At 01:00 AM 1/29/2011, Horace Heffner wrote:
On Jan 28, 2011, at 5:08 PM, SHIRAKAWA Akira wrote:
[snip]
ROSSI. Exactly. In fact, mine is not cold fusion, but weak energy
nuclear reactions. Fleischmann and Pons did heavy water
electrolysis with a palladium cathode and platinum anode. I don't
do electrolysis, I don't use either platinum or palladium and I use
temperatures that manage to melt nickel.
There has been much nonsense about "fusion." Fusion is a term that
can refer to mechanism, but not necessarily to any specific
mechanism. However, much of the 1989 debacle resulted from an
assumption that "unknown nuclear reaction" must be fusion, and
specifically d-d fusion, a narrowing to a (partial description) of a
specific pathway. The "triple miracle" required for the P-F reaction
to be happening was all about d-d fusion, and the voices for
alternate pathways were few at first.
The argument that heat/helium was an astonishing finding of Miles,
supposedly not likely to be reproduced, was (Huizenga) that there
were no gamma rays, and that, obviously, proceeded from an assumption
that a probably impossible reaction would produce gamma rays. Instead
of making the obvious conclusion, that the reaction wasn't D+D->He-4,
but was ... an "unknown nuclear reaction," Huizenga barely budged.
But he sure noticed Miles!
If we have a black box, (maybe covered with aluminum foil!), and
deuterium goes in and helium comes out, with the thermodynamically
required energy being released, what do we call what happens in the
box? I say it's obvious, we call it fusion. And Storms did that under
peer review, and it's foolish to argue that if, say, neutrons are
formed from the interaction of heavy electrons with deuterium, that
then, through some pathway, produce helium, that this is not
"fusion." That's confusing mechanism with result, and fusion,
intrinsically, is the formation of higher weight elements from lower
weight ones, regardless of mechanism.
Without information about what the ingredients and process is with
Rossi, my position is that scientists in the field should publicly
ignore Rossi, or comment neutrally, i.e., "Given that the process is
a secret and has not been revealed, we cannot comment on this."
And I'd have suggested that reputable scientists should have avoided
participating in the demonstration. To participate and make a report
without complete information is to promote the work of Rossi, to
assist Rossi in obtaining funding that might be money tossed down a hole.
Rossi has every right to keep details secret, but not to hitch a ride
on the reputation of cold fusion researchers. If he's got something
real, if his claims are true, he will have no trouble obtaining funding.
Those who did, nevertheless, attend the demonstration should very
clearly point out what they were *not* allowed to see or observe.
Many aspects of the Rossi history are troubling, and these should not
be swept under the carpet.
None of this means that Rossi is a fraud, only that many aspects of
this resemble prior attempts at fraud, or, alternatively, delusion.
"Not fusion" is an attempt to sidestep the reputation of cold fusion.
It worked for Widom-Larsen-Krivit, but only transiently. We are
better off wearing the badge of Cold Fusion proudly. Shall we print
some bumper stickers, "It's Fusion, Get Over It"?
It's been obvious for a long time that more than one LENR exists. The
P-F reaction seems to be almost entirely one reaction, with rare
branches or secondary reactions. But there are others, quite likely.
Do I disagree with Dr. Storms on this? Maybe, when we know the
mechanism, we will find that there is a single mechanism or class of
mechanisms that can come up with differing results when the
conditions are different.
Personally, though, I'm not willing to hitch my star to any theory,
though I do flog Takahashi's TSC theory a bit, merely because it's a
usage of classical quantum field theory, it seems, to predict fusion
from a physical condition that seems like it *might* be in range of
possibility. Storms is correct to point out that the TS condition
requires energy to form, my view is that the energy *might* be within
what's available at low incidence from the Maxwell-Boltzmann
distribution, and I have hereby exhausted my ability to string
together plausible-sounding word salad.
Please, is there a physicist in the house?
(Yes, I know that there are competent physicists, including
specialists in hot fusion, who have been working on cold fusion from
the beginning, but this may be one of the toughest theoretical
problems physicists have faced for a century, and it's been a shame
that, instead of recognizing the problem and starting to work on it,
the physics community, overall, turned its back. Whoever comes up
with a mechanism that is then proven by the normal process could
possibly share in a Nobel Prize, that's my opinion. I already think
Pons and Fleischmann should get a Nobel for doing the work to check
the prediction that cold fusion was impossible, and finding that
"something" happened. Even if they did announce it with a press conference.)
(I also believe that any experimental work that proves that major CF
results are artifact would be readily published, and this is exactly
what the general scientific community failed to do in 1989-1990 et
seq. Negative replications are failures to replicate, not
demonstrations of artifact. They simply imply uncontrolled
conditions. When the Skeptic du Jour is arguing that, say, unmeasured
power supply noise, caused by bubble noise in the cell, is behind CF,
and then that the reason others couldn't replicate was that they
"correctly" measured power, he is acknowledging a presumed difference
in procedure. All it would have taken would have been for the
replicator to measure power the same way as, say, McKubre, get the
excess heat that the Skeptic is predicting, then measure the noise
power and show that it accounted for the excess heat. Of course,
nobody could do that because the McKubre technique is also generally
accepted, and it's sufficiently accurate, by a good margin. The
asserted "error" is actually a totally obvious possibility, it would
have been nailed long ago. The Skeptic has missed that cold fusion
under P-F conditions is a chaotic phenomenon that is *usually*
absent. Bubble noise would be consistent.)
(Lewis's finding of inadequate stirring as a source of apparent
excess heat, in a cell of his, would be an example of finding a
condition, that, when corrected, eliminated the apparent excess heat,
so Lewis -- somewhat appropriately -- speculated that this was the
source. But that didn't match the rest of the data, and failure to
stir was not actually a critical component of CF results. It was
merely a possible error source. Quite simply, the problem was not
that simple, for sure.)
