Mats,
Nice effort. Your piece will be poignant lesson to mainstream physics – should Holmlid be shown to be correct - that physics is still in its infancy. Notice that the focus could now be shifting to Holmlid and a few others, and away from Rossi. Rossi filled a void in a way that only a showman can, but he has not added anything substantive to our understanding of what is going on – other than a reassurance that the mainstream was wrong about LENR. In fact, historians may conclude that Rossi’s constant level of disinformation has done more harm than good, in terms of advancing an accurate understanding of the field. There is far more out there which we don’t know, compared to what we think we know. It is almost criminal to have thrown obscene amounts of money at problems like the Higgs (what a waste!). Those funds are better solved by more closely examining what has been known and rejected for 25 years. What Holmlid has done (two+ decades after P&F) without much help, should have been done at Stanford, MIT, LLNL, etc in 1990-92 and would probably have been - had a few hundred million been invested immediately, instead of retained by arrogant know-it-alls, in the massively redundant boondoggle of hot fusion. When the identical coin is found in two places, under the streetlight and a couple of blocks away, by accident in the dark – then we can say we have finally understood that the Universe is far more complex than anyone wants to believe. The LENR community may have been in the dark about many things, but without unwavering persistence - in pursuing a vision quest, we would not be on the verge of success. Many think we are on the door step now, but be careful what you wish for. That door could open to more than energy independence. From: Mats Lewan Jones, I tried to express a similar concept in a more 'popular' way in this blog post: http://animpossibleinvention.com/2015/02/10/time-to-dispel-the-streetlight-paradox-of-energy/ Bottom line -- sooner or later, efficient access to energy stored in matter will make scarcity of energy be a non-issue. Mats 23 okt 2015 kl. 19:19 skrev "Jones Beene" <jone...@pacbell.net>: A provocative question: If we accept Holmlid’s research suggesting dense metallic hydrogen can be disintegrated by a laser pulse; and therefore – that this reaction can return mass-energy of about 6x10^23 GeV per mole of hydrogen, then what is the value of this fuel? This amounts to about 10^14 Joules per gram. Or stated another way, how much value -added to hydrogen gas - will the market allow for the ultimate fuel (which, after all, is the energy equivalent of matter-antimatter)? As the field of “cold spallation” evolves, perhaps we should become prepared for a scenario where hydrogen (from water-splitting) is converted into dense hydrogen using robotics in giant factories - and sold to the highest bidder – which of course is NASA and DoD. Of course, it will heavily taxed and be illegal to produce at the home Lab, due to profits to be reaped by Daddy Warbucks. That will not stop vorticians and assorted alternative-energy scofflaws from making a few nanograms here and there (the new moonshine?). Imagine NASA redesigning the Space Shuttle to burn dense hydrogen. This gives us an idea of its value to the highest bidder. The Space Shuttle weighed 165,000 pounds empty. Its external tank weighed 78,100 pounds and its two solid rocket boosters weighed 185,000 pounds empty, each. If – with the switch to dense hydrogen, the takeoff weight could be reduced to essentially the Shuttle itself plus extra shielding, then a reduction of say 75% in mass happens off the top – making the Shuttle lighter than most passenger planes. Suddenly, it becomes feasible to take off horizontally from an airstrip instead of vertical lift-off, even with the extra weight for gamma shielding. Each solid rocket Shuttle booster held 1.1 million pounds of fuel- LOX mass 1.39 million pounds. LH2 mass: 234,000 pounds. Total fuel mass was almost 3.85 million pounds. Total energy available 3.4x10^12 joules. Cost per launch – don’t ask. As you may notice, the shuttle required less energy to reach orbit than can be extracted from that gram of dense hydrogen when fully disintegrated ! Whoa. No wonder there are a few skeptics out there, present company included. Kind of ironic that the first skeptics of cold spallation are the basically the same individuals who complain so loudly about the skepticism of cold fusion. J Bottom line, there is a good argument that dense hydrogen (assuming Holmlid is right) will be the most valuable commodity of the next decade… is this the “next big thing” or has yours-truly been sampling moonshine of the retro-variety?
