Mike Carrell wrote:
. . .joules to 17,800 volts. To prevent the terminal voltage from rising to, say 100 volts, 100 farads of capactors would be needed, or 17,857 capcitors. By comparison, batteries look pretty good.
You absolutely do not use a capacitance across the tube. What you have built is a gas-discharge relaxation oscillator equivalent to any common strobe flash. It is ***not*** a PAGD reactor.
If this is the case, then Jeff has taken a serious wrong turn, and he has been wasting his time. That has often happened with cold fusion over the years. It is a terrible shame.
Message to Mike: Why can't you & Jeff get together and iron this out?
Message to Jeff: Would you be willing to try again?
Keith Nagel is probably right when he says, "practically speaking" a replication is impossible unless "Paulo participates in an active way, which he will not." That is the worst shame of all.
Evidently, cold fusion was much easier to reproduce than the pagd (assuming the pagd is real). In 1989, knowledge of electrochemistry was widespread, so even though Fleischmann and Pons were not available to go around holding other people's hands, many researchers such as Bockris, Oriani, Huggins and Miles were able to reproduce it on their own. If the necessary skills and knowledge have been as obscure as those required for the pagd, it probably would have been lost.
"Replication" is a slippery standard. When an effect is successfully replicated, you know the it is real -- simple enough. But when it is *not* replicated, it can be very difficult to judge what happened. Perhaps the effect does not exist after all. Or the people trying to replicate are making honest mistakes. Or they are only making a desultory effort. They may even be deliberately trying to prove that the effect does not exist. You would have to be a mind reader to sort out events. A replication is a clear signal from Mother Nature. A non-replication is a complicated human event, colored by understanding, knowledge, politics, emotion, and so on.
- Jed
