At 10:04 PM 9/9/2012, Jouni Valkonen wrote:
On 10 September 2012 02:52, Jed Rothwell
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
You do not need to satisfy people. You need to
report the replicated, peer-reviewed facts of
the matter. Science is not a popularity contest.
That is true, but here cold fusion science has failed.Â
Correlation of excess power and helium
production during D2O and H2O electrolysis using palladium cathodes
<http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MilesMcorrelatio.pdf>http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MilesMcorrelatio.pdf
Here is one example of the good peer-reviewed
paper, but where is the replication of the data?
The correlation has been confirmed, with higher accuracy.
This finding about the correlation to be
reliable, there should be several successful
replication attempts published. But where are those?
Look at Storms, "Status of cold fusion (2010),"
Naturwissenschaften. A preprint is hosted on lenr-canr.org.
Basically, any PdD experiments that measure heat
helium serve as partial replication, or full
confirmation if the experiments are a coherent
series. It's not been done as much as I'd like,
but what has been done is quite adequate to confirm the fact of correlation.
The paper is almost 20 years old. There are few,
yes, but not good enough quality data and often
the data is even conflicting. E.g. some studies
suggest that both H and D are working.
There are thousands of studies in the field. You
are lumping them together and expecting them to
be consistent. First of all the field is named
"cold fusion," and there are some ready
assumptions that there is only one effect. That
is very unlikely to be the case, though Storms
does propose a common mechanism. His theory is
highly speculative in certain ways (but it's
designed to fit what is known, so it's quite
worthy of respect, even if it might be incorrect in various ways.
PdD experiments produce helium. That is
considered established in the field, and the
inference that the reaction has an expected Q of
23.8 MeV/He-4 (that of deuterium fusing to
helium, by whatever mechanism or intermediate
pathway) is so strong that some papers which
measure helium then use the expected helium as a
comparison value. But it can be quite difficult
to accurately capture and measure all the helium.
We have no idea what is produced if there is a
heat effect with light water. What was recognized
early on was that light water was not a "clean
control." However, in Pd experiments, light water
used as a control shows far less heat than
deuterium. In SRI P13/P14, the hydrogen control
is essentially dead. It's noisy, when the
bubbling gets intense as the current is ramped up, that's all.
Whether or not light water results were an effect
from the low deuterium content of light water
would be one idea, but there have been persistent
reports of light water heat results, particularly with nickel.
This has *nothing to do* with PdD results. NiH
could be wonderful or bogus. Referring to varying
reports of NiH results as in some way weakening
the heat/helium work is an ungrounded fantasy.
Further, the FPHE is known to be highly variable.
That is, what appear to be the exact same
conditions (which is typically with a single
experimenter, since researchers vary their exact
approaches), results can vary widely. Most
research has had a simple goal: to increase the
heat signal, and to increase reliability. Much
progress has been made, to the point where many
groups can expect most cells to show heat, but it still varies a lot.
Given that helium is accepted, and that it's
expensive and difficult to measure, not a lot of
work has been done. However, if I were running a
lab doing CF experiments, with PdD, I'd want to
routinely measure helium, even if only as cell
samples. It's a confirmation of the calorimetry.
The work to nail down the heat/helium ratio is of
little commercial value, so it's unwise to expect
it to be done by commercially-funded research.
This is a job for academia, mostly.
Now, given the variable effect, this allows
identical experiments to be used to measure the
heat/helium ratio. Just treat all cells the same,
measure the heat, and measure the helium. There
are more details than that, but this is the basic
idea. No additional control is needed, though
running hydrogen controls has been done. Hydrogen
control cells do not show helium. Only deuterium
cells producing excess heat show helium, in the
reported work. The analyses are done blind, so
that those measuring the helium do not know the
history of the cell from which the sample was taken.
Perhaps the status of cold fusion could be
better if there were better marketing of ideas.
Scientists are not trained in marketing. How Pons
and Fleischmann were treated by the scientific
community was a travesty. This has all been
well-documented in the academic literature, it
was a total breakdown of how science operates. To
be sure, Pons and Fleischmann made some mistakes,
but they were mistakes from which it would
normally have been possible to recover. Instead,
though Fleischmann was arguably the world's
foremost electrochemist, his work was tossed in
the trash as if it had been the production of an
amateur, he was called a "fool" and a
"charlatan." In front of a major scientific
conference, with the physicists in attendance cheering.
Whew! That threat to our Deep Understanding of
Physics was averted! And we don't need to worry
about the billions in funding for Hot Fusion
research. It's remarkable, actually. Many cold
fusion experiments produce substantially more
power than was put into them, due to the fusion
taking place. Hot fusion has transiently produce
a tiny amount of power, maybe once, and is not
expected to be practical until maybe 2050. And I'll add, if then.
But it employs lots of physicists. Cold fusion
would emply a few. It doesn't take much to
understand why the "debunking" of cold fusion was
so popular among physicists in 1989. It really
was a threat, no kidding. They did not know that
the effect was fragile and very difficult to sustain reliably.
But if the kind of funding were put into cold
fusion research that has been put into hot fusion
research, well, we can't know what would be
found. My bet, though, is that, with far less
funding, the effect would have been explained.
We'd know how it works. And then we'd have a much
better idea if it can be engineered into something practical.
NiH work, being undertaken commercially, might
trump all this, but I'm not holding my breath,
and I think we should not collectively depend on
NiH to rescue the field. It's far too risky.
At this point, activists should work to ensure
that the scientific reality of cold fusion *as
science* is established. My view is that
presenting visions of limitless power is way
premature. It can be mentioned that *if* cold
fusion is understood, that power production, very
likely clean and non-polluting, is possible. Hot
fusion research was funded because the basic
science is known, fusion is very well described
and modelled. What is really difficult with hot
fusion is containing the reaction such that it
sustains (or, alternatively, running it as pulses
or bursts of power, with net positive gain). Hot
fusion also produces radioactive products. Cold fusion apparently does not.
So ... a sensible governmental research budget
would include funding for the investigation of
cold fusion, aimed at answering the basic issue of "what's happening?"
Notice: if cold fusion is not real, a research
project to nail down heat/helium would almost
certainly identify the artifact. But that is now
so totally unlikely that I merely mention it in passing.
(What if there is no fusion but this is a hydrino
(deuterino) effect? Heat/helium should show that
immediately. No helium expected if there is no
fusion. If deuterinos catalyze fusion, then, yes,
helium. But deuterinos would also show heat effects...)
Cold fusion science is notoriously difficult
and if you do not have burning will and money to
commit to research it is almost impossible to reproduce the data.
That's true for a lot of science, though "burning
will" may overstate it. Patience is necessary. I
was told when I started flopping around in this
field that it would take about $8,000 to come up
with something worth looking at. That's not a lot
as research goes. I have designed work that would
cost under $100 per cell, for certain
investigations. But there are many ways to do it
wrong, i.e., the FPHE is quite fragile and
sensitive to cell conditions. If one wants fast
and cheap, what is called (correctly or not)
"codeposition" is probably the way to go. I've
been making materials available, and the
materials for a single SPAWAR neutron experiment
would run around $100 or less, using LR-115 for
the radiation detectors. However, these
experiments, Galileo-class (after The Galileo
Protocol, a Krivit effort), are only measuring
one outcome, without controls. More sophisticated
work would do a great deal more.
But as it is difficult and expensive, it is also
huge liability problem, that the urge to see
something may cloud the judgement. If you do not
see anything, then the money is quite difficult to find.
The classification of results into positive and
negative, with negative being considered some
kind of failure, is one of the problems affecting
the field. Heat/helium actually cuts across that.
But that's not useful in investigating, say, light water.
Here e.g. Miley et al. did not see anything
with light water. How is that possible? Can we
be sure that that they did not just assume that
cold fusion should not work with light water?
That's a rude assumption. If they used proper
care, they showed that *under their conditions*,
light water doesn't produce an anomaly. However,
with PdD experiments, under the best of
conditions, one might see nothing. Try it again
tomorrow and maybe you'll see something.
Look, Storms is pretty much onto why this happens. It's cracks.
The material shifts as it is repeatedly loaded
with deuterium. It cracks, and cracks grow. That
has one obvious effect: as the palladium cracks,
it starts to lose deuterium, if there is enough
cracking, the material can't be highly loaded.
However, before that point is where the FPHE shows up.
Because scientist are humans, science lives from
replication to eliminate the erroneous human factor.
Of course. An original paper is interesting.
Science is established with replication/confirmation.
Cold fusion, i.e., the FPHE, with PdD, is
well-established and amply confirmed,
particularly due to heat/helium, which
establishes a rebuttable presumption that the
effect is some kind of deuterium fusion. A great
deal of work in the field is unconfirmed. For
example, there is some spectacular work by
Vysotskii on biological transmutation. Unconfirmed. And why not?
Well, most people believe that biological
transmutation is impossible. Why bother, then?
(The reason why is that Vysotskii is a competent
scientist who used measurement methods that
should work. Maybe he made some mistake, it can
happen to anyone. But, definitely, it's worth
checking out. Now, who is going to do it?)
