At 12:00 PM 6/18/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
(One skeptic has asserted that a hotter cell would leak more helium,
say if seals were disturbed by the heat. As is common with
pseudoskeptics, the explanations are fabricated and asserted as
facts, when, for example, SRI used flow calorimetry, which
maintained cell temperature at a constant value, so the "excess
heat" is measured by the reduced power needed to keep the cell at
constant temperature. Thus this would not be expected to have any
effect on helium. In most PdD cold fusion, the temperature rise is small.)
I do not know which skeptic asserted this, but I asked Miles about
this hypothesis. He pointed out that the total heat coming from the
cells includes heat from electrolysis plus anomalous heat. This
total heat does not correlate with helium. In some cases, there was
no anomalous heat but electrolysis heat alone was higher than runs
with anomalous heat. In these cases helium did not exceed the cell
background. (I do not mean the atmospheric background, which is much higher.)
Shanahan came up with it in discussions on Wikipedia, as I recall.
This is what I mean by ad hoc attempts to explain away the results.
Someone is sitting in an armchair, so to speak, and thinks of how
heat and helium could possibly be correlated without having a common
cause. The levels of helium are too low to have helium somehow cause
the heat, unless the heat/He-4 is very high. Like nuclear reaction high.
So the skeptic goes to having the heat cause the helium in some way,
other than by actually generating it, since generating helium is,
again, nuclear.
An alternate version of this has the hot cathode being contaminated
with helium, which is driven out by the heat. That's not any better,
for reasons Jed has well explained. They aren't "hotter." They have
more excess heat if there is more helium, but "excess heat" doesn't
mean "hotter." It means "hotter than expected from the energy input."
It gets even more complicated, one could imagine some kind of
reaction in the cell involving helium that generates a heat anomaly
(perhaps some kind of reaction) that, chemically in some way, drives
out the helium contaminant. That, however, wouldn't explain helium
above ambient unless the cathode material were *really* contaminated,
and postulating this across the range of experiments gets Rube Golbergian.
A sane analyst at this point simply concludes that fusion is likely
and moves on, if satisfied, to investigate other aspects. People in
the field, already convinced by multiple evidences, have done this,
nobody is falling over themselves trying to confirm heat/helium,
because it's expensive and difficult. This is work that the U.S. DoE
might, in theory, fund, it would be exactly what the 2004 report
recommended, it would clarify issues.
This is the reproducible experiment that was supposedly so elusive.
It had been improperly defined, people were looking for a single cell
design that would always, with the same apparent conditions, produce
the same heat. No, the "single experiment" should aim to produce the
FPHE and measure helium, with maximum accuracy (accuracy for the heat
is pretty easy, it's the helium, capturing all of it, that's tough,
but it could be done). This "single experiment" would consist of a
series of FP cells, large enough for the results to be overwhelmingly
significant. The heat results can vary all over the map! That is, the
fabulous "irreproducibility" actually becomes a valuable control.
I find this enormously funny. I think that we in the field had a kind
of embarrassment about the variation in results, so it wasn't
emphasized. What's truly important about SRI P13/P14 -- besides the
famous event that has been displayed in red and blue all over the
place -- was the two previous current ramps, same heavy water, same
cathodes, same temperature, etc., where they saw nothing, before they
saw the chimera, with its fabulous feathers and untamed personality.
Third try is a charm. Once an experimenter saw this animal, they were
never the same, no matter how many others asked them, "You saw WHAT?
But that's impossible. We all know that chimeras are just a myth,
they don't exist. Look, I tried and saw nothing. I even tried twice,
just to be sure!"
