At 04:17 PM 3/16/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Ed Storms sometimes reads the messages here, but some technical
glitch prevents him from responding. He wrote a response to this
thread in a fit of pique:
Sorry, Dr. Storms. Perhaps we'll all be able to sit down to some tea
or something like that, in the near future.
This discussion is totally irrelevant and pointless. The issue was
resolved years ago. This is like discussing whether the earth goes
round the sum or the reverse. Reaction of oxygen with deuterium in
a closed cell has no effect on the results no matter where it occurs
and reaction at the metal surface does not produce enough local
energy to cause any change in the material. If this energy could
destroy the surface, all catalysts containing nano particle Pd on
which this reaction is made to occur would crease functioning
because the nano particle would be destroyed, which does not
happen. This issue comes up only because of total ignorance and it
should be answered in the same way as if a person suggested the
moon was made of cheese.
Ed
Ed, it takes all kinds. This was questioning by Rich Murray, who has
been away from the field for a decade or so. That's he's even
considering that cold fusion might be real -- and he is -- is very
much a good thing. He needs some space to come up with the obvious
criticisms. I think he appreciated that his idea was taken seriously
and responded to in detail. And that's also how we should respond to
anyone who comes here with the old mistakes. You know and I know that
some really stupid ideas somehow came to be widely accepted. Now, if
we tell people how stupid they are, we are probably wrong. There was
probably some social force that trapped these people, we might have
been trapped ourselves if we had started out in a different position.
Cut them some slack, as you would have had them cut you some slack.
He was right, almost certainly, about the electric field thing, after
all. At least that's a much more cogent criticism. Could there be
some non-nuclear explanation, then, of the pitting? Maybe. If I'm
willing to accept that our theoretical understanding, twenty years
ago, was inadequate to understand how nuclear reactions could
possibly be taking place in the lattice, I must also be willing to
accept that our theoretical understanding of the chemical
possibilities in one of these cells might be similarly defective now.
I'll be looking for pitting and light emissions from hot spots, but I
don't imagine that these will necessarily prove that nuclear
reactions are taking place. The most definitive and informative
evidence would be heat and helium, but heat is not so easy to measure
well, especially in a very small cell, I suspect, and helium is
likewise quite complex to handle and measure. For me, the big game is
neutrons, even though I know very well that neutrons are a small part
of the picture, i.e., any neutrons are probably from secondary
reactions. They just happen to be, if a gold codep cathode emits
neutrons as commonly as we see from SPAWAR results, the easiest
target. I'm looking for light emissions (and acoustical signals)
because these are easy to monitor during the cell operation, and if
I'm lucky, I'll find immediate signals that correlate with the
formation of NAE, giving me more of a handle on what's going on in
the cell. What if I find, for example, that there is a correlation
between these accessory effects and neutron radiation? I'd have,
then, a way to estimate the nuclear activity that is producing the
neutrons immediately. Later work might establish correlations with
excess heat and helium or other reaction products. But first things
first. Just finding neutrons will make me hopping happy.
Neutrons in my kitchen? See, Dr. Storms, I thought I would be a
nuclear physicist when I was in high school, and that was my initial
plan, going to Caltech, sitting with Feynmann and Pauling. I dropped
it pretty quickly, other aspects of life beckoned quite alluringly.
But now I'm coming full circle. It wasn't all for nothing.
I don't expect to find much, if anything, that's new. You and other
pioneers covered a lot of territory, we who follow behind will always
be grateful to you and all the difficulties you faced. I'm trying to
nail down some stuff, making it fully and easily and widely
replicable. Simple stuff. Wish me luck. The biggest problem, in fact,
is my own inertia.
