Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
Has there even been a single P-F DPd electrolysis cell running anywhere in the world in 2013? When was the last month and year that one was being run? When was the last month and year in which one showed any anomaly? About how much did these runs cost? How carefully were they described in public reports? Are any laboratory components and original records available? The attempts by many groups to replicate the SPAWAR codeposition results with CR39 film recording of claimed particle tracks seem to have floundered in confusion, a few years ago. within the fellowship of service, Rich Murray On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 8:03 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 3:05 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: To the Japanese in 1941, Americans seemed outlandish. To the skeptics who agree with Cude or Close, we are the ones disconnected from reality. We are illogical and even mentally ill thinking that we can fuse hydrogen in a mason jar. I do not think it does any good getting angry at such people. It is important that you understand their mindset. ***Okay, Jed. What we need as a group is a minimum set of facts that we agree are incontrovertible. I would think it is that Pons Fleischmann were careful electrochemists, the preeminent of their day. That the physicists who chose to debunk their findings were far from careful due to inexperience in electrochemistry and this led to their negative findings. That there have been 14,700 replications of the P-F anomolous heat effect. If not, then how many? 180, as per Storms and National Instruments? What are the base minimum set of facts that we all agree on?
Re: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
Ed, I suggested two analogies with the videos 1) alphas trigger the reaction like a spark triggering a fire. As you point out this analogy is difficult to square with observations. 2) alphas are like smoke accompanying a fire. Depending on the conditions there can be lots of smoke with little fire (heat), or lots of fire (heat) with little smoke. This analogy is consistent with observations. harry On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: Harry, random suggestions guided by no relationship to knowledge is not very useful. My guiding principle is that all aspects of CF are consistent with normal, well known, and accepted laws and rules of both physics and chemistry. Only one small part is missing, which needs to be identified. Nevertheless, the role of this missing part can be clearly determined. This missing part does not in any way relate to alpha emission. The interaction of an alpha with matter is well known and understood. It does not initiate a fusion reaction. If it could, all alpha emitters would occasionally produce CF in the presence of hydrogen, which has not been observed. Of course, someone will find a way to counter this conclusion, but to what end? We must use some triage here. We need to consider ideas that are consistent with all that is known about materials and about how CF behaves? Unless you can show some consistency with what is known and observed, the ideas are a waste of time. So, put your thinking cap back on. Ed Storms On May 6, 2013, at 1:14 PM, Harry Veeder wrote: The alpha particles could be a precursor of the new fire. Once the fire the starts less smoke is produced. starting a fire with hand drill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF9GiK_T4PA Or maybe alphas are like sparks for the starting the new fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_35kxuwjcTs Harry On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: Of course, no statement can be made about any subject that does not invite a counter argument. No idea about CF can be suggested that cannot be shown to be false. Clearly, unless some triage is used to sort through the arguments and some common sense is applied, the effect will be impossible to understand. Naturally, I have considered the possibilities you suggest, Axil, before I came to my conclusions. Of course what you propose might be true. Nevertheless, I reached my conclusion by considering all of the observed behavior. A reader will have to decide for themselves which possibility they want to accept because it is impossible to debate such details here and reach an agreed conclusion. No matter what arguments are given, a counter argument can always be provided. I stated what I believe and gave the reasons. You stated what you believe and gave your reasons. That is all we can do. Ed Storms On May 6, 2013, at 12:25 PM, Axil Axil wrote: Ed Storms states: *“We know that when large amounts of heat are detected, alpha emission at a comparable rate does not occur. Clearly, large heat production and alpha emission are not related.”* This could be a false assumption as follows: When a thermalization mechanism that transfers nuclear energy directly to the lattice is in place, alpha particles do not carry enough energy to penetrate the surface of the CR-39. In this situation, the alpha particle drifts out of the nucleus at very low energies rather than being fired off out at high speed. This thermalization mechanism of nuclear energy from LENR directly to the lattice makes deductions about the behavior of alpha particles and their associated behavior and measurement problematic and unreliable. On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: Eric, ALL nuclear reactions generate heat. Alpha emission is a nuclear reaction. Therefore, heat was generated. However, the rate of the reaction was too small to make detectable heat from this reaction. The only unknown is whether heat from a different reaction can occur. We know that when large amounts of heat are detected, alpha emission at a comparable rate does not occur. Clearly, large heat production and alpha emission are not related. Therefore, some other nuclear reaction is the source of the heat. The question is: What is this source? When a large amount of heat are produced, helium is detected. This helium does not come from alpha emission, as the above logic demonstrates. Therefore, it must result from a different nuclear reaction. The question is: What is this reaction? That is the question my and other theories are trying to answer. If you want to answer the question of where the alpha comes from, you need to start a different discussion because this emission is clearly not related to CF. And NO, helium can not be produced by a reaction that sometimes makes alpha and sometimes releases He without kinetic energy. Such a reaction is too
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: To the Japanese in 1941, Americans seemed outlandish. To the skeptics who agree with Cude or Close, we are the ones disconnected from reality. We are illogical and even mentally ill thinking that we can fuse hydrogen in a mason jar. I do not think it does any good getting angry at such people. It is important that you understand their mindset. ***Okay, Jed. What we need as a group is a minimum set of facts that we agree are incontrovertible. Sure, but we cannot expect people like Cude to agree with any of them. A person can always find a reason to dismiss something. Cude says that the tritium results may all be mistakes or fraud. Jones Beene accused him of being intellectually dishonest, but I assume Cude is sincere. Bockris tallied up tritium reports and said that over 100 labs detected it. If I were Cude, this would give me pause. I find it impossible to imagine there are so so many incompetent scientists, I cannot think of why scientists would publish fake data that triggers attacks on their reputation by the Washington Post. What would be the motive? But I am sure that Cude, and Park, and the others sincerely believe that scientists are deliberately trashing their own reputations by publishing fake data. I would think it is that Pons Fleischmann were careful electrochemists, the preeminent of their day. Of course they were, but no skeptic will agree. Fleischmann was the president of the Electrochemical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society, but Cude and the others are convinced he was a sloppy, mentally ill criminal. That's what they say, and I do not think they would say it if they did not believe it. That the physicists who chose to debunk their findings were far from careful due to inexperience in electrochemistry and this led to their negative findings. There were many reasons experiments failed in 1989. Some of the failed experiments were carefully done, but they used the wrong diagnostics. Most of them looked for neutrons instead of heat. That there have been 14,700 replications of the P-F anomolous heat effect. If not, then how many? 180, as per Storms and National Instruments? Those are two different tallies. The 14,700 is the number of individual positive runs reported in the literature for all techniques, including glow discharge. 180 is the number of laboratories reporting success. Some of those labs saw excess heat many times. If 180 labs measure excess heat 10 times each, that would be 1,800 positive runs in the Chinese tally. I do not know where the Chinese got their data. Presumably from published papers. I have not gone through papers counting up positive and negative runs. What are the base minimum set of facts that we all agree on? If we include the skeptics there is not a single fact we all agree on. Not one. Cude looks at Fig. 1 in the McKubre paper and says the peak at 94% loading means nothing. I think he says it is the result of random effects or cherry-picked data. I look at it and say it proves there is a controlling parameter (loading) that cannot possibly cause artifactual excess heat, so this proves the effect is real. I say that even if only 20% achieve high loading, the other 80% are not relevant. Even if only one in a million achieved high loading this would still prove the effect is real. Cude looks at the preponderance of cells that do not achieve high loading and he concludes that they prove this graph is meaningless noise. There is absolutely no reconciling our points of view. From my point of view, his assertion is scientifically illiterate. He does not seem to understand how graphs work, and what it means to say that data is significant rather than noise. From his point of view, McKubre, Storms and I have no idea what we are talking about and this graph is no more significant than a face of Jesus burned into someone's toast. I gather he thinks it is random noise that happens to peak at 94%, or it is fake data. I cannot describe what he thinks, because I have not read his messages carefully, but I am sure he honestly believes that Fig. 1 is meaningless. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
I wrote: Look, top admirals such as Yamamoto and our invincible soldiers have never lost a war in 6,000 years. . . . I meant 2,600 years. That was the claim, made in 1940. They held a big celebration, and informally named the zero fighter airplane after the last 2 digits (00). Supposedly. I do not want to exaggerate their irrationality. They had legitimate reasons to be upset with the U.S. They had entirely different notions about wars, and the scope of war. Their experience was with 19th century colonial wars in Asia, which were brief, with limited goals. They were not all-out wars like the U.S. Civil War or WWI. It did not occur to the Japanese political or military leaders that the only way they could win the war and avoid the destruction of every city in Japan would be for them to invade the continental U.S. and lay waste to every U.S. city and factory, from California to Washington and New York City, the way Sherman destroyed Georgia and the Carolinas in the Civil War. If you had asked a Japanese general or admiral if such a thing is within their power he would have said you are crazy. They were playing by different rules. As one of them remarked after the war, we had no concept of 'total war.' - Jed
Re: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
Harry, it is impossible to apply energy to an alpha unless another particle is involved. You can not propose having energetic alpha emission without also identifying this other particle. Basic laws can not be ignored just because CF is a strange phenomenon. An alpha is normally emitted from this second particle (i.e. the decaying nucleus). When helium is made by fusion, the second particle is an energetic gamma, which carries away most of the energy. This energetic gamma is not emitted during CF. Therefore, the helium cannot be propose to have high energy unless another particle, which is not detected, is identified. Takahashi proposes to form Be8 that fragments after emitting the extra energy as gamma. However, this idea has no experimental support. The other theories do not propose energetic helium is produced. If you want to make a contribution, you need to take these facts into account. Ed Storms On May 11, 2013, at 2:24 AM, Harry Veeder wrote: Ed, I suggested two analogies with the videos 1) alphas trigger the reaction like a spark triggering a fire. As you point out this analogy is difficult to square with observations. 2) alphas are like smoke accompanying a fire. Depending on the conditions there can be lots of smoke with little fire (heat), or lots of fire (heat) with little smoke. This analogy is consistent with observations. harry On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: Harry, random suggestions guided by no relationship to knowledge is not very useful. My guiding principle is that all aspects of CF are consistent with normal, well known, and accepted laws and rules of both physics and chemistry. Only one small part is missing, which needs to be identified. Nevertheless, the role of this missing part can be clearly determined. This missing part does not in any way relate to alpha emission. The interaction of an alpha with matter is well known and understood. It does not initiate a fusion reaction. If it could, all alpha emitters would occasionally produce CF in the presence of hydrogen, which has not been observed. Of course, someone will find a way to counter this conclusion, but to what end? We must use some triage here. We need to consider ideas that are consistent with all that is known about materials and about how CF behaves? Unless you can show some consistency with what is known and observed, the ideas are a waste of time. So, put your thinking cap back on. Ed Storms On May 6, 2013, at 1:14 PM, Harry Veeder wrote: The alpha particles could be a precursor of the new fire. Once the fire the starts less smoke is produced. starting a fire with hand drill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF9GiK_T4PA Or maybe alphas are like sparks for the starting the new fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_35kxuwjcTs Harry On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: Of course, no statement can be made about any subject that does not invite a counter argument. No idea about CF can be suggested that cannot be shown to be false. Clearly, unless some triage is used to sort through the arguments and some common sense is applied, the effect will be impossible to understand. Naturally, I have considered the possibilities you suggest, Axil, before I came to my conclusions. Of course what you propose might be true. Nevertheless, I reached my conclusion by considering all of the observed behavior. A reader will have to decide for themselves which possibility they want to accept because it is impossible to debate such details here and reach an agreed conclusion. No matter what arguments are given, a counter argument can always be provided. I stated what I believe and gave the reasons. You stated what you believe and gave your reasons. That is all we can do. Ed Storms On May 6, 2013, at 12:25 PM, Axil Axil wrote: Ed Storms states: “We know that when large amounts of heat are detected, alpha emission at a comparable rate does not occur. Clearly, large heat production and alpha emission are not related.” This could be a false assumption as follows: When a thermalization mechanism that transfers nuclear energy directly to the lattice is in place, alpha particles do not carry enough energy to penetrate the surface of the CR-39. In this situation, the alpha particle drifts out of the nucleus at very low energies rather than being fired off out at high speed. This thermalization mechanism of nuclear energy from LENR directly to the lattice makes deductions about the behavior of alpha particles and their associated behavior and measurement problematic and unreliable. On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.com wrote: Eric, ALL nuclear reactions generate heat. Alpha emission is a nuclear reaction. Therefore, heat was generated. However, the rate of the reaction was too
RE: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
From: Edmund Storms Takahashi proposes to form Be8 that fragments after emitting the extra energy as gamma. However, this idea has no experimental support. The other theories do not propose energetic helium is produced. If you want to make a contribution, you need to take these facts into account. For the record Ed, this is NOT what Takahashi says - at least not now. Everyone should be given the same leeway to evolve a theory - and his is looking better and better. Takahashi proposes that the excited Be-8 nucleus has a relatively long lifetime in which it emits lower energy photons in a series of transitions until it reaches a level near the ground state. When the beryllium decays, the two alpha particles have about 90 keV of energy. He specifically says that these photons would NOT be gamma rays. He has some evidence for the 90 keV. There is as much - or maybe more - good evidence for Takahashi's contention - as for any theory which proposes some version of Hagelstein's magic phonons as a way around the lack of gammas. Jones
Re: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
On May 11, 2013, at 10:43 AM, Jones Beene wrote: From: Edmund Storms Takahashi proposes to form Be8 that fragments after emitting the extra energy as gamma. However, this idea has no experimental support. The other theories do not propose energetic helium is produced. If you want to make a contribution, you need to take these facts into account. For the record Ed, this is NOT what Takahashi says – at least not now. Everyone should be given the same leeway to evolve a theory – and his is looking better and better. Takahashi proposes that the excited Be-8 nucleus has a relatively long lifetime in which it emits lower energy photons in a series of transitions until it reaches a level near the ground state. Jones, when these photons are emitted, where do they originate? If they originate from electrons changing their energy, they are called X- rays. If they originate from changes in energy of the nucleus, they are called gamma. Your and Akito's description is consistent with the term gamma. When Be8 is formed by conventional nuclear processes, it is observed to fragment into two alpha immediately. Why would Be8 made the way Takahashi proposes decay any other way? In addition, the proposed formation process that creates the cluster from which the Be8 originates violates basic thermochemical laws. Why do you accept this process? I find that all theories are based on a series of assumptions, but some of these assumptions violate basic laws, yet the theory is accepted because the other assumptions are accepted. This is like recommending a road on which the bridge is missing just because the rest of the trip is nice. The road is no longer passible before the goal can be reached, so what is the point of using such a road? Ed Storms When the beryllium decays, the two alpha particles have about 90 keV of energy. He specifically says that these photons would NOT be gamma rays. He has some evidence for the 90 keV. There is as much - or maybe more - good evidence for Takahashi’s contention - as for any theory which proposes some version of Hagelstein’s “magic phonons” as a way around the lack of gammas. Jones
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: or rather, why do nearly all intelligent people reject it. I know a lot about this, because I have access to the traffic data at LENR-CANR.org. The answer is: 1. Most intelligent people do not reject cold fusion, or accept it. Most people have no knowledge of it. They have no idea whether it exists or not, and no basis to judge. They sometimes repeat what they read in the mass media or Wikipedia, but that does not count. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, many people repeated the assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. These people had no knowledge of the situation, no experience in military intelligence, and -- in short -- no idea what they were talking about. 2. Taking the group of people who have read papers and who know enough about science to understand them, a large majority believe that cold fusion is real. I can tell this from the comments and requests for information that come to me as librarian. 3. Among people how done a formal review of cold fusion and written a paper, most believe it is real. They include people such as Gerischer and Duncan. The only exceptions I know of are Dieter Britz and some of the 2004 DoE review panel members. I consider that review a farce. The negative comments violate the scientific method in many ways, showing that these scientists do not know how to do their own jobs. (In every line of work you will find incompetent professionals, even at the highest levels. The creme de la creme of Wall Street tycoons and bankers triggered the 2008 crash. Gen. Colin Powell believed the Iraqi WMD intelligence.) 4. There are small number of hard-core opponents such as Robert Park, Huizenga, Close, Morrison and the editors of the Scientific American. These people jumped to the conclusion that cold fusion is wrong. They wrote highly unscientific papers and books to back this up, which shows that they do not understand the scientific method. Their arguments are easily refuted by grade-school level science textbooks. For example, textbooks say theory cannot overrule widely replicated, high-sigma data. Unfortunately, some of these people have a great deal of influence at places such as the Washington Post and the APS. There is tremendous opposition to cold fusion by the plasma fusion researchers and the DoE, because they fear losing their funding. Huizenga acted as their attack dog, a job he loved, which he described with glee, in his book and in discussions with me and others. These people have staked their reputations on cold fusion being wrong. They are emotionally blind to the facts. Huizenga and Morrison looked at the data, but -- as I said -- they made elementary mistakes. Others such as Park and the Sci. Am. editors say they have never read a paper, and it is clear from their statements they know nothing about this subject, so I assume they are telling the truth. Obviously, this means they have no right to any opinion, positive or negative. I summarized some of the extreme skeptics views here: http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/293wikipedia.html You can see what they say in their own words. - Jed
RE: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
From: Edmund Storms I find that all theories are based on a series of assumptions, but some of these assumptions violate basic laws, yet the theory is accepted because the other assumptions are accepted. This is like recommending a road on which the bridge is missing just because the rest of the trip is nice. The road is no longer passible before the goal can be reached, so what is the point of using such a road? And your map has such a bridge (to explain lack of gammas)? I think not - in fact, it is the same kind of missing bridge that Takahashi uses, but with a different name. The only possible answer is that that the road which one needs to take, to arrive at the correct conclusion - is a road that completely avoids going through gamma-land from the start - by proposing a destination (reaction) in which gammas cannot be involved. Hagelstein's map does not avoid gamma-land, nor does yours - they simply invent new names for the missing bridges which turn out to not be where they should be, once you get there. Jones
Re: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
Jones, you interpretation of what I claim is not correct. My theory and most others try to find a way for the mass-energy to leave the nucleus in units to small be detected. Hagelstein's theory has these units being phonons generated by a process that can only be described by a complex equation. Takahashi has the mass-energy leaking out of Be8 as photons. These photons MUST originate in the Be8 nucleus, hence are called gamma. My theory has the mass-energy being released as photons from a molecule of hydrons in a crack . In my case, these photons are emitted by the fusing nuclei, hence are called gamma. In my case, I try to make ALL steps in the process consistent with basic laws, which is not the case with the other theories. Of course, a feature is missing in the nuclear process that needs to be identified. This missing feature is what LENR has revealed and, when identified, will be the source of a Nobel prize. Meanwhile, I suggest you try to understand exactly what I'm proposing rather than impose your own interpretation. It would help if you used the definition of gamma ray correctly. The only question is: How does the mass-energy get released? The mass energy is in the nucleus. If it comes out directly as a photon, as is normally the case, this process is defined as gamma emission. If the energy gets into the electron structure, it can be released as X-rays or phonons. No other possibility exists within known behavior. Ed Storms On May 11, 2013, at 1:45 PM, Jones Beene wrote: From: Edmund Storms I find that all theories are based on a series of assumptions, but some of these assumptions violate basic laws, yet the theory is accepted because the other assumptions are accepted. This is like recommending a road on which the bridge is missing just because the rest of the trip is nice. The road is no longer passible before the goal can be reached, so what is the point of using such a road? And your map has such a bridge (to explain lack of gammas)? I think not – in fact, it is the same kind of “missing bridge” that Takahashi uses, but with a different name. The only possible answer is that that the road which one needs to take, to arrive at the correct conclusion - is a road that completely avoids going through gamma-land from the start - by proposing a destination (reaction) in which gammas cannot be involved. Hagelstein’s map does not avoid gamma-land, nor does yours – they simply invent new names for the missing bridges which turn out to not be where they should be, once you get there. Jones
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Chris Zell chrisz...@wetmtv.com wrote: ** ** I believe that this lack of civility and fair play makes the 'extraordinary evidence' concept into nonsense. Civility has nothing to do with it. When evidence competes, the strongest evidence is taken more seriously. Keep in mind that the above *doesn't even begin to account for the distortion caused by entrenched moneyed interests. *Dr. Greer (of recent UFO exposure notoriety) referred to them as Petro-Fascists - which nicely sums them up. Anyone care to explain how an entire war costing hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives took place when it was entirely triggered by fraud? And hardly anyone seems to care? Not sure of your point. Academic scientists wouldn't give a hoot about Petro-fascists if an opportunity to win glory, honor and funding presented itself, as we saw in 1989. And the US government stands to benefit strategically against the petro-enemies if cold fusion were real. Fission and hot fusion were originally thought to be the final answer to our energy woes in the 50s and later, and the US pumped billions into both. Although it didn't work out the way everyone hoped, the incident shows that energy revolutions are not suppressed for petro interests or anyone else's. Any exception to generalizations - might always be inferior as to weightor strange, given lack of funding, Nonsense. High Tc superconductivity was instantly accepted. Quasi-crystals were ridiculed for a while but in a few years, they were embraced. Scientific inertia is no match for good evidence. If cold fusion were real, $500 M would be enough to produce similarly unequivocal evidence. A completely isolated device that can do some real work, or heat a large container of water, to prove its energy density is 10 or 100 times its weight in gasoline, would have the world beating a path to cold fusion's door …. again. attention or the outright prejudice that many encounter - in this circumstance of bias. The reality of cold fusion is in the interest of all but a very few researchers, so any bias in this area is more plausibly in its favor, as is obvious from 1989. The extraordinary goalposts might always be a distant illusion, especially if the desired effect is subtle or difficult to enlarge. This is true. If the evidence does not improve, it will come no closer to convincing the skeptics. Whatever his flaws ( and they are many) Rossi displays wisdom by attempting an end run around the biased. Godspeed to him in that. I don't know if Rossi will be able to maintain what is almost certainly a charade as long as Mills has (20 years) or if he will collapse as Steorn essentially has, but if it's the latter, he will have exposed many cold fusion believers like Storms, McKubre, and of course Rothwell, (but not all) as gullible fools. That will not help their cause.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:05 PM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: When blood transfusions were first tried (in 17th century?) some were a success and some ended in deaths and nobody knew why. It wasn't explained until the discovery of blood typing in the early 20th century. Until then blood transfusions were prohibited, for good ethical reasons. I don't see that as an example of the mainstream rejecting an idea that was eventually vindicated. They rejected indiscriminate transfusions for good reasons. Indiscriminate transfusions are still rejected. Why must a community comprised of intelligent people demonise certain research interests? What you see as demonizing is just the natural consequence of scientists making judgements and expressing their views on it. When these are favorable, scientists are venerated. It's not wrong to express your opinion.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:27 PM, Chris Zell chrisz...@wetmtv.com wrote: ** [medical anecdotes] If you're on of those who rejects evidence-based medicine in favor of anecdotal tales of cures from a vague sense of unease, then it's no surprise you are sucked in to the cold fusion vortex.
RE: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
From: Edmund Storms It would help if you used the definition of gamma ray correctly. Ed, I'm afraid that it us you who is not up to date on the semantics of gamma radiation. Gamma radiation these days is independent of origin, and is merely high energy per photon. Apparently, you are unaware of the change in usage. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of .01 to 10 nanometers, with energies in the range 100 eV to 100 keV. These wavelengths are of course shorter than UV and longer than gamma rays. Gamma radiation refers to radiation under .01 nm regardless of its source. You and I were taught that it had to be of nuclear origin - that is not longer the case - even if most of the time atomic nuclei are involved. Gammas also created by other processes, especially cosmologically where the most intense radiation seldom involves nuclei per se. Most gamma in the Universe come from gravitational collapse - neutron star, quark star, or black hole. None of these have nuclei per se. Natural sources of gamma which are not of a nuclear origin are lightning strikes. Betatrons etc. can produce gammas directly from electrons which do not involve a nucleus. Jones
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Harry Veeder hveeder...@gmail.com wrote: However, if a minority of the intelligentsia judge the evidence is compelling it does not give the majority the right to portray the minority as stupid or delusional or as practicing pathological science. The right to express opinions is already present, as long as slander is not involved. That doesn't mean it's polite or good behavior, but usually these characterizations are implicit. And it really is appropriate for scientists to express their opinion that a certain pursuit is highly unlikely to be productive, and likely sustained by wishful thinking, just as it is to recommend other pursuits as inspired and viable.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: History is full of large groups of intelligent people who made ignorant errors leading to disasters. Especially military history. Examples include: Yet you insist it's impossible for a group of cold fusion researchers to make collective ignorant errors.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: The answer is that people often make drastic mistakes. Even intelligent people do. Even cold fusion researchers do. It was not obvious because these people were blinded by emotion. So are the people opposed to cold fusion, such as Robert Park and Cude. Facts, logic, analysis, common sense, education, the lessons of experience . . . all are sacrificed when emotions and the primate instinct for power politics take over the mind. The only plausible influence of emotion in the cold fusion controversy is the one that was on display in 1989 when people stood and cheered Pons, and thousands ran to their labs to try to be among the first to be associated with the revolution, and get their names up in lights. People really wanted cold fusion to be true. It was in their interest, and it was especially in the government's strategic and economic interest, so this claim that people are emotionally resistant to cold fusion is nonsense. Storms wrote: many of us were lured into believing that the Pons-Fleischmann effect would solve the world's energy problems and make us all rich. That's where the emotional pressure is. This is what history teaches us. Learn from it, or you too will make dreadful mistakes, as George Santayana said. History teaches that whacky ideas and fringe science are sometimes just wacky ideas and fringe science. There are degrees of certainty. We're all certain the earth orbits the sun and a rock falls to the ground, and proposals to the contrary would be dismissed with the certainty they deserve, regardless of how mistaken the Japanese were. The view that cold fusion isn't happening is not that certain, but I don't think the great unwashed, and some of the washed have any appreciation of how remote the possibility is. Almost like a rock being repelled by the earth. You've been singing the same tune for 2 decades. I predict you'll be singing it for another two.
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I would like to explore this dreadful history a little more, because I know a lot about it. Certainly not because it has any relevance. What you're saying is that two countries are at war, one claims they will crush the other, and the other doesn't believe it, and therefore cold fusion is real. But for me, I'd associate the US with cold fusion skeptics, and Japan with the true believers. (In truth, I don't think the episode is in the least instructive to this debate.) Anyway, what about when Napolean said he would crush the 7th coalition at Waterloo? The coalition didn't just accept that and roll over either, and they of course were Napolean's waterloo. Or how about Sonny Liston, the heavy favorite in 1964 against Clay (Ali)? He said on the eve of the fight: Cassius, you're my million dollar baby, so please don't let anything happen to you before tomorrow night. Ali didn't back down though, and the rest is history. Of course Ali was far more vocal in his predictions, but in war and fights, both sides usually expect to win, or there wouldn't be wars. Cude and others have often said: If there was any chance cold fusion is real, of course smart people would support it. Everyone wants to see zero-cost energy. Then they say, since smart people do not support this research, that proves there is nothing to it, and no chance it will result in new technology. Obviously, no one could say that many smart people rejecting something proves it's wrong. What it proves is that the evidence for it is not conclusive or unequivocal, which is what true believers claim. Scientists make their judgements based on the evidence, and the vast majority judge the evidence to be weak, and given the overwhelmingly strong evidence against it, they remain skeptical. It's true that most scientists have not kept up with the details of cold fusion research, or even of its broad strokes, but in 1989, nearly every scientist on the planet looked pretty closely at cold fusion, and concluded it was almost certainly bogus. Since then, the evidence has not gotten any better, and so there is no reason to revisit that consensus. What most scientists (at least nuclear physicists) learned when they considered the possibility, was that if the claims of cold fusion advocates had merit, unequivocal evidence would almost certainly be rather easy to produce. And once produced would be submitted to and accepted by a prominent journal like Science or Nature. That hasn't happened. Also, a panel of experts enlisted by the DOE met in 2004 and examined the best of the evidence up to that time, and 17 of 18 said that evidence for LENR was not conclusive. And if do sample the informed opinion, by looking at the results of peer-review in prominent journals or by granting agencies (like the DOE panel), or by the fact that the APS recently rejected the publication of the ICCF conference, then you find that the consensus remains strong that cold fusion is almost certainly bogus. The difference between 1989 and now is that then we had two believable (even distinguished) guys who seemed to have stumbled on (or intuited their way to) a revolutionary claim that would be hard to get wrong. Now, we've got much more distinguished people who claimed negative results, who have looked carefully at the positive results and found they don't stand up, and most importantly, we've got dozens or even hundreds of people who have spent a long time looking for results, and the evidence still doesn't stand up. And experiments are not better (or at least the results are not better), and the theories are no more plausible, except to True Believers. Every new claim that is no better than the previous claims makes it look more pathological, not less. Moreover, there's no one left working in the field with the distinction of Fleischmann; all that's left is a bunch of mostly senior, run-of-the-mill scientists. So what happened in 1989 fits the pattern for some physics discoveries, and that's why people took notice. What's happened since fits the pattern for pathological science, and that's why it's now being ignored. Cude, Frank Close, the editors at Scientific American and others are not worried that they might be holding back a valuable technology. [...] You wrote a lot of words to say simply that skeptics consider the possibility of cold fusion being real exceedingly remote. The additional verbiage replaced by an ellipsis (as well as the entire Japanese story) was intended to put this attitude in a bad light, but then you say: They are as certain it is wrong as I am certain that creationism is wrong. completely deflating your argument. Because none of it was specific to cold fusion, but to the general idea of being too confident that something is wrong. And here you are, certain that something is wrong. The truth is that there *are* varying degrees of certainty about
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial 2
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 PF were right. [...] No one says that tritium proves that PF'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 PF 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.
[Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Please immediately move all debunking to VortexB-L. Vortex' Rule 2 is intended to prevent debunking-based postings here. Also please read: On Wed, 8 May 2013, Edmund Storms wrote: What is the usefulness of all this discussion. Cude will not accept the most obvious and well supported arguments and he will not accept what I just said here. Yes, such discussions usually prove pointless. A simple problem with a simple solution: DEBUNKING IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN ON VORTEX-L. If you see some, it's probably coming from someone who didn't read the forum rules: http://amasci.com/weird/wvort.html#rules It's not just about no sneering. Skeptics are not welcome here. Vortex-L exists to provide a Believer forum which stays far away from the message traffic and time wasted in discussions with staunch non- Believers. There's plenty of other groups for such topics if you want to indulge (including vortexB-L.) And, if rule #2 isn't clear enough, well, here's the expanded version: http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Note well: I started this group as an openminded quiet harbor for interested parties to discuss the Griggs Rotor away from the believer-skeptic uproar on sci.physics.fusion. It quickly mutated into a believers forum for discussion of cold fusion and other anomalous physics. I created Rule #2 to prevent this list from becoming another battleground like the sci.physics.fusion newsgroup. Be warned: IF YOU SELF-IDENTIFY AS NON-WOO, THEN YOU COULD BE REMOVED FROM THE FORUM AT ANY TIME. PS Hey, part of that old article in THE SKEPTIC is now on google books... Skepticism and Credulity, Finding balance between Type-I and -II errors http://goo.gl/jU5Zf Another one: BERKUN, Why smart people defend bad ideas http://scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-bad-ideas/ (( ( ( ( ((O)) ) ) ) ))) William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb amasci comhttp://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
Re: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
In reply to Eric Walker's message of Fri, 10 May 2013 17:05:05 -0700: Hi, [snip] In the situation you describe, there are going to be lots of spallation neutrons, because you only need 2.2 MeV to break a deuterium nucleus into a proton and a neutron, and heavy water is all deuterium. It's going to be a prime source of neutrons, as Jones is fond of pointing out. ;) So far from creating a situation where there will be less neutrons, you have in fact created one where there will be more. In fact this a good reason for suggesting that CF in the D/Pd experiments is not mediated by (very) fast alphas. Neutrons combining with the glass, or the cathode will produce gammas. (The neutron capture cross section of heavy water itself is quite low, which is why it's used as a moderator/coolant in some reactors.) On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 3:21 PM, mix...@bigpond.com wrote: In short, very roughly, a 1 W unshielded power source would double the background rate. Thank you for the numbers. Twice background doesn't sound like all that much; presumably this is near the threshold of detection, and a signal would be easy to swamp out with noise? The alphas would be Ron's alphas, at 22.9 MeV. I'm trying a thought experiment where the secondary spallation neutrons are somehow minimized -- I don't have an explanation for why this would be the case at this point, but I'm curious anyway. The setup I'm thinking of is something like this: | air | glass | heavy water | cathode surface | active region | cathode interior | Here the cathode surface is assumed to be very thin. In the scenario I'm trying to better understand, where the spallation neutrons are somehow avoided, I'm wondering what the activity would like like from the vantage point at the far left, at air. The alphas could potentially travel for quite a while through the cathode before encountering a lattice site, I think I remember reading, during which time they will dissipate energy by way of low-level EMF. I assume that EMF will be stopped by the cathode surface, the heavy water and the glass, before reaching the air -- is this a mistaken assumption? No, in fact all of it will be stopped by the free electrons in the cathode(surface). Note however that we are specifically talking about UV and lower energy levels here. High energy X-rays /or gamma rays will escape easily. Like you say, there will no doubt be inelastic collisions, metastable nuclei and gammas. But assuming little neutron activation, do you have a sense of what the activity would be like outside of this kind of shielding? Aside from the effects caused by spallation neutrons, I doubt you would see much from a purely alpha reaction such as Ron's. I say this because apart from previously mentioned things, the only other form of energy that is likely to escape the cell is high energy X-rays, and to create these, you need high energy electrons. The highest energy electron you can create in a head on collision with a 23 MeV alpha is M_e/M_alpha x 23 MeV = 3152 eV. Even if all of the kinetic energy of such an electron is converted into a maximum energy X-ray through the bremsstrahlung mechanism (and it rarely is), you only get a 3 keV X-ray, which is not very penetrating. I'll leave it up to you to figure out the mean free path and transmission fraction in the various materials of 3 keV X-rays. The question I'm trying to get at is whether we can say for sure that the number of energetic particles (in this case alphas) in the cold fusion experiments is not commensurate with heat. I think most (99%) of the energy from the alphas would convert to heat in the cell. Note however that a doubling of the background rate is easily detected, especially if it turns on and off with the cell, and BTW so is a neutron production rate of that magnitude, if you are using neutron detectors. I said in a previous post a few weeks back that Geiger counters were not particularly good at detecting neutrons, however I forgot about the prompt gammas which would be internally generated in the Geiger counter, so I would now expect them to be more sensitive than I first thought, but the sensitivity would depend on the precise elements, quantities and geometry used in their manufacture, and therefore would vary from one brand/type to the next. [snip] Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
Re: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
Ok Jones, but we now have a problem with communication. If the word gamma only describes a high energy range, than none of the radiation resulting from LENR can be called gamma. But, how do we describe the source of photons? Must we now give the source in so many words every time? And who made this change (Wikipedia??)? Sounds like this change occurred only in cosmology and not in nuclear physics. Nevertheless, this change now makes communication in nuclear physics more difficult. As for other sources, the photons resulting from lightning can come both from the nucleus and from the electrons. How do we talk about the source now that the idea behind the word gamma has been changed? In any case, based on the present definition, the word gamma radiation does not apply to LENR because the emitted photons never enter the defined energy range. Nevertheless, we need to discuss their source. Do they come from the nucleus or from the electron structure? Ed Storms On May 11, 2013, at 3:18 PM, Jones Beene wrote: From: Edmund Storms It would help if you used the definition of gamma ray correctly. Ed, I’m afraid that it us you who is not up to date on the semantics of gamma radiation. Gamma radiation these days is independent of origin, and is merely high energy per photon. Apparently, you are unaware of the change in usage. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of .01 to 10 nanometers, with energies in the range 100 eV to 100 keV. These wavelengths are of course shorter than UV and longer than gamma rays. Gamma radiation refers to radiation under .01 nm regardless of its source. You and I were taught that it had to be of nuclear origin – that is not longer the case – even if most of the time atomic nuclei are involved. Gammas also created by other processes, especially cosmologically where the most intense radiation seldom involves nuclei per se. Most gamma in the Universe come from gravitational collapse - neutron star, quark star, or black hole. None of these have nuclei per se. Natural sources of gamma which are not of a nuclear origin are lightning strikes. Betatrons etc. can produce gammas directly from electrons which do not involve a nucleus. Jones
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
OK. My apologies. Like I said before, I came to post a review of Hagelstein's editorial, which, although negative, I did not think violated rule 2. And then, of course, I can't resist replying to direct responses to stuff I write, and it spiraled outta control. I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. Otherwise, adios. It's been a slice. On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 5:25 PM, William Beaty bi...@eskimo.com wrote: Please immediately move all debunking to VortexB-L. Vortex' Rule 2 is intended to prevent debunking-based postings here. Also please read: On Wed, 8 May 2013, Edmund Storms wrote: What is the usefulness of all this discussion. Cude will not accept the most obvious and well supported arguments and he will not accept what I just said here. Yes, such discussions usually prove pointless. A simple problem with a simple solution: DEBUNKING IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN ON VORTEX-L. If you see some, it's probably coming from someone who didn't read the forum rules: http://amasci.com/weird/wvort.**html#ruleshttp://amasci.com/weird/wvort.html#rules It's not just about no sneering. Skeptics are not welcome here. Vortex-L exists to provide a Believer forum which stays far away from the message traffic and time wasted in discussions with staunch non- Believers. There's plenty of other groups for such topics if you want to indulge (including vortexB-L.) And, if rule #2 isn't clear enough, well, here's the expanded version: http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.**htmlhttp://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Note well: I started this group as an openminded quiet harbor for interested parties to discuss the Griggs Rotor away from the believer-skeptic uproar on sci.physics.fusion. It quickly mutated into a believers forum for discussion of cold fusion and other anomalous physics. I created Rule #2 to prevent this list from becoming another battleground like the sci.physics.fusion newsgroup. Be warned: IF YOU SELF-IDENTIFY AS NON-WOO, THEN YOU COULD BE REMOVED FROM THE FORUM AT ANY TIME. PS Hey, part of that old article in THE SKEPTIC is now on google books... Skepticism and Credulity, Finding balance between Type-I and -II errors http://goo.gl/jU5Zf Another one: BERKUN, Why smart people defend bad ideas http://scottberkun.com/essays/**40-why-smart-people-defend-**bad-ideas/http://scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-bad-ideas/ (( ( ( ( ((O)) ) ) ) ))) William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb amasci comhttp://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
Re: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
Very interesting discussion. If can summarize the main points in my own words, it would be something like this -- for a hypothetical heavy water electrolytic system in which watts of prompt alphas are being produced in a palladium cathode by way of a hypothetical d+d+Pd→4He+Pd + Q (22.9 MeV kinetic energy) reaction, you can expect the following: - There will be plenty of spallation neutrons due to collisions between alphas and heavy water molecules, where the deuterium nuclei are broken apart. These neutrons will either escape the system or activate the surrounding material, resulting in easily detectable gammas. - (To add Hagelstein's point, if I have understood it: in addition, prompt alphas can be expected to collide with deuterium nuclei in the cathode, and deuterium nuclei in the cathode scattered by alphas can be expected to collide with one another, providing an additional source of neutrons.) - The number of spallation neutrons can be expected to be large, since it takes only a fraction of the energy of an alpha with 22.9 MeV to break apart a deuterium nucleus. - There would also be x-rays, with a peak in the 3 keV range. These x-rays will be stopped before leaving the system. - The doubling of the radiation level above background described in an earlier post would be easy to detect, although there would be some subtleties relating to the specific detector that is used. For the mean free paths of 3 keV x-rays, I get small numbers: 46 microns in water, 2 microns in palladium and 6.2 cm in air. So it seems pretty clear that the x-rays are unlikely to make it to a detector after traversing the outer layer of palladium, the heavy water and the glass. On the basis of all of this, I'm wondering if it is safe to conclude the following: any radiation exiting a system of this kind involving fast alphas would be attributable solely to neutrons (spallation and fusion) and the activation gammas they lead to, and to inelastic collisions between alphas and other nuclei and the resulting gammas. Any other radiation can be expected to be quenched and to be undetectable apart from a general increase in temperature of the system. Is this conclusion too broad? Just to call out two important assumptions here: - Prompt alphas will escape from the cathode and make it into the heavy water at still-high energies. - Prompt alphas travelling within a palladium lattice will scatter a significant number of deuterium nuclei, and a significant number of fast deuterium nuclei will scatter with one another; i.e., there is no mechanism that somehow segregates the locations of the two types of nuclei into separate channels. Eric On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 3:37 PM, mix...@bigpond.com wrote: In reply to Eric Walker's message of Fri, 10 May 2013 17:05:05 -0700: Hi, [snip] In the situation you describe, there are going to be lots of spallation neutrons, because you only need 2.2 MeV to break a deuterium nucleus into a proton and a neutron, and heavy water is all deuterium. It's going to be a prime source of neutrons, as Jones is fond of pointing out. ;) So far from creating a situation where there will be less neutrons, you have in fact created one where there will be more. In fact this a good reason for suggesting that CF in the D/Pd experiments is not mediated by (very) fast alphas. Neutrons combining with the glass, or the cathode will produce gammas. (The neutron capture cross section of heavy water itself is quite low, which is why it's used as a moderator/coolant in some reactors.) On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 3:21 PM, mix...@bigpond.com wrote: In short, very roughly, a 1 W unshielded power source would double the background rate. Thank you for the numbers. Twice background doesn't sound like all that much; presumably this is near the threshold of detection, and a signal would be easy to swamp out with noise? The alphas would be Ron's alphas, at 22.9 MeV. I'm trying a thought experiment where the secondary spallation neutrons are somehow minimized -- I don't have an explanation for why this would be the case at this point, but I'm curious anyway. The setup I'm thinking of is something like this: | air | glass | heavy water | cathode surface | active region | cathode interior | Here the cathode surface is assumed to be very thin. In the scenario I'm trying to better understand, where the spallation neutrons are somehow avoided, I'm wondering what the activity would like like from the vantage point at the far left, at air. The alphas could potentially travel for quite a while through the cathode before encountering a lattice site, I think I remember reading, during which time they will dissipate energy by way of low-level EMF. I assume that EMF will be stopped by the cathode surface, the heavy water and the glass, before reaching the air -- is this a mistaken
Re: [Vo]:RE: From Russia, with love
In reply to Eric Walker's message of Sat, 11 May 2013 18:04:19 -0700: Hi Eric, I think your summation is quite good. Very interesting discussion. If can summarize the main points in my own words, it would be something like this -- for a hypothetical heavy water electrolytic system in which watts of prompt alphas are being produced in a palladium cathode by way of a hypothetical d+d+Pd?4He+Pd + Q (22.9 MeV kinetic energy) reaction, you can expect the following: - There will be plenty of spallation neutrons due to collisions between alphas and heavy water molecules, where the deuterium nuclei are broken apart. These neutrons will either escape the system or activate the surrounding material, resulting in easily detectable gammas. - (To add Hagelstein's point, if I have understood it: in addition, prompt alphas can be expected to collide with deuterium nuclei in the cathode, and deuterium nuclei in the cathode scattered by alphas can be expected to collide with one another, providing an additional source of neutrons.) - The number of spallation neutrons can be expected to be large, since it takes only a fraction of the energy of an alpha with 22.9 MeV to break apart a deuterium nucleus. - There would also be x-rays, with a peak in the 3 keV range. These x-rays will be stopped before leaving the system. - The doubling of the radiation level above background described in an earlier post would be easy to detect, although there would be some subtleties relating to the specific detector that is used. For the mean free paths of 3 keV x-rays, I get small numbers: 46 microns in water, 2 microns in palladium and 6.2 cm in air. So it seems pretty clear that the x-rays are unlikely to make it to a detector after traversing the outer layer of palladium, the heavy water and the glass. On the basis of all of this, I'm wondering if it is safe to conclude the following: any radiation exiting a system of this kind involving fast alphas would be attributable solely to neutrons (spallation and fusion) and the activation gammas they lead to, and to inelastic collisions between alphas and other nuclei and the resulting gammas. Any other radiation can be expected to be quenched and to be undetectable apart from a general increase in temperature of the system. Is this conclusion too broad? Just to call out two important assumptions here: - Prompt alphas will escape from the cathode and make it into the heavy water at still-high energies. - Prompt alphas travelling within a palladium lattice will scatter a significant number of deuterium nuclei, and a significant number of fast deuterium nuclei will scatter with one another; i.e., there is no mechanism that somehow segregates the locations of the two types of nuclei into separate channels. Eric On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 3:37 PM, mix...@bigpond.com wrote: In reply to Eric Walker's message of Fri, 10 May 2013 17:05:05 -0700: Hi, [snip] In the situation you describe, there are going to be lots of spallation neutrons, because you only need 2.2 MeV to break a deuterium nucleus into a proton and a neutron, and heavy water is all deuterium. It's going to be a prime source of neutrons, as Jones is fond of pointing out. ;) So far from creating a situation where there will be less neutrons, you have in fact created one where there will be more. In fact this a good reason for suggesting that CF in the D/Pd experiments is not mediated by (very) fast alphas. Neutrons combining with the glass, or the cathode will produce gammas. (The neutron capture cross section of heavy water itself is quite low, which is why it's used as a moderator/coolant in some reactors.) On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 3:21 PM, mix...@bigpond.com wrote: In short, very roughly, a 1 W unshielded power source would double the background rate. Thank you for the numbers. Twice background doesn't sound like all that much; presumably this is near the threshold of detection, and a signal would be easy to swamp out with noise? The alphas would be Ron's alphas, at 22.9 MeV. I'm trying a thought experiment where the secondary spallation neutrons are somehow minimized -- I don't have an explanation for why this would be the case at this point, but I'm curious anyway. The setup I'm thinking of is something like this: | air | glass | heavy water | cathode surface | active region | cathode interior | Here the cathode surface is assumed to be very thin. In the scenario I'm trying to better understand, where the spallation neutrons are somehow avoided, I'm wondering what the activity would like like from the vantage point at the far left, at air. The alphas could potentially travel for quite a while through the cathode before encountering a lattice site, I think I remember reading, during which time they will dissipate energy by way of low-level EMF. I assume that EMF
Re: [Vo]:Hagelstein's editorial
By 'we' I mean Vortex minus debunkers. Small 's' skeptics are welcome, but debunkers are not. We need to know where to draw the line. Which facts do we consider so obvious that when someone denies them, they're a debunker rather than small 's' skeptic. Vortex rules: http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Note that small-s skepticism of the openminded sort is perfectly acceptable on Vortex-L. We crackpots don't want to be *completely* self-deluding. :) The ban here is aimed at Debunkers; at certain disbeleif and its self-superior and archly hostile results, and at the sort of Skeptic who angrily disbelieves all that is not solidly proved true, while carefully rejecting all new data and observations which conflict with the widely accepted theories of the time. On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 8:02 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: To the Japanese in 1941, Americans seemed outlandish. To the skeptics who agree with Cude or Close, we are the ones disconnected from reality. We are illogical and even mentally ill thinking that we can fuse hydrogen in a mason jar. I do not think it does any good getting angry at such people. It is important that you understand their mindset. ***Okay, Jed. What we need as a group is a minimum set of facts that we agree are incontrovertible. Sure, but we cannot expect people like Cude to agree with any of them. A person can always find a reason to dismiss something. Cude says that the tritium results may all be mistakes or fraud. Jones Beene accused him of being intellectually dishonest, but I assume Cude is sincere. Bockris tallied up tritium reports and said that over 100 labs detected it. If I were Cude, this would give me pause. I find it impossible to imagine there are so so many incompetent scientists, I cannot think of why scientists would publish fake data that triggers attacks on their reputation by the Washington Post. What would be the motive? But I am sure that Cude, and Park, and the others sincerely believe that scientists are deliberately trashing their own reputations by publishing fake data. I would think it is that Pons Fleischmann were careful electrochemists, the preeminent of their day. Of course they were, but no skeptic will agree. Fleischmann was the president of the Electrochemical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society, but Cude and the others are convinced he was a sloppy, mentally ill criminal. That's what they say, and I do not think they would say it if they did not believe it. That the physicists who chose to debunk their findings were far from careful due to inexperience in electrochemistry and this led to their negative findings. There were many reasons experiments failed in 1989. Some of the failed experiments were carefully done, but they used the wrong diagnostics. Most of them looked for neutrons instead of heat. That there have been 14,700 replications of the P-F anomolous heat effect. If not, then how many? 180, as per Storms and National Instruments? Those are two different tallies. The 14,700 is the number of individual positive runs reported in the literature for all techniques, including glow discharge. 180 is the number of laboratories reporting success. Some of those labs saw excess heat many times. If 180 labs measure excess heat 10 times each, that would be 1,800 positive runs in the Chinese tally. I do not know where the Chinese got their data. Presumably from published papers. I have not gone through papers counting up positive and negative runs. What are the base minimum set of facts that we all agree on? If we include the skeptics there is not a single fact we all agree on. Not one. Cude looks at Fig. 1 in the McKubre paper and says the peak at 94% loading means nothing. I think he says it is the result of random effects or cherry-picked data. I look at it and say it proves there is a controlling parameter (loading) that cannot possibly cause artifactual excess heat, so this proves the effect is real. I say that even if only 20% achieve high loading, the other 80% are not relevant. Even if only one in a million achieved high loading this would still prove the effect is real. Cude looks at the preponderance of cells that do not achieve high loading and he concludes that they prove this graph is meaningless noise. There is absolutely no reconciling our points of view. From my point of view, his assertion is scientifically illiterate. He does not seem to understand how graphs work, and what it means to say that data is significant rather than noise. From his point of view, McKubre, Storms and I have no idea what we are talking about and this graph is no more significant than a face of Jesus burned into someone's toast. I gather he thinks it is random noise that happens to peak at 94%, or it is fake data. I cannot describe what he thinks, because I have not read his messages
[Vo]:Skeptics and the media
A discussion by Rupert Sheldrake in the context of the TEDx controversy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SGzu8TJsyo
[Vo]:Viscoelastic Silicone Rubber
Viscoelastic Silicone Rubber http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1v=Q1VtAXeMn74feature=endscreen Published on Nov 6, 2012 A novel material developed by Louis A. Bloomfield, professor and associate chair of the Physics Department in the University of Virginia's College of Arts Sciences, has unusual properties that allow it to behave differently in the long and short terms. Harry
