At 04:58 PM 9/29/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
I'll bet if you contacted those people today (the ones still
alive), you would find they have not learned a thing about cold
fusion and they would not change a word of their endorsements.
Unless you could approach them in a way likely to generate rapport,
and discuss the issues in detail, perhaps following the approach of
someone you love to hate, Hoffmann. It's not impossible, but, yes,
it can be very difficult.
Difficult or easy, why would I bother? I don't care what these
nudniks think. They sure don't care what I think!
If, Jed, if. I didn't say you should do it.
As Mike McKubre says, "I wouldn't cross the street to hear a lecture
by Frank Close."
I might, but not if I had to pay, and not if I had to do much more
than cross the street. And I'd bring a good book. Maybe the ACS LENR
Sourcebook. On the other hand, I've never read Close. Have I missed anything?
I have nothing in common with the extreme skeptics and the Avowed
Enemies of Cold Fusion. No meeting of the minds is possible between
us. I never communicate with them unless there is an audience and I
wish to score points. Discussing the issues with them is a futile
waste of time.
Unless certain conditions arose. I don't advise holding your breath
waiting for them, and I'm sure you don't need this advice. Or lack of
advice, now, that was a weird construction, wasn't it?
Needless to say, they think the same thing about me, as they have
often said. Here is one that said that about me yesterday:
http://evildrpain.blogspot.com/2009/09/freedom.html
Supposed scientist uses pseudonym of Evil Dr. Pain. You hang out with
strange people, Jed. Sounds like Wikipedia.
Here is the "heated discussion" linked to in the blog:
http://missatomicbomb.blogspot.com/2008/06/gullible-part-2.html
Yeah, Jed, I've watched what you do, it turns up in searches for
various topics of interest. I've done my share of advocacy responses
to blogs, and, I must say, I've always found your comments quite
civil and to the point. So this is the blog of Miss Atomic Bomb
a.k.a. Nuclear Kelly. I'm always amused by the half-knowledge of some
of these physics bloggers, who raise the most obvious questions not
only as if nobody thought of those questions before, but, of course,
there isn't any answer. Like, How Come the experiments can't be
replicated? How Come the effect disappears if you use more accurate
instrumentation? How Come there isn't any nuclear ash? How Come I ask
all these questions without actually reading anything about the
topic, and when someone like Jed Rothwell comes along and lays it out
for me, I retreat further into my shell of contempt? Huh? How Come?
I'd venture a guess that I was studying nuclear physics sometime
around when Nuclear Kelly's parents were born. She treats Julian
Schwinger as "not a nuclear physicist"? Hello? She imagines that
those who work in the field of cold fusion are totally ignorant of
the Coulomb barrier. Reminds me of a 12-year-old who once "corrected"
my Arabic pronunciation. He'd learned a rule that *usually* applied,
but not in the case involved. And when I told him about it, he flat
refused to believe me. After all, I was only four times his age, why
should he pay attention to me, when he *knew* I was wrong. Bright
kid, actually, too accustomed to being right around adults who didn't
know what they were talking about....
Her comment, "The fact that they call it "low energy nuclear
reactions" actually sickens me," reveals a great deal. That's
emotional attachment, taking offense at what destabilizes her world
view, her sense of herself. It was quite impossible for her to read
what you wrote rationally. Could you read if every word made you nauseous?
She's right, of course, it is not what she knows of as "nuclear
fusion." It's something else, but it is, I can say with certainty,
low energy nuclear reactions. The idea that such reactions are
impossible is preposterous, examples are known, and all that happened
is that a new one was found, an unexpected one, to be sure. Her ad
hoc numerical analysis was way off, and she neglected quite a number
of important factors. Deuterium in a palladium lattice doesn't just
sit at random locations, not when the lattice is at high saturation.
What happens when local concentration exceeds 1:1 is interesting, and
what happens when there is, near the surface, a population with some
level of molecular deuterium may be of the highest interest.
Takahashi -- a nuclear physicist, isn't he -- did his own
calculations: what happens if somehow, it doesn't have to be for long
at all, a femtosecond is enough, two deuterium molecules occupy the
same cubic cell in the lattice? Takahashi's calculations describe
what appears to be a Bose-Einstein collapse and fusion, predicted
using quantum field theory, which appears to be totally beyond Miss
Nuclear Kelly. Is this what happens? Maybe, maybe not, but the point
is that back-of-the-envelope calculations are only as good as the
assumptions on which they are based, and she poured in a whole series
of assumptions that probably don't hold.
What happens when four deuterons are confined in a cubic cell? That's
unstable, it will put more pressure on the lattice bonds than they
can sustain, but meanwhile .... a non-quantum or semi-quantum
understanding of it could be that, as with the Oppenheimer-Phillips
process, the deuterons assume polarized positions, and they can then
approach each other more closely, since the neutrons are to the
inside of the tetrahedron which is the most efficient packing
arrangement. If those neutrons approach closely enough for the
nuclear binding force to take over, they will be pulled together.
That could be enough to overcome the Coulomb barrier. Not with two
deuterons, probably not with three, but with four....
The half-educated young woman is suffering from a poverty of
imagination. Obviously, she's not alone in that, but her position is
a losing one. It's like continuing to believe that sustained
heavier-than-air flight is impossible after you've seen the reports
from Kitty Hawk and some confirmations.
My eight-year-old daughter got it right. I was explaining to her what
I've been up to, and told her about Fleischmann and Pons, who had
discovered this unexpected effect. Then, I told her, other people
tried to find it, to see if it was real, and they failed, and
believed that they'd been fooled, their time had been wasted. She
piped up, "Daddy, they just didn't try hard enough! If it didn't work
the first time, they should have tried again! They should have talked
to the people who had done it!"
You were dealing with practically a religious belief, with much the
same reasons for tenacious clinging. I see that you said that. Ah,
Jed, did you imagine that she would immediately, when you told her
she was practicing a form of holy-book based religion, she would
immediately say, "Why, I never realized that! Thanks for reminding me!"
That wasn't exactly civil, to be sure, but you were right, which is
some small amelioration. In response, she defended her use of "back
of the envelope calculations" as providing evidence of whether
"something is physically feasible or not." She totally failed to
respond to your argument. She then explained the obvious, that what
happens in cold fusion experiments doesn't behave like ordinary d-d
fusion. You hadn't said that it did, you had simply pointed out an
experimental fact: that the heat correlates with the heat expected
from d-d fusion. That would indicate, as a simply hypothesis, that
the process inputs deuterium and outputs helium, at least mostly. But
there may be more than one way to do that, and that's what
Takahashi's theory is about. But Nuclear Kelly gets all confused by
Chubb's theory, and passes over what has been experimentally
confirmed: heat/helium correlation. It's as if you didn't say it.
(I think the heat transfer to the lattice theory is weak, but ...
until we have really good predictive theory, confirmed and accepted,
it can't be said what's happening at the nuclear level. All we know
is that heat and helium are correlated, there is radiation, and some
other experimental phenomena. She really fails to understand the
complexity of the phenomenon. There is not just one reaction taking
place in the lattice, there are secondary reactions, etc. Her
objection to lattice-energy transfer is a reasonable one, but, again,
she's concerned with theory, and she doesn't place nearly enough
weight on confirmed experimental evidence, she's trying to fit the
evidence into the theories instead of the reverse.
She made the obvious rebuttal to you, practically with an Aha! Got
you! I.e., if nobody understands it, how can you call it fusion? Of
course, she has a point. But she missed something. The ash. Helium is
being formed, with the same heat of formation as is found with
fusion. Where there was no helium, there is now helium. Where did it
come from? Sure, it might be formed by fission. Maybe the deuterium
is a catalyst, not the palladium! But to propose that helium is being
formed without *nuclear reactions* is so far outside of scientific
understanding that it makes the fusion hypothesis look like a proven
fact. That is, she has a point, but she misapplies it and uses it to
reject the entire approach instead of recognizing the limits of our
ignorance. We are not ignorant of *everything* about these reactions!
As you know, there are reactions that involve neutron absorption that
aren't usually called "fusion," but, to me, this is only a matter of
common names of things....
You responded with much the same argument as I suggested here (I'm
reading as I'm writing, so I don't know what you are going to say
next!) You mention that the process inputs deuterium. Actually,
that's not known, because such a tiny amount of deuterium would be
consumed that the loss of deuterium can't be measured, at least not
in the experiments I know. We *theorize* that deuterium is the fuel,
but that's only the most likely suspect. What we know is the ash, or
at least one of the ashes.
She responds with, "I'm tired of this. Is it a proven science or is
it not? Does it require explanation or does it not? How does "one
good experiment" overrule the sum of mankind's collected scientific
knowledge, most of which is (imagine that) experimental?
She wants nice neat black and white answers that don't upset her
emotional stability. She refuses to interpret what you say in such a
way as to allow it to have meaning, instead she imputs preposterous
meaning to it, which she can then comfortably reject. "One good
experiment" is not just any experiment, it refers to a reproducible
experiment with clear implications, falsifying existing theory.
Experiments don't contradict each other, we consider the sum of them.
Two apparently contradictory experiments only so appear if one is
applying theories to them, to make predictions from one about what
will happen with another. But no two experiments are exactly the
same, and unexpected results point to unknown phenomena or
mechanisms. Relativistic physics did not contradict centuries of
classical physics, it merely revealed it as an approximation applying
under certain common conditions.
She's totally confused, and taking it all personally.
"Doesn't that mean the thousands of good experiments which indicate
it's not feasible should be given sway? Yes or no?" There is a
linguistic trick here. What is "it"? Thousands of experiments,
millions of experiments, showed ways to not see fusion. So? That has
no bearing at all on whether or not there exists a way. Absolutely,
Miss Nculear Kelly need not be expected to run down and find a way to
invest in cold fusion. If theory makes it seem impossible, it might
be sensible to not pour a lot of effort into it. But when real life
comes and bops you on the nose, it's silly to say, "Nothing happened,
it's impossible for anything to bop me on the nose, and it's never
happened before, so it must not have happened this time. Bop! Or this
time, either."
Nobody saw cold fusion because nobody was looking for it, for the
reasons that Ms. Nuclear knows too well. Mizuno, who happened to be
working wtih palladium deuteride, apparently saw it twice, and didn't
realize it until later. I think there have been other such reports.
Aw, did you really have to say that she looked like an "intelligent
design supporter." Sometimes, Jed....
But, of course, I understand your point.
This person thinks that he won the debate, and that:
She, apparently. Ms. Nuclear Kelly, Miss Atomic Bomb. Remember, she
made the point about being a woman in science. Gratuitious, actually.
"This debate, of course, turned out to be an utterly pointless
exercise, as the advocate descended predictably into nonsensical
argument, and what amounted to name calling, in order to defend his position."
From my point of view, I made mincemeat out of him, and I never
engaged in any name calling. I believe this is cognitive dissonance
on his part. Mainly it was a discussion of matters of fact, not
even technical matters. For example, he claimed that no nuclear
scientists have worked on cold fusion, so I gave him a long list of
distinguished nuclear scientists who have. He claimed that no
replications have been done, so I gave him a list of replications. And so on.
By the way, I would never claim that I won the debate by virtue of
superior intellect or legerdemain. Any fool who bothers to read the
literature can easily win this sort of debate.
You didn't "win" the debate unless there is some accepted definition
of win. You certainly made mincemeat of her argument, in my view. I'd
say you won, but, hey, I'm biased.
She came up with some interesting ideas as "not fusion." Most of them
were either inconsistent with the experiments or were other nuclear
reactions .... She had a point, which is a fairly standard one, that
it might not be "fusion." But it's a weak point, and was being used
by her, apparently, to justify a position of entrenched ignorance.
She wrote:
This is the bulk of my entire argument - there are any number of
things it might be, and the list of possible explanations (other
than nuclear fusion) has certainly not been exhausted. Perhaps the
introduction of interstitial deuterium displaces interstitial helium
which was present in the palladium crystal lattice at formation or
during transport.
Obvious hypothesis, but it would need modification. She has the
driving factor as being displacement from deuterium, but the
correlation isn't simply with the introduction of deuterium, it is
with excess heat. Heat might drive out helium, but why would helium
levels rise above ambient, as they do, does palladium act like a
helium sponge? No, I don't think so, it does that with hydrogen and
deuterium. And the Q value is utterly unexplained by this, and so is
the radiation that is now well-known, probably alpha radiation, plus
those pesky neutrons.
Does a palladium sample produced and stored within a vacuum
chamber yield the same results?
They do that with the palladium, if I'm correct, that is, they heat
it to drive out helium....
Produced in a vacuum chamber? From what? Transmutation?
Perhaps it is a weak interaction (weak = involving the electroweak
force), wherein a proton from the deuterium and free electron from
the palladium react to form a neutron (and an antineutrino), as
occurs within a nucleus during beta-decay. Are antineutrinos produced?
Not so easy to detect, eh? Nuclear reaction she just proposed, with
no particular reason. Does this explain helium? She didn't say how.
Perhaps the affinity of the palladium is great enough that the
Coulomb barrier of the two deuterium nuclei is screened, and they
interact chemically within the crystal lattice to produce an
abnormal (ie, unexpected) deuterium molecule and release energy.
She's confused. There may be electronic screening, that, in fact, may
be a factor in Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate collapse. But if you
are starting with deuterium, what is this "abnormal deuterium
molecule." She pulled this one out of a hat. She's trying to show
that she can think outside the box, I suspect.
Could the detection of a new configuration of deuterium molecule
be mistaken for helium in the setup?
I think that possible confusion is well understood by the experts in
mass spectrometry. Deuterium molecules are obviously present. The
absorption of deuterium gas (molecular form) by palladium is
exothermic; the release of deuterium gas must then be endothermic,
not exothermic as she claims.
Perhaps on the timescales of the electrical pulses used for D-Pd
electrolysis, the electronic structure of palladium is such that an
atomic resonance is hit and the current is discharged into the
medium in a different manner than the heat-transfer models used
surmise, causing "excess" heat.
She's trying to explain excess heat without considering the helium.
She's missed the point. The most likely non-fusion theory is one that
is even more revolutionary than fusion theory: hydrino theory.
Is the result repeatable, and with predictable dependence, with
different electrolysis techniques?
Depends on what you mean by predictable. The heat-helium correlation
cuts through the problem. But, yes, the effect is observed with
different techniques, including the non-electrolytical Arata
technique that she started with.
Perhaps the deuterium and palladium themselves are reacting
(cold-welding, in a sense) and releasing energy.
She doesn't realize that there is a known heat of formation of
palladium hydride. Yes, it releases energy, but not in the manner and
in the quantities seen. Arata's work actually shows both effects, the
big heat burst at the beginning is hydride formation, and it happens
with hydrogen. With deuterium, there is more heat generated, which is
a bit suspicious, but, after all, the chemical behavior of deuterium
is different from that of hydrogen, so that extra heat doesn't known
my socks off. What does leave me barefoot is that the cell doesn't
settle quickly to ambient temperature, but remains at steady heat
generation for 3000 minutes, showing no sign of slowing down.
Is the palladium sample examined at the end of the experiment for
other possible "reaction" products?
Yes. Transmuted elements are found. There is not just one reaction
happening. That was one fact that greatly confused the field for years.
Perhaps, as helium diffuses so readily through anything (hence its
use as a leak detector), the measured helium during the experiments
could come from anywhere.
Sure. But it doesn't behave like that, and this wouldn't explain
correlation with excess heat. The helium level rises with the
measured excess heat, and doesn't slow down as it approaches ambient
levels, as it would if it were from leakage. And it keeps going up,
beyond ambient.
Are the results reproducible in a pressurized argon or nitrogen atmosphere?
There are a million questions one could ask. Each one takes time and
money to answer. Perhaps she would care to send a donation?
Perhaps, because of palladium's unique chemical behavior with regard
to hydrogen isotopes, the palladium crystal lattice is actually
disturbed or altered by the deuterium, such that much of it is not
actually interstitial. Is the palladium crystal examined for damage
after the experiment?
She really made no effort to read the literature, and it shows. Yeah,
the palladium environment is heavily trashed. So?
The discussion went on way too long, and so did my review of it here....
