Abd, First off, thank you for sharing your thoughts, you have a gift with words.
We all filter the world thru our own beliefs and exerience. I have worked as a consulting engineer in industry for the past 21 years and 5 years prior installing industrial control systems. The bulk of my projects have been energy related from boilers to turbines to a large concentrated solar thermal project. I am currently working on a Natural Gas mid-stream storage & supply system. I have to deal with alot of real world problems to make systems in the field perform. Not all do. Unfortunately I do not yet have Jed's team of robots to make my projects all work. When I look at LENR today (this name carries a much nicer connotation/ring to me than CF) I see a wide range of claimed reactants, products and heat gains. I also see a wide range of radiation emissions claimed from nothing to photons, gammas, x-rays, UV and even gravity waves (nanospire) I see a couple systems that catch my eye with claims in the kW range, both of these are gas/powder in a relatively low pressure high temp reactor which might be real and would be game changers if stable and brought to market. I see NASA already advertising flying LENR airframes into space but have not claimed one watt of gain from any research yet. I see NASA promoting W&L theory and I see you tearing down the W&L theory and appear soundly in the fusion camp. I see Krivit discrediting cold fusion. I see Brian Aherm promoting nanomagnetism. W&L promotes beta decay and ULMNs to cover all the pathways. Mills and hydrinos. Brilluoin and q-pulse lattice rattling. Yes I have more questions maybe you can answer? (loaded question). I am at the point the only thing that explains what everyone is seeing is quantum singularities hiding in the voids of that lattice devouring atomic hydrogen and belching out photons, quarks, gluons, etc. mostly showing up as HEAT. The smallest singularity is theorized to be 22 micrograms based on a Planck length. Maybe a singularity masquerading as an electron that is either evaporating or becoming a WIMP? Maybe the singularity carries a charge and has an affinity for all the oppositely charged ions sent its way-either SPPs or hydride ions? Maybe the stress and strain and lattice cracking creates more singularities to bring to the dinner table, amplifying the effect? Singularities are the perfect black-body heat engine. Maybe gravity at the quantum level is strong enough to create these quantum singularities by adding just a few hundred degrees of heat and extra strain within the lattice? No Coulomb barrier to worry about penetrating anymore, just have to aim your ions very accurately at an extremely small target/horizon and there they gooooo..... Singularities are the perfect e=mc2 heat engine. LHC hot fusion guys recently addresed quantum singularities they might create and said they would just evaporate quickly. No explosions, just maybe give off some HEAT and then POOF! Gone. Once they are gone NO MORE HEAT effect. Maybe that explains the wicked behavior of CF. Since the event horizon erases all history of original reactants it is also hard/impossible to nail down pathways-anything goes. Only way I can explain their hidden mass is that it must be hiding in some of those 11 or so dimensions available at the quantum level according to string theory. Singularities are great at increasing entropy. Also, while singularities are evaporating they get HOTTER, which explains "heat after death" which would occur while these singularities consume remaining ions and evaporate? It also explains eruptions in the metallic structure caused by extreme point sources of high temperature? What I believe we have here my friend is a magnificent quantum singularity heat engine. This is my grand unification theory of cold fusion. No wine involved. I was hoping you could answer all of these questions by morning?... Godspeed On Monday, August 6, 2012, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: > > At 10:17 AM 8/6/2012, Chemical Engineer wrote: > >> I have been following for a year and half but it is still very confusing >> to me what the repeatable results are. To me the anomalous heat could >> include anything from nanomagnetism, LENR, CANR, ZPE, vacuum energy, >> Hawking Radiation (my theory), hydrinos, fusion, beta decays to aliens >> farting through a wormhole. >> > > CE, you haven't paid adequate attention. I'll say this much for you, the > literature can be confusing. I came into the study of cold fusion in 2009, > as a result of happening upon an abusive blacklisting (of lenr-canr.org) > on Wikipedia. It puzzled me. So, cold fusion was fringe science, perhaps > unreal. But why blacklist the major repository of scientific papers on the > subject? > > I looked at the article and started to read the sources. I had the > background to understand why cold fusion was considered impossible. That > same background, my training in physics from Richard P. Feynman, had led > me, as well, to know that experiment was King. That if experiment showed > that, say, Newton's Laws of Motion were wrong, we'd better be ready > re-examine the Laws (not just the experiment!). I knew from Feynman that we > did not have the math to analyze the solid state, it was way too complex. > Still, the lack of progress in the field (as I imagined from the lack of > press coverage of progress), had led me to think (from 1990 or so) that > cold fusion was a dud. > > Intrigued by what I found, I bought most of the major books on the topic, > including the skeptical ones, i.e, Huizenga, Taubes, Park, etc. I bought > Storms, Beaudette, Mizuno, and a figure in the field was kind enough to > donate a copy of the 2008 ACS LENR Sourcebook to me. > > And I noticed something. Early on I figured out that the matter had > actually been iced, as to the reality of cold fusion, when Miles found a > correlation between the anomalous heat found so erratically in palladium > deuteride, and helium produced. I.e., the amount of heat might be erratic, > but then, regardless, helium was found in the evolved gases at a particular > ratio to the heat, consistent with a hypothesis that the heat was the > result of some kind of fusion process, fusing deuterium to helium, with > some of the helium remaining trapped at least temporarily. *Rougly* half is > released, under that hypothesis. > > This was very strong evidence that the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect (FPHE) > is nuclear in nature, and is very likely some kind of fusion. > > Huizenga noticed this in the second edition of his book. Good thing I > bought that edition! He wrote that, if confirmed, this would solve a major > mystery of cold fusion, i.e., the ash. Before that, there was total > uncertainty about the ash, and it didn't seem there was one. Some early > efforts to find helium had looked in the palladium rod. It's not found > there, except for very near the surface, and they had taken off the surface > to avoid contamination from ambient helium! -- As I recall. One of > Fleischmann's errors, God rest his soul, was a belief that the reaction was > taking place in the lattice, in the bulk. I can understand why he thought > that, but ... it wasn't so. > > Huizenga expected that the result would not be confirmed. But it was. > There is actually no contrary experimental evidence, and plenty of > confirmation. If the field were being treated normally, the issue would > long ago have been considered resolved. > > What I noticed, however, was that heat/helium wasn't emphasized in the > reviews and articles in the field *from those who accept the reality of > LENR.* I suspect that this may be that most were already convinced by the > calorimetry, and the level of pseudoskepticism involved in the massive > rejection of calorimetry as evidence was indeed enormous and frustrating. > Beaudette covers this very well. > > Chemical Engineer, if you want a repeatable result, you would do this: > > Set up and run a series of cells, as many as possible, using a protocol > known to *occasionally* produce excess heat, use the state of the art for > the electrolysis and calorimetry. Measure helium in the evolved gas (or > sample it from the cell if it's a closed cell; for this purpose, though, > it's a bit more efficient to use an open cell, because the helium will then > reflect the recent history of the cell and you can take more and more > meaningful samples from the cell. But it's also worth considering using > closed cells and thus measuring total accumulated helium. You'll have to > compensate for slow leakage of helium out of the cells, if they are glass. > Helium can leak through glass.) > > Measure the helium blind, whoever is running the analysis should not know > the history of the cell from which it came. Sample from all cells the same, > whether or not they show heat. > > Compare the excess energy, determined from calorimetry, with the helium > measurements, extrapolated back to evolution rates using methods you work > out in advance. > > Something like this has been done many times. The results are always the > same, the variation is within what would be expected from varying > conditions resulting in varying levels of retained helium. Some work has > taken steps to capture as much as possible of the helium. If you want to > improve knowledge in the field, go all-out to do this. > > You will find, from what's been found before, that the energy is within > experimental error of 23.8 MeV/He-4, the theoretical value for dueterium > fusion. (Or for any fusion reaction that starts with deuterium and ends > with helium, such as Takahashi's 4D Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate > fusion, that produces Be-8 which decays to two helium nuclei.) > > This is a "single reproducible experiment." > > What so many demanded for so long, a *reliable* experiment, always > producing the same heat, may not be possible, not until we actually > understand the effect and can control it more effectively. (There are some > gas-loaded results that might be reliable in this way, but I consider the > jury out on that. Inadequate replication.) > > Many have confused the unreliability with inclarity of result. Sometimes > results have been close to noise, but the FPHE was not established by such > experiments. When the effect happens, it is often far above noise. The > example I point to is SRI P13/P14. There is an image of part of the results > from these, done in about 1991, that was part of the Hagelstein review > paper for the 2004 DoE review. > > To understand that image, you need to know that this was the third current > excursion. P13 was a light water control cell, in series with P14 > electrically, so the current through both was the same. Both cells had been > loaded to over 90% (and SRI monitored loading, a crucial condition). The > first two attenpts with the same current profile, both cells showed the > same result, i.e., what P13 showed in the third run. No excess heat to > speak of, some increase in noise from the increased activity, bubbling, > etc. But with P14, the excess heat tracks the current. Far above noise. > > That might seem normal, until you realize that heating from the current > has been subtracted from the total heat being evolved, what is plotted is > the *excess.* The first two runs and the control cell show that the > calorimetry is working. There is only one known difference between the > third try with P14 and the first two: the cathode had "experience." > Palladium can be loaded with deuterium, but high loading, expecially, > stresses the lattice, the material expands, and may start to crack. > > If the cracks get too large, the material deloads, the necessary high > loading is lost. It apparently must be *just right*. > > The way I've described this is that the cold fusion chimera walked into > the lab and licked McKubre in the face. Then sauntered out. From then on, > McKubre knew that this was real. He later did the crucial helium > confirmation work, obtaining the most accurate measurement to date. > > It's possible to challenge details, still, but the basic conclusion is now > overwhelming, and really has been for more than a decade. > > But it was being neglected. So I suggested that Dr. Storms look at it. I > think he was already on this track himself. He asked me to look at a paper, and I did. He submitted the paper, and the editor > came back and asked him to write a full review of the field instead. So he > did. > > That became Edmund Storms, "Status of cold fusion (2010)," > Naturwissenschaften, October, 2010. This is, to my knowledge, the most > comprehensive review of cold fusion ever written for a peer-reviewed > journal, and Naturwissenschaften is Springer-Verlag's "flagship > multidisciplinary journal," founded in 1913. Einstein published in it. > > Some physicists have complained that they haven't read about cold fusion > in physics journals. Well, there is a reason for that! They should talk to > the editors! (Or they could read European Physics Journal - Applied > Physics, but there are only some experimental papers there.) If any > physicist is dissatisfied with the Storms review, they could certainly > write a critique of it, but most physicists really don't know enough about > the field to be ready to write such and have it pass peer review. Most of > them have their heads stuck in a place that is 20 years old. Or somewhere > else. > > At some point the physics community will wake up and realize that this is > a major unsolved problem in physics. How could this be happening? What they > did in 1989, some of them, was sit back and take on the pseudoskeptical > hypothesis that "there must be some error." The term "pseudoskeptic" was > invented for behavior like that. It was fine to remain unconvinced, but > what actually happened was that the community developed an almost violent > rejection, a *belief* that cold fusion was pseudoscience, Bad Science > (Taubes' title). It's hard to back down from something like that! > > There were physicists who knew that cold fusion wasn't, as claimed, > "impossible." Julian Schwinger, Nobel-Prize winner in Physics, wrote a > paper proposing a theory. When it was rejected out of hand by the Journal > of the American Physical Society, he resigned. Normal Ramsey supported cold > fusion research, when he served as co-chair of the ERAB panel. He demanded > that neutral language be used in the report, instead of what would almost > have certainly been very harsh rejection had Huizenga been able to control > the report. Ramsey apparently threatened to noisily resign if his language > wasn't used. That language made it very clear that cold fusion wasn't being > found to be bogus, merely that the evidence, at a point only a few months > after the announcement, wasn't convincing. And, really, at that point, it > wasn't. It took a few more months! And a few years, two or three, to become > overwhelming. > > CE, Huizenga called the cold fusion episode the "scientific fiasco of the > century." He didn't know the half of it! He called it a fiasco because it > was fresh in his mind that practically the entire U.S. research > establishment, anyone in a position to investigate cold fusion, dropped > everything to attempt to replicate. That was all vastly premature, > insufficient information was released, so a lot of time and effort -- and > money -- was wasted. Apparently Pons and Fleishmann didn't know quite a > number of important things about their own experiment. The palladium > material was crucial. Had it been normal palladium, very likely they'd have > seen nothing. When they ran out, they got more, and for a time, they could > not replicate their own experiment. It took time to work around all these > issues. > > Cal Tech attempted replication and used cells much larger than the Pons > and Fleischmann cells. They found a calorimetry error, some cells seemd to > have excess heat. They found that when they stirred the cell, the apparent > heat disappeared. They concluded that Pons and Fleischmann were > incompetent, and announced that at a major physics conference. However, the > Pons and Fleischmann design was self-stirred by the bubbling. Their error > (and correction) showed the hazards of incautious calorimetry, but the > calorimetry of Pons and Fleischmann was later found to be quite accurate. > > A basic rule of replication was ignored: replicate the work, *then* find > possible artifacts. I can see that they thought they had done that, but ... > they hadn't. They had not set up the effect at all. MIT may have had some > small level of excess heat, concealed when someone thought the chart looked > a bit messy and cleaned it up by shifting the baseline a little. But they > didn't find helium, and probably didn't get any excess heat either, to > speak of. These were *replication failures.* They were treated as if they > were refutations, a very obvious error, in hindsight. > > It was a huge mess, involving many people, and leaving behind trails of > bitterness, rancour, and confusion. The protocols and courtesies of science > broke down. It's not particularly surprising: hot fusion research was > consuming hundreds of millions of dollars per year in research funding, > with no breakeven in sight. Entire institutions, and many careers were > dependent upon this. Cold fusion appeared to threaten that. Even if it > turned out to be impractical, for some reason, governments might, > meanwhile, become a bit less eager to shell out vast funding for projects > that -- even today -- are not predicted to be commercially practical until > 2050. > > It's not surprising, then, that those in specialties which would be > economically hit if cold fusion research were to replace hot fusion > research (i.e, nuclear physicists, particle physicists, specialists in > plasma physics, etc.) might be, shall we say, unfriendly? It's really > normal politics, and the cold fusion community played the game very badly. > > (They were scientists! Not public relations agents! They were naive, > initially, they assumed that normal scientific courtesty and processes > would work things out. Yes. Eventually. It really didn't start to happen > until around 2004, with the second DoE review. The shift is apparent then, > the field had come a vast distance from the first review. It just wasn't > over yet. It's still not *entirely* over, but the two largest scientific > publishers in the world are now routinely publishing about cold fusion, and > the largest scientific society in the world, the American Chemical Society, > has been sponsoring cold fusion events and publications. I can imagine the > consternation among some physicists. Don't these idiots know it's > impossible? But that's by far not all physicists. There are hot fusion > physicists who have turned their talents to the problem of cold fusion > theory, that would include Takahashi. And, of course, the peer reviewers at > Naturwissenschaften passed that comment in the abstract.... I'd say the > corner has definitely been turned, and it's time for the cold fusion > community stop the hang-dog, boo-hoo, they are so unfair!, attitude.) > > We need to take a hint from Beaudette's title: Excess Heat, Why Cold > Fusion Research Prevailed. And we need to start acting consistently with it > having prevailed. The truth came out. It's over, except, of course, for the > real work: characterising the reaction, exploring the parameter space, and > beginning to engineer more efficient and more reliable applications. This > is not Get Rich Quick, Free Energy. Not yet, anyway! > > Beware of those who pretend that this is easy, until and unless that's > been proven and confirmed. > > Any questions, CE? >
