Michel Jullian wrote:
> Nuclear reactions were first discovered in the late 19th century because
> they produce excess heat.
Are you sure? I thought they were discovered because a solid state
detector was impressed (Becquerel's photographic plate).
Yes, and the electrometer. I didn't quite mean what I wrote. I meant
that the extent of the energy produced by nuclear reactions was first
determined by calorimetry. Calorimetry was used to determine the
total energy from the reaction. Fleischmann told me this several
times and I read it somewhere too, but I do not recall where.
Calorimeters still play a larger role in particle studies than you
might think. For example, micro-calorimeters are used to measure the
impact of individual particles.
The rest of your post below doesn't make much sense to me either, low
neutron production or not, if nuclear track counts are significantly
above background in SSNTDs used in an environment in which they are
known to be reliable, then nuclear reactions are demonstrated, no?
Yes, but if the experiment does not work, and there are no neutrons,
then you have to go back to the beginning and make sure you have a
cold fusion reaction. The way to do that is to look for heat. Once
you are sure there is heat, then you can look for neutrons and expect
to find them.
Unfortunately you must have two different instruments, one to measure
heat and the other optimized to measure neutrons, and it is possible
that the first experiment succeeds while the second fails. It is a
shame you cannot measure both at the same time, but this is difficult.
It may be that some cold fusion reactions produce heat but no
neutrons. I doubt the opposite can occur: neutrons but no heat. It
may be that the heat is so low it cannot be detected, but I expect
the neutrons would also be very hard to detect in that case.
All of the neutron detectors I am familiar with such as scintillation
counters detect a small fraction of the total neutron flux. As far as
I know, CR-39 also misses a lot of them. This is quite different from
charged particle detectors.
- Jed
