At 03:01 PM 10/29/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I wrote:
However one good professional expensive experiment is worth 1000
amateur ones, in my opinion. . . . If you cannot afford electronic
gadgets you are probably coming to this field 19 years too late to
make a useful contribution. Amateur experiments have caused more
harm than good . . .
This is too harsh. I should say that as long as you do not publish
they cause no harm and they are a good learning experience. I have
done several myself.
So ... I don't expect it, but suppose I figure out how to get serious
excess heat, my cat pees in the tube and, damn, it works, and I can
reproduce it with some uric acid or whatever, sheer luck. I shouldn't
publish? But, sure, publication of sloppy work that makes big claims,
that's lousy. On the other hand, what that makes me think of is the
amateurs at Caltech and MIT in 1989, eh? What made them think they
could do accurate calorimetry and get this miserable solid palladium
electrolytic mess to work?
The professional experiments are, however, FAR more convincing and
valuable. I am not exaggerating about the factor of 1000. Kidwell et
al. have repeated the Arata experiment hundreds of times
successfully using a micro calorimeter. As far as I know it has
never failed. I find this one set of tests more convincing than all
the amateur and semi-amateur contributions of the last 20 years combined.
Great. You find it convincing. Okay, has it convinced everyone else?
Absolutely, we wish. All it would take is publication in a
peer-reviewed journal -- and, hey, Kowalski has been so published,
and he seems awfully amateur to me -- and the world would then beat a
path to the author's door, right? Asking zillions of questions about
exactly how to make it work. I'm sure Vyosotskii had to unplug his
phone to get some sleep, right?
People looking for neutrons from the code that the system . . .
I have no idea what that was supposed to mean. You would have to ask
the tiny little brain of my computer running voice input.
You know, there is nothing wrong with amateur writing with no editor
if you don't publish it.... :-) Actually, I knew what you meant, just
not by those exact words. Before you get your knickers in a twist
about missing neutrons, look to see if the heat is missing too.
By the way, Lomax's analysis of the Earthtech results are astute, in
my opinion. He certainly understands what to watch out for:
Thanks, Jed. From you, that's like half a Nobel Prize. Well, maybe
not half. :-)
Now, I wish that Earthtech would take a harder look at their own
results and try to figure out what happened besides hamburger. Maybe
they did get radiation and it was covered up. I consider their
results extremely useful; but what would happen if they tried new
CR-39 or tried a mylaer window? And used a gold electrode? Up to
them, of course.
There are some people in this field who seem to take other
experimenters as competitors. Sure, some are running a race, but in
the end, we all die and who got to the finish line first won't really
matter. The race model is way too lonely and inefficiency; the field
was delayed for years by the secrecy of some, and the enthusiastic
announcements of commercial products
if-only-we-can-get-enough-funding didn't help. A few of those and
people stop listening, and a really deserving project comes along and
it's too late, too many cries of "Wolf!"
Look, I'm pretty flaky, I have a habit of biting off more than I can
chew, so if I have some good ideas or bad ideas and they don't go
anywhere, it might not be the fault of the ideas but of my ability to
follow through. On the other hand, I've done a few spectacular things
in my life, so.... you never know. I've started buying equipment....
"I think that because they saw hamburger, they assumed they had replicated."
". . . I notice substantial variation from the Galileo protocol, in
ways that the experimenters probably considered would only improve
the results, perhaps under the theory that if a little is better,
more is even better. The photos of what they call "SPAWAR pits"
don't resemble SPAWAR photos. What you have convinced me of, Horace,
is that I should stick very closely to the published protocol, even
in what might seem to be silly details."
I knew only researcher who thoroughly understood how to do an exact
replication, and who did things according to instructions whether he
saw the point or not, without adding his own "improvements." That
was the late George Lonchampt. Engineers who design fission power
reactors know how to follow the rules, and they know which rules to follow.
I'm adding "improvements," but I'm painfully aware that any one of
them could botch the whole thing. On the other hand, probably not.
I'll be running the chemistry as exactly as described in the protocol
as I can, but looks like I'll be using a cathode as designed in the
mylar-window experiment recently published. That's a very small
change from Galileo, really, and an obvious improvement, already
tested by SPAWAR. Heffner has some interesting ideas about cathodes,
but it's way too complex for me to start with.
