On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 6:35 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
> James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> They need an SEM and other expensive toys to do an analysis of the metal >>> before and after. Without that they are flying blind. >>> >> >> Before and after _what_? >> > > Before and after the cold fusion test. To see what changes occurred in the > metal, and to correlate these changes with excess heat production. > > > >> My point is that expenditures on diagnostics is getting the cart before >> the horse. The route to reproducible cold fusion -- hence scientific >> progress -- is in the economic trial of large numbers of Pd electrodes with >> adequate electrochemistry . . . >> > > That would not be economical. Without diagnostics you would have no idea > why one sample worked and another did not. With diagnostics even in the > absence of theory you can identify the microscopic conditions that in > samples from before the run that correlated with success. You can look at a > sample and tell beforehand it is likely to work. What we need is lots of > equipment to look at samples rather than doing a blind search by testing > only. The Storms paper describes the kinds of procedures that are needed. > The thing to do is to automate them, speed them up, and do more of them on > a microscopic scale, because the microscopic scale is where the action is. > What's uneconomic is buying a bunch of diagnostic equipment and then not having any cathodes that have unambiguously exhibited the phenomenon. The cart: Diagnostic equipment. The horse: A supply of cathodes that have unambiguously exhibited the phenomenon.
