At 04:23 PM 5/7/2010, Jones Beene wrote:
I am pretty sure that "discredit" is "apropos of nothing, really" ... Scott would probably love to see real proof of a robust energy anomaly as much as any of us. However, he does not suffer from the "expectation effect" nor "inventor's disease" and he does not cut corners.
Perhaps. I've only read in detail his Galileo replication, which he apparently went ahead with before the protocol was fixed. He rather irritatingly refered to some pits as "SPAWAR pits" when they were ... just pitting, probably chemical damage. He reported chemical damage to the acrylic cell, apparently, which is puzzling. Something about the water there? Or what? In any case, there are lots of reasons to not see results.
For example, I'm handling cell materials with my bare hands, because it is simply too much hassle to do otherwise, so I'll have to clean the finished cathodes and other cell contents. Screw that up, and it might not be surprising if I get no results.
Definitely, reading the Earthtech work was helpful. I've concluded from that and Kowalski that *some* of what has generally been attributed to radiation pitting is, indeed, some kind of chemical damage, and it's actually pretty obvious from the images. Scattered, separated clean pits aren't chemical damage, unless it is somehow concentrated to a very small area, isolated from other areas. I.e., something caused by an occasional oxygen bubble could conceivably be chemical damage, but not ordinary and actually quite unlikely. What looks like chemical damage is the massive connected damage right next to the cathode, sometimes called "hamburger," though Krivit called it "caviar." I think not. Radiation damage would not have a crisp edge, there would simply be a fall-off in pit density as one gets further away from the cathode. That's what's seen on the back, and it is what is seen in some of the SPAWAR experiments outside the central (along the wire) solidly damaged area.
The fact that his standards of reproducible proof are high only increases the credibility of his positive report, once someone finally does take that bullet-proof experiment to Austin.
At that point it won't matter.
My prediction is that it will happen before the end of summer 2010. A quick look at their website shows nothing new in the last year, so they can probably squeeze you in next week, if you have it ready. And "you" probably think this post refers to you.
Hey, why not? But his standing offer is to use his fancy calorimeter, and I'm not searching for heat. Just neutrons. Neutrons are direct evidence of nuclear reactions, nothing else produces them that would be easy to come by, except cosmic rays (i.e., nuclear reactions somewhere else or in the atmosphere from incoming high-energy Stuff (and Widom-Larsen's theory is simply a kind of "nuclear reaction" forming neutronium from electron capture by protium; but W-L theory supposedly will produce cold neutrons, which I wouldn't detect directly.)
I've written about the Earthtech work on this list before. Since it's coming up, I'll write a short bit about it directly, again.
