I appreciate Eric's response. My focus is only my
focus; I am generally encouraging closer
exploration of trhe Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect,
which has been the subject of thousands of efforts, and there is a lot of data.
Often, I find, the data is nevertheless
inadequate for use to distinguish between the
various theories. The reason for that is the
history of cold fusion, which generally treated
the FPHE as a mess, as inadequate, with a push to
"make it reliable" before it would be worth anything.
Which was a serious error. The FPHE was quite
adequately reliable for profound study, as was
shown by Miles' work, which cut completely across
the "reliability" question by considering the
entire experimental set. The "dead cells," then, became the controls!
What is the heat/helium ratio in this type of
experiment? Cells don't need to be reliable -- at
all -- for this investigation.
This one was recognized as being important enough
to be worth confirmation and continued
investigation, for a time, but it has still been
inadequate. Much more accurate work could be done....
But another example: tritium has been found in FP
electrolytic cells, but I've seen no study that
correlates the tritium with the heat effect. I
can understand why. The tritium found was
inadequate to explain the heat *if the reaction
were d+d -> t+p, He-3+n, He-4 + gamma*, i.e.,
ordinary fusion. Nowhere near enough. So the
actual tritium levels were not reported, when
heat was reported, or heat was not reported, when
tritium was reported. Nor were helium and tritium correlations reported.
In addition, some obvious theories as to tritium
formation would want to know the isotopic
composition of the heavy water. Reported? Let's
say that we don't have the data, the H/D
composition of the heavy water. That composition
can vary if the heavy water is exposed to humid
air, deuterium oxide is hygroscopic, so actual
measurement at the time of the experiment could
be important, not just how the heavy water was purchased.
Many very simple facts about the FPHE have not
been investigated. I've just mentioned one, and I
intend to research it in depth. It appears to be
a common observation in some FPHE class
experiments (including codeposition, now), that
there is a drop in cell resistance associated
with the onset of a power burst. A transient
*apparent power burst* is easily explained by
this, because when cell resistance drops, so does
input power, and if output power is calorimetric
power minus input power, the drop in input power
will not be immediately reflected in calorimetric
power, it takes time for the cell to thermally settle.
However, if the excess power persists, and
especially if temperature begins to rise in
association with the resistance reduction (the
opposite of what we'd expect simply from the
reduction in input power), we may have a "tell"
of the reaction. It's actually not difficult to
explain, there are two major ideas, besides
simple error, but the experimental significance
could be great, in terms of practical ways of quickly detecting XP.
One of the problems with considering all possible
environments for cold fusion is that solidly
established work can get mixed up with what is
anecdotal or unverified. That covers the entire
Rossi situation. A "demonstration" is *never* the
same as an independent report.
I'd love to know if biological transmutation is
real. However, the best LENR work in this area
(Vysotskii) is unverified. That says nothing
about the quality of the work, but much about
what researchers are willing to devote time to verify.
At 04:44 PM 7/14/2012, Eric Walker wrote:
On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Abd ul-Rahman
Lomax <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
I prefer to avoid much speculation about other
environments, such as NiH, and consider that
care should be used to not assume that all LENRs
are the same reaction or reaction mechanism.
Maybe they are, but this is not actually a good
application of Occam's Razor, which is about
choosing the simplest explanation for a single
event or effect. If it works, great, if a single
explanation does explain well many effects,
Occam's Razor would favor it, but .... often the
attempt to explain everything with one mechanism
runs into complications, attempting to shoehorn
a boatload of effects in various environments into a single theory.
I'm beginning to appreciate the need to take
more care in keeping track of the specifics of
the various experiments. Â My current thinking
is that it's an open question as to whether
there is a shared mechanism between all of the
substrates (Pd, Ni, Ti, W, etc.) and isotopes of
hydrogen, which is different from what I've
thought in the past. Â I also think that the
question is in itself an interesting one. Â For
this reason I'm going to try to pay more
attention to the details going forward.
Given my bias towards a single mechanism (with
allowances for multiple ways that this mechanism
plays out), I would feel like I might miss an
important detail if I focused exclusively on one
type of experiment or system. Â But it would
also be bad to preclude the possibility of
separate mechanisms by being heedless of the details.
Eric
