Horace Heffner wrote:
There is no convincing single experiment that demonstrates cold fusion.
A year ago I would have agreed. I would have said that the weight of evidence from many different experiments must be considered. Now, I believe that the Arata style nanoparticle gas loading experiment by itself is convincing. However, this experiment is not easy or cheap.
It might become cheaper overnight if someone starts manufacturing large amounts of the powder. There is no inherent reason why the powder should be so expensive. However the experiment will still require a vacuum pump, pure deuterium gas, a good calorimeter and various other pricey things.
Producing a kit that supposedly does demonstrate CF is therefore is a matter of questionable ethics. Doing so at a profit casts an ugly shadow on the effort at best.
I do not think it is questionable ethics, but it may be a mistake, mainly because it is likely to fail. But Lomax will realize this before shipping the first kit so I doubt any harm will come of it.
If there were a convincing single cheap experiment I'd want to see at least 1,000 talented science students graduating from high school every year having personally witnessed cold fusion. That's worth attempting on a non-profit basis. It think 10,000 is even a reasonable goal.
I agree, but alas there is no cheap or easy experiment. The situation is better than it was. Several institutions are now embarked on nanoparticle experiments.
What would make much more sense is to provide enough of a variety of things so that the purchaser can cook up his own experiments, to provide an erector set for electrochemical experiments.
Everyone I know involved in replicating is a professional scientist in a well-equipped laboratory, so this sort of thing is not needed. I expect that if you are not a professional scientist in a well-equipped laboratory there is no chance you will succeed anyway, so I doubt there will ever be a need for this. Producing the cold fusion device is and will always remain roughly as difficult as making a transistor from scratch. I do not think amateurs were ever able to do this. Now that transistors have been integrated, they are far beyond the ability of any amateur or even any small laboratory.
Perhaps in the future small cold fusion devices will be sold as science kits, similar to the high-temperature superconducting devices sold today as kits, and the old Heathkit-style electronics projects. In such things, the difficult work of fabrication has already been done, back at the factory. The person doing the experiment merely observes the effect. This is valuable. It is a learning experience. With an electronics kit and an oscilloscope you learn far more about electronics than you would merely using an ordinary consumer gadget such as a computer or television game. But it is not possible to make a kit of this nature with cold fusion today, given the state of the art.
- Jed
