At 12:37 AM 10/5/2009, Horace Heffner wrote:
Supporting this is not my aim. I did not join your list. In fact, I may mount a competing operation at some point if a good experiment emerges. I suggested a similar effort about a year ago on another list, with the difference being that I suggested a non-profit effort aimed at classrooms. I think such an effort should be non-profit, providing kits to classrooms at cost or less.
Do you think that the people who actually do the work should be compensated? How? Should the availability of the kits be dependent upon how much donation funding is available? I've suggested that people who want to make the kits more available could make donations for that purpose. I've suggested that a nonprofit corporation could be set up and that it might even own whatever business operation exists. I'm starting as an independent entrepreneur, but the scale is so small that I'll be lucky to make minimum wage. I'm pretty sure I'll get my investment back, but I can't afford to donate either the investment or, for that matter, too much time.
Should I put off actually doing the work in order to wait for donations to appear? I haven't noticed any pouring in the door, perhaps I should check my mailbox. Ed Storms has said that he's the only person who has made money on cold fusion. Perhaps if more had figured out how to make money, other than by spending other people's money in fruitless efforts to make the big strike, the field would be a decade ahead of where it is. What I'm doing could have been done probably a decade ago.
Heffner, you are welcome to mount a "competing operation." If you can do something better than I, I'd happily defer to you. If you can supply materials and supplies to experimenters, fine with me! My only worry would be that you would undercut the market, cause competing operations to collapse, but be unable or unwilling to sustain it, so the end result is less availability, not more. To me, the model of buying fairly priced kits from someone who makes a living doing it, and giving them away makes more sense. Even better, probably, investing enough to allow better economy in production, maybe even subsidizing the price, but still requiring some investment from kit buyers, would spread responsibility and a sense of public "ownership."
My recent business experience is with a business selling otherwise-unobtainable materials to textile artists. They can't go to a mill and get a particular yarn made, or to a factory and get a particular kind of fiber, they'd have to buy enough to last them a century. But a small business which supplies 100 artists can do it, and the internet made it possible to connect with the artists, who are scattered all over the world. It doesn't take a large market to support a small business. Have you noticed United Nuclear? Seems like a nice company.... I'm tempted to buy some of their toys. Seems to me that I did see a spinthariscope when I was a kid, and it got me excited. Maybe that's why I thought I would be a nuclear physicist until I was distracted by other joys.
I've purchased some LR-115; I will cut it up, I plan to serialize the chips, and I'll be selling them in small packages. If you want to give some away, you could either subsidize what I'm doing, or you could buy your own material from the supplier. There is nothing stopping you. If I try to price gouge, which would be stupid, anyone else could step in.
I have no interest in spending time on this kind of thing when the basic science to pull this off cheaply and *convincingly* in a classroom setting is not there yet. I would prefer to focus on the fundamentals if I spend time on CF. However, I have a lot more on my plate than CF. If I should find a way to do this my first step would be to publish free instructions with suppliers for all parts listed. No kit necessary. The next step would be to form a non-profit corporation to distribute kits for educational institutions at cost or less.
The instructions already exist. It's the Galileo protocol. It includes a list of suppliers, and detailed instructions. The first thing I'm doing is to follow the protocol very closely; I may do some things a little differently, but I'm quite aware that what might seem like a harmless variation could quench the effect, so I'll be very careful. What I do will be documented. The plan was to, indeed, make all the engineering involved in my kits available, so that anyone could replicate exactly without depending on me for supplies. But if you can buy the supplies in appropriate quantities from me, at a price that is worth spending to save the time and hassle, where I make my profit based on quantity purchase and/or convenience, why would you avoid it? For pure science, spotlessly independent replication, perhaps. But that's not the purpose of these kits. The purpose is to get *demonstration* happening, out in the public, widespread, plus certain other benefits I've mentioned. And, since I'm on social security, with a very limited income and very little savings, making some small profit is important for me. Even though I'm retired, I do have two small children and they could use a little more support than they themselves get from their "survivor's benefits."
You want to form the non-profit, go ahead. I'd cooperate and support it. But I'm not about to stop this effort because someone else prefers to do something else! There already is the New Energy Foundation, which supports Krivit in his work. How about sending them a check? Maybe you already have, I don't know who is behind them. Somebody bought $600-$800 worth of CR-39 and sent it to the researchers in a rush when the Tastrak detectors turned out to be "fogging" in the electrolyte.
Another approach I want to pursue, by the way, is to test one of the standard commercial varieties of CR-39, especially very thin sheets. It's possible to "erase" it before usage, by pre-etching. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.radmeas.2004.11.010. And I'll be working on scaling down the cells. A small amount of radiation is just as useful for our purposes as a larger amount as long as it is clearly above background, and smaller is both safer and cheaper. (But the SPAWAR neutron levels are very low, ten times background is thinner than I like; still, when that's replicable and consistent, it's enough, and I'm hoping that the boron-10 will up the detection levels at least a little. That boron-10 may end up being the most expensive thing in a cell. Well, not "in" the cell, and I won't be using it on cells where I want to observe the cathode with a microscope during the experiment. Unless it's on the opposite side, a possibility, since the neutrons should penetrate in both directions.
