On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Mary Yugo <maryyu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It will take some time with Arata's because while it seems clear enough, > it's written in a very convoluted way and the figures take a lot of work to > understand. It's not how a modern paper should be organized and > illustrated. It looks like it's out of the beginning of the previous > century but I will try to slog through it. > I read something of Arata's that Rothwell recommended (from 2008), and it was far from convincing. The problem is the same in much of the CF literature. It's not so much what is written, which is often too incomplete or marginal to be convincing, but what is not done or written. In Arata's case, he used 7 grams of Pd-something to produce a degree or two temperature elevation above ambient for some 48 hours or so. Except that the ambient temperature wasn't monitored. Then he calculated the heat based on some kind of calibrated heat loss. One can try to slog through these results as you say, but they just scream out such obvious checks, that absent those, it doesn't seem worth the trouble slogging. For example, if the thing is maintaining a couple of degrees above ambient for 2 days, isn't it blatantly obvious that if he insulated the cell a little better, the temperature would climb? And wouldn't temperature *climbing* for 2 days to maybe 10 degrees above ambient attract a little more attention. Likewise, if he gets a degree or two with 7 grams of Pd, why doesn't he do it with 70 grams or 700 grams, and get an effect that is unmistakeable. Evidently there are very complicated theoretical reasons that scaling up doesn't work... Arata's results are also kind of inconsistent with the electrolysis results. In the D-Pd electrolysis experiments, the claim is that the loading of the deuterium has to be well above 90% to see cold fusion. But in Arata's case, even though it is still D-Pd, the loading is much lower, probably well below 50%, and yet he observes cold fusion.
