At 12:27 PM 11/4/2009, Horace Heffner wrote:
On Nov 4, 2009, at 4:52 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
To the extent that anyone is taking this seriously, there are some
students laughing so hard they are in danger of something falling off.
Means nothing of course! There are plenty of students and professors
laughing at the lunatics that think it is possible to create fusion
in a jar. They haven't done the work, and they know nothing of the
field. What else would one expect?
The purpose of this list is to explore these things with an open
mind. That is not to say explore without serious factually or
logically based criticism, but explore without ridicule, derision or
ad hominem attacks.
If it makes the peanut gallery laugh, all the better. The world
needs more humor! And, it needs more creative problem solving.
What's happening here, though, is exploration of an idea that is then
extended into realms not even remotely covered in the announcement. I
approached it with an open mind. And what I found was signs that this
was a jape.
Not like cold fusion at all. Pons and Fleischmann reported excess
heat and neutrons. From that report, there was either a world-class
expert in calorimetry being really, really stupid, or there was an
actual anomaly. Just from the press conference. Sure, he was wrong
about the neutrons, but he didn't make some really bogus claims about
the explanation, the most he did was suggest it was deuterium fusion,
which was probably an error. He provided no theory.
These people are providing a theory! That seems blatantly a spoof, to
me, a transparent trick that might fool someone for a few minutes,
unless the person has no understanding of physics. All the stuff
about exerting a force on the vacuum, stated here, is to explain an
experimental effect, but without any description of the experiment.
What's going on? The video doesn't explain *at all*. They make it
look like this experimental apparatus is floating. Okay, was it
floating under it's own power; that would be 1 g acceleration. The
thing was a little wobbly, it looked like. A little wobble, and it
would shoot off to the side! Anything keeping it from wobbling?
Nothing that I saw and nothing described. They don't say what is
going on at all, except that it's a demonstration. Demonstration of
what? How much power consumed? Why is this a fixed camera view? Why
not look at this from all different angles?
I think the answer is obvious. They wanted to see how easy it was to
get people stumbling over themselves to refute or speculate. Occam's Razor.
Nothing wrong with speculating about vacuum forces, though, I'm sure,
most here are aware of the problems. This thing would have to be
operating on the vacuum inside, i.e., the empty space, what used to
be called the "ether," for this to mean anything. And then, is it
ejecting the ether in one direction? (There is your reaction mass --
and what effects would this have on Other Stuff.) Or is the ether
like a stiff mat? We'd have to think of it as rigid and immovable. It's a mess.
