Hi, Abd al-Rahman, Many thanks for your response and comments.
I read your account of your own evolution in thinking with great interest. It is always nice to see someone thinking and acting together, with both evolving. I do like your idea of kits. I assume these kits would be less sophisticated and less expensive and more numerous than those being developed by the US government. I wish you success. The materials that I am advocating would be a nice complement to your project, though they are to first order aimed at somewhat different audiences. Both audiences are important. I am not trying to change my colleague's thinking, as much as here I was only reporting what his thinking vis-a-vis CF was, as I understand it. You are right: he is fully engaged in important and demanding work, and doing a great job at it. No one can do everything solely because it is 'interesting'. I know; I've tried. :D It is silly to vilify him because he doesn't leap into CF work. But as an intellectual exercise I have considered what it might take to get his attention for CF, as his interest could make a significant difference in advancing the field. The posters here seem to have written off Wikipedia. I think this is a mistake: Wikipedia has emerged as the go-to place for people seeking introductory and overview information about virtually all matters. In my opinion, CF should be covered, and covered in the most useful way possible. Wikipedia has a very specific culture and set of processes that have guided its development. Anyone wanting to get information into Wikipedia MUST work within this framework. Not everyone can, but I don't think there is anything intrinsic about CF that would make it harder for Wikipedia to cover properly than it does thousands of even more controversial subjects, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wikipedia does not want to be a place for publishing cutting edge science -- for obvious reasons -- but CF is far beyond that, now. Cheers, Lawry -----Original Message----- From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com] Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 1:09 AM To: debiv...@evolutionaryservices.org; vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:Obama visiting MIT to discuss energy At 06:40 PM 10/22/2009, Lawrence de Bivort wrote: >I don't think books will do I what I believe needs to be done, no matter how >well written -- because the book FORMAT will not get the job I envisage >done. The problem is not with the content but with the format. The books do >a good job at doing what they do. I am talking about a different task. Less than a year ago, I was skeptical about cold fusion. I had been very aware of the events of 1989-1990, and, in fact, arranged to put $10,000 in a palladium metal account at a Swiss bank, which was about all the money I and my wife at the time could put together. I thought it was pretty safe, I didn't buy futures! And I got my money back, just didn't make any. I had followed the news for a year or so, and basically concluded that it was all a mistake, the theories that it was impossible were probably right, etc. Then, being involved with Wikipedia as an active editor, I came across the Cold fusion article. There had been a blatantly unfair blacklisting of lenr-canr.org, and I started to work to undo that, not because of any support for cold fusion, but for fairness and Wikpedia policy. But I started reading the sources. Like Robert Duncan, I was quite surprised at what I found. The rejection of cold fusion had been an error; while strong skepticism had been appropriate, an incorrect impression arose that the basic finding of Pons and Fleischmann had been disproved, found to be sloppy, and that impression was compounded by many factors that had nothing to do with whether or not low energy nuclear reactions were taking place in the palladium deuteride system. In the end, as had others before me, I was blocked from editing Wikipedia because it appeared to powerful editors there that I was now promoting a fringe science, even though I'd been very careful to only stick to reliable sources strictly according to Wikipedia guidelines. So, freed from any obligation or sense that I should remain neutral, I've started to work on an idea that came to me, thinking about cold fusion for more than a half a year, and about what could be done to educate the public and scientists. Much focus from people in the field has been on trying to prove that LENR is a real phenomenon, but, in fact, there is quite adequate evidence, reliably reported and confirmed, to at least create a new preponderance of the evidence: it's real. It's there, there are books about it, with more appearing now, such as the 2008 American Chemical Society Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, with another volume appearing this year, I understand. Papers are appearing in mainstream publications, and some of the work is quite convincing. I don't think the solution is a book. I think the solution is a kit. It's about demonstrating a nuclear effect with what could be a science fair kit. Jed has been a bit negative about it, he claims that replicating the effects is difficult, but it appears that the codeposition approach is not that difficult to replicate, and it's reliable, apparently. Steve Krivit of New Energy Times coordinated the Galileo Project in 2007 which had a well-described protocol, step by step, apparently complete, and not expensive, as far as I can see. So I started a mailing list and I'm starting a commercial venture, to design, document, "manufacture," and sell codeposition cells, with all the materials needed, and also, probably, to provide, perhaps for rent, the associated equipment that one would use. I believe that sufficient interest already exists to support a modest operation along these lines. And once I started getting into details of kit design and what kinds of experiments one could do, I started to realize that the implication might be broader. If there is a standard kit that is known to work, with reasonably consistent results, then many variations become possible, and some of these could indeed generate some new scientific data. Perhaps some of these variations have been tried, there is a vast literature, but ... perhaps not. I expect, with some level of confidence, to detect radiation wtih CR-39, standard with the Galileo project. That's a nuclear effect, and it could be enough, but I suspect that there are associated phenomena. For example, the SPAWAR group report tiny hot flashes, and show an IR imaging video, on what appears to be the back of a foil cathode. They report, also, finding little holes, on the order of 10 microns across, where it appears the palladium has melted, and there are SEMs of this. I think that on the active side of the cathode, if I understand the geometry correctly, there will be visible light emissions, small flashes where the palladium vaporizes. They also report detection pressure shocks with a piezo detector. So, if I'm lucky, I will be able to make a microscope video of flashes of light, with correlated sounds, high-frequency pops (and I'll probably have to filter out the bubble noise). Correlated with this will be radiation detection with CR-39, but also I intend to look more intensively for neutrons, I will be optimizing neutron generation by using a gold electrode, which is reported to be more effective at generating the neutron triple-tracks reported by SPAWAR, plus I will be using, outside the cell, LR-115 radiation detectors with some boron-10 converter screen to convert and detect thermal neutrons, if there are any, and other materials to more effectively detect fast neutrons. I want to make something people can actually see. By itself, not necessarily "proof," but cold fusion needs a new generation, young people becoming interested, and thinking back to when I was a kid, and I was very interested in nuclear physics and thought I'd be a nuclear physicist, if I'd been able to buy a kit and run an experiment like this, actually seeing a nuclear reaction, a little sun for a moment, I might have gone that way. Similar sums of money were spent for other things, such as a glass blank to grind a telescope mirror. I believe the market is there, and if a market develops for any kind of cold fusion, that's it. Some might scream fraud or that it's bogus, but they will have a devil of a time proving that. I don't intend to create fake kits! Experimenters will run controls, etc. All the materials and construction will be carefully documented, so if someone really wants to independently obtain the materials and put the same thing together, and if they follow the instructions exactly, they should be able to replicate it. Cheaply. Really cheaply. Small. It's not going to bowl over any venture capitalist, because the goal isn't energy generation and I won't be doing anything but the most primitive calorimetry. The goal is hands-on experience with condensed matter nuclear science. Get those kits out, get some buzz, I think it may help the shift in consciousness to take place. As to your friend, why do you want him to change his mind? His decision to not spend his time with cold fusion could be very rational. CF is, at this point, and may remain for quite some time, a scientific curiosity, a fragile effect not of much practical importance. If Vyosotskii's work in Russia is solid, that might be the first place for CANR applications to crop up, with nuclear decontamination. But the world is full of interesting stuff, and your friend may not have the specific skills or interests needed in this field; I'm sure he has other things to occupy him. If he's curious, when events start to present themselves to him, he'll start to shift. Or maybe not. It's not important.
