At 03:56 PM 6/16/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Krivit's previous blog entry is a doozy:
<<http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/06/06/cold-fusion-may-ye-rest-in-peace/>http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/06/06/cold-fusion-may-ye-rest-in-peace/>http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/06/06/cold-fusion-may-ye-rest-in-peace/
He's nuts on this. There is some ambiguity in the term "fusion," a
confusion between process and result.
This is even nuttier than usual.
Disagree. It's usual.
Krivit wrote:
"'Cold fusion' was a metaphor for a utopian dream: clean,
inexpensive, universally available, virtually unlimited energy from water."
It is not a metaphor; it is a fact. This is like saying that the
atomic bomb was a metaphor for killing hundreds of thousands of
people in Hiroshima.
Well, the dream is a fact, i.e., there is that dream. We don't have
that energy from cold fusion yet, nor from any form of LENR. What
Krivit does is to claim that neutron activation, under the special
conditions W-L propose, isn't "fusion," based on a pedantic
distinction. In my book, if you take deuterium and make it into two
neutrons by adding an electron, then insert this into a nucleus,
which then spits out the electron, you have just accomplished fusion
of deuterium with that nucleus, by "neutralizing" it with that
original electron. It's fusion even before the electron is ejected.
Adding an electron is a possible way to accomplish "fusion." There are others.
And we don't know which one is active, and it's possible that more
than one is active.
"The concept of 'cold fusion' inspired hope for a greener planet,
local energy production, freedom from the shackles of the petrocracy
and, among other benevolent ideals, world peace. My first book, The
Rebirth of Cold Fusion: Real Science, Real Hope, Real Energy,
espoused this perspective."
Somehow I think that the hope of world peace is a tad thin. Maybe, if
there is less to fight over. And maybe not. I suspect that people
will still find things to fight over, such as the definition of
"fusion." Maybe we should run the W-L people out of town on a rail,
or tar and feather them. How does that sound? Game?
My disappointment is that a man who thought of himself as a
hard-hitting investigative journalist became a shill for one side of
a dispute. However, isn't this what he originally did with cold
fusion itself? He acknowledges being influenced by "PhDs." Methinks
that Krivit had a preference for PhDs with erratic views, the
underdog, so to speak. I can understand that, but it's dangerous, and
makes for poor investigative journalism. Sometimes the majority is right!
(Usually, actually, but the exceptions can be doozies!)
Why would any of this be nullified by the W-L theory, or if Mills is
right? Theory has nothing to do with these predictions.
Right. Cold fusion was very difficult to replicate, and for the same
reason, commercial applications were even more difficult. That,
however, simply sets the challenge. I saw, at the LANR conference,
designs being proposed for LENR reactors, when we don't know nearly
enough about sustaining these reactions to have a clue how to design
them yet. Rossi, if this isn't fraud, did his homework well, and it's
not about superior theory, as far as I can tell, but, again, we need
to know more. I found this remarkable quote from the soul who wrote
the report of that APS meeting in 1989:
Jones' data were challenged by Morrison of CERN, who said Jones
had overstated the statistical significance of his data.
This summarizes the most optimistic outcome of the entire
session. Whether it's 2 or 5.7 standard deviations, if it is
reproducible then it does seem to indicate SOMETHING, perhaps
cold fusion, is possible in metals, though at an extremely low
rate. One other speaker mentioned the possibility of looking for
the K-alpha x-ray emission from Pd as a signal of fusion. Most
of the other papers represent essentially gloomy forecasts on the
whole predicament. It may be time for most people to sit back
and let Los Alamos (with Pons' collaboration) either reproduce or
repudiate the F&P results. On the other hand it's possible, even
if F&P are wrong (and it sure looks that way), that some good
will have come out of all this: people may be inspired now to
look in completely new directions. After all, some of the
possible ideas (boson condensation, screening, etc.) that have
been touted to explain this cold fusion in a metal do not sound
so terribly off base. And there still are the Jones' results to
contend with. Perhaps now research will proceed via the
responsible scientific approach.
Whoever wrote that had, more or less, the right idea. They were all
on a wrong track, though, assuming that, if F&P was real, it would be
normal fusion, which it obviously is not. Nevertheless, this writer
was giving experiment its proper place, allowing experiment to drive
theory instead of the reverse. The "responsible scientific approach"
was needed.
"For many years, proponents claimed 'cold fusion' as a nuclear
process that emulated thermonuclear fusion at room temperature. LENR
is nuclear, but it looks nothing like fusion."
Unless it is fusion, in which case it looks like a different kind of
fusion. He mean it looks nothing like plasma fusion, which is a
different assertion.
It looks nothing like classical d-d fusion, i.e., plasma fusion. It
doesn't look like muon-catalyzed fusion, either, which is why the
comment of the author above abotu "screening," i.e., electron
screening, is probably off. W-L theory does bypass this, but, as far
as I can tell, would lead to predicted results that don't match
experiment at all. Krivit finds that McKubre failed to dot an i,
here, and cross a t, there, but the substantial results stand.
"Not even cold fusion proponents propose that light-hydrogen nuclei
fuse with each other at room temperature."
Of course they do! Why wouldn't they? It is not that much more a
stretch than deuterons fusing.
Krivit is roughly correct on this, but it's a gross
oversimplification. My sense is that nost researchers dismissed the
NiH results because of more severe problems with mechanism. It's a
bit hard to explain otherwise. In other words, the affliction of
demanding theoretical explanations still oppressed the CF research
community, to some degree. But NiH was known to the field. I'll point
out that biological transmutation also suffers from neglect, and if
you want to know where I think an alternate future might be -- or at
least part of it -- that's it.
"Chubb's last words to me about our ideological disagreement
revolved around the absence of experimental evidence for the theory
of 'cold fusion.' This followed my revelation of the data
manipulation and fabrication by electrochemist Michael McKubre."
This is nuts. Completely around the bend. This revelation exists in
Krivit's own mind only.
Yeah. And Krivit's work can be damaging, because he has gone after
heat/helium, the strongest evidence so far for nuclear reactions,
because nuclear product, helium, is correlated with the generated
heat, and Krivit goes ape over the ratio. That the ratio was within
an order of magnitude of the expected figure for deuterium -> helium
-- regardless of mechanism -- was enough to knock Huizenga over. He
still sputtered that "of course, it won't be replicated, like many
cold fusion claims, and, of course, there are no gammas," supposedly
the proof of bogosity, not realizing that the lack of gammas, if heat
and helium are, in fact, correlated, demonstrates exactly what Pons
and Fleischmann claimed, an "unknown nuclear reaction."
But he knew and acknowledged the importance. Krivit doesn't get it.
Helium. Tritium would be expected from W-L neutrons, plenty of it.
Not found, not in the quantities that would be expected. Gammas would
be expected. W-L waves them away with a completely unconfirmed, and
somehow miraculously efficient, gamma suppression effect that doesn't
even leak around the edges. Helium would not be the most prominent
product of W-L reactions, it seems. There are severe rate problems,
where a rare initial reaction somehow is met with a 100% completion
intermediate reaction of the same general class.
What I've seen in Krivit's analyses of the helium work is that he
didn't understand the reports. Violante, for example, does not exlude
ambient helium from his experiments, but measures total helium.
Krivit got a decimal point wrong, misunderstanding correspondence
from Violante and harangued him about it, impugning his integrity. My
sense is that Krivit is over his head when it comes to the science,
and always was.
He could still do a good job of reporting, but only if he avoids
taking sides and imposing his own ignorant conclusions on what he
reports. Krivit has made himself into part of the story, and he's not
objective. He badly needs an editor, but who would he accept?
As I said, this is a doozy.
Yeah. But not new for him. It's the same party line he's been pushing
for quite some time now. He asks "tough questions" of McKubre and
Marwan, abougt topics so obscure that hardly anyone understood what
he was talking about, at the ACS conference, for example, but where
is he asking the obvious questions of Widom and Larsen? Once upon a
time he reported problems with W-L, such as the Garwin question about
experimental confirmation of the gamma suppression, but he stopped
that. Now that W-L were awarded a patent on that, where is that
experimental data?
I suspect that he doesn't know enough to ask them, and that he
rejects those who do as "biased," and he doesn't want to alienate his
friends, Widom and Larsen. He avoids fora where he's likely to be
asked these questions, himself, such as this mailing list or the CMNS
list. He sticks to his own blog, where he can decide which comments
to post and which ones to "disappear." Because that's what happens to
inconvenient comments, you didn't think that the balance of opinion
represented there was unbiased, did you?
