Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> There is no other way to be sure you have a cold fusion effect in the first >> place. There is no point to testing a cell that is not producing heat. >> > > That's not *entirely true*, but it is a huge caveat. In the early days, > lots of experiments were done where they didn't even look for heat, they > looked for "nuclear products." Hey, if it's fusion, there have to be > "nuclear products," eh? > This experiment was electrochemical Pd-D circa 1990. Back then the only practical way to confirm that the reaction was happening was to measure heat or tritium. Pam Boss can now measure neutrons, but that's a different story. There were other techniques back then such as cryogenic gas loaded Ti chips done at BARC that could produce a definite sign of a nuclear reaction besides heat. > Sure. Like helium. But, as Jed is implying, no heat, no reaction-- > probably!, it's possible there was some and you might detect certain > possible nuclear products -- but if you don't see nuclear products, you have > demonstrated, with considerable effort, nothing. Actually, I was thinking more of diagnostics. It is easier to measure heat than helium. Tritium is sporadic. The cryogenic Ti produces a burst reaction which is not what you want when trying to detect neutrinos. You want a steady reaction, I think. Anyway there was never the slightest chance this particular experiment would work. As I said, it was amateur. There was a photo published in the mass media of the researchers holding the Pd cathode up to the camera with their bare fingers just before launching the test. That ensures massive contamination from skin oil and the like. The photo made it clear that the other hardware in the experiment was filthy by the standards of electrochemistry. In electrochemistry you have have to take pains to ensure cleanliness. I mean 2 or 3 days of cleaning and preparation. Also, I have it on pretty good authority that they confused the anode (+) and the cathode (-). The only experiment dirtier than this that I know of was done by the late Tom Droege. He worked in his basement. He showed me a slide of his cathode surface, and the conversation when like this: ME: "What are those fibers? They seem to be galvanized on to the surface." TOM: "Cat hairs. The cat you see in the other slide likes to sleep on the calorimeter, because it's warm." - Jed
