At 04:17 PM 5/25/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Le Clair is quoted:
The experiment gave off powerful crested cnoid de Broglie Matter
wave soliton wave packages that were doubly periodic and followed
the Jacobi Elliptic functions exactly, mostly in the form of large
doubly-periodic vortices. Hundreds of wave trains and vortices
appeared everywhere and are permanently burned into walls, objects
and trees surrounding the lab.
Good heavens. It is amazing they survived.
Did they take photographs of these things? Did they preserve some of
the hundreds of samples of damaged wood and other materials from the
surroundings? If they did not take photos and samples, I doubt this
account is accurate.
Maybe I should not be so dismissive, since Fleischmann and Pons did
not take photos or preserve samples from their explosion. It was
very stupid of them not to. Very unprofessional. I said that to
Martin, and he ruefully agreed.
Sure. That makes sense. Beaudette reports an independent account of
the shambles in the lab after that meltdown. One recent account of
this had it as damaging the concrete floor of their "garage," showing
a kind of standing assumption that cold fusion research takes place
in garages of wild-eyed high-functioning lunatics.
However, with the LeClair reports, allegedly LeClair and his partner
almost did not survive, they got very, very sick. But notice: these
effects, described as "wave traiins and vortices" showing the intense
interpretations of what was actually observed -- if anything was
"actually" observed -- are also described as "permanently burned"
into "walls, objects and trees surrounding the lab."
Okay, surely this could be independently verified. Still. Unless, of
course, you cut the trees down and dispose of them, you raze the
building or rebuild the walls, etc. Pons and Fleischmann, they just
cleaned up the lab, replaced the lab table with the hole in it, and
patched the concrete floor. That patch could probably still be found,
unless the building has been razed. Perhaps some U of Utah student
would like to recover a piece of history, that meltdown was very
important as the first major sign to P and F that they had stumbled
onto something far bigger than they had expected. Note: they then
scaled down, for obvious reasons.
When I first encountered the LeClair reports, I thought it was likely
to be a practical joke, intended to see just how bloody gullible we
all are. That remains a possibility, though some sort of
psychopathology is more likely. I'd put reality of the effect way
down the scale, but, pursuing that, the radiation may have left
LeClair impaired. I was unable to pursue confirmation myself,
travelling is currently difficult for me, but there were others who
indicated they might take it on. I haven't heard of any results.
Apparently Nanospire has recently announced they are ceasing
research. Why? Not explained. The research would not be particularly
dangerous, as long as reasonable precautions were followed, mostly by
starting small. You don't wisely turn this thing on and get enough
heat to measure, except maybe at the limits of sensitivity, if that,
or if you are behind adequate shielding. This is hot fusion, very
dangerous in large scale, but small-scale hot fusion is handled all
the time by amateurs, with Farnsworth Fusors. If you want to scale up
to heat generation, then you need to build the device to handle the
expected radiation. Yet Nanospire was enthusiastically promoting this
as something useful for home hot water heating.... a tad premature, eh?
