At 06:46 PM 10/29/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
So finding no radiation or other products, by
MIT, as a huge example, meant practically
nothing. All they showed, in fact, was that
they did not manage to cause the effect.
On the contrary I think they probably did cause
the effect at MIT, and also CalTech and Harwell.
The heat signature is pretty clear. See Mallove
and Miles on that. (You are probably aware of
this dispute, but some readers may not be.)
Sure, they caused an effect, but not what they
were looking for, something much smaller. That's
why they overlooked it (hey, Jed, I give people
the benefit of the doubt) or swept it under the
carpet, who wants to look at this messy baseline anyway?
They did not detect neutrons, but people seldom
do detect them, after all. Whether that is
because the neutrons are too slow or too fast or
because neutron detectors are insensitive I do
not know. The detectors I know about and have
actually looked and discussed in labs are very
insensitive, as I mentioned. BF3 and simulation
counters capture only a tiny fraction of the
total neutrons. And who knows whether the
neutrons are distributed evenly in a sphere
around the cathode? That has not been
established as far as I know. No neutron
detector envelops the whole cell as far as I know. A calorimeter does!
I strongly suspect that the neutron radiation,
like the alpha, is in all directions, rather
evenly. It's path effects (i.e., short path) that
cause the detected alphas to mostly be aligned
with a straight line between the cathode and the
detector (i.e., as with CR-39). Because of the
penetrating nature of neutron radiation, I'd
expect the neutron record on a detector to be
proportional to the solid angle the detector
takes up with respect to the active area.
Storms and some others consider the MIT results
so close to the noise they may be meaningless,
but Miles thinks there was excess heat in that
experiment. No one I know disputes that Caltech
produced a clear signal of excess heat. It
showed up as ~1°C, which is huge. The people
there thought the calibration constant was inconstant, but that makes no sense.
Neither does low energy nuclear reactions.
My eight-year old daughter understood that
immediately. If it's true that Earthtech did
not create NAE, I'd really want to know why,
because what they did was *close* to the Galileo protocol.
You could spend the next several years tying to
learn why, possibly without success. One problem
with Earthtech in my opinion is that they do not
seem to spent years in a concerted effort to do
one experiment. I have never heard of anyone who
succeeded in cold fusion starting from scratch
without devoting two or three years of intensive
effort to the job. Several people managed to
replicate early on, within a few months, such as
Mizuno and McKubre, but most of them were
already experts in making hydrides and
deuterides. A few were skilled and they also got lucky, especially at BARC.
Understand that I'm starting with a fairly
closely defined protocol, not vague hints, and
not with all the problems of solid palladium and
very long loading times. I think I'm likely to
see effects first time. But ... you never know till you try.
