At 11:53 AM 10/23/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Their reaction is understandable.
Yes, of course. But it is really in the same class as the rejection
of experimental evidence indicating cold fusion.
I do not think so. Biology is very different from chemistry or
physics. There are many rare physical effects that can only be
triggered on earth with great difficulty, such as inside a Tokamak
or an accelerator. These effects can never play a role in biology.
Sure, as to what is accomplished with tokamaks. A CF cell is far, far
from a Tokamak. If we assume that the reaction requires very special
palladium and pure D2O, yes. But it may not. We'll know better when
we understand what's happening in CF cells. We don't.
The same "we don't" applies to biological transmutation. On the face,
it seems very unlikely, for lots of reasons. But so did LENR seem
very unlikely.
However, we know that chemical environment can, under some
conditions, influence nuclear activity. Good example is Be-7, which
is stable when ionized in free space, but which becomes unstable when
it has the electrons (decaying through electron capture).
Again, you can come with lots of reasons why this wouldn't apply,
that's only an odd exception, etc. All those argumewnts were used
against cold fusion. "It seems impossible" is a reason for an
individual to decide not to bother looking in to something, but it is
never an excuse for rejecting experimental work without the tough
work of replication efforts and a demonstration of artifact. Nobody
should *ever* be condemned for reporting "impossible" results. For
falsification of data, throw the book at them. For error in
interpretation, some criticism, perhaps., but to err is human, and
people who never make mistakes probably discover little new. But for
honest reporting of puzzling results, this is necessary for science.
One of the oft-used bases for rejecting papers on cold fusion was
"presents no theoretical explanation of results." That was completely
backwards. New theory may be utterly unattainable without a lot of
investigation, and if the work is rejected because of lack of theory,
there is a vicious circle set up.
Biology has a more limited repertoire of reactions and materials.
But far higher sophistication in how these reactions and materials are applied.
It can only make use of benign reactions and readily available,
non-toxic materials.
That is quite misleading. What is developed and conserved by
evolution is the genetic blueprint of a species, not of individuals.
Something totally toxic to an individual, which might kill and
disrupt an individual cell, for example, but which then makes
something useful available to the rest of the members of a colony,
could be an advantageous trait. Further, deuterium, if it's a
necessary ingredient, may be adequately available for some biological
purposes. Cells might be able to preferentially move deuterium to
some location, for example.
No species on earth can be dependent on elements such as gold,
because it is not readily available, or arsenic. There are some
ocean plants that concentrate iodine from extremely low
concentration sea water, but they can do this because sea water is
constantly moving with the tides, so new water is constantly
presented to the plants. Plants or animals on land could never do this.
With what?
By the way, Vyosotskii's finding that deinococcus radiodurans may be
transmuting Mn to Fe does not show that this is the primary reaction
that the organism uses. The primary reaction might be something else,
and it simply happens that Mn -> Fe happens with some frequency as a
side effect.
Consider all the confusion that resulted from the tritium and
neutrons question with cold fusion. People assumed, first of all,
that tritium and neutrons would necessarily be major products. Their
relative absence was a huge puzzle, leading people to conclude that
d-d fusion was not occurring.
My view is that this conclusion was probably correct! The reaction is
almost certainly something else. As I've written before, it's still
not utterly impossible that d-d fusion takes place, even that it is
the primary reaction, but this requires either something completely
new (possible but not terribly likely) or several more possible but
still quite unlikely things happening at the same time. Big problem:
branching ratio and conservation of momentum. Occam's razor, my
opinion, "unknown nuclear reaction," just as Fleischmann wrote in his paper....
As Storms writes, there are now some "plausible" theories. Each one
still has some unsolved problems, but, to me, they seem much less
insuperable than the original d-d fusion hypothesis. Given the
possibility of direct fusion to Be-8, the remaining problem is how
the resulting alphas or helium atoms end up with less than the 20 KeV
that Hagelstein sets as an upper limit. If he's correct! And I assume he is.
Gad, that's low! At first, I naively thought that 23.8 MeV alphas
would be just fine, they'd be quickly absorbed, and they might cause
some secondary reactions to explain the tritium at low levels, the
neutrons at very low levels, and the other transmutations at low
levels, plus the SPAWAR CR-39 results. Now, I don't have an
explanation for the "front side track" results other than chemical damage.
As to the neutrons on the back, those tell us practically nothing
about the main reaction. They are present in some cells (gold wire
cathode, and platinum at lower levels) and not others (silver
cathode), though all these cells, we can think, are producing the
main reaction. This is what I'll be investigating in more detail.
First, anything that can happen in biology tends to be widely
exploited by many different species. Even phenomena that do not seem
possible in biology sometimes turn out to be possible, and when they
do, we have no trouble finding examples of them.
You could say that any fusion reaction in palladium loaded with
deuterium would have been noticed before.
That is incorrect. Only a handful of people in history ever looked
at palladium loaded with deuterium. Mizuno and maybe a dozen others.
I very much doubt that. If I'm correct, loading palladium with
deuterium was a fairly routine way to generate neutrons, through
bombardment of the loaded material with accelerated deuterons. Mizuno
was doing this not to investigate the material, but for practical
application. He didn't invent that. But you could be right, and I'm
not about to waste time searching the literature to prove this
incorrect. What Mizuno shows, quite well, and I'm sure you know this,
is that there could be anomalous phenomena that were never reported.
The material never arises in nature in amounts large enough to be
detected. It is artificial, like conditions inside an accelerator.
Whereas any biological process that can occur at all tends to occur
everywhere, constantly. There are practically no unique or
one-of-a-kind reactions or events that occur in only one species.
The only thing that comes to mind is high intelligence and high
technology in homo sapiens.
Jed, Vysotskii finds transmutations with many different species of
bacteria. The others in the field, Kevran and Komaki, find it with
multicelled organisms, like chickens, I think. (I have not studied
this literature and don't particularly plan to. I am *not* on a
biological transmutation soapbox. At least not yet!)
We don't know how many species can manage nuclear reactions (if
any). Most organisms would find the radiation intolerable.
The only kind of cold fusion reaction that could occur in organisms
would be the reactions that produce no measurable effect other than
heat, no matter how closely you look, no matter how sensitive the
instrument. People have been looking for radiation, neutrons,
particles or what-have-you for 21 years. With some reactions, there
is no trace of them, so I conclude they are not there and will never be found.
Yes. It's not true that all reactions that produce radiation must be
excluded. Rather, this limits the kind of utility possible, and
indicates why an organism like deinococcus radiodurans might need
that radiation-resistance. (It's also possible that DR is
radiation-resistant from a side-effect that allows it to survive
other kinds of toxicity that would otherwise fatally disrupt DNA.)
I assume there must be a continuum between plasma fusion reactions
that always produce dangerous emissions, and cold fusion reactions
that never produce them. If biological cold fusion exists, obviously
it would have to be the benign side of the scale. A cell that
produced a dangerous reaction would kill itself off and cause
extinction. Only the benign reactions would survive.
Depends on the level and the nature of the emissions and the ability
of the organism to resist or handle the damage.
That's why deinococcus radiodurans was a good place to look. It can
handle radiation designed to kill everything else, totally. It has
multiply redundant copies of its DNA. Ask yourself, Jed, why it
wastes so much energy on that redundancy.
Obviously because it lives in heavy water. That's a lot less
dangerous than producing the radiation inside the cell! I cannot
imagine that any form of cold fusion that produces radiation can
happen in biology.
Lots of organisms could live in heavy water, if I'm correct. DR can
handle massive amounts of radiation, i.e., each cell can take
multiple disruptions and continue to function. It is also possible to
repair DNA. Basically, the whole line of argument is a diversion.
I would not think of biological transmutation if there were no
experimental evidence. I remain quite skeptical, on general
principles, with a single report. I have utterly no reason to doubt
Vysotskii personally. He's a long-established and heavily published
scientist, before he ever came up with this stuff. But who knows what
can happen with an individual. People lose it sometimes. I may, you
may, we all may, none of us are immune to this. That's why, for
something of this magnitude, we need independent replication. Before
that might come such work as laboratory visits, close examination of
the experimental work, review of primary research documents and data, etc.
When there are reports that come from researchers who will not
disclose the necessary information and cooperate fully with such
study, and then replication efforts, again, we have more cause to
discount the work, even though there can be decent reasons for that.
Larsen claims that he has evidence to support the suppression of
radiation through the heavy electrons he postulates allow his ULM
neutrons to form. When I found that he was refusing to disclose this
evidence for "proprietary reasons," my trust in his claims went very
close to zero. Even though he might, again, have perfectly reasonable
motives. This problem afflicted cold fusion research for quite some
time, or, at least, it's been alleged that it did, that Pons and
Fleischmann withheld data because of intellectual property issues.
Might be true, but I can understand if it put others off their feed.
I'm not suggesting that cold fusion is *necessary,* nor even that it
would be probable. I'm merely suggesting that, if cold fusion is
real, and particular if it is based on something like cluster
fusion, it would not be terribly surprising if proteins can pull it off.
Without knowing anything about how cells might or might not produce
an NAE, I think we can probably rule it out based on old-fashioned
evolutionary principles.
Nope. That is the very same argument as "ruling out" cold fusion
based on "old-fashioned" nuclear physics. It's an argument from
ignorance, both of them. "Unknown phenomenon" is "impossible" because
it does not have "characteristics of known phenomena."
As I'm now saying about cold fusion to the pseudoskeptics, *what*
phenomenon is impossible. Be specific, and do the math! This is a
variation on what I said when lecturing about Islam at colleges where
I was invited to speak, to an atheist who proudly said, "I don't
believe in God!" I asked, "In what god do you not believe?" And when
he was speechless, I said, "The god in which you do not believe, I
probably do not believe in either."
What I've been finding is that about all the skeptical literature is
basing the rejection on a hypothesis that the reaction, if it exists,
must be d-d fusion. I just recently had a bit of a debate with an old
friend, a mathematician, who, it seems, has some knowledge of nuclear
physics. Adamant, he's been. This is total nonsense, he believes, and
he warns me about what he assumes are people who will try to extract
my life savings from me on some promise of fabulous profit. He is
totally impervious to facts, except that, state a fact to him, if he
bothers to respond to it at all, he makes up some ad-hoc reason why
it's preposterous.
I told him about Be-8 theory. Preposterous! Unlikely to the third
power, he wrote. He didn't explain, but he doesn't realize that I
know that argument very well, it is rooted in the assumptions of
independent probability, that what Be-8 would require is not just d-d
fusion (very low cross section), not just simultaneous collision with
another deuteron (original cross-section squared), but the addition
of yet another deuteron at the same time (cubed). Such a reaction has
never been observed, he asserted with utter confidence and certainty.
I'm at this point wondering if I should even bother to tell him that
experiments with palladium deuteride bombarded by deuterons show
elevation of 3D fusion by a factor of 10^26 over the naive
expectation he pronounced. That this is what led Takahashi to
investigate the theory of multibody fusion in lattice confinement,
i.e., in situations where particular configurations of atoms are
vastly enhanced. Reactions taking place in or on a lattice are not at
all the same as in free space with random collision of reactants. It
would be like predicting a chemical reaction based on what happens
when elements meet each other, purely and simply, ignoring catalysis.
Fleischmann expected that there might be some minor effect on fusion
cross-section from high palladium loading with deuterium, but he
expected that it would be below measurement error. That was a very
reasonable expectation (both the elevation of cross-section, but also
the small level of the effect). He was wrong. Deliciously wrong.
If cellular cold fusion were possible, it would be a tremendously
valuable adaption. It would greatly enhance the chances of survival
for many reasons, such as the ability to generate heat (reducing the
need for food), and the ability to make elements in short supply. A
species with the latter ability would not suffer from diseases such
as pellagra or iodine deficiency.
It might be quite difficult, and, as you have pointed out, might come
with possible hazards. Storms speculated -- to much derision on
Wikipedia, by the way -- that spontaneous combustion might be the
result of some cold fusion process in the body. I find that
practically preposterous. But once one is accustomed to accepting
several impossible things before breakfast, it might be less
preposterous. I am nowhere near ready to go into spontaneous human
combustion, and I rather wish that Storms had not mentioned this!
Energetically, it might be easier to get those necessities the normal
way than from biological transmutation. Suppose the reaction does
produce dangerous radiation. Only a few species, under some
conditions, might still find it advantageous.
The DNA for that mechanism would have been passed to many different
species, and it would have changed and adapted to many other uses.
The adaption would probably arise independently in different
species, the way vision and flight have. So it would not be a rare
phenomenon, difficult to observe. It would be everywhere you look,
with such intensity you could not miss it.
A similar argument, by the way, has been advanced against cold
fusion. If certain crystal structures were able to catalyze fusion,
even at a very low rate, over time this would accumulate reaction
products, etc. Of course, there are some reaction product anomalies
that are what led Jones into this field.
The argument does not at all establish impossibility. Always
remember, never rule out the unknown!
I find it hard to imagine that chickens could evolve the ability to
transmute material into calcium, but other birds and species related
to them would not have any ability to do other transmutations and
cold fusion energy releases. The ability would confer so many
advantages on the animals, the DNA would have spread far and wide by
now. It does not resemble the specialized and limited ability to
produce visible light in a lightning bug, which would not confer
advantages to other species. Bat sonar is another example of a
specialized ability would not be valuable for most species. (Both
are only useful to animals active in the evening with low light.)
This is one reason why I've not investigated biological transmutation
in higher organisms. But I would certainly not condemn someone who
does investigate it.
My view is that the Vyostotskii papers were properly included. That
was the whole point.
