On Jul 20, 2009, at 5:50 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 03:21 PM 7/16/2009, Horace Heffner wrote:
The emission rate for alphas in CF experiments is very low. Some
CR-39 exposures have only a few dozen per mm^2, for a two week
experiment.
Those wouldn't be the experiments with the detector immediately
next to the electrode, if I have it right.
Yes, that's right for the most part, though if memory serves there
were experiments not having the 6 micron shield in place where the
larger (probably alpha) tracks were not dense, while the lower energy
tracks in the same areas were very dense.
I should also note that the IR temperature measurements (on which I
based my comments) and CR-39 track recording were done in separate
experiments. Normally, this could not have any meaning, but the
SPAWAR results are so consistent that I think it does have meaning.
I don't have time right now to read back through the articles, but I
think they established a 2 degree C increase in temperature of the
cathode vs the electrolyte in some experiments where tracks were
taken. This is not calorimetry, but it is an indication of excess
heat, because the resistance of the cathode is way less than the
electrolyte, and the current density is similar for both at the
surface. I suppose this is a bogus argument though, because most of
the i^2 R heating should be in the two molecule thick electrolyte-
electrode interfaces, about half at the anode, and half at the
cathode, due to the fact that's where most of the potential drop is
in the electrolyte. The argument for the hot spots visible by IR is
probably not bogus though. The argument that excess heat has been
been measured in CF experiments in general is also pretty reliable.
It would be useful to have a quantitative analysis.
Yes. One thing that would have helped a lot with the SPAWAR papers
would have been to edit in a scale in each of the micrographs, or to
publish the field of view width for each photo, rather than using the
power: 40x, 100x, etc. It appears they used the same Nikon system
for all the work, so it is pretty easy to get a feel for the scale,
however.
This kind of emission rate can be difficult to
distinguish from cosmic ray initiated background. This shows the
strengths of an integrating and particle type discriminating detector
like CR-39, vs particle counters, for low activity experiments.
Yes. If it's true, however, that there is excess heat, being
generated by reactions close to the detector, with such low
pitting, there goes Takahashi, nice while it lasted. (Unless some
other mechanism is asserted beyond Be-8 decay; for example, TSC
fusion with palladium, which might be common, followed by other
sequelae.)
I suppose this is anecdotal, but it gives the benefit of what limited
information and experience I have. In reading the early works on
transmutation one of the things that struck me was the apparent lack
of heat (and radiation for that matter) corresponding to the heavy
transmutations. It appeared to me that this might account in part for
the unreliability of the experiments, the inability to produce
repeatably excess heat or radiation of any kind. The inability to
control the proportion of heavy transmutation vs light fusions can
account for much of the variability when you consider that only
excess heat, radiation, or transmutation is (was) typically examined
in a given experiment, not all of them simultaneously. I got the
impression that the more transmutation, the less the other
signatures. This observation led me to believe that electron
catalysis must be involved in the process, especially in the
transmutation process, for reasons that follow.
A catalytic electron in an immediate post-fusion He* nucleus
essentially steals about half the energy. This is because the
electron in the pre-catalytic state retains kinetic energy due to its
proximity to the hydrogen nucleus. For convenience, I called this
pre-catalysis state a "deflated state" hydrogen. In hydrogen, even
in the lattice, the electron kinetic plus potential energy sum is
unperturbed by transitions from the deflated state to the ground
state and vice-versa. This state can thus be a coexisting (with the
ground state, or adsorbed ionic state) and thus (called) a degenerate
state of hydrogen. However, if the deflated state hydrogen and
another hydrogen nucleus merge via tunneling, bingo! The catalytic
electron only has half the kinetic energy it needs to escape the new
He* nucleus, because it has two protons, not just one. An electron
catalyzed fused nucleus thus is *de-energized* by the electron
catalysis that makes the fusion possible. In the case of D+D->He*->?
fusion, this almost totally eliminates the probability of the normal
reaction branches, which leaves only the D+D->He*->He+(photons)
branch. Because the non-orbital small wavelength electron is in the
nucleus, and thus has spin independent of its angular velocity, i.e.
it is a "free" electron, it is free to radiate in small increments
until the zero point field can re-inflate its orbital.
With that background, it is now easy to see why heavy nuclei
transmutation by cold hydrogen fusion exhibits no or very limited
free energy. The catalytic electron now has to overcome not two
nuclear charges, but many times that. It has a long half-life in the
large fused nucleus, which makes weak reactions far more probable. It
also makes multiple fusions to a highly bound nucleus state (i.e.
multiple alpha state) more probable that would otherwise be expected.
Beyond these complexities is the fact that the proximity of the
catalyzing electron to the new nucleus is a random variable, and this
distance determines the energy of the new state - it is not a fixed
energy as is the case with kinetic fusion. This is an indication of
the strong relationship cold fusion has with vacuum energy, and why
product energies can vary across a wide distribution. Energy is
returned to the vacuum when the fusion occurs, and returned from the
vacuum via electron orbital expansion if that occurs subsequently.
Both such energies are samples from random distributions. The
balance of energy involved is from the strong force.
End editorial.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
