Edmund Storms writes, > Personally I do not believe all that is claimed, even in cold fusion :-).
Instead of "even in cold fusion" some observers might "even" be inclined to opine "espeically"... as that genius Bob Park does on a regular basis - but in this case, there is some reason for me to believe that Szpak et al. are indeed exactly on-target. > I have seen such "boulders" on metal samples that clearly result > from the environment. If what Szpak has located in this image were purely a one-of-a-kind, singularity type of thing, instead of something which was not uncommon in the work, then yes you could be right. But I do not think that they would have taken the time to present it this way, if they did not think that this feature was *normal* to their expeiment. One must assume that they took the necessary precautions to avoid contamination, since they do mention this factor as an alternative explanation... for the skeptics to fall back on (they are diplomatic, one should add)... > The normal environment has all kinds of small > particles floating in the air, which can land on a sample and be > completely unnoticed until after the experiment. Perhaps this could explain a single instance, or it could explain abnormally sloppy work, which is hopefully NOT your implication, I am assuming. It all gets back to whether this phenomenon is a regular feature of their work or not. If they said that it is, then I would be inclined to suggest that a proper resolution of the anomaly would NOT relate to environmental contamination. > As you point out, it > makes no sense for transmutation products to move from where they are > produced to form a boulder. This defies the concept of entropy. I hope that I wasn't misconstrued on this. My intent may have been just the opposite... What is wrong with "defying" the poorly understood concept of "entropy" anyway? Sure, this experiment defies entropy in several other ways - for one, in exactly the same way that LENR defies the concept of entropy. IOW it presents a such a clear violation, such as hot-nuclear energy itself once presented, that the violation in itself forces the pedagogues who believe in "entropy" to go back to the drawing board and redefine it... to save face, if nothing else. Entropy has been already revised more than once, for instance to NOT inlcude the hot version of nuclear energy - and now this work, and ZPE also becomes just a further invitation to revise the 'entropy concept' further to include a "bulk transmutation" BEC-like effect which can occur in energy-neutral fashion, and in a rather large particulates consisting of many atoms. If you have a BEC-like reaction, it will seldom involve on a few atoms. Not ot mention that any of regular BEC has entropy violating issues which have nto been adequately addressed. I think that you are failing to grasp the critical point that can possibly explain the Szpak results ... that when a BEC-like QM reaction occurs at all, it usually IS a bulk energy-near-neutral type of reaction, not confined to 'pair of particles' or even a few particles. When you have the QM wave functions involved, as with the putative bulk reaction [Pd106 + D --> Cd1098 ---> four Al27 + four (*e-)] then this can occur in the normal Pd nanaoparticle as a unit, and if energy neutral, you do indeed end up with a "boulder" - entropy-be-damned. But of course, one must first buy-into the concept of a BEC-like reaction. Jones
