Bob,
You have expressed the arguments against Holmlid's interpretation being
accurate quite well. Thanks for taking the time to do this. As I
mentioned before, these arguments can be generally condensed into "show
me more." Yet Holmlid is doing as much with small funding as can be
reasonably expected. Curiously, no one has taken the obvious approach of
reporting a failed replication. If there was a failed replication, then
deep skepticism would be more relevant.
Bottom line - in the big picture, Holmlid has presented a case for a
breakthrough which is well beyond incremental. It would be a profound
paradigm shift if accurate - of greater importance than the entire opus
of CERN with the $20 billion spent there. Even if the chances of his
results and interpretation being accurate are low, the payoff is so high
that it is mind blowing.
The DoD/DoE has invested an obscene amount of money in ICF at LLNL. It
makes no sense for them not to try to replicated.
Bob Higgins wrote:
So far, as I keep reading Holmlid's latest paper, I keep coming to a
statement, and I ask myself, "where's the support for this?" So I go
through the string of references and find illogical hand waving or
leaps of faith, but not logical support. This business of the "2.3
pm" spaced seems to still rely entirely on the particle velocities
whose measured energy has come entirely from an improbable conjecture
of "Coulombic explosion". Coloumbic potential energy would have to be
stored in the system - I.E. placed there by some process of squeezing
the atoms into some metastable state. Yet, the H(0) or D(0) state is
being portrayed as having lower Hamiltonian (total energy) than H2.
Thus, one would expect ordinary H2 gas as having tremendous Coulombic
potential energy - even more than H(0) since H2's total energy is
higher than H(0) according to Holmlid (see his figure in the latest
paper which is reproduced from his other works).
Holmlid's background is in the study of hydrogen Rydberg matter.
These condensed matter particles have a good basis in science, and
have been thoroughly characterized. Hydrogen Rydberg particles are not
dense - just the opposite. The atomic spacing in RM particles is
twice that of H2, making the local molecular density of H2 much
greater than that for RM. There have been molecular RM models created
and the rotational spectra computed and matched to observed spectra.
The basis and characterization of RM is very strong. Holmlid seems to
be trying to transfer that strong basis for RM onto his conjecture for
H(0) and D(0) with what appears to be only hand-waving - and
hand-waving with contradictory claims.
H(0) and/or D(0) are supposed to be the lowest energy state of
hydrogen condensed matter. Such a low energy state cannot be planar
like RM - though Holmlid is claiming that RM is a precursor to H(0).
In Holmlid's description of coupled D-D pairs, he describes coupled
pairs at right angles which form a tetrahedron string having an atomic
spacing of 5 pm. Evidence is claimed for matching rotational
spectroscopy (2016, "Emission spectroscopy of IR laser-induced
processes in ultra-dense deuterium"). To calculate the rotational
spectrum, you have to have a model for the entire molecule. The
spectrum will result from an eigensolution of the quantum fomulation
for rotational states. With some hand waving, some modeling was done
and some matching was found in his 2016 paper, but this is not
convincing like the work to determine the structure of the RM particles.
Basically, I cannot get past the fact that Holmlid is building a huge
castle on a foundation of sand. He has not produced a sound basis for
H(0)/D(0) that underlies all of his conjecture. His arguments of
"Coulombic explosion" don't pass the common sense test as a similar CE
of H2 should result in more energy release than H(0). How can what
is being proposed on the basis of H(0)/D(0) be taken seriously without
reasonable proof of the existence of the fundamentals?
Bob Higginswrote:
I believe there are circular arguments going on here. On the one
hand you are saying that neutral mesons are decaying into muons
(charged) far from the reactor. But also there is the claim of
fusion in his reactor, wherein many are supposing MCF. He is also
measuring charged particles in his reactor. The decay "times" are
statistical means and there will be some probability of a decay
from t = zero to infinity. That's why it is possible to see
mesons -> muons in the reactor, more outside the reactor, and more
further away from the reactor.
So, I am saying that there are meson decays going on all along the
path from the reactor. Muons should be easy to detect because they
are charged and likely to interact with the scintillator
crystal/liquid/plastic or by exciting photoelectron cascades in
the GM tube. The fact that the corresponding muons are not
detected in ordinary LENR with GM tubes and scintillators
basically means that, in LENR, mesons are not produced. They may
not be produced in Holmlid's reaction ... but I have to finish
reading the paper to understand the case he is claiming.
Jones Beenewrote:
Bob Higgins wrote:
The descriptions in 5,8) below suggests that Holmlid's
reaction produces a high muon flux that would escape the
reactor. A high muon flux would be very similar to a high
beta flux. First of all, it would seem that a flux of
charged muons would be highly absorbed in the reactor walls.
Bob - Yes, this has been the obvious criticism in the past,
but it has been addressed.
As I understand it, the muons which are detected*do not exist*
until the meson, which is the progenitor particle, is many
meters away. This makes the lack of containment of muons very
simple to understand.
At one time muons were thought to exist as neutral instead of
charged (see the reference Bob Cook sent, from 1957) but in
fact, the observers at that time, due to poor instrumentation
- were seeing neutral mesons, not muons.
As an example, a neutral Kaon decays to two muons one negative
and one positive. However, the lifetime of the Kaon which is
much shorter than the muon but still about ~10^-8 seconds
means that on average 99+% of the particles are tens to
hundreds of meters away before they decay to muons. Thus the
reactor is transparent to the progenitor particle.
This is why Holmlid places a muon detector some distance away
and then calculates the decay time. Thus he claims an
extraordinarily high flux of muons which assumes that the
detector is mapping out a small space on a large sphere.
However, they are not usable any more than neutrinos are
usable, since they start out as a neutral meson.
