On Oct 25, 2009, at 9:10 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
This is also a preliminary response to Horace. I agree that the Galileo Project is a "poor kit to offer," or whatever you wrote. However, it was designed for simplicity. Make it complicated, and "replication" becomes less likely.
Why would anyone go to the trouble to produce a "poor kit to offer"? BTW, those are not my words.
Production of a kit for amateurs using a procedure known to have major problems and that produces results that are not even convincing to the CF community is potentially harmful to the field. Doing so for profit casts an even darker pall on the community, because the motives can be impugned.
I'm starting for my own testing with Galileo because I'm confident that I'll see results, not because the design is optimal. There are many aspects to the design that can safely be optimized, especially by adding external monitoring of various kinds. Cathode design is an obvious place to move to, but much monkeying with it in the initial tests gets increasingly risky with how complex the change is. What you have written, Horace, isn't wasted, it will be considered as final cathode design moves forward. Fabrication through plating had already been considered. (Why use a gold wire if a gold-plated silver wire, for example, would do?)
If nothing else I hope you keep the CR-39 or other detector out of the electrolyte. That is known to cause problems.
It's been suggested that I study various topics. Great idea. When I have another lifetime to spare, I will. Seriously, every day I feel intensely the weight of my ignorance about, say, electrochemistry. Especially electrochemistry. As well, my knowledge about the behavior of various elements under alpha bombardment is severely limited. So many topics, so little time. So ... I punt. I depend on my friends and even on my enemies. They will point my bloopers out to me. In a way, I'm just a node in a network, my own intelligence is quite limited, the network's intelligence is not nearly as limited. If I don't listen to my friends, that's when I become truly stupid.
On Sep 29, 2009, at 6:08 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Originally, I thought I'd be a nuclear physicist, and I was on my way, as an undergraduate student at Caltech. But my life took me to different places, so I never developed an investment in theory; I simply got an attitude and an approach from sitting with Feynmann -- who taught physics my first two years at Caltech, those lectures were the ones that became the standard text. I also had Linus Pauling for freshman chemistry, but he wasn't nearly as memorable.
On Sep 1, 2009, at 10:31 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
If the volume were large enough, we could buy one of those spectrometers. Or build one, it's not a difficult measurement, you need a Co-57 source, an accurate gamma detector, and a linear motor to drive the source toward or away from the test sample at a known velocity. I did this in sophomore physics lab at Caltech, that's why I recognized the significance of Vyosotskii's findings, I'm not sure that others get it.
Back in those days it was nearly impossible to find a physics major at Caltech with less than 140 IQ.
This exercise is beginning to look more like a social science experiment than a legitimate physics effort.
Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
