At 12:04 AM 9/9/2009, [email protected] wrote:
In reply to Abd ul-Rahman Lomax's message of Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:58:43 -0400:
Hi,
[snip]
How are you going to judge the results? I assume that from a whole
swag of test
kits, the results will vary from no tracks / cm^2 to perhaps 100 or
more / cm^2.
I have no idea what the results will look like. And, further, I'm not
the one to judge the results. What I intend is that for what might
otherwise be proprietary company data, we will release it. So how to
judge the results can't be predicted at this point, except as
practically pure speculation. I'd imagine that each "judge" will
decide for himself or herself, and if someone writes up a report,
they will judge, and so will any editor or peer reviewer.
So there will be more judges than customers.
Do you then say that there was a CF reaction in the kits where there many
tracks, or is this just cherry picking?
I'm not interested in whether or not there is a CF reaction. I'm
interested in experimental phenomena that might be of interest to
others. Suppose many of these kits show tracks that look like SPAWAR
tracks. Wouldn't that be interesting? Perhaps someone would take a
kit and modify it a little and report a finding that the tracks are,
indeed, some unexpected kind of chemical damage. Wouldn't that be interesting?
On the other hand, suppose that tracks are correlated with other
phenomena. One of the ideas is to do helium analysis. Now, I don't
know what helium results there have been from SPAWAR codep cells;
rumor is that these cells don't run intensely enough to show solid
helium results. If, however, there is a detectable reaction product
of some kind, it becomes possible to do post-run analysis on a
boatload of cells. There is a cheap way to do this and an expensive
way. The cheap way involves categorizing cells according to initial
results, dividing them into batches according to the intensity of the
result (i.e., tracks, perhaps). Then the cell contents are blended
for each bath and helium analysis done on the batches. The expensive
way, but superior, depends on analyzing each cell.
Which would be done would depend on available funding. Because of the
implications, it's possible that some researcher with access to
helium (or whatever) analysis would do this in order to publish it.
We would know by that time if we had succeeded in replicating
SPAWAR-type codep. It's possible that we'll have triple-track
results, maybe. Remember, with many, many cells, even low levels are
significant if the entire population is examined uniformly.
Hopefully this question will emphasize the need for control experiments, which
then also raises the question, what does one do for a control?
Regards,
Robin van Spaandonk
There are several kinds of controls. With solid palladium, control is
actually easy, if the cells aren't 100% or close. In Miles' helium
work, as reported by Storms, the controls are the dead cells. As long
as everything was the same with the dead cells and the "live" ones,
finding no helium in the dead cells and helium in the live ones, is
highly significant, and certain kinds of variations wouldn't matter;
his numbers were 12 dead and 21 live with no dead helium and all live
cells showing helium except for 3. Of the 3 live showing helium, two
had a different electrode design, different materials, which is
fascinating but not conclusive about anything, and with one,
apparently there was reason to suspect the calorimetry. That was a
stunning result, given the quality of the work. It really should have
turned the tide, right then, had the scientific world been paying
attention. Now, someone tell me why Miles was an idiot, or I'm an
idiot for believing those results, I might change my mind.... but I
don't think so.
But other controls are cells where the only difference is ordinary
water instead of deuterium, i.e., the difference in deuterium
concentration is very high; cells with no electrolysis or with
different voltage/current programs; perhaps cells with magnetic or
electrostatic field or no field (we don't have the protocol yet!)
Again, if the cells themselves are cheap, and with the big expense
being the set-up (programmable power supply, instrumentation,
interface, and software), and the cells are plug-in and run, many
different variations can be tried by many different experimenters.
What I think we are likely to do is set up a standard protocol that
is the most reliable to get *some* result that is different from
basic controls. So everyone buying a kit is likely to see something.
But what the experimenters choose to do then will be up to them. Some
will choose from a menu of protocols. Some will make up their own.
Some will be amateurs, some not.
These "toys" will, in fact, make it possible for a professional to
enter the field at very low cost. Skeptics, even. Especially after we
are seeing some results and there is some buzz.
It's impossible to say what the kit prices will be at this point, the
engineering hasn't really begun. But I would imagine that individual
cells might sell for prices as low as a few dollars each. If we go
the Arata path, they will almost certainly be a lot more expensive, 7
g of palladium last I looked was worth about $50, and that's bulk
metal, not nanoparticle processed with zirconium.
I've thought that a condition of sale might be that the customer is
required to share the data from the basic protocol(s). The software
could be designed to handle this, in fact, it could automatically
transmit results. On the other hand, I generally dislike compulsion.
What occurs to me now is that donors may subsidize kits that
automatically share the results, so you pay less if you agree to
share the data. And we also watch to see if there are differences
from results submitted automatically and results submitted by those
who declined to share and paid a bit more. Wouldn't such a difference
be interesting?
