Steve:
I had asked Ludwik "What kind of instrument did you use to make this
scratch?"
His reply came after our deadline for NET25. I enclose it if it helps.
"Steve,
Any mechanical scratch is ALWAYS surrounded by tracks-looking pits.
That is why one of the rules of counting, established by oriani, is to
ignore tracks which form straight line segments. Tracks that are very
close to the edges are also not counted; they are probably produced
during cutting. The picture you have was a very shallow scratch. I do
not remember how it was produced; most likely not deliberately."
The thing that I didn't completely follow in his logic was, if he didn't
know for sure how the "scratch" was caused, how was he sure it was a
scratch?
And the fact that nature caused a repeating pattern, with nearly a
perfect similarity in each of the groups and sub-features and their
relationship to each other, in a slightly crescent, shape seemed
inexplicable to me.
Yes, the crescent shape is interesting in the 'cloud chamber context'
but that relevance would be negated in the context of a reaction going
horizontal to the plane of the film. One would suspect that kind of
orientation would not be normal at all; but even so, has any effort been
made to determine if the curvature is relatively standard, or does it
vary considerably ?
And most of all -- to be clear on the ultimate implications, the
possibility of some of the pits coming from scratches, and being
mechanical only goes to the net count, right?
I mean there is no serious contention that there are not nuclear
reactions at all, which are responsible for most of the pits, right?
J.
