At 10:39 PM 12/26/2011, Aussie Guy E-Cat wrote:
As I read Dr Bushnell, he is saying 5 things: 1) Excess heat is real
and has been replicated in 100s of labs around the world.
Yes. It has. By a couple of years ago, there were 153 reports of
excess heat in peer-reviewed journals, there is a complilation
listing those papers on lenr-canr.org. Storms reviews all this in his
book, The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, World Scientific, 2007.
This has little or nothing to do with Rossi, except in one way. Once
one knows that LENR is possible, the immediate rejection of Rossi
isn't quite so simple. Rossi still looks like a con. Note: "looks like."
2) The scale of the heat generated is beyond current chemistry.
Yes. Note that this is not at all a claim that chemistry, if used in
some fraudulent scheme, could not produce this amount of energy. It
means that analysis of the experiment by experts in chemistry
sometimes shows heat well beyond "current chemistry." Given that a
nuclear product, helium, has been shown to be very strongly
associated with the FPHE, Occam's Razor currently points to ... a
nuclear reaction. That the energy ratio is right for deuterium fusion
is frosting on the cake, and could be a red herring. Most in the
field consider straight deuterium fusion, the direct fusion of two
deuterons, to be impossible, just as did the physicists in 1989-1990.
As Huizenga told us ad nauseum, on about every page, there are no
neutrons, and, when he realized, as he did, the significance of
Miles' work with helium, he pointed out, "but there are no gammas."
Right. No gammas! Get over it! "Unkknown nuclear reactions" don't
follow the rules for known ones. The assumption of two reactants and
a single helium nucleus as a product (which would indeed require a
gamma or *something* to handle the energy and momentum balance) was
just that: an assumption. For some very odd reason, the logic went,
if this is a nuclear reaction, it must be d-d fusion, but since the
branching ratio is obviously Wrong, since there are no gammas, well,
the energy must be artifact and the helium is, of course, leakage
from ambient, and we will stuff our ears so that we don't hear about
why this is completely inconsistent with the experimental data.
People still write ad-hoc Rube Goldberg explanations of how the
helium and heat just happen to be consistent with deuterium fusion
(by whatever mechanism, if, inside a black box, deuterium is somehow
converted to helium, no other products, the energy must be 23.8 KeV
per helium nucleus. It would be that if the deuterium is broken down
into quarks and then reassembled as helium, it would be that if
somehow some neutrons are produced from deuterium (i.e., D2 + e ->
2n, or W-L mechanism), and then some transmutation in the cell
produces an isotope that ends up ejecting an alpha, if the fuel is
deuterium and the product is helium, regardless of what catalysts
accomplish the feat, the energy will be that.)
3) What is being observed to occur is not Fusion (Hot or Cold) as
it is currently understood.
Key word: "as it is currently understood." There is a lost
performative there. Understood by whom? Whatever "cold fusion" LENR
turns out to be, it is not what everyone thought of in 1989-1990.
It's something else. But "fusion" does remain a simple and popular
term that does describe, most likely, what's happening. Just not,
most likely, d-d fusion. If it *is* d-d fusion, something is very,
very odd about it. For example, the conditions that allow the fusion
would have to also drastically modify the branching ratio, and
suppress radiation. That's a tall order, one that I don't think Widom
and Larsen really appreciate (they do possibly resolve the branching
ratio problem, but wave a magic wand to get rid of the expected
gammas from neutron activation.)
As an example of a possibility that may not be *it*, but that might
be close, Takahashi has calculated 100% cross-section for fusion
within a femtosecond of the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate
from four deuterons should they be found in a tetrahedral pattern
with very low relative velocity, for even about a femtosecond. That
is a *prediction* of fusion from quantum field theory, but what is
unknown is how this pattern would form, and it is unverified that it
actually forms, and the work to predict formation rate hasn't been
done. This is solid state quantum mechanics, a field that I was
taught was impossibly complex, beyond our capacities, unless perhaps
you have a lot of time on some supercomputers. The reaction, then,
would be 2 D2 -> Be-8 -> 2 He-4 (yes, two deuterium molecules,
*molecular fusion*, which obviously could only occur at low
temperatures), and because there are two products, there is no
conservation of momentum problem. There is still an issue of how the
energy is dumped. Suffice it to say that there are physicists working
on this problem. There should be more, many more. This is new
physics, and, to be sure, the physicists should have listened twenty
years ago when chemists said, "This isn't chemistry." After all, they
did know chemistry!
Sure, they might have been wrong. But, as it happens, they were not.
If it *is* chemistry, it's new chemistry!
4) WL seem to be on the right track in developing a workable theory.
W-L theory pretends to not be "fusion." It's a conceit, based on a
semantic trick. Fusion is the formation of heavier elements from
lighter ones. "Cold fusion" has long been used to refer to fusion at
temperatures below straight hot fusion temperatures. For example, at
lower temperatures, fusion still occurs, but the reaction rate goes
down. So when transuranium elements (very high Z) are formed by
bombardment at temperatures below normal fusion energy, this is
called "cold fusion." Even though it's what we'd normally think of as
very hot. They do this because when they use normal fusion energies,
to overcome the Coulomb barrier without quantum tunneling, the
resulting impact breaks apart the formed high-Z nucleus immediately.
So the have to sneak the impact nuclei in at low energies....
I've not seen anyone who knows what they are talking about who
accepts W-L theory. It is radically unformed, incomplete, as it's
been published. Huge issues are simply dismissed. If ultra-low
momentum neutrons are being formed, those would have very high fusion
cross-section, they would fuse with many elements present, and there
would be standard neutron activation gamma rays. Further, to get the
known reaction product (almost all helium, apparently, very little
else), they need more than one reaction, and the first reaction in
the series (the formation of a neutron) must have very low rate (or
else we'd see a lot more effect!), and the second reaction also
requires the formation of another neutron, so for it to somehow find
the first reaction product and again transmute it would be rare
beyond rare, and lots of the first reaction product would be found,
and it isn't.
5) NASA is interested and has done replications.
I believe so. Some LENR work has been published.
AG, this is not about Rossi. It may or may not involve NiH. NiH work,
if any, would be recent and likely unpublished, but someone may know better.
There is nothing about Bushnell's comments that can be taken as
lending credence to Rossi's work. However, anyone who is aware of the
solid LENR work will be *interested* in Rossi. And, I'd hope, cautious as hell.
