At 07:34 PM 12/19/2012, Harry Veeder wrote:
I meant that if the excess heat is real and whatever the cause of the excess heat, the excess heat might force a limited number of transmutations and emit a small amount of gammas and neutrons.
Sure, the FPHE appears to do that, but the "small amounts" are difficult to detect, and the apparatus and approach used in this case would be expected to come up empty. One must consider background radiation, which is ubiquitous, and, as well, the inverse square law that has radiation decline in intensity as the square of the distance from the source.
SPAWAR has detected low levels of neutrons by using solid state radiation detectors which are very close to the source, and they can accumulate radiation over weeks. They are, under those conditions, apparently observing roughly ten times background. This is extremely low level. You would not see this with detectors outside the cell, unless the reaction site is next to the cell wall, and the detectors are right next to the cell wall on the outside, and even that will reduce the signal.
It's easy to look for radiation as they did, and cheap. But negative findings mean nothing, beyond setting an upper limit on radiation.
We have not found LENR effects that produce much prompt radiation, or much of any radiation. That's quite an interesting observation, itself. There may be something about LENR mechanisms that suppresses unstable products, that takes the reaction all the way to stable products (like helium) while non-photon/phonon emissions remain at low levels. And the photons cannot be high-energy, or they would easily be detected.
Storms takes this and runs with it, postulating a series of photon emissions at low energies, instead of one big photon dump. He's proposing a specific mechanism for this that seems shaky to me, but the basic idea is sound. There are, very likely, a series of emissions that are not individually large. For example, Be-8, if formed from 4D fusion, will first exist as an excited nucleus. That excited nucleus will start to emit photons in a series of emissions down to the ground state. If it reaches the ground state, eventually it will fission and we would expect two alphas at roungly 45 KeV each. That's above the Hagelstein limit, but *not far.* So call me, maybe.
The fly in this ointment is that Be-8 has a normal half-life of a femtosecond. It doesn't seem like it would have time to decay as described, so the alphas would have *much* higher energy, and that *would* be observed. You don't have 20 MeV alphas zipping around with no observable effects. Even if there is no prompt gamma, there will be secondary radiation, and plenty of it.
So something else is happening. Maybe a fusion product being formed inside of a condensate remains stable for a while. I still don't get it. I'd think that if a condensate started radiating photons, it would uncondense, very rapidly. But ... we do not know.
That's the central message about cold fusion at this point. We don't know what it is, and I suggest a healthy dose of skepticism for *any theory* that, at this point, proposes to explain it. This mystery has survived for twenty years, with some very powerful minds having worked on it.
Almost certainly, we need more information about the conditions of cold fusion before theory will start to catch up.
Of course, if someone has a theory and uses it with success to predict CF behavior *quantitatively* -- or qualitatively under new, unexpected conditions -- the *experimental results* should be respected and confirmed. Not to do this wouldn't be skepticism, it would be pseudoskepticism.
