From: Jed Rothwell
Letters from Miles and Kowalski. Google alerts brought me this: http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_63/iss_6/10_1.shtml?bypassSSO=1 One comment about the Miles contention that: “I have investigated cold fusion for many years and find that the Fleischmann–Pons effect is strongly dependent on the palladium material. Palladium–boron alloys made by the US Naval Research Laboratory have worked especially well in my experiments (see US Patent 6,764,561, 20 July 2004, and US Patent 7,381,368, 3 June 2008). That seems to me to suggest the importance of impurities (boron is an oxygen getter) rather than cosmic‑ray muons.” OK - boron is one of many known oxygen getters, but there are others that are far more effective in that role - and it would not be a good choice for the job if there was not more to it than binding to oxygen. Boron notably has a very high cross-section for thermal neutrons, but that is never mentioned as being important. Taking this odd statement at face value would indicate that oxygen (presumably the impurity) causes a negative effect, and that the boron is only there to eliminate oxygen. Can this be interpreted another way? The glaring problem with that statement is that the Arata-Zhang alloy – which is presumably the most active host metal ever found to date by any researcher, since it is active without an ongoing energy input at all (other than pressurization and the initial thermal trigger), contains more oxygen than any other element. This is due to the powder being baked in air at high temperature for many hours. Notably the percentage of palladium is tiny compared to oxygen. Nickel, zirconium and oxygen are there in substantial atomic ratios compared to palladium. Rossi and many others use no palladium. Surely someone on Physics Today will pick up on this bit of apparent irrationality. IOW - it does not look good from the PR perspective, if one is trying to present a logical case to skeptics for cold fusion. Why not emphasize the A-Z effect instead, since it has been replicated by a number of different groups now? Jones
