At 09:22 PM 9/8/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
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.
Jed, you are stuck. Please read carefully. I didn't ask about the
CR-39, I asked about the camera looking through it.
Then the cell would be sent off to the Company, which would dismantle
it and recover the palladium for recycling, etc., and send the CR-39
to be professionally etched and imaged. The customer gets the chip
back, etched, and the image, and the Project gets the image as well,
and, if the customer in enrolled in the automatic data submission
program, the Project also has the camera images and other data
collected as well.
You said "nothing." Now that you understand the question, are you so
confident of that answer?
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.
Yes. And, by the way, some electronic methods might be adaptable for
home use, it's a possible avenue to explore. Off-the shelf is cheaper
for small quantities, but a specially engineered approach is cheaper
for larger quantities.
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
I'll check it. I'm obviously very interested in "failures." There is
no such thing as a failure if the experimental conditions were
carefully recorded, the results were recorded and made available and
not merely thrown away, and especially if the experimenter is
available for later questions. "Did you by any chance wash out your
cell with water before running it? We found that this poisons the
effect, we had to blah blah and run the cell below X% humidity."
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.)
Jed, you've mistaken "kludge," which is what one does with
prototypes, with the idea that a kludged set-up would be used to
convince people. No, the commercial cells would be industrial
products, designed specifically for what is needed and inexpensive
compared to multipurpose instruments designed for a very different
set of conditions, and typically for a broad set of conditions.
Just remember what the pioneers in nuclear physics worked with. It
was all "kludges."
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.
But other professionals can buy a kit for themselves. Or someone can
buy one and donate it to them....
Consider this. We make 50 kits, to obsessively documented
specifications. All the same, with regard to every characteristic
where there is any evidence at all for effect on the results. We
might make dummy cells of various kinds, too. We put together five
basic setups for a demonstration, say, CR-39. We identify fifty
people willing to try it. Not professionals necessarily. But the
software does report everything to us automatically. Each person gets
the kit for a month, they return it at the end of this time. (They
may have to put up a deposit....) After ten months, we have tested
fifty cells. What do the results look like? We've already done
everything we can imagine to make these cells likely to work, based
on consultation with people who have made cells work. We've already
tried one or a few, and they worked. We saw the important effect.
Those people advising us don't have to agree with each other. *We
want their experience.* The actual Company (or companies, there can
be more than one, but it's more efficient if there is one, i.e., if
people who participate can agree) will be controlled by the
investors, in a roughly traditional way, though we might tweak it a
little. (Legally, I presume, it will be a for-profit corporation,
though it might be owned, partially or fully, by a nonprofit). The
people with experience will serve as advisors, unless they want to
put in some cash or labor!
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.
Yes. That is why, Jed, I'm bypassing these entirely. We don't need
the journalists, for example. Some will help, as I'm sure you expect.
But we will also buy advertising, when it's time.
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.
What happens when tha politician's son's son has run a kit for a
science fair project and the dad tells his father about it?
Not necessarily anything, by the way. But the next time the "expert"
tells this politician that this is all bogus and only believed in by
complete fanatics, the politician takes it personally.... and gets fired up.
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.
You've missed the point. Your expectations are of the same value as
the expectations of the nuclear physicists with respect to the
condensed matter environment. They didn't have experience with it.
But they still had opinions. You have not experienced what I'm
talking about, because it's never been done. Yet, indeed, you have
strong opinions. That's fine, your opinions are welcome. But your
*actual experience* is even more welcome. I contest only your
conclusions; you might even be right about them, but I doubt it.
Again, you've seized on "kludged." In the end, the images will just
be images, the camera won't matter. You are assuming we are trying to
convince the powerful. No. Backwards. We (that is, I and those who
join me in this) are trying to build buzz, from the bottom. There are
others working on high-level stuff, and God bless them. Krivit's
being published; it's a bit sad that the journal is so much
off-the-path, but it's better than nothing, and the ACS Sourcebook
series is way better than nothing.
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.
Can you point me to those results? For the kids, not the intelligence
test for the editor of SciAm.
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!
In other words, the buzz from the SPAWAR work is Wrong. And the
critic's claim that cold fusion is difficult to reproduce is true.
Note that a reasonable success rate, shown in a series of experiments
with similar conditions, basically the same experiment, would be
quite adequate. A big problem with the field is that there hasn't
been this broad reproduction *of the same experiment,* the critics
correctly note that results are all over the map, as a result.
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.
Yes. Jed, you aren't reading carefully. I'm talking about now, not 1989.
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).
We don't mind the engineering documentation for our kits to run to
several hundred pages. You've mistaken the difficulty of the work
*we* do for difficulty that will be experienced by our customers. If
SPAWAR can make cells that work for them, and if their experience is
available to us (will it be? I don't know), then *we* can make kits
that will work for our customers. Have they been cherry-picking their
reported data?
I'd be disappointed, for sure.
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.
Since you are sure, can you report *in detail* why you are so sure?
Where does the difficulty lie?
I know of some pitfalls. There are different manufacturers of CR-39,
and different sources have different characteristics. However, that
problem won't be serious for us -- unless a manufacturer changes
their specifications or batch process. We'll test the material, I
assume, each batch, possibly each sheet if we buy big sheets.
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.
"I've been trying to convince," therefore you will fail. Nice logic.
Except, Jed, I'm not trying to convince anyone, not even you. I'm
describing what I see, what I envision. People will buy it or not. I
might talk to a hundred people, and it's enough if one buys it. It
gets easier if it's more, that's all.
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.
There are ways, Jed. That's a difficulty for the company, not for the
buyer. Yeah, I've already expected that this stuff couldn't be
mailed, ordinarily. It's only money, Jed, and, in this case, not a
lot. I haven't investigated details, but I do suspect that the cells
themselves, which will probably be pre-loaded with electrolyte, I
imagine (thus eliminating a whole class of possible experimenter
error), will be shippable. What you've just done, Jed, is describe a
difficulty that is an obstacle for an individual, but not much of one
for a company.
I keep telling you, nobody has tried anything like this before, at
least not that I've heard of!, every commercial effort was in a very,
very different direction, the
invest-a-pile-of-money-and-get-filthy-rich-We-promise direction.
Those opportunities might exist, Jed, but that's not this project.
The plan is to succeed without requiring new science or seriously new
engineering.
One of my long-term slogans: If we are going to change the world, it
has to be easy.
