Abd, your comments prodded me to read Oriani's paper more closely and to dig around for Kowalski's attempted replication. I see that there are several papers with Kowalski as author or coauthor that mention Oriani, and I wasn't sure which one you had in mind. It might be [1], but in that one Kowalski concludes that electrolysis is the source of the tracks, although he does not find evidence for Oriani's claim of reproducibility.
Additional comments inline. On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com>wrote: Oriani did not use adequate controls, and his "effect" was explicitly not > correlated with the electrolysis current. Basically, we don't ordinarily > leave radiation detectors sitting in electrolytic cells, we don't know, > really, what "normal" behavior is, and it would vary with the lab > environment. > I don't think you need a claim about the amount of current to conclude that it is electrolysis that causes the tracks and not ambient radiation or cosmic rays. A finding pertaining to current would be nice, of course. But to my mind, current is just a proxy for hydrogen flux (or loading), and it is possible that you could get high flux with lower current, so correlation with this particular variable is a week finding, as far as I can see. I have no thoughts on whether it is a good protocol to leave CR39 chips sitting around in electrolytic cells. This might be a silly thing to do. :) > I don't think Oriani used "control cells." I think you made that up, Eric, > by not reading his paper carefully. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate > correction, but I did review this fairly carefully before, looking as well > at Kowalski's attempt to replicate. Kowlaski was not able to see the effect > that Oriani had claimed. > With regard to the question of controls, I should distinguish between two important details here -- what Oriani claims and whether what he claims is valid. For every section of Oriani's paper [2], which pertains to a different protocol, he describes a different "control." In the case of the finding of tracks within the CR39 chips during electrolysis (sec. 6), the control involves two rounds of etching of chips that were in comparable cells in which electrolysis did not take place. In the case of the finding of tracks within CR39 chips suspended in the anode compartment of a U-shaped tube, where the oxygen and the hydrogen bubble up into different compartments and don't mix (sec. 7), the "control" is to suspend chips in a similar assembly without electrolysis. Just to pin the details down, I should mention that the assembly in sec. 6 appears to be the first cell he describes on p. 110, which involves either Pd/D or Ni/D or Ni/H, and the assembly in sec. 7 appears to be a different setup, with Pd cathodes and anodes, and Li2SO4 in distilled H2O. As you mention below, the numbers are relatively low in the electrolysis cells, and in some cases they overlap with the purported control cells. Oriani uses a Mann-Whitney statistical significance test to determine the probability that the different sets of results arise from the same population and concludes that it is P = 3E-10, which is very small. Concerning the second detail, of whether what Oriani claims to be controls are in fact scientifically valid ones (or whether a Mann-Whitney statistical analysis gets us anything here, for that matter), I am not in a position to say one way or the other. As I recall, Oriani claimed "reproducible" but it turns out that his > evidence didn't show that, it showed that he found *something* anomalous > each time he looked. Not always the same thing. Sometimes it was an > increase in front side tracks, sometimes in back side. It seems that the > range of track counts found for experimental runs overlapped the range of > counts found in controls. (Controls were chips not exposed to the cells.) > I think his main claim of reproducibility, at least in [2], pertains to sec. 5, where the CR39 chips are suspended in the electrolyte in close proximity to the cathode, with 6um of Mylar between the chip and the cathode to protect against chemical attack. In this section he says that the number of pits, either on the facing side or on the opposing side, are always considerably greater than those found in the controls (p. 112). > I can't say that there was *nothing* there in Oriani's work, only that it > was far less clear than claimed. > Perhaps. I know very little about the quality of Oriani's work or the difficulties involved in making the claims he's making. The claims themselves are pretty interesting if they can be substantiated. Eric [1] http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KowalskiLonemission.pdf [2] http://www.iscmns.org/CMNS/JCMNS-Vol6.pdf, p. 108 ff.
