Jed Rothwell wrote:
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.
While I agree with Jed about the basic point he is making, success in replicating the cold fusion claims is not based on skill, or at least not the kind of skill Jed is noting. Success has been based on chance creation of the nuclear active environment. No one, even today, knows what this environment looks like or how to create it on purpose. Repeated success is based on having a chance success that the researcher was able to duplicate by holding the conditions constant. Naturally, because many variables are involved, not all of them can be held constant. Consequently, success is frequently marred by many failures, even for the more successful researchers. Only gradually, have some of the variables been identified. This has happened only because a few people kept trying and failing. Initially, the effect was thought to occur in bulk palladium. Consequently, great effort was devoted to obtaining palladium that could load to high D/Pd ratios. Now we know that this approach is not important. A variety of materials work and these can be applied as thin layers to inert materials. The point is that if the PAGD effect is like cold fusion, it probably can be initiated several different ways, some of which can be found by the same kind of trial and error used by the Correas.
l would also like to point out that a strict duplication is not replication. It is possible for both studies to make the same mistakes. Replication is most impressive when the same effect can be produced several different ways, each of which show that the same variables are having the same effect on the outcome. Cold fusion has passed this test. The PAGD effect has not.
"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.
Regards, Ed
- Jed
