At 06:25 PM 9/10/2009, you wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
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. . . .
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.
Actually, I do have experience doing cold fusion experiments, albeit
mainly ones that did not work. But I was reporting what the
researchers say, not what I say. They say it is difficult and it
does not work most of the time, for unknown reasons. There are some
experiments that work very often, or all of the time, such as
Iwamura's, but these are extremely demanding. That is why they work.
The people doing them have established elaborate and time consuming
procedures that must be followed. (You can see from their equipment
that the experiment is not portable.)
I'm getting different reports. Some techniques are obviously
extremely difficult. Codep doesn't appear to be, the Galileo project
proved that it was within reach. Understand that codep hasn't had a
lot of interest because it may not be scalable. But for our purposes
it might be fine.
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?
I do now know anyone capable of designing or testing such a kit. The
experiment you are thinking of making into a commodity (as it were)
was taught to others in the Galileo project. The results were mixed.
Yes. And Krivit reported the problems, which were *social* problems,
Jed. Mized results, I take as good news, you seem to take as bad.
Think of the Galileo project as the first step in an engineering
journel. What's the next step, Jed?
I do not know the details but I did not get a sense that it
reached the point that you could put something in a box, ship it,
and have the recipient do a meaningful experiment. As far as I
know, the replications were done by people who got hands on
training. Steve Krivit would know.
I've read the reports. Now, was the training documented in detail. If
not, Jed, there is the problem in a nutshell. We are not talking
something enormously complicated.
If you can accomplish this, and reduce the art to science, you
should do a more practical experiment such as Arata. I will then
call some of these venture capitalists who have been hounding me and
we'll get you tons of money.
Maybe. Tons of money for what? To develop science fair kits?
Remember, I'm not at all talking about energy generation; we'll be
lucky, if I'm correct, to even measure much heat. But I don't know
yet, it is way too early.
Do you really think that building a cold fusion demonstration, say
a simple codep cell, is as difficult as building an automobile?
Sure. It is roughly as difficult as building an automobile in 1908,
just before the Model T went on sale.
I'm going to say, horseshit. I think that if I had the funding
necessary to build an automobile (analogously to that time), I'd be
set on these kits. There are already people who know the technology,
we may invent some engineering tricks, but not new science, serious
new technology -- unless we get really lucky, and the project doesn't
depend on that.
I'm just talking about taking a known technology -- say codeposition
cells -- and scaling them down. That makes heat measurement more
difficult, but it could make other things much easier.
As I said, building an automobile was a do it yourself project,
like building a microcomputer in 1975.
I did that. It was easy. Altair 8800. And I kludged a cassette
interface and it was published in Byte magazine. Two parts: a diode
and a capacitor, and the wires and a jack to go into the cassette recorder.
Sears sold instruction books and you could get a lot of the parts
off the shelf. Skilled mechanics and blacksmiths built their own
engines, in a couple of months, but I think you could buy
ready-made engines. Anyway, it took a great deal of skill. I have a
book describing how Charley Taylor built the first airplane engine
in 1903, written by a guy I met who replicated the engine using
period tools, for a museum. It sounds about as difficult as doing a
cold fusion experiment. The engine worked a lot better than most
cold fusion experiments, so in that sense it was easier.
Jed, your account of how difficult it is to replicate "cold fusion
experiments" would be true for Fleischmann-type cells, probably,
though I do assume it is easier now than in 1985-1989! Or 1990, for
that matter.
In the 1920s, Model-T Fords were shipped as unassembled kits, to
dealers. That's the step you want to leapfrog to.
No. Those were full functioning automobiles, major masses of metal,
not "toys." I'm talking about a cold fusion toy, so to speak. A
demonstration of some effect, not a power plant!
If you can do it, more power to you, but you need not bother
selling kits to amateurs. Make an Arata kit that works and I can
sell dozens for $1,000 each to governments and universities. Heck
if the materials are expensive you could make it $10,000 each, or
$20,000. They wouldn't care. Heck, I'd buy one in minute for $10,000.
My concept is science fair kits, more or less, but the same kits
could have other purposes. And if we get the company going, nothing
says it has to limit itself to science fair kits, it could make more
sophisticated kits.
Here is the basic science concept that some have described, and they
were right: develop an experiment that shows the phenomenon with
reasonable reliability. The cheaper it is, the less reliable it needs
to be, because you can run lots of them. Then you start running these
experiments with a single variable. One of the things I'm realizing
is how useful it would be to identify signs of the formation of NAE
that don't necessarily prove nuclear origin. As a wild guess, for
example, suppose that NAEs make some characteristic sound. You run
cells and the cells with the radiation have the sound, and no
radiation, no sound. Sound isn't a "nuclear effect," but what one has
done is to associate it with one. Then one can use a simple
detection, sound, as a sign that NAE has formed, and can much more
rapidly change the variables; periodically verifying that the nuclear
effect has remained.
I don't think this is rocket science; and my habit is to simply
approach a new field and say what I think. Most of it might be
nonsense, but my experience has been, in the past, that some of what
I come up with is, shall we say, new.
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.
Well it might cost you several million to design it.
I don't think so. I'm certainly not asking for a million dollars. I'm
not asking for any money at this point, and when money is asked for,
it may not be by me. I'm asking for interested participation, right
now, in brainstorming, to develop a series of ideas for cheap kits
that could reliably show a LENR effect.
It is impossible to say. My grandfather designed many kits for the
arts and crafts business and it was harder than you might think. It
is not clear to me how reliable you want it.
I want the kits to be uniformly manufactured. If the effect is
chaotic, I still want to be able to see roughly the same percentage
of successes. But I'm leaning a bit on He Jing-Tang. He claims that
some groups have been getting 100%. Okay. How did they do it?
I have no experience doing the co-dep experiments and I do not
know much about the Galileo project so I cannot judge, but it sure
does not sound easy or reliable.
While Arata sounds easy, and that's one of the ideas under
consideration, it also requires expensive materials.
To make an Arata experiment kit that anyone can demonstrate, I
suppose it would cost a few million bucks R&D. Maybe $10 million .
. . Assuming that experiment works in the first place and you can
find a vendor or persuade Santoku to produce the material in
quantity. (I don't know why they wouldn't; just pay them.)
It's not my approach. I have no objection, people aren't obligated to
follow my approach. But I intend to succeed. Galileo Project
technology seems adequate, I'd just want to scale it down.
If it costs $1 million and you sell 100 kits then the R&D would cost
$10,000 each. It would be less trouble to find 10 customers willing
to pay $100,000 each. You realize, I hope, that such a gadget is
worth billions and billions of dollars, as is, even at 1 W output.
Obviously, that million-dollar project isn't going to sell enough
science fair kits to pay back the investment. If I could get 1 W
output, maybe I wouldn't need to make science fair kits....
Look, you are right. It's worth billions of dollars at 1W reliable
output. But .... why hasn't this been built, if it is worth so much?
No, I have in mind a total shoestring project, self-funded,
bootstrapping. At some point some money will be needed, at that point
proposals will be made. I don't know the specifics of how it will
play out, but the fallback plan is twofold: the participants fund it,
cooperatively, probably forming a corporation with investments,
modest ones. The design is protoyped by a modest group; from this,
final engineering documentation is prepared and a modest number of
kits are built and tested, by the group. Probably not by a
"professional lab," though there is nothing saying that professionals
can't participate! If somebody wants to pay for that lab, fine. The
kits, though, will generate their own data, they are, essentially,
self-testing. Then, assuming we have reasonable reliability (the more
expensive the cell, the more reliable it must be, if it is very very
cheap, it could be pretty unreliable, as long as *some* cells work,
and one can run enough of them to be reasonably certain of seeing
some success, some nuclear effect, we will then start selling kits.
The instrumentation packages will be purchased by customers; the
company will offer to buy back the packages so that the customer ends
up having leased the equipment. There will be full disclosure of
risks, both financial and safety. What that does is to provide cash
flow for buying more equipment for the instrumentation package.
It could be done differently if there is sufficient capital invested.
But I'm not counting on that, and many projects fail because of too
much money! If you have more money, you spend more, and it's hard to
scale back when the money starts to run out. Start from the bottom,
bootstrapping, establishing the market, creating demand, seems more
sensible to me. There are hazards, but they can be avoided, I think.
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.
So, all you need is a time machine or a suitcase full of money and
you can leapfrog the present difficulties and Bob's your Uncle! From
Volta to Eveready in one fell swoop.
No. Just Volta.
You need to forget this "expensive" stuff. Cost is irrelevant. If
you can do what you describe, and make a kit of any sort that
demonstrates an effect unambiguously enough for an ordinary person
to understand, then you will have something worth a fortune.
Really? To whom?
Jed, I think such a thing is *valuable*, or I wouldn't be interested
in doing it, but I don't think that, in itself, it will make a
fortune for me or for those involved. On the other hand, if cost is
irrelevant, fine. You can send me a check, whatever you think
necessary, and I will spend it carefully and wisely.
But until I have that check, from you or from someone else, cost is
very much an issue.
Someone else may be in a different position and have different ideas.
Maybe someone wants to make that Convince-A-Venture-Capitalist Kit.
The kit costs $50,000, but with it, you can extract millions of
dollars from venture capitalist pockets. Somehow, Jed, I suspect this
has already been tried. Been *done*, actually.
And, then, for good reason, the venture capitalists have become a tad
shy about pouring in the big bucks.
Enough talk. Let's do some design.
There is no point in suggesting that people do experiments that
they cannot afford. Jed, you should get your imagination checked, it's broken.
Why bother selling to people who can't afford it?!?
I'm designing kits to be affordable by more or less ordinary people.
Yes, I know this seems completely crazy to you. Let's find out.
That's nuts. Sell to people who are loaded with money and who
really, really want your product. Every major industrial
corporation in the U.S., Japan and Europe tunes into LENR-CANR from
time to time. Within a few months they will download thousands of
copies of the NSF/EPRI proceedings, for example. They control
trillions of dollars in capital. If you can convince them this kit
you are describing exists they will pay any amount of money for it.
Good. If we get a good description together, maybe they will fund the
project by looking at a prototype and some results and buying a
thousand cells for their labs to go to town with. They won't need our
instrumentation package, just the manufactured cells.
They actually won't need anything, for we will be providing full
engineering documentation, for kits that work. Or at least work as
well as the art of those who help us will allow!
Money is not the limiting factor. Credibility is. The resistance to
new ideas, and the fear of making a fool of oneself is.
Believability is, and that particular barrier was greatly reduced
thanks to CBS "60 Minutes." With the kind of kit you describe, these
barriers would be easily overcome.
Okay.
It is as if you think you can make a machine that turns lead into
gold, but you are fretting that people will not have enough money to buy it.
I'm not "fretting." I'm *designing.* If the market you describe
exists and is ready to buy, great!
It may be that you can pull this off. I cannot judge. I have seen
many people claim they can do this in the past. They have all
failed, but that does not mean you will fail. Go ahead and try, and
more power to you. I suggest you visit experiments.
I'm calling your bluff, Jed, if it's a bluff. Who tried it? What
happened? Exactly what happened?
One of the ways to succeed where others failed is to (1) try new
ideas, but (2) also pay very close attention to what failed, how,
and, if possible, why.
I'd love to "visit experiments." I can't afford it at this point. But
I'm not thinking that my own knowledge is essential at all. I'm not
the "lead engineer." I'm just a facilitator, a catalyst.
