Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
I have no idea what the results will look like.
They will look like a Rorschach test. And people will interpret them along similar lines.
I'm not interested in whether or not there is a CF reaction.
Then I see no point to this project. The only reason to an experiment of this nature is to see a CF reaction. Otherwise you are wasting your time.
Perhaps someone would take a kit and modify it a little and report a finding that the tracks are, indeed, some unexpected kind of chemical damage. Wouldn't that be interesting?
An ordinary person doing these experiments the first time (such as me) cannot tell the difference between chemical damage and a real track. I can tell now . . . probably, but I spent two days discussing it and I edited 5 or 10 papers. Mostly what you will see is what it looks like when you botch the experiment. The take home message from Fisher's lecture was that there are many ways to botch it. I doubt many amateurs will devote 3 to 6 months full time to learning how to do this. I doubt any of them will. And if you don't keep plugging away every day for months, and also visit with and consult with people who have done this, you will fail. That goes for all cold fusion experiments I have seen. They are all roughly as difficult as building or remodeling a house -- a job I have commissioned and assisted with two or three times.
If you do not have years of experience in carpentry you will end up with loads of mistakes and a leaking roof. (Especially if you have a skylight window, as I pointed out here a few months ago. Even professionals get that wrong.) The only person I know who managed to build a superb looking house the first time he tried it is Edmund Storms.
Put it this way: If an amateur could do a cold fusion experiment in his spare time, and produce a meaningful or even persuasive result, that would be a remarkably easy experiment. Easier than any I have heard of. We would know about that. I sure would know about it! I would feature it at LENR-CANR.org, which is visited by ~3,000 scientists per week, and I expect many scientists would be doing it right now.
The only way cold fusion will ever get "easy" is the same way other other technologies have gotten easier over the years. Paradoxically, they get easy by getting much harder. In the 1908 Sears Roebuck catalog they sell books and equipment to build your own automobile. It probably was not easy but a skilled blacksmith could do it. A few years later anyone could purchase a ready-made from Henry Ford, and that was way easier, but the machine itself is much more sophisticated than the ones in the Sears catalog. When I was a kid we used to make our primitive telegraphs and telephones by winding wires to make electromagnets. They barely worked. Nowadays any kid can buy a cell phone, which is thousands of times more complicated than any telephone in 1960, and which works perfectly.
Anyone can replicate Volta's experiments today by going to the drugstore, buying a small battery and lighting a small bulb with a few wires. 99.999% of the work is done for you by the Eveready Battery company. You can demonstrate the Meissner effect a high temperature superconductor because there are kits for sale with fabricated materials in them. You just get some LN (I think it is) and levitate away. Until we can pre-package a cold fusion experiment in a similar way, and do nearly all the work beforehand, no amateur will be able to replicate, and very few scientists will take the trouble to replicate. You need to concentrate on materials and find the best possible one to demonstrate with the highest s/n ratio and the least ambiguity. I find the CR-39 results ambiguous, to say the least.
Almost all of the difficulty of doing a cold fusion experiment is in the materials, just as it is when making a battery. If you can find a good source of materials and you have good instruments, you can demonstrate the effect. The instruments must be reliable and sensitive, and they cost far more than the materials, which is why I do not understand why anyone wants to reduce the cost of materials. What is the point? You could reduce the cost of materials to few dollars but the experiment would still cost $100,000 to $1 million. In fact most materials are supplied for free to researchers by companies such as Tanaka precious metals and Santoku, although that would not be the case for kits.
When the Italians give you a sample of their palladium foils, you eliminate 90% of the work Storms described in his paper How to produce the Pons-Fleischmann effect. When Santoku gives you a sample of the Pd-Zr material, they are doing 99% of the work for you. Just add highly pure D2 and away it goes. We think. Assuming the calorimetry is right.
You also wrote:
But I would imagine that individual cells might sell for prices as low as a few dollars each. If we go the Arata path, they will almost certainly be a lot more expensive, 7 g of palladium last I looked was worth about $50, and that's bulk metal, not nanoparticle processed with zirconium.
If they charged $1000 per gram it would be a bargain. It would be far cheaper than doing an experiment with material that cost $10 overall, because it is less time consuming and it (probably!) works more reliably with a higher s/n ratio. There is no point to doing an experiment that does not work, no matter how cheap it is.
Either way, you are going to spend $50,000 to get meaningful results. More, if your time is worth anything. Unless, of course, it turns out that with 100 g of Santoku material you can get a 10 W reaction in a small device that is palpable, with no input, lasting for days. That is possible. As far as I know, no one has tried doing that yet.
- Jed
