Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
The idea that excess heat is easier to detect reliably than radiation is downright weird.
It is. But not so much if you assume that in some cases the reaction produces only heat and no particles. Also, when the particles in question are neutrons, you are probably missing most of them.
Since neutrons come and go and they are not found in fixed numbers compared to the heat (not scalar, as Mike Carrel put it), they must be the product of a secondary reaction or an usual mode that occurs sometimes and not other times.
One particle can be detected, and, under the right conditions, even characterized, and with its energy being estimated . . .
You cannot actually detect only 1 particle with typical equipment. You have to be down in a salt mine with all kinds of fancy coincidence detection stuff, that confirms the particle came from within the cell and not from outside. (I have read and edited a number of papers about that, and a chapter of a book, so I have what you might call mechanical knowledge of it.)
There is no question you can detect particles at a far lower level than heat with a normal nuclear reaction. However, cold fusion does not appear to be normal. In his ICCF-15 presentation Srinivasan discussed the orders-of-magnitude differences between the expected number of particles and what is actually found.
- Jed
