On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 10:58 AM, <pagnu...@htdconnect.com> wrote:
So - if the results are correct, maybe we should expect neutrons are
falling into shallow nuclear potential wells, forming short-lived
> isotopes?
>
This is what I'm hoping for. In my mind it connects together so many
pieces of the puzzle very nicely -- the lower-than-expected gammas; the
very low levels of neutrons and their reported lack of correlation with
heat; the tritium; the purported transmutations, and so on. It also neatly
dispatches at least one calculation that has been hard to interpret,
mentioned on p. 180 of Ed Storms' "The Science of Low Energy Nuclear
Reaction." He describes an experiment at SRI that was reported by Peter
Hagelstein and others. In that experiment they calculated the energy
generated per atom of helium to be 24.8 +/-2.5 MeV. If I'm doing
my math correctly, something in this range is straightforward to obtain
using very slow neutrons (assuming helium-4):
hydrogen-2 + 2n -> helium-4 + e- + 26.34 MeV
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some variables that can be tweaked, so
that if you run the experiment one way, you get radioisotopes, and if you
run it another way, you get stable isotopes and
little noticeable radioactivity. (You would always get isotopes, though.)
Initially it might come down to a polynomial that you have to fit to the
data to get a set of constants for a known configuration of the substrate,
seeds, and so on. You would have to do some number crunching to get the
books to balance, but hopefully it wouldn't be too long before an
analytical explanation was found for the previously-ad hoc constants.
There are some problems with this line of explanation, as people here enjoy
pointing out. Ed Storms's book offers a fantastic technical exposition,
and I highly recommend it; in it, he enlarges upon some of the more serious
problems, as well as challenges that are particular to other explanations.
To my thinking, though, it is not much more magical to say that "gammas
are missing, because they are what triggers the reaction" than to say
"gammas are missing, because the resulting energy of the reactants is
coupled with the lattice." Or to say "neutrons, by way of a photoelectric
effect involving a high energy photon traveling through a potential barrier
in the midst of a plasmon" than to say "Bose-Einstein condensate, by way of
phonons."
I have no idea how credible the reported results are. It would be
> interesting to know how confident Miley is on the transmutation reports.
>
I'm definitely waiting to find out more.
Eric
