On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 11:03 AM, Bastiaan Bergman < bastiaan.berg...@gmail.com> wrote:
In addition to > oxidation/reduction/melting cycles I believe carbon may play a role as > it is active in oxidation and reduction reactions and reported to work > in other LENR experiments (Lesley Case). K2CO3 is also repeatedly > reported to be of influence in LENR reports. > It's exciting to see the number of knowledgeable experimenters here. It seems like the parameter space is large for LENR. If I had the aptitude, time and resources, I would want to proceed very systematically. Otherwise it's easy to imagine ending up wandering through the woods for a long time without getting anywhere. I would probably try to begin with a replication -- any replication -- and use that to assure myself that my lab setup works and that I can clearly and reliably distinguish a blank from a positive result. One simple experiment that has been replicated with success by Michael McKubre at SRI is of Les Case's design (mentioned above). See: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CaseLCcatalyticf.pdf If I ever got to the point where I could distinguish a positive result from a negative one, and determine that the positive result was above error, I would come up with a protocol -- a set of numbers to carefully keep track of and a set of steps to follow, and so on. I would repeat the protocol enough times to start hating LENR and keep all of the details for both the good and bad runs in a notebook or a spreadsheet. I would not try to do anything fancy -- just find some result above error, and then proceed from there. Once I had a good set of data for that particular protocol, I would make a small change. Perhaps replace the palladium with nickel, or change the quantity of the palladium or the temperature of the setup. I would only modify one dimension per set of runs, in order to keep careful track of what it is that is influencing the experiment. For the Les Case experiment, I think a good calorimeter, a Geiger-Muller counter, a way to detect x-rays and a way to measure the volume of helium would be good to have. A way to analyze the substrate for transmutations afterwards would be nice as well. I'm sure there are many other things you would want, but these seem like valuable observables for many possible experiments. It would be helpful to try to get measurements of heat and x-rays and any other quantities as the experiment proceeds, so that correlations can be sought out afterwards. A large set of quality data along these lines, made available to the public in raw, undigested form, following well-defined protocols and including information about the statistical error would be invaluable. Eric
