Well, Jed, thanks anyway for posting it, in spite of the risk. I
don't think you were insulting. This is exactly what I would expect.
Steady heat in a controlled reaction. Precisely. Very difficult,
unless someone gets lucky, and the fact that hundreds of millions of
dollars have been spent, I think, looking for this is a clue that it
is far less than easy.
But, of course, that's not what the project I'm starting is about.
It's not designed to directly convince the venture capitalists, or
anyone else who is stubbornly or even simply instinctively skeptical,
we could even call it "prudent," for that matter, though it may help
with true skeptics. It's designed simply to demonstrate one or more
of the effects we consider clearly *associated* with excess heat. If
we can show excess heat, great, but that is probably not the
baseline, cheapest kit. We *might* show some evidence of heat
generation without being able to nail it down.
Indeed, the most conclusive evidence for nuclear reactions, helium
correlated with excess heat, we may not be able to show, at least it
is far less than a sure thing, if your explanation about Miles' work
is definitive (but I'm not giving up, just recognizing a very
significant chance of failing there, I'll deal with a remaining
possibility in another post). But that work has been done, and it's
been replicated, and though not through more-desirable exact
replications, still quite adequately.
The most frustrating aspect of the 2004 DoE review, to me, was the
insufficient attention given to the helium results. Dismissing those
results as below ambient (false, actually) or noisy simply doesn't
recognize what any trained scientist should recognize, the power of
correlation. The report summary got the facts blatantly wrong,
misstating what was in the report; had the misstatement been correct,
what would have been shown was lack of correlation, not correlation.
In other words, Hagelstein et al failed to get the reviewers'
attention, and the attention of the DoE, in an effective manner.
(That's not a personal criticism, punching through the noise on
something like this is extremely difficult, though there may be
people who would have been more skilled at it, if we could get them involved.)
In other words, we already know, to a reasonable certainty, that we
are looking at low-energy nuclear reactions. And we know that
conclusive evidence will be rejected, because it has been, and helium
is only one example. So how to move beyond this?
My plan is to build the community, to extend and broaden the
community, and, especially, to involve young people, the future.
Kowalski is more or less on the right track, I hope he becomes
involved. Chemistry teachers, physics teachers will be part of our market.
Many are involved in the search for how to make the effects reliable
and to scale them up. However, the field overall is, in my view,
severely hampered by the absence of simple baseline experiments that
anyone can easily replicate. You seem to think that impossible, but
that is, I believe, because you are looking for qualities in that
experiment that need not be there. The essential is that the
experiment create and detect, in some way, NAE. Arata could work, and
that's an approach that is on the table, but codeposition is a
technique that has seen much wider use. I was just reading some of
the early work, plus the powerpoint presentation from the SPAWAR
group at Duncan's recent seminar, very nice.
The "simple replication" is far from the demonstration that the VCs
want to see.
Once there is a baseline kit, cheap, widely tested (both by amateurs,
students, etc., but also by experts), we might see an explosion of
research into variations, and, you never know, one of the amateurs
just might stumble across something. Or one of the experts, more likely.
At 03:21 PM 9/11/2009, you wrote:
Perhaps I should not post this message here because one of these
fellows might be thinking of calling me back, and this might upset him . . .
I have been contacted by venture capitalists from time to time, more
often after the 60 Minutes program. Several researchers I know have
also been contacted. The conversation may be short or long but
boiled down to its essence it is a Repeat Until loop with the
condition Until True=False. It goes something like this:
V.C.: If you can show me a cell that produces steady heat in a
controlled reaction, I can get you lots of money.
Me: If I had a cell that did that, I wouldn't need your money.
[etc.]
