At 04:42 PM 5/25/2012, Chemical Engineer wrote:
Reads like the catalyst may have been
Lysergic acid diethylamide
It does read that way. LeClair does not report the primary
observational data, but, rather, his high-level abstract impressions,
his *interpretations* of the data, and that is precisely what occurs
in hallucinatory states, generally. It is the interpretation that is
believed and remembered, and presented as fact, not the sensory information.
I've been there, I know what this is like, at least partially.
(Indeed, the collapse of interpretation with actual sensory
experience is *normal,* almost all of us do this routinely, unless we
are trained to do something different. Science, as a method, is
designed to compensate for this. When it works.)
(With schiziod breaks, the interpretation faculty becomes so active,
so able to create interpretations, that only the most slender thread
still connects interpretation with sensory evidence, almost any
interpretation can be created from nothing or almost nothing.)
But the title of this thread is Zawodny's video. Zawodny is
apparently doing the kind of thing I've long been suggesting: massive
parallel experimentation. I mostly thought of parallel identical
cells, essentially manufactured, but his design of what appears to be
"experiments on a chip" could be even more powerful. That all the
"cells" are created by the same process is a powerful approach.
However, he will still need to make and test multiple devices, i.e.,
many of these multi-cell chips.
It's disappointing to see so much enthusiastic "this could
revolutionize energy generation" (which has been obvious for more
than twenty years) with so little detail on what the hell he's actually doing.
The material on W-L theory is practically irrelevant. W-L theory is
still awaiting some kind of experimental verification; the obvious
expectations of what would happen with ULM neutron generation don't
match experimental results, and that's waved away with *another*
unobserved and unconfirmed phenomenon, 100% absorption of gammas by
the "heavy electron patches" that are theorized to allow p-e
combination to form the neutrons.
The theory raises more questions than it resolves, obvious questions,
and none of the (again enthusiastic) reports address those questions.
We'd expect to see, for starters, leftover intermediate products,
since there is no reason to think that the neutrons would react with
high preference with the intermediate products, and the original
(first) reaction rate is very low. Experimentally, the reaction
series created must complete, but mechanism for that is ignored.
Further, there must be no leakage of gammas from the expected neutron
activation of elements present must not only be absorbed by the heavy
electron patches, there must be no leakage (presumably from the "edges").
That gamma shield must be (1) thin, and (2) perfect. Yes, we
understand why Larsen might not want to talk about it. Commercial
interest, intellectual property, yatta yatta. But all this means that
we *cannot* consider W-L theory to be anything like established,
whereas Zawodny treats it as this amazing idea that finally explains
cold fusion. Maybe he knows something we don't, that's always possible.
But LENR was clearly established by the mid-1990s, and this does not
depend on any theory at all, beyond what is most simple: *something*
is converting deuterium to helium in P-F class experiments, as shown
by Miles, confirming earlier, sketchier reports, and as confirmed by
other research groups around the world, with there being extremely
little contrary evidence. Strictly speaking, that it is deuterium
being converted is only a reasonable, perhaps default, conjecture,
reinforced by some work that shows that the ratio of helium to heat
is close to the deuterium fusion value, and much more work on the
reaction Q is seriously indicated.
Which, by the way, was the unanimous position of the 2004 U.S. DoE
review, more research is needed. If we want to talk about
hallucinations, as a product of projecting personal beliefs back onto
sensory evidence, the pseudoskeptics who imagine they represent
science have read the 2004 review as continuing to reject cold
fusion. Nope. The review, in fact, shows that the issue is very much
alive, and needs further research, just as was the real conclusion in
1989. "Not convincing" is read as "Thoroughly rejected, bogus, forget
about it." Isn't that weird?
But it's how people think when they have become nailed to what they
believe. These pseudoskeptics, of late, have switched positions with
the "believers," imagining that the balance of publication in
peer-reviewed journals is purely a result of bias. They don't notice
that the balance switched drastically, and, in fact, switched long
ago, sometime around 1991. But with difficulties getting funding,
and, yes, difficulties getting research published, peer-reviewed
papers on cold fusion did decline drastically, to a nadir around 2005
of one paper every two months. Last time I looked, it had gone up to
about two papers per month. It is the pseudoskeptics who are clinging
to Rube Goldberg attempts to explain away experimental evidence. It
is the pseudoskeptics who reject Storms's review paper in
Naturwissenschaften, "Status of cold fusion (2010)," claiming that it
was only published because Storms is LENR editor there, somehow
overlooking the implications of NW, published by Springer-Verlag, one
of the largest scientific publishers in the world, and being a
publication with access to the best peer review resources, needing a
LENR editor at all; they imply that Storms reviewed his own paper
(obviously not true), and they don't realize or accept that the paper
was *solicited,* by a venerable mainstream publication, which allowed
the striking claim in the abstract.
(copy at http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEstatusofcoa.pdf)
The evidence supports the claim that a nuclear reaction between deuterons to
produce helium can occur in special materials without application of
high energy.
Their old road is rapidly fading. They can't get published any more,
and the old "negative replications" have been almost totally covered,
are now part of the experimental record that *confirms* the
Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect (i.e., the necessary conditions, missing
in those experiments, are now largely understood).
I do wish that Krivit would ask the difficult questions of Larsen et
al. If he doesn't know what they are, he could ask.
