Hi Jed,
A cat? Haha. Tom always said that some wiring had dipped into the
electrolyte. That makes since now I guess it was the times.
I wish I had copied the data I sent to him on the analysis of his cells.
We took one electron micrograph of his cell that was just the wildest
image. If you recall some of electron micrographs from Dr. Mosier-Boss,
they have these
images of what looks like a crater on the moon; a site where something
exploded outward. We found the exact same thing on Tom's electrode. But
Tom Droege's cell was even better. We found a Pd crystal structure that
had the explosive volcano as center of a huge cross in the middle of
a circle. At the center was the volcano, with a perfect cross or plus sign
ridges extending out to the ridges of a perfect circle. This was on the
surface of a used Pd cold fusion cell that had been under electrolysis for
months. It's amazing what happens under electrolysis.
My speculation is the circle was formed at a location where D2 gas bubbles
would form, At the edge of the gas bubble, the electric fields directed
deposits of Pd to form the ridges. I also speculate that as the metal
saturated bubble leaves the surface, deposits of the metal joined the
crystal structure to form that spectacular cross.
For people curious about the Yttrium signal, that was looking at the edge
of huge fracture in Tom's cell. In hind sight, I think it was just a
mis-identification of spectral peaks. Tom had another idea. Tom and I had
talked about doing a paper, but it just never happened, and I lost contact
with him. I don't know. Maybe he didn't want to ruin my science career;
haha.
I bought Mallove's book "Fire from Ice" during a visit to MIT. It was just
released and I bought it on the First day it went on sale. It was so
refreshing to read, compared to the bias of Frank Close and "Too Hot to
Handle". Mallove seemed like a great guy. I'm sorry you lost your friend.
Good people like that are rare.
Chuck,
-------
On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
> Chuck Sites <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> You probably remember Tom Droege the Electrical Engineer from Fermi
>> lab.
>>
>
> I sure do. I met with him several times, with Gene Mallove.
>
>
> He had a live P&F replication running for few months and would post his
>> latest measurements in Usenet's sci.physics.fusion group. I think he did
>> eventually publish a conference paper on coloremetry . . .
>>
>
>
> That was in ICCF2. I have not uploaded it.
>
>
>
>> Anyway, the EDAX plots I sent him where pretty incredible. The EDAX was
>> from x-ray back scatter analysis of the surface of his electrode, and it
>> was covered with *tons* of junk.
>>
>
> It was covered with cat hairs, galvanized onto the cathode. He had a large
> gray cat who spent a lot of time sleeping on the warm calorimeter power
> supplies (I think it was). There was cat hair everywhere in his lab.
>
> There is no way a cold fusion experiment can work with so much
> contamination.
>
> - Jed
>
>
