At 03:24 PM 6/14/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
See:
On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science,
by David Goodstein
http://www.amazon.com/Fact-Fraud-Cautionary-Tales-Science/dp/0691139660/ref=sr_1_1
In this book, Goodstein peddles the same nonsense he did in this
paper, claiming that "nothing has changed":
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GoodsteinDwhateverha.pdf
Jed, you are misquoting him, if you are referring to the paper. From
the paper introductory note:
The article that follows was written in 1994, and first appeared in
The American Scholar (vol. 63 p. 527). In the three years since then
much has happened, but little has changed. There have been reports
of increasingly reliable production of excess heat, and of the
detection of 4He residue, and much more. Nevertheless, the most
remarkable fact remains that cold fusion has neither been accepted
by mainstream science, nor has it withered away. The general
situation that the article describes still seems to be in place today.
"Today" was as late as 2000 (the intro implies 1997 or 1998), and the
comment seems to be true. When he was talking about "nothing has
changed," then, he's not referring to the evidence, but to the
response. And he calls this a "most remarkable fact."
What's remarkable, Jed? It's obvious. That "mainstream science" seems
to be impervious to evidence!
He even mentions, in that brief note, the critical heat/helium
evidence; the heaviest argument levied against cold fusion in the
early days was the supposed absence of the "ash," the product of the
reaction. From known branching ratios for d-d fusion, this was quite
unexpected, but, as Huizenga noted, "if confirmed," this would
explain the mystery. Huizenga was right, for a change.
I searched the book for "nothing has changed." No results. But
"little has changed" pops up a paragraph which is quite consistent
with what he wrote before. I would certainly object to his argument
from theory, but he is not, in fact, nailing himself to that
argument, he is pointing out the contradiction, and not resolving it.
Given the opportunity, I would attempt to show him how the argument
from theory was badly defective, that there was no theoretical reason
to consider low energy nuclear reactions "impossible," because
application of the theory would require an analysis of the specific
situation, and the specific situation was not known, and, in fact is
still not known, though there are proposals. In at least one or more
of these *physical situations*, not intrinsically impossible, merely
rare, fusion is *predicted* from classical quantum field theory. It
is only the two-body approximation, known to be an approximation, and
simply presumed to apply universally, that predicts fusion would
occur at such a low rate as to be undetectable.
I'd point out to him that the actual goal of Pons and Fleischmann was
not "limitless energy," or something like that, but to test the
boundaries of the very approximation that was used to reject their
work. They expected to come up with null results, it was a long shot,
and they knew it. Physicists have later treated them as if they were
ignorant, far from it. They knew that it was supposedly impossible,
but they also knew that we don't know everything, and that nobody had
seriously looked in this particular nook and cranny.
Indeed, once they found what they found, and with hindsight, other
clues were seen in the memories of researchers, odd things that had
happened that were set aside as unexplainable anomalies that are
occasionally found, and that usually represent some odd artifact,
researchers don't have the time to track all these down. Mizuno's
radiation detector going off from a palladium deuteride experiment.
Must have been cosmic rays, or some contamination or electronic
glitch, just a coincidence. His extended boil-off of the heavy water
when he shut down the loading of another batch of palladium. That one
was a serious mystery, until later work gave an "explanation," if we
can call it that, of LENR.
Will Goodstein's new book help or harm the field? I suspect, in the
long run, that it will help. The skeptics will read it as confirming
their view, but they will consider it weak. I mean, doesn't he know
that it's truly impossible and that all those positive results were
just shoddy work, coincidence, etc.?
But nothing is going to convince those people, not even a cup of tea.
I do plan to present them with cups of tea, so to speak. Not tea they
can drink, but another wake-up that might seriously inconvenience
their smug comfort. Hordes of high school students who have seen LENR
for themselves. How you gonna keep them down on the farm, after
they've seen New Physics?
Will I fail? I find that a very interesting question, don't you? I
might. There are many, many ways for a cold fusion experiment to go
wrong, you've been telling me that for years, and you are right. But
... is there a way to get it right? Or is Goodstein correct, that
there is no readily reproducible "recipe" for cold fusion?
That's all he's saying, really. I think he might be wrong. And, in
fact, I think he'd love to find he's wrong. He is looking for that
counter-example, it's what he needs to resolve that part of the issue.
(Suppose Pons and Fleischmann hadn't made that premature
announcement. Suppose they realized the difficulty of reproduction,
and designed a "kit" and and -- it would have taken some
considerable investment, but a recoverable one -- made several
hundred of these kits, identical, and tested, themselves, a hundred
picked at random from the set, and they found that, say, 15% of them
gave excess heat. Were their results down in that range? Then they
sold the kits, to recover the investment. What would have happened?
Those who ran the negative replications weren't replicating the
original conditions. The kit would have included a precise protocol.
Absolutely, not independent replications. But rather portable
demonstrations, and then it's possible to pick them apart and try to
figure out what went "wrong." What was the artifact? As we now
realize very well, negative replications mean nothing if the positive
effect isn't confirmed and reliable, and is rooted in unknown
conditions that might vary. A 15% "success" rate is well above that
necessary for significance. It would have cost less, in labor and
materials, in fact, to run these kits than to do a fully independent
replication, which would be the *next* step. But scientists haven't
thought in these ways. It's done all the time in engineering. You
have some new integrated circuit to sell, and applications are
tricky, they have to be designed just right. You want your customers
to succeed, so you sell them a relatively cheap "evaluation board."
Properly designed to work, with the easy mistakes avoided. You get
your costs from the evaluation board back. They don't give them away,
but it also saves your customers money, they can even incorporate the
actual printed circuit design files in their own designs.)
This is the method to my madness, Jed. I might not make money, but I
doubt, long term, that I'll lose money.
There are two main possibilities: first, the kits might not work. I
am only looking for neutrons, primarily. I'm looking for Other Stuff,
but only for later engineering purposes. If, for example, I see
high-frequency shock waves, those don't prove fusion at all. They
would be, however, a possible accessory symptom. Which can then be
used, possibly, to more rapidly detect that I'm getting NAE, which
then makes much more rapid exploration of the parameter space
possible. SSNTD results are slow and accumulated. If I pull the chips
periodically, I'll get faster results, but at lower intensity.
If the kits don't work, then I'll begin an intensive search to find
out why. What's being done that is different from what SPAWAR did. At
this point, their cooperation will become crucial. Since they have
already published a detailed protocol, and their is apparently quite
adequate and detailed information in their papers to reproduce very
accurately their work, taken together with the detailed protocol (The
Galielo Project), I'm not starting with communication with them. This
is, in fact, an independent effort, all materials were independently
obtained. My heavy water is apparently from a different source. I've
gotten off-the-shelf chemicals. I'm using the same materials for the
cell, though I plan to shift one, moving from the polyethylene
electrode supports to acrylic plastic for fabrication accuracy and
ease. The cell itself is acrylic, so I'm hoping this is not a critical element.
Suppose the kits work, and I see neutron evidence. Does this prove
fusion? Well, it's certainly strong evidence, and this would be,
unless someone beats me to it -- which I'd love! -- the first
replication of the neutron work, and if I can get these results from
a few cells (by this time, there would be others cooperating with
this), the kits will go on sale. Right now, I've got materials
available, see http://lomaxdesign.com/coldfusion, but that's what I'm
selling, materials. Not a kit represented as demonstrating cold fusion.
I have all the materials necessary to run a Galileo replication
available for sale. One stop shopping.... You'll need a power supply
and hook-up wire. If you want to develop your own LR-115 SSNTDs,
you'll need a way to control temperature in the etch bath. When I was
in high school, I did controlled temperature development of color
film, using the kitchen sink. I'd drop in ice cubes or hot water....
But I have a lab hotplate-stirrer, $70 or so from ebay. I may offer
etching services, or maybe someone else will do that. It is much
easier to etch LR-115 than CR-39. Compare 40 minutes at lower
temperature and lower concentration of NaOH to, say, six hours with CR-39.
First sale was about a week ago, a researcher in California bought
some LR-115. It is really, really cool stuff, and cheap. Much easier
to use and apparently with higher-resolution results and less noise
than CR-39. This material has been used for radiation detection since
1985, I don't know why the field went to CR-39, except that you can
use CR-39 wet, supposedly, and that's a bad idea with LR-115, the
cellulose nitrate detector layer is probably not stable in the
electrolyte. But, then again, SPAWAR went to dry configuration,
because CR-39 is also not really stable wet, near an electrolytic cathode.
The tracks are far easier to see with LR-115, because one etches
completely through the red detector layer, thus creating a high
contrast structure. I bought 6 micron material (100 micron polyester
base). 12 micron material is available, I'd like to try it. Since
tracks that don't go all the way through are still visible as lighter
areas, it might even be better than 6 micron for some purposes.
