On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Cude wrote: > > >> That's nonsense. It's the believers who are forever using tritium and >>> neutrons at ridiculously low levels to prove P&F were right. >>> >> [...] > No one says that tritium "proves" that P&F's claims of excess heat is > correct. Tritium cannot prove that calorimety works. That's absurd. It does > prove there is a nuclear effect, which is indirect supporting evidence for > heat beyond the limits of chemistry. That's not the same as "proof." > I'll rephrase without weakening the point: It's the believers who are forever using tritium and neutrons at ridiculously low levels to give P&F more credibility. Still conflating the two. > Also the tritium is not at "ridiculously low levels." > You misunderstood the context. The claims are at ridiculously low levels compared to what would be needed to explain the claimed heat. Capiche? It is at very high levels, easily measured, typically 10 to 50 times > background, sometimes millions of times background. > Storms writes (in the book): Tritium production is also too small and too infrequent to provide much information about the major processes. If the evidence for tritium were unequivocal, people would not abandon the experiments, and the explanation of their production would become clearer, and experts would be convinced by them. But in fact, as with heat (or neutrons), the situation is no clearer now than it was 20 years ago. There were a lot of searches for tritium in the early days, when people thought there might be conventional fusion reactions, and many people claimed to observe it. Some of the highest levels were observed at BARC within weeks of the 1989 press conference, when people thought ordinary fusion might be taking place, but as it became clear that the tritium could not account for the heat, and as the experiments became more careful, the tritium levels mostly decreased, just like pathological science everywhere. And some early claimants, like Will, got out of the field. In 1998 McKubre wrote: "we may nevertheless state with some confidence that tritium is not a routinely produced product of the electrochemical loading of deuterium into palladium." In the last decade, there has been very little activity on the tritium front, which again, fits pathological science, and puts those early results -- some already under suspicion -- in serious doubt. To my mind, if they can't resolve the tritium question in some kind of definitive and quantitative way, there is no hope for heat. Isn't it interesting that neutrons can be detected at reaction rates a million times lower than tritium, and that's exactly where they're detected. You can predict the levels of nuclear products because they are correlated to the detection capability more closely than anything else. > Easily measured, high sigma levels of tritium are not "low" because they > are lower than an irrelevant inapplicable theory predicts. They would only > be "low" if they are hard to measure. > > We all get that "low" is a relative term, but in the context of my sentence, it meant low compared to levels required to explain the heat.
