At 01:54 PM 4/1/2010, Michel Jullian wrote:
Too much proof makes people doubt. What we need is an indisputable proof of He production. All right it leaks through glass, so how about a closed cell kept under positive pressure? Surely, after a few days it would accumulate a sizable amount of He, which couldn't possibly come from the atmosphere because of the positive pressure.
Let me say this again. Helium results alone, if they can be conclusively confirmed, would indeed be conclusive as to nuclear reactions. That is, if there was no helium there to start, if leakage in can be excluded, or other measurement error, and then there is helium, there is some kind of nuclear reaction, and that is true for every element. (The most common nuclear reaction around is radioactive decay, which, by the way, often produces helium. So having a radioactive source in the container sufficient to produce the helium must also be excluded.)
The problem is that it is very easy to get helium measurement wrong. Most of the data is with helium below ambient, and, sorry, overpressure isn't enough to prevent diffusion into the cell, if I'm correct. This isn't from an air leak, necessarily, it is from helium actually diffusing through glass.
Whether they are right or wrong, helium alone isn't enough to make a crystal clear case. Huizenga knew that, all the skeptics knew that, and they will still know it and are likely to doubt stand-alone helium results no matter how careful they are.
However, it is far more difficult to reject helium correlated with excess heat. Miles' early helium data was pretty crude, but when you look for correlation with excess heat, it's stunning. Storms summarizes Miles' data (which includes later experiments, I believe). 12 cells with no excess heat, no helium detected. 21 cells with excess heat, helium detected in 18. Storms notes that for one cell, calorimetric error was suspected, and for the other two no-helium cells, the cathode was a different composition, who knows what effect that has? We have to remember that it is possible there is more than one kind of reaction, so, ideally, combining data from different experiments, they should be similar conditions, and still, because we are looking at a possibly chaotic process, there is lots of room to go astray.
But it seems we are lucky. If you use the same experimental protocol, it appears that, sure, you may not have control over when you get excess heat, but if you then compare excess heat with helium, and when you don't get excess heat you don't get any helium, and when you do get excess heat, you get helium, over many experiments, you have iced it. Whatever is causing the excess heat is also causing helium to appear.
Try to figure out an explanation for it that doesn't involve a nuclear reaction. Leakage? Why would a little leakage of helium change the excess heat figures, causing excess heat when a little helium gets in? Calorimetry error? Okay, but why would the calorimetry error track the helium measurements, the amount of helium involved is so small that the idea it would be influencing the chemistry so much is preposterous.
The correlation, in fact, validates the calorimetry and the helium, so much that ENEA compared heat and helium with an assumption of 24 MeV to get an idea of how accurate their measurements were. Just as an idea: that wasn't intended, at all, as a proof of 24 MeV, as Krivit claimed, but simply as discussion, and, in fact, the figure that came out spot on 24 MeV was obviously an error, artifact. This was the lowest level of excess heat measured, and the lowest level of helium, only slightly above background, and thus the weakest result, the error bar was quite large percentage-wise. Unless extraordinary precautions are taken, there will certainly be loss of helium that ends up not being measured, so the measured helium will be less than what is actually generated and therefore the calculated heat/helium ratio will be larger than the real figure from the reaction.
There is only one experiment done with sufficient care that the experimenters, and Storms, have thought it's reasonably accurate, and something this important cannot depend on only one experiment, if we are trying to establish what the real ratio is (under fixed conditions, and, then, it will be of interest if it changes under other conditions). But correlation, that if, in a series of experiments, you get more heat, you get more helium, with the relationship being linear, that's established quite well, enough that, certainly, anyone paying attention would be interested in seeing further work.
Heat/helium is a far more powerful result than helium alone, unless the helium found were so copious that it overwhelms all possibilities other than new generation of helium in the cell. There are some experiments where the helium continued to rise above ambient, but only a few, so there is still room for some skepticism.
Michel, none of these experiments generate a "sizeable amount of He." I don't think I've seen one that accumulates more than double ambient, and it's less than that as I recall, and it's ordinarily less than ambient. You get a lot of heat from only a tiny amount of helium. That's fusion for you!
The skeptics assumed that if helium were being generated, it would be easy to detect the associated gamma rays, so most ruled out helium from the start. That, simply, assumed deuteron fusion, D+D, two deuterons, one helium nucleus resulting, plus a gamma ray. The obvious and simple conclusion is that this is not the reaction, unless it's very weird. Very weird cannot be ruled out, that any fusion occurs at all is very weird, by the old assumptions. I prefer the simpler assumption that it is a new reaction that is otherwise pretty ordinary. Simply rare. And candidates exist.
