Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: > > Consider a clear piece of CR-39 on the flat bottom of a glass cell. The > CR-39 has distinctive marks on the bottom. On top of it is a coiled-up gold > wire, resting on it. Co-deposition. Underneath the cell, looking up, is a > microscope, focused, through the CR-39, on the wire. The assembly is in a > light-tight box. What will the microscope camera see while the cell is > operating? Nothing? >
It will see nothing. The CR-39 has to be removed from the cell and etched before you see anything. During the Sicily conference Fisher gave a long talk about his efforts to use CR-39 at home. He is an experienced chemist I believe, but he struggled for months and as far as I can tell from his lecture his results were confusing and not significant. All kinds of things go wrong with CR-39. The experts spent 2 days during that conference arguing about it. The technique is fundamentally sound and in some ways superior for this particular application. But it is difficult. That is why it has been abandoned in the U.S. and Europe. More modern, real time, electronic methods are used instead. See: Fisher, J.C. *External Radiation Produced by Electrolysis -- A Work in Progress*. in *8th International Workshop on Anomalies in Hydrogen / Deuterium Loaded Metals*. 2007. Sicily, Italy. Which is where ever the Sicily papers are at ISCMNS.org They doubt that a kludged instrument is reliable and accurate. You will gain >> no credibility and they ignore you and your results. >> > > Who is "they," Jed. The skeptics? The skeptics are hopeless. You want something that will convince friendly would-be supporters. With kludged instruments and CR-39 in the hands of people like Fisher, you can't even convince *me*. (Granted I am a hard sell, because I have seen many meaningless experiments.) Who does it not convince and who does it convince? Ed's suggestion was to > make 50 kits and give them to a professional lab to test. That's not a bad > idea, but that's not, I think, where we will start. Only a professional lab will be able to do it. An amateur will produce no meaningful results. Other professionals will find lots of reasons to doubt the professional's results. > Unfortunately, professional scientists ignore such results, and -- perhaps >> even more unfortunately -- they are the people we must convince if this >> field is ever going to get anywhere. >> > > That's been your thinking for almost twenty years. Has it worked? That's not my thinking. It is the thinking of the politicians, decision makers journalists, venture capitalists and others I have spoken with. They all say: "You need to first convince my scientific experts first and then I will talk to you. As long as Prof. X of Y University tells me cold fusion is bunk, I will have nothing to do with it." Most of them are incapable of understanding the claims or judging the issue themselves, because they do not understand junior high level physics or chemistry. I am reiterating what I said here: > If we try to convince newspaper editors, government officials, the Obama >> administration, or any other non-scientists they will not understand the >> technical issues, and they will call in professional scientists and ask them >> to evaluate the results. Any result with a kludged camera in someone's house >> will automatically be given a failing grade. That's unfair but that's how >> things are. You need to deal with it. >> > > This is what you expect, Jed, but what I'm proposing has never been tried. That's what I know, not expect, because I have been trying to convince such people for 15 years without success. Very few people have spoken to as many decision makers as I have. What you are proposing might work with simpler diagnostics than CR-39, but it will not work with CR-39. The excess heat results produced by high school kids working with Prof. Dash were no convincing, but they were in the direction you want. Those kids were very smart, by the way. Way smarter and more capable than, say, the editor of the Scientific American. Just some little effect that can be reproduced. Is this hard? You seem to > think it is, Ed seems to think so. We sure do! > Well, if so, then, just as the Fleischmann work was oversold in 1989, the > ongoing work continues to be oversold. Is it? This is nonsense. Fleischmann said repeatedly, at the U.S. Congress, the EPRI NSF conference and elsewhere that this experiment is extremely DIFFICULT. Read the 1989 testimony I just uploaded. He never said, implied, or hinted anything else. I have met hundreds of electrochemists who replicated and EVERY ONE OF THEM said it is fraught with difficulties. Oriani said it was the most difficult experiment he ever did. It was difficult in 1989 and it still is. For that matter, so is building a steam engine, gourmet cooking, or programming in Pascal. Some things never get easy. There is no reason to think that cold fusion will ever be easier than, say, fabricating NiCad batteries or semiconductors. There may be a "recipe" for making CF devices someday but it will be hundreds of pages long and incomprehensible to non-experts, just like Mother Bell's Cookbook was in 1951 (a.k.a. "Transistor Technology" in two volumes). Or is it *reasonably* easy to get a SPAWAR co-deposition cell to do its > stuff? No, it is difficult. That much I am sure of. > We also need to convince dozens or hundreds of professional scientists. Not >> all of them by any means. Not a majority. But a lot more than we have now. >> . . . Perhaps the purpose of this kit is to bring in more members of the >> public, but I doubt it will succeed in doing that. >> > > Doubt. In advance. Not in advance; after the fact. I have been trying to convince people for 15 years, without success. Also, by the way, most cold fusion experiments I have seen have been rather >> dangerous and I would not want people to try this at home. >> > > Do you imagine that I haven't thought of this? Cost is not the only reason > to be small. If a cell is small enough and kept in containment, it could > blow and you'd hear a faint pop. You are worried about the wrong thing. The electrolyte and other chemicals in this experiment are toxic. People cannot even buy or ship this sort of thing anymore. Ed and others have to jump through hoops these days to get chemicals. - Jed
