On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 9:30 AM, Foks0904 . <foks0...@gmail.com> wrote:
I really like how Ed's theory fits PdD, and you may be right about the more > exotic elements of NiH, but lets face it, we don't have much solid > experimental work to pull from in NiH. > I look forward to reading Ed's book. It arrived in the mail about a week ago. Currently I'm in the middle of another book which I hope to finish first, but I'll start on Ed's book when I'm done. Each researcher in the field has his strengths. What I like about Ed's contributions are his compendious reviews, his attention to detail and his careful compiling and summarizing of so much of the data that has been collected over the years. After reading his "Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction," I realized that PdD was not the only system that was interesting and that there were many others, as well, such as NiH, TiD, etc., that should paid attention to, as well as a suspicion (no doubt Ed's as well) that LENR takes a different course depending on which combination appears of the large number of possible parameters. Ed has shown that the experimental record is complex and difficult to pin down or draw generalizations from. In addition, when Ed has stubbornly insisted on a generalization, such as the finding that in PdD experiments, the 4He that is detected is detected without the accompanying gamma photons or bremsstrahlung that one would expect of a dd fusion reaction, such conclusions have often been borne out in my own reading of some of the original sources. Where I start to trust Ed less is when he steps away from his experimental work and begins to theorize. This, in two ways -- first, to my mind, his hydroton theory is altogether improbable, for some of the same objections he raises about other theories (e.g., relating to thermodynamics), as well as for other reasons. In addition, I sometimes worry that he has unintentionally overlooked experimental findings that provide evidence against his hydroton theory. He also suggests that deuterium might be a byproduct in NiH LENR, which, as far as I can tell, is unrelated to any experimental that has been carried out. If Ed's theory seems to me to be unpromising, this is not to say that I find Hagelstein's or Takahashi's theories are any more promising, although they do appear to have a better command of the relevant math. Ed thinks there is a common mechanism at work in NiH and PdD, and my sense is that this is a good assumption. That doesn't mean the reactions are the same, or even that the substrate plays the same role in all cases (e.g., it could be a reactant in one case and somewhat inert in another). He also is rightly scornful of theorizing untethered to experimental research and of efforts to sort things out purely using math, and I can definitely relate to this as well. Eric
