At 07:06 PM 5/7/2010, Jones Beene wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
> But his [Scott Little] standing offer is to use his fancy calorimeter,
and I'm not searching for heat. Just neutrons. Neutrons are direct
evidence of nuclear reactions ...
That is a good strategy, and Scott is also an expert in radioactive species
detection. He may be semi-retired however, but I'm sure he would be
interested in helping at some point.
I assume I'll eventually talk to him, if he's still active. I think
he did some spectacular work with the RIFEX kits, though I haven't
read a critical review of it; my impression is simply based on the
fact that he didn't wave it away as impossible, but seems to have
tried very hard to make it work, and then to analyze what he found.
We need to understand that this field does not depend on any
particular experiment being confirmed. There are lots of ways to make
mistakes, and some of them might even be systematic. But any
experiment that claims reproducibility should be carefully
investigated. It's okay if it's investigated first by "believers,"
because the skeptics have a point: if there is no reason to believe
that a thing is possible, they can't be expected to check out every
nutty report. So ... this is how science works: those who are
sufficiently convinced or intrigued to think something is possible
are naturally the first to check it out, and only when they start
reporting confirmation -- establishing that there is *some kind* of
reproducibility -- would we properly start to see serious attempts to
debunk by *experimental* skeptics, as distinct from the armchair kind.
It's an error, generally, to go for "fully independent" reproduction
at first, when even dependent reproduction is found to be difficult.
In 1989, the hot fusion scientists rushed to "reproduce," but, I
suspect, they weren't exactly hoping for "success," for they were
very quick to announce negative results as if it proved something
other than failure to replicate. They pinned the failure on
Fleischmann's sloppiness, without ever actually doing anything but
come up with speculations as to what might have gone wrong. The
sloppiness was, in fact, theirs.
My 8-year old daughter got it immediately, when I explained the
history to her, quite neutrally. I told her that this man, Martin,
had found something by doing certain things, but that others tried it
and it didn't work. She said, immediately and instinctively, "But,
Daddy, they didn't try hard enough!"
Sure, it was reasonable to think that there might be artifact, and
that, thus, the failure to reproduce was because there was nothing to
reproduce. But they jumped to that conclusion without ever finding
the smoking gun, the actual error supposedly made by Fleischmann in
his calorimetry. But, then, this error was compounded by not only an
assumption of proof of bogosity, but, as well, active efforts by some
to repress cold fusion research, efforts which seriously damaged the
field for a long time. That's changing, as was practically
inevitable. Barriers to truth tend to be leaky, they require constant
maintenance, and it gets hard to recruit new workers. After all, if
this thing is bogus, why do we have to put so much effort into keeping it down?
BTW - aside for CR-39 film, another way of detecting neutrons which we have
not mentioned before is possibly worth consideration for some specialty uses
like yours, and that is the rare earth metal gadolinium, element 64 ... and
it is not as rare as you might think, since it is a byproduct of high
tonnage thorium mining and refining where they have to get rid of every
trace, for the obvious reason.
Cool. However.
Whereas boron has extremely high sensitivity to low energy neutrons, as we
all know - gadolinium is over 10 times higher ! (~50,000 barns) Truly
remarkable. I don't know if you knew about Gd, but if not - it would be
worth putting some thought into a way to use gadolinium in the testing
procedure, as it may be superior to film at some level.
Probably not, and I'll say why. I don't think it's penetrated how low
the neutron levels are.
It might be best used as an adjunct and alternative. Obviously if you detect
these cold neuts in two different ways, then it eliminates the objections to
film which have been voiced.
Gd could be used with a simple GM meter, for instance, since it (presumably)
converts low energy neutrons to gammas on adsorption.
Again, if a cell is showing (cold) neutron production in two different ways,
then that fact backs skeptics into a tight corner - and as for availability
- I notice that it is being sold on eBay.
This is what I expect to see: I'll be lucky if I register on the film
one neutron track per several minutes, maybe ten minutes, average.
The key to the film is getting the film very close to the source, so
neutron levels on the level of one per minute can be accumulated.
Now, if I have a gamma detector, how do I know that the gammas came
from the source? Couldn't they come from cosmic rays? Consider how
much background there is on an ordinary Geiger counter!
Sure, I'm interested in electronic detection, but the detector would
have to be designed to be very small, and close to the source.
Indeed, an ideal electronic design would be a very small detector
that is then used as a substrate for codeposition. And gadolinium
could indeed be a good material to use to convert the neutrons to
gammas. If cold neutrons are being generated, they might make it into
the substrate and be detected. But I'm not looking for cold neutrons,
at least not at first, I'm looking for energetic neutrons. Cold
neutrons are so easily absorbed that I wouldn't expect them to get
out of the cell.
It appears that prior electronic neutron detection found bursts of
neutrons, but just barely above background. My guess is that they
weren't narrowing the source down to the cathode adequately; this is
what SSNTDs can do, and they integrate over the life of the
experiment. So there might be, over the whole detector surface, tens
or even hundreds (for a long experiment) of background tracks, but
then, the experimental tracks are concentrated next to the cathode,
and hopefully are in the thousands, but they could be in the hundreds
and still be convincing. That's what background can't do, and that's
why these results are so important, why background isn't a viable
explanation for the SPAWAR findings. Contamination could remain a
possibility, something radioactive that might concentrate on the
cathode, but why would this happen with heavy water and not with
light water? And most radioactivity doesn't generate neutrons, and to
get to the detector in my design, other radiation would have to get
through 1/16 inch of acrylic. I don't like that distance, and
eventually I may take it down to six microns of polyester, but I
wanted to start out very simple, and since 1/16 inch is the thickness
of CR-39 being used by SPAWAR, I think, it should be fine.
I'll be running a light water cell in series with the heavy water
one, everything about both cells will be otherwise the same. (The
current will be the same, which will probably cause some different
voltage history, but I expect this to be of little effect, and I'm
not doing any serious calorimetry.) I'll have radiation detectors
placed in various locations, the same on both cells. I'll have piezo
sensors on both cells (which, if there are actually significant shock
waves, should pick them up. I'm not making the sensor into a cathode,
so it's possible I won't see this effect. But I wanted an excuse to
buy a digital storage oscilloscope! And I'll be watching in visible
light, with a microscope trained on the cathode (a section of the
cathode will be exposed, much of it will be covered on the outside by
LR-115 film; I'd hoped to use CR-39 because it's very clear, but
that's now for another day).
I'll look at gadolinium for future reference, thanks. Boron or
Boron-10 is used for neutron detection with LR-115 because it
produces alpha particles, which then will pit the cellulose nitrate.
Gadolinium would have to be used with something sensitive to gammas,
which LR-115 supposedly is not. X-ray film?
(LR-115 does not require preventing exposure to light or to gammas,
it's a selling point.)
By the way, I wrote "cellulose acetate," I think, in another post.
It's the nitrate that is used in LR-115.
