At 03:25 PM 4/2/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Lawrence de Bivort wrote:
Suppressing CF? This requires that the 'bad guys' perceive CF as a
serious threat. I have heard it argued that the 'energy companies'
would wish to suppress CF, but much more likely is that they will
if CF shows any promise commercially simply buy the intellectual property up.
Thanks to the U.S. Patent Office, there is no intellectual property
in cold fusion. It is in the public domain. That is generally
considered a problem that is holding back the field. I think that
opposition from established energy companies will inevitably arise,
once they realize the effect is real. When that happens, the fact
that it is in the public domain may turn out to be more of a
blessing than a curse.
Actually, there are ways around the patent restriction, as SPAWAR has
shown. Don't claim "cold fusion," but claim a method of creating
conditions for a specific observable effect that others may wish to
study, so your device is "useful" in studying the effect. Whether or
not "cold fusion" is real. The cause of the effect might be totally
ordinary. Or not.
If you don't claim a nuclear origin, and there is no reason to claim
that in a patent, at least not at this time, you can then see that
the patent is steering to examiners in the field that the patent
relates to. Say, electrochemists. It's worked, and the skeptics on
Wikipedia screamed about it: they got this patent by hiding the fact
that this was a "cold fusion" patent!
But, of course, any electrochemist who read the patent would know
that this was cold fusion, they'd have to be exceedingly dim not to.
But the patent made no claims about fusion, as I recall, just the
generation of heat using deuterium and heavy water....
Not fusion, no sirree! If it were fusion, why, wouldn't everything be
different? No, these cells are useful for debunking that awful cold
fusion pathological science, proving that it's not really fusion, but
something else. Those buying this product will use better calorimetry
and better experimental process to uncover the real truth. Right?
A cautionary strategy would be simply to take an ownership position
in any CF venture showing promise. Again, not expensive to do,
given the underfunding of CF research.
To buy up one or two start-up that show promise would cost nothing
by the standards of the energy industry. But it would not work. Once
it becomes generally known how to produce and control a cold fusion
reaction, there will thousands of start-up companies and established
companies frantically pursuing the research. The energy industry
cannot afford to buy them all, and even if they could, it would be a
gigantic game of whack-a-mole, where if they miss even one, they lose.
It would also be stupid. If they realize that this is actually real,
and they have money to invest, it would make better sense to buy in, for real.
Producing a controlled cold fusion reaction is impossible at
present, as far as I know, unless Mills or Rossi have they think they have.
Mills is seeing, he seems to claim, reliable results, but it's
codeposition. Codep does, in fact, have the reputation for being
highly reliable. But also for not being spectacularly heat-producing!
As far as I know. Now, build a codep cell with thousands of tiny
wires in a small area, get the thing up close to boiling -- or
boiling in a system that recycles the heavy steam --, all bets are
off. (The system would recover all the evolved deuterium, perhaps
generating a bit of electrical power directly, with a fuel cell).
Maybe it would work.
I'm interested in getting one teeny wire to work. I'm not sure, at
all, if I will see any more heat in the experimental cell(s) than in
the control cell(s). If, on the other hand, if the experimental cell
is consistently warmer, in operation, than the light water control
cell, I'll have a clue. These will be matched current cells, in
series, but because the electrolysis voltage may be different, there
will be different voltages across the cell, I expect, so there will
be some power dissipation difference, and I may need to calibrate the
cells by some means if I want to make calorimetric sense out of this.
I'm looking just for some qualitative difference, though, as to heat.
The primary goal is neutrons.
It might remain impossible forever. Perhaps after the last cold
fusion researcher dies, the field may be forgotten.
Not going to happen. It's being passed on, there are young researchers now.
However, if anyone does control it, and they communicate their
methods to others, then making the second controlled cold fusion
reaction will not be as difficult as the first. Making the third,
fourth and fifth will easier still, and by the time we hit 1,000
(perhaps a few months later) there will be hundreds of thousands of
people capable of doing it, all of them frantically trying to do
it. The knowledge of how to do it will increase by leaps and
bounds, daily, or hourly.
Damn! My Secret Business Plan leaked out! I can see I need to get to work!
That is what happened with transistors in the months following the
publication of Bell Labs' "Transistor Technology" (1952), (a.k.a.
"Mother Bell's Cookbook.") It happened with personal computer clones
in the year or two following the introduction of the IBM PC. It
happened with aviation in the months following the August 1908
demonstration. Louis Bleriot, who could barely get off the ground
before watching the demo, flew across the English channel 11 months
later. There were hundreds more like him. They were talented and
capable aviators and aircraft builders, but they did not understand
how to make an airplane until they saw one. They should have read
the patent carefully, and learned. But they did not do that until
after the demonstration. Then they sure did! The airplane was much
easier to replicate than it was to invent. Cold fusion will be
somewhat more difficult to replicate, but not much.
Wrong. Much easier (if I'm right and can depend on what SPAWAR has
published and documented and don't screw it up. First one might be
tricky, but once the right protocol is in place, it will be very easy
and cheap for anyone to reproduce.) Jed, when I first started talking
about this, I was told by certain persons that it would take
thousands of dollars to run an experiment, like perhaps $10,000. And
heavy expertise. Don't even think about it unless you can bring that
to bear! Well, I haven't proven otherwise yet, but the obstacles
aren't money nor expertise, as far as I can see. Just my getting to
it! For roughly $5000, I've purchased all necessary equipment and
enough material for hundreds of cells, and the most expensive
equipment wasn't necessary, just frosting on the cake, or involved
with production, not the cells themselves. I didn't need a DSO to run
the experiment, nor, for that matter, a LabJack or the Celestron
microscope, or even the drill press, laser-guided cutter, etc.
The difficulties of this field seem larger than they are because
researchers struggle under so many artificial handicaps, such as
having to work with antiquated equipment, no assistance, and no funding.
Yes. But there was another obstacle. No engineering aimed at
producing experimental cells that were cheap and easy to use. Given
the obstacles you mention, that one made them difficult.
Pam Boss actually did a design that qualified, that's what Krivit's
Galileo project used. (By the way, kudos to Krivit for organizing
that, certainly I'm grateful for it.) But Galileo left it to everyone
to buy their own materials, which made sense if you wanted heavily
independent replications, but didn't make economic sense. I think
there was some collective buying, or subsidized buying, that helped.
I want to make that routine. Anyone doing large-scale runs of cells
may want to go direct to suppliers, but for very small numbers, or
even modest numbers, it will make sense to come to me (or to someone
else doing the same thing). One hell of a lot more convenient, and
not any more expensive. That's how a lot of small businesses make it.
But once you are buying in the same quantities as I am, there isn't
any margin. But we could still cooperate in various ways. If we could
buy together, we could lower our costs.
I've taken the Galileo design and am attempting to scale it down a
little, to reduce costs even more, hopefully simply reducing the
neutron results to a smaller length of "wire image" on the SSNTD. It
should be the same peak density of tracks, proton knock-on tracks,
dry configuration. Maybe a few triple-tracks, if I'm lucky, but not
actually necessary.
