At 11:06 AM 9/11/2009, you wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
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.
I do not know enough about the Galileo project or co-dep to judge,
but I can see that the project is not continuing and the number of
people doing the experiment is not expanding, so by that metric it
has not succeeded. I do not think the project was intended to give
people the ability to do this without hands-on training. That was
not a project goal.
The goal was limited, and Krivit did not continue the project. He ran
into social obstacles, as has often happened in this field. He writes
about it, and the experience of the Galileo project is very important to us.
Think of the Galileo project as the first step in an engineering
journel. What's the next step, Jed?
I wouldn't know about this technique.
Journey.
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?
No. They want reliable excess heat. They have no use for neutrons,
kids, or science fairs.
Right. And they want more than a little excess heat. They want to be
able to brew cups of tea, at least. How do we get there, Jed?
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.
I suggest you read books about Henry Ford did what Charles E. Taylor
did. I should get the title of the book I have at home about Taylor.
It took considerable skill to make your automobile back then,
especially when you started by making an engine. Of course those
engines were primitive.
Very much. My point.
I'm trying to mass-produce one component for an automobile, one that
has a value all of its own, satisfying an interest in *science*. Not
free energy. I'm really still a kid, I have adult ADHD, a
developmental disorder, it means, basically, that I never grew up.
I think it would be totally neat to run a nuclear reaction on my
kitchen table. And I know that there are, in fact, millions of people
like me. Well, maybe not millions. Hundreds of thousands.
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.
You have it backward. Charles Taylor's 1903 engine was easy to make;
the ones he and the Wrights were making a few years later were much
harder, but much better. The engines Ford began mass-producing in
1908 were better still and far beyond the capabilities of a single
mechanic at a workbench in a bicycle store.
None of these were easy to make. But, I'm sorry, a cold fusion cell,
a basic codep cell, should be easy to make; if it is not, we've been
snookered, and I don't think we have.
It was easy to do cold fusion experiments in 1989 and it is much harder now.
No, it is much easier, with codep. With bulk palladium, I'm not going
to comment. Parts of it are certainly quite difficult.
Nowadays people know how to do them and there is a long checklist
of things you must accomplish and verify, so it is hard.
No, that means "easy." Especially it means easy when manufacturing
kits. You can do all those things, with people doing them over and
over. Doing it the first time for anyone can be hard, quite hard,
because it's easy to overlook or misinterpret one item that turns out
to be critical.
In 1989 it was a shot in the dark that wasn't hard to do, but it
usually failed. As Ed Storms says it was like randomly selecting
pieces of gravel from your driveway to look for the semiconductor
effect. To take an actual similar example from the history of semiconductors:
Yes. Now, how does this apply to codeposition?
"Shockley was a theoretician, not an experimentalist. One day in
1940, a scientist named Wooldridge found him fiddling around in the
lab with a piece of oxidized copper, which 'had apparently been cut
out of some very old copper back porch screen with very dull
scissors.' Shockley was trying to position wires so they would
barely touch the green oxide coating. He hoped to adjust the voltage
applied to the mesh to control the current flow. In other words, he
was trying to make a crude transistor. Wooldridge later wrote: 'so
here he had the three elements of a transistor, these two wires and
the copper screen. Of course, he was orders of magnitude away from
anything that would work!'"
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtransistor.pdf
It was easy to cut some old copper screen with scissors and do a
rudimentary experiment. It was much harder to make an actual working
semiconductor 8 years later.
Sure. But easier to do rudimentary experiments, once it was known what to do.
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?
By assembling millions of dollars of equipment and paying experts
who have decades of experience.
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?
Well I don't know anyone who can make one that works reliably,
except perhaps Arata and that has not yet been demonstrated. The
reason why people have not spent the money to make them reliable is
because of political opposition from academic rivals. Read the
Beaudette book. Also because it would probably cost $100 million, or
maybe $300 million depending on which expert you ask. IMRA (Toyota)
spent tens of millions and made significant progress but the data is
locked away somewhere at Johnson Matthey.
I'd say the Galileo project proved it's an accessible technology. It
completely avoids Johnson Matthey, fabricating the loaded lattice on
the spot, quickly and cheaply.
No, I have in mind a total shoestring project, self-funded, bootstrapping.
I do not believe such a thing is possible, because I have seen
similar attempts fail, and because I do not believe that anyone is
capable of reducing art to science at this stage of development. But good luck!
I've asked again and again for evidence about "similar attempts."
None have been described that were similar. I'm not jumping down to
my basement to start putting cells together. I'm putting people
together, not cells.
And a collection of people with good communication are far smarter
and have more powerful resources than any individual.
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?
Don't be silly. I never bluff. Long-time readers of this list and
people familiar with the history of the field will know that I mean
people such as Mallove, Tinsley, Redding and Krivit (the Galileo
project, which was not a failure, but did not trigger a continuing
success either, as I said). There have been others whose names I do
not recall. Kits have been discussed and attempted many times. One
of these times, a kit might actually work.
Krivit succeeded, in part. We build on that. We see what "mistakes"
he made and we avoid them. He did great work. The Galileo project did
not attempt to make kits, it attempted to develop and test a
protocol, which is one element of a kit. I'm unaware of any effort by
the others to make kits, either.
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.
They failed for lack of knowledge, money and gumption, in that
order. Most of all they -- and other defunct R&D -- failed for the
reasons described by Wilbur Wright, in Appendix A here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf
I'll read it later, but one place where I'm different is that, while
I don't have knowledge (more than a little) or money (more than very
little), I do have gumption, and part of what I know is that two
heads are better than one, and a dozen heads are even better, as long
as the communication process is functional. If I succeed, the
project's working groups will have the knowledge, the best that
exists, and the project is designed to be self-supporting because I
don't want it to fail for lack of an angel. I think the angels may be
tapped out by this time. If I'm wrong, fine, but I'd advise any
potential angel to be very careful. Don't waste the money this time.
Spend it on something *will* work.
If I were an angel looking at this idea, right now, I'd say,
.mmmmm... I'll watch this, see what they come up with....
Right now, there is only a big pile of what could easily be bluster.
