From: Eric Walker Jones Beene wrote:
This conflict and other divergent results is leading to the only possible conclusion about LENR - that there are more than one type of reaction, possibly many similar but differing reactions - and more than one type of positive outcome. This seems likely to me. In this context people attempt to tighten up their arguments by referencing PdD or the Pons and Fleischmann effect. But I suspect the reactions involved in the F&P effect will end up being far more diverse than people anticipate when the underlying mechanisms are eventually discovered. Yes indeed, and this is why it can be helpful to consider all the present day (new) R&D such as from Holmlid, when re-evaluating and re-interpreting the old results. No one understands the basic mechanism well enough to predict outcomes; and if there are several overlapping mechanisms, say one which is quantum mechanical, one which is classical physics and one Millsean – then all of them could be operating at the same time in varying proportions or in differing ratios, any of which serve to cover up the others. There could be effective ratios of 3 mechanisms which interact say - at 8:2:1 or 4:6:3 and so on. Nearly infinite variability. If you had to pick the one common denominator – which is a universal underlying mechanism, having a required contribution to every reported experiment, it would probably be labeled as “hydrogen activation” or more precisely “hydrogen densification”… in which the electron orbital is fundamentally altered so that the atom interacts differently. This can be a temporary change with a useful lifetime and need not be permanent. The kind of activation is variable in stages of density down to metallic hydrogen (possibly as many as 137 Rydberg stages) but any of them can facilitate tunneling, spin coupling, photon absorption and eventually fusion, and everything else, like transmutation of the host. One level may work better than another and one may be exothermic while the next is endothermic. For instance, the P&F effect may depend on deuteron densification to one specific Rydberg level (based on the palladium catalysis to the first 27.2 level) which gives only helium as the ash, but Claytor uses parameters which give tritium and no exotherm, and the Dash titanium-effect will not be identical due to the depth of densification of Pd (redundancy) and will go to a different level (level 7) which can have slightly better exotherm. The palladium that works best may have a small amount of another element, say rhodium, which makes it perform differently. Arata’s gas-phase technique may result in an inverted Rydberg level in such a way that helium-3 shows up, but that level does not happen with densification via electrolysis. Ahern documented an endothermic anomaly. You can see where this is going. The difficulty of LENR as a technology, and the reason it is not understood after 27 years could easily relate to this inherent complexity in the hydrogen activation process involving electron orbital dynamics.
