Well, he has written down theoretical claims that violate most of the known laws of electrodynamics, quantum mechanics and nuclear phenomonology with no stated justification.
***The justification is the 14,000 times the excess heat Pons-Fleishmann effect has been replicated. If you do not accept that as an observational point, then you have no need to bother with digging down into the physics as KP Sinha does.
That does not make him a solid and capable scientist.
***What does make him a solid and capable scientist is all the other peer reviewed publications and what he does for a living.
I have no problem with someone claiming to discover a new principle of physics. It just has to be based upon a sound understanding of sound experimental evidence.
***Like I said, the PF effect is replicated 14,000 times. That is the experimental evidence. Sinha’s theory explains the evidence.
For instance, if Sinha wants to disprove the Heisenberg uncertainty principle he is welcome to try.
***If there is some observation that disproves it then it is legitimate to use it in a theoretical approach. The way Richard Feynman won his Nobel prize was by disregarding an accepted principle, and later on he was vindicated.
Show some data and explain why this data is at variance with all the other data on the subject.
***Start here for the data.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/FilesByDate.htm
But you don’t just trip over it ignorant of the fact that it is even there and claim you are doing physics.
***Good advice, that is, if you have been over the same data that Sinha has.
You have not been paying attention, have you. Your guys have not generated gigajoules of energy.
***http://www.pdfdocspace.com/docs/47627/cold-fusion-and-the-future.html
A typical cold fusion experiment using Seebeck calorimeter
costs roughly $50,000 including all equipment. Some have produced 50 to 300 megajoules in one run. They have achieved the two goals hot fusion has failed to reach for 60 years: breakeven and full ignition.
The Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) at the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy cost “about a billion dollars” to construct and $70 million a year to operate. It produced 6 megajoules in one experiment, the world record run for hot fusion.
A gigajoule is the equivalent of a ton of TNT. These guys have not individually or collectively detonated a ton of TNT.
***Yes they have.
They have not even released a pound of it. We would all know it if they did.
***Your assumption seems to be that much energy being released in one instant. Your assumption is invalid.
Second, hot fusion does work. We have a picture of it working. It is called Operation Greenhouse George.
***It works as a bomb, an uncontrolled release of energy. For the last 60 years we have tried to harness that huge release of energy, and the best controlled run that a $10B Tokomak reactor has attained is 6MJoules. What else have we gotten for all that effort, do we have hot-fusion cars or airplanes or water heaters? No. Your analogy of saying that fusion works because we have a fusion bomb is like saying that there’s plenty of water to drink because we have oceans.
That is not at all true. Richard Feynman earned his Nobel Prize along with Schwinger and Tomonaga for developing the theory of quantum electrodynamics, which was the first good relativistic quantum field theory that we have. Feynman's real contribution was not to discard what folks already knew, but rather to develop an idea of Dirac's which extended Hamilton's principal of least action to reexpress the physics in the Dirac equation in quantum path integral formulation. This lead to a systematic method of doing perturbation theory, commonly called "Feynman diagrams."
This enabled Feynman to reproduce and extend the nonrelativistic calculation that Bethe had done showing how to renormalize the mass of the electron to eliminate the formal divergence of certain integrals.
Feynman's methods then led to systematic efforts to understand and explain away other divergences in the perturbation theory. These techniques were later extended by Glashow Weinberg and Salaam to develop "the standard model."
He is also famous for the "Parton Model" demonstrating that if the deep inelastic scattering data off of nuclei was accurate, then protons and neutrons had to have point like sub-consituents. This was early confirmation that those who were developing the "quark model" were on the right track.
At no time did Feynman claim he was discarding already accepted physical laws,and in fact he relies thoroughly on such things as relativistic invariance, charge conservation, maxwell's laws, spin and angular momentum conservation, guage invariance, the Dirac formulation of relativistic quantum mechanics for spin 1/2 particles, etc. If you read his lectures there is almost nothing there that was not pretty well understood by the early 20th centry.
I am the last person to try to diminish Feynman's genius. But Feynman's real genius was understanding what everyone already knew to be true better than everyone else and showing what else had to be true if these things were true. His intuition for how things worked was simply better than almost anybody else.
In short, thank you for mentioning Feynman. The contrast between that great man and those arguing for LENR could not be clearer. That is exactly my point. The LENR crowd do not talk like good physicists, none of them, and the contrast with Feynman is clear demonstration of that.
You really need to pay attention. The argument of the LENR crowd is that these effects are very subtle and difficult to measure. There is nothing subtle about the energy content of a ton of TNT.
Thank you for the link to Rothwell's book. The first thing I discovered was that in order to download it I had to fill in an application to find out my credit rating.[sic!] What is up with that? Needless to say, I did not take up the invitation and just read it (skimmed it actually- reading it is too painful, like trying to read the manifesto of some leftist organization) in its inconvenient on-line format.
Here is a claim in Rothwell's book: "This cathode produced 85 megajoules of heat after death, and at least 97 megajoules during the experiment, which is enough to drive an average U.S. automobile 27 kilometers....The actual total was probably hundreds of megajoules....... cold fusion appears to fuse deuterium to produce helium, releasing heat in the same ratio as hot fusion does. The comparison ends there...A hot fusion reaction that produces a watt of heat will also generate a deadly flux of neutrons, killing all observers....
I would only note that he does not describe much less explain this difference, then going on an irrelevant digression about what is wrong with hot fusion.
And if I had something that threatened to glow red and melt-down I would not be going home at night and coming back in the morning and saving my unwitnessed claims for some future date. I would be there with camera's and video cameras and getting every colleague from 100 miles away to come witness and take measurements. I would turn the lights off and get pictures of the red glow and I would get pictures of the boiling water and I would be measuring the temperature with a pyrometer and I would have every goddamned nuclear instrument I could beg borrow or steal.