Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
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.
Ah. CR-39 is opaque. You mean looking around it, from another angle.
An IR camera focused on the cathode will see heat very blurry through
the water I think, but you cannot tell the difference between blurry
cold fusion heat and electrolysis heat. You can if you are focused on
the back surface of the cathode through air, not water. Cold fusion
heat appears in small hot spots much hotter than the surroundings. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/Collections/USNavy.htm
http://lenr-canr.org/Collections/SzpakIR.wmv
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.
Why go to the trouble to make specifically designed instruments to
convince a few amateurs? Just have 5 or 10 professionals do it with
proper off-the-shelf instruments, which they already have.
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.
Bypassing them to accomplish what? What is your ultimate purpose? You
are not going to trigger any funding or research in cold fusion
unless you find a way to persuade more professional scientists.
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?
The chances of reaching a politician's kid is 1 in a million. You
might as well buy a lottery ticket. In any case, no politician will
stick his neck out for cold fusion, no matter what his kid tells him.
The only thing he will do under any conditions is ask a professional
scientist for an "evaluation," and I can tell you what the scientist
will say, word-for-word, in my sleep. I have heard it a thousand times before!
You have to realize, professional politicians such as Gore, Cheney
and the Japanese Minister of Education and Science have met with and
discussed cold fusion with highly credentialed professional
scientists who are way more convincing than their own children. These
people have semi-technical backgrounds and I expect they understood
these briefings better than the average man on the street. Gore, for
example, really did make important contributions to the Internet and
he really did understand the technical issues, although he was
writing legislation not telephony protocols. I expect he wrote large
parts of his book, which is technically correct in every respect with
regard to energy. There is no question in my mind that he understands
the significance of the reaction that produces megajoules per mole
without chemical transformations. These people know there is a great
deal of evidence in favor of cold fusion. Yet none of them was
willing to lift a finger to allow experiments. They will not risk one
nanogram of their own credibility, or go out on a limb for a small
group of scientists. They realize that if they do that they will be
attacked by many other scientists.
You have not experienced what I'm talking about, because it's never been done.
People have attempted to do what you are trying to do, albeit not
with this technique, but they failed because it was technically
impossible and because there were no potential customers. Also there
are laws about shipping chemicals around, and you can't let kids mess
with electrochemistry at home nowadays.
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.
I'll do both. For the kids, see:
http://lenr-canr.org/Experiments.htm#HighSchoolStudents
And look up the papers by them, Lee, Pederson, Zimmerman et al. such
as The Quest for Excess, which is one of the better titles in our collection:
http://lenr-canr.org/Experiments.htm#HighSchoolStudents
For the editor of Sci. Am., see:
http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#SciAmSlam
This is also word-for-word what Sec. of Energy Steven Chu or any
other high muckety-muck will say when a Congressman asks him to
evaluate cold fusion. Chu's only comment about CF on the record,
recently, was as disparaging as you would expect. He will not devote
5 minutes to the topic, unless he happens to know someone in the
field such as Storms or Duncan, or he happened to watch the 60
Minutes program and he paid attention.
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.
I do not know what you are talking about. I have met the people from
SPAWAR many times and read every paper they published. I have NEVER,
NEVER seen them claim that the experiment is easy. I can't imagine
where you get that idea. Heck, washing glassware in electrochemistry
is difficult. I have seen people at Hokkaido U. spend all afternoon doing that.
Yes, obviously cold fusion is difficult to reproduce. It has not
gotten any easier since 1989. On the contrary, it has gotten harder
and requires more expertise. As I said, this is similar to the fact
that it takes more knowledge to make a cell phone than a circa 1876
telephone, or a NiCad battery compared to Volta's battery. It is more
reproducible only if you can take advantage of the expertise has been
developed at ENEA, Santoku, the NRL in Washington, or at some other
lab where they have learned to make effective materials. The people
at Santoku have been making similar materials for 70 years. You are
not going to pick up their skills at home in your spare time. If you
want some of that stuff, you need to either talk Santoku or find the
best nano-materials people in the U.S. you can, and try to persuade
them to make some. (I am doing that, with cooperation and sample
materials from Santoku.)
If it were easy, everyone would have done it years ago and we would
have cold fusion powered cars by now. The political opposition could
not have stalled it this long if it were easy to reproduce.
- Jed
