At 08:17 PM 8/10/2010, Rich Murray wrote:
George Miley trained Scott Little in person in Nov 1996 on use of costly CETI RIFEX kit -- Little had many discussions during his runs -- no hints re using D2O not H2O: Rich Murray 2010.08.10
Rich, there is lots of evidence that the conditions where LENR takes place are very sensitive to what might seem, given our lack of understanding of the mechanism, to be not important, and easily not reported at all. A great deal of the work has depended upon a single signal, typically excess, heat, or, sometimes, radiation or a fusion product such as helium (well established) or other transmutation (still much more easily questioned).
What is far more conclusive at this time is the body of work where both excess heat and helium were measured, from the same cell. The findings are stunning, really, if one wants to remain skeptical: In Miles' work, for example, a series of 33 cells, 12 showed no excess heat. Big surprise, none of the 12 showed excess heat. Of the 21 that showed excess heat, 18 showed helium. Confirmation of this from other workers exists, and some of the work allows a relatively good estimate of excess heat per helium atom generated. Storms estimates 25 +/- 5 MeV per He-4. I'm sure you realize the significance of this value.
In 1994, Huizenga noticed Miles' work and wrote that, if confirmed, this would solve a major puzzle about cold fusion, i.e., where is the ash? But the believed that they would not be replicated. He was wrong. Studies where excess heat and helium are both measured, per cell, have confirmed that the helium is correlated with the excess heat. That alone makes, now, the most reasonable presumption that some kind of nuclear reaction is going on, and that it takes in deuterium and releases helium. Their may also be other possible nuclear reactions than this one; an early red herring was the variety of results. It was assumed that there couldn't possibly be more than one previously undiscovered reaction! Problem is that for the obvious theoretical reasons, combined with the apparent difficulty of setting up what Ed calls NAE, nuclear active environment, few had looked.
Fleischmann and Pons realized that there was a defect in the analysis that predicted no fusion at low temperatures, which was the use of the approximations of two-body quantum mechanics, instead of the more accurate quantum field theory or quantum electrodynamics. The math is horrific, apparently, that's what I learned in 1962, sitting in freshman and sophomore physics with Richard P. Feynmann. Fleischmann later wrote that they expected to find nothing, that the difference between QM and the reality would be below the noise. They were wrong. What they were doing was basic science, testing the boundaries of theory. They found an edge where previous theory -- and, still, present theory, probably -- was inadequate.
There are many red herrings in the field. Someone may run an experiment looking, for example, for radiation evidence alone, no calorimetry. They find no radiation. The question is, then, did they get a reaction at all? Only by correlating more than one signal can we start to answer the questions. So far, this has been done best with heat and helium. The two measurements validate each other.
I'll be looking for neutrons, as reported by Mosier-Boss et al, and this entirely sets aside the issues you have raised (cogently, it seems to me) about electric fields in the cell. Those fields are not -- at all -- a part of this work. Now, what if I don't find neutrons? Does this prove something? Not exactly. What if, for example, I allowed my heavy water to become contaminated with ordinary water from the air. After all, heavy water is hygroscopic, if left exposed, the hydrogen concentration will slowly increase, and Storms has published work showing -- clearly -- that hydrogen poisons the reaction, reducing it to *far* lower levels. There may be thousands of possible variations between what I do and what Mosier-Boss has done, even though I'm trying to keep the conditions the same. I'll be using acrylic cathode and anode supports instead of polyethylene, as recommended in the Galileo protocol. Will that make a difference? It shouldn't! But what if it does? (If I didn't have good reasons to use acrylic, I'd not make this variation. I'm hoping to get lucky, that it simply works.)
Scott Little has done some amazing work, but it's also been flawed in certain ways. He's pointed out obvious reasons to suspect Miley's results about transmutation, and that must be respected. But ... did he get a reaction? How would we know? I think he's done some calorimetry, and I have no reason to suspect his calorimentry, but, let me point out, if he found no excess heat, why would we expect him to find transmutation? Rather, his results would, in fact, tend to *confirm* other results -- if they exist -- where excess heat, or other nuclear signature, was found along with transmutation. No excess heat or other nuclear signature, no transmutation.
The problem isn't Scott Little's work, he really has, at times, exercised extraordinary caution, and he's thoroughly reported what he did, which must be commended. It's drawing undue conclusions from it. Scott Little's Galileo replication must stand as a "replication failure," a negative result, and until and unless his specific "errors" are identified, it must toss a bit of cold water on the Galileo protocol as being reliable. However, that doesn't translate into that protocol being useless. The protocol allowed, as originally written, the use of a gold cathode, the conditions that were later reported to generate "back-side" tracks and triple tracks, evidence of neutrons. Pam could not, at the time, reveal this, and when Steve Krivit requested a single metal for the cathode, she was probably forced to suggest silver. (There were possible national security concerns that were under review.) At that time, she believed that the front side tracks were sufficiently clear to show other radiation than neutrons. In my view, this is a question that is still open; the claim of Scott Little that much or all of the front side evidence is due to chemical damage (or, in my suspicion, is exacerbated by a combination of chemical damage with radiation damage, possibly also caused by knock-on protons from neutron radiation -- or maybe there is some level of radiation other than neutrons, though Hagelstein argues otherwise) cannot be simply dismissed, there are obvious signs of this in the images provided of front-side damage, in the rather crisp edge to the "hamburger," which would not happen from radiation unless there were some kind of mask, which there was not.
I do not find any way to explain away the neutron evidence provided by Pam. Because this experiment seems simple to reproduce, I'm focusing my efforts on that, on making kits available; but first I've got to do it myself.... soon, I hope I have results to report. If I come up negative, I'll report that as well, but I will not conclude that, therefore, there is no effect. I'll conclude that I did not succeed in setting one up, and I'll look for the reasons why. The general assumption in science is that, absent fraud, experimental results are to be accepted. Pam did get the results she reported. What do they mean? That's why we keep working on this!
