Here is another nifty paper that has nothing to do with cold fusion, but might in the future:
http://iccf15.frascati.enea.it/ICCF15-PRESENTATIONS/S8_O2_Cook.pdf This is a theory paper, but unlike most theory papers, I can make head or tail of it. The author, along with many others, thinks that atomic nuclei have structure, rather than being an undifferentiated mass of particles. Let me speculate a little about theory, something I hardly ever do . . . When the modern atom was first conceived of in the late 19th century and early 20th century, people assumed that it would be an unstructured, undifferentiated mass with electrons stuck here and there like "raisins in bread." Later on they realized that electrons have fixed patterns of shells. It seems likely to me that the nucleus is structured too, and if protons and neutrons are made of smaller particles (as I gather they are) these particles also fit a structure of some sort. They are not arranged at random. In other words, like the Indian mystic who claimed the universe is "turtles all the way down" I suppose it is structure all the way down. (Neither of us has any real justification for this, but at least I can show that things have turned out to be more structured than people thought, so far. As to what it goes all the way down to, what is the latest fad . . . strings, I suppose.) Anyway, a theory such as Cook's may eventually be applied to cold fusion in a useful way because -- in my opinion -- some sort of fusion must be occurring and it cannot be a random brute force event. I mean brute force in the literal sense of shoving nuclei together to overcome the Coulomb barrier the way they do in plasma fusion. That model strikes me as ridiculous. Whatever is happening, it is analogous to opening a lock with a key, smoothly and with little force, whereas plasma fusion is analogous to smashing through the lock with a sledgehammer. The fusion reactions do not release high energy particles, therefore no rapid, concentrated, high energy event are occurring. That much is clear. And it isn't as if something is "suppressing" high energy events, and natures is trying her best to keep those gamma rays from flying out. There is never any inclination anywhere in the system to produce them. No brute force pushing together of nuclei happens or can happen. That is why I have always thought it is silly for people to look for even tiny numbers of high energy particles to try to "explain" the reaction. (I realize there are small numbers but they must be coming from some secondary reaction.) Instead of things being shoved together, many nuclei are lining up somehow and all of them smoothly and probably slowly fitting together to form helium atoms. Think of a strand of DNA during replication. It attracts the right molecules and they form a chain, all at very low energy. The process does not hammer together a new chain . . . it encourages or stands as a template for the new chain. It seems to me that in cold fusion, the solid state lattice -- a highly structured and quiet (non-moving) environment -- somehow acts as a template in a similar manner, holding not chains of molecules like DNA, but individual nuclei. The nucleus is structured, and somehow the multiple structures fit together gracefully and easily, like three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle falling into place. The structure of the lattice (or where ever the NAE is) may hold and orient nuclei to an extent and with precision now unimaginable. Think of what Bemporad can do with his nifty nano-instruments. Now consider that fact that DNA and cellular machinery can assemble things orders of magnitude smaller. It works reliability, speed and precision many, many orders of magnitude better than any human-made instrument, with fantastic economy of motion and energy. The constant cell division in one one animal or plant is is nearly flawless and the amount of information reproduced flawlessly in this manner far exceeds all the human books and databases on earth. Now go down several orders of magnitude in size, and suppose you have a physical structure (the NAE) that can orient and move individual atoms together with their nucleus-scale structures aligned perfectly. The key moving the lock tumblers only, as it were, not the whole lock. For some reason this overcomes the repulsion between nuclei. The other day I mentioned that I know of no proof that neutrons fly off in a sphere, in all directions randomly. That is a crazy thing to say from the point of view of plasma fusion. Atomic plasma is the most chaotic, randomly oriented matter in the universe I believe, and I gather that nuclear theory predicts that you cannot know even in principle in which direction a neutron will take off after two deuterons fuse. However, it may be that fusion in a lattice is under such tight control and it occurs so smoothly that perhaps the neutrons are also under control, and they all take off in more or less the same direction relative to the lattice. (Actually, relative to the group of deutrons brought together in a nano-scale square dance formation -- where a real square dance is a bunch of human moving in lattice formation.) So if you detect them in peaks and you often miss them, that is because you have a tiny little neutron ray gun -- something I realize is quite impossible with conventional physics -- and most of the time the ray is missing your detector. The SPAWAR CR39 does appear to show the neutrons going off in all directions in a sphere. But perhaps if you could slow it down and look at each isolated microscopic cold fusion event (they do appear to be isolated, short term reactions) you would see directed streams of neutrons headed whereever the lattice pointed them. The lattice grains point in all directions, I suppose, so over time you get a sphere-like distribution. - Jed
