At 08:58 AM 10/1/2009, Roarty, Francis X wrote:
[snip] might not be a metal lattice; the whole biological transmutation
approach, we might suspect, would represent protein-catalyzed fusion,
basically a protein, I assume, setting up confinement conditions that
facilitate fusion.[snip]
Abd,
I am not familiar with this biological transmutation but
assume your previous reference to spontaneous human combustion also
comes under this heading?
Not really, but politically they are similar in certain ways.
Biological transmutation is a highly controversial field, of course.
If cold fusion is impossible, biological transmutation would be
restricted to certain narrow possibilities, such as the acceleration
of radioactive decay; it's known that the chemical environment can do
that. But, of course, we think that cold fusion, or something more or
less equivalent that can result in elemental transformation, is possible.
So biological transmutation is on the table.
With SHC, then, we might imagine an energy source from cold fusion,
but there are already ample energy sources available for combustion,
in body fat, for example. How an NAE would not only arise in the body
such that there is energy release, but that this, then, without
generating intermediate effects, like your arm burning up but not the
rest of you, goes whole-hog and incinerates the whole body, seems
quite a stretch. Quite a stretch. With runaway "heat-after-death" --
which is much more "reproducible" than SHC -- there is a continuum of
effects, from none to low to high enough to melt the palladium.
Given that the very existence of SHC is controversial, adding
controversy to controversy by very publicly speculating on SHC in his
book, I think Storms shot himself in the foot. A little. I can
understand. Simon notes that CF researchers, having been rejected and
isolated as fringe or worse for so many years, generally became more
tolerant of the extreme fringe. To some degree, the effect is good.
Extreme fringe should never be *completely* off the table, just
channeled to a corner where it can be discussed on a small scale
until and unless something more reliable is found. This all has to do
with how collective intelligence functions, when it's functional.
I have suspected such a connection since learning the rare earth
metal calcium is a porous powder which the body uses to build bone
structure. I can only speculate at some natural process or disease
that builds or leaches away to form pores of Casimir geometry in a
biological equivalent of creating skeletal catalysts (no pun
intended). Something out of the ordinary might be needed to
encourage the ambient gas in these pores to become monatomic but
the possible connection to excess heat is an intriguing clue.
Fran
There is a paper out there, so to speak, by Solomon Goldfein: Energy
Development From Elemental Transmutations In Biological Systems,
http://www.rexresearch.com/goldfein/goldfein.htm
As I investigated the field of cold fusion for Wikipedia, I came
across the "Biological transmutation" article, and, as well, the work
of Vyosotskii. When I first looked at the Goldfein article, I was
immediately put off by the reference to ATP as a "cyclotron." Now,
rereading the paper recently, I saw that what he claimed might be
more plausible than my knee-jerk reaction would allow. It still seems
ridiculous, because what confines the electrons to the ATP chain once
they reach sufficient energy to break free?
Rather, Goldfein's theory is built on sand, insufficient confirmed
anecdotal experimental evidence. That foundation must be solid for a
radical theory, overturning more than a century of assumptions, to
gain traction. There is a place for very raw speculation, but it's
not in widespread discourse, it is in the locale for
"back-of-the-envelope" or "napkin" sketches or calculations: in
private work or in very small-scale discussions where brainstorming
is de rigeur, where there is rapport; such discussions can cut
through the rigid assumptions that are necessary for routine life,
but which confine and restrict at the same time.
If someone wants to work on biological transformation, and thinks
that there is a reproducible experiment out there, nail down an
experimental design, I'd be very interested, if it's cheap to do. If
it's not cheap, you'd have to convince someone weightier than I. What
I like about Vyosotskii is that it's possible for the work with
deinococcus radiodurans to be done cheaply, the only really difficult
part is the Mossbauer spectroscopy, assuming Voysotskii's culture
wasn't unique, and it's possible that a market could be sufficient to
justify hiring the services or building an adequate, special-purpose,
spectrograph. Perhaps if someone meets Vyosotskii, or has good
communication with him, he can be asked about how to obtain the
culture. I'd definitely be interested in establishing a line and
making it available for sale. If I buy the culture from the source I
mentioned the other day, I'd be highly restricted, if they would even
sell to me, and I wouldn't know for sure that it was a functional culture.
One nice thing about d. radiodurans: it apparently has highly stable
DNA. Very difficult to mutate it, that's the point.
