On Oct 27, 2009, at 10:53 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Horace Heffner wrote:
[snip]
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.
Many of the "experts" involved in cold fusion are actually amateurs
in one part of the field or another. They either are not trained
particle physicists or electrochemists. Some are MDs.
Producing the cold fusion device is and will always remain roughly
as difficult as making a transistor from scratch.
It does not appear this is true. Certainly a lot of the experiments
I've seen published are not much more difficult to construct than a
fusor. I'll certainly grant you that obtaining clean data is another
thing entirely. There have been many blunders in calorimetry,
chemsitry, and basic design of controlled experiments, some by
professional scientists. As difficult as making a transistor - maybe
not. This remains to be seen.
I do not think amateurs were ever able to do this.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
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 not as valuable right now as the expanding the search for
results. For example, the Edisonian search for better rocket fuels
that occurred by amateurs, even high schoolers, back in the 50's may
have had a significant effect on solid fuels used today. Sorry I
don't have a reference, but I have read something about that. Took
part in it a bit too! 8^)
I think we might be right on the verge of finding something robust.
There is no doubt that *some* nuclear events are occurring.
Tunneling is a key aspect of that. The wave function declines
exponentially - so we must already have conditions that are very very
close to robust.
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
Yes, it appears that way. But it *is* possible to build a set to
explore some possibilities reasonably scientifically.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
