At 02:59 PM 10/12/2010, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
From Jed:
> Â Here is another good article in the Columbia Daily Tribune: an editorial
> "Cold fusion will it work?"
>
> http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/oct/11/cold-fusion/
Good follow-up comments, Jed.
I was especially amused (and somewhat exasperated) with the comments
attributed to WayneTArmburst (Ph.D.) who sed right out of the starting
gate:
"There are two primary reasons why I believe that 'Cold Fusion' is a hoax"
Not a mistake, not the result of misinterpreting the data, mind you... A HOAX!
Whatever...
I just posted there, recommending that readers
look at the Storms review. Really, readers like
Wayne are just repeating stuff they heard years ago.
I've been pouring over Huizenga and the other
skeptical sources. They all reject CF because
there are no neutrons, and they reject helium because there are no gammas.
That's all dependent upon an assumption: that if
there is fusion, it must be d-d fusion.
Some other kind of fusion, those arguments go out
the window. The rejection was *really, really stupid.* Classic arrogance.
N-rays and polywater were debunked when the
original experimental observations were
explained, conclusively. That never happened with
cold fusion; what happened was that opponents
were able to raise doubt, buttressed by "theory,"
which, of course, was d-d fusion theory. Not
quantum field theory applied to the condensed
matter environment, which I was taught, more than
forty years ago, was way, way too complex to handle mathematically.
Takahashi's Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate
theory is certainly not the only possbiility, it
just happens to be, probably, the one that is
easiest to do the math for. Symmetric!
Huizenga noticed the heat/helium results of
Miles, in the second edition of his book in 1993,
and wrote that, if confirmed, this would resolve
a major mystery of cold fusion, i..e, the ash.
However, he also wrote that it probably would not
be confirmed, because of the lack of gamma rays.
There is that assumption again!
The fact is that Miles was confirming Bush and
Lagowski who was confirming none other than Pons
and Fleischmann, who did report helium production.
And then Miles was quite adequately confirmed,
with some of the experiments being thorough
enough to come up with a more accurate estimate
of the heat/helium ration; Storms estimates 25 +/- 5 MeV.
That's an experimental value, and is little short
of astonishing if you are trying to hold on to
claim that this is not fusion. No heat, no
helium, which trashes the "helium leakage"
theory. Heat, helium proportional to the heat found.
Krivit quibbles about some of the experiments,
but Krivit ignores this: there is no other
nuclear product found in anything even close to
the levels of helium found. Storms gives the
ratios, I forget, but the transmutation products
-- which Widom-Larsen would predict would be more
abundant than helium, are, by comparison wtih
helium, practically missing. Widom-Larsen has the
tremendous task of explaining why these ULM
neutrons, which would be highly reactive with
many different nuclei, fail to produce the
copious intermediates that, say, production of
helium would require, as well as the other
isotopes that would be expected from ULM neutrons wandering about.
