At 06:11 PM 8/17/2012, Axil Axil wrote:
The hot fusion people and the nuclear physicist crowd will not
believe that LENR is real unless they see lots of neutrons; this is
a good political type experiment.
It hasn't worked before, why should it work now?
The main cold fusion reaction, responsible for the FPHE, does not
produce neutrons. It's real, and that's easy to show. It does produce
a nuclear product, helium. Think that's not a nuclear product? Be my
guest, make it some other way.
Ah, yes, I should mention that the often-repeated meme that the
helium could be leakage from ambient is *preposterous*, it's only
possible to assert that by radically ignoring the actual experimental
evidence, which includes, but is not limited to, situations where the
produced helium rose above ambient, quite significantly.
The real kicker is that the helium produced is *always* proportional
to the anomalous energy, and the ratio is "consistent with" deuterium
fusion. Other reactions besides d-d fusion can do that, though they
almost certainly involve, then, multibody fusion. I.e., 4D -> 2He-4
or the like.
Bottom line, we don't know what the main reaction is. The
pseudoskeptical physics community has made a whole series of demands
as to what would satisfy them. It's a moving target, because as
evidence accumulated, the demands increased.
1. "Reliable experiment." That means, for them, an experiment that
always produces the same results. This is wilful blindness, and an
imposition on other fields of particular expectations of physicists,
who are accustomed to nice clean experiments where conditions are
very precisely controlled. Naturally, these people hate
electrochemistry with a passion. It's messy as hell. However, that
doesn't mean that science can't be done, it can, and as in all the
messier fields, one looks for statistical correlations.
2. "Nuclear product." Originally, it was assumed that the reaction
must be d-d fusion or nothing. So the expected products from d-d
fusion were sought, and when it was shown, rather conclusively, that
these products were not appearing, this was considered definitive
refutation of "cold fusion." It's an obvious error. What that worked
showed was that the experiment did not reproduce the conditions of
hot, d-d fusion. It's something else. It would be like assuming that
all burglars wear watch caps with holes cut out for the eyes, and
therefore a photo of a burglar is fake because the fellow has no watch cap on.
3. "Two cups of tea" on demand. This is a variation on "reliable
experiment." It's total nonsense, because lots of cold fusion
experiments run hot and could be used to brew tea, it would mean nothing.
4. "Commercial device." Of course they would be convinced if there is
a commercial device. But a physical effect might be nowhere near
ready for commercialization, might *never* be commercializable, and
that has practically nothing to do with reality. Muon-catalyzed
fusion is known and understood and will probably never be
commercially useful. FPHE fusion depends on very difficult-to-control
material conditions, and the material shifts during the experiment,
in uncontrolled ways (so far).
5. "An explanation." I.e., some explanation that will satisfy them.
*Sometimes,* PdD shows anomalous heat. This was shown in hundreds of
reports, 153 in peer-reviewed journals alone. What is the source of
that heat? That was, beginning in 1989, a simple scientific question.
The physicists, because of a relatively small number of negative
replications-- which only show replication failure -- began to assume
"unidentified calorimetry error." They stuck to this story in spite
of massive reports, using many different kinds of calorimetry.
There never has been a peer-reviewed report that actually explained
the source of the heat, other than attempts to explain it as a
nuclear effect. Yet physicists, many of them, to this day, treat cold
fusion as a closed book. "Wasn't that proven to be bogus, twenty years ago?"
No. It wasn't. That's plain and simple. Questions were raised, that's
all. And then, over the next decade, the questions were answered, but
the physicists stopped listening.
Most importantly, by 1991, expanded in 1993, the ash was identified:
helium. And that does, in fact, "explain" the excess heat. It's
proportional to the helium produced, at (approximately) the value
expected from any form of deuterium conversion to helium. That does
*not* explain the *mechanism."
To explain the mechanism is going to take, most likely, a concerted
effort on the part of quantum physicists, using the most
sophisticated tools of quantum field theory. And we aren't yet giving
these physicists enough data, nor are they attempting to develop it themselves.
That is why this is truly a "Scientific Fiasco." We have the mass
abandonment of a field by those whose expertise would be needed to
resolve mysteries. Chemists struggle along, with little guidance from
accurate theory. And the physicists continue to blame the chemists
for not explaining the phenomenon.
Real science: determine the cause of the FPHE. If it's not nuclear,
what is it? If it's systematic error, fine. Show the error. It might
be necessary to show different errors for different calorimetric
approaches, as well as the correlated helium measurement errors.
Warning: I don't think you will succeed.
If you do the basic work, that is, you take an established approach
to demonstrate the FPHE, and measure helium, you will be replicating
the "single reliable experiment" that was demanded. That experiment
was thought to be one where the same level of heat is always
produced. That's a bit equivalent to demanding that the same result
happen every time from a coin toss. No, is the heat correlated with
the helium? If so, what is the value of the correlation, the
heat/helium ratio? With this approach, *every experiment* produces
useful data. There are no "failures," unless one truly makes a
mistake, such as allowing helium leakage from ambient, or an error of
calorimetry, such as happened with one of Miles' cells where they
allowed the cell to boil dry and thus got some "excess heat" -- with
their method -- from recombination.
The "single reliable experiment" has been available since 1993 or so.
Huizenga noticed this, and commented on the amazing significance of
Miles' findings. He simply expected that Miles would not be confirmed
"since there are no gammas," i.e., the gamma rays expected from
helium formation are not observed.
Huizenga's comment -- it's in the second edition of his book, "Cold
Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century," shows how deeply the
assumption of "if it's real, it must be d-d fusion" penetrated the
minds of the skeptics. The ash is helium and it's correlated with
heat, or not, and that is entirely idependent of whether or not
gammas are found. In fact, if gammas were found, their energy would
have to be added to the heat, that is a way that energy could escape.
But they are not found. Almost nothing is found but helium,
everything else is at quite low levels, low enough to be explainable
by rare branches or secondary reactions, produced by a primary fusion reaction.
It's actually up to the physicists to do that, not the chemists. Yet
physicists seem to be expecting that chemists
