuff, or (b) it's not actually reactionless but is pushing against something "exotic" like dark matter or dark energy. E-Cat or anything like it (LENR) would mean new nuclear physics -- some way of bypassing the Coulomb barrier at low energies via some novel probably quantum mechanism. But fundamentally it's not violating anything as foundational as a conservation law. We know the energy is there via E=mc^2 and all. We just don't currently know of any way to get at that energy at sub-plasma temperatures and pressures (and for the proposed fusion reaction in the E-Cat, by no known physical means). LENR would require new physics but would not break existing physics. I do recall reading some interesting stuff about how some of the gas giant planets seem a bit warmer than they should be, and that if LENR were a thing it would provide a possible explanation for some anomalous heating observed in astronomical observations.

tetraverse 11y ago

So, what happens if you disconnect the electrical power input and connect the output back into the input. The device should continue to run for a measurably period until the 'cold-fusion' fuel is expended. "The measurements of electrical power input were performed with a large bandwidth three-phase power analyzer. Data were collected during 32 days of running in March 2014. The reactor operating point was set to about 1260 oC in the first half of the run, and at about 1400 °C in the second half. The measured energy balance between input and output heat yielded a COP factor of about 3.2 and 3.6 for the 1260 oC and 1400 oC runs, respectively." http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor-verified-by-third-party-researchers-seems-to-have-1-million-times-the-energy-density-of-gasoline http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reacto...

maxxxxx 11y ago

The E-cat definitely triggers all my bullshit detectors. Has there ever been a case where somebody had this fantastic invention but never let anybody take a close look but the invention was actually legitimate? The only one I can think of is the Wright brothers who didn't show their flyer for years until the patents were finished.

brudgers 11y ago
Greek fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire

SaberTail 11y ago

I'm not sure what they're trying to show with their gamma ray spectra. To me, they all look like a potassium-40 peak (at 1460 keV), with a bunch of Compton scattering at lower energies.