At 02:54 PM 9/9/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
I have no idea what the results will look like.
They will look like a Rorschach test. And people will interpret them
along similar lines.
Great. The kids will learn a lot about science.
I'm not interested in whether or not there is a CF reaction.
Then I see no point to this project. The only reason to an
experiment of this nature is to see a CF reaction. Otherwise you are
wasting your time.
Tell me. Suppose we come up with a kit. It shows the phenomena that
we call CF. It makes nice pits on CR-39 chips once they are etched.
Maybe it does something else, too. It's a "cold fusion cell," and not
a "dead one." And then someone, examining this closely, discovers
what is really going on, and it isn't fusion, it's something else.
Maybe nuclear, maybe not. Maybe it's hydrinos or wombats.
It would all be interesting and not a waste of time. What I'm
interested in is reproducing cold fusion *experiments*. Particularly
one, to start. The biggest bang for the buck, so to speak.
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?
An ordinary person doing these experiments the first time (such as
me) cannot tell the difference between chemical damage and a real track.
Funny, I look at the photos of tracks, and chemical damage, and they
look really, really different.
I can tell now . . . probably, but I spent two days discussing it
and I edited 5 or 10 papers. Mostly what you will see is what it
looks like when you botch the experiment. The take home message
from Fisher's lecture was that there are many ways to botch it. I
doubt many amateurs will devote 3 to 6 months full time to learning
how to do this. I doubt any of them will. And if you don't keep
plugging away every day for months, and also visit with and consult
with people who have done this, you will fail. That goes for all
cold fusion experiments I have seen. They are all roughly as
difficult as building or remodeling a house -- a job I have
commissioned and assisted with two or three times.
Again, Jed, it's like I've been talking to a wall. In a sense, the
experiment isn't being done by the person who buys the kit. In a
sense, they are just subsidizing it, paying for it, and they get to
watch it, but the experiment is being done by the engineers who
designed the kit, as advised and in interaction with the experienced
researchers, as much as they are willing to cooperate. The *company*
will plug away for months or longer, until it gets it right, as right
as can be done within the cost limitations -- which haven't been set
yet, it's way too early.
If you do not have years of experience in carpentry you will end up
with loads of mistakes and a leaking roof.
Yeah, but we are selling a total prefab. Bring it in a truck and set
it down on site. Yeah, with a house, you need a foundation. So for
these kits, they will need a level table to place the kit on.
Hopefully, it will make some instrumentation displays on their
computer, temperature, maybe pressure, voltage, current, and more.
(Especially if you have a skylight window, as I pointed out here a
few months ago. Even professionals get that wrong.) The only person
I know who managed to build a superb looking house the first time
he tried it is Edmund Storms.
Put it this way: If an amateur could do a cold fusion experiment in
his spare time, and produce a meaningful or even persuasive result,
that would be a remarkably easy experiment. Easier than any I have
heard of. We would know about that. I sure would know about it! I
would feature it at LENR-CANR.org, which is visited by ~3,000
scientists per week, and I expect many scientists would be doing it right now.
Well, then, we know where we can sell the kit! Jed, I know it's
difficult, I get it. But, I suspect, it isn't as difficult as you
think, it is only difficult when you are one person with no
experience and you try to set it up yourself. Have any of these
people who had such a hard time had a kit to buy that had been
designed *and tested* by people with the necessary experience?
Really, I'm not sure why I'm bothering, I'm getting great ideas from
some people.
The only way cold fusion will ever get "easy" is the same way other
other technologies have gotten easier over the years. Paradoxically,
they get easy by getting much harder. In the 1908 Sears Roebuck
catalog they sell books and equipment to build your own automobile.
It probably was not easy but a skilled blacksmith could do it. A few
years later anyone could purchase a ready-made from Henry Ford, and
that was way easier, but the machine itself is much more
sophisticated than the ones in the Sears catalog. When I was a kid
we used to make our primitive telegraphs and telephones by winding
wires to make electromagnets. They barely worked. Nowadays any kid
can buy a cell phone, which is thousands of times more complicated
than any telephone in 1960, and which works perfectly.
Do you really think that building a cold fusion demonstration, say a
simple codep cell, is as difficult as building an automobile? With
all our highly developed technology, mass producing automobiles, they
cost more now then they did years ago, much more. I'd say they cost
more in real dollars, actually. Do you think a cold fusion
demonstration cell, engineered to be mass produced, is going to cost
more than $10,000? Come on, Jed, this is getting ridiculous.
Anyone can replicate Volta's experiments today by going to the
drugstore, buying a small battery and lighting a small bulb with a
few wires. 99.999% of the work is done for you by the Eveready Battery company.
My point, actually.
You can demonstrate the Meissner effect a high temperature
superconductor because there are kits for sale with fabricated
materials in them.
Indeed.
You just get some LN (I think it is) and levitate away. Until we
can pre-package a cold fusion experiment in a similar way, and do
nearly all the work beforehand, no amateur will be able to
replicate, and very few scientists will take the trouble to
replicate. You need to concentrate on materials and find the best
possible one to demonstrate with the highest s/n ratio and the
least ambiguity. I find the CR-39 results ambiguous, to say the least.
They are results, and they are cheap to get, and some of those
results might be important ones. Neutrons are pretty important (for
the science, they have almost nothing to do with the long-term energy
generation prospects). You want to make more expensive kits, sure.
That could be done, too. But it will take more investment.
Almost all of the difficulty of doing a cold fusion experiment is in
the materials, just as it is when making a battery. If you can find
a good source of materials and you have good instruments, you can
demonstrate the effect.
Isn't this exactly what the kit company will do? "Good instruments,"
though, means instruments adequate to show the demonstrated effect.
CR-39 is certainly a candidate, and it has certain obvious advantages
over most electronic instruments.
The instruments must be reliable and sensitive, and they cost far
more than the materials, which is why I do not understand why
anyone wants to reduce the cost of materials. What is the point?
You could reduce the cost of materials to few dollars but the
experiment would still cost $100,000 to $1 million. In fact most
materials are supplied for free to researchers by companies such as
Tanaka precious metals and Santoku, although that would not be the
case for kits.
Maybe. It depends on how the project is run and what they think of
it. When I talk about a for-profit company, I'm really talking about
it being self-supporting in what it does. There might be donations involved.
When the Italians give you a sample of their palladium foils, you
eliminate 90% of the work Storms described in his paper How to
produce the Pons-Fleischmann effect. When Santoku gives you a sample
of the Pd-Zr material, they are doing 99% of the work for you. Just
add highly pure D2 and away it goes. We think. Assuming the
calorimetry is right.
I've said that Arata-type demonstrations are a possibility. But if
they aren't donating the material, and especially if they are
profiting from it, it could be too expensive.
You also wrote:
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.
If they charged $1000 per gram it would be a bargain. It would be
far cheaper than doing an experiment with material that cost $10
overall, because it is less time consuming and it (probably!) works
more reliably with a higher s/n ratio. There is no point to doing an
experiment that does not work, no matter how cheap it is.
There is no point in suggesting that people do experiments that they
cannot afford. Jed, you should get your imagination checked, it's broken.
I'm also not interested in trying to make something that hasn't been
done before. I'm willing to kludge things, provided that the kludges
work. The cell design should be solid, but, as we start to make and
test these designs, indeed, they might shift. Especially they might
shift as we think of ways to make them cheaper, we try the cheaper
cell, and it still works.... Ideally, we identify some characteristic
of the cells that is strongly associated with the nuclear effects.
That's why I'm interested in imaging and sound and possibly RF
detection -- or radiation detection, if that can be done
electronically. (we could have much better instrumentation at the
company lab than would be in the kits, because that's one-up). Or
someone with the equipment can do that part of the work for us.
The biggest problem with CR-39 is the delay to see results.
