At 08:24 PM 12/25/2009, you wrote:
I do not want to make too big a deal about this, by the way. I think
"thermonuclear" is technically inaccurate in this context but
broadly speaking, taken to mean "conventional, known, plasma fusion
reactions" then Steve is right. This hypothesis has dogged the
field. I do not think Fleischmann and Pons proposed that hypothesis
but someone reading their first paper might have gotten that impression.
I agree with this. That 1989 paper did not actually propose those
reactions as a hypothesis, but the writing was obscure and it could
certainly look like that.
As I said, I wish they had inserted the caveat Pons introduced a few
months later, in his testimony. They had been thinking about this
subject for a long time and they are not fools, so I am sure they
knew long before they published that this cannot be a normal fusion reaction.
Charles Beaudette told me that the paper was written in haste.
Perhaps it was the best they could do in a short time. There were a
number of sloppy errors corrected in the next issue of the journal
so evidently it was written in a hurry. I do not recall why. Perhaps
to ensure priority because of the showdown with Steve Jones.
Yeah, seems possible. We have a technical term for situations like
this. "Mess."
Regarding the hypothesis that extreme pressure causes the reaction,
that is discussed in the Congressional testimony referenced above,
and in Mizuno's book. I think people still take that hypothesis
seriously. It is difficult to discuss this or any other scientific
subject in a congressional hearing because you have to be 100%
honest and not condescending, but at the same time you cannot use
the kind of detailed technical language Mizuno uses in his book, and
you have to say everything in a few minutes. Pons did his best, saying:
"On the next slide, we point out that if, indeed, you would try to
-- if you were to try to obtain that same voltage by the compression
of hydrogen gas to get that same chemical potential of .8 volts, you
would have to exert a hydrostatic pressure of a billion, billion,
billion atmospheres, tremendously high pressure."
That's an interesting statement, since Fleischmann mentioned, in the
press conference, 10^27 atmospheres as the equivalent pressure to the
conditions attained in the lattice. A billion, billion, billion.
"And, further, we see -- or the point here is that also these
pressures -- or certainly these pressures, absolute hydrostatic
pressures, are not attained inside the metal lattice. The
dissolution of this material, these atoms going to these ions inside
the lattice, represents a very high energy process, and it is not
very well understood. . . ."
Taubes claims that Fleischmann had made a calculation error with the
10^27 figure. Has Fleischmann written about this, later? Fleischmann
was really writing about compression, i.e., resulting density, not
pressure, per se. But 10^27 is still vastly too high. What did he have in mind?
